Archives
Browse the linkblog archives.

Friday 30th November, 2018 #

  • Why we stopped trusting elites - Quite a long piece but touches on a lot of relevant shifts that are happening in the landscape
  • Brexit - May not ruling out second MPs' vote on deal, the Norway+ option, Parliament could be forced to sit over Christmas
  • Cookie AutoDelete - Control your cookies! Auto-delete unused cookies from your closed tabs while keeping the ones you want
  • Insane that I just had to run this incredibly hacky fix to get iTunes to recognize my iOS device again, why are you breaking things Apple?
  • Facebook’s new local news section could be a boon to social activists and researchers
  • Facebook to require proof that political ads come from UK
  • Techmeme launches paid and free "Leaderboards" showing the most influential reporters around a specific news topic
  • Interesting piece today in _The Intercept_ about Google Dragonfly, how are we to view Google these days? Do we trust them still?
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Thursday 29th November, 2018 #

  • Remember to update systemd when changing Redis default path or else you eventually get - Redis: Failed opening .rdb for saving
  • Unbelievably bad internet connectivity problems today, resulting in a cascade of issues, just when you think you've been kicked in the teeth enough - how many independent software developers does it take to post a message - well it depends on how many kicks in the teeth they are receiving silly!
  • Doesn't the Brexit trade purgatory feel like the EU trying to exit quarantine the UK from the rest of the world?
  • Quantum mechanics and Kevin Spacey, JFK’s five assassins, and proof of reincarnation, in this week’s dubious tabloids
  • Bank warns no-deal could see UK sink into recession - says deal purgatory is good (personally I think deal purgatory is bullshit bullying tactics used by thugs and the mob)
  • Initab - Chrome new tab extension for Developers that replaces the new tab page with a dashboard of useful tools to make your job as a programmer easier
  • Why I use the BEM naming convention for my CSS
  • What, exactly, is the DOM? (Makes me think that it would be nice if browser devtools had pure DOM and CSSOM tabs)
  • HEAD - A free guide to <head> elements
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Wednesday 28th November, 2018 #

  • Details about the event-stream incident
  • Amazon Web Services launches AWS Ground Station, a cloud service for satellite operators
  • Dropping Acid - Describes an interesting and relatively rarely occurring moment in culture, when there is a radical inflection point, in this case the 1980s, musicians in Chicago built a new genre out of obsolete machinery - Listeners lost their minds
  • Incredible picture of May looking like an owl/eagle/dracula while with Trump - as for the news article it actually has some good Brexit analysis - the 21 month trade purgatory sounds a bit shit if you ask me
  • Auschwitz Photographs Hidden from the Nazis Are Given New Life in Color
  • The Future of Robots Won’t Be Like ‘The Terminator’ - It’ll Probably Be Worse
  • South Koreans lock themselves up to escape prison of daily life - “This prison gives me a sense of freedom” (At what point do we stop and say ok there is something seriously wrong with the world?)
  • Google employees join together with Amnesty International to oppose Chinese censorship and surveillance - "We are Google employees. Google must drop Dragonfly."
  • Hacker backdoors popular JavaScript library to steal Bitcoin funds
  • The Fake News Inquiry Chair Says He's Seen Evidence A Facebook Engineer Flagged Russian "Entities" Pulling Data In 2014
  • Climate change - CO2 emissions rising for first time in four years
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Tuesday 27th November, 2018 #

  • New data suggests African audiences see significantly more misinformation than Americans do
  • A table of contents of the Brexit deal document is on Github! Makes it a LOT easier to find any section you might be interested in or that might affects you
  • The actual Brexit document is really not published in a modern format - there should be an outline/index, and each section should be linkable via url - the w3c's HTML spec is a good example
  • The only major news organisation that has published the full text of the Brexit deal on their website is CNN!
  • It's worth remembering that most of the politicians and journalists will keep their jobs whether it's a good deal or a bad deal - Read / Scan through the actual Brexit document for YOURSELF!
  • Facebook's YouTube competitor Watch - "shows have successfully captured younger viewers" (Are we perhaps using the wrong sort of language to describe social media?)
  • Mars InSight - The moment of touchdown
  • Brexit: Trump says May's Brexit plan could hurt UK-US trade deal - He says under the proposed deal the UK might not be "allowed to trade"
  • SpaceX CEO Elon Musk teases Mars breakthroughs as Starship design radically changes
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Monday 26th November, 2018 #

