Leftovers

• Tracy Durnell ☛ The open web as gift economy (Part 4)

  Is the [Internet], at its core, a marketplace or a Third Place? Is it meant for facilitating capitalism or community? Whether we think of the [Internet] first a place for connection and second for commerce, or vice versa, shapes our expectations and norms for the web.

• Jeff Bridgforth ☛ Blog Questions Challenge

  I wrote a similar article last year, Blogging and Me, in which I answered interview questions from People and Blogs. I reused some of that article for this challenge. But mostly new and original content.

• Lou Plummer ☛ This is Not Nam. This is the Internet. There Are Rules.

  Like the memorable scene from the Big Lebowski, I sometimes feel the need to remind people on the Internet that there is some structure to the world and that failing to acknowledge that can leave you entering a world of pain.

• Lee Peterson ☛ Finding your own productivity system

  I’ve stepped away from an all digital productivity system and onto a good old paper notebook. One thing this has taught me is to find my own way, what works for me won’t work for you and the other way around.

• Science

  • Chris ☛ Intention-to-Treat Experiments

    In other words, by switching from a naïve analysis to an intention-to-treat analysis, we make confounders result in false negatives rather than false positives. This is usually preferred when sciencing.

• Career/Education

  • Harvard University ☛ What makes a good teacher?

    Most scholars would say that a good teacher does three key things: They establish strong, caring teacher-student relationships; challenge students to think, reason, and communicate their ideas; and convey subject matter accurately and clearly.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Daniel Gerlach’s programming quote collection

    Daniel collated a list of programming quotes, though they could easily apply to so many endeavours. I hadn’t heard of these: [...]

  • [Old] University of Michigan ☛ Information superhighway adds a new stop; Internet Public Library

    “The IPL uses the connecting power of the Internet to link users and service providers in exciting new configurations, extending far beyond the walls of traditional public libraries to secure the best services for its global network of users,” says Joseph Janes, assistant professor of information and library studies. “The IPL is prepared to provide essential library services to a target audience estimated to number a quarter of the entire American population by the end of the century. ”

    The IPL was created by U-M graduate students as part of their course work under the direction of Janes and ” demonstrates the use of rapidly changing technology to reinvent library service delivery for a 21st century audience. ”

  • [Old] University of Michigan ☛ Before Its Time: The Internet Public Library

    Joe Janes, an assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Studies at the University of Michigan[1], wanted to put a new spin on "ILS-726: Information Technology, Impacts and Implications," a graduate-level survey course that he had already taught several times. For the spring semester, 1995, he wanted to try to integrate library studies with the World Wide Web. He had been involved in the University of Michigan Digital Library project[2], and he wanted to further explore the merger of networking and libraries by planning, building, and running a digital library on the Internet based on the public-library model.

    His idea was that he could do more than just replicate the functions and processes of a real public library, or add to the long lists of digital resources that were then available on the Internet — resources that had little intellectual control or input from the library community. He wanted to create a hybrid that combined the strengths of both public libraries and the lists of links that attempted to categorize Internet resources. His Web-based library would feature such standard public-library services as reference, cataloging, educational outreach, exhibits, a children's space, and popular reading. It would also have some features less common in public libraries, such as government documents, special collections and archives, and serials, as well as online-only services, such as a reference MOO. [3]

• Hardware

  • [Old] BSDly ☛ That grumpy BSD guy: The Impending Doom of Your Operating System Going to or Past 11, Versus the Lush Oasis of Open Source Systems

    But then came the announcements from Apple and Microsoft of their operating systems going past 11 or to 11 respectively, spaced not too many weeks apart. In both cases, the announcements indicated that the new operating system versions would not work with older hardware.

    At their WWDC event in early June 2021, Apple announced new versions of their system with somewhat vague but only thinly veiled formulations that specific new features of the upcoming system would only be available on the newer ARM architecture "Apple silicon" hardware.

    Then a few weeks later into June 2021, Microsoft announced their Windows 11, and the announcement included some fairly confusing statements that seemed to indicate at first that Windows 11 would only work well or at all on hardware based on Intel's 8th generation Core processors or equivalent.

