Leftovers

• Derek Sivers ☛ How and why to make a /now page on your site | Derek Sivers

  Then I realized some people might wonder the same about me. So in 2015, I made a /now page on my website, saying what I’d tell a friend I hadn’t seen in a year.

• Jonas Brusman ☛ Glyphhanger – subset fonts for the web | Jonas Brusman

  This site uses two custom fonts, and I wanted to see if I could make them smaller to improve loading times. I found a tool called Glyphhanger that does just that: subsetting fonts to only include the characters needed.

• Los Angeles Times ☛ Former Facebook DEI head gets 5 years in prison for fraud

  Exploiting her access to company credit cards at Facebook, which is now called Meta, Furlow-Smiles would pay people for services they did not do for the company, then have those people kick back the money to her.

• The Atlantic ☛ Why the internet is boring now

  Ian Bogost has lived through more than a few hype cycles on the internet. The Atlantic contributing writer has been online, and building websites, since the early days of the World Wide Web. I spoke with him about what happens when new technologies age into the mainstream, how the web has in some ways been a victim of its own success, and the parts of the internet that still delight him.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Om Malik

  This is the 38th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Om Malik and his blog, om.co

  Om is a writer, photographer, investor, and many other things. His blog goes back decades and there are apparently almost 900 pages worth of archive you can scroll through on his site so if you like his content you'll have plenty to read. If you're a reader of this site go check Om's post titled "Write like a human" and you'll quickly understand why I'm a fan of him.

• Rob Knight ☛ My Blogging Workflow

  Heiji asked what my blogging workflow is and I thought not only is it an interesting idea for a post, but also can serve as a blueprint for how I want my new CMS to work.

• Scott Jehl ☛ Just Speculating: You May Not Need a SPA framework | Scott Jehl, Web Designer/Developer

  The way Speculation Rules work is similar in some ways to existing standards like resource hints (you know, rel=preload, prerender, preconnect, etc), though the format is more robust and expressive, and formatted as JSON. The rules can be delivered via a script element with a type of speculationrules, like this example from MDN: [...]

• Education

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Syntax Error #14: I don't know

    Approaching debugging sessions with humility and leaving your assumptions at the door can lead to quicker and less stressful process. In today's newsletter, I write about the importance of saying "I don't know"

  • Futurism ☛ Students Show Up to Graduation, Find Commencement Speaker Is an AI Robot

    Many students didn't feel that way. When the university announced Sophia would be the speaker, more than 2,500 signed a petition saying the decision "disrespected" the students, demanding a human take the stage.

  • Rach Smith ☛ I've never done a real interview

    I imagine a whiteboard interview going something like this:

    interviewer: “show me how you can turn this array in to a hash map” me: “how dare you?! I built an IDE backed by an entire social platform with my bare hands! Good day sir!!!”

  • Aaron Aiken ☛ today is my last day living and working where I have lived and worked for the past three years | Coffee with Aaron

    I’m eager to put my apartment behind me, eager to move into a space where I will be more comfortable, as I have mentioned plenty of times recently, but I also want to be careful that I don’t look back at this time as all negative. It became a prison, but that’s not how it started.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Diminishing Returns of Having Good Taste

    I wouldn’t have understood this at age 9, but I had just engaged in a successful act of cultural arbitrage. If financial arbitrage involves the acquisition of commodities in a market where they are inexpensive and selling them for profit in a market where they are expensive, cultural arbitrage is the acquisition of information, goods, or styles in one location where they are common and dispersing them in places where they are rare. The “profit” is paid out not in money but in esteem and social clout. Individuals gain respect when others find their information useful or entertaining—and repeated deployments may help them build entire personas based on being smart, worldly, and connected.

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ Underwater datacenters could be vulnerable to sonic attack

    In a paper available on the arXiv open-access repository, the researchers detail how sound at a resonant frequency of the hard disk drives (HDDs) deployed in submerged enclosures can cause throughput reduction and even application crashing.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Bob Monsour ☛ My hearing loss journey...consider a cochlear implant?

