[Jess Weatherbed at The Verge] "A federal judge has blocked the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete agreements that make it difficult for workers to join their employers’ rivals or launch competing businesses. The ruling prevents the FTC’s ban on noncompete agreements fr … | Continue reading
This past week I embarked upon two long car drives — from Philadelphia to Cape Cod and back again — with an almost-two year-old. He’s a remarkably good traveler who takes everything in his stride (as long as he has his puffy stickers and you agree to put Elmo on the radio from ti … | Continue reading
[Erin Kissane] "Back in the fall, I wrote about a research project I was diving into with Darius Kazemi. Now, after a few months of prepping and conducting interviews with people who run Mastodon and Hometown servers about how they govern their parts of the network and then many … | Continue reading
[Open Society Foundations] "In February 2024, the Open Society Foundations issued a call for applications for a convening in which selected participants would share their visions of an AI-mediated future." I thought this, from the concluding observations, was telling: "Participan … | Continue reading
[Alexander Saeedy and Dana Mattioli at The Wall Street Journal] "The $13 billion that Elon Musk borrowed to buy Twitter has turned into the worst merger-finance deal for banks since the 2008-09 financial crisis." "[...] The banks haven’t been able to offload the debt without incu … | Continue reading
[Jess Weatherbed at The Verge] "“Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future,” Procreate said on the new AI section of its website. “We think machine learning is a compelling technology … | Continue reading
[Surveillance Watch: They Know Who You Are] "Surveillance Watch is an interactive map revealing the intricate connections between surveillance companies, their funding sources and affiliations." This is a volunteer-driven, well-cited database of global surveillance companies and … | Continue reading
[Anuj Ahooja and Sean Tilley at We Distribute] "Starting today, Flipboard will let users search for and follow accounts from across the Fediverse from the comfort of their own dashboards. [...] This new feature isn’t just limited to Mastodon or PixelFed, but includes Threads prof … | Continue reading
Webmentions have been broken on this blog for a little while. I’m on vacation this week, so I’m hoping to get them fixed up — as well as a few other fixes here and there. Mostly, though, I have to admit that I’ll be taking the little one to the beach, cooking delicious food, and … | Continue reading
[Andy Kroll at ProPublica and Nick Surgey at Documented] "Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But … | Continue reading
[Dan Kennedy at Media Nation] "Four years ago, Boston lawyer and journalist James Barron wrote that the Watergate break-in may well have been an attempt to steal documents from Democratic Party headquarters showing that Nixon had taken $549,000 from the Greek government in order … | Continue reading
Every so often, a post goes around in tech circles about how news is bad and we shouldn’t pay attention to it. I think that’s ludicrous. Today’s was a post from 2022 called The News is Information Junk Food. I think it’s a bad argument that could have poor consequences. It was fe … | Continue reading
[Bill Grueskin in Columbia Journalism Review] "What’s most important is that a disruptive start-up not be placed at the mercy of the old organization—which might see the upstart as a competitive threat and attempt to have it shut down or cause it to fail." "[...] Newsroom manager … | Continue reading
[Sean Tilley at We Distribute] "Following President Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 election, Democratic supporters have gained a massive influx of energy and support all over the Web. Hours after the president made his announcement, Heidi Li Feldman, a law professor emeritus at G … | Continue reading
[Matt Levine at Bloomberg] "Here’s a thing. It costs $1. If you buy one, the next one will cost $2. If someone buys it, the next one will cost $4. Et cetera. The price of the thing always goes up, leaving every buyer (except the most recent one) with a large guaranteed profit. Of … | Continue reading
This moment isn’t about partisanship, because the discussions we’re having aren’t about tax policy or the intricacies of how we interact overseas. In 2024, one candidate’s supporters are waving flags that read “mass deportations now”, while the candidate is telling them they’ll n … | Continue reading
So, the Blaugust festival of blogging is a thing. Who knew? For anyone arriving here for the very first time Blaugust is a month-long event that takes place each August which focuses on blogging primarily and has started to include other forms of serialized content over the last … | Continue reading
[Lauren Feiner at The Verge] "A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets. “After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion … | Continue reading
[Joel Gascoigne] "The larger social networks provide a level of distribution that's worth tapping into, but I strongly encourage investing a portion of your energy into networks where you will be able to maintain ownership long-term." Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne talks about how the … | Continue reading
[Reid Hoffman in the New York Times] "As Vice President Harris defines her vision for how best to lead the United States in this moment in time, she has an opportunity to take the torch passed to her by President Biden in an explicitly pro-innovation direction. Instead of governi … | Continue reading
Somehow, I need to deal with my sadness. Do we all? It’s like it sits just under the surface, ready to spring up. Is every adult like this? I think it must be more common than anyone talks about. It’s not even that the world is getting harder, between climate change and nationali … | Continue reading
Over time — and really, over the last few years — this personal space really has evolved to become more about tech and society and less about me. I’m going to add more “me” back. This is my space. | Continue reading
[Dmitry Antonov and Andrew Osborn at Reuters] "A family of Russian sleeper agents flown to Moscow in the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War were so deep under cover that their children found out they were Russians only after the flight took off, the Kremlin said o … | Continue reading
I don’t invest any more, but here are some areas I’d be interested to see startups explore: The hallway track for remote and hybrid teams. One reason many companies are enacting return to office policies is to re-establish cross-pollination across teams. Yes, a strong, intentiona … | Continue reading
