#1yrago Educator sued for criticising “invigilation” tool https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/#proctorio

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and blogger. He has a podcast, a newsletter, a Twitter feed, a Mastodon feed, and a Tumblr feed. He was born in Canada, became a British citizen and now lives in Burbank, California…

Last May, the profitable Chicago Tribune was acquired by the notorious vulture firm Alden Global Capital. They suffered waves of downsizing, including a sell-off of the iconic Tribute Building. Today, a skeleton crew puts out the Trib from “a newsroom the size of a Chipotle.”

In a long, deeply reported…

#20yrsago RIAA to upload malware to P2P networks https://web.archive.org/web/20011016123120/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-7535856.html

#20yrsago Stephen Hawkings: without spaceships, pandemics will wipe out humanity https://web.archive.org/web/20011017025400/https://abcnews.go.com/wire/SciTech/reuters20011016_9.html

#1yrago Ferris wheel offices https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/16/lucky-ducky/#gondoliers

#1yrago UK to tax Amazon’s victims https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/16/lucky-ducky/#amazon-tax…

If you’re an Internet Person of a Certain Vintage, you’ll likely experience the same thrill of delight I felt this morning when I discovered ROT8000, a Unicode version of the old ROT13 cipher. But after I finished smiling, I got to thinking.

http://rot8000.com/Index

ROT13 is a toy cipher with a…

#20yrsago Delta flight delay after Islamaphobe mistakes orthodox Jews for Muslims https://web.archive.org/web/20011016000622/http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011015/od/delta_dc_1.html

#15yrsago Play Money: memoir of a year selling game-gold https://memex.craphound.com/2006/10/15/play-money-memoir-of-a-year-selling-game-gold/

#5yrsago After being outed for massive hack and installing an NSA “rootkit,” Yahoo cancels earnings call https://www.huffpost.com/entry/yahoo-hacking-verizon_n_5800eef7e4b0e8c198a78b14…

2001, 2011, 2016, 2020.

#20yrsago John Norman decries Worldcon “monothink” http://www.locusmag.com/2001/Departments/Letters10Norman.html

#20yrsago Bruce Sterling’s predictions for a post-9/11 world https://web.archive.org/web/20011102212150/http://www.edge.org/documents/whatnow/whatnow_sterling.html

#10yrsago Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow: a chapbook in PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series https://craphound.com/category/gbbt/

#5yrsago Ikea Shanghai to elderly, lonely Chinese people: buy something or get out https://qz.com/806990/lonely-shanghai-seniors-now-have-to-buy-something-if-they-want-to-cruise-all-day-in-ikeas-cafeteria/…

The term “solutionism” gets thrown around a lot. Any time an attempt to address a problem fails, it’s easy to point at the technological elements of the failure and deride the whole enterprise as a solutionist muddle.

Which is a pity, because solutionism is real, and it’s a scourge. …

The death of Adobe Flash in January 2021 was long overdue; Adobe’s hyper-proprietary interactive runtime was a source of persistent, terrifying security vulnerabilities that had harmed web users for decades.

But the demise of Flash also meant that all the Flash-based media that had been created since its debut (as…