  • Behind the scenes with Hollywood's creature making wizards
  • How '50s And '60s Jazz Got Its Iconic Look
  • Summary of UK papers headlines - May begins Brexit 'hard sell'
  • Plot twist - The evolution of the AI ham radio VR brain hackers is a new "Elite" of people who no longer read, instead they loiter outside the houses of people who read and hack their brains, straight to the source of knowledge! But there is a widespread Schrödinger problem, because they are not passive observers, creating massive distortions in the worlds reality. Oh noes!
  • This appears to be the draft Brexit deal document, buried really deep on the European Commission website - An example of the EU's lack of transparency, IMO it should be on the front page!
  • The Brexit deal document isn't even available for download on the European Commission website front page!
  • List of newspapers in the United Kingdom
  • Suggestion - Every single major newspaper should be hosting a copy of the Brexit agreement for people to download and read, even the outline headings of the document would be useful, instead there is nothing but drivel
  • Some Brexit facts (sort of) in this piece even if they are all conjecture on what could happen next
  • A small nugget of info about the deal's policy on immigration in this piece
  • Seems as though the journalists are just waiting to be spoon fed by the PM on her two week charm offensive, hundreds and hundreds of words, only note worthy fact is a tiny mention of fisheries
  • Have any journalists actually bothered to read the deal? I haven't read a single news article that explains point by point what's in and whats not in the deal, nothing but high level hand waving non-factual rubbish
  • EU leaders agree UK's Brexit deal at Brussels summit
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Saturday 24th November, 2018 #

  • Police fire tear gas, water cannon at Paris fuel protesters
  • Baseball in London is fantastic! Not liking this video edit though, "Buy great assets and own them for a very long time", was it really one take as it's made out to seem? Hmm.
  • Timelapse of a rocket launch as seen from space
  • Why Switzerland is worried about UK trade after Brexit
  • We have reached Peak Tech - Why tech is taking a hammering
  • Plot twist - Oh noes the AI ham radio brain hackers are back and they have hooked their rigs up to VR, now they can keep you suspended in a dream like state while interacting with you using javascript! Secret ai ham radio javascript labor camps everywhere! Argh
  • Brain-computer interfaces in JavaScript! (Her worse gripe with the tech is a little short sited, personally I would be more worried about another opium war style scenario but with no end because no one would know it was happening)
  • Today all the tech press are reporting on the "We are not robots" protests from Amazon employees across Europe - It's the first I've heard about it
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Friday 23rd November, 2018 #

  • Dad's Army - Battle Of The Giants
  • And now a nice cheery picture to go with the atmosphere here in helltopia...Happy Thanksgiving!
  • Which Celebrity Has The Best Turkey Recipe?
  • HINT - In the future this is going to get particularly unpleasant for everyone if we all keep blindly moving forward with all this AI stuff
  • Just had to do a captcha image selection thingy, it took 4 minutes, and then failed me - "Oops! Robot detection failed"
  • Corbyn & May - I'd like to know what you plan to do after Brexit to deal with the AI just around the corner that will make the indian caste system seem like Disney Land
  • Corbyn - EU (Brexit) agreement is 'worst of all worlds', '26 pages of waffle'
  • A Thanksgiving prayer from William S. Burroughs - (Not a fan of all the words, but the general tone feels appropriate)
  • A majority of Americans don't think social networks are good for the world
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Thursday 22nd November, 2018 #

  • The House on Mayo Road - Dur e Aziz Amna considers the year in Pakistan when everything changed
  • The launch of the linkblog.io redesign will have to wait - oh well it will happen some day very soon!
  • Just another independent software developer getting kicked in the teeth (AGAIN) ... nothing to see here ... please move along
  • The VPN provider that I use has cut me off from the internet, on the day before the biggest online sales day of the year - posting this using highly constrained methods
  • Heroku - Deploying from a branch besides master
  • Slow Software - an investigation into the various causes of software slowness (latency)
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Wednesday 21st November, 2018 #

  • Does the Content Security Policy Standard support wildcard paths?
  • Transactions (new in MongoDB 4.0 and Mongoose 5.2.0) - execute multiple operations in isolation and potentially undo all the operations if one of them fails
  • Elon Musk renames his BFR spacecraft Starship
  • The Attention Economy Is Eating Our Brains
  • A Binary Star Is About to Go Supernova, And Could Produce a Gamma-Ray Burst (more energy in 10 seconds than the Sun could in 10 billion years)
  • New York City subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral'
  • The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
  • How does Content Security Policy work?
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Tuesday 20th November, 2018 #

  • Spain Brexit - PM Sánchez threatens to vote no over Gibraltar
  • Instagram is using AI to purge fake accounts
  • It's the final few yards of the NYT wave from last week - Facebook is at ‘War’ with the Media - Presumably some sort of "come down" will ensue now
  • There has been some movement on the Bitbucket deploy keys issue - "We will add support for Deploy Keys on v2 apis" :)
  • Inside the British Army's secret information warfare machine - the 77th Brigade edit videos, record podcasts and write viral posts
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Monday 19th November, 2018 #

