Why is Tim Cook announcing product launches in a Nazi bar?

Two figures in Devon, by Willem de Kooning, 1971, 📸 by Win Tam

Here is the User Guide for ELITE, the Tool Palantir Made for ICE 404 Media is publishing a version of the user guide for ELITE, which lets ICE bring up dossiers on individual people and provides a “confidence score” of their address.

SCOOP: 404 Media is publishing a version of the user guide for ELITE, a tool Palantir made for ICE which brings up dossiers on individual people and provides a “confidence score” of their address.

The full user guide here:

These are all Black people. The regime is betting that you wont care Jamael & Trahern the way you care about Alex & Renée

Recall that Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered not long ago by a fake cop who showed up at their door looking like this guy

This is your regular reminder that the data broker industry must be destroyed.

Until the signs are restored, it would be great for someone to make an augmented reality app where visitors can tour the site and see the signs in their original location using their phone. Why not Apple?

X must be removed from the App Store.

notably, deleting your ad id can help mitigate this.
On Android: Settings > Privacy > Ads > Delete advertising ID
iOS: Settings > Privacy & Security > Tracking > Allow Apps to Request To Track

Mr. Rogers: Even though machines might move or sound like they're talking, they don't have feelings.

The wisdom of Mr. Rogers is eternal:

This is my sense too: the folks in charge of software design are unaware of HCI principles, and their bosses don't care. Each update gets a few things right, perhaps by chance, but also pulls the rug out from folks who spent the last year figuring out how to navigate the last set of changes.

It’s clear that folks in Apple Design teams haven’t read the older HIGs for macOS and have little to no historical knowledge of desktop computing.

Designers and devs in 2025 LOVE to put a symbol to every single label in their UI it seems. 😒

comparison between apple's finder icon and mine. apple's is the split blue and white smiley face, mine is two blue and white anime girls making out

comparison between discord's icon and mine. mine is like a screaming cat on a blue/purple slimy background

comparison between celsys's clip studio paint icon and mine. mine is similar but rotated with some comic styling and pink and blue highlights

comparison between mozilla's firefox icon and mine. mine is similar but looks closer to the old firefox icon and brings back the little arm and gives the fox a cute little smiley face

last week i remembered that macOS lets you set your own icons and that *I* have the power to delegitimize the professionalism of the software that runs on my machine, so here's a thread of the 16 new icons i've made so far

i really forgot how fun it was to just sit down and make art for myself :')

Even in little ways, like saying "I'm sorry" when it makes a mistake. That is not true! Do not lie to me, robot!

yeah this is a thing I've felt about recently is that like, I don't necessarily have a problem with the machine doing stochastic reasoning or whatever, but it is actively programmed to *pretend to be a person* and that is dishonest.

my most butlerian jihad coded belief is that we should probably make it illegal – and more importantly, we should work toward a cultural consensus that it is immoral – to design a computer program whose interface uses the first person

We need to build some real social stigma around being afraid of cities. You don't have to like them or live there, but a politics built this strongly around watching TV and going "ewww" is embarrassing, and people should be embarrassed by it. It's like "fear of werewolves" being your top issue.

You can be disappeared into a concentration camp or exiled for torture in another country if their app claims your face matches a non-citizen, even if you present a birth certificate or passport.

THIS is why we scream about uncritical acceptance of buggy, racist tech like facial recognition & LLMs

ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship Videos on social media show officers from ICE and CBP using facial recognition technology on people in the field. One expert described the practice as “pure dystopian creep.”

“We should have banned government use of face recognition when we had the chance because it is dangerous, invasive, and an inherent threat to civil liberties,” EFF’s @MGuariglia.bsky.social told @404Media.co. www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp...

Atlas of Surveillance Documenting Police Tech in Our Communities with Open Source Research

To find out what kind of surveillance tech you may be facing at a protest, check out EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance: www.atlasofsurveillance.org/.

to remove the flashlight from the lock screen
u just press and hold on the lock screen like u are changing the wall paper and press the 'customize' button and u can add or subtract features u actually do not need immediately

like the flashlight

Upper right of a macOS Google Chrome window showing the new Gemini icon, and a contextual (right-click) menu with 'Unpin Gemini' selected.

Google Chrome is adding a new "AI" feature that monitors all of your browsing. When you update, you'll see the Gemini icon (a "sparkle" or "star") in the top right of your Chrome window. To disable this, right-click the top of the window (outside of any tabs), then choose "Unpin Gemini".

I know older people were conditioned to pick up the phone when it rings; I was well into my thirties when cell phones became ubiquitous. But that's a habit you really should unlearn.

When the phone rings, look at the caller ID. If it isn't someone in your phone directory, hit "ignore".

Your ad network is popping fake McAfee virus warning pages on iPhone. Can you fix that?

This article popped open a fake McAfee virus warning page on my iPhone. This is why ad blockers are a necessary part of your security stack, unfortunately. Publishers must insist on more secure ad networks rather than begging us to disable our security tools.

8/ Unfortunately, “Cyberselfish“ predicted the future but did not sell well.

Borsook's writing career hit the rocks as tech fortunes skyrocketed astronomically in the 2000s. She is now elderly, disabled and struggling to survive as the rest of the world finds out what she knew a long time ago.

from cyberselfish by paulina borsook: It's an inability to reconcile the demands of being individual with the demands of participating in society, which coincides beautifully with a preference for, and glorification of, being the solo comman- der of one's computer in lieu of any other economically viable be- havior. Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be. As many political schools of thought do, these technolibertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect.

2/ In 2001, Borsook said tech "libertarianism" reflected an adolescent mindset, with a craving for unchecked independence & resistance to constraint.

She warned that tech libertarians wanted an anti-human world that worked more like a computer. From "Cyberselfish," a book based on her 90s writing:

In case you didn’t know, I’m hosting a podcast about what happens after the fix: the time teams reclaim, the fires they stop fighting, and the strategic work they finally get to tackle. So grateful for the guests who have shared their stories. the-sequence.com/podcast