    After that 3 weeks, I again returned for a hearing test...same results. At this point, the doctor shrugged his shoulders and said that they have no idea what caused my hearing loss and that it was unlikely to return. They call it idiopathic, meaning:

    "relating to or denoting any disease or condition which arises spontaneously or for which the cause is unknown."

  • Habib Cham ☛ Social Media ‘Post Brain’

    I don’t have any factual evidence, but I’d wager the majority of active users on social platforms circa early 2010s onwards probably experienced some sort of Post Brain. I certainly did during my highly active daily Twitter use — I think it’s fair to call mine exclusively ‘Twitter Post Brain’ since it was the only network this effect had a hold on me. Furthermore, I can, however, declare that almost 50% of the Post Brain content ended up sitting in my drafts and later on lost momentum, and got deleted.

  • NYPost ☛ Youth social media use linked to tobacco and vaping

    The new study, published in the medical journal Thorax, revealed that a mere 0.8% of kids who do not use social media vape, but the number spikes to 2.4% among those who use social media for just one to three hours daily, and increases to 4% for those that spend seven-plus hours scrolling.

  • Brandon ☛ You Are What You Consume

    Years ago, I conducted an experiment where I substituted the music I listened to on my drive home with classical music. The results were undeniable. I arrived home in a much more relaxed state and experienced way less road rage along the way and I honestly don't listen to all that much dark or heavy music. So, I can only imagine what a difference that might make for folks who do.

    I feel bad for people who wake up, doom scroll, listen to the news or podcasts on the way to work, spend the day off and on social media/news, come home watch true crime documentaries and repeat. I mean, I just couldn't function if nothing I ever consumed offered any hope or break from all the pain around me.

  • [Repeat] Science Alert ☛ Eerie Personality Changes Sometimes Happen After Organ Transplants

    If these symptoms can be directly linked to organ transplants, perhaps that means our 'sense of self' is contained in every cell of our bodies, not just one or two organs.

    An online survey among 23 heart recipients and 24 other organ recipients found nearly 90 percent experienced personality changes after transplant surgery, no matter the organ they received.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Matt Webb ☛ When you’re driving in Google Maps you’re re-enacting an ancient space combat sim (Interconnected)

    It’s about the little dart-shaped arrow that appears at the top of your iPhone when an app is using your location. You know the arrow I mean. The students all recognise it too.

    The heart of this story is from research and a long read by Benj Edwards, tech historian and journalist.

  • Nicolas Cropp ☛ I miss Reddit

    I've thought about rejoining Reddit, but when I remember how they massacred my boy, I renew my vows to never go back. I've used the Reddit official app, and it's a steaming pile of absolute dogshit. Reddit remains in the Hall of Dead To Me, between Twitter and Meta.

  • USGAO ☛ F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: Program Continues to Encounter Production Issues and Modernization Delays

    The F-35 program is facing a range of issues due to the late deliveries of TR-3 hardware and software. These upgrades are intended to enable many Block 4 capabilities once installed on the aircraft, but suppliers have faced various setbacks. TR-3 was originally planned to be delivered on aircraft starting in July 2023, but has since been delayed until June 2024 and will be less capable than originally planned.

  • Defense One ☛ F-35s are piling up on Lockheed tarmacs, presenting ‘unique’ risks to the Pentagon - Defense One

    “According to program officials, this initial TR-3 software will allow the program to accept delivered aircraft but not deliver any new capabilities to the aircraft. TR-3 software with new capabilities will not be delivered until 2025, two years later than originally planned. This means the warfighter will continue to wait for these critical upgrades,” GAO said.

    Specifically, the TR-3 software has had trouble supporting the F-35’s radar and electronic warfare systems. Some test pilots have said that they had to reboot their radar and electronic warfare systems mid-flight, according to the report.

  • The Scotsman ☛ Post Office stripped of status as specialist reporting agency after Horizon scandal

    The Post Office has been stripped of its status as a specialist reporting agency in Scotland following the Horizon scandal.

    Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain KC, Scotland’s top law officer, said the move followed its “fundamental and sustained failures”. It means the Post Office will no longer be able to investigate and report allegations directly to the Crown Office, Scotland’s prosecution service.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ CISA Adds Flaws To Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog

    According to a post shared by CISA, among the listed vulnerabilities, one affects D-Link routers, a common target for cyberattacks. The CVE-2014-100005 is related to the D-Link DIR-600 router series, specifically revolving around Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) concerns.

  • Security Week ☛ Critical Flaw in AI Python Package Can Lead to System and Data Compromise

    CVE-2024-34359 is related to the Jinja2 template rendering Python tool, which is mainly used for generating HTML, and the llama_cpp_python package, which is used for integrating AI models with Python.

    Llama_cpp_python uses Jinja2 for processing model metadata, but failed to use certain safeguards, enabling template injection attacks.

  • [Repeat] Tom's Hardware ☛ Bye Bye, AI: How to block Google's annoying AI overviews and just get search results

    Unfortunately, Google does not provide a way to turn off AI Overviews in its settings, but there are a few ways to avoid these atrocities and go straight to search results. In perhaps a tacit admission that its default results page is now a junk yard, the search giant has added a "web" tab to the site so, just like you can narrow your search to "images" or "videos" or "news," you can now get a plain old list of web pages without AI, answer boxes or other cruft.

    Below, I'll show you how to send your searches directly to the web tab from Chrome's address bar or filter AI overviews from the main search results tab. Unfortunately, at the moment, neither of these methods works for Chrome on Android or iOS. However, you can use a different mobile browser, such as Firefox.

  • The Age AU ☛ Cloud computing: UniSuper outage raises lockout fears

    The root cause? The fund’s cloud computing provider, US tech giant Google, had accidentally erased UniSuper’s Google Cloud account.

  • Wired ☛ Twitter Is Finally Dead. It’s X All the Way Down

    Like a venomous puss moth emerging from its hard cocoon, the social network formerly known as Twitter has fully metamorphosed into X.com.

    Various elements of Twitter had already embraced the rebranding, and the company has been using X.com links since early April. But now the domain has flipped over entirely, marking the end of a tumultuous transition period—and erasing the last vestiges of the bird app.

  • The Verge ☛ iMessage had an outage, but now it’s back

    The Apple services status page didn’t show any indication of trouble while the problems were going on, but now it has been updated after the fact, reflecting a resolved issue where “Users were unable to use this service” for iMessage, Apple Messages for Business, FaceTime, and HomeKit. According to the note, the problems went on from about 5:39PM ET until 6:35PM ET.

  • The Verge ☛ Twitter is officially X.com now

    The social network formerly known as Twitter has officially adopted X.com for all its core systems. That means typing twitter.com in your browser will now redirect to Elon Musk’s favored domain, or should. At the time of publication, we’re seeing a mix of results depending upon browser choice and whether you’re logged in or not.

  • Barry Hess ☛ The Amazon App Being Stupid with AI

    A feature I often use on Amazon is one you have to scroll down a ways on the product page to access. It’s a useful search through product information, Q&As, and customer reviews. In this case I’m searching for “boots” in this set of information for a pair of hiking pants. I’m looking for references to how well the pants come on and off while wearing hiking boots.

  • Michal Zelazny ☛ About pro users

    There is an ongoing discussion caused by the recent Apple keynote. I don’t like to get involved in such discussions, and I don’t feel the need to. Until today. Today I realized that the problem goes deeper and is connected to other thoughts I have had recently.

    This post isn’t about new iPads. It is about professional computer users.

