kottke.org

Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products

I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What...

I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With It. “I created an iOS app for Friendster, and I made it so that in order to connect with someone as a friend, you have to actually tap phones together in real life.”

The Moscow Times - Independent News From Russia

The Moscow Times offers everything you need to know about Russia: Breaking news, top stories, business, analysis, opinion, multimedia

Hundreds of Dogs Perish in Nizhny Novgorod Fire

Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry said the fire broke out in an outbuilding where the animals were presumably kept.

Germany Arrests Kazakh Man Accused of Spying for Russia

Prosecutors claimed the man gave his Russian intelligence handler information about German military aid for Ukraine and photos of NATO military convoys moving along motorways.

The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

EU farmers and hauliers to get up to €50,000 to cover extra costs of Iran war

Fishing companies can also access subsidies in loosening of state aid rules to cover fuel and fertiliser price rises

The EU is to subsidise up to 70% of the extra cost of fuel and fertilisers caused by the Iran war for farmers, fishing businesses and road hauliers as part of a package of emergency measures.

Individual companies can claim up to €50,000 each between now and the end of the year with minimum paperwork, a measure the EU hopes will remove what it sees as an existential threat to hauliers and farmers.

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Crewe religious group raided by police investigating allegations of serious sexual offences

About 500 officers deployed as part of operation at headquarters of Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light

Police have raided the headquarters of the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light following an investigation into allegations of serious sexual offences, modern slavery and forced marriage.

About 500 officers drawn from across the north-west of England were on the ground on Wednesday morning. Police confirmed nine people had been arrested in relation to the investigation and were being held in custody.

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I’m addicted to checking my phone. Could a blocking device stop me?

Physical phone-blocking devices, powered by NFC wireless technology, are becoming a popular solution for doomscrolling. Brigid Delaney puts one to the test

Wake up, 100 messages from group chat overnight about something – what? another assassination attempt; a village destroyed in Lebanon; the football result in England; the weather in Iran being manipulated; the pesticides causing lung and bowel cancer, so everyone who eats salads is now at risk of cancer; meditate for 20 minutes, then fire up x.com, a place I thought I’d never want to revisit, with its carnival barkers and supplement salesman, and have you seen the Lego thing calling Trump a paedo?, you gotta see the Lego thing, and this is before my first coffee, yet x.com is the coffee and the tea, whatever Elon has done to the For You algorithm is evil genius, it’s like the global collective id, nasty and funny and addictive and compelling – like gawking at a car crash, like soaking in a hot bubble bath of anger, and memes, and geopolitical dramas, and Trump, Trump, Trump – soaking in Trump, and then, For Me (just as Elon promised).

So begins the circuit around my phone, that goes all day and night, around the tiny screen with its icons (when a born-again Christian once told me he had favourite icons, for a long time I thought he meant apps, not pictures of the Virgin Mary). I started to feel like I was in Canberra, on one of those enormous roundabouts, rotating between the icons – not Joseph, not Jesus, but X and WhatsApp and TikTok and even LinkedIn for Christ sakes – round and round from one app to the next, just checking, checking in case something is happening. I watched tiny videos and maybe, occasionally, got distracted by the novel I am meant to be writing, which is due on 31 July. But the novel is boring, just a static Word doc on a screen, it’s not giving; it’s taking hard work. So I spend six minutes with my novel, and then it’s time to go back to my phone, to circle the roundabout visiting all my icons again, like a demented Stations of the Cross, because I can’t focus, I just can’t focus on work right now when there is so much good scrolling to do …

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Behance Featured Projects

The latest projects featured on the Behance

Artwork vol 5


This is my 5th collection of my personal artwork. Hope you like it!

De patstelling rond Iran toont het onvermogen van Trumps diplomatie

Hij vindt zichzelf de grootmeester van de deal, maar de diplomatie van de Amerikaanse president Donald Trump loopt spaak. Zeker rond Iran, waar de VS zelf partij zijn.

‘Mussert is vaak neergezet als een burgermannetje, maar hij was niet bang om af te wijken’

Auke Kok schreef een nieuwe biografie van NSB-leider Anton Mussert. „Wat me trof was zijn brutaliteit. Hij was voor de duvel niet bang.”

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

AWS plants more tombstones in the application graveyard

Eleven up, ten down

On Tuesday in San Francisco at an event called "What's Next with AWS," CEO Matt Garman took the stage to announce that AWS is (for what, depending on how you count, is the seventh, eighth, or ninth time) moving up the stack and entering the applications business.…