Mita Williams
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copystar.bsky.social
Mita Williams
@copystar.bsky.social
630 followers 690 following 340 posts
Law Librarian at Windsor Law.
https://copystar.neocities.org/
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copystar.bsky.social
Mita Williams @copystar.bsky.social · Dec 15
I don’t have a tagline for my newsletter, but I’m workshopping “Reader’s advisory for the utopia of the dimmer light” www.uofwinds.com
University of Winds
Three links to wonderful and thought-provoking things every other Saturday morning from Mita Williams.
www.uofwinds.com
copystar.bsky.social
📚Librarian of Things: The internet was designed to route around gatekeepers

We can create space where students grow in confidence as they develop their own abilities as they gain new ways of understanding. But that space will require gate-keeping.

librarian.aedileworks.com/2025/11/25/t...
The internet was designed to route around gatekeepers
We can create space where students grow in confidence as they develop their own abilities as they gain new ways of understanding. But that space will require gate-keeping.
librarian.aedileworks.com
November 26, 2025 at 3:19 PM
copystar.bsky.social
I am into this.

See also: Jack Cheng's Digital Mending Circle: www.jackcheng.com/sunday/450-r...

See also: Ain’t no party like a LibGuides Party: ’cause a LibGuides Party is mandatory crln.acrl.org/index.php/cr...
November 26, 2025 at 3:17 PM
copystar.bsky.social
We have known that the monetization of Internet traffic has been incentivizing fictional news for *years* now: www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverm...
November 24, 2025 at 8:51 PM
Reposted by Mita Williams
debcha.bsky.social
Friends — after a lengthy hiatus, I am finally rebooting my newsletter, Metafoundry. If you’re already a subscriber, you should have received your first newsletter from my new provider, Buttondown. Otherwise, you can learn more and subscribe here: buttondown.com/metafoundry#...
Metafoundry
The newsletter of Deb Chachra's work and ideas. Musings on infrastructure, technology, culture, design, education, and more. Low volume, no spam, no tracking, unsubscribe whenever. Want a taste of wha...
buttondown.com
November 23, 2025 at 4:53 PM
copystar.bsky.social
This is your periodic reminder that I have a newsletter called “The University of Winds” that is sent out every other Saturday morning which you can subscribe to either via rss or by email 🪁
November 23, 2025 at 4:57 PM
Reposted by Mita Williams
celesteheadlee.bsky.social
This is weaponized petty and I'm here for it.
victinibcn.bsky.social Luca Migo ❌👑 @victinibcn.bsky.social · 3d
In Monrovia, California, protesters are purchasing 17¢ ICE scrapers from Home Depot and immediately returning them to create long lines and slow down the entire store. Their aim is to disrupt sales and convey a message opposing ICE raids occurring in their neighborhood.
November 23, 2025 at 12:47 PM
Reposted by Mita Williams
ernie.tedium.co
If you have been sharing that Malwarebytes article on the Gmail thing, you should note the giant correction up top.

www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...
Update November 22. We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Gmail does scan email content to power its own “smart features,” such as spam filtering, categorisation, and writing suggestions. But this is part of how Gmail normally works and isn’t the same as training Google’s generative AI models. Google also maintains that these feature settings are opt-in rather than opt-out, although users’ experiences seem to vary depending on when and how the new wording appeared. It’s easy to see where the confusion came from. Google’s updated language around “smart features” is vague, and the term “smart” often implies AI—especially at a time when Gemini is being integrated into other parts of Google’s products. When the new wording started appearing for some users without much explanation, many assumed it signalled a broader shift. We’ve revised this article to reflect what we can confirm from Google’s documentation, as it’s always been our aim to give readers accurate, helpful guidance.
November 22, 2025 at 9:44 PM
copystar.bsky.social
This is my new favourite newsletter. I learn something new and meaningful every issue.
November 23, 2025 at 1:16 PM
Reposted by Mita Williams
heimbergecon.bsky.social
"academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it... The dominant four collectively generated... $12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024."
November 18, 2025 at 6:48 AM
copystar.bsky.social
“Rather than believe the women he had collaborated with, and so be forced to revise his image of the respectable men in his midst, he chose to maintain that respectability by refusing the validity of his own observations.”

aworkinglibrary.com/writing/beyo...
Beyond credibility
To believe in supremacy is to refuse to see what’s right in front of you, over and over and over again.
aworkinglibrary.com
November 13, 2025 at 12:53 PM
Reposted by Mita Williams
rusty.todayintabs.com
You’ll never guess who the article was about
safety.bsky.app Bluesky Safety @safety.bsky.app · 13d
The account owner of @sarahkendzior.bsky.social was suspended for 72 hours for expressing a desire to shoot the author of an article. The post, made 11/10, stated: "I want to shoot the author of this article just to watch him die." 1/2
November 12, 2025 at 8:54 PM
Reposted by Mita Williams
kissane.myatproto.social
I want to restate something I said in a lot of replies yesterday, which is that this move is not going to reduce replies yelling at the Bsky team—and that should not be the goal.

What it does is clarify how moderation works here so that people can assess that and act accordingly.
safety.bsky.app Bluesky Safety @safety.bsky.app · 13d
The account owner of @sarahkendzior.bsky.social was suspended for 72 hours for expressing a desire to shoot the author of an article. The post, made 11/10, stated: "I want to shoot the author of this article just to watch him die." 1/2
November 12, 2025 at 7:19 PM
copystar.bsky.social
Some weeks ago, I found on Pinboard's most popular bookmarks, this interactive essay called Build Your Own Database: A step-by-step guide to building a key-value database from scratch." www.nan.fyi/database

From it I learned that memory management is very important in building a database!
Build Your Own Database
A step-by-step guide to building a key-value database from scratch.
www.nan.fyi
November 12, 2025 at 7:47 PM
copystar.bsky.social
Today I was able to make it into one of the rounds for FIFA World Cup tickets. I was in the queue for a very long time.