  • Interested to see how Mark Zuckerberg confronts the mainstream media companies, maybe he'll buy one like Bezos or perhaps something more radical?
  • Google News may shut over EU plans to charge tax for links
  • New PR: Client side ejs compiled with express middleware example
  • Emmanuel Macron - "Our strength - our true strength - lies in unity"
  • With all the money LinkedIn is making you’d think they could afford a customer support email address!
  • Google’s “Smart City” in Toronto Faces New Resistance
  • The ultimate web design tool - a browser (Some Firefox design features look pretty great)
  • The "C" in CSS: The Cascade - includes a useful definitive guide to css styling order diagram
  • Why are tech companies making custom typefaces?
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Sunday 18th November, 2018 #

  • Can someone please turn off the failover / high availability enforcement machine that has engulfed the world ensuring each and every one of us spends our entire life glued to a computer? Cheers. /notsarcasm
  • Another kick in the teeth - It's official, Bitbucket will knowingly break users systems (mine included) by deprecating deploy keys in their v2 API - So much disappointment this week
  • Kind of fascinating to watch how the news cycle works these days - NYT creates a massive wave with a Novella News piece, then everyone jumps onto the wave writing really serious and factual articles
  • Brexit - "UK not standing up to Brussels bullies"
  • It's worth remembering that Brexit is really a tale of two unions, the smaller one leaving the bigger one (quite an important detail)
  • French mother jailed for hiding baby in car boot
  • Protesters plan to bring France to a halt
  • Amazon Web Services in Plain English
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Saturday 17th November, 2018 #

  • Prince Charles - 70 years in 70 pictures
  • International System of Units overhauled in historic vote - Good news but IMO I think they should have a yearly ceremony where they check that there has been no drift
  • Oil Demand for Cars and Transportation Is Already Falling - Might explain why the Saudis are so interested in Silicon Valley at the minute
  • Mozilla Fights On For Net Neutrality
  • Command line for fetching and analyzing SSL certificate
  • digg.com won't load in Chrome and in Firefox the page loads but there is some sort of certificate/security error icon next to the url
  • How strange that digg.com's SSL cert scores a T in SSL tests, distrusted by Mozilla and Google
  • After two years with TypeScript – was it worth it?
  • Promise chaining is dead - Long live async/await
  • The Power of Web Components
  • A followup piece to the NYT novella news reconstruction piece on Facebook - completely different writing style, much more factual "real news" style
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Friday 16th November, 2018 #

  • Pretty disappointed to discover that Bootstrap v4 isn't compatible with Content Security Policy (CSP) - Compatibility expected for v5 (probably several years + another painful upgrade away)
  • Content-Security-Policy - HTTP response header that helps you reduce XSS risks on modern browsers by declaring, which dynamic resources are allowed to load
  • On Migrating from Wordpress to Static Markdown
  • Vim in the Future - really nicely written piece intended as an intro, quite calming
  • Faster async functions and promises in V8 - good to see improvements but I’m still not convinced on promises and asyc functions, difficult to debug, too much magic
  • Facebook responds to the novella news reconstruction NYT piece (That was quick!)
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Thursday 15th November, 2018 #

  • Good to see some movement on the Bitbucket API deploy keys issue, less than 2 months until they discontinue this critical feature, some more votes/comments would be great!
  • The BBC publishes a very factual sounding story about the Facebook story/novella/crime-fiction-reconstruction piece published by the NYT earlier
  • Exoplanet discovered around neighbouring star
  • Page Flip Layout - A template with a two-sided, magazine-like layout and a flat page flip animation, layout powered by CSS Grid
  • Gestalt-driven UX - the patterns that drive our world
  • Plot twist - Most of the world's population has lost the ability to tell the difference between real and fake news because of the ham radio ai brain hackers! Oh noes
  • This New York Times piece covering recent Facebook activity reads like some sort of crime fiction novel, like one of those clichéd reconstructions on the tele with stand-in actors (with text only it's much more difficult to spot)
  • "Functional CSS" seems interesting but it sort of feels like it could be another oh-my-zsh (I now use plain bash shell)
  • Mocking is a Code Smell - Overall I like this article but it is very waffley, quite long and there aren't enough code examples, always slightly to high level and abstract (imho :))
  • CSS and Network Performance - Very practical info about how to construct your page efficiently
  • CSS Frameworks Or CSS Grid - What Should I Use For My Project? (Timely piece as I just finished a somewhat laborious upgrade to Bootstrap 4)
  • Brexit - A guide to where we are
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Wednesday 14th November, 2018 #

