- Ambient-light sensors in web browsers can be weaponized for geolocation: cloud-pattern correlation plus nearby-device data narrows a user’s physical position to within roughly one mile; physical masking of the sensor and its surrounding glass is the recommended countermeasure.  
- MEMS gyroscopes in smartphones can function as covert microphones; the Stanford “gyrophone” paper demonstrates speech recognition without microphone permissions, adding a new hardware-level eavesdropping vector.  
- ThinkPad keyboard firmware exhibits measurable polling lag that may bottleneck high-speed typists; participants discuss firmware patches and alternative keyboard architectures to reduce latency.  
- Amazon Transcribe now provides real-time speech-to-text, lowering the barrier for live captioning and voice-driven interfaces.  
- A twin-study meta-analysis circulated on Twitter finds that classroom-level effects on literacy and numeracy are largely nonsignificant, with genetics accounting for 50–75 % of the observed variance.  
- Security vs. usability debate: hardware webcam covers and physical disconnect switches are preferred over software-only mitigations for cameras, gyros, and microphones.  
- DIY-laptop proposals include hardware kill-switches for every sensor to give users granular control over data leakage.  
- Tommy Wood’s AHS19 talk “Lies, Damn Lies, and Genetics” is shared as a critique of misleading SNP statistics and the gap between raw genomic data and actionable biological insight.