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’.

Introducing ChatGPT search: OpenAI releases its search engine.

Google CEO says over 25% of new Google code is generated by AI: Their computer programmers are turning into code reviewers.

Why I Am (Still) a Liberal (For Now): ‘Thin’ vs ‘thick’ liberalism, and the Cruelty Culture of 2022-era Twitter.

Yelling at clouds: ‘The Cloud’ might feel like magic but we must remember that it has a real material footprint and consequent impact.

The AI-nuclear weapons analogy, explained : Vox catalogues some similarities and differences between the two technologies.

The Doc Web: A deep dive into the dynamics of publishing to the web via Google Docs.

A woman, blogging: this is a political act: Blogging can be empowering, especially for people who otherwise might not have a voice - but it’s not without risk.

Smarter than ‘Ctrl+F’: Linking Directly to Web Page Content: I didn’t realise URLs already let you link to and highlight any specific piece of text on a webpage.

Ban LLMs Using First-Person Pronouns: Maybe we shouldn’t allow AI chatbots to refer to themselves as ‘I’.