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.

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.