I've seen this LinkedIn "BrowserGate" site posted a few places online. LinkedIn is "searching your computer"! It's a "mass breach of personal data"! It sounds illegal, and maybe it is, but you should know what this is really about, and who's behind it. 🧵

Next year: "Our analytics show that few few people use this feature that we made intentionally difficult to activate, so we'll be removing it in the next version of Android" android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/andr...

This is not what is happening at all. The amount of misinformation on BlueSky about AI is insane, and it keeps promising that AI is all hype that is going away soon. A really dangerous position that cedes all AI policy and decisions about how it will be used to others. Also Futurism is clickbait

I'm old enough to remember when using an Android had as a selling point that it was *your device*, and there was no central authority who I had to beg for to sideload my apps. Google is still not listening to us and maybe you know, look at the world for why centralization of power is bad.

Seems like I read this story every week. If tech companies can't fix their processes for this sort of thing regulators may eventually have to do it for them.

In case you need it: I made a calculator that tells you how long until the daylight increases again. Hang in there! benholmen.com/sunlight

the fewer people are likely to get the joke, the more the people that do get it will love it

New blog post about document formats (exciting, I know): williamoconnell.me/blog/post/re...

*opens side of coat revealing an assortment of dubious looking unicode codepoints* hey kid, wanna buy a non-breaking vertical space

Google going the Apple route of requiring their blessing for every app you run. We should not accept this new vision of computing where computers only do the things a handful of tech companies permit them to. Your phone should be yours. 9to5google.com/2025/08/25/a...

Mastodon is a distributed system, which makes it annoying to use. Bluesky is nicer to use, in part because it isn't meaningfully distributed (although the underlying tech would support that). My guess is that will never change, because distributed systems are annoying to use.

Matter is a technology that doesn't get as much coverage at the moment, but I remain very excited about it. Previously every smart home hardware company had to be a cloud services company too (and many were bad at it). Now every lightbulb doesn't need it's own app. www.theverge.com/matter/75717...

Sigh... it's always Firebase.

New blog post about making things spin on the web: williamoconnell.me/blog/post/wh...

If you publish a mobile app you'll get emails every month about some new app store policy or tax rule and about once a year you'll have to make some change to avoid being delisted. If you publish a web app it'll probably work forever even if you never touch it again. So I recommend that one.

MinIO with the ole bait and switch. www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted... Removed their entire web UI from their docker images and now you have to pay *checks notes* $96,000/yr to get the functionality back...

Compression Dictionaries are my new favourite thing in #webperf! Check out this new Case Study about how Google Search uses this new technology, which also explains exactly what this is and how it works using them as an example: developer.chrome.com/blog/search-...

Holy shit and also: I told you this was going to come down to buttons ans links www.theverge.com/news/659246/...