  • Yanis Varoufakis on capitalism's incompatibility with democracy
  • Inuit community: "There are way too many polar bears"
  • Christine Lagarde of the IMF says governments could set up their own cryptocurrencies
  • You’re All Following Henry Rollins’ Manager’s Instagram Account, Right?
  • Artists pay tribute to Marvel legend Stan Lee
  • What’s going on with Web Components anyways?
  • Nigerian firm takes blame for routing Google traffic through China
  • Gitlab - How This Startup Made $10.5 Million in Revenue With Every Single Employee Working From Home
  • Theresa May continues to defy the laws of probability by looking like a french super villain and also announces the agreed Brexit deal
  • Medium is a poor choice for blogging (Quite ranty but makes some interesting points)
  • Apple confirms its T2 security chip blocks some third-party repairs of new Macs
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Tuesday 13th November, 2018 #

  • YouTube CEO warns of unintended consequences of EU's new internet laws and says YouTube may have to block videos in the EU to avoid liability under the new directive
  • Amazon selects New York City and Arlington, Virginia for its new headquarters
  • How to Install and Use Bookmarklets in Microsoft Edge (Really quite disappointing)
  • UFOs spotted off Irish coast under investigation
  • web.dev - actionable guidance and analysis, helps developers learn and apply the web's modern capabilities to sites and apps (by Google)
  • Google open-sources AI that can distinguish between voices with 92% accuracy
  • Plot twist - an alarming number of top rate musicians, actors and university students are ham radio enthusiasts and have been since the 60s!
  • Plot twist - ham radio enthusiasts have hooked up their rigs to AI and have been scanning/harassing the brains of their neighbours, many of which now have either been committed or have severe PTSD as a result
  • French president and superhero lookalike Emmanuel Macron released an international agreement on cybersecurity principles, more than 50 nations have signed the pact so far
  • School responds after photo of teens making nazi salute goes viral
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Monday 12th November, 2018 #

  • Guy tries to recreate a famous pool shot, finds out it's absurdly difficult
  • Check if file is empty or not using shell script
  • Actually I might be logged out of Google Chrome but there is no login button! And there is a sync button! Really lousy design
  • A long list of companies leaving England because of Brexit
  • Seems like Google lied about fixing the forced login, in the latest Chrome 70.0.3538.102 the logout button has disappeared, I can't logout anymore, trapped by "Don't do Evil" Google
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Sunday 11th November, 2018 #

  • Welcome to the age of the hour-long youtube video
  • Ev Williams (of Twitter fame) is raising more money for the longform publishing platform Medium
  • Armistice Day - Commemorations are taking place around the world to mark the centenary of the Armistice that ended World War One
  • Apple Blocks Linux From Booting On New Hardware With T2 Security Chip
  • Brit boffins build quantum compass, say goodbye to GPS
  • Strong Europe - Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel sign reconciliation book of remembrance in a replica railway carriage of where Adolf Hitler accepted France's capitulation to Nazi Germany in June 1940
  • HN Thread - Sweden's cashless society is no longer a utopia
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Saturday 10th November, 2018 #

  • Every American pizza style, ranked
  • We should probably get some guaranties from Elon that there won't be an advertiser - add blocker type arms race in our heads (/adds/thoughts/g), probably a feature though, everything is a feature to someone
  • Hackers stole income, immigration and tax data in Healthcare.gov breach, government confirms
  • Apple has put a software "kill switch” in the new MacBook Pros - imo does not inspire confidence in their products
  • Giphy unveils its short-form video platform
  • Surely the 'New Arms Race’ between advertisers and add blockers can't be good for society at large
  • Apple and Amazon team up to kill independent repair of old apple products
  • There is such blantant misinformation in some of the Brexit reporting, it's almost as if they are trying to tell us something they can't for some reason say directly
  • Leicester City fans in '5,000-1' walk for helicopter crash victims
  • Advanced CSS Theming with Custom Properties and JavaScript
  • Static Properties in JavaScript Classes with Inheritance
  • Test262 Report - up-to-date information on the state of new and existing language features across implementations
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Friday 9th November, 2018 #

  • Guess who's back, back again? China's back, hacking your friends - Beijing targets American biz amid tech tariff tiff
  • The New York Times documents manipulation at the White House, increasingly technology based, next stop (presumably) AI based manipulation
  • #GoogleWalkout update - Collective action works, and we need to keep working - True equity depends on it
  • Sundar Pichai of Google: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’
  • David Attenborough to present Netflix nature series Our Planet
  • Chrome 71 will warn users about unclear billing charges & subscription sign-ups
  • Coinbase Users Can Now Buy and Sell Brave's Basic Attention Token
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Thursday 8th November, 2018 #

