10 Jan 2026 Search

Trump may be the beginning of the end for ‘enshittification’ – this is our chance to make tech good again by Cory Doctorow. (Tariff-free access to the US market is not the only reason that US-based “Big Tech” companies get away with crimes abroad. There’s also the issue of defense cooperation, which is turning into another big unknown.)

Toward a Proof of Concept for MyTerms by Doc Searls. (Realistically MyTerms has a lot of potential points of integration with other stuff, including the IAB’s GPP and Rewarded Interest which is the long-awaited extension that promises to get its users more personalized ads.)

This Free Script Disables Every AI Feature in Windows 11 by Justin Pot. (This should be a alert for MSFT management. A script that uses “advanced techniques” is more trustworthy than an established company? Scammers and malware operations will start distributing their own clones of this, trying to fool people looking for ways to “turn off the AI” so realistically everyone would be better off with an official “AI kill switch”.)

How Did TVs Get So Cheap? by Brian Potter. (It’s not just the surveillance advertising subsidy, manufacturing learning curves are doing their thing too.)

I replaced Windows with Linux and everything’s going great by Nathan Edwards. My goal here is to see how far I can get using Linux as my main OS without spending a ton of time futzing with it — or even much time researching beforehand. I am not looking for more high-maintenance hobbies at this stage. I want to see if Linux is a wingable alternative to Microsoft’s increasingly annoying OS.

Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods by Joseph Cox. Commercial location data, in this case acquired from hundreds of millions of phones via a company called Penlink, can be queried without a warrant, according to an internal ICE legal analysis shared with 404 Media. (EFF’s Opt Out October Tip 3 covers how to turn off these mobile advertising IDs.)

Boffins probe commercial AI models, find Harry Potter by Thomas Claburn. We extract nearly all of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the authors said, citing a recall rate of 95.8 percent.

Bose open-sources its SoundTouch home theater smart speakers ahead of end-of-life by Stevie Bonifield. (Did someone get kicked out of enshittification club?) More coverage: Bose is open-sourcing its old smart speakers instead of bricking them

Grok generates bikini pics of children — UK, US oddly powerless by David Gerard. (Watch how fast they take down unauthorized Olympic Games content next month, though. IOC gets the kind of moderation that normal people, and even advertisers, just aspire to.)

Google rolls out an AI Inbox view for Gmail, showing users to-dos and summaries of topics rather than a traditional email list, first for US “trusted testers” by Jay Peters. (If you subscribed to email newsletters to avoid slop on the web, maybe it’s time to switch mail clients? Worth a try: How to disable Gemini on Android, Gmail, Chrome, Photos, & Google apps. Opt out of AI tracking now!)

Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards by Elizabeth Lopatto. (point of order: it’s worse. Google is actively paying for CSAM, with Gemini ads on X. Don’t know if Apple is still advertising on there.)

Gamified War in Ukraine: Points, Drones, and the New Moral Economy of Killing by Hadi Al-Majdalani. A significant layer of wartime participation now passes through interfaces that look and feel like games and that are explicitly designed to make participation easier, more satisfying, and more trackable.

Don’t Let These Privacy Shifts Blindside You In 2026 by Allison Schiff (bigger picture, though: privacy lawsuits, regulations, and legislation are people’s way—through their lawyers and elected representatives—to tell companies to put less money into creepy stuff and more into product and service improvements. If a company’s response to privacy news is more compliance paperwork, they’re missing the point.)

How Github monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem by Ploum. (GitHub is turning into the MSIE 6 of project hosting. I’m trying to use other options where I can, to try to avoid an unnecessary lockin problem.)

Children Falling Apart as They Become Addicted to AI by Joe Wilkins. (Book opportunity for some reporter who has good relationships with “tech” company big shots: write up the screen time and device rules that they have for their own families.) Related: China drafts world’s strictest rules to end AI-encouraged suicide, violence

Sympathy for the Devil (2010) (IMHO worth a re-read now that Flash has gone from menace to nifty #retrocomputing)

https://www.amazingcto.com/postgres-for-everything/ by Stephan Schmidt. Postgres can replace - up to millions of users - many backend technologies, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Mongo and Redis among them. This makes every application easier to develop, scale and operate.

Woman Hailed as Hero for Smashing Man’s Meta Smart Glasses on Subway by Victor Tangermann But instead of coming to his support, the internet wholeheartedly rallied behind the alleged perpetrator, celebrating the woman as a folk hero…

More: Links for 22 March 2026