I just got an announcement that LiveJournal is now twenty-five years old, and there will be some special celebratory activities this month ( Read more... )

Just got an e-mail from Amazon. Seems they're going to be ending support for their Image and Image plus Text links -- which means that most of my visual links are going to be breaking, all over my websites ( Read more... )

The state of Florida seems to think so. However, it seems likely this law will be challenged on First Amendment grounds.

OTOH, it may depend on the precise definition of a paid political blogger. Do they only mean someone who is paid regular amounts for their blogging? Or will it also include anyone who has affiliate links on their blog, ( Read more... )

As generative AI becomes increasingly popular, some people just seem to have to mess with it. Sometimes it can be amusing, as when I discovered that ChatGPT is programmed to protect the rights of fantastical and folkloric entities just as if they were actual people, which makes it tricky to elicit certain kind of fictional scenarios (best way is to ( Read more... )

Social media has enabled us to reconnect with old friends and make new ones around the globe. However, any good thing we create can be abused, and social media is no exception.

One of the most insidious is the "pig butchering scam," so called because the scammers go for the whole hog -- that is, everything the mark is worth ( Read more... )

Strictly speaking, it's a ban on putting the app on smartphones managed by the House of Representatives' IT support. But it does point up the serious security issues with the TikTok app, which could leave a user's personal data wide open ( Read more... )

This past year's garden didn't go as well as it could've, mostly because it got neglected in the frantic rush of the convention season, which began right as I needed to start our peppers and tomatoes indoors. From then on, gardening just sort of got squeezed into the cracks of the business -- which is reminiscent of how the garden tended to be on ( Read more... )

Or how did First Amendment rights become so messy?To over-simplify, the Internet transformed the boundaries between private and public, between personal communication and publication, in a fundamental way that was only barely anticipated by such things as the telephone and radio, or even the mimeograph, spirit duplicator and photocopier ( Read more... )

Many years ago, there was discussion about how the Internet was designed to treat censorship as damage and route around it. However, that was back in the Twentieth, when most Internet discourse took place on distributed systems such as USEnet (remember that?) which involved servers at institutions all over the world ( Read more... )

Affinity fraud uses your connections with individuals or groups to gain your trust and lure you into a scam. Most commonly, scammers present themselves as associated with the mark's faith community or a charitable organization, sometimes asking for donations, but often offering "investment opportunities ( Read more... )