Featured Links - April 1, 2026

 Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Note:  There are no April fool jokes in the post.

The rite of spring

• The broligarchy's war on journalism. "The capture of US media by Trump allies is accelerating and the UK is the next in line. Plus: the mystery money behind my old newspaper." The financial shenanigans described here are quite remarkable. If you read The Guardian or The Observer, you should read this. 
• When is an alien invasion not an alien invasion? "Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's alien invasion novel is a time capsule from the Cold War, and a reminder that the threat of nuclear annihilation isn't ancient history." A good review of one of my favourite books from the 1980s that places the book in a wider historical perspective. 
• Endgame for the Open Web. "Now, the centibillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what's still open, and likely won't rest until they've either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time."
• ‘Truly spectacular’ drug for sleeping sickness simplifies treatment, raising hopes for eradication. "European regulators greenlight new one-dose compound that could help African countries get rid of an ancient burden." 
• ‘Canadians don’t want to come here any more’: anger over Trump squeezes US border businesses. "Shops and restaurants once bustling with tourists now struggle for survival as Canadians think twice about crossing the border." It's not just anger over the tariffs; people do not want to deal with the increasingly obtrusive border searches and the risk of ending up in an ICE detention centre. 
• Computer finds flaw in major physics paper for first time (archive link). "A computer language designed to robustly verify mathematical theorems and expose logical flaws has been turned towards a physics paper – and spotted an error. The discovery raises questions about how many other papers may harbour similar issues."
• How to Home. From Recomendo: "a YouTube channel with excellent videos that demonstrate how to complete common household repairs, such as wiring switches, fixing faucet leaks, and threading wire through walls and ceilings. Unlike many DIY videos, these feature high-quality audio, are well-lit, and aren’t blurry."
• How Alberta’s Separatist Movement Could Shake North America. "The resentments, politics, and risks behind their push to leave Canada." The separatists in Alberta are a small minority, but they are very committed and have ties to the US right. 
• The Hunt for Mr. Deepfakes. "A Toronto-area pharmacist is accused of being the internet’s most prolific peddler of deepfake porn. He’s just the beginning."
• This Week’s Small, Furry and Wet Reminder, That Repair is Still Possible. "Some hope for humanity, brought to you by beavers, with no consultants, no ribbon cuttings, just the ancient art of fixing what we keep breaking." Today, the UK. Tomorrow the world!
• Silicon Valley Giants Finally Face the Music. "Is this the Big Tobacco moment for the tech bros?"
• America and Public Disorder. "You can learn more about the U.S. by traveling overseas and comparing, and five years of that has taught me we accept far too much public disorder. We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening. Antisocial and abnormal behavior, open addiction, and mentally tortured people are common in almost every community regardless of size."
•  The life and times of Grateful Dead icon Bob Weir. "We salute the Grateful Dead original, who – in the last 30 years of his life – stepped out from Jerry Garcia’s considerable shadow to emerge as a guitar hero in his own right."

Movie and TV Reviews - March 2026

Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in March. 

Movies

• War Machine: I was hoping for a bit more alien tech in this one than what we got: a steampunk version of a Star Wars walker. And I could have done without the jingoistic rah rah stuff. The only reason to watch is Alan Richson doing his Arnold Schwarzenegger imitation. (Netflix)
• Project Hail Mary: A typical Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster with REALLY good special effects, but it's not in the same league as Dune or Arrival.  It's. enjoyable enough if you don't think about it too much. See it on the biggest screen you can, IMAX if at all possible. (IMAX)

TV Shows

• Grace (season 3-5): Another British detective show. I'd rate this as middling; good acting and characterization, but the plots rely too much on big action sequences for resolution. (BritBox)
• Wednesday (season 2): Big production values and quirky, Tim Burton-influenced humour. Not to be taken seriously, but fun. (Netflix)
• Celebrity Antiques Road Trip (seasons 1 and 2): Another take on the original show's tried and true formula. 13 seasons will keep us going for a while. Most of the celebrities are unfamiliar to us. (PBS)
• 3 Body Problem: A solid adaptation of a complex and somewhat difficult book. I think I prefer it to the novel, which I did read but which I didn't like enough to read the next two books in the trilogy. (Netflix)
• Scarpetta (season 1): We were looking forward to this because it is based on a series of novels by Patricia Cornwall that we've read and enjoyed. We couldn't finish watching the first episode. What a disappointment and waste of some good actors. (Amazon Prime)
• Deadloch (season 2): My review of the first season described it as a "seriously twisted dark comedy" and "totally over the top and sometimes very funny". All that applies to the second season, in spades. (BritBox)
• The Puzzle Lady: A cozy mystery with a crowwwrod puzzle creator who helps the police to solve crimes, Light entertainment and not as good as Ludwig, which had a similar idea. (PBS)

