Jessi Hempel, writing at Backchannel:

Tolia was dining with his communications director, Kelsey Grady, when her iPhone alerted them to the story’s publication. They read the lengthy feature together. It alleged that white Oakland residents were using the “crime and safety” category of Nextdoor to report suspicious activity about their black neighbors. “Rather than bridging gaps between neighbors, Nextdoor can become a forum for paranoid racialism — the equivalent of the nosy Neighborhood Watch appointee in a gated community,” wrote Pendarvis Harshaw.

Bloomberg:

Companies including Apple, Facebook and Microsoft released statements and tweets following the administration’s announcement on Wednesday to withdraw legal guidance put in place by the Obama administration in May. The guidance had directed schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.

Trump’s policy is inhumane and cruel.

SetApp is a new subscription plan for the Mac that gives you access to a bunch of different apps for a monthly fee:

Setapp gives you a growing suite of hand-picked apps in one signup. There’s no store — just a folder on your Mac, and no hidden costs — just a flat monthly fee. It’s simple, like shortcuts should be.

I’ve used quite a few of these apps over the years, and there’s some good stuff in there. Personally, I like owning the software I use and prefer one time payments for a handful of apps I obsessively pick, but this is an interesting alternative. Worth looking at if you wanted to try out some new apps at least.

Brian Feldman, writing at New York magazine on Ajit Pai, the new head of the FCC:

The net-neutrality debate is about whether one class of private entities, ISPs, should be regulated in order to allow millions of other private entities, users and businesses operating online, to operate freely. Pretty much everyone agrees that they should — except for the ISPs … and Ajit Pai. Pai even wrote a 67-page(!) dissent when the order was adopted. Even Google and Facebook support the principle, in part because they often buy up the smaller startups that flourish on an unfettered internet. Imagine an internet where, rather than buying Instagram for $1 billion, Facebook instead paid for a fast lane and forced Instagram out by other means.

As the proprietor of a relatively small internet website with a razor thin budget, and as a fan of the open internet, I’m not super happy about this.

Walt Mossberg, writing at The Verge:

The excessive length and lackluster content of that football ad is but one example of the poor use of ads all over the internet. And that situation is behind the rise in ad-blocking software and the quiet concern about business models at some content sites.

Too often poorly executed, annoying, code-heavy, privacy-invading ads clutter websites and apps — especially on mobile or the News Feed on Facebook, where content increasingly is consumed without requiring the reader or viewer to even visit the originating site.

And:

About a week after our launch, I was seated at a dinner next to a major advertising executive. He complimented me on our new site’s quality and on that of a predecessor site we had created and run, AllThingsD.com. I asked him if that meant he’d be placing ads on our fledgling site. He said yes, he’d do that for a little while. And then, after the cookies he placed on Recode helped him to track our desirable audience around the web, his agency would begin removing the ads and placing them on cheaper sites our readers also happened to visit. In other words, our quality journalism was, to him, nothing more than a lead generator for target-rich readers, and would ultimately benefit sites that might care less about quality.

Holy shit.