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Why artist David Shrigley has pulped 6,000 copies of The Da Vinci Code – BBC News
This somehow feels artistically apposite: conspiracy pseudo-fiction being condensed and replaced to tell actual fiction of dystopian surveillance https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-67218454
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Barnstorming thread by Jess Miers on the US-ian Attorneys General (sp?) wanting to sue Meta for being interesting (i.e. “addictive”)
Thread starts here, is entirely worth clicking-through for a read:
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HashiCorp CEO predicts OSS-free Silicon Valley… | /me *laughs in Sun Microsystems*
Oh dear. Predictions based around one’s own business model are rarely generalisable: https://www.thestack.technology/hashicorp-ceo-predicts-oss-free-silicon-valley-unless-the-open-source-model-evolves/
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GitHub – ruffle-rs/ruffle: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust
I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry; this is a brilliant idea assuming that it lives up to its functionality and security expectations, however the pain which Flash wrought upon the web… causes flashbacks. https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle
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UK government keeping files on teaching assistants’ and librarians’ internet activity | …this is the sort of feature-creep (ha!) that I expect the #OnlineSafetyBill’s snooping of End-to-End Encrypted Messengers will enable
Back in 2000 the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was passed as an “urgent” necessity to stop terrorists; 8 years later it was being used to spy on parents re: whether they are in a school catchment area. Ergo: given the capability to snoop on the private messages of Librarians, who wouldn’t? https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/21/uk-government-keeping-files-on-teaching-assistants-and-librarians-internet-activity
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Sick of Cancel Culture? One Man Has a Surprising Solution – POLITICO | I feel Lukianoff’s “coddling” writing should be informing how we approach Trust & Safety
The culture of “Safeytism” that he describes has begun over the past few years to drive the debate about “tech” and public trust; there’s been a broad move in civil society from “the internet enables us to” towards “the internet should protect us from” and the architectural goals which improve the ability to connect more
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I’ve seen at least three hagiographies for Mastodon in the past 48 hours. I fear this won’t end well. #Mastodon #Threads #EternalSeptember2
For context: from 1989/ish to 1997/ish, I was a USENET user, moderator and administrator – the latter C-News, LeafNews and INN, first at aber.ac.uk and then much more notoriously as the manager of uk-usenet.uk.sun.com. Moore’s Law has rendered any mention of megabytes or gigabytes to be meaningless in the modern day, but I fought a
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The Problem With Jon Stewart ending over AI and China coverage – The Verge | in partial praise of Trump
One thing I can say in favour of Donald Trump was that by making business impossible he made it very easy for corporate America to walk away from China to varying extents in collective shows of business dressed up as moralism. At some point that will boomerang. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/19/23924549/jon-stewart-apple-ai-china-cancel Previously: https://alecmuffett.com/article/15058