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’.

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.