Leftovers

• Vintage Everyday ☛ Alice Cooper and His Band During a Photoshoot by Ed Caraeff in 1969 and 1970

  “We were called the Nazz and we found out about Todd Rundgren’s band who were called the Nazz,” Furnier recalled. “So I said let’s not come up with a name that's dark, because they’re expecting that. I said, ‘What if we sounded like we were somebody’s aunt?’ It was kind of like the all-American, sweet little old lady name. And I wasn’t Alice Cooper. I was just the singer in the band Alice Cooper, like Manfred Mann. Pretty soon everybody called me Alice, they just assumed that the singer’s name was Alice. So, at that point, I legally changed my name to Alice Cooper. It was a total outrage at the time. Now it’s a household name.”

• Lou Plummer ☛ Cost vs. Benefit

  Every so often it is helpful to make lists of pros and cons or to seek counsel from friends, whether they be IRL or from online communities. Other times, going with my gut instinct is the only thing I can do. Every single day is full of choices. Because I am a world-class procrastinator, my choice is often to just wait on more information. That can sometimes be good, frequently it isn't, But, I give myself a break. Like almost everybody, I am doing the best I can with what I've got to work with. I just have to keep moving forward.

• James G ☛ Small things I am proud of today

  You don’t have to share your answer to the question, but you may enjoy thinking about it. I have been taking notes of things that I am proud of recently in my digital notes. I will probably not share them, but the exercise has been incredibly valuable to me in reminding myself of what I can do.

• Flamed Fury ☛ Blogging For The Hell Of It

  I’ve got all these half-finished drafts sitting around, collecting pixel dust. Why not just finish one? It doesn’t have to be perfect. Hell, it doesn’t even have to make sense to anyone but me. The point is to write, and get those thoughts out of my head and onto the screen.

• Elliot C Smith ☛ If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric.

  If it turns out your customers don’t talk to each other or wouldn’t bring up the problem you solve then save your resources. There are plenty of ways to grow a product. Investing in referral programs that don’t pay back is time and money better spent on other growth levers. There are many well run businesses that don’t have referrals as a major driver of growth.

• Brandon ☛ Turning My Blogs Into an E-Book

  One problem all bloggers face is what to do with their content after it's been written. Sure, some of it gets published to a blog, but what happens if you outgrow the content? What happens if your views change and you no longer want certain posts representing you online? Or maybe there is no regret, maybe you just want a better way to save what you wrote for the future. That's the problem I've had for years.

• Annie Mueller ☛ Blog question challenge 2025

  Also a bunch of my friends were talking about blogging and it was all LiveJournal this and TypePad that and Xanga those and whatnot and I was like I WANNA BE A COOL KID TOO. (Later, much later, I realized that for many, many people, having a blog is something that only a non-cool person would consider. But by this point I had also realized that type of person who considered blogging people non-cool are the type of people I consider non-cool. So it’s all good.)

• The New Stack ☛ Observability Isn't Enough. It's Time To Federate Log Data

  For enterprises that are already sending log data primarily to observability platforms, a potential first step is to export data to a data lake, and then use tools like Apache Spark and Databricks to analyze that data further. But exporting data adds additional complexity and costs, not to mention the potential security risk of moving data around.

  Instead, the best practice is data federation. With data federation, you can query data across many different sources without moving it. With this approach, no additional pipeline is needed; there are no egress costs and none of the security risks that come with migrating data.

• Scott Willsey ☛ Cool Site Spotlight Raycast Script Command

  Anyway, it’s been a fairly manual process, and I finally got tired of it yesterday. So I wrote a Raycast script command called “New Cool Site Spotlight” to do it for me.

• Dominik Schwind ☛ Blog Question Challenge

  I’ve had websites since the late 90s, basically ever since I had access to the [Internet]. I played around with them but somehow never quite got to a point where anything clicked. I even played with early proto-blogging software like NewsPro, which more or less seemed to have vanished from the [Internet]. (I did find this two person reddit thread, though.) At this point I already knew about online diaries and real blogs and by 2002 I decided to give it a go myself. At this point I already felt a bit behind but it all seemed to be good fun.

• The Telegraph UK ☛ Angela Rayner ‘branded Prince Andrew a nonce’

  He has now been stripped of all royal titles and removed from virtually all facets of royal life.

