How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance

It's going to be a long summer. WIRED has some advice for being prepared.

Welcome to the new Werd I/O

I relaunched my website on Ghost. Here's why.

Airlines Don't Want You to Know They Sold Your Flight Data to DHS

404 Media reports that the country's major airlines are selling passenger data to Customs and Border Protection and ICE.

Who's reading Werd I/O? Community survey 2025

I’m grateful that people stop by and read my posts. I think I’m really lucky. Thank you! I love writing here, but I’d love to know how I could serve you better. So every year I ask my readers to fill in a short survey. It doesn’

Bounce lets you move your followers from Bluesky to Mastodon

[Cameron Faulkner at The Verge] Bounce is a game-changer for the open social web: "Bounce is built on the work of Bridgy Fed, which makes your Bluesky posts visible on Mastodon and vice versa. Using Bounce will bridge your accounts, in case you haven’t already set up Bridgy

The Darkest Day: A fantasy Doctor Who season

I can’t help myself. I’ve loved every moment of the rebooted Doctor Who on Disney+, but it appears to have hit a bit of a pause while Disney considers whether to renew its co-production. With its future unclear (although I’m certain it’s coming back before too

Letter to Arc members 2025

[The Browser Company] Arc is my primary browser, and I'm feeling like that's a choice I should never have made: "The part that was hard to admit, is that Arc — and even Arc Search — were too incremental. They were meaningful, yes. But ultimately not at

Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America

[Ava Kofman in The New Yorker] Curtis Yarvin is a pathetic little man: "As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months

Building a newsroom technology culture

A quick note before we begin: This post reflects my own views on newsroom technology leadership, not necessarily those of my employer. I like to say that journalism treats technology as something that happens to it — like an asteroid. But technology is too important to the future of news for

What I've Learned from Ten Years with Coral

[Andrew Losowsky] Running an open source community platform for a decade is no small feat - particularly one as storied and supported as Coral. Andrew Losowsky's reflections on its first decade are inspiring. "Among so many conversations, we brought commenters into newsrooms to speak with journalists, moderators

Sahil Lavingia's DOGE diary

[Sahil Lavingia] I personally don't think his decision to join DOGE was defensible, but there are lots of interesting details in Sahil Lavingia's diary of the 55 days he worked there. For example: "I was excited to help in-source VA's software, but I

The Substack Election

[Lauren Egan at The Bulwark] If I was Substack, this is exactly what I'd be doing. But then again, if I was Substack, I wouldn't have paid Nazis to post on my network. "The company sees an opportunity. Its employees have been meeting with congressional

Notes from Perugia: journalism, values, and building the web we need

As I write this, I’m flying home from the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. Now in its 19th year, it’s an annual meeting of newsrooms, journalists, and news professionals from all over the world. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was blown away by

Doctor Who is the best show ever made. Here's why.

The world is full of darkness. So much is going wrong. Experts agree that America has succumbed to right-wing authoritarianism; call it fascism or something else, these are extraordinarily difficult times. This post is a break from all of that. At least kind of. In this piece, I will try

Support Werd I/O

It’s time to try something new. Starting today, you can support my writing on Patreon. I’ll never put up a paywall for my blog or newsletter; in effect, by supporting, you’re helping to continue to make it available for everyone. Here’s what you’ll get: * At

No, we’re not a startup — and that’s fine

Inadvertently, the other day, I became one of those people. My team and I were sitting together as part of a week-long summit; some attendees were in New York City, while others attended remotely. I was taking them through the principles that I believe are important for developing software for

Baby's first blog post

Fp9ootron ABCXXZXCFDSESW4ZXDAWEQ!QWZ fwwqqqqwwQsxXSQWSASXC XDΩSXEDRTY7U8I9 Editor's note: does toddler input have sufficient entropy to be used as a random number generator?

Forcing people back to the office was a choice. I'm making mine.

I cleaned out my desk a little over five years ago. It feels like last week. I was leading engineering at ForUsAll, a fintech company that seeks to make it easier for small businesses to offer retirement plans for their employees. The co-founder, David, had been wearing a mask around

Fediverse

Fediverse House

If you're in Austin, visiting Fediverse House at 412 Congress Ave today and tomorrow is what you need to be doing. You don’t need a SXSW ticket - just show up and meet some of the key people building and thinking about the most important thing happening

About my Tesla

So, yes, hi, I have a Tesla. It’s a long range Model 3 which I bought in 2021. After a career spent working on open source and mission-drive projects — right now I work for a non-profit newsroom; once upon a time I built a social networking platform for education

Decentralizing the cloud: separating software from infrastructure

Much of the last decade or two of the tech industry has been dominated by the idea of the cloud: the simple, powerful idea that all of your applications and data can be accessed from any device with an internet connection. Enterprise businesses around the world have decommissioned server rooms

Please see Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

It’s Oscars day! I haven’t seen very many of the nominees this year, but of the ones I have, I need to make this recommendation: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, nominated for best documentary picture, is brilliant. It’s an under-told part of American history, still highly

The web was always about redistribution of power. Let's bring that back.

I’ve seen a lot of this sentiment lately, and can relate: I miss being excited by technology. I wish I could see a way out of the endless hype cycles that continue to elicit little more than cynicism from me. The version of technology that we’re mostly being

AfD

Hint: if a party is heavily supported by people who throw Nazi salutes, it might not be up to much good. Some voters for new right-wing parties are economically worried, but blame their issues on the influx of immigrants rather than the increasing divides between rich and poor that we&