  • Joel Chrono ☛ It's PSP season!

    Oh yeah, it's true, I have a Nintendo Switch and I have been playing Ridge Racer on my PSP for like 8 hours in a couple days

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Amusing factionalism in the MAHA universe

    Last week, Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term as President of the United States. Today, Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, antivax activist and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will face the Senate Finance Committee, and tomorrow he faces the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). For all intents and purposes, though, it is the Finance Committee that will decide whether to advance his nomination to the full Senate; so that’s where the tough questioning will have to count.

  • Barry Hess ☛ FOMO Machines

    Stepping away from socials would certainly be helpful in numerous ways, but that isn’t the only FOMO machine that I have willingly subjected myself to…

• Proprietary

  • Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging: I've stopped wearing my Apple Watch. Kurzgesagt did this great video on exercise that annoyingly...

    The Apple Watch is great at two things: telling you things you already know (you were active enough today), and telling you things you don't need to know (how many calories you burned. What your calculated VO2 max is). It's theoretically good at other things - crash detection, ECG, and fall detection are useful, but given that it can't reliably unlock my laptop, you'll forgive me for not counting on those things! Pretty much everything else it can do, I can already do on my phone.

  • The New Stack ☛ Why Teams Are Ditching DynamoDB

    But as time goes on, drawbacks emerge, especially as workloads scale and business requirements evolve. Teams sometimes need lower latency, lower costs (especially as they scale) or the ability to run their applications somewhere other than AWS. In those cases, ScyllaDB, which offers a DynamoDB-compatible API, is often selected as an alternative.

    Let’s explore the challenges that drove three teams to leave DynamoDB.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Futurism ☛ The Onion Just Deleted Another Image After Realizing It Was AI Slop

      "Goddammit," wrote the former NBC News extremism reporter and social star. "The Onion once again posted an article in which a portion of the artwork came from an AI-generated Shutterstock image."

      "This article was over a month old and only a portion of the image," wrote the former NBC News extremism reporter and social star. "We took it down immediately. We'll be more vigilant. I'm personally sorry and I'm working on it."

    • Scheerpost ☛ Yanis Varoufakis on Cloud Capital vs AI: DeepSeek, Technofeudalism, Capitalism and the New Cold War

      To begin with, it’s important to note that AI was never a proprietary technology in itself. The underlying code of all AI companies was always open source. What made American AI a quasi-private commodity was the way in which these models were trained using huge amounts of privatized data. Where I say privatized, you should translate stolen data, your data, my data. There was a Google memo that was leaked in 2017 that was widely discussed and refuted, but it was a harbinger for what happened with DeepSeek.

      In that memo, we read the following words: If an open source large language module, it said, trained for a few million dollars, comes to outperform a proprietary model, then there’s going to be trouble. There will be no firewall, the memo continues, even to safeguard open AI. That’s what happened. DeepSeek pierced the United States’ AI company’s bubble by decommodifying the results of the model’s training and doing it at a tiny, tiny cost to itself, shifting the results of AI-trained models from behind a paywall to the public realm. Within days since the release of the latest version of DeepSeek, developers around the world started building their own models on top of DeepSeek’s.

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ Why AI labs offer so many different models

      The base model is never released directly, for two reasons. First, it’s typically too large and too expensive to serve to users. Second, it hasn’t been RLHF-ed yet, so it’ll behave like the raw gestalt of human writing that it is, instead of like a helpful assistant. It’ll happily tell users to make meth or encourage them to kill themselves, or any one of a million other things that’d be a PR nightmare for the AI lab. The purpose of the base model is not to be used directly, but to act as a base for other models.

    • 404 Media ☛ LinkedIn Removes Accounts of AI 'Co-Workers' Looking for Jobs

      LinkedIn has removed at least two accounts that were created for AI “co-workers” whose profile images said they were “#OpenToWork.”

  • Social Control Media

    • Pete Brown ☛ The problem with content moderation is, unsurprisingly, scale.

