The real difference between state surveillance programs and techbro surveillance programs? It's all in the names. The former are usually fairly innocuous-sounding: ECHELON, PRISM etc. The latter could have been thought up by 15 year old gamers, drunk on their own wild power – "look upon my GOD VIEW and despair, puny mortals!"

Five A Day

Everybody wants to buy organic. Nobody has the faintest idea what that means. Nestle to the rescue with their exercise in a bottle thing?

This may all be immaterial, because it looks like your health and fitness apps and various devices will ultimately betray you in court.

One A Day

It's the new thing that's not that new at all. this.cm lets users post one story a day. meh.com offers one product a day for sale.

Early Christmas Gift Klaxon

Get your loved ones the Good Web Bundle. Full access to five of the greatest things on the web for half the usual price. It's what the web should be, and still can be. Anil Dash explains it better than I can.

I see a bunch of sites where instead of women getting harassed, women are founders. I see a web where people are having fun with each other, while they're goofing off during their lunch hour. I see the web we'll curl up with when we're stuck at our parents' house at Thanksgiving and can't stand listening to the TV blasting anymore.

Eye Candy

Cities On Cliffs

Worth Pondering

Totally Confused

Sad compliant robot, mammoth resurrection, food porn addiction, Yelp prison reviews and the museum of selfies

Finally, Wait, What Does Your Startup Do?

@loughlin

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Today is a pretty damn good day for headlines. 'Uber Has An Asshole Problem', 'Barbie Fucks It Up Again' and 'Got Milk? Might Not Be Doing You Much Good' are all standouts and relevant to my interests.

Continuing on, 'Anonymous Takes On The Ku Klux Klan', 'Artist 3D Prints the World’s Smallest Sculptures. Loses Them.' and 'San Francisco’s New Dog Mayor Calls For Mandatory Belly Rubs' are, I'm sure you'll agree, also all very strong headlines deserving mention.

Anyway, programmers have agents now and we all remember how well that worked out the last time, right?

Take the hassle out of sexting with Flirtmoji. Follow how 2 sext on Twitter for lovingly pre-crafted sexts.

If you have a few more minutes to spare, the YouGov profiler provides all kinds of fun opportunities. Bob Geldof fans are the people who still use Internet Explorer.

Eye Candy

Kilian Schönberger

Worth Pondering

Totally Confused

Word of the year, religious Vader, bear-boganning, embarassing tweets revealed and 8chan is completely horrible

Finally, today's mix is Weighted Eyelids by Dan Bodan. I don't advise listening to this whilst falling asleep, despite what Dan says.

@loughlin

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Why spend three grand on a mass manufactured telepresence robot? Locally grown artisianal telepresence solution iPad On A FaceTM brings telepresence doubling to you!

Brought to you by the amazing Stupid Projects From The Stupid Hackathon. Even more Stupid Projects.

It looked like a cross between social media and talk radio, if talk radio had a visual component where a bunch of digital characters shoot one another. And as a form of entertainment, it seemed perfectly suited to a world where people jump around browser windows, watching a video in one, checking Facebook in another.

It seems to be that time where there are a few pieces about professional video gaming doing the rounds. I have yet to figure out why this happens every few months, or whether it’s becoming more frequent, considering that this has been a ‘thing’ for a considerable number of years now. The New Yorker does it well, not surprisingly. The New York Times can’t resist rolling out a few of the traditional cliches but comes up with a good profile piece. Ultimate takeaway: it’s just another job.

The NYT also has a piece on the improbable success of John Oliver. The shorter version of this article would read “perfect for YouTube”.

Remaining with cyclical thinkpieces, ‘The Web is Dying!’ In cyclical response pieces, ‘No it isn’t!’

This is a wearable that will definitely be a success.

Man wears the same suit for a year. Nothing happens.

Whilst reading this piece about Facebook at Work, bear in mind that Facebook has been announcing something similar to Facebook at Work on a fairly regular basis for quite some time now.

Eye Candy

Porcelain Fractal Sculptures

Worth Pondering

Totally Confused

Gordon Ramsay’s table booking nightmares, Beards of Time, thieving squirrel, scam artist to clean up Ebola and emoji evolution.

Finally, ‘Biblical Verses Where “Philistines” Are Replaced With “Haters”‘.

