The "Barnacle" is a networked car-immobilizer that parking guards stick over the windshield of your illegally parked car; you pay the fine online and the Barnacle gets an over-the-air signal to release itself from your car so you can remove it and put it in a nearby deposit bin. Read the rest

As protests in Hong Kong enter their seventh week, protest organizers are worried that the police might be infiltrating Telegram groups; instead, they've taken to organizing protests by sending messages over Tinder and Pokemon Go, and by using Apple's ad-hoc, serverless Airdrop protocol. Read the rest

Back in January, Amy Hawkins and Jeffrey Wasserstrom published a fascinating, nuanced look why Chinese state censors had banned the mention of Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" on social media, but not the book itself. Read the rest

San Francisco's giant fleet of semi-illegal electric scooters have come to symbolize the tech industry's worst excesses, inspiring all kinds of creative resistance Read the rest

Inmates in Ohio's Marion Correctional Institution smuggled computer parts out of an ewaste recycling workshop and built two working computers out of them, hiding them in the ceiling of a training room closet ceiling and covertly patching them into the prison's network. Read the rest

Turns out that when your giant, tax-dodging global furniture enterprise pitches itself as a kind of flat-pack-on-tap public utility, it gets treated like one. Read the rest