>they're mainly complaining about proprietary OS vendors restricting users' choice in browsers
I guess they think everybody forgot about the many years and hundreds of millions of dollars that Mozilla spent trying to get people to adopt FirefoxOS. An operating system that… only allowed using Firefox as the web browser.
I would have agreed with you in the past. And I still do when it comes to defending a lot of the BBC content that doesn't come from the news department.
But BBC News is just so bad and utterly corrosive that I'd abolish the entire institution just to get rid of it. Yes I know other UK media is all as bad or worse, but none of them have the public standing or institutional power that the BBC has. I don't think there's any way of reforming the news department at this point. It's not just a matter of a few bad shows or bad 'journalists'. The entire ethos/mission of BBC News is fundamentally broken. They don't know how to do journalism as a public broadcaster, and I don't think they could ever learn how. Certainly not within the current media culture in the UK.
This incident isn't a one off. It's typical. The only unusual thing is the program got cancelled and they actually deleted the article - usually they double down for weeks and refuse to admit fault. I'm guessing that's only because crypto isn't (yet) a partisan culture war issue in the UK media.
I think experience will differ a lot based on when you were vaccinated. Earlier on (Feb/March last year) it sounds like the waiting time wasn't being strictly enforced - you were advised to wait especially if you were driving but there wasn't really any administration of it. That was the experience my parents had and I heard similar from other people vaccinated at that time.
I got vaccinated in the summer at one of the larger vaccination centres and they were being more strict about it. After getting vaccinated they gave you a card with a time written on it which was when you were supposed to leave (although both times it was only 10 mins not 15). There was a dedicated 'room' with chairs in it and a clock and a nurse watching over things. After your time was up you left the card on the chair. Nobody was physically forcing you to stay but there was an obvious expectation that you would and I didn't see anybody walk straight out either time (out of a sample of 60+ people that I overlapped with).
I have to admit I'm a bit more cynical. Sure somethings are just private/charged for etc and access tokens are just part of a paywall. That is fair enough. I think in a lot of cases it's really about control though. Information that isn't behind a paywall, but that requires a token to access through the API. The classic example would be Twitter, when they shut down most of the third party clients.
There is of course a decent argument that it's their service and they can put whatever T&C on it that they like. However YC didn't seem to care about T&C when they funded AirBNB and defended their (ab)use of Craigslist.
There is no such thing as an open web API. They are all proprietary alternatives to open data formats or protocols. If those companies used open and standard data formats or protocols (I admit that in many cases this might mean proposing a new standard) there would be no need for a custom API at all. Standard data formats can still exist behind a paywall, so it's not an issue of free-as-in-beer. It's an issue of user lockin.
For a bunch of things it won't matter one way or the other because not many people will ever use it, and there isn't much likelihood of other organisations offering the same data anyway.
Take Google Reader API though, where we ended up with a bunch of clients that only targeted the proprietary Google Reader API. When Reader shut down clients had to be rewritten to work with the APIs of other RSS syncing services, services had to try and recreate the Reader API to ease migration and so on. All to arrive at a situation that isn't much better than before - a bunch of clients hard coded to specific services that will have to be altered if those services go away. If Reader had been based on an open protocol then switching would have been trivial for everybody - you just point your client at the address of your new rss syncing server.
I want a world where switching between providers and clients is trivial(ish), like email, rss or the web itself, not a world like Google Reader where we are all hard coded into proprietary APIs that are one cost-cutting meeting away from being closed, leaving everybody with a lot of work to do to migrate.
I'm sure there is less opportunity to make money that way - you can't lock people in as easily and so on. However it's not like most of the companies we are talking about here are ever going to be profitable. The game is about getting bought out. I'd rather we at least create something a bit more lasting while we play the buyout lottery.
>An important trend is the API-ification of everything. As more and more businesses are accessible with a web API, the Internet becomes more and more powerful.
This is a bad thing. Replacing opens standards with proprietary APIs locked behind access tokens hardly makes the internet more accessible.
I guess they think everybody forgot about the many years and hundreds of millions of dollars that Mozilla spent trying to get people to adopt FirefoxOS. An operating system that… only allowed using Firefox as the web browser.