The EU's catastrophic new Copyright Directive is steamrollering towards completion, and that should worry every internet user, not just those in the EU. Read the rest

Today, the EU held a routine vote on regulations for self-driving cars, when something decidedly out of the ordinary happened... Read the rest

Yesterday, Bloomberg published a blockbuster story accusing the Chinese military of sneaking spy-chips "the size of a grain of rice" onto the motherboards of servers sold by Supermicro and/or Elemental for use in data-centers operated by the biggest US corporations (Apple and Amazon, among others), as well as US warships and military data-centers, and the servers used by Congress and the Senate. Read the rest

Poolboy nails one of the three most pernicious forms of marketing trends: the ironic self-deprecating brand run by some douchey social media manager: Read the rest

MIT Comparative Media Studies researcher/instructor Chris Peterson is an adrent supporter of the Math Prize for Girls, and as part of his work with the organization, he's learned about the way that STEM fields were once considered inherently feminine, while the higher-status humanities were dominated by men -- it's the subject of some outstanding feminist scholarship by Professor Maria Charles. Read the rest

The UK Conservative Party's annual conference is about to kick off in Birmingham, and the Tories have distributed an app ahead of time to all attendees: senior ministers, government officials, members of the press, party members, and others. Read the rest

Messages leaked to Buzzfeed reveal the bizarre story of the "Tory First Battalion," a secret Twitter group formed to capitalise on the smear that the Labour party was anti-Semitic by coordinating and amplifying anti-Corbyn messages. Read the rest

Executives from Google, Twitter, AT&T, Amazon, Apple, and other big tech companies told a U.S. Senate panel today they support updating federal law to protect data privacy, but they want Congress to block California's tough new privacy rules. Read the rest

Bravo, Twitter! Something that users are asking for made it in: "Twitter will now let you completely turn off its algorithmic timeline. So now you can revert completely to a reverse-chronological feed of only people you follow."

Twitter has made a surprise change to how it shows tweets to its users, following a viral thread earlier today that discussed ways to reverse the platform’s algorithmic timeline. Now, when you uncheck the settings box reading “Show the best tweets first,” Twitter will completely revert your timeline to a non-algorithmic, reverse-chronological order, which is how Twitter was originally designed and operated for years until the company introduced a default algorithmic model in early 2016.

The company's hand was being gently forced. A few weeks ago, Andy Baio discovered and publicized Twitter search flags that generated a reverse-chronological snapshot of your follows, and last week Enna Kinema discovered that you could vanquish suggested tweets and highlights by muting their metadata tags. Read the rest

“We’re working on new ways to give you more control over your timeline,” Twitter Support tweeted tonight (during the Emmys live broadcast). Read the rest

Channel 4 in the UK:

We stand up for diversity and inclusion. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees. One of the dark sides of this is online abuse. To highlight this disturbing trend, we’ve partnered with some advertisers to show examples of real abuse against real people in their ads. It may shock you.

Here are the ads. If the embed doesn't show, click the link above.

We stand up for diversity and inclusion. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees. One of the dark sides of this is online abuse. To highlight this disturbing trend, we’ve partnered with some advertisers to show examples of real abuse against real people in their ads. It may shock you. pic.twitter.com/guXXTsP8xA

— Channel 4 (@Channel4) September 7, 2018

T.S. Eliot, as dissatisfied by life's pettiness as he was satisfied by his own conservative fatalism, ended his poem The Hollow Men with the famous lines "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper." He later regretted it. People who survived bombings told him they heard nothing at all. Read the rest

The whiner-in-chief frequently turns to Twitter to complain about how he is mistreated and misunderstood. While his relatively small coterie of lickspittle sycophants lap it up, people with more than two neurons to rub together have no trouble recognizing his hypocrisy, lies, and ignorance. Someecards has collected "15 of the internet’s best clapbacks at Trump that we really, really hope he saw." Here are a few of my favorites:

1. Hypocrisy

https://t.co/up6gV85c6q

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) August 29, 2018

2. Going to a knife fight armed with a spray tan

3. Ass-banana calling the kettle black

You know what I don't wanna pay for, jackhole? Your golfing trips, your wife's clothes, your stupid toilet you're going to die on or your nasty spray on wig. Also, it's BORNE not BOURNE. Bourne is a movie you unrelenting fucking idiot ass-banana. https://t.co/N3Pm7VPejb

— Wendy Molyneux (@WendyMolyneux) April 3, 2018

4. Kim Jong Un envy

We don't live in a dictatorship or a monarchy. I swore an oath—in the military and in the Senate—to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not to mindlessly cater to the whims of Cadet Bone Spurs and clap when he demands I clap https://t.co/99gW1yalDl

— Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) February 6, 2018

Image: Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock Read the rest

Zeynep Tufekci (previously) leads Tech Review's politics issue with the best overview of the forces that have combined to make the internet so hospitable to totalitarians and racist pigs. Read the rest

Dril has a book out collecting their tweets, drawings and other elements of the essential twitter experience.

availble now... Dril Official "Mr. Ten Years" Anniversary Collection the real deal

There are three customer reviews so far.

Peter Sibicky ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐I don't know what this is but I bought it

MD ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐My hands are shaking

Kevin Bartz ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐hi dril thanks for your book this is the first review i gave 5 stars for your book thanks

If you don't know what this is about, you won't like it. Read the rest

Facebook wants you to "engage" with its service, so they have an algorithm that plucks your most favorited images out of your past stream and adds dancing whimsical cartoon characters and then rams the resulting animation into your eyeballs, because why not? Read the rest

In the 1970s, there was a boom in pocket calculators, driven by the plummeting costs of their electronic components, and an industry that had once prided itself on its high-end offerings for serious business users found itself rethinking the nature of the calculator, producing "ladies' calculators," calculators for kids (accompanied by bestselling books of "calculator games") and all manner of weird form-factors. Read the rest

Alex Jones is temporarily suspended from Twitter, but is openly boasting about simply switching to his other account to personally evade the weeklong ban—having called upon his supporters to arm themselves with "battle rifles."

The BBC understands that Twitter judged this to be a violation of its rules against abusive behaviour.

The restriction appears to only be effective against the @RealAlexJones account, which has 890,000 followers.

Mr Jones has since posted a video in which he discusses the move to a separate @Infowars feed - with about 431,000 followers - which he described as being a "sub-account".

The special consideration being given to this guy hints at an iceberg's underwater volume. Twitter's had to admit he broke the rules they said he hadn't broken, had to admit that it wouldn't ban him despite saying it would if he broke the rules, and had to endure the public spectacle of its own CEO sanctimoniously lecturing the public about free speech and getting pantsed for it by Kara Swisher in the New York Times. And now it's issuing a temporary suspension, cut just for Alex Jones.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick. Silly boy, shoulda jumped higher, Goodness gracious, great balls of fire! Read the rest