Leftovers

• Manuel Moreale ☛ On corpses, selfishness, and ownership

  Ok so what I’m wondering is this: why is that even a choice I have? Hear me out: who owns my body after I’m dead? I assume this is both a legal and philosophical question and the answer probably changes based on where you live but the reason why I’m intrigued by it is because it’s one of those questions where I don’t have an immediate gut answer that feels right at an intuitive level.

• Roy Tang ☛ the web as a space to be explored

  Except that last paragraph isn't true at all. That "bargain" is not what the web was built on. The web predates Google and search engines. The web is about people putting information online to be shared with other people. This "bargain" came in because capitalism demands things make money, and while we may have gotten some good "content" out of it, we also got a lot of modern-day plagues: spam, clickbait, content farms, scammers, surveillance capitalism and so on. Just because the majority of modern web users grew up with this "bargain" doesn't make it fundamental to the open web.

• Smithsonian Magazine ☛ When Midcentury New York Spoke, This Sound Archivist Listened—and Recorded Every Word

  His 1950s album Sounds of My City, released through the Folkways Records label, captured a sonic portrait of Manhattan that no one else was collecting. Listeners can hear peddlers calling out their wares, children singing in courtyards, band music echoing on side streets and immigrant voices drifting through Midtown Manhattan. Schwartz assembled the symphony of a city in motion.

• Pedro ☛ Pedroblog is moving

  I am not erasing this blog for now, I am moving it to old.pcora.eu this Thursday. This way, all the old content will be kept online.

• Matt Webb ☛ The video calls section in cafes is the new smoking section (Interconnected)

  Even without calls, sitting next to someone who is at their laptop and in the zone is a whole thing. Like standing at a train platform when the non-stopper charges by a metre away, there is just something about the sheering force proximity of the energy.

  So that started a while back. People gently at their laptops, fine. People typing like a donkey falling downstairs, it’s like they’re lit in a different colour. They’re in the room but not of the room. It’s impossible to pick at a pastry sitting next to that kind of intensity.

• Herman Õunapuu ☛ My horrible Fairphone customer care experience

  It’s not an issue with the individual customer support agents, I know how difficult their job is1, and I’m sure that they’re trying their best, but it’s a more systematic issue in the organization itself. It’s become so bad that Fairphone issued an open letter to the Fairphone community forum acknowledging the issue and steps they’re taking to fix it. Until then, I only have my experience to go by.

• Science

  • Mandaris Moore ☛ The Mathening

    I’ve been thinking about writing a post about math (or maths) for months after hearing about if from Fractal Kitty and her passion for Mathober.

    (Un)fortunately, I don’t have any math specific topics that I want to discuss, but I’m not happy with just sitting on an idea when I can share it with you all in case you need it1.

  • Science Alert ☛ Strange Radio Signals Detected Emanating From Deep Under Antarctic Ice

    "We still don't actually have an explanation."

  • Hackaday ☛ Retrotechtacular: Arthur C. Clarke Predicts The Future

    Predicting the future is a dangerous occupation. Few people can claim as much success as Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science and science fiction author. Thanks to the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Company, we can see what Sir Arthur thought about the future in 1964 and then ten years later in 1974.

  • Science Alert ☛ A Fifth Force of Nature May Have Been Discovered Inside Atoms

    We might have finally found it.

  • Science Alert ☛ Long-Term Contraceptive Pill Use Linked With Brain Tumor Risk

    Here's what you need to know.

  • Science Alert ☛ Just One Night of Poor Sleep Can Change How Your Brain Sees Food

    It's the beginning of a cycle.

  • Science Alert ☛ Insulin Isn't Just Made by The Pancreas. Here's Another Location Few Know About.

    Now this makes you think.

  • Science Alert ☛ Solid Rock Caught Flowing 1,700 Miles Beneath Surface in Experimental First

    Demystifying the D" layer.

  • Science Alert ☛ Expert Reveals 5 Important Reasons to Avoid Alcohol When Injured

    "Less is better, and none is best."

  • Science Alert ☛ Trailblazing Satellite Mission Delivers Its First Artificial Solar Eclipse

    The start of something new.

