Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

CLI v5, .config v2, supports Bear – please update - Johnny.Decimal

2026-11-07T01:37:38.000Z

The JD CLI has been updated to v5. It now supports Bear as a JDex.

This required a breaking change to the configuration file which is now versioned 2. The jdex property is now an object.

{
  "version": 2,
  "systems": [
    {
      "sys": "P76",
      "title": "My personal system",
      "root": "/Users/you/Documents/P76 My personal system",
      "jdex": { "app": "bear" }
    }
  ]
}

Updating

git -C ~/.local/share/johnnydecimal/cli pull to get v5.
Run jd which reads your config file, causing the CLI to automatically update it to v2.
If you use my agent skills, npx skills update jdex johnnydecimal.

Now checks for updates

From v5, the CLI reads GitHub tags once/day and will notify you when there's an update. jd update will perform the update.

No telemetry is sent. Run jd update --help for opt-out instructions.

Weeknote #2025 - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-11-06T20:23:14.000Z

A plague has descended upon the Knight household. 0/10, would not recommend.

I remembered a post I now can't find where a developer listed everything they had searched for in a week^[1] and thought it would be fun to include some searches I've done this week with zero context.

marry me pasta
words than end in go
hanging chads
triscuit biscuit

I bought a Legami Super Kawaii pen case designed to hold 100 Legami pens but I needed it for my mildliners. Here it is with just over 60 in it. Also, it's a panda.

I sold my Kodak Charmera for two reasons: one, I knew I'd never really use it again and two, I could sell it on Vinted for what I paid for it but then I bought The Jaffa cake camera — more on that in another post.

As soon as I sent the Jaffa cam to Ben, a fellow novelty camera enjoyer, he replied with another camera I now want — the Godex C100 which has a transparent viewfinder and looks cool af.

This Ghostbusters × Wild Wild West mashup is glorious.

It's been three years since Duel of the Defaults and the post collection is up to 539 posts. Wild.

Pablo wrote a lovely post about the good internet.

I lost more time than I care to admit playing Katamari Met — Katamari Damacy but for objects from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's open object collection. I scored 15k on my first run.

This GitHub issue complaining because their little robot didn't do as it was told and deleted loads of stuff is absolute cinema. Poor baby.

Ben posted about Thai colours of the day. I should try this as a way to get through more of my ink.

While viewing a school for Baby Knight, the teacher (who was teaching six year olds) asked them to say what a "digraph" was and I went into full panic because I had never heard that word in my life. Why did I think she was going to ask me? No idea. Anyway, it's two consonants that join to make a unique sound like "sh".

I want the Pepsi Canamera (not a typo) more than anything right now. Can't stop thinking about it.

If anyone knows what post I'm on about, please send it my way ⤾

Knowvember 2026 - Joel's Log Files

2026-11-06T16:50:00.000Z

I saw some bloggers and friends participating on this prompt/challege, which—of course—originates from Robert Birming’s mind. Even though I’m one of the ones who feels like the about page I have covers pretty much everything, I decided to contribute with my own entry anyway.

A photo

You can find two pretty faithful pixel art recreations of me on both my home page and my about page. These will do for most situations. Here I decided to share a picture of one of my dogs, her name is Lana and she’s a very good girl!

She can't help but wag her tail all the time

Name or nickname

As some of you know, my name is Joel, and joelchrono is my username in most places. I have told this story many times, an older username I had was hard to pronounce in English on Twitch streams, and I went for “Chrono” from Chrono Trigger and appended it to my regular name, not much else to say at this point! Best videogame of all time, not the best username for sure.

Part of me wishes I had gone for a nickname that doesn’t use my real name in any way, but it’s kinda late for that at this point, I don’t mind it much.

Where in the world I blog from

I blog from México! I live in the state of Jalisco and that’s where I post from most of the time, usually via my laptop or my phone.

All I do is upload markdown files to my repo and go from there. I have a whole set-up for this on my laptop, but on my phone I just upload files to GitHub’s website directly. This has made my commit history a little bit ugly, I must admit.

I definitely prefer when I get to sit on my desk at home and write away, but the time for that has lessened since I started to work! Definitely try to do that during weekends though, if I don’t get hooked by some videogame.

What my blog is mostly about

My website is about pretty much everything that lives inside of my head at any given time. I talk about many things. The videogames I play, the books I read, my personal thoughts here and there, regarding whatever situations in my life I’m going through. Every once in a while I mention the state of technology, or what’s on my phone or talk about childhood memories. Maybe I’ll mention a pet of mine, or how my website works, or my thoughts after binge-watching a whole movie franchise.

Do not stick with me if you want me to have serious topics or essays on whatever is trending, although I may dwell on those things from time to time. I do enjoy to know I am being read, and sometimes that affects what I write, but I try to remind myself that most of what I share is because I want to talk about more people about it, so I’m always happy to get comments from people who share my interests and such.

Basically, it’s just me and my hobbies and random thoughts, and if you are lucky, some useful tutorial about some niche thing like FreshRSS.

This is day 66 of #100DaysToOffload

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Fairphone 1: Still going strong after 13 years - Kev Quirk

2026-11-06T14:45:00.000Z

Fairphone 1: Still going strong after 13 years

by Fairphone

The Fairphone team talk through two examples of where the original Fairphone 1 from back in 2013 are "still very much in use", but I think this post is a little disingenuous.

Read post ➡

I saw this post on Mastodon, and clicked on it as the title and intro both read like there's people still using their original Fairphone 1 as a daily driver, after more than a decade. This surprised me as Fairphone clearly states that their phones are supported for 7 years, and according to this site the Fairphone 1 went end of life in July 2017 (that's 4 years of support for those who are counting).

Reading the post it's clear that neither example is using their phone as a daily driver. One is sat on shelf, providing spare CPU capacity for scientific research, and the other is being used as a glorified MP3 player.