Once in, I was unable to get any for Toronto except one opportunity to purchase tickets for $2755 *each*.

I did not purchase these tickets.
November 12, 2025 at 7:02 PM
Reposted by Mita Williams
kissane.myatproto.social
Presumably a mistaken suspension of a journalist who is a very anodyne poster over here, @aaron.bsky.team and co. What's the best way to reach the team who can look into it?
edroso.bsky.social Roy Edroso @edroso.bsky.social · 15d
In a rare case of Substack notes usefulness, I just learned that Sarah Kendzior (author of They Knew and a brilliant writer) got bounced from Bluesky. What the hell? new @sarahkendzior.bsky.social
Sarah Kendzior • 4m I've been suspended from BlueSky. I don't know why. I wasn't online much today, and the last things I posted were excerpts from my substack newsletter articles. The suspension followed without explanation. It seems there's a crackdown. If you enjoy my work and want to make sure you can access it, subscribe! It's free - I would never paywall in times of peril — and voluntary paying subscribers keep it going. It would be great to have your support at this time. Thanks!
November 11, 2025 at 4:53 AM
copystar.bsky.social
"How I use Signal (and Why)"
librarian.aedileworks.com/2025/11/11/h...

This blog post is part of a larger series that might be of interest: librarian.aedileworks.com/tag/howandwhy/
How I use Signal (and Why)
This blog post will go into why I use Signal as my personal messaging app of choice and to point out its features in hopes that it might convince you to use Signal as well.
librarian.aedileworks.com
November 11, 2025 at 8:54 PM
Reposted by Mita Williams
edroso.bsky.social
In a rare case of Substack notes usefulness, I just learned that Sarah Kendzior (author of They Knew and a brilliant writer) got bounced from Bluesky. What the hell? new @sarahkendzior.bsky.social
Sarah Kendzior • 4m I've been suspended from BlueSky. I don't know why. I wasn't online much today, and the last things I posted were excerpts from my substack newsletter articles. The suspension followed without explanation. It seems there's a crackdown. If you enjoy my work and want to make sure you can access it, subscribe! It's free - I would never paywall in times of peril — and voluntary paying subscribers keep it going. It would be great to have your support at this time. Thanks!
November 11, 2025 at 4:09 AM
Reposted by Mita Williams
bgrueskin.bsky.social
Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...
I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…
November 9, 2025 at 8:49 PM
Reposted by Mita Williams
malwaretech.com
I love that the Boston cop slide never got fixed and now people just willingly go down it in tribute. It’s basically a national landmark at this point
November 8, 2025 at 6:15 AM
Reposted by Mita Williams
lukelebrun.ca
Hi Bluesky 👋

Small life update: I’m at the centre of a multimillion dollar lawsuit in Alberta launched by a failed candidate for Jason Kenney’s UCP

It may be the longest and most expensive media trial in Canadian history

I’m ready to go public about it and I want to share more details with you 🧵
November 7, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Reposted by Mita Williams
earlymodernjohn.bsky.social
Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.
October 30, 2025 at 8:21 AM
copystar.bsky.social
Meanwhile in Ontario…

www.cleanairalliance.org/rates-to-ris...
November 4, 2025 at 3:45 AM
Reposted by Mita Williams
volts.wtf
Absolutely amazing: they've got so much solar in Australia that they need more people to use more of it, so the gov't has instructed energy retailers to offer *at least three hours of free power* during the middle of the day.

Meanwhile fossil-addled US struggles with an energy-price crisis ...
Energy retailers to be directed to offer free power three hours a day
Saying there is enough solar power for everyone in the daytime, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen will direct retailers to provide three hours of free power every day to consumers.
www.abc.net.au
November 3, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Reposted by Mita Williams
kristenthomasen.bsky.social
I’m quoted in 3 important media stories from last week. All different but share a common theme: how do we push back against surveillance that is undermining dignity, relationships, the possibilities of collective liberation? Not exactly CBCs framing but it’s a noticeable trend in public discussions:
November 3, 2025 at 11:21 PM
Reposted by Mita Williams
nkalamb.bsky.social
The Canadian Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Research is launching a US-style attack on EDI in Tri-Council funding.

As part of this attack, they are demanding disclosure of confidential demographic info + reviewer comments of all Canadian researchers who have applied b/w 2000-2025.
Maxime Blanchette-Joncas: I'm tabling the following motion: That the committee request the three funding councils, namely the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), as part of the study on the impact of federal funding allocation criteria on research excellence in Canada, to provide it with the disaggregated data of all submitted applications, whether funded or not, for all student and faculty funding programs from the master's level onwards for applications made between 2020 and 2025. That this data include (1) demographic data of applicants and collaborators, including applicants' responses to the equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) questionnaire, (2) the institutions and departments of applicants, including the institutions of collaboration, (3) the language of the application, (4) all data regarding the type of application and project content (application year, grant program, discipline, title, summary, amount requested by the applicant), as well as (5) the identity of the evaluation committee, comments, opinions, scores assigned to applications for each criterion, and (6) the outcome of the application and the amount awarded. That the three funding councils submit all this data to the committee within 15 days following the adoption of this motion, in an Excel spreadsheet format.
October 31, 2025 at 2:33 PM