  • Derek Kędziora ☛ After the Age of the Personal Blog

    With the increasingly level of professionalism among bloggers, everything just gets harder. Even if you don’t care much about SEO, you still want your posts to be findable. That becomes nearly a full-time job. Which then becomes a vicious cycle of monetization and homogenization to justify all the time spent blogging. And this is for an increasingly smaller audience, as most people will watch a 30 second video with a couple of talking points rather than read a nuanced post that took hours to research, write, edit, and publish. Reading blogs as a mainstream source of information will decline in the era of peak Google.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ Conviction of Tornado Cash programmer: Privacy is not a crime!

      Pirate Party Member of the European Parliament Patrick Breyer warns of the consequences of this conviction: “This ruling criminalises legitimate anonymity and all programmers who make it possible. The anonymity we enjoy when using cash, which protects our financial freedom, must not be criminalised when applied to digital currencies.

      The consequences of this approach could well extend to programmers of messenger software or anonymisation networks. It is in this spirit that the EU has recently placed strict limits on anonymous cash payments and is proposing the destruction of the digital privacy of correspondence (chat control or child sexual abuse regulation).

    • Chief Data Officer Magazine ☛ Are You Prepared for the New Data Governance Challenges and Opportunities in the EU?

      The Data Governance Act (DGA), published on February 23, 2022, is a horizontal framework for data sharing that covers both personal and nonpersonal data. With these new rules, the DGA effectively aligns its international transfer regime of nonpersonal data with the one of personal data initially defined by the GDPR and Schrems I & II jurisprudence. However, potential conflicts with the GDPR are still being identified and clarified. The DGA has a strong extraterritorial focus. The measure introduces provisions that encourage EU internal data sharing to increase the value derived from society-wide access to data between Member States. While on the other hand, the new rules proposed by the DGA pose significant challenges to the cross-border exchange of nonpersonal data with the rest of the world, therefore potentially reducing non-EU member countries’ access to knowledge and information held in Europe.

  • Confidentiality

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Norway NCSC Advises Replacement Of SSLVPN And WebVPN

      IPsec with IKEv2 is the NCSC’s recommended alternative for secure remote access. This protocol encrypts and authenticates each packet of data, using keys that are refreshed periodically. Despite acknowledging that no protocol is entirely free of flaws, the NCSC believes that IPsec with IKEv2 significantly reduces the attack surface for secure remote access incidents, especially due to its reduced tolerance for configuration errors compared to SSLVPN.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Independent UK ☛ Record high migrant Channel crossings for first five months of the year

    This is already higher than the total for the first five months of any previous year since current figures began in 2018, according to analysis by the PA news agency.

    The previous record for the period January 1 to May 31 was 9,607, which was set in 2022, while last year saw 7,610 migrants arrive by the end of May.

    The cumulative number of arrivals by small boats in 2024 is now 41% higher than at this point in 2023 and 15% up on this stage in 2022.

  • Defence Web ☛ Islamic State group uses ‘da’wah’ to gain support in Mozambique

    These activities “are an integral part of the Jihadi state-building project and the release of such propaganda helps provide evidence of a form of governance over a specified area,” wrote Weiss, a senior analyst at the Bridgeway Foundation, which works to prevent genocide.

  • RFERL ☛ EU Urges Iran To 'Reverse Nuclear Trajectory' As Tehran Threatens To Cross Threshold

    "Our goal has always been to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, through a diplomatic solution," Stano said, adding that the EU's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, and his team continue efforts to revive the Iran deal.

  • Security Week ☛ Woman Accused of Helping North Korean IT Workers Infiltrate Hundreds of US Firms

    According to the Justice Department, North Korea has dispatched thousands of skilled IT workers around the world. These workers stole the identities of people living in the United States and leveraged them to get jobs at more than 300 companies. This allowed them not only to earn significant amounts of money for North Korea, but also to obtain valuable access to information and networks.

  • The Register UK ☛ Stifling Beijing in cyberspace big focus for UK operatives

    That said, Putin was barely spotlit this year. That's not to say Russia is in the background – far from it – but more of a focus is being placed on China and the "epoch-defining challenge" (NCSC loves this wording) it presents.

