Linked List: July 24, 2026

Friday, 24 July 2026

Coiner of ‘Enshittification’ Endorses ‘Dickover’ ★

Speaking of dickovers, here’s Cory Doctorow, writing this week at Pluralistic:

Seizing the means of computation isn’t theft, it’s bargaining. Commercial surveillance companies will tell you that by spying on you, they are simply engaged in a marketplace exchange in which you swap your privacy for access to online services. But they are running a very curious sort of market: it’s a “market” where as soon as you stop to browse someone’s wares, the stallholder gets to reach into your pocket and clean out your wallet. In “markets,” prices are announced and bargained over, not set unilaterally and extracted from anyone unwise enough to cross the threshold.

Adblocking, dickover blocking and other customizations are a way for you to bargain back, to answer the opening bid of “How about you give me all of your data forever and let me do anything I want with it?” with “How about ‘nah?’”

Doctorow’s specific advice is to switch to Firefox for your browser and Linux as your desktop OS. You’re probably not going to do either of those things. But the spirit of his advice is that you should avail yourself of bookmarklets and browser extensions that fight back against shitty ads and dickovers. There are some great options for Safari. StopTheMadness Pro is great for creating custom rules to permanently block specific page elements. uBlock Origin Lite is a free-of-charge content blocker that is incredibly effective, and very configurable (but complicated). Magic Lasso is a paid content blocker — $30/year — which includes synced blocking on iOS, MacOS, and even Apple TV. Magic Lasso offers a much more approachable configuration interface, and includes a “just turn it on” easy-to-use private VPN feature that allows for blocking ads in all apps, including Apple News.

Bargaining back is exactly what using content blockers is. There’s no reason to feel guilty about it.

(Magic Lasso has previously been a DF sponsor, but not since May 2021. I’m recommending Magic Lasso here only as a happy paying user.)

Dickover of the Week: Tomtoc ★

Here’s a real gem that a reader sent me. Tomtoc is a maker of laptop bags and sleeves. Visit their homepage and, of course, you’ll get a dickover asking you to join their mailing list “for exclusive updates and get a chance to win a free tech pouch every month.” But here’s the gem. If you do subscribe, and you decide later to unsubscribe, you get this:

Sixers Sign LeBron James ★

The betting odds for the Sixers to win the NBA championship went from 20-1 to 10-1. Here’s James on Twitter/X, explaining his decision:

This is my last decision. I’m not going for money. I’m not going for family. What am I really playing for at this point?

I still want to sacrifice. I still want to work. I still want to grind. I still want to compete, to win and to have a chance at the feeling of winning another championship.

I believe I can help make the Philadelphia 76ers a championship team and I am so excited to energize a new fan base and start this incredible journey one last time.

James signed for the league minimum for a veteran: two years at just $4 million per year. He’s going to love playing here.

The Talk Show: ‘A Scam Held Together With Patriotism and Golden Paint’ ★

Quinn Nelson returns to the show to discuss OpenAI’s ChatGPT/Codex “native” app migration fiasco, Siri AI in Apple’s OS 27 betas, MacOS 27 Golden Gate, and the hottest new cell phone of the year, the Trump T1.

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