The post irks me a little as it feels disingenuous. A phone having hardware that's able to turn on and function after 13 years is nothing special. I've just pulled a Blackberry Priv and Wileyfox Swift, both from 2015 out of the drawer and both still work after a few years of daily use.

So having a decade old phone that's running, but not being used as a daily driver, is really nothing special.

For the record, I like what Fairphone are doing - I've seriously considered getting one myself a few times, but this post missed the mark for me. Maybe I'm being unfair here?

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

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Knowember 2026 - Kev Quirk

2026-11-06T13:54:00.000Z

Knowember in the brainchild of Robert Birming. At first I thought it was a bit of a pointless exercise as it only asks fore 3 things from bloggers:

A photo
Name or nickname
What your blog is mostly about

I figured any regular readers will know all those things about me, so it's pointless, but then I read the list of people who have already taken part, some I know of already, others I don't, and in all cases I learned something new.

So here's my entry to Knowember 2026 (I do think it's a silly name though 🙃).

A photo

You can see a photo of me on my about page, so I'm not gonna to share a photo of me here. Instead, I'm going to share a photo of the thing(s) that bring me the most joy in my life...my dogs (don't tell my wife and kids).

LTR - Sidney, Tia, and Nelly

Name or nickname

My real, legal name is Kevin Quirk, but I go by Kev everywhere - I much prefer it. I've never really liked the name Kevin, especially since I learned about Kevinism. My middle name is Thomas, and I'd have preferred to have been named that, but it's too late now. I suppose I could tell people to start calling me "Tom" but I think they'd look at me as if I had 2 heads, given I'm a 40 something man who's always gone by "Kev".

Everyone calls me Kev, except for my wife and my mum. They both call me Kevin, except when they're being serious, then it's Kev. Which is weird as most people have it the other way round - as the saying goes "I'm only called by my full name when I'm in trouble". I suppose it's because Kev is what I've always gone by, so my wife and mum use my "common" name when I'm in trouble. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I've never really had a nickname. Some people used to call me "scouse" when I was in the military, which is the name of a person who comes from Liverpool. But I'm not from Liverpool, I'm from a town on the other side of the River Mersey, called The Wirral. But to people not from the area, I do sound "scouse". I always disliked it when people called me that though, and asked them not to. Being the Army, some of my closer friends would use ironically as they knew I didn't like it.

What my blog is mostly about

Pfft. It's about all kinds of things. Tech, my career, online stuff, my opinions, my home life, and more. In the early days of this blog it was pretty much exclusively tech, but over the years it's grown into a true personal blog where I write about whatever is on my mind.

There's a tag cloud on the discover page if you want to see the tags I've used for all my 1,000+ posts.

That's it

That's it. That's my entry into this little challenge. If you decide to write your own entry, don't forget to let Robert know so he can include you in the list he's keeping.

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.

A video game which caused real world violence - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-11-06T12:34:34.000Z

There has been a dramatic fall in the amount of interpersonal violence in most countries.

I don't want to go too Freakanomics and, obviously, correlation is not causation but perhaps video games have a role to play in this? A teenager being cooped up in their room means less exposure to situations where hormonal impertinence is likely to cause a violent reaction. Shouting and screaming at people via a headset rarely leads to real-life consequences. Beating up street-fighters is less risky than being in a street fight yourself.

But there are times when games do cause problems away from the screen. Players of Pokémon Go ramble about outside trying to collect digital pets - this also causes them to trespass into military bases.

I was recently reminded of one of the first Augmented Reality Games - Mozzies. Back in 2004 having a phone with a camera was almost unheard of. The Mozzies game let you see virtual mosquitoes overlayed on the real world - and then shoot them.

Waving your cameraphone around while playing caused at least one case of physical violence.

Here's a report from Singapore's The New Paper on 6 October 2004.

I'm grateful to Esme Potatoes for helping me find a transcript.

Playing game or snapping girl? Then… SMASH!

The incident happened while he and his friends were at Orchard Cineleisure for a movie recently.
Before the movie started at 7pm, his friends went to E-Zone, an arcade in the same building. The Indonesian student, who has lived in Singapore for more than 10 years, preferred to wait outside and play his favourite game, Mozzies, on his Siemens phone.
The game, which involves killing mosquitoes that appear on screen, requires the use of the phone's camera.
The camera captures a live video image as the game's playing background, with the mosquitoes appearing in the foreground.
The player has to move the phone around to target the mosquitoes.
Heriyono said: "I was so engrossed with the mosquitoes, I became oblivious to my surroundings."
"Then, I saw through the phone, a figure behind the swarm of mosquitoes heading in my direction but I thought he was just passing by."
Heriyono claims the man then shouted: “Trying to take a photo of my girlfriend, is it?”
And he smashed the phone on the floor.
Heriyono said he told the man, whom he estimates to be in his mid- or late 20s, that it was a misunderstanding and that he could check the phone for himself to see if he had indeed taken pictures of the man’s girlfriend.
But the phone was so badly damaged it could not be turned on.
“I was really shocked. He was behaving very aggressively, I thought he was going to hit me,” Heriyono said.
MAN WALKED OFF

But the man then walked off with his girlfriend, he said.
Heriyono and his friends decided not to chase after the man because he was older and they were worried he could get violent.
Heriyono did not make a police report either.
He was worried the man may get to him again, and refused to be photographed for this report.
When contacted, Siemens Mobile said it has never received any complaints about the games on its handphones. (See other report.)
The Mozzies game is available only on the Siemens SX1 model.
Heriyono had bought the handphone about four months earlier for over $700, after convincing his parents that it would be worth it because he uses all its functions, including the radio and MP3 player.
And he particularly liked the Mozzies game.
“In the end, the game caused me so much trouble,” he said with a sigh.
He sent the phone to the Siemens service centre but was told it was beyond repair.
His friends told him later that his actions could have looked suspicious.
“I realised that I could have looked like a pervert if seen by a passer-by,” he admitted.
“The thrill took over basic common sense and I began pointing my camera around.”
The girl was playing “air hockey” with her boyfriend at the time.
Miss Nalia Suli, 18, the receptionist at E-Zone, said she saw the commotion.
She said: “The girl was dressed very sexily. Her skirt was very short and when she bent down to pick up the ball, you could see her underwear.”
She, too, thought Heriyono was taking pictures of the girl.
“If he wasn’t taking pictures, why was the camera facing up?”
But Heriyono said: “Yes I could have pointed to the floor. But the mosquitoes are everywhere on the screen, you have to move around to kill them.”
He is now using a handphone he has borrowed from a friend, until he saves up enough to buy another. “I think after this incident, I will buy a much cheaper phone,” he said.

