The Braindump Blog

Technology

2026-06-25

Meta pauses employee tracker for AI training amid privacy concerns: Funnily enough its employees were not fans of ‘a tool that tracked staff keystrokes, mouse clicks and content displayed on computer screens in order to collect data for training its AI models’.

AI helps read papyrus scroll burnt to crisp during Vesuvius eruption: Seems a decent use of AI if accurate - the doc was all about Stoic philosophy.

Four in five under-16s in Australia using social media despite ban, study shows

2026-06-17

France to ditch Palantir’s AI data tools in favour of domestic provider: A wise move that needs to happen elsewhere too.

2026-06-14: Unsurprisingly the Online Safety Act hasn't stopped social media companies pushing dangerous content

2026-06-13: The Trump administration forces Anthropic to stop foreign nationals accessing its latest AI models

2026-06-13: Dark Mirror retells the Edward Snowden story from a journalist's viewpoint

2026-06-07: DocFetcher is a great multi-OS application for searching through vast tranches of your files

2026-06-06: On the grimmer side of Wikipedia entries I see there’s now an official page for ‘Deaths …

2026-06-06

No Right to Remain Silent: Negative Rights in a Positive-Rights World: ‘…the right to produce no data broadly doesn’t exist.’

2026-06-03: The economic benefits of Open Source software

2026-05-30: Pure nerd in-joke perfection from @KyleTrainEmoji: PICARD: Data, shields up DATA: Brilliant! …

2026-05-30: Instagram quietly disables end-to-end encryption on your DMs

2026-05-28: The pope has (very lengthy) thoughts on AI. I can’t pretend to have read it all yet, but the …

2026-05-27: Government department saves £ millions by replacing its Palantir IT system with an in-house one

2026-05-25: WhatsApp is being repeatedly sued alleging that it's lying about its end-to-end encryption

2026-05-17: The Open Rights Group's very comprehensive report on the importance of Digital Sovereignty

2026-05-16: Britain's dependence on US technology makes us vulnerable

2026-05-02: When my OneDrive sync started seemingly permanently destroying some of my files I was surprised to …

2026-05-02

UN warns women in public life face increasingly sophisticated online violence

2026-04-27

Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They’re the Bad Guys: ‘Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?"’

2026-04-18

US tech firms successfully lobbied EU to keep datacentre emissions secret: ‘legally questionable’

2026-04-09: Anthropic develops an AI model that is extremely good at finding and exploiting previously unknown security bugs in software

2026-04-08

The Team Behind a Pro-Iran, Lego-Themed Viral-Video Campaign: Turns out America isn’t the only country that can meme-war (to the detriment of the rest of us I’m certain).

2026-04-04

Maybe you should have bought an electric car: Electric cars have improved a lot since they came out and are much cheaper to run than petrol alternatives, even before the incredible price rises from the Iran conflict.