Friday links for April 24th 2026
Here we go, some links for your Friday perusal:
1. Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want
Tech leaders dream of inventing the sci-fi future while people just want simple, useful things that will make their lives easier.
2. We must keep age verification from killing anonymity online
Age verification for children is age verification for everyone. That means every adult will also have to hand over their ID to get online. We need to protect children but we don’t want an internet that requires identification for everything.
3. How Big Tech wrote secrecy into EU law to hide data centres’ environmental toll
This is wild. Microsoft and some lobbyists got the EU to copy-paste rules they wrote into European legislation. The rules in question are intended to hide data centre energy and water consumption.
4. Europe Measures Digital Sovereignty. Why Doesn’t It Publish the Results?
The European Commission created a framework to measure digital sovereignty in cloud services. But they don’t publish details about the scoring, limiting transparency. A good start but methodology transparency is needed to make proper choices.
5. Borders are a construct, but this swing isn’t
This is fun: there's a swing on the Belgium-Netherlands border that lets you cross back and forth between countries while you play on it.
Have a good one,
Colin