Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication. One of my early blogs was mostly about economics, a Ukrainian punk band called Gogol Bordello, politics, and a bar on Canal street that turned into an Eastern European disco every night around midnight.
November 2025
The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
I suspect that many people who take an interest in Internet privacy don’t appreciate how hard it is to resist browser fingerprinting. Taking steps to reduce it leads to inconvenience and, with the present state of technology, even the most intrusive approaches are only partially effective. The data collected by fingerprinting is invisible to the user, and stored somewhere beyond the user’s reach.
Meta buried ‘causal’ evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege
Meta buried ‘causal’ evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege
Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms. “The Nielsen study does show causal impact on social comparison,” (unhappy face emoji), an unnamed staff researcher allegedly wrote. Another staffer worried that keeping quiet about negative findings would be akin to the tobacco industry “doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves.”
Librarian Ian Linkletter remains one of Proctorio’s biggest critics after 5-year legal battle
He got sued for sharing public YouTube videos; nightmare ended in settlement
The more that Linkletter researched Proctorio, the more concerned he became. Taking to then-Twitter, he posted a series of seven tweets over a couple days that linked to YouTube videos that Proctorio hosted in its help center. He felt the videos—which showed how Proctorio flagged certain behaviors, tracked “abnormal” eye and head movements, and scanned rooms—helped demonstrate why students were so upset. And while he had fewer than 1,000 followers, he hoped that the influential higher education administrators who followed him would see his posts and consider dropping the tech.
Looking for Hidden Gems in Scientific Literature
Looking for Hidden Gems in Scientific Literature
Why do research papers remain in obscurity, does it matter if they do, and what can be done to redeem them? They may be hard to find to begin with, if published in poorly indexed or low visibility journals or in a foreign language. Alternatively, they may be relatively easy to find but still be neglected if they are ahead of their time and not recognized as important at the time of publication (such papers are called sleeping beauties). It could also be that obscure papers are truly of low quality and are thus justifiably neglected.
Short Little Difficult Books – by Lincoln Michel
Novels that challenge with style, story, or form that you can read in a day.
The Message in the Medium: A love story told in books
This essay is my answer — my echo, my reformulation — of Andrew’s question. I asked about the mysterious stickers, and Andrew told me that, actually, they go the other way. The pigeon is upside down, clinging like a bat to an M. He also told me the provenance of the image, the origin of the iconography (which is hilarious), but I’ll leave that for people to discover themselves.
Copyright Winter is Coming (to Wikipedia?)
A new ruling in Authors Guild v. OpenAI has major implications for copyright law, well beyond artificial intelligence. On October 27, 2025, Judge Sidney Stein of the Southern District of New York denied OpenAI%u2019s motion to dismiss claims that ChatGPT outputs infringed the rights of authors such as George R.R. Martin and David Baldacci. The opinion suggests that short summaries of popular works of fiction are very likely infringing (unless fair use comes to the rescue).
This is a fundamental assault on the idea-expression distinction as applied to works of fiction. It places thousands of Wikipedia entries in the copyright crosshairs and suggests that any kind of summary or analysis of a work of fiction is presumptively infringing.
Copyright Office head asks Supreme Court to keep her in role
The register of copyrights at the Library of Congress defended a lower court ruling that kept her in office despite President Donald Trump%u2019s attempts to fire her in a legal filing Monday urging the Supreme Court to allow her to remain in office.
The filing on behalf of Shira Perlmutter argued that Trump cannot lawfully remove someone who is effectively an employee of the legislative branch, especially over policy disagreements over artificial intelligence issues. Last month Trump asked the Supreme Court to allow him to remove her from office after a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reinstated her.
TN libraries close a week after Trump ‘gender ideology’ order on books
Rutherford County libraries close for week to adhere to Trump ‘gender ideology’ order
Murfreesboro Daily News JournalLibrary patrons will endure a week-long closure of Smyrna and Murfreesboro branches, following a state response to an executive order from President Donald Trump on “gender ideology extremism.”
A sign posted out front of Smyrna Public Library alerts visitors to an “EMERGENCY CLOSURE NOTICE” that’s keeping the branch closed Nov. 10-15.
“In order to meet new reporting requirements from the TN State Secretary’s Office, this library will be closed,” the sign said, “for the purpose of reviewing inventory.”
Recent Comments