Linkdump No 92
January 30, 2026
Reading time: 6 minutes
The web is getting worse, search engines are becoming more and more useless and AI crawlers are so greedy that by now they're almost indistinguishable from a DDoS attack. I had a few interesting discussions about this on Mastodon this week, and everybody is exhausted, frustrated and angry. What do we do about it? I have no idea... Michal advocates for switching to a different protocol like Gemini, and maybe that's not a bad idea if more people did it. I might look into this at some point. I'd love to have a space free of ads, tracking, slop, privacy invasions and corporate garbage. You know, a place which is still human.
In some other threads we talked about the importance of sharing links now that Google etc. are practically useless and have deteriorated to being little more than advertising frontends and slop dispensers. Since my linkdumps seem to be quite popular, I decided to create a dedicated RSS feed only for those, which you can find here. The regular feed which you're probably reading right now will stay as it is and contain all blog posts and linkdumps, so there is no need to subscribe to both. This is purely for the people who are mainly interested in the links and not so much in my other ramblings. You'll still have to deal with my random nonsense in the intro though, I'm not letting you off that easily :)
Articles
- France ditches Microsoft Teams and Zoom for Visio, a local alternative
Good job France, well done! I hope other European countries follow suit. In the wake of the invasion of Ukraine many institutions and corporations ditched Russian software like Kaspersky, and it's about time we did the same with US software, which at this point should be treated as spyware from a hostile nation. - Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption
Some people claim that Meta can access all Whatsapp chats despite promising e2e encryption, Meta denies everything of course... who is right? No idea, but I wouldn't be surprised one bit if this were true. (via) - “IG is a drug”: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial - Ars Technica
At this point, Meta really should be dissolved and its upper management be thrown in jail for life. The amount of damage that this one corporation has caused to societies around the globe is insane.
Software/Services
- fen2board for chess players | Adële's blog
This is not for me because I don't know how to play chess, but maybe it's for you? - feedspool-go v0.2.0: Smooth Scrolling and Quiet Feeds - blog.lmorchard.com
Another RSS feed reader, this time one that creates a nice looking website with all new posts. I already mentioned this in a previous linkdump, but it's a new version and it's looking pretty good!
Hardware Projects
- The "Impossible" is now Reality: Full CFW on PS3 Super Slim via Raspberry Pi Pico (BadWDSD). 850MHz OC verified!
Apparently it's now possible to mod a Super Slim PS3 with nothing more than a Rpi Pico. That's cool because for this revision of the PS3 there was no hardware mod available until now. It's also cool because I have this exact PS3 model... - blog.smartere » Floppy Disks: the best TV remote for kids
This guy created a way for his kid to choose what to watch on TV using floppy disks... just insert a disk into the drive, wait a few seconds and the corresponding show starts. Neat! - Running DOOM On Earbuds | Hackaday
If it doesn't run Doom yet, it has to be made to run Doom, so here's a pair of earbuds running Doom :)
Videos
- I built a light that can see radio waves - YouTube
This guy built a lightbar that visualises what's going on in the radio frequency spectrum that is used by wifi and bluetooth devices. It looks amazing, but if you stare at it long enough you will probably trigger an epileptic seizure...
Around the Small Web
- Die ältesten Dinge
The oldest thing I own (and use!) | Povuh
Old things, and the people behind them
I wrote a post about the oldest things I own a few days ago, and a few others got in touch and shared their own posts with me. Thanks, everyone! Also check out the responses to my Mastodon post, there are a few great answers in there, too! - Blogroll – Elizabeth Tai
Link Dumps
Elizabeth and Mike have both curated linkdumps of blogs which dump linkdumps, so if this linkdump dumps not enough links for you, you can find more links to linkdumps in their linkdumps. Thanks Elizabeth and Mike for dumping links to my linkdumps in your linkdumps :)
Misc