iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

insurance company: we are denying you access to the medical care that your doctor prescribed. you can find out more at [broken link]. me: that link is broken insurance company: sorry, we can't help you with that question me: I mean, yeah, your job is denying access to prescription medicine, not […]

techpolicy.social

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

the Freedom of Speech Online Conference (from @CenDemTech and Stand Together Trust) next week is covering threats to online anonymity: foso26.cdt.org Always a good event, but I'm especially looking forward to the very topical discussions about age verification and anti-fraud/proof of […]

techpolicy.social

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2026

A new one for me: the AI-generated auto answer gives correct information, but of course I don't trust it, so I click on the link that the AI generated text provides as a citation. But the citation is wrong, and so that link gives me conflicting information, which in this case is incorrect. This […]

techpolicy.social

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026

@ben ebikes! life-changing personally, community-changing for parents and kids, and society-changing for urban environments and the climate

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

@mhoye some artificial sensory triggers are pretty old-fashioned: e.g. the smell added to gas so that people can easily detect a leak

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026

Want to help with that work? The Threats and Harms Community Group is free and easy to join: www.w3.org/community/threats-and-ha… (It’s just a mailing list, for now.)

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026

The Advisory Board's recommendations, and the work (lots) ahead: 1. reporting regularly on human rights impacts of web standards; 2. expanding wide review to consider topics like sustainability and free expression; 3. chartering a dedicated group to document threats to human rights online and […]

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026

A couple years ago, at W3C’s 30th anniversary, I gave a speech recognizing our duties, as a technical and human community, to supporting human rights in web technology. www.w3.org/2024/09/TPAC/talk/w3c30-… It's a welcome sight for W3C community leadership to continue that progress.

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Advisory Board @ab has published their recommendations for supporting human rights in web standards. www.w3.org/TR/furthering-human-righ… Aligning technical standards with human rights has been a long project, involving privacy standards […]

techpolicy.social

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

I don't want the rest of my professional life to consist of trying to decipher whether a human wrote something or just pasted something from their chatbot, navigating how to ask that politely, and/or spending most of my time responding to unending streams of slop.

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

if browsers enabled one-click presentation of cryptographic proofs of email ownership, how would that primarily be used? -- tracking users across domains, selling their identity and personal information to data brokers, and spam could we protect against that small step towards even more […]

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

I can't find it now, but someone has been posting occasionally about how we need safe accessible social media style communities for kids, and so schools could run their own fediverse instances, with good moderation, so that kids can get exposed to and learn how to use social media within their […]

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

Do IETF/W3C spec documents get longer, wordier, more abstruse when every commit is co-authored by an LLM? Do, and should, specifications include documentation on what the LLM provided vs what the purported editor provided?

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026

'booking a vacation' has become the quintessential AI use case. are these developers just all too rich? they don't want to learn about travel, or how things work in other countries? or it's an existing model and people want travel agents back, as long as they don't have to pay them?

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

If you're unwilling to read the text answers to open-ended questions in your survey, I would rather you not ask those questions at all, rather than asking them, and then asking an AI to summarize instead of reading them. That is: if you won't bother to read something, why should I bother to […]

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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 18/07/2026

We didn't previously integrate wildfire-smoke costs into the supposed cost of climate change for the US, and it turns out to be bigger than all those other costs combined. Oops! Gosh I wonder if we're underestimating anything else. Probably shoulda done something about this. Ah well.

heatmap.news

What Worries Me Most About This Wildfire Smoke

We didn’t know days like this could happen. Then we learned how bad they really are.

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/06/2026

many consider the web too centralized on the user agent side (fair!), what if in order to get your new website to load, you had to ping someone on the Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox teams and get them to approve it?

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/06/2026

like with any decentralized protocol, you have to get advance permission from developers at a single company before using any of the functionality

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b @b.xoxo.zone.ap.brid.gy · 26/06/2026

The simpler approach to AI, I propose, is to go back to the other thread: when you say you're going to mass-harvest the work of creators so that you can replace those creators at mass scale, that's dead center in the sphere of unfair business dealings. If you only pay creators with enough […]

xoxo.zone

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Kate Ruane @kateruane.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

@davidgreene.bsky.social speaking the absolute truth. "Parenthood, even in the earliest days, made it clear to me that my children were not mere balls of clay for me to mold. They were, and are, their own people."

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/06/2026

@ben I have an Aventon Abound SR (short-tail), an ebike that works well for me and my 3-year old. And I admire the Abound (long-tail) when I see them parked at the bike rack. The Thule seats are really nice for our toddler (we have one on each of our bikes). While the Thule seat fits on most any […]

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/06/2026

Let's put a nice, 17 acre park with multiple playgrounds and picnic shelters at the end of a greenway. We have multiple parking lots in case people want to drive. How many bike racks should we have? Durham, NC: Zero, definitely.