      In other words, content moderation doesn’t scale. Combine that with the fact that when the rest of your platform does scale, so to does the amount of content that needs to be moderated. But none of the big players has any interest or incentive to do anything about that, and even if they did, there is no real answer other than “Don’t get so big that you can’t keep up with the stuff your users are posting.”

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Project Censored ☛ 2025-01-20 [Older] Fires, Frontlines, and Surveillance: Looking into Environmental and Civil Rights Crises

    • Scheerpost ☛ 2025-01-22 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini Issues Order to End Censorship [Ed: Censorship is imposed in his favour now]

    • Papers Please ☛ Surveillance as a service (SAAS)

      [Infographic from WCC.]Does SAAS stand for “software as a service” or “surveillance as a service”?

      As we’ve reported previously, the UN Security Council and ICAO have illegally ordered all UN and ICAO members to create national agencies for surveillance of airline passengers and global sharing of airline reservations (PNR) and passenger manifest (API) data.

      Through bilateral and multilateral efforts and the UN Countering Terrorist Travel program, the US and Dutch governments have made available ready-made software for creating and managing travel watchlists, blocklists, and profiling algorithms and rulesets.

    • NYOB ☛ Data Protection Day: Only 1.3% of cases before EU DPAs result in a fine

      When the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force in 2018, it ushered in a new era of data protection in the EU. At least on paper. Consumers were given the tools to stand up for their fundamental rights, while authorities received serious investigatory powers and the ability to sanction breaches with hefty fines. Nearly 7 years later, the reality is much bleaker. On the occasion of this year’s Data Protection Day on 28 January, noyb analysed current EDPB statistics on the (in)activity of national data protection authorities (DPAs). The data shows that, on average, merely 1.3% of cases before DPAs result in a fine. However, data protection professionals say that fines are the most effective way of ensuring companies comply with the law.

    • Threema GmbH ☛ Data Privacy Day: Show Your Support for Online Privacy – Threema

      In light of this, privacy protection on the Internet is way more important today than it was when the Data Privacy Day was introduced in 2008. And since an ever-increasing part of our lives takes place online, it’s paramount to stand up against the growing surveillance in the digital space.

    • Deseret Media ☛ Why Utahns might need to show ID in order to download apps

      Lawmakers on Utah's Capitol Hill advanced a bill that would require digital app stores to verify the ages of users in an effort to protect underage Utahns from accessing potentially harmful content and having personal data collected by apps.

      The bill is similar to the state's previous attempts to require age verification on social media platforms, though several opponents said the bill opens kids and families to even more invasive data collection while potentially violating constitutional free speech protections.

    • EFF ☛ California Law Enforcement Misused State Databases More Than 7,000 Times in 2023

      Records obtained by EFF also included numerous cases of other forms of database abuse in 2023, such as police allegedly using data for personal vendettas. While many violations resulted only in officers or other staff being retrained in appropriate use of the database, departments across the state reported that violations in 2023 led to 24 officers being suspended, six officers resigning, and nine being fired.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Lawsuit claims systems behind OPM governmentwide email blast are illegal, insecure

      A lawsuit filed in federal court Monday alleges that the Office of Personnel Management set up an on-premise server to conduct last week’s mass email blast to federal employees and store information it received in response without doing a privacy impact assessment on the system as required by law.

      Filed by two anonymous federal employees in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the class-action lawsuit calls for OPM to stop the use of the system until the agency can show that it’s lawfully conducted a privacy assessment.

    • Techdirt ☛ TikTok, AliExpress, SHEIN, Temu, WeChat, And Xiaomi Hit With GDPR Complaints Over Personal Data Transfers To China

      As you may have noticed, the tech world is full of news about TikTok, its ban, its reprieve and possible sale, and whether it represents a security threat to the US and its citizens. Of course, the question of whether TikTok is spying on its users and sending data back to China is broader than that. It can also be asked of the other rising Chinese tech companies, and not just in the US, but globally. That includes the EU, which has famously strict laws aiming to protect citizens’ personal data. So it was probably inevitable that complaints under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) should be filed against Chinese companies. And it was probably inevitable that the person and organization to do so would be Max Schrems and his noyb.eu team that have weaponized the GDPR with huge success. Here’s their latest move, which is a significant one: [...]

