Facing yet another weekend with little to set itself apart from those before, I homebrewed a batch of beer Friday night. Those four hours of work mean I can spend another three hours bottling all this ale next weekend–but then I should have about five gallons of beer taking up space in the basement.

8/17/2020: Privacy Optimization Meets Pandemic Tracking, O’Reilly Media

The report on coronavirus-tracing apps that I filed in draft form in early July–the first assignment I’ve had since college to be budgeted in terms of pages instead of words or column inches–finally got published. You can download a free copy of this 19-page evaluation of the potential of mobile software built on the Apple/Google Exposure Notification API by providing a minimal level of employer-related data.

8/19/2020: Twitter breach led to arrests of Saudi dissidents, Al Jazeera

The Qatar-based news network had me on to discuss Ryan Gallagher’s report for Bloomberg about how a 2015 case of Saudi spies working at Twitter led to arrests of dissidents in Saudi Arabia. The point I made–which hopefully came through in the live overdubbing into Arabic–is that Twitter can’t allow completely anonymous use if it’s going to police fake accounts, so it needs to ensure that only well-vetted employees can see the personally identifying information of its users.

8/20/2020: We Think Social Platforms Censor Political Views. Because Politicians Want Us To., Forbes

President Trump served up a news peg for this writeup of a study from the Pew Research Center about perceptions of social platforms’ treatment of political speech, and not just by posting his usual complaints about the unfairness of Twitter. Instead, he essentially played footsie in a Wednesday-evening press conference with the QAnon conspiracy-theory cult that Twitter and Facebook now rightly consider harmful.