@loughlin

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First, a #ShirtStorm update!

Serial. Serial Serial Serial.

It's the golden days of radio all over again and the salvation of the content 'industry' or something. Serial

I finally caught up with the long form This American Life-birthed podcast over the weekend. It's very well crafted and captivating. I'm hooked. Of course, I'm not the only one.

Before Serial was international news, Reddit was rapidly on the case. Reddit being Reddit, some people promptly set about attempting to doxx the characters in the story. The admins of the Reddit board attempted to stop this and seem to have been mostly successful. That was until the Daily Mail decided that it was in the public interest for it to do so after the latest episode. You stay classy, Daily Mail.

• Podcast about the podcast, from the AV Club
• Parodies of the podcast
• Puns about the podcast

In other serious online content news, both The Onion and Funny Or Die are up for sale.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Auroras

Totally Confused

Bread, burgers, bros, bullets and just plain ol' bad.

Sportsing Video Corner: The Bad And The Good

The FIFA Files. Manuel Neuer

Finally, do you compulsively self-edit as you type? This tool will probably do one of two things for you: help solve this problem or drive you demented. You have been warned.

@loughlin

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It seems parts of the Internet experienced a sudden outbreak of adlessness on Wednesday. I can't say I noticed because cough Adblock, but interesting nonetheless.

In comet updates, the silly bearded scientist attempted to make the comet landing all about his silly sexist shirt. Not really, but as an antidote to that silliness, here's This Is What A Scientist Looks Like

Without diving too far back into the mess that is GamerGate, here's a guy that people hate a lot more than the silly scientist, and rightly so.

Back In The Real World

More than four hundred people have visited a health centre for screening for blood-borne viruses after 22,000 dental patients were recalled … Doug Black, medical director for NHS England in Nottinghamshire, said it was the "largest recall in NHS history".

Dentist Desmond D'Mello investigation: Screening for blood-borne viruses begins

• The Dirty History of Doctor's Hands
  (This is from a lovely-looking new quarterly called Method.)

Paul Mason of Channel 4 has a superb rant about banks and their ongoing misdemeanours here.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

A Beijing Facelift

Totally Confused

Aging boy band members, 'Let It Goat', always-clean lettuce, chainsaw in pants and lumbersexuals.

Finally, make your Wikipedia browsing much slicker with WikiWand. Seriously, it's great and will make you read even more Wikipedia articles that are not immediately relevant to your interests than ever before.

Yours weekendingly, @loughlin

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Well done primates. The best thing to come out of humans landing a robot on a comet so far is this adorable video of Rosetta and Philae.

• Also, the comet sings

Internets

YouTube launches its paid music service. Amazingly, Ireland is one of the first countries it is being rolled out to. Twitter can silence obnoxious eejits if they want to, but is this the way they should go about it? Meanwhile, Twitter seems to have forgotten that they used to provide Google with their firehose and tweets showed up in Google real-time search results.

General techbros

The meritocratic glow of Silicon Valley is so frustrating. It creates a pass for people who use things like the "culture" filter. What's the culture filter? An easy excuse to be prejudiced. It's culture bias, like [not hiring someone] because they didn't like Animal Collective as much as you do? Seriously.

Race in Silicon Valley

Could we possibly see a new category of awards in games development, Best Glitches? Some of these from Assassin's Creed Unity are the stuff of nightmares.

Worth Pondering

Pedantry alert. This is not a selfie.

Eye Candy

Double exposures by Julia Fullerton Batten

Totally Confused

3D print yourself for love, a computer that writes folk music, the other side of Internet fame, women not as creepy as men and Orwellian

Finally, vote for Steph Roche in FIFA's Puskas awards if you're so inclined. A nation once again!

Yours as always, @loughlin

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The crew manning the Katie Hopkins Klaxon is still being kept busy. 78% of Mirror readers think she's gone too far. For Hopkins, that is presumably mission accomplished.

• Who said it: Katie Hopkins or Stormfront?
• Katie Hopkins and the Dangers of Obverse Journalism
• A collection of probably made-up Richard Madeley quotes

Inviting the Internet to 'meme' you is probably never a good idea, especially if you're Bill Cosby and you have multiple allegations of rape and sexual assault following you around.

