In this blasted hell year of 2025, it is still possible for good things to happen. A last-minute seven-figure donation has saved the Oasis nightclub in SF from having to close:
SFist - San Francisco News, Restaurants, Events, & Sports
Christmas Miracle: Oasis Nightclub Saved From Closure With Multi-Million Dollar Philanthropic Gift
Just six days before its scheduled permanent closure, popular SoMa nightclub Oasis has been saved with a seven-figure donation to keep the club ope...
MIT Technology Review profiles @npub1dy9x...e54l who understood that civil society needed digital defense long before just about anyone else and has been doing it ever since.
MIT Technology Review
Meet the man hunting the spies in your smartphone
Ronald Deibert and his research group, the Citizen Lab, have rigorously worked to unveil alarming digital threats for the past two decades. Now, he...
If you happen to be looking for bad redactions in a large set of data files today for some reason, there's an open source tool for that.
GitHub
GitHub - freelawproject/x-ray: A tool to detect whether a PDF has a bad redaction
A tool to detect whether a PDF has a bad redaction - freelawproject/x-ray
My whole timeline is made up of folks watching a 60 Minutes report the Trump administration tried to kill and unredacting Epstein files that weren't supposed to have been posted yet. Can't stop the signal.
Just to recap: The TikTok ban? Bad. The SCOTUS ruling upholding the TikTok ban? Also bad. Trump choosing not to enforce the ban? More bad. The Trump-backed mostly-US consortium taking over US Tiktok? You guessed it...bad.
The push for the TikTok ban was bipartisan and stupid. But the Trump administration's goals for the ban have always been crystal clear: to place control of TikTok in the US in the hands of people chosen by and indebted to Trump.
The US TikTok sale has been signed. The company will be controlled by a joint venture including Oracle, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, Abu Dhabi-based MGX. Adding a UAE company really makes it clear that this was never about national security concerns. https://www.axios.com/2025/12/18/tiktok-sale
This year I took my vacation in a war zone and I served on a jury in a domestic violence case and the deeply traumatic experience I would never want to repeat was jury duty.
Sometimes I love SF so much my eyes get suspiciously watery: The faith leaders, wearing religious garb from various denominations, had earlier stood in front of the courthouse doors, singing, “If you come for them, you’ll have to go through us.”
Mission Local
42 faith leaders arrested after chaining themselves to S.F. immigration court
About 20 protesters were arrested by federal police after chaining themselves to San Francisco's immigration court.
I can't believe I have to say this, but please do not take revolutionary OPSEC advice from YA novels Cory Doctorow wrote almost twenty years ago.