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ New Gmail war crime spotted in the wild

  • Confidentiality

    • Trail of Bits ☛ Best practices for key derivation

      Key derivation is essential in many cryptographic applications, including key exchange, key management, secure communications, and building robust cryptographic primitives. But it’s also easy to get wrong: although standard tools exist for different key derivation needs, our audits often uncover improper uses of these tools that could compromise key security. Flickr’s API signature forgery vulnerability is a famous example of misusing a hash function during key derivation.

      These misuses indicate potential misunderstandings about key derivation functions (KDFs). This post covers best practices for using KDFs, including specialized scenarios that require careful treatment of key derivation to achieve the desired security properties. Along the way, we offer advice for answering common questions, like: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Local DK ☛ 2025-01-20 [Older] Danish refugee agency extends freeze on Syrian cases after regime change

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-18 [Older] Syria: Nationalist education dropped, but what comes next?

  • CS Monitor ☛ Hamas reasserts rule in Gaza with ceasefire, defying Israel

    Instead, outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said recently that U.S. intelligence services “assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost” since October 7, 2023.

  • Irish Examiner ☛ EU states are now in 'full war preparation mode', Simon Harris told

    The ministerial brief from the Department of Defence said “strengthening cyber defence capabilities” and “securing critical infrastructure” were key matters on the EU agenda.

    The document said that up until now, Ireland’s position, and that of other countries, of military neutrality, had been accepted, but that the changing geopolitical climate and the decision of previously neutral states such as Sweden and Finland to join [NATO] would likely result in a “lower tolerance or understanding” of this position into the future.

  • The Local SE ☛ Police carry out controlled explosions in southern Stockholm

    The incident is being investigated as försök till grov allmänfarlig ödeläggelse, or literally 'attempted gross devastation endangering the public'.

  • The Local SE ☛ Two held after Sweden records 30th explosion since the turn of the year

    The Bagarmossen explosion is the 30th explosion in Sweden since the turn of the year. The previous record for the most explosions in a single month was 22.

  • The Local DK ☛ Denmark announces 15 billion kroner Arctic security plan

    "We must face the fact that there are serious challenges regarding security and defence in the Arctic and North Atlantic," Denmark's Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said in a statement.

    His announcement came ahead of a visit by the country's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen to Berlin, Paris and Brussels this week to shore up "European unity" on Greenland.

  • France24 ☛ Danish PM marshals European support against Trump's threats to Greenland

    Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on Tuesday said she had received support from European leaders as she sought backing to counter US President Donald Trump's threats to take over Greenland.

    Frederiksen and NATO chief Rutte agreed that allies need to focus on strengthening defences in the Arctic, a source familiar with the talks told Reuters.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Confirming Kash Patel Will Get Senators "Drug through the Streets"

    But that’s not a proof of a two-tier system of justice. That’s proof that America’s prisons suck, and that Jan6ers had more success in using that to get released than others.

    Ultimately, though, Patel is claiming that one can get in your truck with guns in the back, drive to DC, threaten to drag people like Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley through the streets because they certified Joe Biden’s win, spray cops with toxic chemicals, and then call on the mob to grab more weapons to break into the Capitol, and not be assigned to pre-trial detention. That’s what Nichols did: He directly threatened Senators, both Republicans and Democrats. The notion that Nichols was improperly detained suggests one can assault cops after threatening the members of Congress they’re protecting with impunity.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • American Oversight ☛ American Oversight Opens Investigation into Mass Firings of Inspectors General by Trump Administration

    On Monday, American Oversight filed multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, demanding any communication that would shed light on what, if any, notice was given to Congress—as required by law—on the firing of over a dozen Senate-confirmed, independent Inspectors General from at least 14 major federal agencies. The FOIA requests also seek any communication between the agency heads and the Trump transition team, the White House, or Congress.

  • Public-Inbox ☛ public-inbox - an "archives first" approach to mailing lists

    public-inbox spawned around three main ideas:

    * Publicly accessible and archived communication is essential to Free Software development.

    * Contributing to Free Software projects should not require the use of non-Free services or software.

