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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

Climate

Far-Right Extremists Embrace Environmentalism to Justify Violent Anti-Immigrant Beliefs

[Abrahm Lustgarten at ProPublica] "For a generation, conservatives — not just the far right, which Crusius appeared to identify with — had propelled the notion that climate change was a hoax fabricated so the government could impose new restrictions on the economy and society. Yet Crusius hadn’t denied climate change

19 Oct 2024

Technology

My solar-powered and self-hosted website

[Dries Buytaert] "I'm excited to share an experiment I've been working on: a solar-powered, self-hosted website running on a Raspberry Pi." Lovely! The key seems to be a Voltaic 50-watt panel and 18 amp-hour battery, which run to around $300 in total. That'

18 Oct 2024

Media

Underrepresented journalists most impacted by layoffs, says new report

[James Salanga at The Objective] "Layoffs in journalism since 2022 have disproportionately impacted people of marginalized genders and people of color, according to a new report from the Institute of Independent Journalists (IIJ). It collects data from a survey with 176 journalist respondents who had undergone a layoff or

18 Oct 2024

I joined Dot Social for a conversation about the future of media

I was lucky enough to sit down with Mike McCue, CEO at Flipboard, and 404 Media co-founder (and former Motherboard Editor-in-Chief) Jason Koebler to talk about the future of media and its intersection with the future of the social web. Savvy journalists at forward-thinking newsrooms are not letting this happen

18 Oct 2024

To be clear, I'm not in any ...

To be clear, I'm not in any way saying that they should - just that I can see it as a possibility!

15 Oct 2024

Technology

Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?

[Mathew Ingram] Mathew Ingram's overview of the WordPress drama continues to be updated with new information. The hole just seems to be getting deeper and deeper. As he says: it's a mess. "It's pretty clear that Matt sees what he is doing as

15 Oct 2024

Technology

It feels like 2004 again.

[Anil Dash] Anil Dash makes a pertinent observation about the current state of the web: "At the start of this year, I wrote The Internet Is About To Get Weird Again, which began by calling back to the Internet of 2000. In thinking more about it, though, we more

15 Oct 2024

Revisiting Known

I thought it would be fun to revisit Known, the open source publishing platform that powers my site. How it works Known allows a team or community to publish news on any topic to a single, searchable stream of content that’s easily accessible from any device. It is not

13 Oct 2024

Technology

WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin

[Wes Davis at The Verge] The feud between Automattic (or more specifically, Matt Mullenweg himself) and WP Engine is getting bonkers: "WordPress.org has taken over a popular WP Engine plugin in order “to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem,” WordPress cofounder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg

13 Oct 2024

AI

Insecure Deebot robot vacuums collect photos and audio to train AI

[Julian Fell at Australian ABC News] "Ecovacs robot vacuums, which have been found to suffer from critical cybersecurity flaws, are collecting photos, videos and voice recordings – taken inside customers' houses – to train the company's AI models." So in effect these robot vacuums are tiny spies

10 Oct 2024

It turns out I'm still excited about the web

I’m worried I’ve become cynical about technology as I’ve gotten older. But maybe technology really is worse. Someone asked me the other day: “what [in media and technology] are you excited about right now?” We both agreed that it was a surprisingly difficult question. And then came

10 Oct 2024

Media

Why Reach journalists are being asked to write up to eight articles per day

[Charlotte Tobitt at Press Gazette] "Paul Rowland wrote in an email to staff on 27 September that article volumes were being talked about “a lot in newsrooms at the moment” and blamed, in part, the volatility from previously huge traffic referrers like Google and Facebook." "A separate

10 Oct 2024
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Werd I/O explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. It's independently published by Ben Werdmuller, reader-supported, and always free to read.