I read Feed in high school and found it interesting, but when I read it again in 2019, it was amazing. This review gets at why the book is so good—and important. Maybe it’s time for me to visit it again.

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.

What a mess of a story. School safety tech is edtech, and like edtech, a lot of it appears to be more posturing and theater than effective practice.

Exciting news! This still leaves a lot of research behind paywalls, though.

See, this is censorship.

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

Well, here’s some happy news! I hope this ruling sticks.

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’ve been grumpy about ClassDojo all week, and this is the only thing that’s made me feel better about it—BECAUSE THIS IS SO MUCH WORSE.

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.

These numbers sound great, but what cost are we paying? I’m not talking about the $70,000, I’m talking about the hard to quantify costs of surveillance—which, as the ACLU of KY points out, are likely to disproportionately target communities of color. Except we can’t know that because the city won’t tell us where the cameras are.

It’s helpful to hear that the university is theoretically willing to bring back a mask mandate… but I don’t know that I see it happening.

Interesting perspective on what’s happening on “alternative” platforms.

I hadn’t realized so many academics were working with data brokers. It’s kind of scary! The EFF has some good points here about so-called “data for good”—and rightly brings up that ethics review boards should be thinking about this sort of thing.

This may be the most fascinating episode of Mormon Land I’ve ever listened to. It’s amazing how much the Latter-day Saint understanding and practice of temple rituals has changed over time.

On one hand, I strongly believe Trump should be held accountable for all laws he’s broken or flouted. On the other, I believe that the Espionage Act has been used as a crude cudgel by several presidential administrations, and it’s really important not to be sloppy here. The second doesn’t outweigh the first, but just like one can defend the FBI raid without putting the FBI on a pedestal of infallibility, we need to be critically minded about all this.

Appreciate Joshs’s reflections here—espeically as it relates to disciplinary and language differences within education.

Interesting development here.

Such a bad idea. Normalizing Ring won’t make it any better—only worse.

I was not aware of this episode of history, and I feel more informed for it. It’s an example of where a Democratic president should be held to the same standard as Trump is being held right now—not out of any kind of whataboutism, but because both presidents crossed lines. In fact, “both” isn’t right here: Nixon comes out of this looking as bad as (if not worse than) Johnson.