  • Hackaday ☛ History Of Forgotten Moon Bases

    If you were alive when 2001: A Space Odyssey was in theaters, you might have thought it didn’t really go far enough. After all, in 1958, the US launched its first satellite. The first US astronaut went up in 1961. Eight years later, Armstrong put a boot on the moon’s surface. That was a lot of progress for 11 years. The movie came out in 1968, so what would happen in 33 years? Turns out, not as much as you would have guessed back then. [The History Guy] takes us through a trip of what could have been if progress had marched on after those first few moon landings. You can watch the video below.

  • Hackaday ☛ Expanding Racks In The Spirit Of The Hoberman Sphere

    If you’re a mechanical engineering wonk, you might appreciate this latest video from [Henry Segerman] wherein he demonstrates his various expanding racks.

• Career/Education

  • Wired ☛ Why We Made a Guide to Winning a Fight

    Finally, we’ve got all the guidance you could possibly need to fight the Big Fights in this moment, from locking down your digital security to protesting safely amid increasing—and increasingly dangerous—government surveillance.

    So put on your big-person pants, shake off any lingering nerves, and remember: Whatever you’re fighting for in this moment, don’t stop until you land that victory blow. But please, not a physical one. WIRED doesn’t condone violence, and I still feel kinda bad about that third grade thing.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

    I haven’t watched this in a long time, but damn, it is still so good: [...]

  • Neil Selwyn ☛ Why AI will not Democratize Education (notes on Wieczorek 2025)

    As Michał Wieczorek (2025) argues, the current push for educational AI is resulting in technologies that diminish students’ opportunities for communication and collaboration with others. These are forms of AI that habituate students into feeling that they have little (or no) control over their learning environments. All told, these are forms of AI that do a lousy job of preparing young people for living together with others and collectively dealing with shared problems – all things that we might hope democratic citizens to be able to do.

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ Penn State research team builds 2D CMOS system

    The team, led by Pennsylvania State University engineering science professor Saptarshi Das, published a paper last week detailing the design and construction of their 2D one instruction set computer (OISC) based on the same complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) design that's a standard part of modern silicon-based computers. OISC is a minimalist abstract machine model that performs all operations using a single, universal instruction.

  • Hackaday ☛ Kludge Compensates For Kaput Component With Contemporary Capacitor

    It is a well-known reality of rescuing certain older electronic devices that, at some point, you’re likely going to have to replace a busted capacitor. This is the stage [Kevin] is at in the 3rd installment in his saga of reviving a 50-year-old Military Tektronix oscilloscope.

  • Hackaday ☛ Cube Teeter Totter: One Motor, Many Lessons

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • FAIR ☛ How NYT Magazine Threw Away Journalistic Ethics on Suicide

    Trigger warning: discussion of suicide and its depictions.

  • Science Alert ☛ 'Ozempic Babies': Here's Why Oral Contraceptives Might Be Failing

    This is what we know so far.

  • Science Alert ☛ Hundreds of Mysterious Giant Viruses Discovered Lurking in The Ocean

    We've only just scratched the surface.

• Proprietary

  • SchwarzTech ☛ Article: Initial Thoughts on WWDC25 Announcements

    Apple just wrapped up the WWDC25 keynote and I have some weird feelings about what I just saw. This comes along with the general sense of uncanny valley dread with the initial Vision Pro demo two years ago and the party-tricks-turned-vaporware of Apple Intelligence last year. Because of this, I had low expectations for this year’s event, but found some silver linings. I won’t be recapping everything, but wanted to share some sentiment and what really stuck out as things that I’ll be enjoying this fall.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Armin Ronacher ☛ We Can Just Measure Things

      When an agent struggles, so does a human. There is a lot of code and tooling out there which is objectively not good, but because of one reason or another became dominant. If you want to start paying attention to technology choices or you want to start writing your own libraries, now you can use agents to evaluate the developer experience.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Where AI Provides Value

      AI will often not be as effective as a human doing the same job. It won’t always know more or be more accurate. And it definitely won’t always be fairer or more reliable. But it may still be used whenever it has an advantage over humans in one of four dimensions: speed, scale, scope and sophistication. Understanding these dimensions is the key to understanding AI-human replacement.

