Well, hello there. Have a sip of Dominique A.

On the news,

• WSJ - Twelve days in Xinjiang: how China’s surveillance state overwhelms daily life, "government has turned the remote region into a laboratory for its high-tech social controls".
• The Good War: How America’s infatuation with World War II has eroded our conscience, awesome comic adaptation of Chris Haye's Good war on terror.
• Alone on an island, "The challenge of true solitude".
• [fr] D'où viennent les nuages ? — Science étonnante #50.
• The Pudding Awards 2017, neat dataviz / "visual storytelling" selection. Via waxy.
• Why Mickey Mouse’s 1998 copyright extension probably won’t happen again, 👍.
• Ravioli cat bath rap, merci Isabelle.
• SMBC: Make love.
• Tech:
  • The network Uber drivers built. Kinda-startofa-union? Ride-hailing drivers are banding together to better understand the plans, policies and behaviour of their gig^H^H^H exploitation platforms. Via EV148.
  • The growing body of evidence that digital distraction damages our minds. HN.
  • ... and Two major apple shareholders push for study of phone addiction in children, good. HN.
  • A letter about Google AMP; to which Google answers they might do something, but AMP will still suck.
  • Reminder: Chrome is turning into the new Internet Explorer 6, and recent Firefoxes are Real Good Stuff™.
  • Typical Programmer: What does code readability mean? 👍👍👍.
  • More tracking? More tracking. Games using phone microphones to track what you’re watching on TV, and No boundaries for user identities: Web trackers exploit browser login managers. An attempt at at least inspecting the problem on Android: Εxodus "is a privacy auditing platform for Android applications".
  • Joel Spolsky: Birdcage liners, on how Facebook/Twitter initial UX/ML choices determined what kind of discussions emerged. Curious to see if New Ethical Facebook™ will stick to their "making people more connected and less lonely" target.
• 💩😷⚠ Donaldese:
  • NYT: US North Carolina congressional map ruled unconstitutionally gerrymandered by the Republican-controlled General Assembly. Good.
  • How Haiti became poor, WJW, didn't know half of that. And Scalzi: Trump is a racist. Stop pretending otherwise.