Giant web site companies are capturing and centralizing the internet, so that now 30 companies generate half the traffic in the US. They are converting it primarily into a broadcast medium.

I almost never access those companies' sites. In my view, the only good use of the internet is what they don't do.

Fortunately there is still enough of that to make a big difference from what the world was like before the internet.

When foreign fighters want to leave PISSI, it holds them prisoner and threatens to kill them.

Meanwhile, when Britons who went to Syria to fight against Assad go home because they don't support PISSI, the UK puts them in prison.

Fear of Ebola elicits bizarre reactions.

Hoax news contributes to the panic.

Ironically, Ebola is being used to spread computer viruses. But they probably can't hurt you if you are running GNU/Linux.

New Jersey's emergency experiment with voting by email ran into various practical problems in addition to the fundamental ones you'd expect, and there is no way of knowing how many votes were lost.

It is amusing how the artificial concern with voter fraud, stoked to provide a basis for stopping poor and disabled people from voting, is not applied to internet voting.

A company wants to pay people to turn old camera phones into remote surveillance cameras.

How is this different from stationing a human there to count people? They couldn't afford to station humans full time in very many places. And if they argue that they don't or can't recognize individuals, what assurance do we have that they won't be recognizing individuals using the same technique 10 years from now?

I think it should be illegal to set up a camera looking for more than a short time at a place where the public is admitted, if it makes the video remotely accessible. Individuals, and especially the state, should have to get a court order before they can do this.