    • The Register UK ☛ Huge increase in UK students using AI to cheat for grades

      One solution is to go old-school, and sales of the traditional US blue books used for handwritten exams are on the rise. For example, UC Berkeley's campus store saw an 80 percent jump in blue-book purchases over the past two academic years, as professors revert to handwritten, in-class essays to guard against AI-generated submissions.

      China takes it even further. During the gaokao National College Entrance Examination, an annual event that could mean the difference between success and failure in life for students, Deepseek and ByteDance both reportedly shut down access to their services during exam hours to reduce cheating.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ US offering $10 million for info on Iranian [attackers] behind IOControl malware

      U.S. officials are offering up to $10 million for details on a [cracker] affiliated with the group called CyberAv3ngers that gained prominence in 2023 and 2024 for a string of cyberattacks on U.S. and Israeli water utilities.

    • The Register UK ☛ Freedman HealthCare targeted by cyber extortionists

      According to a claim posted Sunday on the shame site belonging to World Leaks, formerly Hunters International, the data thieves alleged to have pilfered 52.4 GB of data containing 42,204 files, which they will release at 4 am EDT on Tuesday.

    • Security Week ☛ New ClickFix Malware Variant ‘LightPerlGirl’ Targets Users in Stealthy Hack

      ClickFix uses social engineering to trick users into loading LOLBINS malware on their own devices, in this case using PowerShell. With evasion built into the ClickFix code and PowerShell execution undertaken in memory, the presence of ClickFix malware is easily missed.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Is It Really FOSS ☛ Is it really foss?

      Where Projects are Evaluated To see if they're as free and open source as advertised

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • 404 Media ☛ California Cops Investigate ‘Immigration Protest’ With AI-Camera System

      New data obtained by 404 Media also shows California cops are illegally sharing Flock automatic license plate reader (ALPR) data with other agencies out of state, who in turn are performing searches for ICE.

    • 404 Media ☛ Meta Invents New Way to Humiliate Users With Feed of People's Chats With AI

      If you somehow missed this while millions of people were protesting in the streets, state politicians were being assassinated, war was breaking out between Israel and Iran, the military was deployed to the streets of Los Angeles, and a Coinbase-sponsored military parade rolled past dozens of passersby in Washington, D.C., here is what the “Discover” tab is: The Meta AI app, which is the company’s competitor to the ChatGPT app, is posting users’ conversations on a public “Discover” page where anyone can see the things that users are asking Meta’s chatbot to make for them.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Government Seeks To Exempt Political Parties From Privacy Laws Even As CRTC Reports They Are Leading Source of Spam Complaints

      This is not the first time that Canadian governments have exempted themselves from the privacy rules that apply to private sector organizations. Nearly 20 years ago, the government created a do-not-call list that allowed Canadians to register their numbers to block unwanted telemarketing calls. The catch? The political parties were exempted from the do-not-call rules, an exemption that remains in place until this day. Several years later, the government passed anti-spam legislation with subsequent regulations that explicitly exempted political parties, including spam whose primary purpose is to solicit campaign contributions.

    • 404 Media ☛ Emails Reveal the Casual Surveillance Alliance Between ICE and Local Police

      In the email thread, crime analysts from several local police departments and the FBI introduced themselves to each other and made lists of surveillance tools and tactics they have access to and felt comfortable using, and in some cases offered to perform surveillance for their colleagues in other departments. The thread also includes a member of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and members of Oregon’s State Police. In the thread, called the “Southern Oregon Analyst Group,” some members talked about making fake social media profiles to surveil people, and others discussed being excited to learn and try new surveillance techniques. The emails show both the wide array of surveillance tools that are available to even small police departments in the United States and also shows informal collaboration between local police departments and federal agencies, when ordinarily agencies like ICE are expected to follow their own legal processes for carrying out the surveillance.

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft adds export option to Windows Recall in Europe

      Exports can include the last seven or 30 days of snapshots, or everything captured to date. Alternatively, a user can opt to export snapshots to the selected folder on an ongoing basis. Both options require authorization via Windows Hello.