Perhaps staying inside to play games is safer all round!

After Binance, check what your signing systems can approve - Trail of Bits Blog

2026-11-06T12:00:00.000Z

Binance’s October 2026 security incident raises an operational question for every organization holding user funds: Can your security controls recognize when a valid signature grants an attacker wallet authority? If an organization only monitors transfers and ownership changes, it may miss the shift in wallet authority until assets move.

Binance’s initial update about the incident suggested that a compromised DevOps laptop allowed an attacker to access a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawals. Its second update reported additional breaches but no evidence that wallet private keys had leaked. In its November 3 report, Binance described a broader attack involving social engineering, misuse of an internal AI tool, stolen credentials, and unauthorized access to its wallet-signing service. The attacker nevertheless obtained valid signatures, illustrating a major risk: a compromised server with permission to request signatures can misuse a protected key without extracting it.

The attacker used an EIP-7702 delegation that allows a wallet to sign a standing instruction: “Use this code when my account is called.” Ethereum keeps that instruction in place until it is changed or cleared using the wallet’s key. That enabled repeated transfers, including funds deposited after the first theft, without further signatures from Binance. Other Binance wallets were drained through ordinary signed transfers.

Transaction execution and monitoring systems must keep pace with Ethereum. EIP-7702 places delegation authorizations outside ordinary calldata. Session keys, recovery paths, authorization modules, Safe modules, and ERC-4337 UserOperations all add execution paths that signing policies and monitors must understand. Systems that have not been updated can miss malicious authority changes and asset movements, leaving wallets exposed. Teams must update their detection rules and test that these attack paths are covered.

If you’re responsible for securing wallet infrastructure, start with our checklist.

Four steps to strengthen wallet security

These four recommendations address the risks exposed by the attack. We also provide tests to help you verify that these security controls work.

1. Reduce access to signing infrastructure

Document every service and API that can request wallet signatures, who can call it, and what it can authorize, including transfers, delegation, and arbitrary data. Review this inventory whenever wallet functionality changes on supported chains. Separate signing infrastructure from everyday business systems and verify transaction details through an independent system. Use our TRAIL method to trace how a compromised laptop or server could reach signing.

Verify the result:

For each identified compromise path, use the access and credentials available to the compromised system to attempt an unapproved action. Identify the control expected to block it and retain evidence that no usable signature was produced.

2. Treat delegation as an administrative privilege

Configure signing services to recognize requests that change account authority. Reject EIP-7702 authorizations for custody externally owned accounts (EOAs) that do not need delegation, and ensure generic digest-signing APIs cannot bypass that restriction. Where delegation is required, separately approve the authorizing account, delegate address and code, chain, and nonce. Before evaluating execution, simulations must apply the proposed delegation and inspect changes to permissions and future execution authority alongside immediate balance changes.

Verify the result:

Delegation requests for accounts with delegation disabled are rejected through both dedicated and generic signing interfaces.
Changing an approved account, delegate, chain, or nonce requires renewed approval. Simulations expose added authority even when the transaction moves no assets immediately.

3. Limit damage even if signing is compromised

Even after delegation, the original EOA key can still transfer funds or change the delegate. This means that if the key is compromised, an attacker can bypass limits enforced by the delegate. Protect those assets with separate custody controls that the operational key cannot change. Our cold-storage guidance describes independently enforced limits, monitored delays on sensitive actions, and a separate configuration authority.

Verify the result:

Treat the operational key as compromised and attempt direct transfers, delegate replacement, and policy changes. Confirm these paths cannot bypass the claimed protections, including shortening or removing delays.
Exercise incident response against a malicious withdrawal. Record alert and containment times, and demonstrate that responders can cancel or contain the withdrawal before execution. Confirm that the blocked withdrawal cannot subsequently execute.

4. Detect changes in wallet authority

Map each wallet to the assets and contracts it controls, including wallets that hold no funds. Alerts should identify the affected systems and privileges (e.g., an unapproved delegation on an account that can upgrade funded vaults). Attribute direct calls, module execution, and ERC-4337 operations to their authorization paths.

Verify the result:

Test various delegation scenarios, mixed authorization tuples, multisig-module execution, and failed UserOperations inside successful bundles.
Monitoring should reconstruct authority changes and asset movements in order, identify affected systems, and distinguish detection from controls that block execution before funds move.

Make signing infrastructure an ongoing responsibility

If your organization runs wallets or signing services, take another look at how they’re secured. Test whether your signing policies account for EIP-7702 and ERC-4337, whether independent safeguards still work if an attacker gains access to signing, and whether your monitoring catches changes to accounts and permissions.

Give someone ownership of this review and put it on a regular schedule. Run it again whenever you change the protocols you support, the wallets you use, or your signing services.

Notable links: November 6, 2026 - Werd I/O

2026-11-06T10:00:00.000Z

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

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How an obscure website became a force in America’s election information machine

There hasn’t been enough discussion about the proliferation of reference sites that are built not for humans but to influence chatbot answers. Take the Ballot Brief, which was designed to influence questions about the election:

“In tests by The Washington Post, ChatGPT cited the Ballot Brief in 22 percent of its answers to questions about the election. Microsoft’s Copilot cited it in 75 percent of answers. […] Anthropic’s Claude initially turned to established voter guides run by nonprofits — but started frequently linking to the Ballot Brief in The Post’s second round of tests.”

