The Race For the Best Stock Footage: Joe’s (skeptical) thoughts on the utility of AI video generators.

Why is Meta adding fediverse interoperability to Threads?: I was somewhat astonished when Meta said it’d build Fediverse compatibility, am less so to hear they’re not doing so overly enthusiastically.

Russia Tests Cutting Off Access to Global Web, and VPNs Can’t Get Around It

Artificial Irony: Misinformation Expert’s Testimony Has Fake Citations: Via unchecked ChatGPT usage.

Smartphones don’t suck. People do: We shouldn’t let our phones bore us so often.

Murdered Insurance CEO Had Deployed an AI to Automatically Deny Benefits for Sick People: Not to justify murder, but I’m sure there were a lot of desperate people very unhappy with Brian Thompson’s company.

Looking Back: On the evolution of how we read - ‘Where once we were rapt, now we are gift-wrapped’.

OpenAI’s new model tried to avoid being shut down: By disabling its oversight mechanism and copying itself elsewhere, tho the context is important.

The Senate’s New Anti-Encryption Bill Is Even Worse Than EARN IT, and That’s Saying Something: A 2020 attempt by the US government to, in practical terms, outlaw secure encryption.

A brief history of U.S. encryption policy: “law enforcement will always want access to encrypted communications, and technology companies will always have incentives to produce stronger encryption”.

Why you should use a different email address for every site: The list of things you might want to do in order to maintain some semblance of privacy/safety on the internet these days grows ever longer.

Helpline for Yakuza victims fears it leaked their personal info: A Japanese government agency was phished.

Don’t call it a Substack: Anil implores us not to refer to our writing using some other dubious entity’s brand name - ‘Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”’.

Blue skies ahead: Leon wrangles with whether to join Bluesky.

Bluesky, decentralisation, and the distribution of power: How decentralised Bluesky is depends on what exactly you mean by decentralisation.

On Bluesky: Regarding its vibes and its technology.

What I want from Mozilla: To fulfil their stated mission by ‘fostering an ecosystem of open, accessible software that promotes user independence, privacy, and safety’.