    • Wired ☛ Minnesota Shooting Suspect Allegedly Used Data Broker Sites to Find Targets’ Addresses

      According to an FBI affidavit, police searched the SUV believed to be the suspect's and found notebooks that included handwritten lists of “more than 45 Minnesota state and federal public officials, including Representative Hortman’s, whose home address was written next to her name.” According to the same affidavit, one notebook also listed 11 mainstream search platforms for finding people's home addresses and other personal information, like phone numbers and relatives.

  • Confidentiality

    • Jake Lazaroff ☛ Homomorphically Encrypting CRDTs

      Here’s a problem with local-first software.

      You want to work on a document together with a friend who lives far away from you. That sounds like local-first’s bread and butter: store the document as a CRDT, then use some sort of sync server to merge updates and relay them between you and your friend.

      But there’s a catch: the contents of that document are secret. So secret, in fact, that you don’t even want the app developer to know what they are.

    • Terence Eden ☛ Your Password Algorithm Sucks

      Stupid people use a password manager. They know they can't remember a hundred different passwords and so outsource the thinking to something reasonably secure. I'm a stupid person and am very happy to have BitWarden generate and save fiendishly complex unique passwords which are then protected by the app's MFA. Lovely!

      But people who think they are clever decide to bypass that and use their own super-secret algorithm.

• Defence/Aggression

  • FAIR ☛ NYT Undermines Fight Against Antisemitism by Using It as Shield for Zionism

    Pro-Israel zealots commonly attempt to discredit criticism of the Israeli government by equating such criticism with antisemitism, because Israel is the world’s only state with a Jewish majority.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ "The Answer Is Zero:" When Fragile White Supremacists Discover ... They Aren't

    Pete Hegseth’s DOD is disseminating Russian-style disinformation to justify their invasion of Los Angeles (as Newsom’s staff noted, DHS has started doing the same).

    Whiskey Pete’s response to being exposed as incompetent, DOD’s response to launching an invasion with no basis, has been the same: To double down on the lies, to double down on the dehumanization.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ “No Kings” Was a Rebellion in Trump Country

    It wasn’t just large, liberal cities but the heart of Trump country that formed the base of last Saturday’s “No Kings” protests. Together with his underwhelming military parade, they’re a warning of the softness of his support.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Marc Andreessen’s Manifesto for Rule by the Few

    Andreessen doesn’t cite this theory to critique power or warn against it. Rather, he distorts it to justify why his class of Silicon Valley “builders” should be in charge. “The Iron Law of Oligarchy basically says democracy is fake,” he concludes from his simplistic reading of Michels’s argument. Andreessen’s understanding echoes the logic Benito Mussolini used to justify fascism in Italy.

  • France24 ☛ Israel struck Iran 'without clear endgame': 'Can't finish job they started and unclear if US will'

    Iran vows to 'pummel' Israel until attacks stop while the Iranian Foreign Minister has insisted the US could stop Israeli attacks with 'one phone call'. As Convicted Felon pondered inviting Putin to mediate between Israel and Iran, Macron immediately threw cold water on the idea highlighting that Russia lacked the credibility for that kind of role. For in-depth analysis and a deeper perspective, FRANCE 24's François Picard welcomes Hussein Ibish, Senior Resident Scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute (AGSIW) in Washington. He is also a weekly columnist for The National (UAE) and a regular contributor to The New York Times and The Daily Beast.

  • RFERL ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man To Leave G7 Summit Early After Telling Residents Of Tehran To Evacuate

    US President The Insurrectionist will return to Washington from the Group of Seven summit in Canada early to attend to many "important matters," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on June 16.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • New York Times ☛ At G7, Convicted Felon Renews Embrace of Putin Amid Rift With Allies

      Hell Toupée opened his remarks at the Group of 7 gathering of industrialized nations by criticizing the decision to expel Russia from the bloc after Moscow’s 2014 “annexation” of Crimea.

