Bruce Lawson's personal site

This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We’ve just released Vivaldi 7.9, adding UI Auto-hide and Follower Tab on Desktop, and on Mobile we released two levels of tabs, beautiful images, Safari import and Desktop Mode.

• The Value of z-index – a systematic approach to z-index numbering, to avoid magic numbers
• Digital Markets Act: MEPs demand timely action and resilience against external pressures – can’t happen too quickly, if you ask me. (Go on, ask me…)
• Meanwhile… Inside the far-right network targeting Europe’s digital rules – “The Trump administration and a network of far-right think tanks are increasingly targeting the EU’s digital regulations and rules on content moderation. Far-right MEPs have taken over these narratives, while tech companies are hoping to exploit the opportunity.”
• Top ten Figma betrayals by David Bushell
• Germany makes Open Document Format mandatory as the standard format for documents within its sovereign digital infrastructure (along with PDF/UA, accessible PDF)
• Reddit User Uncovers Who Is Behind Meta’s $2B Lobbying for Invasive Age Verification Tech – Meta’s $2B campaign to force Apple and Google into building surveillance systems for age verification while exempting its own platforms. Will nobody think of the children?!?!?
• North Carolina Man Pleads Guilty To Music Streaming Fraud Aided By Artificial Intelligence – He used Slop-generators to create hundreds of thousands of “songs”, and bots to stream those slongs billions of times, collecting $8m in royalties. It’s the perfect metaphor for late-stage capitalism: burning forests to generate fake songs to stream by robots that can’t hear, endlessly, while artists starve.
• Google Just Patented The End Of Your Website – “a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google’s machine learning model thinks they should see instead.”
• This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into AI Podcasts – WebinarTV hosts 200,000 “webinars.” A Zoom call you may thought was private might be one of them.
• 🚨Schadenfreude klaxon!🚨 Elon Musk’s X advertising boycott lawsuit dismissed by US judge

The other day, I was pruning my inbox when I noticed an email from a company that I occasionally buy print cartridges from, IJT Direct, offering a reconditioned PC, with a new USB keyboard, mouse, wifi dongle, all for £50–including tax and delivery. Last year I upcycled an eBay Windows machine for my mum with ZorinOS and Vivaldi browser, so naturally, I had to get a £50 desktop, just to try it out and see if I could run Vivaldi.

The set arrived.

The computer is an SFF PC Pentium G4400 “up to 3.30GHz Processor” with 4GB RAM and a 128GB SSD. Beautiful it is not. But, like me, it’s ugly and old, yet still capable of being useful.

I found myself an old VGA cable, and plugged it all in. It booted very fast, to something called ChromeOS Flex. ChromeOS Flex does not support Android apps, but it should support the Linux development environment. Of course, you have to sign in with a Google account, so I duly did, and after the OS updated itself, I went to Settings > About ChromeOS > Developers to set up Linux.

Yikes. The whole option was greyed-out. A bit of digging later, and I realised that the machines needed to be set up for Virtualisation in order to set up Linux. Was it? I would need to go to the BIOS to find out. Unfortunately, all tutorials told me that to go to the BIOS I needed to power up while pressing the Chromebook’s Refresh key–but this isn’t a Chromebook, so there was no refresh key.

Through trial and error (starting up while holding Esc) I entered the BIOS, mooched around until I saw “virtualisation” was off, turned it on, booted into ChromeOS Flex and, lo and behold! I was able to set up the Linux development environment.

Then, it was a simple matter of going grabbing the Debian-flavoured Vivaldi and installing it with Linux (which ChromeOS offered to do automatically):

And then Vivaldi is installed and available in the task bar, like any of ChromeOS’s pre-installed apps. You don’t have to do anything fancy, like start Linux and then start Vivaldi within that. It takes a few seconds to start after the machine is booted up; I assume this is because it has to boot up the Linux environment beforehand. If I quit Vivaldi, and restart it, it’s immediate.

It runs pretty well, considering it only has 4 GB of RAM. YouTube videos play properly (I wondered about codecs etc) and video conferencing is fine. The only thing that prevents Vivaldi being a “full citizen” is that ChromeOS doesn’t respect setting it as the default browser. I assumed this is because Linux is a sub-system (from the “Start button”, all Linux apps are displayed together in a folder called “Linux Apps”, while pre-installed ones are shown separately). However, when I installed LibreOffice with Linux and clicked a link in a document, the link still opened in Chrome.

It’s not the most elegant of machines, and isn’t portable, but it would do the trick for someone who wants a desktop rather than a laptop for civilian computer tasks: emails, YouTube, shopping, paying bills, social networking, writing the occasional documents (which is probably the majority of PC users).

And, for very little money, it’s prolonged the life of a perfectly usable machine and saved it from landfill. Hurrah.

This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We’ve just released a Vivaldi desktop snapshot, with a new onboarding step for people who have visual impairments, require keyboard-only access or use assistive technologies. Feedback would be most welcome.

• Link o’ the week: Request for developer feedback: focusgroup – “The focusgroup HTML attribute is a proposed declarative way to add keyboard arrow-key navigation to composite widgets such as toolbars, tablists, menus, listboxes, etc. without writing any roving-tabindex JavaScript. One attribute replaces hundreds of lines of boilerplate.” – This is exciting,so kudos to the Microsoft Edge team and the Open UI Group for their work on this. Darwin knows, I give Microsoft a lot of grief for their management’s antics, but I have a whole lotta love for their web platform team.
• The Enshittificator – a short Norwegian documentary about the life of an Enshittificator, and how the Internet and AI has enhanced his productivity.
• Claude is an Electron App because we’ve lost native – “API-wise, native apps lost to web apps a long time ago. Native APIs are terrible to use, and OS vendors use everything in their power to make you not want to develop native apps for their platform”. (Ignore the reference to everyone’s favourite way to target 100 Iranian schoolgirls for shredding.)
• They Hacked the CSS: Inside Chrome’s First Zero-Day of 2026 (CVE-2026–2441) – “For years, security researchers have joked about the complexity of the web stack, but the hyperbolic nightmare has become reality: The CSS has been compromised.”
• Historic Zuckerberg Testimony Exposes The Truth: Meta CEO Knew Kids Were Being Hurt and He Covered It Up
• How to stop Stalker Ads – from Open Rights Group, for civilians
• The Internet Isn’t Facebook: How Openness Changes Everything by Mark Nottingham
• DHS Orders Tech Giants to Unmask Anti-ICE Accounts – “Free speech advocates warn the subpoenas threaten long-standing protections for anonymous speech.”
• I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here’s What I Actually Handed Over. – basically, everything (to a server outside EU rules)
• US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives – Reuters reports some twat named Rubio wants to interfere in other nation’s sovereignty.
• Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more – nothing you didn’t know here, but notable that this discourse is now in mainstream press
• Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine For Accurately Reporting That The Swiss Government Didn’t Want Palantir – “from the surveillance-streisand dept”
• Hackers Expose Age-Verification Software Powering Surveillance Web – “Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet”. Cool, cool.
• AI Added ‘Basically Zero’ to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
• The Government Uses Targeted Advertising to Track Your Location. Here’s What We Need to Do. – just in case the link between surveillance capitalism and tradition jackbooted fascism wasn’t already clear
• Mike Little: the British co-founder of WordPress you’ve probably never heard of (but should)…
• The Big Tech Lobby Playbook: How Big Tech’s power has rewritten digital rules globally – in-depth reports.
• The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all – “Age-verification systems require collecting sensitive data to support the biometric information. In no time, the internet will become a fully surveilled digital panopticon”