Trump inauguration: Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk seated in front of cabinet picks: Remember the good old days where it wasn’t the done thing for political leaders to make their chumocratic oligarchy fantasies quite so obvious.

Trump embraces role of demagogue on divine mission to reshape America: Trump kicks off with an utterly shameless, quite chilling speech.

New Year, same American violence: America is a ‘culturally violent place’, as well as having far too many guns of course.

Zuckerberg’s Spineless Surrender: Rehashing Old News To Enable False GOP Narratives: ‘Zuckerberg’s claim that he would stand up to government pressure on moderation is undermined by the fact that he’s revealing this literally while caving to government pressure on moderation.’

The Guardian view on development’s paradox: the rich benefit more than the poor: ‘Developing countries struggle to break out of a trading and financial system skewed against them because the global north’s economic growth still depends on extracting their resources and labour’

The Guardian view on corridor care: the normalisation of crisis is shocking: Medics increasingly having to deliver care in hospital corridors and other unsuitable places is resulting in ‘increased suffering’.

Smartphones Are Hot: A decade-old take on ‘What would Marshall McLuhan make of the smartphone?’

Google Maps turns 20, adds AI features, new countries to beat Apple: Next month sees Google Maps' 20th year anniversary; it is kind of hard to imagine life without this type of software.

‘I’ll kiss the ground’: chaos feared amid Gaza ceasefire as families head home: Many of the 90% of Palestinians who have been displaced by the war are about to set off to see what remains of their homes, presumably under the assumption that the cease fire holds.

TikTok ban: App shuts down in the United States hours ahead of a ban: Whether the ban will last is a different story.

People Left Twitter Because Twitter’s Product Sucks, Not Because of Purity Politics: Hard to know how much of the decline is ethical concerns vs it’s simply not a very good experience for many people.

Call to overhaul obesity diagnoses amid fears of over-reliance on BMI: ‘…there are fears BMI on its own is not a “reliable measure” of an individual’s health and may be resulting in both under- and over-diagnosis of obesity….’

Lawsuit: Allstate used GasBuddy and other apps to quietly track driving behavior: Allstate taken to court for covertly using data from apps to track drivers and adjust or cancel their car insurance.

Nowhere to retvrn: how far-right revisionism spreads online: You can’t ‘return’ to something if it never existed in the first place.

Meta surrenders to the right on speech: A good summary of Zuckerberg’s awful announcement about the future of moderation at Meta.

A new era of lies: Mark Zuckerberg has just ushered in an extinction-level event for truth on social media: Looks like I’m not the only person kinda terrified about Zuckerberg’s latest pronouncement.

Understanding DOGE as Procurement Capture: The Department of Government Efficiency is clearly going to be nothing to do with government efficiency.

Ambulance handover delays in England may harm 1,000 patients a day: This is happening more and more due to hospitals having insufficient capacity to take in the patients concerned.

DDoS’ing Yourself with To-dos and Reminders: It me.

Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South: Due to new state-level age verification laws.

Meet Gem the cocker spaniel – the face of UK pet cloning: It’s illegal to clone animals for commercial purposes in the UK, but companies are working around this by sending samples of rich people’s pets overseas.

Alcohol should carry warning label for cancer risk, US surgeon general says

Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too): Modern web browsers are powerful and capable.

“Efficientize” is not a real word but even so: never ever efficientize the things you like doing

The beautiful sentence that is the web: ‘In web development, HTML is the noun, CSS is the adjective that describes the noun, and JavaScript is the verb that makes it do something.’