The State of Progress

Chrome, Opera isolate the renderer in separate processes -- this allows tabs to crash on their own. ...but the issue is that the browswer is still a monolithic kernel.

Servo -- extra threading! ...but still monolithic.

The problem: Browser developers take the monolithic design as a given, and tinker around the edges.

The Problem

What is a browser trying to do? Provide services for origins -- render, computation, i/o + messaging

• It provides
  origin = <protocol, host, port>

Render: HTML CSS MathML Aria WebGL video canvas images

IO: XHR DOM IndexedDB Cookies FileReader BrowserCache AppCache

Currently: providing services for origins, but they're high-level and complex. You wouldn't ask your operating system to implement Emacs in the kernel. ...well, you might. That was a test; I've already called the police on you.

Kernel: network, UI, storage (concurrency)

Usercode: rendering, javascript, parser

Atlantis

Taglines: security, performance, robustness

But first, some depressing things...

Browsers offer many opportunities for parallelism! ex: HTML parsing, rendering, network and disk IO. But current architectures limit concurrency, suffer from races.

But the DOM model says: JS is single-threaded, and cannot see browser locks. So: JS execution should biglock the DOM. What does happen: NOT THAT.

But in reality, there's just no concurrency re: the DOM. None. more at: Race Detection for Web Applications -- Petrov et al., PLDI '12

idiosyncratic abstraction (n.) an abstraction that is inconsistently applied throughout an application.

HTML5 screen-sharing attacks: SOP should prevent attacker.com from opening and screen-scraping bank.

Today, I was going through my morning newspaper feedreader^[1], saw a few links I liked, socked some away for Friday's linkwrap, dropped some others in my blog's reading feed, on the off-chance that I -- or someone else trawling the archives of Faults -- would want to revisit them later. Another one was an annoying article on Bloomberg about how the FCC's Title II reclassification of Internet Service Providers will raise rates by $X and thus price Internet access out of the reach of Y million households.

And I closed it, and didn't show it to anyone, and hoped that that would mean that fewer people would look at it. Yes, I could have pointed at it for the purposes of dissent, but I've got a post about vaccines to write, and blogging confrontationally makes me sad, so I decided that it was easier to flush it down the memory hole that is ctrl-W^[2] instead.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four occasionally seems like one of those books that missed slightly in meme-space and fifty years temporally, but nevertheless was disturbingly prescient. Of course we've all ported ourselves off paper and nothing's truly lost forever on the Internet, but all the same...the real question is becoming less "is the record around" and more "does anyone remember it?"

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last

1

The Upshot, when they're not putting out awesome data features, apparently publishes things like Obama's Community-College Plan: A Reading List, which is a useful read on (1) what is actually being proposed (2) how it compares to other similar proposals and programs (3) why any of this matters.

The odds of a Republican Congress passing an Obama proposal on any issue aren't very high... [But i]f nothing else, the Obama proposal seems likely to increase the profile of the universal-college movement. That movement echoes the universal-high-school movement of the early 20th century, as I mentioned in an article Thursday. (...)

And a short bit of opinion on the necessity of "universal college":

Yet we never stop to ask why 13 years of universal education has become the magic number -- and why it should permanently be so, given how much more complex our society and economy have become in the ensuing century. If nine years of free education was the sensible norm for the masses in the 19th century and 13 years was the sensible norm in the early 20th century, what is the right number in the 21st century?

Anyway, after spending a plane flight from SLC to Baltimore discussing universal-community-college with my mother, I've come around to the belief that this is by no means as simple as "just throw money at it" -- there are going to be lots of secondary market effects and unintended consequences -- but I think it's time we're having the conversation, at least. Maybe I'll try to write a thing later.

2

Also in politics: If you're familiar with the Net Neutrality debate, this headline will mean

Blah blah blah blah Reading Feed blah.

Sometimes, when we're interacting with people on the internet, we forget that, on the other end of a digital pipeline, there's an actual human being.

...and so, sometimes the right way to deal with internet trolls is by letting their mothers know what they're up to:

Sometimes young boys on Facebook send me rape threats, so I've started telling their mothers. pic.twitter.com/0Cbs81eXiE

— Alanah Pearce (@Charalanahzard) November 28, 2014

Alanah Pearce, student and sometime-game-reviewer, is quoted in The Guardian:

"A while ago, I realised that a lot of the people who send disgusting or overly sexual comments to me over the internet aren't adult males... It turns out that mostly they're young boys and the problem is they don't know any better, so responding to them rationally didn’t resolve the situation. And it got to the point where their comments were starting to make me feel really uncomfortable."

When Pearce sat down to figure out the best way to resolve the situation, she concluded she was best off contacting the boys’ mothers directly, "especially as most of them write to me through their personal Facebook pages. It's shockingly easy to find out who their families are."

Also, we're not going to talk about #gamergate, because Pearce is on the record saying she doesn't want to make it about #gamergate, and that's enough for me.

At the other end of the