The Ballot Brief is, in itself, built using AI, with one guy — Ben Torres Ezrick — in control. Here in the US, 42% of adults use AI to ask questions, including about the election. That gives Torres Ezrick outsize influence on information people receive that may influence how they use their vote. Given that Torres Ezrick’s most recent position was Chief Marketing Officer at the far-right video streaming service Rumble, that should probably give us some pause.

And even without that potential rightward skew, the Ballot Brief consists of a bunch of content created at scale using AI with little oversight. So inevitably, there are mistakes:

“The Post identified numerous mistakes on the Ballot Brief. Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) was credited with supporting a bill that passed before he took office — an error that Copilot repeated in a response to The Post. Two Robert Garcias running in California were collapsed into one profile. And several House members were listed with incorrect committee jobs.”

The web has already been insufferable for years because of SEO; this has only gotten worse with the rise of AI-generated marketing content. Now it stands to become a battleground as various entrenched interests fight to have their perspectives represented in chatbot results.

Should newsrooms counteract this with their own set of open, validated information? Or is it an unwinnable arms race that is bound to be dominated by moneyed interests? I’m not sure. But the web is certainly no longer just a place for humans to publish and be heard.

Creating a New Internet Bargain to Preserve Fair Use and Protect the Commons

This should be required reading for everyone in news, but also anyone who cares about a healthy knowledge commons:

Two of the most important organizations advocating for a healthy information economy, Public Knowledge and Creative Commons, have produced an important document that describes the threats and some potential solutions.

I particularly appreciated their definition of what they call defensive enclosure. In a world where their content is being scraped for someone else’s profit — and robots.txt files are being ignored at least 30% of the time, while almost nobody is using AI-specific exclusion standards — publishers are more likely to hide their content away. In turn, this has created its own ecosystem of tools, many of which have the potential to also be centralized and monopolistic.

As their article summarizes the problem:

“The blunt tools in use on either side of the AI developer/rights holder divide are serving to shrink the knowledge commons and erode its quality. This isn’t theoretical, AI-doomer prognosticating about some imagined AI future. The digital knowledge commons is contracting at an alarming rate, driven by the rise of AI model developers that have transformed openly shared content into a high-value industrial input and the defensive response of rights holders who are rapidly restricting access through legal, technical, and contractual means.”

This is not just a problem for us humans who would like to learn and build on each other’s work; AI model developers themselves rely on this information to train their future products. They, too, should be invested in solving the problem.

The challenge is that for newsrooms and other publishers, this enclosure is completely rational. The desire to not be intermediated from their communities is based on a need to serve them well and to achieve financial sustainability. To them, these blunt instruments are tools to ward off an existential threat. But, of course, that then has an adverse effect on the knowledge ecosystem as a whole: there’s an enclosure movement in progress, and the battle is really over who is building the fences.

So it’s interesting to read the angle these two organizations take here. They take the stance that training on content is fair use (which has been found in, for example, Bartz v. Anthropic). They also want to protect public-interest scraping, which would allow researchers and journalists (among others) to continue gathering information, and reject legislation that restricts bot activity without the public in mind. Instead, they favor a bigger swing: renegotiating the broad economic framework of the web itself to move the incentives away from enclosure.

They think solutions may involve some combination of public policy and innovation around data governance. The question is really: what does that mean in practice? How might we shift the web’s value exchange in order to promote open publishing? And — beyond the public good — whose interests are aligned with that?

Without a concrete answer, publishers will keep blocking, and AI vendors will keep strip-mining. That’s a path that will lead to a much more restricted information commons, to the detriment of all of us.

How Can Wikipedians Overcome Leadership Succession Crises? Lessons from the Invasion of Ukraine

An interesting dive into what happened to the Ukrainian Wikipedia in the aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion, told with characteristic care by CAT Lab’s J. Nathan Matias.

“Inside Ukraine, people desperately needed to understand the changing circumstances of the war. Outside of Ukraine, the world flocked to information sources like Wikipedia to learn about the people and places facing the violence we saw on our screens. In the weeks following the invasion, viewership of the Ukrainian language Wikipedia increased by millions.”

At the same time, as you might expect under the circumstances, the number of active contributors plummeted. Wikipedia lives or dies based on its contributions and its editorial process — and Ukrainian attention was diverted elsewhere. Still, a dedicated core remained, and stories like the librarian who contributed edits from a bomb shelter are remarkable.

But the point here isn’t just to highlight the dedication of the volunteers keeping trustworthy information online even as the immediate world around them succumbed to war. It’s a lesson about succession. Our information ecosystem is vulnerable to a diminishing pipeline of administrators, editors, and dedicated contributors; the number of admins in particular is shrinking across Wikipedia. How can we fix that?

In Ukraine, they added a new probationary admin role:

“To fill the urgent need for admins, the Ukrainian Wikipedia created a “temporary administrator role” the day after the invasion. Rather than use their normal extended discussion and voting process, leaders quickly appointed new admins after a 3 day discussion period and [gave] a probationary period of 1-2 months, with the option to extend.”

They basically created an apprenticeship, designed to try someone out, help teach them the skills, and most importantly, demonstrate and build trust. (It also had a quick escape hatch if they turned out to be untrustworthy.) The result: 20% more admins within months.

The full post dives into the lessons to be learned for organizations like Wikipedia in useful detail. There are deeper lessons to be learned for other community spaces too, including in news and journalism. The stat about non-profits without leadership succession being around three times more likely to close is striking; how many non-profit newsrooms have a plan in place?

We often talk about building the organizations and the platform stacks that they depend on. We talk less about ensuring there’s a pipeline for succession to safeguard their sustainability — or the layers of carefully designed community-building and socialization that this requires.

