Take note, NSO Group.

Amigues en CDMX y más allá: El 5 de noviembre a las 10am voy a charlar con David Pruneda sobre Binding Media para el CISAN, UNAM. Yo estaré virtualmente pero la sede oficial es la Torre de Humanidades II en CU. También se va a transmitir en vivo vía el YouTube de CISAN www.youtube.com/cisanunamweb

Mass surveillance makes us less safe. www.404media.co/flock-logins...

Trans data epistemologies: Transgender ways of knowing with data by @drnikko.bsky.social and @ameliadogan.bsky.social in @bigdatasoc.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

We watched How to Survive a Plague in class, and I cried from beginning to end. I thought I was moved because I was a '90s kid who lost 'uncles' to HIV, but many students were moved, too. A story of people who, as they were dying, found it in their heart to fight for their right to live, saving many

A reminder that we're collecting books, chapters, and journal articles by non-TT historians for publication in our year-end lists. Anything with a 2025 pub date is eligible and you can submit for your friends/colleagues! contingentmagazine.org/yearly-pub-l...

What makes the internet so special you ask? It was designed in the 1970s to create a system resilient to single points of.....oh. Jokes aside, I'm grateful that so much infrastructure *did* keep running yesterday. Saying a general thanks to all the engineers whose work made that possible.

I am being asked to tell my department which pieces of lab equipment should be supported with backup power because they expect rolling blackouts and brownouts in 2026 due to increased energy demands from AI. In case you're wondering how my day is going.

I have learned *so much* from @msifry.bsky.social's nuanced, informed, realistically optimistic thinking on the biggest conflicts humanity has faced the past few years. He shares it all for free on his Substack, so his book is an immediate order for me: micahsifry.com/books/whendo...

This project is #goals for anyone working on AI, computing, and environment: insightful research on an urgent matter, extremely compelling choice of case studies in the global majority, and beautifulllllll grabado/print illustrations. The women behind it are a dream team. tramas.digital/es/

In February, @404media.co did a piece on the overwhelming amount of AI Slop in public library vendor Hoopla Digital. They promised to clean up their platform, but just this morning I went looking and easily found a self-publishing house pushing shoddy health content by a fake author.

Today in dream job alerts, the International Spy Museum is hiring a historian: www.spymuseum.org/about/career...

Seven years ago today, Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was tortured, murdered and then dismembered. And any so-called comedian who can't stand up tonight in Riyadh and do ten minutes on that kind of hijinx and horseplay just isn't worth the Saudi blood money he's being paid.

Today I met someone. As I age, this feeling becomes more and more rare, but today I felt it strongly in my heart: it is the beginning of a long friendship. And I wish I could tell introvert teen me about it.

Thanks to the miracle that is our elementary school special ed teacher, Fat Bear Week has been an important event in my family life, and the kids screamed when they saw the news they had been awaiting: CHUNK WON! Or, as NYT reported it, "All of the Bears Were Fat, but Chunk Was the Fattest of All"

Here is the thing that all the US libs (and deluded libs-who-think-they're-leftists) who stan Claudia: you cannot support Morena and also the Zapatistas, or the Ayotzinapa families, or the searching mothers of the disappeared, because Morena is against them

My best advice for parents re: harmful content: show genuine interest in the stuff your kid is watching and doing online. Let them talk your ear off about Minecraft and Roblox and the funny video they just watched. Make them feel excited to share with you, vs making them feel ashamed or judged

🫠

The UK Prime Minister has announced plans for a new mandatory digital ID scheme for anyone who wants to work in the UK. The initiative is being pitched as a way to control borders - we fail to see how the two are linked. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cw...

Insightful research on #surveillance in Peru by Hiperderecho documenting the legal framework, FOIA limitations, and especially a list of cases kept secret by the government (starts in p60). [In Spanish, pdf link]: hiperderecho.org/wp-content/u... Tagging @surveillancemw.bsky.social

This is some great public writing on #surveillance. The illustrations, the narrative. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

This week, I published with the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing on the History of Misinformation-at-Scale and Efforts to Mitigate it. It’s very relevant to today’s discourse on media consolidation, academic freedom, and the power elite. FREE TO READ! drive.google.com/file/d/1Klg9...

The hardest week of my life was 8 years ago today, when Mexico City was torn by an earthquake. (I was in the US, diagnosed with cancer a month later, which oddly wasn't as devastating!) By now, my displaced friends are back home. The vestiges of destruction are fewer, farther in between.

Australian Spy Museum Featured Artefact this week are beautiful vintage spy film posters - note the French "Espionne" for female spy. We're also looking at running an exhibit in Sydney where this art is displayed alongside vintage spy-tech. Stay tuned, and let us know if interested in sponsoring 😀

Sacaron a otra mujer trans de los vagones de mujeres del metro de CDMX. Más allá de que esto muestra que el gobierno local no ha dado capacitación (y que los activismos vendidos ya nunca dicen nada), en verdad espero que quepa la prudencia en ciertas compañeras que solo han entorpecido esta lucha.

