The Braindump Blog

Technology

2026-10-04: 'Empire of AI' - artificial intelligence as an imperialist project

2026-10-04

Meet the ā€˜burglars’ paid to break into businesses: ‘As cyber-defences improve, physical entry to premises is emerging as one of the best ways to hack into systems.’

2026-09-29

Stop shaming people for using AI. Start organizing to prevent our obsolescence

2026-09-26

Pope Leo warns of AI threat to humanity at start of three-day France visit: ‘Pope Leo has warned against losing humanity in a ā€œparadise of machinesā€’

2026-09-23

New UK agency to fight ā€˜information warfare’ from likes of Russia, Burnham tells UN

2026-09-22

Google fined more than €400m by Irish regulator over its use of location data: A well-deserved outcome for a company that ‘used “various tricks” to ensure location history and web and app activity were enabled’.

2026-09-20: Person of Interest - an action sci-fi show from 15 years ago - raises questions about AI and surveillance we still need to urgently grapple with

2026-09-19: The Monevator blog summarises the darkly hilarious offer our big tech AI overlords incessantly …

2026-09-19: Rescue iTunes music from your iPhone by connecting it to Linux as thought it was a disk drive

2026-09-19

Sensitive UK police data vulnerable to ā€˜compromise’ by US government and foreign actors: It’s stored without end-to-end encryption who-knows-where on Microsoft Azure that many employees can access

2026-09-16: Facebook is apparently experimenting with a ‘feature’ where, for some people at least, …

2026-09-07

Why shaming people about AI slop isn’t enough to stop Big AI

The “Taylor’s Version” generation is not gonna let Big AI steal her stuff

2026-09-01: So ‘quietly’ has pushed its way through the ranks to be the word that I now most assume …

2026-09-01

Number of young people with no close friends has soared since 2014 in England: ‘The number of young people with no close friends has risen fivefold since 2014 as a result of growing up in a “bleak world” dominated by austerity, the pandemic and social media.’

Anthropic sued over alleged theft of ā€˜tens of thousands’ of songs: ‘The plaintiffs claim they are victims of “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.’

2026-08-29

Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day: ‘In many ways - no, actually, in every way - Hardcore IndieWeb mirrors the very same web publishing practices that were used in the 90s when the web was brand new.’

2026-08-27

AI is coming for your glasses: ‘Critics call it cringe stalkerware’, seems right, given Meta make them.

Meta agrees to major changes to Facebook and Instagram as it settles US trial over teen addiction for up to $18bn: ‘…changes included time limits, stopping notifications during school, a block on the app during critical overnight hours, bans on plastic surgery filters and more.’

2026-08-24: Our critical infrastructure seems increasingly subject to effective cyber attacks.

2026-08-16

How Claude’s text watermarking works

2026-08-15: Bad Blood tells the story of Theranos, one of the biggest Silicon Valley scams of all time

2026-08-15: Setting up Yubikeys in Linux

2026-08-12

Mark Zuckerberg is back, and still talking bollocks about AI: It’s almost like these tech bro billionaires aren’t actually geniuses.

2026-08-01

Anthropic’s AI Claude hacked into three organizations during cybersecurity test