webcurios

 Who is Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway and why is the world paying so much attention to her?

Visit Akin’s Trump Executive Order Overview to view a summary. Use the menu below to filter by topic. Subscribe to regular updates as new orders are published.”

“The website is the home of Web Curios, a blognewslettertypething which has existed in various forms in various places online since about 2010 (it also exists as a bot on Bluesky, for anyone who, inexplicably, doesn’t want to read 10k words about ‘stuff on the internet’ in one go each week). 

First published on the corporate website of PR agency Hill & Knowlton UK (this amazes me as much as it does you, trust me), Web Curios was then published by Imperica between 2013-20; now it lives here along with the (partial) archive of previous editions. Thanks to the magic of coding, the archive is now searchable – 

I plan to add tags to this when I get a moment to go through the 7,000-odd links that said archive contains AI gets good enough to do it automatically, but til then you’ll have to make do with freetext. I can’t stress enough how potentially-useful this is – honestly, if you need digital-type ideas, I suggest you go spelunking and rip off some old shit from 4 years ago that you can give a conceptual refresh to and pass off as ‘original’ thinking. 

Noone will EVER know…

What IS this? Web Curios is a weekly roundup of stuff that its author – that is, me – has found interesting online over the past 7 days, and thinks worth sharing with its small readership. Web Curios has no real curatorial theme, beyond ‘stuff that its author thinks is interesting’, which may in part explain its steadfast refusal to grow beyond a very niche concern despite its preposterous longevity…”

Sciurls is a project by Browserling – a friendly and fun cross-browser testing company powered by alien technology.” “It looks like a Really Simple way to manage content Syndication”

Looking for finance/business news? We also have FINURLS – finance news aggregator. Check it out!

Marginalia Search – Explore the Web your way – Search: All. Blogs, Academia, Vintage, Plain Text, Wikis, Forums, Recipes, Search in Title, Recent Results, Remove Javascript, Reduce Adtech.

• Prioritizes non-commercial content
• Tools for both search and discovery
• Find lost old websites

Open Source

• Custom index and crawler software
• Simple technology — no AI or cloud
• AGPL license

Privacy by default

• Filter out tracking and adtech
• No user or search data shared with 3rd parties
• No long-term retention of queries or IP addresses

Sarah Taylor ATO warning for millions over sinister new trend: 'Luring in honest people'

 ATO warning for millions over sinister new trend: 'Luring in honest people'

Aussies have been urged to be on the lookout for schemes that sound too good to be true.

Stewart Perrie · Senior Journalist Fri 31 January 2025 

The ATO's Assistant Commissioner Sarah Taylor said Aussies need to be wary of too-good-to-be-true schemes online. (Source: LinkedIn/Getty)

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is warning people to be wary of too-good-to-be-true schemes they might see online. It has noticed an uptick in dodgy tax schemesthat "lure in honest people" by promising amazing benefits.

Many of the schemes offer ways to reduce or avoid paying tax altogether and the ATOsaid that should serve as a big red flag. The tax office's Acting Deputy Commissioner Sarah Taylor said you need to have your wits about you while scrolling the internet.

"Sometimes tax schemes can be peddled as investment schemes. We don’t want to see honest people lured into unlawful tax schemes with false promises of high returns and tax savings – if an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is," she said.

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"Those who invest in unlawful tax schemes stand to lose their hard-earned cash, and risk paying tax with interest and heavy penalties.

"Promoters of these schemes are often opportunistic and target vulnerable people. Protect yourself and your money by getting advice from a registered tax practitioner before committing to anything."

'Not victimless crimes': Tax schemes on the ATO's radar

The ATO singled out one recent scheme that asked people to invest in a start-up company that claimed to qualify as an early-stage innovation company (ESIC).

Wannabe investors are told that by plunging their cash into an ESIC, they can claim the early-stage investor tax offset on shares purchased through the scheme.

However, the tax office is dubious about the ESIC claims for these companies and investors might not be able to access the promised tax benefits.

Another scheme the ATO has noticed is one tricking Aussies into thinking they can avoid paying tax if they set up a "non-profit foundation" and put their income into it.

This method won't actually allow you to dodge the taxman and you'll still have to cough up the dough.

"Promoting and participating in unlawful tax schemes are not victimless crimes," Taylor added.

"Those who choose to engage in these behaviours are attempting to obtain an unfair advantage over those who do the right thing.

"We take targeted action against unlawful tax schemes that promote tax avoidance behaviours and against those who promote these schemes. We are committed to helping protect the community against misinformation about schemes spread on various channels."

The ATO is encouraging anyone who comes across these types of schemes to report it via the tip-off form or by calling 1800 060 062.

In 2008, the US Central Intelligence Agency made public a World War Two-era handbook written for grassroots sabotage.