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Ross Grady @rossgrady.dood.net.ap.brid.gy · 18/06/2026

Central North Carolina people: I *hope* you don't know this dude, but if you recognize him or his car, speak up. He is an attempted murderer of two cyclists in Durham. (Also: Is it weird that the cops appear to have surveillance photos from a tire shop but they don't have his name or any other […]

dood.net

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/06/2026

that "best minds of my generation lost to madness" quote is a much better fit for the AI endlessly-making-you-feel-right-prompting machine, but we already re-used it too much for the ad-clicking-data metaphor, so, alas, it's not available

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/06/2026

it might be individually unhelpful to express your rage at some lone individual when it's actually a small symptom of a much larger systemic problem, and, it's totally normal for people to get mad when they suffer consequences from an individual symptom of a much larger systemic problem; like […]

techpolicy.social

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Jan Penfrat @ilumium.eupolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2026

Okay, turns out I don't manage to participate in many panels after all, but still wanted to highlight @cdteurope's excellent panel "Beyond age gating" about how to _really_ protect minors online (hint: it's not by banning them from social media). 👏 #CPDP2026

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Laurie Voss @seldo.alpaca.gold.ap.brid.gy · 09/05/2026

You're just saying "I have no literally no additional ideas as to what we could do".

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/05/2026

Call for participation in the Online Safety Community Group at @w3c: www.w3.org/community/online-safety/… While many stakeholders have a particular interest in bolstering safety for vulnerable populations such as children […]

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/04/2026

stepped out to the burger stand for lunch / passed a press conference about the local children kidnapped by ICE

crowd of people around a blue podium saying Siembra NC, a speaker with long black hair, two posters with pictures of smiling young children

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/04/2026

the wiring to my ebike's integrated headlamp snapped, while I was installing a rack and basket. do bike shops like to fix that kind of electrical thing? or am I an adult that should just relearn the skills to solder/heat-shrink/whatever wires back together?

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/03/2026

maybe we could just recognize that some people genuinely find it fun, I can get that. maybe they could stop the self-justification that their fun was essential and inevitable and that everyone else, even as they watched it destroy the institutions around them, had to find it fun too.

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/03/2026

the only way to stop centralization is for everyone to stop learning anything about technology and instead outsource all practical understanding to a small number of tools

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/03/2026

@evan @timbray right, we need to reduce emissions in every sector of society. In tech, where we work, AI has led most companies to abandon their promises and increase emissions where they had been on track to reducing them. It's not as significant as transportation or heating or food, but for […]

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/02/2026

Indicative datum from using chat apps with emoji reactions, my most commonly used reacji, or at least one that is always listed in my frequently-used list is: :disappointed:

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/02/2026

'sure, the last dozen times we told you this we were lying, and our ultimate goal is to erase the gains of labor over the past hundred years, extract as much money as possible to as few people as possible, burn all the fuel we can to prevent progress towards climate adaptation, undermine every […]

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/02/2026

Denial of service attacks at different levels: * I wrote this 20 page document with an LLM. Can you now review it and tell me if it's any good? * Someone I don't know wrote a wordy issue/request. Is this real? Would it insult them to ask if it's AI-generated? * Although boosters have been wrong […]

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/02/2026

just heard an insulting NPR piece on the "extreme" measures that some Olympic athletes are taking to avoid getting COVID before competing. Some are wearing masks inside!!1!

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/02/2026

> (This is how men behave.) Among the more sickening parentheticals I've read.

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Kate Ruane @kateruane.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

The TikTok deal has improved the privacy of exactly no one and has done nothing to improve national security. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

nytimes.com

TikTok Strikes Deal for New U.S. Entity, Ending Long Legal Saga

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Daphne Keller @daphnek.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

@anupamchander.bsky.social with the money quote: “My worry all along is that we may have traded fears of foreign propaganda for the reality of domestic propaganda.” www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

nytimes.com

TikTok Strikes Deal for New U.S. Entity, Ending Long Legal Saga

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Tim Bray 🇨🇦 @timbray.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy · 17/01/2026

What would happen if ICE wanted to join the Fediverse? Most instances probably wouldn’t host that account, but some would. The account would be broadly blocked at both individual and instance levels, and some instances would probably defederate the hosting instance. Some folks would migrate […]

cosocial.ca

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/01/2026

We could try to explain the privacy concept of "resignation" (answering apparent "privacy paradox" with evidence that people conclude surveillance is inescapable) with academic papers from Joe Turow and survey research ... or, you could just watch this Subway Take […]

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/12/2025

@jyasskin I've been iterating on a single-sentence definition I can give students when I've lectured on the topic. My current draft: > Built on top of the Internet, the World Wide Web is a standardized, decentralized client-server information system in which user agents browse links between […]

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/12/2025

We (@CenDemTech @grittygrease) helped to organize a workshop in July, alongside the IETF 123 meeting in Madrid, with leaders from @ietf, @w3c, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (including @mallory), and civil society to discuss institutional design and human rights […]

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/12/2025

The decisions made in standard-setting have "crucial ramifications for human rights" (so says the Human Rights Council) — so how should we design technical standard-setting bodies and their practices to better support human rights?

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myrmepropagandist @futurebird.sauropods.win.ap.brid.gy · 14/12/2025

I think that schools should take on this role. You could have a server for a school with mastodon, but not connected to the rest of the fedi, you could network with similar schools. Just like at the school dance the teachers are around so there are limits to how it's used. Teens could post […]

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/11/2025

I wish it need not have happened in my time

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Nick Doty @npdoty.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/11/2025

because my favorite fediverse client is behind cloudflare, had to log in to my instance to directly to keep using decentralized social media

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