Tessera

Now getting AI generated spam tailored to my blog entries (badly). We are indeed on the shittiest timeline.

When to reach for a well-known URI — and the traps that catch most protocol designers. https://mnot.net/blog/2026/well_known_uris

As always, @kkomaitis nails it: "[W]hen trust dissolves in networked systems, states do what states have always done: they seek insulation, redundancy, and control. Digital sovereignty, in that sense, is not merely ideological fragmentation. It is geopolitical insurance against uncertainty in an

Anybody else getting this on random Web sites? Any of my Googly friends care to comment? (Safari latest, been happening for the last <1 week)

OH in coffee shop: “The final season of America is riveting.” Response: “But we’ll be disappointed with the finale. Just like Game of Thrones.”

My father-in-law passed recently, and so I was helping my mother-in-law clean up the digital leftovers today. It turns out he had subscribed to a few substacks. They had a shared e-mail address, so I went to unsubscribe him and delete the account. Substack has decided to handle Australia's age

Anyone want to go in on a proposal for a Unicode emoji of a guillotine? It feels very 2026.

and... "Regulation that’s defined entirely in terms of the technology it regulates, as opposed to in terms of the effects it has on society or imposing boundaries and limits on the technology itself, is a core component of the technopolistic political and legislative environment."

"The game of technology is defined and controlled by the United States of America. Local governments can impose rules that moderate the impact, but genuine limitations on technology are impossible. Or, they used to be." https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-old-world-of-tech-is-dying/ Via

> pipx install feed-survey > feed-survey-probe -r https://mnot.net/

"A stable competitive market never has more than three significant competitors, the largest of which has no more than four times the market share of the smallest." https://www.bcg.com/publications/1976/business-unit-strategy-growth-rule-three-four

I looked through Common Crawl and found over 300,000 parseable RSS/Atom feeds, confirming that Web feeds are still a major part of the Open Web. But most aren’t high quality, and autodiscovery often points users at stale or abandoned feeds. https://mnot.net/blog/2026/feed-survey

Every online interaction is a lopsided negotiation. For AI to truly work for us, we need more than just safety -- we need to start building true agency. https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/04/24/agents_as_collective_bargains

Implementation as a browser extension here: https://github.com/mnot/feedmenu-extension

Playing around with a new way to discover feeds on a site; feedback most welcome. https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-nottingham-feed-menu-00.html

This needs to be spread wide and far. https://www.themandarin.com.au/311397-privacy-raised-during-teen-social-media-ban-tech-trial-were-ignored/

If this is true, AI creates even more pressure towards centralisation than is obviously apparent (and there's a lot that's apparent). For previous thoughts, see: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2024/11/29/platforms

I wrote a while back about Carliss Baldwin's excellent insights into platforms and openness. One of her underlying points (AIUI) is that modularity helps manage complexity, and at a certain scale and under certain conditions distributing it across multiple companies through standard interfaces

AI seems to have the same pathology that leads humans to name files like "report_final_done_final2_lastone_finanimeanit_revision3"

In the last few weeks, Trump has done more for the worldwide adoption of electric vehicles than any previous US president. Congratulations.

In 2026, kids skating in public spaces isn’t annoying - it’s FUCKING WHOLESOME, carrying on a 40+ year legacy, and certainly should not be considered any kind of crime.

Guidelines for aspiring Nobel Prize winners: 1. Do not threaten other countries with wholesale destruction and possible genocide.