Without a Trace: How to Take Your Phone Off the Grid
The Markup: A guide on anonymizing your phone, so you can use it without it using you
Author archives
Meet Rayhunter: A New Open Source Tool from EFF to Detect Cellular Spying
EFF: “At EFF we spend a lot of time thinking about Street Level Surveillance technologies—the technologies used by police and other authorities to spy on you while you are going about your everyday life—such as automated license plate readers, facial recognition, surveillance camera networks, and cell-site simulators (CSS). Rayhunter is a new open source tool …
US lost a fifth of its butterflies within two decades
BBC: “Butterfly populations in the US shrank by more than a fifth within the space of two decades, according to a new study. Numbers fell by 22% between 2000 and 2020, according to research by Binghamton University in New York. A third of species saw serious decline, with some, like Julia’s Skipper, losing more than …
Tariffs—Everything you need to know but were afraid to ask
Fact Sheet • By Adam S. Hersh and Josh Bivens • February 10, 2025 . “During his presidential campaign, President Trump pledged to impose universal tariffs of 10–60% on all U.S. imports—a whopping $4.2 trillion in goods and services purchased from abroad in 2024. This was always a real possibility. The International Economic Emergency Powers Act …
Trump Wants to Use the IRS to Track Down Immigrants. They May Stop Paying Taxes
The Bulwark: “Immigrants in this country illegally paid nearly $100 billion in taxes in 2022, according to a report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic policy. But that source of government revenue may soon taper off as the Trump administration pushes the Internal Revenue Service to help it accelerate its program of mass deportations. …
How to spot AI slop on Pinterest and why it’s such a big problem
ZDNet: “For years, Pinterest has been dubbed the go-to social media site for inspirational mood boards, tracking lifestyle, fashion, and beauty trends, and finding niche and popular consumer-based products. Recently, however, the site has been plagued with an onslaught of AI slop, making it difficult for users to decipher what’s real, human-made content or fake. …
The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide
“The text below, dubbed the “Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide”, was published in social media in January 2017 in a series of improvised, spontaneous tweets, which reached 3 million views within one month. Their common element was their trademark signature, “- With love, your Eastern European friends”, and the accompanying hashtag #LearnFromEurope. The Guide went viral …
Half of world’s CO2 emissions come from 36 fossil fuel firms
The Guardian: “Half of the world’s climate-heating carbon emissions come from the fossil fuels produced by just 36 companies, analysis has revealed…The Carbon Majors report calculates the emissions released by the burning of the coal, oil and gas produced by 169 major companies in 2023. The database also includes emissions from the production of cement, …
Archivists Recreate Pre-Trump CDC Website, Are Hosting It in Europe
404 Media: “The team used a Reddit-made archive of the CDC website to create a new live mirror of the site before it was purged. A team of volunteer archivists has recreated the Centers for Disease Control website exactly as it was the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. The site, called RestoredCDC.org, went live Tuesday …
The Digital Packrat Manifesto
404 Media: “Amazon’s recent decision to stop allowing people to download copies of their Kindle e-books to a computer has vindicated some of my longstanding beliefs about digital media. Specifically, that it doesn’t exist and you don’t own it unless you can copy and access it without being connected to the internet. The recent move …
The Biodiversity Collections Crisis
The Biodiversity Collections Crisis – “You might be familiar with the concept of the present “biodiversity crisis“. There is an increasing consensus in the ecological research community that the current loss of species this planet is experiencing is not sustainable, in the sense that the loss of some species may precipitate the loss of more, in …
89% of enterprise AI usage is invisible to the organization
Help Net Security: “71% of connections to GenAI tools are done using personal non-corporate accounts. Among logins using corporate accounts, 58% of connections are done without Single-Sign On (SSO). These interactions bypass organizational identity and access management (IAM) systems, leaving security teams blind to how GenAI tools are used and what data is being shared. …
