Beware the Copyleft Trolls — photographers using Creative Commons and the courts "as a blunt object with which to coerce nuisance value settlements from unsuspecting parties" #

Ed Yong on the aftermath of America’s pandemic trauma — anxiety, grief, and psychic numbing from a self-reinforcing disaster #

The Linda Lindas play the L.A. Public Library — their song "Racist Sexist Boy" is blowing up on Twitter, but the whole set's great (via) #

Were microwaves invented to thaw cryogenically frozen hamsters in the 1950s? — yet another brilliant Tom Scott video (via) #

Fansubbing BookStory — collaboratively translating Kairosoft's used bookstore simulator after 24 years (via) #

Determining the time of a photo by measuring its shadows — if you know the location/date and have a clear, straight shot, you can estimate within 30 minutes #

Preserving Worlds — a "documentary travelogue through aging but beloved virtual worlds," interviewing people trying to preserve them (via) #

Aaron A. Reed on LambdaMOO — it's stayed running continuously for over 30 years, still easily accessible today #

AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google — ding dong, AMP is dead (via) #

25 Edits That Defined the Modern Internet Video — related: 12 Video Creators on Their Hardest Edit Ever (via) #

Exploring a general store untouched for nearly 60 years — the 153 Mile Store opened in 1914 and closed in 1963 with everything inside, a time capsule of the early 20th century #

Pouët looks at 20 years of demoscene trends — wild that the Commodore 64 passed Windows for the last two years, albeit with smaller prods #

Visit the first Apple Store from 2001 in augmented reality — please do Electronics Boutique in 1988 next, thanks #

Twitter shares learnings about biased image cropping algorithm — they found it favored white faces, leading to the cropping changes this month #

Freenode staff resigns after hostile takeover of IRC network — the holding company for the world's largest IRC network was sold under false pretenses #

NYT’s Amanda Hess talks to Sinead O’Connor — “I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.” #

Google adding an RSS reader to Chrome on Android — a headline I didn't expect to see in 2021 #

Trash the Planet — browser-based idle game about capitalist raccoons taking over the world (via) #

Vandal — browser add-on to see historical versions of a webpage from the Wayback Machine without leaving the tab (via) #

pmndrs market — newly-launched database of freely-licensed 3D models/textures with an open API (via) #

After 20 years, eBay closing its adults-only categories next month — including all adult art, comics, and games, presumably because they're transitioning from Paypal to traditional payment processors #

Google previews Project Starline, a life-size holographic 3D video chat booth — multiple cameras and sensors capture a 3D model in real-time, displayed on a 65-inch holographic light field display #

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) #