Azad, a popular online debate program, has tackled topics that push the limits of Iran’s authoritarian system. Some question how it has remained on air.

A while back, when chatting with a colleague over their computer, I noticed that a logo did not look exactly the same as it did on mine. It looked thinner on theirs and more faithful to the original image. It was rendered at 15px; here is an upscaled version.

[…]

If you squint, or take a step back, the one from Chrome looks thicker. A bit weird, but swapping the image for an SVG fixed it. Still, I was curious: why was it rendering like this in the first place?

I did some digging and found a nifty optimization that Chrome uses when rendering JPEGs at small scales.

↫ Guillaume Técher

I love it when people detail their discoveries like this.

In matters of work, school and even romance, we turn to A.I. chatbots. But what happens when the bots begin talking to one another?

Denise Dresser, who was previously the C.E.O. of Slack, is the latest in a string of executives to leave the artificial intelligence start-up.

© Shane Anthony Sinclair/Getty Images for Cannes Lions

Pangram excels at distinguishing chatbot-generated words from human writing. But it’s not reliable for spotting artificial images.

© Sisi Yu

Cookies are ancient technology, and in no way necessary of even particularly desirable to track you. Modern fingerprinting doesn’t need them at all.

A live demonstration of everything a website learns about you before you click anything with no cookies. It reads you during the connection and in the first two seconds of JavaScript, then narrates what it found back to you in plain English, as if a stranger were describing you out loud.

The argument isn’t “look how creepy this site is.” It’s: the site you visit after this one can do all of it too, and won’t tell you.

↫ Kuber Mehta

Also note, as the demonstration does, that if some of the things it determines about you are wrong, that doesn’t really matter. In fact, it may actually make fingerprinting and tracking you easier; as long as fingerprinting consistently gets the same things wrong in the same way, it becomes a valuable part of the fingerprint, like a small scar obscuring part of your real thumb’s fingerprint.

Online tracking of people should be illegal.

Out of all the bloody things Microsoft could release as open source, they chose the world’s weirdest IRC client they shipped in the late ’90s that nobody used or even remembered? What on earth is happening?

Microsoft Comic Chat is a Microsoft-developed Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chat client released in 1996 that rendered conversations as automatically generated comic strips. Instead of plain text, users communicated through cartoon avatars with messages displayed in speech bubbles inside dynamically composed comic panels. The application used an expert system to determine character placement, gestures, facial expressions, balloon shape, and panel layout in real time. It shipped as part of Internet Explorer 3.0 and was later bundled with Windows 98 and MSN before being discontinued in the early 2000s.

↫ Comic Chat’s GitHub page

Not only is the original source code now available on GitHub, there’s also a modern, updated version that can make use of larger displays and higher resolutions. There’s a deliciously ’90s website for it, too.