I think that everybody sexts. Not everyone sends nude photos, of course, for a variety of reasons. But many people I’ve talked to define a sext as anything sent with sexual intent, be it a suggestive Gchat exchange, a racy photo, a suggestive Snapchat, or even those aqua-blue droplets of sweat emoji.

Everybody sexts

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Chuck Anderson

Totally Confused

Mayonnaise wars, 600 years of selfies, DogVaCay, vacation breasts and wacky world leader costumes.

Finally, from the 'it can't possibly be any good' desk, the Game of Thrones video game.

Yours as always, @loughlin

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“I fly all around the world and go to conferences.” Let that sink in, because it doesn’t seem to be part of a parody, or an excerpt from a conference logistics workers’ diary but an actual part of an actual New Yorker profile. Still, “like Phyliss Diller or Beetlejuice” is one hell of a hairstyle.

Facebook seems to feel it deserves some kind of cookie for giving its users a smidgen more control over what updates they see, from entities whose updates they’ve decided they want to see.

Obligatory link to ‘Too Many Cooks’.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy, Berlin Mauerfall Edition

The 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down was celebrated at the weekend. There were many balloons involved.

• InFocus, ‘The Berlin Wall, 25 Years After the Fall’
• A History of the Berlin Wall through maps
• The Berlin Wall of Sound
• ‘Why the fall of the Berlin Wall led to the world we know today’
• ‘Our own private Germany’

Totally Confused

Hiding in plain e-sight, an accurate org chart, Orwell trending in Egypt, a truly disturbing Vine and a humiliated grammar bully

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Did you know there were extremely posh corners of the Internet, and you're not invited? Unless you can stump up the cash, of course.

The Feds are looking for more from Facebook, while Twitter belatedly does something about it's rather large harassment issues. Asking someone else to take care of it for you is better than nothing, I suppose.

Meanwhile, in surprising news, Buzzfeed doesn't do clickbait. Apparently.

• Clickbait PhD

The Internet Of Things (That Shout At You Or Watch You)

Somebody, somewhere might have naked pictures of you that your own machines have taken. Now you can buy yet another device that will shout instructions at you. Thanks Amazon, hope it works out as well as your phone …

• Extra Echo

Oireland

Regarding the ECB letters, and the general shenanigans back then, this is worth revisiting.

The effect of this fantasy is plain to see in TV3’s The Apprentice, a brilliant satire on what now passes for an Irish business culture, a world where commitment, hunger and determination (all synonyms for wanting) are valued above skill, intelligence or any other real-world attribute.

Fergal Crehan, from 2010.

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Movie title typos, illustrated. London, Instagrammed and timelapsed.

Totally Confused

My name is NOT Elizabeth Gallagher, Facebook, you're NOT my mother, no dog walking for you, no smart phone and just stop looking at your phone.

Finally, which lemur are you?

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Took a mini-break from the newsletter earlier this week so I could pay attention to the stream of breathless tweets emerging from the Web Summit. People were impressed by a bridge made from shipping containers, balloons, everything a man from Twitter said, and just the overall humblingness of being there.

People were less impressed by the sad old conference reliables of misogyny, poxy WiFi and the discriminatory caste system when it came to getting free grub.

All of this was eclipsed by renaissance man Enda Kenny and his “Dig-ee-taaahl Sum-maht” song and dance routine (watch the hand!)

Bonus Summit: Can you solve a hurdle?

Anyway, that will all be over soon. If you read just one thing this week, make it ‘The Sixth Stage of Grief is Retro-Computing. It’s a really poignant and beautiful piece of writing.

Won’t Somebody Think Of The Intelligence Agencies?

Spying is hard. It’s just plain mean to make spying harder by not handing information over to spies.

• Doc Searls on what a nice social network might look like
• What’s the use of worrying anyway, as it turns out your TV is watching you, unblinkingly

For relaxing times, make it Suntory time

Worth Pondering

Eye Candy

Kowloon cross section

Totally Confused

Better security questions, Tupperware empire, the 36 people who run Wikipedia, why innocent people plead guilty and how murderers use Facebook.

Finally, in absurd Kickstarters that will probably go on to be incredibly successful because what do I know, Mousr! In fact, it’ll probably end up on a future edition of this list.

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