Great links on @accessnow.org 's newsletter. Info on the internet shutdown in Nepal www.bbc.com/news/article.... Silicon Valley's role in digital cages in China apnews.com/article/chin... . And @atlanticcouncil.bsky.social 's work on the global spyware market www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-res...

Welp. "Microsoft said on Saturday that its Microsoft Azure users may experience increased latency due to multiple undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea." www.reuters.com/world/middle...

Just announced: @who.int is ending the public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) over the spread of #mpox in Africa. It was declared in August 2024. (AfricaCDC has announced it remains a Continental Emergency.) #IDsky 🧪

Guadalajara, home to more than 1,000 tech companies, is sometimes called Mexico’s Silicon Valley. It hosts four World Cup games next year. Thanks to CJNG, It’s also ground zero for a national crisis: The abduction of tens of thousands of young people – many to work for the cartels wapo.st/422J9Cs

¿Cuántos hogares en México están rotos por la desaparición forzada de un ser querido? 💔 De acuerdo con datos de la ENVIPE, 1 de cada 729 hogares reporta la desaparición forzada de un familiar en 2023. La tasa más alta desde 2014 y el doble en 7 años 📈. Hoy publicamos nuestro #DatitoExplicado 💡.

As is the case with every city hosting an international sporting event, Mexico City has now announced a shiny new mass surveillance project in time for next year's World Cup: "Ojos que te cuidan," "Eyes that care for you."

I bring you a postcard of joy from this afternoon's commute: an African American family, proudly dressed in 'Harvard mom,' 'Harvard dad' T-shirts, moving their beloved son into his dorm at Harvard Yard. May he bring them pride <3 Also, the dahlias are dahlia-ing!!

Overheard on the radio (a love bachata song), in Spanish: “I blocked you on Instagram but I watch your stories on another account”

If you’re an oncologist, you’re meeting traumatized people on one of the worst days of their lives. It’s routine for you but never is for them. These types of “AI” used prey on doctors & patients because they undermine not only the doctor’s ability, but also the trust necessary in that relationship.

Somebody on LinkedIn said what we're all thinking.

So my afternoon went to a long forgotten (to me) drama: Nightwish's firing of Tarja Turunen in 2005. It would have been a *fine* exercise in internet archeology, but I found a subreddit full of people discussing it still in the year of the lord 2025. I'm 35 and still finding my people online!

Researcher high: finding the right keyword a couple of hours in and watching the relevant results finally flow. AI couldn't even. (That said, there *is* some computation enabling this. I thank the technologists and archivists that lined things up with good scans, OCR, databases, web interfaces.)

The Center for the sociology of innovation learned with great sadness that Michel Callon has passed away. A graduate of the École des Mines, Michel joined the center in the late 1960s and was its director from 1982 to 1994.

I feel very lucky to have gotten a chance to talk about “AI” with @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social — authors of The AI Con. Enjoy the episode! pca.st/episode/ee9c...

We may have the chance to hire an outstanding researcher 3+ years post PhD to join Tarleton Gillespie, Mary Gray and me in Cambridge MA bringing critical sociotechnical perspectives to bear on new technologies. jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/jo...

Victor McElheny, the visionary science journalist who founded MIT's Knight Science Journalism Program, has passed away at 89. In his final years, he was so insightful on COVID reporting through the lens of what he had learned reporting in the HIV/AIDS 90s. news.mit.edu/2025/victor-...

am I crazy or is it just weird that Mexico's chamber of deputies is mourning the death of Ozzy Osbourne? 🤔 #OzzyOsbourne

Nearly one-third of Tuvalu residents apply for Australian climate change visa program www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06...

Omfg these stories. Read them all. Fantastic reporting by @bcmerchant.bsky.social on how tech workers are right now, as we speak, having their jobs fucked up by management’s love of AI

100 years ago this week, the brothers Harry & Sam Warner struck a deal with Bell Labs to use their innovative Vitaphone technology in the production of the first sound films for Warner Brothers. It was a turning point in the history of film & media, & the inspiration for this week's blog series! 🗃️

Things I will miss from my academic stint when it's over: teaching, especially teaching technical students. Savoring every Experiential Ethics, or science and technology ethics for engineers at MIT, this summer 💗

🚨 La militarización avanza en México con la reciente aprobación la Ley de la #GuardiaNacional 🪖. La Guardia Nacional se convierte en la cuarta #FuerzaArmada bajo el mando de la SEDENA, con nuevas facultades de inteligencia y espionaje. Estos son algunos riesgos. concopiaoculta.org