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 #

Crypto casino apps on iOS are masquerading as children’s games — like backdoor speakeasies, they only appear if you're in certain countries or on a VPN #

The Guardian on India’s devastating virus surge — they're nearly one-third of all new cases worldwide, with nearly 300k yesterday #

Derek Chauvin found guilty on all counts of George Floyd’s murder — not justice, but a rare moment of accountability after a year of protests #

The war between McDonald’s and a startup trying to fix their unreliable ice-cream machines — they sold a device to monitor and repair the notoriously finicky hardware and ended up in court #

Zoom Jeopardy! — amazing TouchDesigner mod to play archival or custom Jeopardy! games with friends over Zoom, get it before it's C&Ded #

OpenAI-powered Linux shell — pretty useful when it's not completely hallucinating answers #

The Nothings Suite — Pippin Barr's collection of "hello world" anti-games in 14 engines #

GANcraft — generate photorealistic imagery from Minecraft worlds #

Google Earth Timelapse — a global zoomable video of 37 years of satellite imagery #

The Story of “A Thousand Miles” — VICE interviewed virtually everyone involved with Vanessa Carlton's 2002 hit, including Terry Crews #

NYPD deploys Spot Mini to public housing complex — creepy authoritarian surveillance just got more dystopian #

Discord will block NSFW servers on iOS — did Apple require this change or is this Discord's attempt to get their 12+ rating back? #

Yamauchi No.10 Family Office — every homepage should have a theme song #

Just One Day – 2winz² — the only thing better than Brian David Gilbert is four Brian David Gilberts #

Visualizing the risk-reward of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — the risk is so absurdly small, it seems inevitable that many more people die as a result of halting distribution (via) #

Charlie Warzel on Twitter and context collapse — the first issue of his new Galaxy Brain newsletter on the attention economy #

Murder Offsets — "paying for the right to do wrong" (via) #

Officer who fatally shot Daunte Wright resigns, as does Brooklyn Center police chief — yet another racist killing of an unarmed black man, 15 miles from where George Floyd was killed #

Teaching a Spot Mini to pee beer — Michael Reeves is like the edgelord version of Simone Giertz (via) #

Patrick Klepek on Cruel World, a multiplayer game designed to degrade as people play it selfishly — it originated as a commentary on NFTs, but evolved beyond the creator's expectations (via) #

Guardian investigation finds Facebook ignored “Page abuse” loophole used for political manipulation by world leaders — they prioritized enforcement for rich countries and their adversaries, while internal reports about abuse elsewhere languished for months #

Ben Smith on Substack — big scoops in here including Daniel Lavery's deal, Charlie Warzel leaving the NYT, the Sidechannel Discord, and a Gawker revival?! #