  • VOA News ☛ US arrests American and Ukrainian in North Korea-linked IT infiltration scheme

    The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said the elaborate scheme, aimed at generating revenue for North Korea in contravention of international sanctions, involved the infiltration of more than 300 U.S. firms, including Fortune 500 companies and banks, and the theft of the identities of more than 60 Americans.

  • The Strategist ☛ Before applying AI to war, we’d better think about its limitations

    AI has many different branches with different capabilities. Not all require data for learning, but the AI systems in the form we are hearing about these days mostly do. They learn to identify patterns. Since they work fast and generally with satisfactory levels of accuracy for civilian applications, we are moving towards using them in many different ways.

  • JURIST ☛ HRW: ISIS-linked group in Mozambique used boys for looting

    Local residents, as well as two humanitarian workers, confirmed the presence of children among the militants to HRW. Most of the militants were reportedly children and young people who spoke local languages.

    According to parents, witnesses and survivors interviewed by HRW in 2021, al-Shabab abducted boys, trained them at its bases and used them as soldiers. The armed group also reportedly abducted children to turn them into fighters. Children received military training, Islamic lessons and instructions on how to attack villages.

  • HRW ☛ Mozambique: Child Soldiers Used in Raid on Northern Town

    An armed group linked to the Islamic State (ISIS) in northern Mozambique used boys as young as 13 to raid and loot the town of Macomia, in Cabo Delgado province, on May 10, 2024, Human Rights Watch said today. It is unclear if the children also engaged in fighting against government armed forces. The recruitment and use of children under age 15 as child soldiers is a war crime.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ ‘Inversion’ Photographer and visual artist Danila Tkachenko brings war-torn Ukraine to Europe’s best-known landmarks — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Flipping the script on Latvia’s culinary reputation The nation’s restaurant scene has earned its own Michelin Guide, so why is it still struggling? — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Putin: Russia seeking to create ‘buffer zone’ near Kharkiv and has no plans to capture city ‘as of today’ — Meduza

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • DeSmog ☛ Week of Protests Over Equinor’s Media Sponsorship Greenwashing

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: You were promised a jetpack by liars

      Well, I was wrong. In a terrific new 99 Percent Invisible episode, Chris Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked his life every time he went up in it: [...]

    • 99% Invisible ☛ Rocket Man - 99% Invisible

      In the twentieth century, the jetpack became synonymous with the idea of a ‘futuristic society.’ Appearing in cartoons and magazines, it felt like a matter of time before people could ride a jetpack to work. But jetpacks never became a mainstream technology, leaving many to wonder… why did they fall off the radar?

    • The Nation ☛ Biden’s Best Move Is to Declare Class War. Why Is He Holding Back?

      What’s more, the same energy profiteers Trump was romancing en masse are conveniently some of the biggest engineers behind the supply-chain inflation that continues to upend the consumer economy. Studies of the wave of corporate “greedflation” artificially driving prices further upward in the wake of the pandemic lockdowns have identified energy concerns as the lead offenders—who, as a direct result, realized some of the greatest profits from those inflationary surges. And that rash of price-gouging was further abetted by the forces of paper speculation—hedge funds, principally—that have long sent energy prices skyward.

    • CS Monitor ☛ Bicycle shops see falling prices after pandemic boom

      In 2023, bike sales totaled $4.1 million, up 23% from 2019, but down 24% from 2020, according to Circana. The path out of the pandemic has been uneven – national retailers, such as REI and Scheels, are stabilizing faster than independent bike stores, said Matt Tucker, director of client development for Circana’s sports equipment business.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Jeff Geerling ☛ The Cicadas are Here

      Their mating ritual involves the males crunching part of their body to the tune of 100 dB or so, which apparently the females find attractive.

      Put tens of thousands of these things in a tree, and you get 76 dBa of constant sound—and it's been increasing this week.

