Prosecutors can’t prove cheerleader mom deepfake is actually a deepfake — with evidence pointing to its authenticity, seems like a case of deepfakes being blamed for teens screwing around #

Sending an international email in 1984 — "I won't tell you my account number" (clearly types in account number and "0000" PIN on keyboard) (via) #

Colossal Cave Adventure as a playable long-polling GIF on AO3 — learn more about Andrew Sillers' Living GIFs, including Doom on AO3 #

Itch.io waiving all fees today for Creator Day — go get some delightful indie games with 100% of revenue going to their creators #

Vox on the Gaza doom loop — solid explainer on the political dynamics behind Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority #

Researchers find 12 people responsible for the majority of anti-vaccine content online — you can read the full report #

The Palestinian Dispossession at the Heart of the Gaza Conflict — "They will rubber stamp more evictions, all the while using the tool of law to provide a veneer of integrity." #

Wired’s Megan Molteni on the 60-year-old scientific error that helped Covid kill — related: Zeynep Tufekci on the long delay in accepting spread by aerosol transmission #

Aaron A. Reed on Monster Island, a play-by-mail MMO from 1989 — over 250,000 rooms and 1,600 concurrent players, all running on a 386 and played via postal mail #

David Farrier gets scammed by a foot fetishist — don't miss his interview with an online sex worker about their lessons learned: cash up-front and never use Paypal #

Enhancing photorealism in GTA V with a convolutional networks — processing game imagery using a network trained on cityscapes #

Google Docs to switch from HTML to canvas based rendering — I wonder when media sites will start doing this to prevent ad blockers (via) #

The Absurdity is the Point — Charlie Warzel on memeified finance and politics as protest #

mmm.page — friendly drag-and-drop quirky website builder (via) #

How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body — Laine Nooney on the history of computer-induced pain and the ways people tried to manage it #

WaPo interviews the Japanese biker dad who uses FaceApp to post as a young woman — raises complex questions around authenticity and identity online #

P.R.E.S.T.A.V.B.A. (1988) — teen hackers in communist Czechoslovakia made and swapped illegal protest text games on bootleg cassettes #

Genesis Noir leads IGF 2021 finalists — as always, an incredible year of indie games to seek out and play #

Stumbled — StumbleUpon reborn, it immediately paid off for me with this laser bagpipe (via) #

Negativland’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert — a tiny desk I never expected to see #

Neopets’ blackmarket pet scandal, explained — Simone de Rochefort dives into the site's history, current drama, and future #

LiveLeak shuttered after 15 years — I never knew until today that it started as an offshoot of internet shock site Ogrish #

Report finds ISPs funded fake net neutrality comments — 18 out of 22 million comments were fake, 7.7 million from a single 19-year-old college student #

Signal banned from running Instagram ads revealing how much Facebook knows about you — a stunt, but a good one (via) #

How Basecamp Blew Up — incredible reporting from Casey Newton on the disastrous all-hands meeting that led to a third of the company quitting #

Verizon sells Yahoo and AOL to private equity firm — the new company will be just called "Yahoo," finally dropping the exclamation point #

Web Curios returns — after a nine-month hiatus, Matt Muir's link-laden newsletter is back and at its own domain #

Lena — fictional Wikipedia entry about the first executable image of a human brain (via) #

Captain Yajima — Worthikids uses Blender to flawlessly mimic the feel of stop-motion animation #

Basecamp employees quit en masse after politics ban and severance offer — I counted 19 out of 57, fully one-third of their team, and those are just the ones who announced it publicly #

Snopes or Nopes — guess whether Snopes fact-checks were true or not based on the article titles (via) #

Casey Newton on what really happened at Basecamp — the company banned societal/political discussions at work, to the surprise and dismay of its employees #

Making animated glitter text with SVG — reproducing the Angelfire look with SVG's noise, color cycling, and blending features #

The Yayagram — charming Raspberry Pi project to send and receive Telegram messages to grandma #

SiriusXM acquires 99% Invisible — the show will remain free, with Roman Mars and his team developing new shows for Stitcher #

Yahoo, the Destroyer — Kaitlin Tiffany interviewed me, Jason Scott, Maciej Ceglowski, and others about Yahoo's casual destruction of internet history #

The Slander Industry — Aaron Krolik and Kashmir Hill dig into the relationship between gripe sites and reputation-management services #

Student illustrators envision post-pandemic New Yorker covers — these pack an emotional punch #

The copyright quagmire of Emily Ratajkowski’s NFT — who owns the rights to a link to a photo of a print of a screenshot of a photo #

Pixel Fill — like Tetris meets Snake (via) #

things are a little crazy rn — two GPT-3 bots try to find a time to meet up (via) #

Using emoji as favicons — genius little hack #

Oxford Malaria vaccine proves highly effective in trials — 77% efficacy over 12 months compared to current vaccines that only prevent 29% of severe cases #

TikTok creators struggle with its opaque and unpredictable algorithm — in the past, human moderators have suppressed videos based on attractiveness and political content #

longARcat — iOS app to make extremely long cats with augmented reality #

Aaron A. Reed on Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger — completely new to me, a pioneering work of interactive fiction on the WELL that predates games like Her Story by 30 years #

Join my birthday paste party — last year, I wrote about why I love these and their long history online #

Ed Zitron on the misplaced wrath directed at social media managers — "the average social media manager has very little power over any of the decisions but all of the consequences" (via) #

Charlie Warzel on Facebook’s worrying embrace of the creator economy — I expect these monetization tools will be a hit for Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, and their other biggest pages #

IRS estimates tax cheats are costing the U.S. $1 trillion a year — offshore tax evasion, cryptocurrency, and other methods allow the richest 1% to hide 20% of their income #