It’s not just you, Google Search really has gotten worse: Researchers find that search engines are getting ever more flooded with nasty SEO product spam sites despite their best efforts.

Why changes to the block on Elon Musk’s X are driving users away: Musk doesn’t believe block buttons should block.

Online Safety and the “Great Decentralization” – The Perils and Promises of Federated Social Media: Is the Fediverse in need of better tooling around moderation?

Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications - US senator: Inevitably the centralisation and lack of encryption around push notifications makes them a useful source of surveillance material.

Governments Are Using Spyware on Citizens. Can They Be Stopped?: Companies like the NSO Group are happy to sell commercial spyware to governments who will predictably use it for bad things.

The Subprime AI Crisis: Ed Zitron worries about what happens when the unprofitability of the current generative AI business becomes unsustainable.

Get Me Out Of Data Hell: The day Nikhil Suresh’s software engineering work pushed him so far into the pain zone that he has to quit there and then.

The Other Bubble: Why “Software as a Service” (SaaS) products - especially the enterprise-oriented offerings - often end up being so awful.

Who owns your shiny new Pixel 9 phone? You can’t say no to Google’s surveillance: Researchers find the Pixel 9 phone transmits “location, email address, phone number, network status, and other telemetry” to Google every 15 minutes by default.

Expensive sci-fi dreck: The title refers to Elon Musk’s latest robo-stuff of course.

TikTok knows its app is harming kids, new internal documents show: All the social media companies either know full well the harms that using their product can bring or are wilfully ignorant of them.

The future of live news online sucks: Why the TikTokization of the big social media platforms makes them ‘uniquely bad places to follow news’.

Crowdsourcing the Monetization of Social Media: Social media could have been good if only we’d landed on a different incentive structure.

Thousands of Linux systems infected by stealthy malware since 2021: Researchers discover ‘perfCtl’ - computer malware that, unusually, targets Linux and does all sorts of nasty things.

Apple is Silently Removing VPN Apps from Russia’s App Store: Presumably at government request, limiting the ability to access uncensored information and privacy of Russian internet users.

Exposing The Flaw In Our Phone System: Mildly terrifying episode of Veritasium showing how easy it is to hack almost any phone via exploiting the SS7 system.

Spy companies using Channel Islands to track phones around the world: The Channel Islands are a hotspot for the SS7 attacks that may allow hackers to track almost any phone’s location as well as intercepting calls and SMS.