Another large passel of articles I’ve written are out!

• “A T-Shirt Company Tries On A Radical Idea: Tees That Fit Actual Women," about Cotton Bureau’s efforts to make a better T (Fast Company, Sept. 10)
• “Meet The Font Detectives Who Ferret Out Fakery" (Wired, Sept. 13) on the expert typographers who testify in trials about print and type history, sizes, and legibility largely in pursuit of forgery.
• “Where are the flaws in two-factor authentication?” (the Economist, Sept. 13)
• “This 10-Year-Old’s $2 Million Amazon Business Is Leaving Competitors In The Dust" (Fast Company, Sept. 12)
• “Face ID on the iPhone X: Everything you need to know about Apple’s facial recognition” (Macworld, Sept. 15)
• “How Amazon’s Nonstop Growth Is Creating A Brand-New Seattle" (Fast Company, Aug. 24), explaining how Amazon has had a huge impact on Seattle’s downtown, housing, and culture, but is also bringing

For those interested in finding my recent articles, I like to publish an occasional summary. Here’s a selection from the last few weeks:

• The rebirth of letterpress at Wired's Backchannel. Letterpress printing nearly died as a practical craft. Digitally driven analog technology brought it back from the brink, and the future will be even more interesting as 2D cutting and engraving and 3D printing becomes affordable and widespread. (A lot of research for this story didn’t fit, so expect even more detail in the future.)
• Three separate stories for Fast Company dealt with privacy and intrusion: “Here’s How To Track The Smartphone Apps That Are Tracking You,” “The Feds And Tech Firms Who Let Ransomware Spread Must Help Stop It,” and “Have These Researchers Created An Unbeatable Ad-Blocking Technology?”
• I love QR Codes, despite the fact that they’ve been ridiculed—in America! not elsewhere—for

Several articles that were percolating over various periods of time all ran in the last week, which is all in the life of a busy freelancer:

• In the Economist, you can read "The Internet of Stings" about how the billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices can be hijacked, and how they were used to launch one of the biggest Internet attacks ever against a lone journalist, Brian Krebs. (This appears in the print issue as well as online; I'm rarely in print publications these days.)
• In my first appearance in The Ringer, Bill Simmons' new journalism venture, I dive into gender-based technology rejection, driven against sites and products that men think are only for women.
• At Fast Company, I dig into what appears to be a normal copyright dispute over photographs by the renowned Carol Highsmith, which could result in a court decision that gives scammers carte blanche to

The first issue of my newsletter has been sent to patrons! It covers:

• The origin of the term printer’s devil, the newsletter’s name
• Oblique and italic type
• A copyright case involving the Library of Congress
• The history of “this page intentionally left blank” (link)
• Whether Wolverine can use Bluetooth headphones (link)
• The passing of Richard Thompson, a great cartoonist

Become a supporter of my work, and these secrets of the universe will accrue to you!

I love my work as a writer, but the current freelance climate makes it different to make a consistent living. It's a constant cycle of research and pitching, and every week has a different outcome. I have some recurring gigs, and I'm trying something new to add one more.

If you like my writing, you could consider becoming a direct patron of my quirky work at Patreon. Starting at $1 a month, you can get exclusive access to a newsletter full of the interesting stuff I constantly find and don't have an outlet to share with, and if I reach certain goals, articles that I write and deliver to patrons first. (Some may appear elsewhere later, like in ebook collections.)

Having this additional way to share stories is a win-win, giving you access to a never-ending stream of the oddball and obscure items I find, and helping me continue to

As an old man of the Internet, I've seen several waves of "scribble on top of other people's pages" plug-ins and web site. Anyone remember Third Voice? It was a browser plug-in that first appeared in 1999. that let you annotate other people's sites. It failed. When it shut down in 2001, Wired wrote this about it:

Third Voice

Spinspotter started up around 2008. It was a toolbar plug-in that let users annotate news articles and press releases (or, really, any web page) to mark up spin. It was an attempt to crowdsource spin and remove it. (I was on its journalist advisory committee. I quite liked the founders.) By 2009, they pivoted to a new model, as GigaOm reported:

…the company switched strategies because [founder John Atcheson said] “we found it hard to get people to mark spin with the quality level necessary, and (b) we saw a much

It took years of litigation, but the "Happy Birthday" copyright issues could finally be settled. The song's musical component long ago entered the public domain, but the "Happy Birthday To You" lyrics have remained ostensibly under copyright—until an intrepid filmmaker sued the group that claimed to own the rights.

I've written about the details several times, which included an 11th-hour addition to the suit by a foundation funded by the Hill sisters, one of whom was credited with the lyrics, as that foundation belatedly asserted that it inherited all the rights, not just a share of royalties. (See my August coverage of the suit, then a September update, and a November surprise update.)

The settlement, if approved by a judge who should weep tears of bitter joy to sign off on it, wipes away decades of copyright ownership. Any fees collected

I was appalled by Amazon digging through its employees' records to respond to a New York Times article, in an attempt to discredit months of reporting in part by alleging that one ex-employee quoted briefly in the opening of the piece had committed fraud while at the company, admitted it, and resigned. (That employee says no such thing occurred; he left because of disorganization.)

I wrote this examination (posted at Medium) of how reporting and verification works using Amazon and the Times back and forth over the matter.