Discover the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual: A Timeless Guide to Subverting Any Organization with “Purposeful Stupidity” (1944)

Murdoch to Musk, The Evolution of Journalism - Podcast | Peter Jukes & Hardeep Matharu

The Big Four Are Coming After Big Law: KPMG Moves Step Closer To Approval For U.S. Law Firm (‘KPMG Law’)

SCOTUSblog Founder Tom Goldstein Hit With 22-Count Federal Tax Evasion Indictment

Weisbach: Taxing Corporate Payouts

Big Brother Becomes Little Brother

Ken Klippenstein – Corporations are the new nation state, U.S. intelligence admits – Envious of the power and wealth of corporate America, the head of U.S. intelligence has issued a new directive calling on the spy agencies to “routinize”  and “expand” their partnerships with private companies. Agencies are even authorized to incur “risk” in these relationships, the directive says. The move underscores the awesome power of corporations — the appistocracy, as I call them, or “non-state entities,” the directive’s euphemistic term. 

Called Intelligence Community Directive 406, the order was signed on January 16 by then-President Biden’s Director of National Intelligence in the final days of the administration. It lays out new ways for spy agencies to capitalize on the information and expertise of these corporate superpowers, which could be anything from social media platforms to AI firms. It is not yet clear how the Trump administration plans to exercise these authorities…

 Meet ‘Blonde Supremacy’: Meet Trump’s Fox-Ready Press Squad

The Brookings Center on Regulations and Markets Regulatory Tracker (“Reg Tracker”) is a tool that tracks and provides insights into important regulatory actions by the federal government. 

Originally launched in October 2017, the Reg Tracker monitors a curated selection of executive agency rules, guidance, and policy introductions or revocations, as well as executive actions like executive orders. 

The rules span a wide range of policy areas, including but not limited to education, labor, environment, and transportation. This post provides context surrounding the regulatory process, details on what actions the Reg Tracker encompasses, and guidance on how to use its interactive features.”

Meet the tracking companies that follow you around the internet

Datawrapper – “Considering the cookie consent banners that have come to grace our screens on a daily basis, it might not come as a surprise that companies are interested in extracting data from your online activities, and that browsing the internet is not exactly a private affair. 

Still, it is hard to grasp how this data collection actually happens and who is involved. In this post, I want to take a closer look at web tracking and the companies behind it. One website, many connections – When you visit a website, your web browser typically doesn’t just connect to the domain visible in the address bar, but to a variety of external services as well. Some of them might be required for the website’s basic functions, while others might serve advertisements, gather visitor statistics, or display embedded content from social media. All of these connections have one thing in common:

 They give the parties on the other side an opportunity to collect data. Those parties can also use a variety of mechanisms to tell your connection apart from others, including storing browser cookies, loading invisible images (“tracking pixels”), and generating unique fingerprints from your device- and system-specific settings. The chart below shows the tracking services that have been observed on some of the web’s most popular websites. (Along with the other charts in this post, this one uses data collected by Ghostery, an ad-blocking browser plugin, and published in the open-source tracker database WhoTracks.Me.)…

 Amazon’s 26 trackers, two thirds of which are used for advertising, already make up a considerable number. Yet it is not uncommon for websites to embed two, three, or even four times as many. Among the 100 websites most frequented by Ghostery users, the UK’s Daily Mail takes the top spot with a staggering 125 unique trackersobserved…” +Google, YouTube, Fiverr, Reddit, Amazon, Facebook. X and Wikipedia!

via EFF: “Better late than never: last night a federal district court held that backdoor searches of databases full of Americans’ private communications collected under Section 702 ordinarily require a warrant. The landmark ruling comes in a criminal case, United States v. Hasbajrami, after more than a decade of litigation, and over four years since the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that backdoor searches constitute “separate Fourth Amendment events” and directed the district court to determine a warrant was required. Now, that has been officially decreed. In the intervening years, Congress has reauthorizedSection 702 multiple times, each time ignoring overwhelming evidence that the FBI and the intelligence community abuse their access to databases of warrantlessly collected messages and other data.

 The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which Congress assigned with the primary role of judicial oversight of Section 702, has also repeatedly dismissed arguments that the backdoor searches violate the Fourth Amendment, giving the intelligence community endless do-overs despite its repeated transgressions of even lax safeguards on these searches. This decision sheds light on the government’s liberal use of what is essential a “finders keepers” rule regarding your communication data. As a legal authority, FISA Section 702 allows the intelligence community to collect a massive amount of communications data from overseas in the name of “national security.” 

But, in cases where one side of that conversation is a person on US soil, that data is still collected and retained in large databases searchable by federal law enforcement. Because the US-side of these communications is already collected and just sitting there, the government has claimed that law enforcement agencies do not need a warrant to sift through them. EFF argued for over a decade that this is unconstitutional, and now a federal court agrees with us…”