    * Graphical user interfaces should not be required for text-based communication. Users may have broken graphics drivers, limited eyesight, or be unable to afford modern hardware.

• Environment

  • DeSmog ☛ We Need a Data Revolution to Avert Climate Disaster

    Take the Planetary Boundaries framework, one of the most recognized global indicators of humanity’s transgression of critical ecological thresholds, such as climate stability and biodiversity. Despite its importance in signaling the health of Earth’s living systems, the Boundaries graphic is a 2D, static radial chart that’s updated once a year and buried deep on the Internet.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • CBC ☛ 2025-01-22 [Older] The oilpatch thought it had dodged a bullet, until Cheeto Mussolini mentioned tariffs again

    • CBC ☛ 2025-01-22 [Older] First Nations leader apologizes, walks back support for Northern Gateway pipeline in B.C.

    • Futurism ☛ Energy Companies Stocks Plummet as DeepSeek Shows AI Doesn't Need Entire Coal Plants to Cheat on Homework

      That's rattled tech stocks in AI-adjacent industries, with the semiconductor company Broadcom down over 17.5 percent over two days, and Nvidia continuing to fluctuate after shedding nearly $600 billion in one day, dragging the NASDAQ down by an astonishing 3 percent.

      Now joining them are energy and utility corporations, as investors reel from DeepSeek's more efficient model seeming to use considerably less power than OpenAI to achieve similar results. Essentially, fossil fuel outfits had been banking on huge new datacenters needing tons of energy.

    • New York Times ☛ Chevron Wants to Tap Into A.I. Boom by Selling Electricity to Data Centers

      The artificial intelligence boom has turbocharged demand for electricity, and everyone who is anyone in the U.S. energy industry wants a piece of the action.

      The latest entrant is Chevron, the country’s second-largest oil and gas company, which sees opportunity in building natural gas-fueled power plants that will feed energy directly to data centers.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ AI's energy obsession gets a reality check

      A reminder about the first piece: OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and an Abu Dhabi–based investment fund called MGX plan to spend up to $500 billion opening massive data centers around the US to build better AI. Much of the groundwork for this project was laid in 2024, when OpenAI increased its lobbying spending sevenfold (which we were first to report last week) and AI companies started pushing for policies that were less about controlling problems like deepfakes and misinformation, and more about securing more energy.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Digital Music News ☛ Meta Is Paying TikTok Influencers Big Bucks to Switch to Instagram

    One offer to a creator was $300,000 for content created over six months. Creators would be required to post never-before-seen short-form video content on Instagram Reels. They would need to post at least 10 new Reels to their Instagram accounts each month and the content must be exclusive to Instagram for three months. Videos must be at least 15 seconds and no longer than three minutes—catering directly to short-form video watchers.

  • Futurism ☛ Nancy Pelosi's Husband Sold a Boatload of Nvidia Stock Right Before It Was Eviscerated by Chinese Startup

    Apparently that dream isn't just for us nine-to-fivers. US Representative Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul Pelosi has cashed in to the tune of $38 million thanks to some very smart investments, with some alleging that the centi-millionaire couple might be making their own luck.

  • Techdirt ☛ Sonos Executives Pay The Price For Company’s Shitty, Anti-Consumer Policies

    You might remember that Sonos was the golden child of “smart,” [Internet]-connected home hardware a decade or so ago. But that reputation has been steadily tarnished by a long line of bone-headed decisions, ranging from their 2020-era choice to brick still useful speakers and hardware, to their choice last year to release an app update that made their speakers more buggy and way less useful. That rushed and buggy app alone cost the company an estimated $20-30 million in value.

  • Rest of World ☛ The global struggle over how to regulate AI

    Hany Farid, former dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information and a prominent regulation advocate who often testifies at government hearings on the tech sector, told Rest of World that lobbying by big U.S. companies over AI in Western nations has been intense. “They are trying to kill every [piece of] legislation or write it in their favor,” he said. “It’s fierce.”Meanwhile, outside the West, where AI regulations are often more nascent, these same companies have received a red-carpet welcome from many politicians eager for investment. As Aakrit Vaish, an adviser to the Indian government’s AI initiative, told Rest of World: “Regulation is actually not even a conversation.”

