Tony Webster
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tony.xyz
Tony Webster
@tony.xyz
3.7K followers 250 following 30 posts
Personal account, views expressed are my own
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Reposted by Tony Webster
caylen.bsky.social
a “Space Force”, if you will
dieworkwear.bsky.social derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 5d
we need a department of kerning
The Department of War's seal hangs on a wall. The kerning appears to be off.
November 13, 2025 at 2:27 PM
Reposted by Tony Webster
josephcox.bsky.social
New incredible detail here: ICE says a match in its facial recognition app Mobile Fortify is a "definitive" determination of a person's status, and that this overrides birth certificates. This is an app ICE is using in the field to scan people

www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...
Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement “Mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens at risk of detention and even deportation.” He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”
October 29, 2025 at 3:03 PM
Reposted by Tony Webster
josephcox.bsky.social
We tested out Zenni's anti-facial recognition glasses coating. It actually (kinda, technically) works? "ID Guard" adds a pink sheen to the surface of the glasses that reflects the infrared light used by some facial recognition cameras. So, only threats like that

www.404media.co/zennis-anti-...
Zenni’s Anti-Facial Recognition Glasses are Eyewear for Our Paranoid Age
These anti-facial recognition glasses technically work, but won’t save you from our surveillance dystopia.
www.404media.co
October 27, 2025 at 1:50 PM
tony.xyz
Seems like a good time for a reminder to not name your dog Cortana if you might still want to play Halo 15 years later.
October 27, 2025 at 3:21 AM
Reposted by Tony Webster
carlquintanilla.bsky.social
#WarRavagedPortland
October 8, 2025 at 11:23 AM
tony.xyz
LPT: When TikTok shows you angry political propaganda videos, simply tap “not interested” 100-20,000 times until your feed is exclusively biologists standing in swamps talking about birds
September 18, 2025 at 12:02 AM
Reposted by Tony Webster
cwarzel.bsky.social
all signs point to this being just an incredibly destabilizing moment. very very bad stuff. we're in a very dark place.
September 10, 2025 at 8:49 PM
Reposted by Tony Webster
annabower.bsky.social
This is the story of the government's unlawful effort to deport migrant children under the cover of night during a holiday weekend.

It’s also the story of how district court judges are watching each other grapple with the administration—and adapting in response: www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-...
The Judicial Learning Curve by Anna Bower on Lawfare:https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-judicial-learning-curve
September 9, 2025 at 10:11 PM
Reposted by Tony Webster
dansinker.com
We couldn’t possibly be in a worse information environment for what’s happening. Which is probably, in part, why it’s happening.
September 7, 2025 at 3:23 AM
Reposted by Tony Webster
josephcox.bsky.social
It turns out every Nexar dashcam came with an AWS key that too high privileges. Which let that individual camera upload its own footage, but also let an attacker access everyone else's footage too. Terabytes of data. Nexar fixed after I contacted www.404media.co/this-company...
The hacker said they were able to access one of Nexar’s AWS buckets, a type of database run by Amazon Web Services, in which they found more than 130 terabytes of data. That included raw recordings from peoples’ dashcams and GPS data, the hacker said. The issue, the hacker said, was that embedded in every Nexar dashcam was a key to this database which had too high privileges, allowing anyone with the key not just to upload their own camera’s data, but also access that of everyone else. Nexar fixed this issue after being contacted by 404 Media this week. Fernandez-Ruiz said these recordings were users’ private backups.
September 4, 2025 at 2:28 PM
Reposted by Tony Webster
annabower.bsky.social
JUST IN: Drew Ensign, on behalf of DOJ, reports that all of the migrant children have been returned to ORR custody.
FIFTH STATUS REPORT Defendants hereby provide notice that that final minor alien of the four mentioned in the fourth status report was returned to ORR custody at approximately 1:30am EDT. The other alien mentioned in the fourth status report was also placed in ORR custody today. Defendants are not aware of any other putative class members that have not been returned to ORR custody. Respectfully submitted this September 1, 2025.
September 1, 2025 at 3:20 PM
Reposted by Tony Webster
katiephang.bsky.social
BREAKING NEWS: Federal judge in Miami orders Alligator Alcatraz, the concentration camp in the middle of the Everglades, to be dismantled within 60 days and blocks any new detainees from being brought into the facility.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
storage.courtlistener.com
August 22, 2025 at 1:43 AM
Reposted by Tony Webster
lauraolin.bsky.social
What happened in these 24 minutes
August 20, 2025 at 9:04 PM
tony.xyz
Luckily Excel is famously never used in legal, regulatory, or compliance situations
hypervisible.blacksky.app Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · Aug 20
“Microsoft also warns against using the AI function for numerical calculations or in ‘high-stakes scenarios’ with legal, regulatory, and compliance implications, as COPILOT ‘can give incorrect responses.’” 🤷🏿‍♂️
Microsoft Excel adds Copilot AI to help fill in spreadsheet cells
Get ready for some AI spreadsheeting.
www.theverge.com
August 20, 2025 at 2:38 PM
Reposted by Tony Webster
jacobharr.is
One of the things you learned at 18F and USDS is that government isn’t like a business: it has to serve everybody and not just specific market segments that are the most convenient.
August 20, 2025 at 12:49 PM
Reposted by Tony Webster
theonion.com
Starbase Named Best City To Start Family With Boss
Starbase Named Best City To Start Family With Boss
NEW YORK—Describing the city recently incorporated by SpaceX workers as ideal for those hoping to settle down and raise their employer’s children, U.S. News & World Report published a new ranking this...
theonion.com
August 14, 2025 at 3:01 PM
Reposted by Tony Webster
joadsprocket.bsky.social
when someone I thought was normal says "seed oil"
Inglorious bastards 3 dot jpeg
August 5, 2025 at 10:47 AM
Reposted by Tony Webster
clarajeffery.bsky.social
"According to [cybersecurity firm] CHEQ, a whopping 75.85 percent of traffic from X to its advertising clients' websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl was fake."

