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.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.’

Quitting social media gave me a new creed: only disconnect: ‘…our virtual selves are not our inner selves, but behaviours drawn out from us by the social media platforms’.

Scientist’s ‘ruthlessly imaginative’ 1925 predictions for the future come true – mostly: How much did Prof Archibald Montgomery Low get right?

Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates: Apparently it’s easier to rewrite science that get Excel to stop auto-converting “MARCH1” into a date.

I’m Tired of Pretending Physical Media Isn’t Still Better Than Streaming Digital: I’m too clutter-phobic to indulge in much physical media, but its hard to deny you tend to get a higher quality and less annoying experience if you do.

AdGuard Mail — a new AdGuard product to protect your email: AdGuard enters into the cadre of services like SimpleLogin and Addy by offering a product designed to keep your email private.

Mobile Communications Best Practice Guidance: Largely sensible advice from the US cyber defence agency on keeping your mobile communications secure.

More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators diagnosed with severe PTSD: Spending hours a day looking at the worst humanity has to offer is damaging to one’s health.

Why Romania’s election was annulled – and what happens next?: Romanian courts rule that their presidential election was too contaminated with social media manipulation, Russian interference, cyber attacks and illegal funding to stand.

AI’s Walking Dog: ‘AI itself has much to offer, but it has not lived up to its potential to serve the public good, and the context of AI’s development explains why’