    Meanwhile, outside the West, where AI regulations are often more nascent, these same companies have received a red-carpet welcome from many politicians eager for investment. As Aakrit Vaish, an adviser to the Indian government’s AI initiative, told Rest of World: “Regulation is actually not even a conversation.”

  • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Google is right to change Gulf of Mexico's name in its Maps app in the US

    Someone dug up a 2008 post from Google’s public policy blog where the then-global director of the sector talks about this very issue — “How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth.”

    Google has a uniform policy they call “Primary Local Usage:” [...]

  • Wired ☛ Under Trump, US Cyberdefense Loses Its Head

    The timing couldn’t be worse for the nation to lose its top cybersecurity cop. A Beijing-linked group called Salt Typhoon spent months last year rampaging through American telecoms and siphoning call logs, recordings, text messages, and even potentially location data. Many experts have called it the biggest hack in US telecom history. Easterly and her agency unknowingly detected Salt Typhoon activity in federal networks early last year—warning signs that ultimately sped up the unraveling of the espionage campaign.

  • Wired ☛ Elon Musk Is Running the Twitter Playbook on the Federal Government

    About two weeks later, remaining employees received an email with the subject line “A Fork in the Road.” Musk said that they would need to be “extremely hardcore” in order to realize his vision for Twitter 2.0. This meant “working long hours at high intensity.” He noted that "only exceptional performance” would receive “a passing grade." Employees were asked to opt into this vision via a web form. Anyone who failed to do so by the following day would receive three months severance, Musk said. Thousands of Twitter employees would later sue, arguing that they were not paid their full severance. Musk ultimately was able to get the suit dismissed.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • CBC ☛ 2025-01-22 [Older] District of North Vancouver exits X. Will other municipalities follow?

    • The Independent UK ☛ California water regulators deny Trump's claim that US military 'turned on the water' in the state

      California water regulators have said there's no truth to President Donald Trump's claim that the U_S_ military entered the state and “turned on the water.”

    • US News And World Report ☛ California Water Regulators Deny Trump's Claim That US Military 'Turned on the Water' in the State

      The White House suggested Tuesday that Trump was referring to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers but did not provide details about how much water was involved, where it came from or how changes were implemented. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked at a briefing what role soldiers were playing in California water policy. She said California had “turned on the water,” referring to the authorities allowing water to flow from northern California to southern parts of the state.

    • The Telegraph UK ☛ What is DeepSeek? The Chinese AI that has sparked a $1 trillion panic

      But DeepSeek is now ringing alarm bells in the West as it breaks out of China and threatens to challenge America’s AI giants across the rest of the world.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • TruthOut ☛ 2025-01-24 [Older] Instagram, Facebook Under Fire for Censoring Posts From Abortion Pill Providers

  • CPJ ☛ 2025-01-24 [Older] Attacks, arrests, threats, censorship: The high risks of reporting the Israel-Gaza war

  • Techdirt ☛ Nunes’s SLAPP Suit Over Forgotten Esquire Farm Story Crashes (Again)

    The lawsuits, generally, have not gone well. One of the dumber lawsuits was the one he filed in 2019 against Hearst Magazine (publisher of Esquire Magazine) and reporter Ryan Lizza, over a 2018 story that Nunes absolutely doesn’t want you to read about his family’s farm: Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Is Hiding A Politically Explosive Secret.

    If Nunes had just left it alone, basically everyone would have forgotten about the article. Instead, because he sued over it (and then, later, got his family to sue over it as well, which was eventually merged into a single case), the story has been in the news for more than six years now, providing a textbook example of the Streisand Effect.

  • ABC ☛ Department of Education dismisses book ban complaints, ends guidance

    The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has announced that it is rescinding all past guidance issued against the removal of books and will no longer employ a coordinator to investigate instances of unlawful book removals.

    The department also announced that it has dismissed 11 book ban complaints and six pending complaints. According to the DOE, the complaints alleged that the removal of these books "created a hostile environment for students."

