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Oct 24, 2025 ↓

The mad king's digital killswitch

Cory Doctorow:

Remember when we were all worried that Huawei had filled our telecoms infrastructure with listening devices and killswitches? It sure would be dangerous if a corporation beholden to a brutal autocrat became structurally essential to your country’s continued operations, huh?

In other, unrelated news, earlier this month, Trump’s DoJ ordered Apple and Google to remove apps that allowed users to report ICE’s roving gangs of masked thugs, who have kidnapped thousands of our neighbors and sent them to black sites.

There’s more: Decades of protectionist tech regulation gives the Trump government control of the world’s cloud applications, networks, tractors, phones, game consoles, medical implants, ventilators and more. “It’s well past time for a post-American internet.”

Oct 24, 2025 ↓

‘Things keep evolving into anteaters.’

Anteaters evolved independently at least 12 times in the 66 million years since nonavian dinosaurs went extinct.

Ants and termites are good eating and there are plenty of them. They outweigh all other insects, mammals, amphibians and birds combined in the rainforests of South and Central America. And globally, termites alone outweigh all wild mammals by a factor of 10.

Jake Buehler at Science