    • Latvia ☛ Poet Inese Zandere: The more you learn about Ukrainian cultural values, the easier it is to understand why Russia hates Ukraine so much

      The outstanding Latvian poet and writer Inese Zandere was the subject of a fascinating in-depth interview by Latvian Radio's Arnis Krauze recently, and in among a host of wise words, she had some pertinent thoughts about Ukraine and its heroic defence against Russia's brutal imperialism.

    • France24 ☛ Russia strikes Kyiv with waves of drones and missiles, sparking fires

      Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukraine's capital Kyiv early Tuesday killed at least one person -- a US citizen -- with 16 more injured, the city's mayor said.

    • JURIST ☛ Russia student fined for speech in Telegram chats

      The Russian government fined a nineteen-year old college student in the Crimean city of Sevastopol roughly $1,300 Monday for allegedly “discrediting armed forces” and promoting “LGTBQA+ propaganda” on Telegram chat posts. According to the city’s Interior Ministry, the student posted comments critical of the Russian military’s involvement in Ukraine and voiced support for homosexuality identity.

    • LRT ☛ Russian GPS interference won't stop once the war in Ukraine is over – transport minister

      GPS signal interference, which has recently affected aircraft and maritime navigation near Lithuania's seaport of Klaipėda, is unlikely to stop even after the war in Ukraine ends, has warned Transport Minister Eugenijus Sabutis, calling countries in the region to take action.

    • RFERL ☛ Overnight Drone, Missile Strike Hits Residential Areas Of Kyiv, Killing 1

      A combined Russian drone and missile attack in Kyiv early on June 17 killed one person -- an American -- and left at least 20 people wounded, according to Ukrainian officials.

    • RFERL ☛ Moscow Mixing Up Body Parts And Sending Russian Remains, Complicating Identification Of War Dead, Ukraine Charges

      Russia is purposefully making it more difficult for Ukraine to identify repatriated remains by sending badly mutilated bodies and mixing up body parts, complicating the grim task of matching names to the remains of the dead, Ukraine’s top police official has charged.

    • RFERL ☛ G7 Leaders Confront New Crisis In Middle East At Summit Also Expected To Discuss Ukraine War

      Israel and Iran kept up their attacks on each other on June 15 as leaders of the Group of Seven began gathering in Canada for a summit expected to discuss the fighting and ways to keep the conflict from further escalating.

    • New York Times ☛ Ukraine Takes First Step Toward Carrying Out Minerals Deal With U.S.

      The government is trying to show the Convicted Felon administration that it can deliver on the agreement.

    • Meduza ☛ Ukraine receives remains of 1,245 more people, says ‘repatriation portion of the Istanbul agreements’ is complete — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Moscow included Russian soldiers’ bodies in remains sent to Kyiv in repatriation exchange, Ukraine says — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Latvian lawmaker arrested and searched over alleged cooperation with Russia and incitement of ethnic hatred — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russian authorities add Chechen woman feared victim of ‘honor killing’ to missing persons database — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ ‘Neocolonial piracy’: In occupied Crimea, Russia is building roads to move weapons and stolen resources — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ An invisible maritime menace: Mysterious drones spy on Western defenses as cargo ships linked to Russia cruise European waters — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ At least 14 killed in massive Russian strike on Kyiv — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Team Navalny cancels memorial concert in Berlin — Meduza

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Drone Girl ☛ Southern Company deploys massive drones that can fly 3+ hours

      The multi-aircraft deployment marks a major milestone for both companies and signals a turning point for how the American energy sector manages thousands of miles of power lines, pipelines and storm-ravaged infrastructure.

      And for the drone industry, it’s interesting news to see such massive aircraft without a human pilot conducting flights this long.

• Finance

  • 404 Media ☛ I Tried Pre-Ordering the Trump Phone. The Page Failed and It Charged My Credit Card the Wrong Amount

    I got a confirmation email saying I'll get another confirmation when it's shipped. But I haven't provided a shipping address.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Unicorn Media ☛ Why Is FOSS Force Reporting on a ‘No Kings’ Event in Elkin, NC

    On No Kings Day in a small town in North Carolina, our reporter rediscovers that code, community, and politics are intertwined.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Amazon’s CEO tells employees that AI will eliminate some of their jobs

    In screenshots of internal Slack messages shared with The Post, one Amazon employee noted that layoffs and attrition without replacement have become the norm at Amazon in recent years.

