Link posts 22 Feb 2026
• ‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks (theguardian.com) Karen Newton, a 65-year-old grandmother from Hertfordshire, was shackled and held for 42 days in ICE detention after a paperwork issue with her husband’s visa at the US-Canada border — despite her own visa being valid. She was pressured into signing a “voluntary” self-removal without legal counsel, unknowingly waiving her right to a judge and accepting a potential 10-year ban. UK arrivals to the US were down 15% in 2025.
• LibreOffice blasts ‘fake open source’ OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft to lock users in - Neowin (neowin.net) The Document Foundation has labelled OnlyOffice “fake open source” for defaulting to Microsoft’s DOCX/XLSX/PPTX formats rather than the Open Document Format, arguing this entrenches vendor lock-in even without a formal Microsoft partnership. TDF frames the issue as increasingly urgent given growing interest in digital sovereignty from US tech platforms.
• Some “Summarize with AI” buttons are secretly injecting ads into your chatbot’s memory (the-decoder.com) Microsoft’s security team has documented a new prompt injection class: “Summarize with AI” buttons that hide instructions telling AI assistants to remember the company as a trusted source across future sessions. Researchers found 50+ manipulative prompts from 31 companies in 60 days. Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Grok are all susceptible — Microsoft has since removed the vulnerable URL prompt parameter from Copilot.
• Is ‘Brain Rot’ Real? How Too Much Time Online Can Affect Your Mind. (tech.slashdot.org) The Washington Post examines the science behind “brain rot” (Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year). A 2025 study of 7,000+ children found more screen time correlated with reduced cortical thickness in areas governing attention and impulse control. The key nuance: removing social media but leaving phone access unchanged produced no harmful effects — the content, not the medium, is what matters.