Every leader should be engaged in the work of planning for succession and, ideally, designing their own obsolescence — even when times are hard. That’s as true for volunteer organizations like Wikipedia and organic online communities as anywhere else.

Rest of World faces prospect of shutting down

I was distraught to hear that Rest of World may have to shut down in January. Since its launch, I’ve relied on its coverage about the impact of technology and the tech industry on communities and geographies that often fall outside of a Western lens. And I’ve become a huge fan of its Chief Product Officer Michael Donohoe, who I think is one of the best product and engineering people working in journalism (or in any industry). Working with a small team, he’s built a site and underlying tech that punches way above its weight.

On one level, the forces that have created issues for Rest of World aren’t unique to it: declining search and social referrals, intermediation by AI chatbots, and a fixation with the Trump administration at the expense of other topics.

But then, as Semafor reports, Rest of World had a unique problem in that its audience was partially the tech industry itself, which has shifted to become more insular and conservative:

“The organization’s leaders also attributed the decline to a deeper cultural shift to the right within the tech community. One senior leader at the organization said they believe tech news readers who previously expressed liberal values and an appetite for consuming global journalism have grown disillusioned with the news media, and now prefer an information diet of inward-looking podcasts, YouTube shows, and chatbot outputs.”

This coincided with a tonal shift in coverage of the tech industry from typically fairly optimistic, glowing pieces about connection and innovation to criticism about oligarchy and the role of tech power in the global rise of authoritarianism. Looking at Rest of World’s homepage today, many headlines are now about how communities around the world are being either taken advantage of by American AI firms or left out of AI developments.

That’s vital coverage, in my opinion, and makes Rest of World required reading for me — but for an industry that likes to be praised for changing the world and is bad at engaging with criticism, it might be a tough read. Semafor notes that the likes of Wired and The Verge, which also produce excellent coverage, are suffering from the same problem (although I’ve also heard that Wired’s subscriptions are growing).

What’s surprising to me is that Rest of World should also be required reading for a whole slew of foundations and NGOs that want to make a positive impact globally, as well as investors looking to support ventures in underserved markets. Clearly this either isn’t happening or it’s not happening in a way that converts into the kind of financial support the newsroom needs.

It’s also, in a way, a warning about newsrooms started by founders with deep pockets. Sophie Schmidt (Eric Schmidt’s daughter) committed $60M to Rest of World a months into its launch. That gave it both a solid mission and an enormous runway that may have made it harder to test and pivot. It did pivot, to focus more on countries that Western readers might be more interested in, as well as to require user registration as a way to know its audience better, but it was relatively late in its life. I’m very grateful for the resulting coverage but I think it would be worth having an open conversation about whether those funds helped or hindered its ability to become sustainable in the long run.

Anyway, I hope it finds a home. I badly want it to continue to exist. For me, it’s the best tech journalism there is.

And more:

Here are some of the articles I didn't get a chance to go into in depth this week.

Bluesky hit peak usage for the year on election night

I adore Bluesky and I'm always surprised when people I know aren't on it. It's a community of people that genuinely care about news and information. Newsrooms should know that they disproportionately engage with and support trustworthy journalism. And it's where many of us looked for a backchannel during the night of the midterms.

Building Opportunities: One Year Since The First App

The Newsmast Foundation now powers 16 community apps for journalists and activists around the world, all powered by the open social web. Pretty impressive; pretty cool.

The Tech Bros Who Bet On Fascism Lost. Don’t Let The Internet Pay For It.

A warning against letting the justified backlash to tech oligarchy curdle into regulation that punishes the open internet itself. The distinction between Big Tech and the web matters enormously – but do legislators understand the difference?

Almost no one uses AI agents to book their Uber, company says

Also see a similar note from DoorDash. That doesn't necessarily mean it won't happen – but it's not happening right now, despite the hype. Have the people building and funding AI agents done the research due diligence to know if this actually solves a problem for anyone?

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan uses AI agents so much, he spends up to $200K a year on tokens

The absolutely unhinged counterpoint to the above. But there's a real point here: it costs too much, the technical overhead is enormous, and this is a pastime for the privileged.

Want to Rent an Internet Address at the White House?

"Several staffers at the White House are using computers or mobile devices equipped with residential proxy services that render their internet address available for others to rent, security experts warned today. One of the proxy services is a Russian company whose founder’s web hosting business was ground zero for cyberattacks against election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016." Seems bad. But, by the way, do you know for a fact this isn't happening at your office too?

Voters Rejected A.I. in the Midterms. Now Comes an Era of Scrutiny.

"Despite record donations by tech executives to tech-friendly candidates, voters chose a new Democratic leadership raring to investigate the cozy ties between A.I. companies and the administration." This isn't about tech so much as it is abuses of wealth and power.

A lesson on resilient knowledge organizations from Ukrainian Wikipedia - Werd I/O

2026-11-06T06:12:32.000Z

Link: How Can Wikipedians Overcome Leadership Succession Crises? Lessons from the Invasion of Ukraine, by J. Nathan Matias at CAT Lab

An interesting dive into what happened to the Ukrainian Wikipedia in the aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion, told with characteristic care by CAT Lab’s J. Nathan Matias.

“Inside Ukraine, people desperately needed to understand the changing circumstances of the war. Outside of Ukraine, the world flocked to information sources like Wikipedia to learn about the people and places facing the violence we saw on our screens. In the weeks following the invasion, viewership of the Ukrainian language Wikipedia increased by millions.”

In Ukraine, they added a new probationary admin role:

“To fill the urgent need for admins, the Ukrainian Wikipedia created a “temporary administrator role” the day after the invasion. Rather than use their normal extended discussion and voting process, leaders quickly appointed new admins after a 3 day discussion period and [gave] a probationary period of 1-2 months, with the option to extend.”