  • enquirer - Stylish, intuitive and user-friendly prompt system (for building nodejs CLIs)
  • There Was No Midterm Misinformation Crisis Because We've Democratized Propaganda
  • Why There Will Never Be Another RedHat - The Economics Of Open Source
  • Big investors sue 16 banks in U.S. over currency market rigging
  • HF Ham Radio on a Budget - QRP Labs, QRPGuys, CW Academy
  • This foldable phones have definitely started arriving
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Wednesday 7th November, 2018 #

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Tuesday 6th November, 2018 #

  • Europe's massive plan to require open access for all science gets two new backers
  • We tried the world’s first folding phone, and it actually works
  • The Copyleft Bust Up (aka How unimaginably mindbogglingly soul-destroyingly complicated it is to get on the software property ladder - "Software...it's great")
  • Some technical details about the recent China Telecom's internet traffic misdirection
  • Chrome 70 will ad-block an entire website if it shows abusive ads
  • Gmail for iOS now lets you view all of your accounts in a single inbox
  • Will Google’s homepage news feed repeat Facebook’s mistakes?
  • Zuckerberg says the future is sharing via 100B messages & 1B Stories/day
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Monday 5th November, 2018 #

  • The Cure - "Boys Don't Cry" MTV Unplugged
  • Acid rain is a rain or any other form of precipitation that is unusually acidic, meaning that it has elevated levels of hydrogen ions (low pH)
  • How George Soros Came To Be Blamed For Pretty Much Everything
  • Google employees and contractors participate in global “walkout for real change”
  • Prison time, hefty fines for data privacy violations - draft U.S. Senate bill
  • In a court filing, Edward Snowden says a report critical to an NSA lawsuit is authentic
  • Microsoft releases a linux version of the procdump sysinternals tool
  • What is the difference between visibility:hidden and display:none?
  • Why is there no way to disable the browser cache for specific hosts? (Really annoying for development)
  • Foreigners living abroad invited to join the UK Armed Forces
  • U.S. imposed sanctions to Iran, only Italy, India, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, China and India are allowed to trade oil with them
  • Around 10,000 flames have been lit at the Tower of London to mark the centenary of the end of World War I
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Sunday 4th November, 2018 #

  • More Evidence Points to China as Source of Ozone-Depleting Gas
  • Why Oromo baby girls can be engaged on the day they are born (an example of a bad deal imho)
  • And if the PM doesn't get a good deal, I suppose the next logical sep would be general strike, so the people could get a "second vote" if it was absolutely necessary
  • Business leaders call for second EU vote on Brexit (It boils down to do we trust the PM to make a vaguely good deal with the EU?)
  • An article that attempts to over the important topic of how Google balances the opposing realities of user privacy with user tracking
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Saturday 3rd November, 2018 #

  • Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction - By 2050, Africa is expected to lose 50% of its birds and mammals
  • Sononym is a sample browser that offers a fresh perspective on how sounds can be explored and organized
  • Why Big Tech pays poor Kenyans to programme self-driving cars
  • Radio DJ Paul Gambaccini has won damages from prosecutors over unfounded allegations of historical sex offences
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Friday 2nd November, 2018 #

  • <input> elements of type datetime-local create input controls that let the user easily enter both a date and a time
  • I wonder does Google's spying/tracking everyone affect the Google work culture? And in what way?
  • Google Employees Around The World Are Walking Out To Protest Sexual Misconduct
  • Flickr will end 1TB of free storage and limit free users to 1,000 photos
  • padStart() method pads the current string with another string (requires polyfill for IE)
  • Really fascinating in depth comparison of Apple and Google maps - Has Apple closed the gap with Google’s map?
  • The Complete JavaScript Handbook (very high density, starts with newest features)
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Thursday 1st November, 2018 #

  • HN thread on Google blocking nojs users (Something feels wrong here ... how does Google know they only make up 1% of users if all the bots are not using js? Maybe there aren't many bots? So why do they need to stop nojs users then?)
  • Making the GPL more scary (Concerning the recent MongoDB and Redis license change)
  • The Brexit app to be used by EU citizens to apply for settled status in the UK won't work on iphones
  • Zuckerberg gets joint summons from UK and Canadian parliaments
  • An AI Lie Detector Is Going to Start Questioning Travelers in the EU
  • Google to start requiring javascript to run in your browser (for security!) and they "will help you get back to the beginning"
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