• Rick Carlino ☛ 2024 Year in Review

  It’s already February of 2025, and I am running behind schedule on writing this article! Since I’ve been writing year-in-review posts for so many years, I figured I’d rather write this quickly and keep the streak going rather than break it. Here goes!

• Lou Plummer ☛ Technology Edition of the Blog Questions Challenge

  I started late. For years, I avoided anything related to computers because I thought they required something I didn't have — advanced math skills. I associated them with the brainy guys who read books on physics from high school. My brother was one of those guys, and he had a computer, so that reinforced my belief. It wasn't until my uncle, whose twin passions were coon hunting and tractor pulls, got a computer that I thought I might be able to learn something about using a PC. It was his DOS 386 where I first logged on to an online community, Prodigy and learned that what you can do with technology is practically limitless. It was December 1993. I was 28.

• Barry Hess ☛ Mark All Read

  I sometimes miss the magazine life, but I have to admit it felt good when the monthly magazines slowed down to a trickle of maybe one per month. Now that trickle is gone and I often wonder if I should subscribe to just one magazine. That wouldn’t be bad, would it? Just one?

  Fast forward to today and RSS feeds have supplanted magazines as a major guilt-pile in my life. I don’t feel like I subscribe to that many feeds, but here I am with 700+ unread articles/posts/etc. That’s a bit much, yeah? I want to get to a place where I can confidently click Mark All Read every week. How do I plan to do that?

• Dan Q ☛ BBC News RSS… with the sport?

  Earlier today, somebody called Allan commented on the latest in my series of several blog posts about how I mutilate manipulate the RSS feeds of BBC News to work around their (many, and increasingly so) various shortcomings, specifically: [...]

• Science

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Chinese algorithm claimed to boost Nvidia GPU performance by up to 800X for advanced science applications

    Peridynamics is widely used to predict material failure in aerospace, civil engineering, and military applications. However, traditional PD simulations require significant computational resources, making large-scale studies slow and impractical. Associate Professor Yang Yang and her team tackled this problem by leveraging Nvidia's CUDA technology to optimize algorithm design and memory management.

  • SCMP ☛ Chinese algorithm boosts Nvidia GPU performance 800-fold in science computing | South China Morning Post

    Developed by a research team at Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, co-founded by Lomonosov Moscow State University and Beijing Institute of Technology, the new algorithm enhances the computational efficiency of peridynamics (PD), a cutting edge, non-local theory that solves difficult physical issues such as cracks, damage and fractures.

    It opens up new possibilities for solving complex mechanical problems across various industries, including aerospace and military applications, on widely available chips that are low-cost and not subject to US sanctions.

  • Chris ☛ Brier Score

    The accuracy of a binary prediction (i.e. will an event happen or not) can be evaluated through the Brier score. For all the faults of the Brier score11 Does not account for question difficulty, does not penalise overconfidence as strongly as e.g. a log score, cannot account for mutually exclusive forecasts, which implies it also cannot handle forecasting full distributions., it’s the most standard score we have to compare the accuracy of predictions and predictors.

  • Cryptography Engineering ☛ How to prove false statements? (Part 1)

    So when we analyze schemes where hash functions must behave in this manner, we have to do some pretty suspicious things. The approach we take is bonkers. First, we analyze our schemes inside of an artificial “model” where efficient (polynomial-time) participants can somehow evaluate random functions, despite the fact that this is literally impossible. To make this apparent contradiction work, we “yank” the hash function logic into a magical box that lives outside that participants — this includes both honest participants in a protocol, as well as any adversaries who try to attack the scheme — and we force everyone to call out to that functionality. This new thing is called a “random oracle.”

    One weird implication of this approach is that no party can ever know the code of the “hash function” they’re evaluating. They literally cannot know it, since in this model the hash function is comprised of an enormous random lookup table that’s much too big for anyone to actually know! This may seem like a not-very big deal, but it will be exceptionally important going forward.

  • Mark-Jason Dominus ☛ Just ANSWER THE QUESTION

    Here's a Math SE pathology that bugs me. OP will ask "I'm trying to prove that groups A and B are isomorphic, I constructed this bijection but I see that it's not a homomorphism. Is it sufficient, or do I need to find a bijective homomorphism?"

    And respondent R will reply in the comments "How can a function which is not an homomorphism prove that the groups are isomorphic?"

    Which is literally the exact question that OP was asking! "Do I need to find … a homomorphism?"