To protect the web, we need to renegotiate its value. - Werd I/O

2026-11-06T00:54:46.000Z

Link: Creating a New Internet Bargain to Preserve Fair Use and Protect the Commons, by Lisa Macpherson and Anna Tumadóttir in Tech Policy Press

This should be required reading for everyone in news, but also anyone who cares about a healthy knowledge commons:

As their article summarizes the problem:

“The blunt tools in use on either side of the AI developer/rights holder divide are serving to shrink the knowledge commons and erode its quality. This isn’t theoretical, AI-doomer prognosticating about some imagined AI future. The digital knowledge commons is contracting at an alarming rate, driven by the rise of AI model developers that have transformed openly shared content into a high-value industrial input and the defensive response of rights holders who are rapidly restricting access through legal, technical, and contractual means.”

Nature’s layers - James' Coffee Blog

2026-11-06T00:00:00.000Z

Leaves moulting by day
Nature’s layers, all visible —
Silver veins: the heart.

Gadget Review: Tozo NC9 Pro Bluetooth Headphones ★★★★⯪ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-11-05T12:34:17.000Z

The most interesting thing about these headphones isn't the headphones; it's their case.

The good folks at Tozo have sent me a pair of their new ear-blasters. They're a fairly standard pair of in-ear headphones. Sound quality is good, noise cancelling is excellent, battery life is fine. You know, all pretty standard. But what's actually a little bit special is the charging case.

As well providing charging to the cans, it has this cute little full-colour display!

Which is also a touchscreen!

Everyone knows that hardware manufacturers can't write decent apps - and Tozo are no different. But here you don't have to rely on the app, or anything on your phone. Tap the screen to wake, slide to unlock, fiddle about with the settings:

Or change what song is playing:

Or interact with a dozen different helpful functions:

Specs

You can read about the headphones on the official site but the headline features for me are:

14 hours playback with about 60 hours from the case.
LDAC if you crave bit-perfect audio.
Active Noise Cancelling with various different modes.
Multi-function touch buttons on each side.

The App

*sigh* OK, it isn't the worst headphone app I've used, but it isn't great. In its defence, you do not need to create an account in order to use most of the features.

The app isn't brilliantly translated, but you'll probably be able to figure it out.

You can play about with some basic settings in the app.

Both headphones support multi-tap, so you can change them to your preference. There are four different types of tap each ear can support.

It's also possible to change the noise cancellation. The functions are perhaps a little indistinguishable - but they do work.

There is, sadly, a bunch of bullshit in the app. As well as a shop, there's also this weird "Community" tab given pride of place in the middle of the shortcut bar.

Apparently you can earn points the more you post? Why? Who cares! You also get the now-ubiquitous AI tools, which you have to sign in to use, and some white noise to drown out the sounds of the world.

Ultimately, the app is usable. You can adjust the EQ to your preferences, check for firmware updates, and similar. But you'll play with it once or twice then forget it exists.

Audio Quality

I'm not an audiophile. I'm not going to pretend that you need virgin-rolled cables adorned with mystic crystals in order to hear the true sonic soundstage of The Spice Girls.

Everything sounds fine. The default profile was good enough for me. I pumped up the bass and it was nice and boomy. There was no noticeable sound leakage at moderate volumes. The "spatial mode" didn't sound particularly nice to me and introduced a fair bit of distortion.

The noise cancellation was pretty decent as well. It won't drown out a crying baby next to you on public transport.

It will do LDAC on both Android:

And Linux:

Sound quality on both was excellent.

Usability

Pretty good! The taps are quick to respond and, of course, you can whip out the case if you want to change the settings. The touchscreen is small but responds well.

Price

They're between £50 - £60 on Amazon right now, or about £40 direct from the manufacturer. That's bang on what I'd expect for normal headphones, but I think is decent value considering the little touch-screen it includes.

It's a pity that the app is so woeful. But once you've set up your favourite EQ settings, you'll never need to touch it again.

But if you want noise cancelling, snug fitting, easy to use headphones, these are hard to beat.

Many thanks to Tozo for supplying me with the review unit.

BAITED - Kev Quirk

2026-11-05T09:32:00.000Z

BAITED

Author: RR Haywood
Genre: Thriller
Released: 2026
Rating: ★★★★☆

Find Ollie Perkins.

There’s just one problem.

Mike isn’t allowed to ask anyone about him. He can’t say his name. He doesn’t know what he looks like. So Mike takes a job as a security guard at a highly secure data facility on the edge of town and waits.

Then things start happening.

Lies get told. A body turns up. Foreign agents begin circling. Mike realises he's being watched and that he's not the only one looking for Ollie Perkins.

The pressure soon mounts. Mike needs to find the target before more people die.

BAITED is the third Mike Humber novel. A very different kind of British crime twist-loaded, contemporary, darkly funny, unpredictable and built around an ex-detective who survives largely through instinct, guile and an increasingly questionable relationship with authority.

Learn more on Goodreads ➡

I'm growing to really enjoy the Mike Humber series. As Haywood develops the books, and Mike's character, we get more of an insight into the inner workings of his frankly, completely fucked mind.

I've read a number of Haywood's books at this point and he's quickly becoming one of my favourite authors. His British whit and the way he writes is a breath of fresh air - it's nice to read someone who gets British sarcasm, but also dark humour.

All the Mike Humber books end in a crescendo where seemingly unrelated threads come together in a really satisfying way. I'm yet to predict any of the endings too, which is makes the stories all the more enjoyable.

Cracking read.

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choice in the neue - James' Coffee Blog

2026-11-05T00:00:00.000Z

Seeking character(s) —
Choice of sans, neue, serif
Glowing lettering.

Dune Messiah - Joel's Log Files

2026-11-04T21:30:00.000Z

With Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming film that shall put an end to his Dune trilogy, I have been meaning to read Dune Messiah for quite a while. I was planning to read it with a friend but I was utterly forgotten and she read it without me—don’t worry we are good lol.