    • www.cicadamania.com ☛ Cicada Mania: Photos, Sounds, News & Facts About Cicadas

      Once the cicada hatches from the egg it will begin to feed on the tree fluids. At this point, it looks like a termite or a small white ant. Once the young cicada is ready, it crawls from the groove and falls to the ground where it will dig until it finds roots to feed on. It will typically start with smaller roots of grass plants and work its way up to the roots of its host tree. Depending on the species, the cicada will stay underground from 2 to 17 years. Cicadas are active underground, tunneling, feeding, and not sleeping or hibernating as commonly thought.

      After a long 2 to 17 years, cicadas emerge from the ground as nymphs. Nymphs climb the nearest available vertical surface (usually a plant) and begin to shed their nymph exoskeleton. Free of their old skin, their wings will inflate with fluid (hemolymph) and their adult skin will harden (sclerotize). Once their new wings and body are ready, they can begin their brief adult life.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Who were the biggest spenders on lobbying the 2024 Maine Legislature?

    A flavored tobacco ban, new charges for streaming companies, and digital privacy bills topped the list for most-lobbied legislation

  • RTL ☛ Rolling in it: Paul McCartney becomes UK's first billionaire musician

    The 81-year-old's fortune was boosted by "strong touring, a valuable back catalogue and even a little help from Beyoncé", who covered the Beatles song "Blackbird", said the Rich List, considered the definitive guide of the UK's wealthy.

    McCartney, whose net worth was estimated at £1.0 billion ($1.26 billion), has bucked the trend, with the amount of billionaires in the UK falling from a peak of 177 in 2022 to 165 this year.

  • India Times ☛ Wipro’s COO Amit Choudhary resigns; Sanjeev Jain appointed as successor

    Wipro's chief operating officer Amit Choudhary stepped down from his role on Friday, a week after Anis Chenchah, the chief executive of APMEA (Asia Pacific, India, Middle East & Africa) Strategic Market Unit (SMU) resigned. This is the second senior executive exit at the IT major after new CEO Srinivas Pallia took the helm last month.

    The IT major appointed Sanjeev Jain as the chief operating officer effective immediately.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Axios ☛ How Google’s AI could accelerate the Web’s decline

      Google's shift toward AI-generated search results, displacing the familiar list of links, is rewiring the[Internet] — and could accelerate the decline of the 30+-year-old World Wide Web.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Patrick Breyer ☛ 31 EU lawmakers call on British government to stop Julian Assange’s extradition

    Today, 31 Members of the European Parliament from several political groups sent an open letter to UK Home Secretary James Cleverly urging him to stop the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the United States. The letter was sent ahead of the upcoming court hearing and possibly final court decision on 20 May 2024, which is expected to decide Assange’s fate.

  • Wired ☛ Deadspin’s New Owners Are Embracing Betting Content—but Not AI

    Over a series of emails with WIRED, Booker went on to lay out what appears to be the first public statement of his plans for Deadspin. They include steering into gambling content—but absolutely no AI-generated blog posts.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Tripwire ☛ BreachForums seized! One of the world's largest hacking forums is taken down by the FBI... again

    BreachForums, a notorious marketplace for stolen data, was seized by the authorities on Wednesday, according to a message on its website.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ California park agency issues $100 fines to visitors who roll through stop signs

    Back in July, one of his adult kids visited Temescal Canyon park near Pacific Palisades. A camera recorded Rice’s Prius rolling through a stop sign at the park’s parking lot, resulting in a $100 fine for Rice, the registered owner of the car.

    Yet it was not a violation of the vehicle code. It won’t affect Rice’s driving record, and it was not a traffic citation. Instead, it was a fine for violating park rules, issued by the Mountains Recreation & Conservation Authority — a local public agency dedicated to protecting local parkland.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Toilet Theory of the Internet

    Allow me to explain my toilet theory of the internet. The premise, while unprovable, is quite simple: At any given moment, a great deal of the teeming, frenetic activity we experience online—clicks, views, posts, comments, likes, and shares—is coming from people who are scrolling on their phones in the bathroom.