• Career/Education

  • Wired ☛ Chris Anderson Is Giving TED Away to Whoever Has the Best Idea for Its Future

    Today he’s announcing his intention to step down from the nonprofit and turn over the whole kaboodle to whoever shares the best idea of what to do with it. “It seems like a bonkers idea, except everything that’s ever happened to TED since I’ve been overseeing it has happened when we let go of something,” he told me, speaking exclusively to WIRED. “We gave away the content, and that’s what made TED viral. We gave away the brand in the form of TEDx licenses. When you give someone else control of something, you’re giving them the motivation to do their best. There are amazing things TED can do in its next chapter. And so I think it’s time to try the same thing again. Let go and be amazed.”

  • Public Books ☛ In Search of Logged Time

    Internet archivists who attempt to save webpages are met with two obstacles: Firstly, e-files have fraught ownership, and therefore if a piece of content is deemed privately distributed, it cannot be archived—even if it runs a risk of being lost. Secondly, the idea that a creator owns their content is tenuous. It’s a ubiquitous practice to have mirror servers that store information in case of unexpected loss. For example, a YouTuber may delete one of their own videos, but fans who have shadow copies can easily re-upload it. Similarly, if someone wants to delete a comment of theirs from the [Internet], they have no power over any screenshots that might have been taken.

  • [Old] Libcom ☛ The third wave, 1967: an account

    The Third Wave. Well at last it can be talked about. Here I’ve met a student and we've talked for hours about this nightmare. The secret must finally be waning. It's taken three years. I can tell you and anyone else about the Third Wave. It's now just a dream, something to remember, no it's something we tried to forget. That's how it all started. By strange coincidence I think it was Steve who started the Third Ways with a question.

    We were studying Nazi Germany and in the middle of a lecture I was interrupted by the question. How could the German populace claim ignorance of the slaughter of the Jewish people. How could the townspeople, railroad conductors, teachers, doctors, claim they knew nothing about concentration camps and human carnage. How can people who were neighbors and maybe even friends of the Jewish citizen say they weren't there when it happened. it was a good question. I didn't know the answer.

    In as such as there were several months still to go in the school year and I was already at World War II, I decided to take a week and explore the question.

  • LRT ☛ Rare 15th-century book discovered in Lithuania’s National Library

    The De Gregori brothers’ printing house in Venice operated between 1480 and 1505, mainly publishing large-format publications for universities.

• Hardware

  • Digital Camera World ☛ "I like taking pictures now with my camera, it's my new thing" – Ed Sheeran is embracing the compact camera

    Sheeran’s foray into photography comes at a time when compact cameras are experiencing a major resurgence. With film photography making a big comeback in recent years, and smartphone users craving a break from social media-driven photography, more people are turning to small but powerful digital cameras for a fresh perspective. The RX100 VII, for example, offers high-quality images in a pocket-sized design, making it a favorite among casual shooters and professionals due to its compact form but powerful features.

  • PC World ☛ Forget performance versus efficiency, PCs powered by Snapdragon let you have both

    These are the kind of laptop devices which let your workers stay productive for longer, wherever they are, without constraint. Most laptop owners are used to staying near a charger for maximum performance and expect far less than 10 hours of battery life between charges. With the new Snapdragon X Series laptops, however, you can upend their preconceptions with a new tier of performance and longevity. Snapdragon X Series laptops can offer up to 22 hours of battery life. That’s enough for multiple workdays, whether it’s back-to-back meetings, long-haul travel, or home-office marathons (with a quick streamed movie in their downtime).

  • TechTea ☛ My Stationery Drawer | TechTea

    While I’m not the biggest fan of consumerism I do love to see how people work. This often leads me down a rabbit hole looking at how people setup their offices, how they organize their drawers, and what things they have that improve their lives. I was thinking of doing one of those desk tour videos that I sometimes see on YouTube, but my desk is a mess. Instead I’ll go over something that is near and dear to me, the stationery drawer under my desk.

  • The Register UK ☛ Not even Nvidia's Jensen Huang can talk President Tariffs out of chip import taxes

    Short term or not, the impact of the tariffs is expected to drive up the cost of electronics in America. In fact, the proposed US tariffs on Canada already stirred tensions in the tech sector. In response, Ontario's government threatened to scrap its Starlink contract. With the 30-day-plus pause in place, though, Canada has paused its retaliatory measures, including the previously discussed possibility of restricting energy exports to the US.