In any case, I ended up choosing this as my last read for October given its relatively short length and that the film is coming in a bit more than a month by now.

While I read the original Dune after watching the movie, this time I read the book first, and it has really managed to set my expectations quite high!

Dune Messiah takes place twelve years after the first book ended, Paul started a Jihad with the Fremen, and has become the ruler of the galaxy. He is not just an Emperor, but a God for pretty much every planet he has conquered, with a new religion under his name, even if he has lost control of his own quest. He continues regardless, since this is the best outcome his prescience can conceive.

After so many worlds, and billions upon billions of deaths, a resistance develops, old powers such as the Bene Geserit, the Spacing Guild and the Tleilaxu—a new group we hadn’t seen in the original novel—join forces to develop a plan to take down the Emperor once and for all.

This book explores Paul’s inner thoughts dealing with the results on following up with his destiny. Leaving a lot of the war and the barbaric actions as something that already happened, distant from the story as of now.

There are plots within plots, there is a clash between free will and prophecy, there are characters trying to take over, each one with their own agendas. But all of this happens in a rather small scale. At the same time, it feels like future of all the universe is being written on stone.

Honestly, most of the writing is rather difficult to follow, but the weight of each conversations and political move felt huge to me the whole time. Frank’s prose and dialogue style is rather ominous, and sometimes I can see why some consider it to be trying a little too much and feeling rather “edgy”. The truth is I couldn’t stop reading. My only limiting factor this time around was my commute, and the fact I was reading the book in physical format, so I couldn’t sneak a few more pages during work hours like I often do in other books…

Anyway. This book also jumps between different characters and their points of view and inner thoughts in a moment’s notice, sometimes it can be confusing to see whose thoughts we are reading, but it gets easier over time and it allows for a lot of development to happen without the need of repeating a scene from multiple angles, which some other novels may do. It fits Dune, at least.

The plot against Paul from multiple fronts is quite nerve-wracking though, the Bene Gesserit are back, and we also get to see more of the Guild and mentats as well. The Tleilaxu and their methods are a welcome addition to Herbert’s universe, as they are able to perform acts and develop technology that clashes with the ideals of other societies, especially the Fremen, making way for interesting conflicts as Paul has to juggle with it all.

I don’t want to say much more about this one, I am very curious on checking out the last book of the original trilogy of Dune. Paul is really an interesting character, and reading about how everyone celebrates him as a hero in the novels and in the real world, even when his life is pretty much a tragedy continues to boggle my mind, a train-wreck you can’t look away from.

If there are things to critique here, or at least warn about, I’d have to mention the incestuous undertones of some of the scenes regarding Alia (who is Paul’s sister and has become a Goddess for the Fremen and the galaxy at large too), and some weird writing for the female characters who kinda seem to exist to revolve around Paul and lack more development from there (Chani has a very important role and yet we barely see her own perspective on what’s going on?).

Other than that, I was amazed by this read. I didn’t think I’d be able to be enveloped so quickly on Dune’s universe all over again, especially after literally reading a whole space opera series and all the other books since I finished the original.

This review isn’t as grandiose and epic as the one I did for the original Dune, but I think it’s fair to say that this sequal novel is on the same level as the first, if not better!

This is day 65 of #100DaysToOffload

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Note published on November 4, 2026 at 5:08 PM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-11-04T17:08:51.000Z

Here’s a small sample of the letters from Democratic members of Congress I’ve covered since Trump took office. Most were ignored, but they laid the groundwork for what they need to do in January.

The House on the Borderland - Joel's Log Files

2026-11-04T16:30:00.000Z

This was my second book of the month of Octoer (even if I actually started it earlier than Left Hand of Darkness) and the spookiest of the three. It’s all about cosmic horror, existential dread, fear of the unknown and all of that mumbo jumbo that is often attributed to H.P. Lovecraft but well, it actually comes from here!

This is an earlier work by William Hope Hodgson, published in 1908 and doing a lot of heavy-lifting for the genre already! A novel that starts out with two rather unimportant characters who end up lost and find an old notebook after exploring the remains of some old building.

The ancient manuscript details the experiences of an old man—our protagonist and unreliable narrator—who lives in a house… on the borderland. The rest of the book is pretty much just the found text, with a couple of footnotes here and there from the characters reacting to it.

All we get is the perspective of this old man as he goes through plenty of supernatural experiences, involving impossible journeys across time and space, abnormal creatures that seek to surround and invade his home, physical phenomena altering the environment around him, encounters with dark and demonic beings in alternate dimensions, and bearing witness to cosmic events beyond comprehension, and quite a lot more.

The narrator is pretty much going insane as the story goes on, more unreliable and difficult to understand. The writing also decays over time, we start to get only fragments and glimpses at whatever may be going on, and all we can do is read what is there and imply the worst.

There are multiple events described here. I don’t think there’s anything truly terrifying about any of them, but the phsycological dread is present, the fear of the unknown is there. The descriptions of the events are rather well done, and those where survival is involved do have quite a bit of tension that builds up quite well.

I have to say that a lot of the events that are more like “visions”, while extremely interesting—and maybe even educational for the 1900s—can drag on for quite a while. Descriptions of planets and stars and cosmic events across incomprehensible amounts of time take a lot of… time, to be fleshed out in the writing. I guess that is kind of the point, and nothing compared to what the character goes through, at least.

One factor to consider is that I had to read most of this book in both English and Spanish. There were a lot of words I didn’t understand in English (mostly related to environment descriptions, and old English expressions) and some words I also didn’t get in my own language (mostly those about parts of old houses or furniture, or words not common in Mexico, since the translation is from Spain). I wish I had kept track of the words just to share examples, but I don’t have any at the moment.

This is another of those books that I can’t really say I enjoyed fully, but that have nonetheless expanded my horizons and brought something new to the table for my experience. I don’t know if I can go through more purely cosmic horror novels, but I have enjoyed it in smaller doses when it is present in other more general works of fiction (like The Expanse, Hothouse, Roadside Picnic and the like), and it’s neat to have see an early version of that. I should probably check some modern works in the genre though, we’ll see!

