Accessible tips for people to protect their privacy
[Bill Fitzgerald]Bill Fitzgerald has updated his open source guide to personal privacy:"Conversations about privacy and security often focus on technology and give scant attention to the human,...
View ArticleJournalists - is Twitter actually your community?
[Damon Kiesow in Working Systems]Damon Kiesow, who is the Knight Chair in Digital Editing and Producing at the Missouri School of Journalism, writes:"We ourselves have torn down the wall between...
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PSA: Social media privacy and you
I’ve noticed a few mistaken assumptions circulating on social media lately, so I thought it was worth clarifying a few things around privacy and surveillance.Much of this depends on the idea of a...
View ArticleImproving Private Signal Calls: Call Links & More
[Signal]Signal has improved its group call functionality pretty significantly:"If you love group calls on Signal, but don’t want to create a group chat for every combination of your friends or...
View ArticleHow I ship projects at big tech companies
[Sean Goedecke]This is very good. It's advertised as a piece about shipping in big tech companies, but honestly, I think it's true of many smaller companies too. It's not true in the smallest startups...
View ArticleCongress About to Gift Trump Sweeping Powers to Crush Political Enemies
[Noah Hurowitz at The Intercept]This should be a five alarm fire:"Up for a potential fast-track vote next week in the House of Representatives, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American...
View ArticleI’m a neurology ICU nurse. The creep of AI in our hospitals terrifies me
[Michael Kennedy and Isobel Cockerell in Coda Story]Just one example of many of AI being used to take agency away from ordinary workers:"The upshot was, it took away our ability to advocate for...
View ArticleThe corner café
We’ve got a new takeaway in the neighborhood, occupying a small space that was previously taken up by a pizza joint. Their opening was a bit of a saga — it seemed like they were waiting an age for...
View ArticleWhy the Guardian is no longer posting on X
[The Guardian]Given the reluctance to leave X among most publishers, the Guardian is taking a big leadership role here by refusing to continue to post to X:"This is something we have been considering...
View ArticleThe Onion acquires Infowars
[Oliver Darcy at Status]I literally had to check to see if this was real:"The Onion has successfully acquired Infowars.The satirical news outlet purchased Alex Jones' right-wing conspiracy empire at a...
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Bluesky, the Fediverse, and the future of social media
I care a lot about the future of social media. It’s how many of us learn about the world and connect to each other; putting something so important in the hands of a handful of centralized corporations...
View ArticleIs BlueSky the new Twitter, and if so is that a good thing?
[Mathew Ingram at The Torment Nexus]Mathew wrestles with where Bluesky sits in the future of social media given its connections to venture capital and blockchain supporters:"I have no doubt that, as...
View ArticleNewsletter platform beehiiv launches multi-million dollar journalism fund
[Sara Fischer at Axios]"Beehiiv, a newsletter startup taking aim at Substack, says it's making a "multi-million dollar investment" to create a new "beehiiv Media Collective" of journalists on its...
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What I want from Mozilla
Like many of you, I received a survey today with the title: “What is your dream for Mozilla?” I filled it in, but the potential for Mozilla is so expansive and critical to the future of the internet...
View ArticleBiden Asked Microsoft to “Raise the Bar on Cybersecurity.” He May Have Helped...
[Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke, at ProPublica]Security lapses in Microsoft's own products led to hacks that in turn pushed President Biden to ask for help from it and other tech companies...
View ArticleEscape from Twitter: The Future of Social Media Is Decentralized
This is a pretty great article about the decentralized social web, which quotes Christine Lemmer-Webber, Blaine Cook, and me.It’s in Polish, but if you don’t speak the language, the “translate” button...
View ArticleElon Musk algorithmically boosted Republican accounts on X from the moment he...
[Timothy Graham and Mark Andrejevic]Elon Musk didn't just endorse Trump with his words - according to this pre-print research paper, he gave Republicans an algorithmic boost on X, too:"The analysis...
View ArticleMicrosoft and Google incubated Chinese startups tied to police
[Joanna Chiu and Viola Zhou at Rest of World]Tech companies like Microsoft and Google have, through their accelerators, supported startups that provide censorship and policing technologies in China....
View ArticleInside UnitedHealth’s Playbook for Limiting Mental Health Coverage
[Annie Waldman at ProPublica]UnitedHealth Group has been using an algorithm to determine whether patients have been receiving "too much" therapy and then cutting them off:"Around 2016, government...
View ArticleSF tech layoffs: Tales of post-pink-slip reinvention
[Jillian D'Onfro at The San Francisco Standard]On one level, this piece about tech workers leaving the industry behind and doing something more culturally meaningful is quite nice:"Andrew Wasilewski,...
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