Links for 30 Aug 2026

Understanding the Patchwork of U.S. State Consumer Privacy Laws (Usually best to treat everyone as “Privacyland, USA” instead of trying to rely on getting jurisdiction right every time. Also see SIX PIXELS AND A SOFA: Wayfair Threw Everything At This CIPA Complaint And Only Won The Claim The Plaintiff Forgot To Defend. by Keerti Jaya. The tl;dr here is that understanding juror/customer attitudes is more important than getting the details of the regs right. ICYMI: Allison v. PHH Mortgage: The Ruling That Just Made Tracking Pixels a CCPA Problem—this is not just a CIPA thing. The real issue is a mismatch between privacy norms inside and outside the marketing filter bubble.)

Cinemas, schools and ICE are all banning Meta smart glasses by Ana Maria Constantin. (Some places already had the policy in place from Google Glass.)

Bad Men by Rich Siegel. I wanted to bring the Burger Chef character out of retirement to be the spokesperson for Hardee’s. But unlike other cheery spokespeople, like Flo from Progressive or the very grating Jan for Toyotathon, we wanted Burger Chef to be angry, reluctant and alcoholic! In other words, real. We had some very funny scripts, now buried in a box out in my garage. And might have even written a catchphrase for the ornery old guy who would often show up the restaurant to make sure the kids were doing the food right. Mostly, they weren’t. Get outta my kitchen!, Burger Chef would growl. And hilarity would ensue.

optimise for high density. by Jake Archibald. (I’ll do the lazy version, lower quality but higher resolution)

We need a PIT Crew for news by Ben Werdmuller. (News organizations have understaffed and undercompensated internal software teams almost as badly as social media companies have understaffed and undercompensated their moderation teams.)

The Real Thucydides Trap Is Inside Western Tech by Justin Bassi. (Oversimplifying to “West” vs. China is not helpful on most of these issues, though. There are three teams: the market-reliant West and the two factions—CPC and TESCREAL—of the centrally planned economy side.)

A Common Thread by Mansour Behabadi. (Use camera thread style connections to connect and mount a variety of projects.)

“Google and Reddit do not own the Internet,” web scraper says after court win by Ashley Belanger. [A] court took the somewhat rare step of granting SerpApi’s motion to dismiss very early on in Google’s lawsuit. In that case, the judge found that Google had no DMCA standing to sue SerpApi, since it didn’t own any of the content in the search results and has not shown that it’s acting on behalf of any rights holders.