When Tumblr announced its plan to purge "female-presenting nipples from its service, the volunteer Archive Team leapt into action, working furiously to preserve years of material before Tumblr tore a… Read the rest of the article: Before Tumblr switched off access to NSFW blogs, it blocked archivists who were trying to preserve them
Designed by Jon Gray and available for pre-order next week (ISBN: 9780441007462): Gibson loves it.
The intrepid and brilliant artist and journalist Molly Crabapple (previously) traveled to the immigration detention centers of the Rio Grande and interviewed and sketched the people she met there.
Facebook is a model of offering incredible, nuanced privacy protections to its users, allowing them to configure exactly how much of their data they want to share and how they… Read the rest of the article: Even after you turn off Facebook location tracking, Facebook tracks your location
When your toothbrush is part of the Internet of Shit, sometimes you need to update its firmware, and when that happens, sometimes you have to decide whether your toothbrush will… Read the rest of the article: Livetweeting a toothbrush's firmware update
In 2015, a scandal involving the state-owned 1Malaysia Development Berhad fund brought down the country's authoritarian government, amid allegations that the disgraced ex-Prime Minister Najib Razak and his retinue embezzled… Read the rest of the article: Malaysia charges Goldman Sachs with criminal complicity in multi-billion-dollar 1MDB fraud
Haisam Elsharkawi is a US citizen of Egyptian descent who was travelling to Mecca in 2017 when he was pulled out the boarding line for his flight from LAX by… Read the rest of the article: Lawsuit: US citizen suing CBP for coercing him into unlocking his phone during boarding at LAX
Back when Sony's fraudulent copyright claims resulted in a 47 second recording of pianist James Rhodes playing Bach, apologists argued that Sony and Youtube's copyright bots couldn't be expected to… Read the rest of the article: Sony won't let you post "crap recordings" of a few seconds of your own Beethoven piano performance
In 1991, Vicky Jo Metz borrowed $16,613 to pay for tuition; now she's 59, and has paid back 90% of that money — and she still owes $67,277.
Charter-Spectrum has settled a lawsuit brought by the New York Attorney General that accused the company of defrauding New Yorkers through false advertising about the data-speeds they could expect from… Read the rest of the article: Charter will pay $174.2m for defrauding New Yorkers over data speeds, the largest settlement ever paid by a US ISP
Yesterday, despite the manifest, glaring problems with its porn filter, Tumblr turned on mandatory porn-blocking for all its users' content, so that anything that its bots identified a pornographic would… Read the rest of the article: Tumblr's porn filter blocked Tumblr's images illustrating what Tumblr's porn filter won't block
When lawmakers and cops propose banning working cryptography (as they often do in the USA), or ban it outright (as they just did in Australia), they are long on talk… Read the rest of the article: Debunking "ghost users": MI5's plan to backdoor all secure messaging platforms
Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced a bill called the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, which allows the US government to manufacture generic versions of drugs "in cases in which no company… Read the rest of the article: Elizabeth Warren's new bill: let the US government manufacture generic versions of overpriced, unavailable drugs
John Unger writes, "Using marble, stone and precious gems, I am creating a series of 14 mosaics that replicate 16th century anatomical engravings. Each mosaic is 7' x 4' and… Read the rest of the article: Kickstarting mosaics made from precious stones and marble that replicate 16th-century anatomical drawings
Arizona realtor Andy Gregg's Nest doorbell/camera started talking to him: the voice on the other end identified itself as a Canadian "white hat" security researcher who'd broken into his camera… Read the rest of the article: Arizona realtor surprised to find Canadian "white hat" hacker talking to him through his smart doorbell
The Green European Journal has published a package on the proposed new European Copyright Directive: first, an outstanding interview with the rebel Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda (previously); and then… Read the rest of the article: False Flag: my science fiction story about the future of copyright filters in an Article 13 Europe
The employee uprising over Google's secret "Project Dragonfly — a plan to release a censored, surveilling search engine for use in China — has reportedly attained its goals: some of… Read the rest of the article: Internal sources say googler uprising has killed Google's plans to launch a censored, spying Chinese search engine
Google's Sidewalk Labs convinced Toronto to let it build an all-surveilling "smart city" on a small patch of lakefront and then promptly shenaniganized things, breaking all its privacy and transparency… Read the rest of the article: Google's secretive, data-hungry private city within Toronto will be much larger than previously disclosed
The Alien Chestburster Christmas Ornament is just the thing to finish your nerdmas tree; it's from Pittsburgh's Creature Replicas, who will also sell you a life-size 'burster, a fossil Tremors… Read the rest of the article: Chestburster Christmas Ornament (and other delights)
More outstanding paleocomputing Christmas cheer from Paleotronics (previously): a trove of 55 Christmas covers of classic computer magazines, include lamented bygones like Creative Computing.