    However, tariffs aren't the only reason Huang might have for meeting with Trump.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science News ☛ Plastic shards permeate human brains

    This appraisal of microplastics and nanoplastics, published February 3 in Nature Medicine, raises questions and worries about what this plastic is doing to us.

    “The findings are both significant and concerning,” says Raffaele Marfella, a cardiovascular researcher at University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli” in Naples, Italy. He and colleagues recently found that people with more micro- and nanoplastics, or MNPs for short, in blood vessel plaques were at higher risk of heart attacks, strokes and death.

  • Nature ☛ Bioaccumulation of microplastics in decedent human brains

    So far, visual microscopic spectroscopy methods have identified particulates in organs, such as the lungs, intestine7 and placenta8. These methods are often limited to larger (<5 µm) particulates; thus, smaller nanoplastics are unintentionally excluded. As a new approach, pyrolysis gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (Py-GC/MS) has been applied to blood9, placentas10 and recently major blood vessels3,4 in a manner that appears more cumulative, quantitative and less biased when coupled with orthogonal methods. Py-GC/MS data between labs has been comparable, providing confidence in this method for human tissue analysis3,9,10. Here we applied Py-GC/MS in concert with visualization methods to assess the relative distribution of MNPs in major organ systems from human decedent livers, kidneys and brains.

  • New Yorker ☛ The U.S. Military’s Recruiting Crisis

    When prospective recruits were asked to drop and do five pushups, many groaned and struggled, unable to complete the task. Some, their faces crimson, could barely hold themselves up.

    “You thought you’d join the Army without being able to do a single pushup?” Staff Sergeant Kennedy Robinson barked at a recruit whose arms were twitching in agony.

    “Yes, ma’am!” he said. To an extent that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago, he may have been right.

  • The Scotsman ☛ 'Accountants are making clinical decisions': Diabetes patients slam NHS service

    “That system would tell me my blood sugar was really high but then I did a finger prick and I was nowhere near that - if I had let the insulin pump correct me, it could have killed me.

    “I know it works for some people but I don’t want to try it again, but due to the expense I can’t get the system I want.”

    [...]

    She added: “I feel like admin staff are in charge of the decisions."

  • Adam Fortuna ☛ New House, New Rules

    Later this month, we’re moving from the apartment we’ve lived in for the last 8 years to a house! It’s an exciting time. We’re still fixing and improving a few projects, but it should be mostly set to move in.

    Whenever I go on a trip, I like to use that as an excuse to change my routine. It’s a time when my schedule seems the most flexible. I’m no longer evaluating things daily, allowing me to change my plans with a clearer view of the future.

    I’m using the upcoming move as another chance to reset my routine and figure out what I want to leave behind.

  • Dan Q ☛ Sabbatical Lesson #2: Burnout

    If I were anybody else, you might reasonably expect me to talk about work-related burnout and how a sabbatical helped me to recover from it. But in a surprise twist1, my recent brush with burnout came during my sabbatical.

  • Seth Godin ☛ Muscling your way through

    Attention doesn’t scale, no matter how hard we try.

  • Seth Michael Larson ☛ Connection without Connectivity (#1: Space)

    The shape of today's “software for connection” uses centralized servers in the cloud, algorithmic curation, and incentives optimized for users to connect with the platform (aka “engagement” and “parasociality”), not necessarily with other humans. Software for connection has followed in the same rut created by big tech, as can be seen in protocols, browsers, and infrastructure.

• Proprietary

  • The Record ☛ Researchers warn of risks tied to abandoned cloud storage buckets

    The blog outlines several examples illustrating how a malicious actor could take over an abandoned S3 bucket and take any number of actions. Someone could put their own code in a software update mechanism and “watch significant numbers of systems, and sensitive networks, pull down the payload.”

    The blog jokingly notes that their research began with the idea of simply putting their logo on other websites but quickly morphed into serious concern about buckets connected to .mil websites — which are run by the United States Department of Defense.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Here’s all the ways an abandoned cloud instance can cause security issues

    The findings emphasize that neglected cloud infrastructure, particularly with outdated configurations, leaves sensitive networks vulnerable to unauthorized access, and setting the stage for highly damaging supply chain attacks.

  • Manton Reece ☛ 1,000 AIs in your pocket

    It’s easy to look back now and judge Apple’s AI rollout, but even at WWDC you could tell Apple was throwing everything at the wall. Image Playground wasn’t going to be as good as frontier image models. Siri world knowledge wasn’t going to be as deep as what ChatGPT could do. By trying to do nearly everything, each piece feels like a gimmick.

