data
Joshua Morris (opens on the publisher’s site)
joshuamorris.info
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Judge Sara Hill called Flock-style ALPR history indiscriminate mass surveillance and suppressed a warrantless month of travel data.
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Savannah fired four officers and two civilians for personal Flock Safety searches—127 inappropriate queries among ~39,000 this year—showing audit logs catch abuse after the fact, not as access control for nationwide plate data.
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NASA’s “Big Bang” power fix keeps Voyager 2’s three remaining science instruments running another year on a probe launched in 1977 for a five-year mission—now nearly 49 years old and still returning data from interstellar space.
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California’s DROP platform reached its August 1, 2026 processing milestone—one request can reach hundreds of registered data brokers, with per-day fines for noncompliance, while the real test will be whether deletion results are audited and enforced.
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George Michaelson’s history of the Berkeley sockets interface—how 4.2BSD in 1983 treated a network connection like a file, made networked programs straightforward to write, and quietly became the standard path for TCP/IP software, including modern protocols that still send data through sockets.
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404 Media documents show Verona, Wisconsin asked Flock to remove ALPR cameras after the contract ended, then bagged them while waiting—arguing surveillance gear should stop collecting data and leave promptly when a city votes it out.
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Cory Doctorow argues the real problem with data brokers is that they may collect and sell personal information by default—and that California’s DROP platform, while a real improvement, still puts the burden on the person being cataloged.
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Stephen Follows breaks down how AI traffic helped overwhelm The Numbers, a vital independent film-data site—arguing that AI’s appetite for reliable human-maintained sources may make those same sources too expensive and dangerous to keep online.
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Michael Stonebraker and Peter Baile Chen argue LLMs are not ready to let anyone reliably query enterprise data in ordinary language—because the dangerous SQL runs successfully, returns plausible numbers, and answers the wrong question with the appearance of authority.
Josh Can Help (opens on the publisher’s site)
www.joshcanhelp.com
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It feels more important now than ever to take back some control and add a layer of privacy and protection where I can. This is how I'm doing that.
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Taking a step forward on the Personal Data Pipeline project by autoloading JSON and adding an interface for data transformation.
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I've been thinking a lot about personal data lately: where it's stored, how to extract it, and what to do with it. Here's where I landed.