It’s not just you, Google Search really has gotten worse: Researchers find that search engines are getting ever more flooded with nasty SEO product spam sites despite their best efforts.

Why you should ditch social media for a (micro)blog: Yes, I’m a big fan of both the general concept and the specific product Aaron mentions.

Why changes to the block on Elon Musk’s X are driving users away: Musk doesn’t believe block buttons should block.

Online Safety and the “Great Decentralization” – The Perils and Promises of Federated Social Media: Is the Fediverse in need of better tooling around moderation?

All What Is Delicious to Man: Today’s implausible vision of superabundance is a lot grimmer than the one that they were promised in the 1830s.

Google moves to end geofence warrants, a surveillance problem it largely created: Geofence warrants require companies to hand over data about everyone that was using a mobile device within a given geographical region - a type of reverse search warrant.

The ‘Internet of Things’ helping to provide key evidence in criminal trials: The Crown Prosecution Service’s take on the utility of our data-gathering gadgets.

Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications - US senator: Inevitably the centralisation and lack of encryption around push notifications makes them a useful source of surveillance material.

Governments Are Using Spyware on Citizens. Can They Be Stopped?: Companies like the NSO Group are happy to sell commercial spyware to governments who will predictably use it for bad things.

The Subprime AI Crisis: Ed Zitron worries about what happens when the unprofitability of the current generative AI business becomes unsustainable.

Get Me Out Of Data Hell: The day Nikhil Suresh’s software engineering work pushed him so far into the pain zone that he has to quit there and then.

The Other Bubble: Why “Software as a Service” (SaaS) products - especially the enterprise-oriented offerings - often end up being so awful.

XOXO festival 2024 playlist: Videos from the final outing of the ‘experimental festival for independent artists who live and work online’.

Who owns your shiny new Pixel 9 phone? You can’t say no to Google’s surveillance: Researchers find the Pixel 9 phone transmits “location, email address, phone number, network status, and other telemetry” to Google every 15 minutes by default.

The Return of the Deniers and the Revenge of Patoshi: One of the analyses that suggest that the creator of Bitcoin owns around 1.1 million of them.

Using static websites for tiny archives: What Alex does with the files that survive the decluttering.

You should be using an RSS reader: RSS is great (& Cory Doctorow uses Newsblur for it).

Expensive sci-fi dreck: The title refers to Elon Musk’s latest robo-stuff of course.

The future of live news online sucks: Why the TikTokization of the big social media platforms makes them ‘uniquely bad places to follow news’.