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

Introducing canvas: A new interface for OpenAI’s ChatGPT that’s designed for better “collaboration” when coding or writing.

You Can’t Own The Social Web: Would the ‘Social Web Foundation’ better be thought of as an Activitypub trade group?

Thousands of Linux systems infected by stealthy malware since 2021: Researchers discover ‘perfCtl’ - computer malware that, unusually, targets Linux and does all sorts of nasty things.

Labour to commit almost £22bn to carbon capture and storage projects: Glad to see them putting serious investment into something ‘environmental’, tho I don’t know enough about the technology to know if this is is the best option.

Apple is Silently Removing VPN Apps from Russia’s App Store: Presumably at government request, limiting the ability to access uncensored information and privacy of Russian internet users.

Exposing The Flaw In Our Phone System: Mildly terrifying episode of Veritasium showing how easy it is to hack almost any phone via exploiting the SS7 system.

Spy companies using Channel Islands to track phones around the world: The Channel Islands are a hotspot for the SS7 attacks that may allow hackers to track almost any phone’s location as well as intercepting calls and SMS.

Moving to Pika: In which a post about changing blog hosts turns out to be full of commentary on coping with the exhausting conditions of modern existence.

The True Story of “Hidden Figures,” the Forgotten Women Who Helped Win the Space Race: Not all 1960s NASA brainiacs were bespectacled White men.

NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules: The US National Institute of Standards and Technology advises that it’s counterproductive to make users set passwords with specific composition rules or change them regularly.

Twitter Is a Far-Right Social Network: Claims from last year that under Musk’s ‘leadership’ Twitter became indistinguishable from Parler or Truth Social.

Elon Musk says he wants free speech, but his track record suggests otherwise: Elon Musk is only really a ‘free speech absolutist’ when it comes to his own speech.

Twitter is complying with more government demands under Elon Musk: Probably not a bad thing, but it’s definitely a hypocritical thing vs what Musk likes to pretend his values are.

Hate speech is soaring on Twitter under Elon Musk: Contra Musk’s claims, hate speech on Twitter reportedly increased after he took over.

Elon Musk backs down in his fight with Brazilian judges to restore X: Musk presumably decided that his wealth was more important than his supposed ‘principles’.

Highlights from Matt Mullenweg’s Spiciest Word Camp Presentation at WordCamp US 2024: More info and context on, and reactions to, the Mullenweg / WP Engine feud.

As the open social web grows, a new nonprofit looks to expand the ‘fediverse’: I’m happy to see time and money going into improving and promoting open de-siloing technologies such as ActivityPub federation.

Social Web Foundation: It’s a slightly controversial organisation - mainly I think for implying via its name that it’s something with wider scope than it has - but anything that might help knock down the walled silos of monopoly big tech is a positive.