Tiktok bills itself as apolitical, despite the fact that is both a de facto arm of Chinese political propaganda (and, weirdly, for Uyghur human rights activists).

Elena Botella worked at Capital One — one of the US's leading issuers of subprime credit-cards — for three years; in a fascinating first-person account, she describes how Capital One's… Read the rest of the article: "I just love to solve problems": how people who work at predatory lenders avoid thinking about the pain they inflict

The Cyber Independent Testing Lab is a security measurement company founded by Mudge Zadko (previously), late of the Cult of the Dead Cow and l0pht Heavy Industries and the NSA's… Read the rest of the article: Assessing the security of devices by measuring how many difficult things the programmers tried to do

"Interoperability" is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to… Read the rest of the article: Adversarial Interoperability

Nine years ago, Republican lawmakers gutted the IRS's budget, but didn't relax its requirement to conduct random audits: in response, the IRS has shifted its focus from auditing rich people… Read the rest of the article: IRS admits it audits poor people because auditing rich people is too expensive

Elizabeth Warren has already proposed strict limits on lobbyists' activities, but in her latest policy proposal, she offers a way of hitting the most aggressive lobbyists in their pocketbooks, and… Read the rest of the article: Elizabeth Warren proposes an "excessive lobbying tax" that would fund independent Congressional experts and public participation in policy

Machine learning systems are pretty good at finding hidden correlations in data and using them to infer potentially compromising information about the people who generate that data: for example, researchers… Read the rest of the article: Researchers think that adversarial examples could help us maintain privacy from machine learning systems

DMZ, an outstanding post-apocalyptic comic written by Brian Wood which came to its satsifying conclusion in 2012, and has been subsequently collected in beautiful deluxe editions (which also reprint my… Read the rest of the article: Ava DuVernay is directing an HBO adaptation based on Brian Wood's DMZ

Hkmap Live is a crowdsourced app that uses reports from a Telegram group to track the locations of protesters, police, and traffic, as well as the use of antipersonnel weapons… Read the rest of the article: Apple bans an app because Hong Kong protesters might use it to avoid the murderous, out of control police

On NPR's always-excellent Rough Translation podcast comes an incredibly complex and nuanced story (MP3, transcript) about marginalized, racialized people in public housing in Marseille who found an accepting haven in… Read the rest of the article: The complicated, nuanced story of how racialized French people fought to save their local McDonald's

Last year in the USA, a corporate coalition led by Apple killed 20 state Right to Repair bills (Massachusetts subsequently passed a ballot initiative that accomplished the same rules without… Read the rest of the article: Europe's Right to Repair rules have passed, and will take effect in 2021

We're big fans of useless machines around here: those boxes with one or more switches, that, when toggled, trigger some kind of arm that pops out and puts the switch… Read the rest of the article: Make: a Halloween "Useless Machine" with a skeleton inside it

In July, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg held two hour-long internal employee meetings to discuss the business's future; The Verge obtained the recordings of those meetings, which reveal, among other things,… Read the rest of the article: Zuckerberg: President Warren would "suck" for Facebook

Being a Tor author is pretty swell. (Thanks, Patrick!)

Sean K Reynolds' and Shanna Germain's free, short ebook Consent in Gaming (from Monte Cook Games) is a beautifully thought-through exploration of how game-masters and players can negotiate their own… Read the rest of the article: Consent in Gaming: a guide for GMs and players to difficult subjects for amazing games

Garrett Hardin's 1968 Science essay "The Tragedy of the Commons" is one of the most widely assigned readings in the past ten years' worth of university syllabi; notionally, it describes… Read the rest of the article: "The Tragedy of the Commons": how ecofascism was smuggled into mainstream thought

A beauty from last February: Kyle McDonald tweeted redacted social media screenshots from a surveillance camera owner that emitted a steady stream of alerts because it saw a face in… Read the rest of the article: Surveillance camera hallucinates face in the snow, won't shut up about it

As of Jan 1, a new International Maritime Organisation standard will seriously restrict the kind of air pollution that shipping vessels can emit; in response, the industry has invested more… Read the rest of the article: Global shipping companies comply with anti-air-pollution rules by dumping pollution into the sea, instead

For years, the Harvard Business School fellow William Lazonick has been writing about the rise of the "shareholder value" doctrine in capital markets, and how that has driven financial engineering… Read the rest of the article: Stock buybacks: how Wall Street has created "profits without prosperity"

For years, I've been covering the career of Patrick Costello (previously) a deaf, copyfighting, open access banjo player and teacher who is responsible for a bounty of instructional books, videos,… Read the rest of the article: Just This Banjo: free/open banjo instruction for an angry moment, because you can't be sad while playing the banjo