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump’s Dept. Of Education Rolls Back Anti-Book Ban Guidance, Says Bring On The Censorship!

    Some of this went on the back burner, mostly due to courts recognizing the inherent unconstitutionality of these laws and acts. Some of it got shelved temporarily after the government was in the hands of a regular type of president, rather than a dead-eyed despot with delusions of grandeur.

    Unfortunately, someone who was considered an aberrational embarrassment on the presidential timeline, has made a return to the nation’s top office. And he’s brought all of his bad ideas and terrible people with him, along with four years of burning resentment.

  • CBC ☛ Montreal public library says it can't host English book club, citing Quebec's new language law

    "The new Law 14 requires us to program activities held mainly in French," the library wrote in an email to DiRaddo, which was provided to CBC News. Law 14, also known as Bill 96, went into effect last fall.

    The library wrote there must be a way for members wishing to speak French to participate in the activity and so, "all conversations in English must be translated."

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ China's DeepSeek censors answers about Hong Kong and Taiwan

    Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek’s answers about the Hong Kong protests in 2019, Taiwan’s status and other topics echo Beijing’s party line, according to test questions posed by HKFP.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Facebook flags Linux topics as 'cybersecurity threats' — posts and users being blocked

    Facebook is banning posts that mention various Linux-related topics, sites, or groups. Some users may also see their accounts locked or limited when posting Linux topics. Major open-source operating system news, reviews, and discussion site DistroWatch is at the center of the controversy, as it seems to be the first to have noticed that Facebook's Community Standards had blackballed it.

    A post on the site claims, "Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labeled groups associated with Linux as being 'cybersecurity threats.' We tried to post some blurb about distrowatch.com on Facebook and can confirm that it was barred with a message citing Community Standards.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Free speech fears mount as Pakistan’s Senate approves bill criminalizing ‘false news’

    The amendments to the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) were previously approved by the National Assembly and now await the president’s signature to become law.

    “The Pakistan Senate’s passage of amendments to the country’s cybercrime laws is deeply concerning. While on its face, the law seeks to tamp down the spread of false news, if signed into law, it will disproportionately curtail freedom of speech in Pakistan,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “President Asif Ali Zardari must veto the bill, which threatens the fundamental rights of Pakistani citizens and journalists while granting the government and security agencies sweeping powers to impose complete control over internet freedom in the country.”

  • CPJ ☛ Kurdish journalist sentenced to 6 years, 3 months on terrorism charges in Turkey

    “The evidence brought against Kurdish journalist Safiye Alagaş consists of her professional journalism and does not support accusations that she was a member of a terrorist organization, as indicated by one of the judges’ dissenting from the guilty verdict,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should not fight Alagaş in her upcoming appeal and stop equating journalism with terrorism.”

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Project Censored ☛ 2025-01-23 [Older] From #MeToo to Misdirection

  • RFERL ☛ In Russian Region, Muslim Women Lose Child Custody After Remarrying 

    Sannet’s case is far from unique in the conservative, predominantly Muslim region, where children are often considered the sole property of their fathers and their father’s family.

    These local beliefs clash with Russian law. Yet they often shape court rulings, depriving many mothers of custody of their children if they divorce, remarry, or become widows.

  • RFA ☛ Dalai Lama chronicles 70-year struggle with China in new book – Radio Free Asia

    A new book by the Dalai Lama documents for the first time in detail the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader’s 70-year struggle with China to secure a future for the Tibetan people.

    “Voice for the Voiceless: Over Seven Decades of Struggle with China for My Land and My People,” will be released on March 11.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Confirmed: Unions Squandered the Biden Years

    Of course Biden was infinitely better for unions and workers than the alternative scenario of Trump winning in 2020. That is common sense, a question not even worth dwelling on. The question is not, “Should unions support Republicans or Democrats?” The real question is: Has achieving electoral political power translated into the growth of union power? Have the dollars spent on politics rather than on union organizing paid off? Does organized labor have its priorities in order?

