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.

Do you really need a new phone every 2 years? How to get more out of your devices: If you must upgrade there are several options beyond throwing your old phone away.

Repairing – not recycling – is the first step to tackling smartphone e-waste: Reusing and repairing your old phone is much better for the environment than recycling it.

Using LLMs to Simplify your Writing: Using LLMs as a personal writing editor seems like one of their more benign uses if you’re happy to fact-check the results - and this idea is one my colleagues probably wish I’d take up.

Ban warnings fly as users dare to probe the “thoughts” of OpenAI’s latest model: OpenAI’s typical levels of actual openness surfacing again as they threaten to ban anyone asking their new model why it says the things it does.

Hundreds of pagers exploded in Lebanon and Syria in deadly attack: Seemingly a coordinated attack on Hezbollah via explosive pagers.