  • Simon Willison ☛ A computer can never be held accountable.

    This legendary page from an internal IBM training in 1979 could not be more appropriate for our new age of AI.

  • Amit Patel ☛ Thoughts on Flash

    I know a lot of people hated the Flash Player web plugin, but I found it to be quite useful for my experiments. It gave me vector graphics in the browser so that I could share demos without asking people to download an executable from me. And it ran long before SVG / HTML5 was widely available in browsers. I had been porting some of my old Flash code to Javascript, but that takes time that I could be instead spending on new projects. So I’m glad to see that the Ruffle Flash emulator has made so much progress on ActionScript 3: [...]

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ The 2024 Six Colors Report Card

    This year, Snell posted everyone’s full comments, but I’ve collected mine here as well.

  • Six Colors ☛ Apple in 2024: The Six Colors report card

    This is the tenth year that I’ve presented this survey to my hand-selected group. They were prompted with 14 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 (worst) to 5 (best) and optionally provide text commentary per category.

    As is only fitting for the survery’s tenth year, I’ve made a few adjustments to the questions I asked:

  • [Old] InformationWeek ☛ Bill Gates Dumping Microsoft Shares By The Millions

    While some critics might point to Windows Vista or the KIN phone as proof that Microsoft has become a garbage-in, garbage-out software company, Gates now seems to be more interested in garbage, literally. Of late, he's been snapping up shares in relatively obscure outfits like Las Vegas-based Republic Services, which describes itself as a provider of "industry-leading solid waste and environmental services."

  • Tabnine cuts 18% of workforce in restructuring effort

    Tabnine, which develops an AI-powered assistant for developers, has laid off 15 of its 80 employees. In Israel, the company laid off six employees, with the remaining layoffs taking place in the United States, mostly affecting staff in the marketing departments of both countries.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • 404 Media ☛ [LLM]-Generated Slop Is Already In Your Public Library

      Public libraries primarily use two companies to manage and lend ebooks: Hoopla and OverDrive, the latter of which people may know from its borrowing app, Libby. Both companies have a variety of payment options for libraries, but generally libraries get access to the companies’ catalog of books and pay for customers to be able to borrow that book, with different books having different licenses and prices. A key difference is that with OverDrive, librarians can pick and choose which books in OverDrive’s catalog they want to give their customers the option of borrowing. With Hoopla, librarians have to opt into Hoopla’s entire catalog, then pay for whatever their customers choose to borrow from that catalog. The only way librarians can limit what Hoopla books their customers can borrow is by setting a limit on the price of books. For example, a library can use Hoopla but make it so their customers can only borrow books that cost the library $5 per use.

    • Simon Willison ☛ AI-Generated Slop Is Already In Your Public Library

      The Hoopla catalog is increasingly filling up with junk AI slop ebooks like "Fatty Liver Diet Cookbook: 2000 Days of Simple and Flavorful Recipes for a Revitalized Liver", which then cost libraries money if someone checks them out.

      Apparently librarians already have a term for this kind of low-quality, low effort content that predates it being written by LLMs: vendor slurry.

    • Tim Kellogg ☛ S1: The $6 R1 Competitor?

      OpenAI were the first to claim the inference-time scaling laws. Basically, an LLM can get higher performance if it can “think” longer before answering. But, like, how do you do it? How do you make it think longer?

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Forum admin’s madness, AI edition: Physics Forums fills with generated slop

      In 2025, the web is full of [LLM] slop. Some propose going back to 2000s-style forums. But watch out for 2025 admins.

      Physics Forums dates back to 2001. Dave and Felipe of Hall Of Impossible Dreams noticed something odd about the forum. A post dated December 31, 2007, about the HP 50g Graphing Calculator, starts as follows: [...]

    • The New Stack ☛ Developers: The Last Line of Defense Against AI Risks

      Employees must also shoulder some of the responsibility in addition to the developer team’s duties. Promoting ongoing education and awareness of security best practices among developers is vital, and passing them on to wider teams will better safeguard the company. If everyone understands the latest security protocols, everyone stands to benefit as AI and ML technologies evolve.