    Today, we can definitively say the answer is “no.” That’s because, this morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual measurement of union membership in America, the best statistical measure of the total strength and size of unions. In 2024, union density in America fell to 9.9% of the work force. In 1983, union density was 20.1%, meaning that organized labor is now less than half as powerful as it was during the Reagan presidency. This is the first time in generations that less than ten percent of workers have been union members. In 2020, union density was 10.8%. That means that over the course of the most pro-union presidency in my lifetime, not only did union density not rise—it declined into single digits.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ Network traffic modelling approaches

    This post explores the characteristics of various traffic models using synthetic data and offers an overview of traffic patterns. We’ll generate and analyse time series data to highlight the fundamental properties of different traffic models. In a follow-up post, we will apply these insights to a practical example, examining how these traffic patterns affect the performance of Random Early Detection (RED) parameter tuning.

    This is also a very high-level overview of the topic to provide a broader perspective. Think of it as a guided foothills tour, providing a view of the distant peaks. The climb to those distant peaks is left as an adventure for readers to explore in the future.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ CISA Under Trump

    If Project 2025 is a guide, the agency will be gutted under Trump: [...]

  • Inside Towers ☛ Carr Appoints Additional Agency Leaders - Inside Towers

    FCC Chairman Brendan Carr appointed more FCC leadership positions on Friday. This is after naming six acting bureau chiefs and the acting general counsel and managing director earlier in the week.

    Tom Sullivan is Acting Chief of the Office of International Affairs. He has served in other leadership roles at the Commission including as Deputy Chief of the bureau he now leads, Chief of the International Bureau, and Chief of Staff for the International Bureau.

  • The Verge ☛ FCC chair says landlords can force bulk [Internet] service on residents

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • PC World ☛ Hours-long unskippable ads spotted on YouTube. What's going on?

    Google is getting sick and tired of YouTube watchers who use ad blockers, and — no surprise — the company is stepping it up in an effort to extract (reclaim?) even more ad revenue from users.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • [Old] TechnologyAdvice ☛ Eben Moglen Speaks: the GPL Today

      So there are two classes of activity under GPL3 that affect the interests of those who license patent claims within the enterprise. They want to know if distribution is going on what patent claims in the house might lead other distributed software or that it’s not worth searching. And they have a call-back if they have a problem; they can cease distribution. With respect to the code, which is contributed to GPL3 where it’s on the other hand they need to make a permanent commitment when the contribution goes out the door. They need to have thought about whether it is appropriate for this contribution to be made and they need to decide whether they are prepared to allow those patent claims to be used by those who may or have made modified versions of the work as well employ the work itself.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • EFF ☛ What Proponents of Digital Replica Laws Can Learn from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

      And the NO FAKES provisions to allow improperly targeted speakers to hold the notice abuser accountable will offer as little deterrent as the roughly parallel provisions in the DMCA. As with the DMCA, a speaker must prove that the lie was “knowing,” which can be interpreted to mean that the sender gets off scot-free as long as they subjectively believe the lie to be true, no matter how unreasonable that belief.

• Copyrights

  • EFF ☛ Don't Make Copyright Law in Smoke-Filled Rooms

    Copyright law affects everything we do on the [Internet]. So why do some lawmakers and powerful companies still think they can write new copyright law behind closed doors, with ordinary [Internet] users on the outside?

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Nintendo Piracy Lawsuit Defendant Makes Dire Situation Even Worse

    A Nintendo lawsuit filed last November targeted video gamer Jesse Keighin, aka EveryGameGuru. Given the scope of the allegations, narrowly focused on a single defendant, the action seems unusually punitive. Yet if the plan was to push Keighin into a corner, the Colorado resident hasn't read the script. Allegations of destruction of evidence, obstructing service, and abuse of Nintendo's legal team, combine to make a dire situation even worse. But not for Nintendo.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ LLM Taken Down Following Legal Pressure from Anti-Piracy Group

    The use of copyrighted material in training large language models (LLMs) has sparked legal battles and takedown notices. In the Netherlands, anti-piracy group BREIN takes credit for forcing the popular 'GEITje' LLM offline, which in part was trained on copyrighted texts. The developer didn't necessarily agree with BREIN, but lacked the resources to fight back.