mashable.com/article/x-tw...
The majority of traffic from Elon Musk's X may have been fake during the Super Bowl, report suggests
These numbers are legitimately shocking.
mashable.com
July 31, 2025 at 11:40 PM
tony.xyz
Some photos from around Wyoming and Montana last week
American flag and POW/MIA flag above a street at sunset in Lander, Wyoming Two prairie dogs sticking their heads up above the grass, Fossil Butte National Monument, Wyoming Pond and mountain at sunrise. Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming Sun shines on tall grasses and trees in Three Forks, Montana
July 8, 2025 at 4:34 PM
Reposted by Tony Webster
andreapitzer.bsky.social
As a writer, painter, and former record-store manager, I want to underline every word @bencollins.bsky.social said here. We are fucking human beings who do amazing things. We should absolutely glory in that and not become cogs in somebody's efficiency machine or let ourselves be stripped for parts.
bencollins.bsky.social Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · Jul 7
Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose.

www.status.news/p/the-onion-...
What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business? The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday. The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times. That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working. You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step. If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.
July 7, 2025 at 4:16 PM
tony.xyz
Home from my camping road trip. ☑ bad sunburn ☑ hail damage ☑ 1.5TB of photos ☑ mosquito bite on eyelid ☑ woke up to a grizzly right outside my truck ☑ one (1) legit shower in 12 days ☑ lots of time to think about life ☑ caught up on podcasts
Map of camping route through SW Wyoming, Idaho including Sawtooth and Boise national forests, up through Payette National Forest, to Nez Perce-Clearwater, Missoula to Bozeman, down to Yellowstone, then Cody Lovell Worland Lander etc. back home
July 6, 2025 at 4:03 PM
Reposted by Tony Webster
peterhenderson.bsky.social
First time a judge has decided a case based on hallucinated case law in the US that I've encountered.

caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ga-cou...
July 3, 2025 at 11:35 PM
Reposted by Tony Webster
joshuajfriedman.com
NEW: Kilmar Abrego Garcia asks the Tennessee criminal court to order the govt to stop making extrajudicial statements about Abrego that could prejudice the trial. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
PRELIMINARY STATEMENT From the moment Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia challenged his illegal rendition to El Salvador in March 2025, the government has repeatedly maligned him in public statements. Instead of complying with the Supreme Court’s order that it “facilitate” Mr. Abrego’s return to the United States, the government launched a public disparagement campaign against him to justify his unlawful detention in El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (“CECOT”), one of the most violent, inhumane prisons in the world. As Mr. Abrego’s plight captured national attention, officials occupying the highest positions of the United States government baselessly labeled him a “gangbanger,” “monster,” “illegal predator,” “illegal alien terrorist,” “wife beater,” “barbarian,” and “human trafficker.” The Vice President, a Yale Law School graduate, went so far as to flatly lie about Mr. Abrego, calling him a “convicted MS-13 gang member,” notwithstanding that Mr. Abrego in fact has never been convicted of any crime at all.
July 3, 2025 at 3:53 AM
Reposted by Tony Webster
mtsw.bsky.social
we're living through a major, civilization-altering technological revolution and it has nothing to do with AI
volts.wtf David Roberts @volts.wtf · Jul 2
Just recorded a pod on solar+storage and holy shit y'all, if you are not tracking this market on a daily basis, you have no idea how wild it is. The global average price of a battery pack fell 40% *from 2023 to 2024*. That dropped the LCOE of a solar+storage plant by 22%. In a year!
July 2, 2025 at 10:23 PM
Reposted by Tony Webster
annabower.bsky.social
“In Cell 15, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia and 20 other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion. During this time, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself…”
120. Upon arrival at CECOT, the detainees were greeted by a prison official who stated, "Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn't leave." Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was then forced to strip, issued prison clothing, and subjected to physical abuse including being kicked in the legs with boots and struck on his head and arms to make him change clothes faster. His head was shaved with a zero razor, and he was frog-marched to cell 15, being struck with wooden batons along the way. By the following day, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia had visible bruises and lumps all over his body. 121. In Cell 15, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia and 20 other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion. During this time, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself The detainees were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day, and minimal access to sanitation. 122. After approximately one week at CECOT, prison director Osiris Luna and other officials separated the 21 Salvadorans who had arrived together. Twelve individuals with visible gang-related tattoos were moved to another cell, while Plaintiff Abrego Garcia remained with eight others who, like him, upon information and belief had no gang affiliations or tattoos. 123. As reflected by his segregation, the Salvadoran authorities recognized that Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was not affiliated with any gang and, at around this time, prison officials explicitly acknowledged that Plaintiff Abrego Garcia's tattoos were not gang-related, telling him "your
July 2, 2025 at 9:35 PM