And maybe even essential
Thanks to her wise, literate, grounded, and funny videos (plus her music and much else), I have fallen in like with Elle Cordova. She's brilliant. Casually so, which makes her even more brilliant.
The Big Why
OG Anonoby's wingspan is 7'2". That's big reason why he made the tip-in that won the game for the Knicks yesterday.
Getting the Right right
In The World has Moved On, Cory Doctorow offers a vigorous and well-sourced take-down of conservatives. I still prefer George Lakoff's take in Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't. It's not a stretch to say that George got Obama elected. I have many more thoughts about all this, but I won't go there, because algorithms.
This is a bigger-than-big deal.
Elizabeth Ginexi: A Rule Nobody Voted On Could Cut Federal Funding to Your Community.
Another pull quote: "The biggest risk of all is only talking about the risk."
In her lunch interview at ODR2026, Beth Noveck just used the term "expertocratic" to label the way culture elevates academics (such as the many who are gathered here in a nice new building at Harvard). She also reminds us that "democratize" refers less to the democratic electoral process than to empowering individuals. She also just quoted somebody calling social media "democracy's dumpster fire." Dunno what of this I might bring up when I talk later, but I don't want to forget them.
Just in case you feel private online
Scientists Find That Ordinary Wi-Fi Routers Can Identify People With Near-Perfect Accuracy, headlines My Modern Met. The source of the story is an academic work titled BFId: Identity Inference Attacks Utilizing Beamforming Feedback Information. The abstract:
Beamforming, as introduced in WiFi 5, requires clients to broadcast observations of their channel characteristics. This introduces a new information source for WiFi sensing with privacy threats that have not been explored, so far. With WiFi networks being ubiquitous in our everyday lives, the impact of unknown privacy threats is likely severe. To investigate this concern, we introduce BFId, the first identity inference attack using BFI-based sensing and evaluate its efficacy on a novel dataset containing WiFi recordings of 197 individuals. We show that we can infer the identity of individuals with very high accuracy, across different walking styles and perspectives, even with large sample sizes.
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