The Peril of Tracking Pixels

I've known about tracking pixels for a long time but never figured that they were much of a problem. Of course, they do reveal that you read an email or accessed a web site, but there are riskier things to worry about reading emails or browsing the web. 

But things have changed, as Steve Gibson pointed out in the latest installment of his Security Now podcast. From page 8 of his show notes:

I just learned how far tracking pixels have evolved. They’re easy to miss because, much like cookies, the code their presence on any webpage allows to run is hidden from us. But last Wednesday the 18th, the security researchers at Jscrambler shared what they had recently learned about what TikTok and Meta are doing.

Their headline was: “Beyond Analytics: The Silent Collection of Commercial Intelligence by TikTok and Meta Ad Pixels”. As we’ll see, this writing is targeted at web merchants who are voluntarily adding these insidious tracking pixels to their sites’ own webpages without a full appreciation or understanding of the privacy implications for their visitors. 

It turns out that Meta and TikTok are grabbing both personal information (names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card information) and a log of just about everything that people are doing on sites with these tracking pixels. From the report, Gibson quotes this: 

Meta’s pixel includes a feature called Automatic Events, which is enabled by default. The feature automatically scans page elements and captures information such as checkout interactions and visible payment card details, including the last digits, expiration date, and cardholder name. Since this is the default behavior and not an opt-in, merchants may not be aware that the pixel is collecting this information. On separate sites, Meta captured recipients' full names and delivery addresses when users selected address options during checkout.

This information can be used by Meta to compile a huge database of behaviour that it can sell. It's also presents a risk to anyone using those sites in the case of a security breach at Meta and because the information being sent to Meta may not be encrypted, making it a vulnerability should the user be the target of an attacker. 

Both TikTok and Meta's pixel code can load and begin transmitting data before the website's consent management system has time to block it, meaning information can leave the browser before the user’s choice is applied. Even more concerning is that data may be transmitted in cleartext—occasionally within the request URL itself—exposing sensitive information to browser histories, server logs, intermediaries, and debugging tools.

This vulnerability stems not only from the pixel’s data-collection methods but also from misconfigurations during its implementation or from issues with the website's underlying architecture. Consequently, the attack surface is significantly broader than a surface-level analysis suggest

Using Firefox, which supports the full uBlock Origin, is probably a good idea. Google Chrome supports uBlock Origin Lite (which I am using), but it's not as effective as the original uBlock Origin in blocking tracking pixels, web beacons, and tracking scripts. 

Yet another item to add to my To Do list. 

Photo of the Week - March 29, 2026

This week's picture is a follow up to last week's photo. This is the same yucca, but without any snow on top of it. I hope it recovers from the winter. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.

A yucca after the snow melts

Saturday Sounds - St. Vincent - Live in London

I haven't followed the musical career of St. Vincent (the stage name of Jules Buckley) closely though I have listened to some of her albums and enjoyed them. Live in London was performed at the Royal Albert Hall with a full orchestra as part of the BBC Pops series. 

Orchestral pop albums can be hit or miss but this one nails it. The arrangements perfectly suit her songs and the recording quality, as you might expect from the BBC, is outstanding. She's performing in Toronto with an orchestra on her current tour but unfortunately ticket prices are out of my league. 

The Bloated Web Page

I'm constantly annoyed and frustrated by the crap that websites are blasting my phone with when I try t o read an article or browse a web page. Popups, autoplaying videos that refuse to close, ads that jump out and shove the text I'm reading out of the way;; I'm sure you've seen it all.