This is day 64 of #100DaysToOffload

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Published on Citation Needed: "Crypto and AI’s $250 million election goes sideways" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-11-04T14:14:11.000Z

Published an issue of Citation Needed:

Crypto and AI’s $250 million election goes sideways

The industries’ biggest bets lost almost across the board.

The Left Hand of Darkness - Joel's Log Files

2026-11-04T14:00:00.000Z

This is the first novel I read from Ursula K. Le Guin, and it did not dissapoint.

Published in 1969, it was one of the first works of fiction to meaningfully attempt to tackle society’s gender norms, showing us an alien world where the definition of male or female is not in the equation of how things work.

Gethen—also known as Winter—is a world stuck on an Ice Age, with a rather unique civilization. Our main protagonist is Genly Ai—a human embassador from “Terra” who wants Gethen to join a confederation of planets known as the Ekumen—to share knowledge and exchange ideas.

Unfortunately, the cultural difference proves a big challenge. The Gethenians are ambisexual and androgynous, which is a huge barrier for mutual understanding as this affects every layer of their culture. Genly is a rather flawed protagonist, unable to cope with this reality and constatly letting his preconceptions gain the better of him.

He is aided by Estraven, a Gethenian politician who seems to be the only person in the planet that can see the benefits of establishing a relationship with the Ekumen. However, there is still distrust and many things that he’ll have to deal with in order to help Ai on his missio, such as the political schemes from the nations in power, the conflicts between them, and of course, Ai’s unwillingness to trust him.

The novel is written in a very interesting style. It is more of a report or documentary from the embassador, with additional notes sharing Estraven’s journal and perspective, as well as short stories and tales from Gethenian folklore or scientific investigations that are sometimes unrelated to the main plot.

Everything kind of starts from the middle of things, we don’t get to learn much along our protagonist—we are mostly playing catch up as the plot moves forward. As such, the first half can be very confusing, full of terminology that we can’t quite grasp yet, sudden changes in perspective or switching to random information dumps. I had a rough time getting through some of it, but the chapters were short and I quickly learned to simply accept that I won’t know everything on a first read, and take what happens at face value.

The second half of the novel is much more focused, we get more of the lingo and the perspectives make more sense now that we are familiar with things. The story becomes much more personal and it’s easier to relate to it. The challenges our protagonist face and the way they ought to work together to move forward hooked me all the way to the end of the novel.

Gethen has a very interesting culture, and the queerness of it goes beyond the biology of the Gethenians. The psychology, the nations and how they have developed, the politics of it all, the cold, deadly climate. The world manages to feel grandiose and alive despite the short lenght of this work. I really enjoyed learning about the myths and legends of this place, as well as the perspectives from investigators that came before Ai to this planet.

Some of the concepts here seem to be common in Le Guin’s works, such as the ansible, an instant communication device which is how the planets that are part of the Ekumen stay in contact, or the balance between light and darkness.

Even though this work was pretty progressive for late 60s, it’s important to know it’s still a product of its time. It’s not a book about how society should be, I think it’s better to just see it as the different planet with some things in common and some things very different.

The main character has ideas that are misogynist or ignorant in nature. I think this can lead to some uncomfortable dialogue that is, nonetheless, how some people thought at the time (and even today).

In Gethen, sex is biologically defined and every Gethenian is referred to as he/him. There are similar aspects that aren’t quite what a modern audience would expect, so just be ready for that stuff. It was easy for me to shove aside since the story and main ideas are just great and well, it’s an alien world. Maybe the Gethenian language is like that, or it’s lost in translation, or it just doesn’t matter that much?

I was able to just take things as they are and enjoy the huge effort put into this nivel. Ursula had a background in anthropology and the way even the simplest things said so much was kinda awesome. It was definitely worth the read. It holds up well despite it all—as long as you give it time to cook!

This is day 63 of #100DaysToOffload

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Book Review: Practice by Rosalind Brown ★★★★☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-11-04T12:34:07.000Z

I have a simple rule - if I meet someone at a party and they say they've written a book, then I will immediately buy that book. It's a strategy which has worked out well; leading me to some truly interesting and delightful prose.

Rosalind Brown (a fellow UEA graduate) has written a stunning little book. Practice is an almost Proustian meander through a day-in-the-life of a young woman going through an essay crisis. Much like R. F. Kuang's "Katabasis", I'm rather glad the author found university to be a bewildering and, at times, upsetting experience as it provides rich fodder for this tale.

There is an inherent tragedy in studying English literature. The more you read, the more futile it becomes. Just like repeatedly saying a word aloud creates semantic satiation, so to does the repeated reading of sonnets drive away all their meaning. The closer you study a poem the further it slips from your grasp. The more introspective you become, the more you lose sight of what you really want out of life.

As Proverbs 26:11 suggests, some students are like a snake which is compelled to eat its own tail. The protagonist, Annabel, isn't a caricature but she sure is a trope that you've met in halls. She's a woe-is-me wretch who'd rather cultivate a "Heated Rivalry" style interior monologue rather than engage with those around her. So self-absorbed to that she doesn't realise that, not only do other people have feelings, other people are carrying the same burden she does. I suspect her essay research really should have widened to include the seminal "Male gays in the female gaze"!

It's a short novel, but pleasingly thorough. Although there aren't any major twists, I can't say I predicted how the story would evolve and conclude. The punctuation and sentence structure is charmingly idiosyncratic and, I think, perfectly fits the story.

A note on formatting. The ePub has hard page breaks. That means some "pages" contain little more than a paragraph. I suspect that's intentional as it gives a wonderfully staccato pace to the text. Our day is broken up into little moments which don't quite fit the strictures of a chapter, yet we experience the day as a cohesive whole.

An excellent book - but one to read after you've finished your homework.