Mark Nottingham

I don't monitor every @ - if you want to make sure I see something, e-mail.

Safari 27.0 fixed a bunch of caching bugs. https://github.com/http-tests/cache-tests/commit/d644cf4bf487763646aac19d2c8b846daa0f604d

@rizzi I just updated to MacOS 27 and Reeder Classic was silently replaced by Reeder -- and all of my subscriptions are gone. Help?

What 120 million HTTP responses from Common Crawl reveal about how protocol extensions actually get deployed — and what that should tell us when we design new ones. https://mnot.net/blog/2026/linting_the_web

Because technology is always neutral. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBW9QCVDSjY

Now getting AI generated spam tailored to my blog entries (badly). We are indeed on the shittiest timeline.

When to reach for a well-known URI — and the traps that catch most protocol designers. https://mnot.net/blog/2026/well_known_uris

Anybody else getting this on random Web sites? Any of my Googly friends care to comment? (Safari latest, been happening for the last <1 week)

OH in coffee shop: “The final season of America is riveting.” Response: “But we’ll be disappointed with the finale. Just like Game of Thrones.”

Anyone want to go in on a proposal for a Unicode emoji of a guillotine? It feels very 2026.

and... "Regulation that’s defined entirely in terms of the technology it regulates, as opposed to in terms of the effects it has on society or imposing boundaries and limits on the technology itself, is a core component of the technopolistic political and legislative environment."

> pipx install feed-survey > feed-survey-probe -r https://mnot.net/

"A stable competitive market never has more than three significant competitors, the largest of which has no more than four times the market share of the smallest." https://www.bcg.com/publications/1976/business-unit-strategy-growth-rule-three-four

I looked through Common Crawl and found over 300,000 parseable RSS/Atom feeds, confirming that Web feeds are still a major part of the Open Web. But most aren’t high quality, and autodiscovery often points users at stale or abandoned feeds. https://mnot.net/blog/2026/feed-survey

Every online interaction is a lopsided negotiation. For AI to truly work for us, we need more than just safety -- we need to start building true agency. https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/04/24/agents_as_collective_bargains

Implementation as a browser extension here: https://github.com/mnot/feedmenu-extension

This needs to be spread wide and far. https://www.themandarin.com.au/311397-privacy-raised-during-teen-social-media-ban-tech-trial-were-ignored/

If this is true, AI creates even more pressure towards centralisation than is obviously apparent (and there's a lot that's apparent). For previous thoughts, see: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2024/11/29/platforms

AI seems to have the same pathology that leads humans to name files like "report_final_done_final2_lastone_finanimeanit_revision3"

In the last few weeks, Trump has done more for the worldwide adoption of electric vehicles than any previous US president. Congratulations.

In 2026, kids skating in public spaces isn’t annoying - it’s FUCKING WHOLESOME, carrying on a 40+ year legacy, and certainly should not be considered any kind of crime.

Guidelines for aspiring Nobel Prize winners: 1. Do not threaten other countries with wholesale destruction and possible genocide.

Standards work is notoriously hard to track. Let’s explore if grounding AI in working group records can make that history more accessible. https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/03/25/using_ai

More belated introspection from the adtech industry. https://www.adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/the-privacy-zealots-were-right-ad-techs-infrastructure-was-always-a-risk/

Openness makes the Internet harder to govern — but also makes it resilient, innovative, and difficult to capture. Let's look at how the openness of the Internet both defines it and ensures its success. https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/02/20/open_systems

If you work on the web, you should read @mnot.net's latest: mnot.net/blog/2026/02/13/… It much more elegantly gets to the core of the pro/anti-progress asymmetry I tried to explore last year: infrequently.org/2025/08/how-do-c…

The voluntary nature of Internet standards means that the biggest power move may be to avoid playing the game. Let's take a look. https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/02/13/no

Hmm, this one shows promise... https://consult.treasury.gov.au/c2026-739506

Right now, companies are hawking new AI features. They're not built for users -- they're built to satisfy management and investors. I'll know they're serious when they start pushing new features that *happen* to use AI, but are designed to solve specific problems.

Social media companies baking fake notification indicators into their favicon is borderline abusive behaviour.

The Open Web means several things to different people, depending on context, but recently discussions have focused on the Web's Openness in terms of access to information -- how easy it is to publish and obtain information without barriers there. https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/01/20/open_web

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/world-without-rules

Software update #2: I've made a small tweak to https://rfc.fyi/ to make it much more useful; when considering how many references an RFC has, it also counts those from the RFCs it obsoletes. That means that searching for a term like 'HTTP' or 'DNS' returns the most relevant RFCs first!

Software update #1: https://redbot.org/ has a range of new tests -- including updates to caching and support for Content Security Policy, Permissions Policy, and CORS -- and now is multilingual! Please take a look and give feedback.

French-speaking friends, does this make sense? How awful is the translation? https://gist.github.com/mnot/47d819b1907ca13a8968b611dc56bb82

“An industry without newcomers is a dying industry.” -- Rolex CEO Jean-Frédéric Dufour at Dubai Watch Week

"[G]overnments that seek to systematically undermine democratic institutions will seek, first and foremost, to move away from the law and from expertise." https://academic.oup.com/jeclap/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jeclap/lpaf068/8306543

Davies draws an interesting line between Ferdinand Porsche, Donald Knuth, and startup culture. https://monocle.com/business/in-defence-of-middle-management/