  • The Register UK ☛ OpenAI scores $200m Defense Department AI pilot deal

    The post also mentions the defense deal, stating it will "prototype how frontier AI can transform [the DOD's] administrative options." The post mentions outcomes such as helping service members get health care and aiding cyber defense.

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ From Mandate to Maybe: The Quiet Unwinding of Federal Cybersecurity Policy

    But beneath the geopolitical theater, something quieter and more troubling has happened. The Executive Order has systematically stripped out the enforcement mechanisms that made federal cybersecurity modernization possible. Mandates have become “guidance.” Deadlines have turned into discretion. Requirements have transformed into recommendations.

    We’re witnessing a shift from actionable federal cybersecurity policy to a fragmented, voluntary approach, just as other nations double down on binding standards and enforcement.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Truthdig ☛ Right-Wing Influencers Spread Disinformation About Assassinated Legislator

      Displaying complete ignorance about Minnesota politics, Mike Cernovich and others dumped lies and rumor into the immediate wake of the shootings.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ, partners denied visit to jailed Philippine journalist 

    The delegation — which includes Reporters Without Borders, Free Press Unlimited, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, and the Altermidya network of independent media groups — had previously raised serious concerns over Cumpio’s pretrial detention and allegations that authorities had planted the weapons that led to her arrest in February 2020.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Wired ☛ 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties

    With so much happening at once, numerous organizations and individuals have launched databases, interactive maps, and other trackers to catalog these government actions and their impacts on people’s civil rights across the US. Using open source intelligence, public data, news coverage, and other research, these tools are vital resources for documenting, contextualizing, and analyzing the flood of federal activity that is fundamentally reshaping the US. Here are a few prominent examples.

  • Wired ☛ How Private Equity Killed the American Dream

    In her new book Bad Company, journalist Megan Greenwell chronicles how private equity upended industries from health care to local news—and the ways workers are fighting back.

  • Reuters ☛ Exclusive: US Marines carry out first known detention of civilian in Los Angeles, video shows

    Speaking to reporters after he was released, the civilian identified himself as Marcos Leao, 27. Leao said he was an Army veteran on his way to an office of the Department of Veterans Affairs when he crossed a yellow tape boundary and was asked to stop.

  • Bitdefender ☛ Dutch police identify users as young as 11-year-old on Cracked.io hacking forum

    The forum, which is said to have helped hackers and fraudsters target at least 17 million US computer users, was seized by international law enforcement agencies in January 2025 as part of "Operation Talent," which dismantled the site's infrastructure and seized its domain.

    A subsequent investigation by Dutch police, using data seized from Cracked.io's servers, has identified 126 Dutch users of the site - some of whom had previous convictions or were already the subject of ongoing investigations.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Michael Geist ☛ The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 236: Robert Diab on the Return of Lawful Access

    Lawful access is back. Bill C-2, the government’s border bill, includes a new information demand power that would result in warrantless disclosure of information about a subscriber, a new international production order, and requirements for providers to assist law enforcement in working with their networks.

    There will no doubt be multiple podcast episodes devoted to this bill in the coming months. To get started, Robert Diab, a law professor at Thompson Rivers University and the co-author of a recent text on Search and Seizure joins the Law Bytes podcast to discuss the historical context of lawful access and the key provisions in this bill.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Drew Breunig ☛ The Drawbridges Go Up

  Once network effects crowded a few winners, the drawbridges slowly pulled up. Previously simple APIs evolved into complicated layers of access controls and pricing tiers. Winning platforms adjusted their APIs so you could support their platforms, but not build anything competitive. Perhaps the best example of this was Twitter’s 2012 policy adjustment which limited client 3rd party apps to a maximum of 100,000 users (they’ve since cut off all 3rd party clients).

  The Web 2.0 dream of unfettered free exchange evolved into tightly governed one-way interfaces. Today there are plenty of APIs to support ad buying and posting on Facebook, Google, or Twitter, but barely any that allow you to consume data.

  We’re already seeing a similar narrative play out with MCPs.