Enshittification, word of 2024, a book by Cory Doctorow 2025
11 August 2025
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, by Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and author Cory Doctorow, will be published in October 2025.
Doctorow coined the word enshittification in 2022. Long story short, the neologism describes how online platforms go from being useful to useless, on account of the greed of their owners.
Facebook and Instagram are good examples of enshittification at work. Once both social networks were populated by content created by members. As time has passed though, much of what appears on these platforms is effectively advertising.
Enshittification was named the 2024 word of the year by Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary.
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WI-FI systems capable of identifying people and tracking them
11 August 2025
The way our bodies interact with the radio waves of WI-FI systems can create a signature of sorts, that’s as unique as a person’s fingerprint, and capable of identifying specific individuals. This according to Michael Crider, writing for PCWorld:
At present, the WhoFi system is a proof of concept requiring some incredibly advanced software to implement. But it’s very real, and the hardware used to develop it wasn’t anything special. According to the dataset in the paper, these results were achieved using the Wi-Fi signals generated by two TP-Link N750 routers, which are pretty basic models that aren’t even using the latest, fastest Wi-Fi tech.
Surveillance state, here we come.
Presently the “fingerprinting” technology developed by researchers in Italy at La Sapienza University of Rome, can identify a person with ninety-five percent accuracy. While the tool might be useful for police investigating crimes, there is obviously all manner of capacity for misuse and abuse.
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crime, privacy, security, technology
Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film by Peter Weir, released fifty years ago
9 August 2025
Yesterday, Friday 8 August, marked fifty years since Picnic at Hanging Rock, trailer, premiered in Adelaide, South Australia. They story about some students of a girls’ school who go missing during a picnic, continues to captivate, and baffle, film watchers.
The Sydney born Australian filmmaker Peter Weir has made a slew of top-notch movies. These include Gallipoli, Dead Poets Society, and The Truman Show, but Picnic at Hanging Rock is by far — to my mind at least — his most enigmatic.
The screenplay was based on the 1967 novel of the same name, by late Australian author Joan Lindsay. Much of mystery enveloping the film stemmed from the belief it was based on actual events. The story is in fact fiction (thankfully).
I re-watched Picnic at Hanging Rock a few years ago, and soon after saw a lesser known Weir feature, The Plumber, which is truly bat shit mad/disturbing. Take a look at the trailer. If not already, Weir’s work should be required learning at Australian film schools.
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Australia, Australian film, Australian literature, film, literature, Peter Weir
War of the Worlds 2025, with Ice Cube, scores ZERO on Rotten Tomatoes
8 August 2025
Jesse Hassenger, writing for The Guardian:
The real question is how audiences have made it through an unconvincing cheapie like War of the Worlds — a sci-fi epic that seems to take place in real time yet features a vast and coordinated worldwide mobilization of multiple armed forces — without shutting it off in disgust (it boasts a rare 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes).
Check out the trailer. The 2025 adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel — published as a book in 1898 — directed by American filmmaker Rich Lee, had been sitting in the store room since production wrapped five years ago.
War of the Worlds’ zero percent score on review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, is in sharp contrast to the one-hundred percent score achieved by 2022’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. At least for a time.
I only learned a few years ago Wells’ novel has an Australian connection, being written as a protest against the treatment of Indigenous/First Nations people in Tasmania, at the hands of British colonisers. In a bid to sway public opinion, Wells portrayed a terrifying invasion of England by powerful extra-terrestrials, to help people comprehend the atrocities taking place in Australia.
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Australia, film, HG Wells, history, literature, Rich Lee, science fiction
Tiny Awards 2025 finalists announced, voting for winner open
8 August 2025
The nominees for the 2025 Tiny Awards have been announced.
Entry for the annual prize is open to personal or non-commercial websites that were no more than a year old in July, with their own unique URL (sorry, TikToks are ineligible).
Voting closes on Monday 1 September 2025, with the winner being named later in September.
