The FBI created its own cryptocurrency to catch scammers in pump-and-dump schemes. It would be much easier to simply identify the crypto companies that are not scammers. Are there any?


Apple MacOS 15 Sequoia is officially UNIX. Of personal interest to me; my first tech journalism job was at UNIX Today! (the exclamation was part of the name — my fellow UNIX nerds will recognize the punctuation symbol as a “bang.")


When I first heard “every accusation is a confession,” I thought it was just political joke. I’ve been shocked the extent to which it’s the literal truth.


New NRA CEO Doug Hamlin pleaded no contest to brutally murdering a pet cat with his fraternity brothers as a student.

This is just the latest conservative/Republican leader whose history of animal abuse caught up with them. Trump and Vance are right that people are killing and abusing animals, but it’s their own faction doing it.


Normal people hearing about a robot that makes burgers: “Wow! So futuristic!”

People who have worked in restaurants: “Who’s gonna clean it”

@sidereal@kolektiva.social


I just ordered business cards. What next? Will I send a fax? Will I receive a memo in a pneumatic tube?




Right-wing terrorists, led by Trump, are making death threats against local government officials, FEMA workers and even TV weather people in Florida and North Carolina. It’s part of a rising idiocracy.

Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality. If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.

I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is, by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic


I went door to door to get out the vote for the Democratic Party this afternoon. I did 15 out of 47 houses in the neighborhood. I would have done more but I got into conversations with the neighbors. We have many Harris/Walz signs in front yards.


Antitrust is having a moment.

People understand that corporate looters – not “the economy” or “the forces of history” – are the reason that the businesses where they worked and shopped were destroyed by private equity goons who amassed intergenerational, dynastic fortunes by strip-mining the real economy and leaving behind rubble.

Lina Khan’s future is the future of the Democratic Party – and America, Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr


Don’t ever hand your phone to the cops. “Digital IDs make it tempting to leave your driver’s license at home – but that’s a dangerous risk.”

No matter what, teaching people they can add their IDs to their phones means some people will inevitably leave the house without physical ID, and that means creating the opportunity for cops to demand phones — which you should never, ever do. Technical details of your digital ID aside, handing your phone to a police officer grants law enforcement a lot of power over some of your most intimate personal data.



Jamie Zawinski: Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today:

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the “What’s Cool” button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca’s Smut Shack.)


What’s the best news portal? Apple News, Google News, Yahoo News, MSN Start, something else?


Rereading replies on Bluesky I now see that I was wrong to compare Florida’s extremist religious government to the Taliban, because it implies that what Florida is doing is un-American, rather than an official action by the third most populous state in the nation.


I’m being called a fuckhead on BlueSky for comparing Florida’s forced-birth extremists to the Taliban.

Apparently, this is offensive to the Taliban.

I’m OK with that.


Harris faces new urgency to explain how her potential presidency would be different from Biden’s.

Bullshit. “Urgency” from whom?

This is an issue for the journalists in the Washington press corps who have been locked in a room smelling each other’s farts for 25 years.

For the rest of us, the choice is clear: One choice is someone who we can hope will be a transformative President — a Roosevelt or Lincoln — someone who can lead the rebirth of a declining nation.

Probably not.

She’ll probably govern as a conventional politician and avoid burning down the house for another four to eight years, at which time we get to do it again.

The other choice is a violent psychopath who smears poop in his hair, along with his couch-fucking sidekick.

So yeah nobody gives a shit if Harris is different from Biden.


Florida’s Taliban government is threatening to criminally prosecute TV stations that air an ad advocating repeal of the state’s fanatical abortion ban. Republican claims to support free speech and Constitutional originalism are cynical lies and always have been.


“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

Dave Barnhart