I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met.
Great reads, thoughtfully curated by npr for 2022 – “What would you like to read? Mix and match the filters below and the years above to explore more than 3,200 recommendations from NPR staff and trusted critics.”
Swurl.com web search engine optimized for mobile
Swurl.com – “The design started with observing 3 growing trends:
- Mobile is primary
- Swiping to see more is easier than clicking.
- Searching multiple websites is valuable. Google, LinkedIn, Instagram, Amazon, YouTube, Images, News and Reddit, and all results are viewed by scrolling or swiping – no clicking.
- Content is always mobile sized. Then because of SnapChat and TikTok and Instagram, we are finding people like swiping to see more. There is no need to click to another page or tab for more content. We like immediate access to more content. So let’s swipe to see more. Last, we are going to more and more different websites to search directly. For example YouTube, Amazon, Instagram, and Reddit. That’s great, but let’s try doing all those searches in 1 place.”
Tracing Twitter from Its Roots as a Protest Tool to Elon Musk’s Acquisition
Crimethinc: The Billionaire and the Anarchists Tracing Twitter from Its Roots as a Protest Tool to Elon Musk’s Acquisition – “…But Twitter did not simply spring, fully formed like Athena, from the head of company co-founder Jack Dorsey. In fact, it was a modest refinement of a model already demonstrated by TXTmob, the SMS text messaging program developed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy for protests at the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Blaine Cook and Evan Henshaw-Plath, anarchist developers who worked alongside Dorsey at his previous company Odeo, helped refine TXTmob and later took the model with them into the conversations with Dorsey that gave rise to Twitter.
If the unrelenting urgency of social media in general and Twitter in particular can be exhausting, that’s to be expected—the infrastructure of Twitter was originally designed for street communications during high-stakes mass mobilizations in which information must go out immediately, boiled down to its bare essentials. It’s not a coincidence that, despite its shortcomings, the platform has continued to be useful to street activists and conflict journalists…”
Vice: “In October, [Northeastern University] quietly introduced heat sensors under desk without notifying students or seeking their consent. Students removed the devices, hacked them, and were able to force the university to stop its surveillance….Surveillance has been creeping unabated across schools, universities, and much of daily life over the past few years, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in October, however, graduate students at Northeastern University were able to organize and beat back an attempt at introducing invasive surveillance devices that were quietly placed under desks at their school. Early in October, Senior Vice Provost David Luzzi installed motion sensors under all the desks at the school’s Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Complex (ISEC), a facility used by graduate students and home to the “Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute” which studies surveillance. These sensors were installed at night—without student knowledge or consent—and when pressed for an explanation, students were told this was part of a study on “desk usage,” according to a blog post by Max von Hippel, a Privacy Institute PhD candidate who wrote about the situation for the Tech Workers Coalition’s newsletter…”
Grad Students Analyze, Hack, and Remove Under-Desk Surveillance Devices Designed to Track Them Vice
