Linked List: October 13, 2024

Sunday, 13 October 2024

Sponsorship Openings at Daring Fireball, Q4 Edition 

After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship schedule at DF is unusually open at the moment — including this upcoming week.

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch. And again, this coming week remains open.

1Password 

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired longtime DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. In a 2023 survey of IT and security professionals, 50 percent of respondents said that their organization’s vulnerability management program had support from leadership to “a large/great extent”. That’s good for them. But it also leaves a full half of respondents without enough support from leadership.

If you’re trying to get buy-in at your own organization, come equipped with the facts about the risks you’re facing, and come with a clear plan to remediate them. To learn more about how vulnerability management is changing, read 1Password’s blog post, and come prepared.

Cabel Sasser’s Talk at XOXO 2024 

The less you know about this talk, the more you’ll enjoy watching it unfold. Just remarkably good. Trust me, watch it now, before anything about it is spoiled for you.

Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Was Released 30 Years Ago Today 

Jamie Zawinski:

For those of you who are unaware of these finer details, 0.9 was the first release of the Netscape browser (which begat Firefox) available to the general public. This beta release was an unannounced surprise. Prior to this, everyone assumed that what we were doing was going to be a standard for-sale product where you sent off your $35 and then some time later got a disc in the mail with a license key. That we just said, “Here’s our FTP site, come get it, go crazy” was, at the time, shocking to people.

The thing that confuses people sometimes about new platforms is that while the platform and its clients are different things, you usually need both to be great for the whole thing to succeed. The World Wide Web, as conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, was and remains a remarkable, world-changing platform. But it really didn’t take off until Netscape hit. It was just such a great app, including on the Mac. It was the browser the web needed.