[Jason Snell at Six Colors] "In the most recent financial quarter, Apple generated $24.4 billion in revenue from Services. The Mac, iPad, and wearables categories together generated just $22.3 billion. Only the iPhone is more important to Apple’s top line than Services." This is … | Continue reading
[Nieman Journalism Lab] "The number of digital news startup launches has been slowing since 2022 in Europe, Latin America, and North America, according to the new Global Project Oasis report. Global Project Oasis, a research project funded by the Google News Initiative that maps … | Continue reading
[Molly White] "With $45.5 million in corporate contributions, American cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is the largest donor to Fairshake: a newly-minted super PAC focused solely on installing political candidates who will be friendly to the cryptocurrency industry, and ousting t … | Continue reading
[Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica] The majority of Donald Trump's net worth is wrapped up in Truth Social's parent company Trump Media & Technology Group. If he's elected, its deals and ownership structure will present conflicts of interests - ill … | Continue reading
[Kylie Robison at The Verge] "Perplexity’s “Publishers’ Program” has recruited its first batch of partners, including prominent names like Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and Automattic (with WordPress.com participating but not Tumblr). Under this pro … | Continue reading
[Bron Maher at PressGazette] "Mail Online, The Independent and the websites of the Daily Mirror and Daily Express have begun requiring readers to pay for access if they do not consent to third-party cookies." I believe this would have been illegal were the UK still a part of the … | Continue reading
[Shiraz Shaikh on Global Network on Extremism & Technology] "Video games and their associated platforms are vastly becoming hubs of radicalisation, extremism and recruitment by far-right extremist organisations. The development of bespoke games and modifications, often known as M … | Continue reading
[Kate Conger at the New York Times] ""Time and again, Ms. Yaccarino has faced similar situations, as Mr. Musk is always one whim away from undoing her work. Ms. Yaccarino’s task of repairing and remaking X’s business over the past year has been complicated by Mr. Musk’s seeming d … | Continue reading
[Ian Sample in The Guardian] "England’s former chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, has said there is no safe level of alcohol intake. A major study published in 2018 supported the view. It found that alcohol led to 2.8 million deaths in 2016 and was the leading risk factor … | Continue reading
[Carl Sullivan at Flipboard] "Flipboard has worked with local papers and websites since its inception. Now, as part of the gradual federation of our platform, we’re bringing some of those publications to the fediverse." Flipboard turns the fediverse on for a whopping 64 US-based … | Continue reading
Here’s what I want to see from every technology-driven product team: Do you know your user? Not “this is the industry we’re targeting” or “this is for everyone!”, but who , specifically, are you thinking of? What is their life like? Why is this important to them? What is the prob … | Continue reading
[David Ingram at NBC News] "Vivian Jenna Wilson, the transgender daughter of Elon Musk, said Thursday in her first interview that he was an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being queer and feminine." Her full Threads thread is worth reading. She seems to have her … | Continue reading
[Samantha Cole at 404 Media] "A highly-praised AI video generation tool made by multi-billion dollar company Runway was secretly trained by scraping thousands of videos from popular YouTube creators and brands, as well as pirated films." 404 Media has linked to the spreadsheet it … | Continue reading
[Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge] "Last week, the founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz declared their allegiance to Donald Trump in their customary fashion: talking about money on a podcast. “Sorry, Mom,” Ben Horowitz says in an episode of The Ben & Marc Show. “I k … | Continue reading
[Anthony Robledo at USA Today] "Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his estranged transgender daughter was "killed" by the "woke mind virus" after he was tricked into agreeing to gender-affirming care procedures." The thing is, his daughter Vivian is perfectly happy with the decision. The t … | Continue reading
[Christine Hall at FOSS Force] "The Apache Software Foundation is making changes in an attempt to right a wrong it unintentionally created when it adopted its name 25-years ago." This is an unnecessarily awkward article (why describe the existing logo as cool in this context?!) t … | Continue reading
[Kayleigh Barber and Seb Joseph at Digiday] "After much back and forth, Google has decided to keep third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. Turns out all the fuss over the years wasn’t in vain after all; the ad industry’s cries have finally been heard." Advertisers are rejoicin … | Continue reading
[Gerben Wierda at R&A IT Strategy & Architecture] "ChatGPT doesn’t summarise. When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text. And there is a fundamental difference between the two." The distinction is indeed important: it's akin to making an easy reader … | Continue reading
I didn’t post about it — what is there to say that hasn’t been said elsewhere? — but former President Trump was almost shot last week. The would-be assassin’s motive is muddy (he was a Republican), but the bullet or a sliver of glass narrowly missed him, taking a nip out of his e … | Continue reading
Enormous hugs to everyone who had to work on the Crowdstrike outage today. One of the legendarily bad IT outages. | Continue reading
[Matt Stoller] "So what does Vance think? He is in agreement with the views of a rising set of younger conservatives, populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass, who assert that libertarianism is a cover for private rule, most explicitly in Ahmari’s book Tyranny, Inc. It is flour … | Continue reading
[Om Malik] "Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its commitment to privacy." This move says a lot about modern Apple, but mor … | Continue reading
[Richard J. Tofel] "I think some of those choosing these new business leaders themselves forgot about the special nature of the news business. It won’t be enough, for instance, at least in most cases, for someone who aspires to run a news organization to recognize the importance … | Continue reading
JD Vance is an obvious, bald-faced opportunist. It makes sense that Trump would pick him as his Vice Presidential candidate; they probably understand each other quite well. It can’t have hurt that a bevy of tech billionaires told Trump to pick him, and it’s not unreasonable to as … | Continue reading