I hope the Fairphone will be sold in the U.S. one day. It’s an awesome project.

Americans should be more worried about the NSA than they are.

This is a tragic detail in an even more tragic story. Government can absolutely be good, and our allergic reaction to spending, laws, and policy only makes these situations worse.

It isn’t that TikTok doesn’t pose a real threat, it’s that it’s not alone in doing so. In particular, I appreciate that this article points out that U.S. border agents REGULARLY SEARCH COMPUTERS AND SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS. So, yes, raise concerns, but be consistent instead of creating a moral panic around thus one app (which, by the way, would be a privacy threat even if it were totally owned by a U.S. company).

A good case for why the edit button probably isn’t as good as everyone thinks.

Intellectual property is a social justice issue.

What a story. I knew how awful the TSA could be to passengers, but I never knew how bad it also was for its own employees.

This is very interesting—it gives me some hope that I haven’t had over the past couple of months.

Speaking personally, I’d be happy to pay extra taxes to better support our local schools.

I don’t know that any of this is surprising, but it remains worrying.

The inconsistency here is infuriating. When I was in grad school, I had the philosophy that I (a Mormon working toward a PhD) couldn’t rule out the possibility of working at BYU. There’s still a lot that I like and respect about BYU, but seeing the way they’re putting the squeeze on their employees makes it clear that I could never have survived there.

BYU is really on a roll this week.

I’ve read this comic through Boing Boing for a while now, so when I saw a collection of strips at the library, I thought I ought to pick it up and enjoy some of the strips from before I began reading it.

I was surprised, then, to not enjoy the collection. I like the contemporary strips (mostly), but there was something about the collection that didn’t work for me. Maybe they would have been better if I were reading them one at a time when they came out. Maybe my relative conservatism during the 2012-2015 era collected in this volume stopped me from enjoying the obvious left-wing slant. Maybe I still have enough resistance to left-wing views that a concentration of them didn’t go well.

Learned about the Trib article from this blog post, which I think also makes some solid points. It’s one thing to prefer that outside organizations not provide materials, but if BYU isn’t doing anything itself…

What a disappointment.

Great example of how automation often makes things easier but not better. The former can be good so long as we don’t lose sight of the latter.

See, this is censorship.

What an epic—if illegal—rickroll. The best part in my book is repurposing student monitoring software.

Interesting read on privacy-focused phones—and related scams.

McConnell gets so close to recognizing the danger other Republicans pose to democracy, but he always stops just short.

I appreciate the way that Masnick uses examples from the news to call out how dumb some of these laws are.

I read Torba’s blog post last week but hadn’t been aware of the context. Interesting read.

This is why the EFF and others have concerns about overreach of even clearly well intentioned content moderation. CSAM is clearly despicable, but automated content moderation can make mistakes, and consequences for those mistakes aren’t small.

Masnick makes two good points here: The GOP seems to only care about content moderation in self-serving ways, but also we should be wary of political mandates for content moderation.

I want to be more involved with and aware of what the FCPS school board is up to—livestreaming seems like a good idea to me.