politics – j2i.net

Now is an opportunity to take a break. I’ve not posted here in a while because I’ve spent time helping someone. I made technology services contributions to an election candidate. We had elections this past week. the candidate won!. 🎉🎊🥳

While I’ve worked on websites for years, making a website for someone running for an office was a unique experience. The technology aspects of making the site were regular. Where more attention was required was from requirements that were imposed on the site from other services that were used, some of which had no direct interaction with the website itself. For example, to use 10DLC A2P text messaging for promotional messages, the service used had requirements for the website such as the publication of a privacy policy and that policy containing certain terms and conditions. Some of the requirements that were imposed by third parties were only applicable if the purposes were for an election or related to politics, even if the election is for a bipartisan.

Of course, the effect of the website being a dependency for other services translated into an increased scope of activities. Promptness was required in taking action on feedback that came from the other service providers to compensate for delays added by the way feedback was provided. Especially since the other providers do not always spell out necessary changes at once. In the absence of a published document that states the requirements, they were discovered through feedback from failing to satisfy them. Given three requirements that a submission might not satisfy, the feedback sometimes would only mention one. After the mentioned requirement was satisfied, I would then be informed of the next one. That’s not how you want feedback to be passed when you wish to get the site fully functional as quickly as possible.

My initial intended role in my effort contributions was website management. I did some graphics work, too. It is generally known that Adobe products, especially Adobe Photoshop, is a major influence in this space. I’m not a fan of Adobe’s subscription model and what I evaluated as cancellation risks in their ToS and do not use Photoshop. But there were times when a graphic needed to be created from existing material. I was reminded how dominant that Photoshop is. Speaking to a services that were printing various materials, such as signs or billboards, their requirements were expressed in terms of how to configure one’s art board. This makes sense. But I did find myself making a quick calculation program for translating those settings to pixel dimensions.

It is interesting to note that as soon as the contact forms went live on the web site, they were immediately hit by people probing and submitting information to those forms for various purposes. Some of the submissions were spam. Others were attempts at SQL Injection attacks. Some submissions were attempts at testing whether I used specific services to implement the form. Some of the bots that try to submit this information do not pay attention to the visibility of form fields. Placing text fields in a page that have no visibility but have fairly obvious names like “email” results in some bots submitting forms in which these invisible fields are populated with the spam data. I found this to be a useful way to identify some bots.

Now that the election is over, the site has been updated to express appreciation to the voters. I’m going to finish up some documentation on what would be needed to get the site back up-and-running if it gets used as a starting point the next time an election comes up. Then I can get back to more regular updates of this site.

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Some of the largest technology companies in the USA have yet again been called to testify at the House of Representatives to testify. They have been called many times before. This time it is on competition. Some have alleged that each of these companies has done something to hinder competition and they are being called to speak on it. In a letter written to these companies the House has asked that the CEOs of these companies be the ones to testify. They are also asking the companies to produce documents that were generated in response to competition. If the companies do not produce documentation they may be subpoenaed and obligated to produce it anyway.

For Apple the only way to publish an application is through the Apple App Store. For applications published thay way Apple earns a portion of the sales and subscriptions. Apps sold through the App store cannot advertise paying for services through means other than the App store.

Alphabet (the parent company of Google) has been accused of anticompetitive behaviours along several fronts. This includes giving preference to Alphabet provided serviced in Google searches and having an extensive advertising vertical.

Amazon is a bit unique. Previous anticompetitive cases have focused on consumer welfare. But Amazon’s practices haven’t met past criteria for poor consumer welfare. Amazon has access to lots of sells data and the computational and AI capabilities for profitably using that information and under pricing those that sell through their service.

Facebook has been accused of cutting developers off from their services to serve their own purposes. They have also purchased other services that might have competed with them otherwise (ex:Instagram). Some competitors have described Facebook as an unlawful monopoly.

Whether or not these companies engage in anticompetitive behaviour is a topic of debate. This hearing is part of an ongoing investigation into competition in technology. At the same time the EU is launching an anti-competitive investigation on Apple’s App Store and on Apple Pay. The investigation is based on a complaint from Spotify from last year and a complaint from an unnamed ebook/audio-book distributor. Their complaints are on the fee that must be payed to Apple for services purchased through the user’s iOS device and the prohibitions on communicating to users how they can upgrade their services through other means. For Apple Pay the investigation is on that being the only contactless payment solution that can be deployed to the iPhone. Especially at a time when there is increased interest in contacless transactions in the wake of COVID-19.