If you want to get a better idea of what's happening and why, read The 49MB Web Page by Shumham Bose, a developer and user interface design expert. The article was triggered when they looked behind the scenes at what was happening when they opened an article from The New York Times website and found that the browser downloaded 49 MB of data. (That's roughly equivalent to an album of MP3s or 50 books in EPUB format). 

When you open a website on your phone, it's like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.

I don't usually see most of this on my PC because I run an ad blocker (uBlock Origin Lite) that blocks much of the crap that the article discusses.  I use Firefox with uBlock Origin as my default browser on the phone, despite the annoyance of having different browsers on my PC and phone. (I know, I know; it's just laziness that keeps me from using Firefox on my PC). Apps, where publishers seem to consider pushing ads their primary purpose in life, are also problematic. 

I should point out that there are real security problems inherent in the use of programmatic ad auctions and tracking pixels and their associated scripts. (I'll have another post about this tomorrow or Monday). 

This is the best article about web design that I've seen in a very long time. Even if you're not particularly technical, it's worth reading just to understand why your browsing experience is so unpleasant.

Featured Links - March 25, 2026

Things I was interested in but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Bluffer's Park on a cloudy day

• Inside the fiery, deadly crashes involving the Tesla Cybertruck. "Cybertrucks have locked passengers inside and burned so hot they’ve disintegrated drivers’ bones. Victims’ families blame what they say is the faulty design of a truck Elon Musk calls ‘apocalypse-proof’" Just in case you need another reason to not buy a Cybertruck. 
• No Pills or Needles, Just Paper: How Deadly Drugs Are Changing (gift link). "Lab-made drugs soaked into the pages of letters, books and even legal documents are being smuggled behind bars, killing inmates and frustrating investigators."
• Inside the Dirty, Dystopian World of AI Data Centers (archive link). "The race to power AI is already remaking the physical world."
  
• Resisting the superbugs (archive link). "Canadian researcher Gerry Wright is searching for the next generation of life-saving antibiotics." Unfortunately, discovering a new antibiotic is easier than getting it to market. 
  
• Record-torching March heat ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change. "Friday’s spring equinox may seem like a quaint notion to those already enduring furnace-like 90-110°F summer heat." In this part of the country, we've had a cold winter with more snow than usual in recent years.
• The Trap Always Closes. "Donald Trump, Lyndon Johnson, and wars we can’t win." History shows that Trump can't win this war. His only way out is to stop, and he won't.
• Ryugu asteroid samples contain all DNA and RNA building blocks, bolstering origin-of-life theories. "We are stardust, we are golden ...".
• The World Factbook. "The community-maintained successor to the CIA World Factbook. Comprehensive data on 254 countries and territories." The CIA killed the CIA World Factbook in February and that this site is maintaining the information. 
• Canada wants to build up its long-neglected Arctic. The hard question is how. "Ottawa wants to modernize a region in the north that’s about six times the size of Texas, ‘just like in the 1800s’"
• As SpaceX Launches its 10,000th Satellite, A Photographer Captures the Impact on the Night Sky, "This week SpaceX passed an eye-watering milestone: it launched its 10,000th satellite into low-Earth orbit. The sheer scale of the devices whizzing around above humanity is unimaginable, but photographer Joshua Rozells is helping people see. Rozells’ image, Swamped Skies, is a composite of 343 photos that all contain at least one satellite streak. The Australian photographer didn’t set out to make the image; he originally wanted to capture star trails."
• Project Hail Mary is packed with hard science. An astrophysicist breaks it down. '"Project Hail Mary" is more than just an epic adventure film with beautiful visuals. It's a story that reminds us how important our world is—and how vital science is to our continued existence on it.'
• When Hyperglobalization Meets Chaos. "Choke points are everywhere you look." The crisis over the strait of Hormuz is only the beginning. 
• Historians Say They’ve Discovered a Long-Lost Page From the Archimedes Palimpsest, a Treasure Trove of Rare Ancient Mathematical Treatises. "Three leaves had been missing for more than a century. Researchers found one of them when they decided on a whim to check the archives of a French museum."

Photo of the Week - March 22, 2026

This week's photo is of a hasta yucca in our front yard that has spent most of the winter buried under a waist-high mound of the snow. I hope this winter hasn't killed it off. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro and edited in Google Photos to improve the contrast. 

Leaves of a yucca mostly buried in the snow