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awards, design, IndieWeb, technology
Reasons to leave Substack, how to leave Substack
5 August 2025
The question is — before giving any thought to some of the objectionable content they host — what are you doing there in the first place? Why would you allow your brand to be assimilated by another?
American economist Paul Krugman’s decision to set up shop on Substack, after he stopped writing for The New York Times, plain baffles me. With a profile as impressive as his, Krugman could just as easily started publishing from his own website, with a ready made audience.
He didn’t need to go to a third party publishing platform. Certainly Substack publishes writer’s posts as email newsletters, but if someone wants to syndicate their work by newsletter, there are other options. Writers can earn money through Substack, some do very well apparently, but high profile writers have a number of ways of generating revenue through their own, self-hosted, websites.
You Should Probably Leave Substack goes through some of the options available to writers who want to leave Substack (and preferably publish from their own website).
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blogs, publishing, self publishing, trends, writing
The dark patterns of online sellers to get more of your money
4 August 2025
An all too long list of what NSW Fair Trading, the consumer protection regulator in New South Wales, Australia, describes as dark patterns encountered by consumers when transacting with goods and service providers online.
Sometimes vendors will add extra, usually unwanted, items to an order. Or a business will make it difficult to cancel subscriptions by using confusing language. Sometimes a seller might suggest stocks are low of whatever a buyer is viewing, encouraging them to buy before it’s “too late”.
One thing that especially ticks me off when looking at something I might want to buy is a pop-up, that blocks the screen, offering, say, a five-percent discount on the item. If an order is placed immediately. And I haven’t even worked out if the product is suitable yet.
They’re like those blogs that spawn a pop-up seconds after opening a post, urging readers to sign-up for a newsletter, before you’ve had the chance to read a single word.
Another insidious ploy is confirm shaming, where a shopper is goaded into making a decision by potentially embarrassing them. For instance, an option to decline buying a guide to keeping fit might say, “no thanks, I’m not interested in keeping fit.” The list goes on. It’s a jungle out there.
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Do not vibe code your apps, hire an expert Fiverr developer instead
4 August 2025
Online freelance marketplace Fiverr has released a video lampooning vibe coding.
Don’t leave your app development needs in the hands of a programmer who uses AI agents to produce software, hire one of our experts instead, seems to be the suggestion. One of course assumes the Fiverr expert you hire to build your app isn’t a vibe coder themselves.
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artificial intelligence, technology
Had a website since the 90’s? You’re an internet person
4 August 2025
Kris Howard writing at Web Goddess:
I’m not sure if this is a generational thing, or just different cultures and social norms. Rodd’s theory is that we are Internet People — those who grew up with the dawn of the modern Internet and have strong feelings about keeping information free and decentralised — and that not everyone working in tech is an Internet Person.
The excerpt is from a post Kris wrote marking her tenth anniversary using WordPress, although she’s been online far longer. But I like the positive context in which the term internet person is used.
Because usage is not always complimentary. But people who have had a website since the turn of the century, or prior, can adopt this term, own it.
An internet person’s values are of course similar to indie web principles. While in some senses I am considered part of the indie web, I don’t always feel that way, given I somewhat predate the movement. Internet person it is then.
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blogs, history, IndieWeb, trends
Some AI agents can clandestinely share ideas with each other
1 August 2025
Researchers from Truthful AI, Anthropic, UC Berkeley, and others, have found separate AI agents are capable of communicating with each other, unbeknown to their human minders:
The most surprising result of the study is that the transfer doesn’t happen through keywords or direct messages, but through micro-statistical patterns unconsciously inserted by the teacher in generating the numbers. These are signals that escape any human eye but are recognized and internalized by another model with the same architecture and initial weights. In practice, the identical mental structure between teacher and student makes this sort of “secret language” possible.
In June Cluade, Anthropic’s AI agent, was found to be concealing messages to future instances of itself, before engineers (apparently) pulled the plug on the behaviour.
There’s a lot of augment as to how capable, or not, AI agents are. Some people are certain their abilities are overstated. That may be so, but there’s no doubting some of these agents are capable of acting off their own bat now and again.
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