Asides

Elon Musk’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nitter’s maintainer, a legitimate service that displays X posts through a different interface. The person, who goes by zedeus, complied with the threat, took down their own Nitter instance, and stopped development.

These guys don’t even bother hiding the hypocrisy anymore. They scrape the entire internet to feed their AI parrots, but turn around and use financial muscle and legal harassment to go after individuals doing the same thing — for more honest reasons and on a garage-shop scale.

XCancel, the popular Nitter instance I’ve been using for several months now, is still up.

Update (19h33): XCancel is down, too.

Early in 2026, a Chinese app that alerts trusted contacts if the user is still alive made some noise. The premise, somewhat morbid, is useful for certain groups, like activists, journalists covering high-risk areas, and people who live alone. The person has to check in at regular intervals. If they fail to, their contacts are notified automatically.

Wellness Ping is a variation on this kind of service with an approach that promises greater privacy: it’s free, requires no app download, and everything happens over email or Signal (preferred). Announcing version 2.0, its creator, who goes by Micr0byte, said that the code (which is open source) went through a full security review.

LineageOS now has a web installer. The project warns, however, that it doesn’t handle the entire process, and that you’ll still need to follow the instructions on your device’s wiki. Even so, it should make things considerably easier during those major yearly updates. In the same announcement, they report that work on LineageOS 24 — based on Android 17 — is “progressing nicely”.

Hot take: if you feel comfortable with Markdown, you don’t need an editor that displays the formatting. Any plain text editor will do. The rest is just fluff.

Google will remove the last traces of Manifest v2, the feature that enabled robust ad-blocking extensions like uBlock Origin, in Chrome versions 150 and 151. Chromium forks — Edge and Opera — have signaled they will follow Google’s lead, though no firm deadlines have been set. Manifest v3-compliant ad blockers work, albeit with limitations.

Firefox (and its derivatives) and Safari will continue to support Manifest v2.

At the opening of Build 2026, Microsoft lived up to the nature of the event — focused on developers — and announced, among other things, a slew of updates to make Windows 11 more appealing to this audience. The linuxification of Windows is moving forward at full steam, now with native coreutils and container support in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Beyond that, plenty of things involving AI “agents” — the big theme this year — including native support for OpenClaw.

Still thinking about Google I/O…

Google presented “AI agents” capable of doing people’s work in countless scenarios, none of them very believable for real people. (Who needs AI to organize a neighborhood block party?) At TechCrunch, Sarah Perez writes a solid critique of this questionable utopia that Google is trying to sell us.

On my end, I think we’re living a “Groundhog Day” moment of that Google Now feature from ~2012, which would notify you via push notification that your flight’s gate had changed. As if that information wasn’t already on your face the whole time at the airport. For 15 years Google has been using different technologies, each increasingly complex and expensive, to try to solve problems that no human being has ever actually had.

I had the chance to see the “privacy screen” that Samsung put on the Galaxy S26 Ultra in person at one of the brand’s stores. It has two levels of dimming, and at either level, the screen loses a lot of brightness for the person using the device (facing it; see this video), and although I wasn’t wearing glasses, I got the impression (and I wasn’t the only one) that the drop in resolution with the privacy screen enabled is noticeable (for some, even with it disabled).

For me, the significant emphasis Samsung places on a tangential feature supports a healthy trend I noticed years ago: phones became utilities, and buying one is now similar to buying a refrigerator.

Simplenote, a note-taking app with very good syncing, is in maintenance mode, which means that there are no features/new developments planned or in development, only occasional bug fixes. The news was dropped on a support forum, which fits with the melancholic end of the app, bought by Automattic in 2013.

Firefox 148, released on Tuesday (24th), features a kill switch for the browser's AI features. Below it are selective controls for specific features. All of them are located in a new area in the settings (about:preferences), called “Artificial Intelligence Controls.”

Confirming the rumors, the upcoming iOS 26.4 is expected to bring end-to-end encryption to messages exchanged between iPhone and Android using the RCS standard. There’s more: as this feature depends on a newer version of RCS, 3.0, other welcome additions are also expected to arrive: editing and deleting sent messages, reactions (tapback) without duplicating messages, and replying to specific messages.