    Toilet theory isn’t necessarily literal, of course. Mindless scrolling isn’t limited to the bathroom, and plenty of idle or bored swiping happens during other down moments—while waiting in line, or sitting in gridlocked traffic. Right now, somebody somewhere is probably reading an article or liking an Instagram post with a phone in one hand and an irritable infant in the other.

  • RIPE ☛ Reflections on Six Months as Chief Registry Officer

    Since rejoining the RIPE NCC as the Chief Registry Officer just over six months ago, I have been contemplating the extensive changes in the Registry since I left over a decade ago. Our core values and mission remain the same; we are the custodians of IP addresses and ASNs for a complex and diverse service region. We ensure Registry accuracy, maintain compliance with the relevant regulatory bodies in our service region and allocate Internet number resources in accordance with RIPE policies. And I’m very happy to see the dedication, integrity and expertise of the Registry department remains the same.

    Yet so much has also changed. The world around us is in a very different place. We have more responsibility than ever as we face a rocky political environment, regional conflicts, and growing external regulations. This has triggered a wider discussion about ensuring the future stability of the RIPE NCC which I encourage you all to participate in.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CBC ☛ Canadian Taylor Swift fans are flying to Europe for cheaper concert tickets

  Retail tickets for shows on Swift's record-setting Eras Tour in North America and Europe sold out almost instantly. Many then popped up on resale sites just as quickly. On StubHub, the cheapest seat to a Toronto concert in November right now is listed at $2,822. Yet the cost to get in the door in Stockholm this weekend is just a fraction of that price — $83.

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: AI is a WMD

  This was catnip to the kind of sociopath who a) owns a hedge-fund and b) hates journalists for being pain-in-the-ass, stick-in-the-mud sticklers for "truth" and "facts" and other impediments to the care and maintenance of a functional reality-distortion field. These dickheads started buying up beloved news sites and converting them to spam-farms, filled with garbage "reviews" and other Google-pleasing, affiliate-fee-generating nonsense.

  (These news-sites were vulnerable to acquisition in large part thanks to Google, whose dominance of ad-tech lets it cream 51 cents off every ad dollar and whose mobile OS monopoly lets it steal 30 cents off every in-app subscriber dollar): [...]

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ French Torrent Giant YggTorrent Goes Private

    YggTorrent, the largest francophone torrent community, is no longer available as a public site. After going private, only registered users can access the site now. The change comes just a few weeks after new blocking measures were put in place in France. By going private and processing takedown notices, the site's operators hope to shake off their copyright troubles, at least as far as that's possible.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Shueisha DMCA Subpoena Targets Two Dozen Manga Piracy Sites

    Japan-based publisher Shueisha is maintaining the pressure on sites distributing vast quantities of pirated manga content. A DMCA subpoena obtained at a United States court reveals around two dozen targets, some with relatively low traffic but many enjoying millions of visits per month. One stand out platform is currently ranked the 14th most popular site in Vietnam, period.

  • Pratik ☛ The Ethics of Sharing Creativity

    The conversation that followed was very insightful, with most people responding with an emphatic ‘Yes’ to both questions. However, I’m still not convinced that works for, for lack of a better phrase, the greater good. When Google started, if they had to ask permission from all websites in their index before listing them in the search results, it would have never taken off, and we would’ve been still relying on Yahoo’s web directory and DMOZ to discover new stuff on the Internet. Human curation is great, but it doesn’t scale if you want to make information accessible to 8 billion humans. But Google did give something in return for listing your website in their results - clicks back to your site. People loved that ego boost and the satisfaction of people reading them.

  • Techdirt ☛ There Is No Good Reason To Just Let Unsupported Video Games Die

    The main problem is that if a company abandons a game, the latter remains covered by copyright, and is thus locked down for decades more. Even if people are willing to take over the running of a game at their own expense, it is not possible to do that without the permission of the company involved, which rarely grants it. As Breyer notes, there is a wider initiative centered around the YouTuber Ross Scott, formed to oppose the destruction of video games. There is a dedicated site, Stop Killing Games. As that explains: [...]