    • Futurism ☛ Character.AI Says It’s Made Huge Changes to Protect Underage Users, But It’s Emailing Them to Recommend Conversations With AI Versions of School Shooters

      It's true that the company pulled down the exact school shooter chatbots we specifically flagged, but it left many more online.

      In fact, it continued recommending the ghoulish bots to underage users. Earlier last month, an email we'd used to register a Character.AI account as a 14-year-old received an alarming new message.

    • The Verge ☛ ChatGPT’s agent can now do deep research for you

      OpenAI has revealed another new agentic feature for ChatGPT called deep research, which it says can operate autonomously to “plan and execute a multi-step trajectory to find the data it needs, backtracking and reacting to real-time information where necessary.”

    • 404 Media ☛ Air Force Documents on Gen AI Test Are Just Whole Pages of Redactions

      The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), whose tagline is “Win the Fight”, has paid more than a hundred thousand dollars to a company that is providing generative AI services to other parts of the Department of Defense. But the AFRL refused to say what exactly the point of the research was, and provided page after page of entirely blacked out, redacted documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from 404 Media related to the contract.

    • Eric Bailey ☛ Stanislav Petrov

      A lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces prevented the end of human civilization on September 26th, 1983. His name was Stanislav Petrov.

    • Ben Congdon ☛ How I Use AI: Early 2025

      The landscape of AI tooling continues to shift, even in the past half year. This is not unexpected. This post is an updated snapshot of the “state of things I use”.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Generative AI bias poses risk to democratic values, research suggests

      In collaboration with researchers from the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) and Insper, both in Brazil, the research showed that ChatGPT exhibits biases in both text and image outputs—leaning toward left-wing political values—raising questions about fairness and accountability in its design.

    • The New Stack ☛ AI Is Spamming Open Source Repos With Fake Issues

      Potiuk explained to us that AI submissions don’t just create more work for maintainers; they also can lead to legitimate issues being overlooked or incorrectly closed.

      “We have like 30 issues a day, maybe 40, but now in 24 hours, we’ve got 30 more, so like 100% more, this means that we couldn’t make as many decisions on other things, because we had to make decisions on: Is this a good issue or bad issue?” he said. “Because of the very detrimental effect of it, there were at least two or three issues which were created by real people, and some of the maintainers, who are already sensitive, they closed them as spam.”

  • Social Control Media

    • Matt Fantinel ☛ “Special Interests” and Negativity

      Now it seems like people only go out of their way if it's to talk about things they hate. Communities centered around something remotely popular are gonna be filled with people complaining and pointing out every single flaw about it.

      Why is that? I'm not sure. Maybe because people are so angry all the time? Digital drugs (a.k.a. social media) monetize your anger, so we're naturally more angry if we don't actively fight against it.

    • Jason Velazquez ☛ The future of social media

      Such a technology would completely change how venture capital is invested. Whereas in the platform era it would take a talented team of engineers and a business-savvy founder to lock in that round of seed funding, this new era, what I call The Computational Web, would dictate that any social media founder must only have a certain level of celebrity and influence to attract investors.

    • Greg Morris ☛ Problematic Recommendations

      Once you start to use the word recommended, or any simile, you get bogged down. There’s a responsibility of recommending, sharing or pointing towards something that we wall expect. If an influencers tells you a product is good, you expect it too be good. If a blog post appears on a recommended feed, you expect it to be a good read or at the very least represent whoever recommended it.

      Technology companies know this more than most. Twitter (not x) used their Verification badge as a sudo support of threat they user was tweeting. Meta too got themselves into hot water recommending news articles and feeds.

    • Andrea Contino ☛ Looking for something different - Andrea Contino - Go With The Flow

      Also, I am already coming from a situation where my usage of Social Networks was very limited, so I don’t feel that much of a difference. Not just yet. But the trend I’m noticing makes me feel I am not the only one. I was inspired by this post by skoobz:

      "I'm tired of algorithms. I'm tired of doom scrolling. I don't mind text messaging most of the time, but it doesn't replace human connection"

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Futurism ☛ Scam Altman Regrets Ditching Open Source, Says He's Been on the "Wrong Side of History"

      It also reignited a debate surrounding the role of open-source code in the AI industry. Despite its name and open-source roots, the Altman-led company has doubled down on working on its proprietary software behind doors while maximizing profits.

      Meanwhile, OpenAI's competitors, most notably DeepSeek and Meta, have — broadly speaking — open-sourced their AI models, allowing experts to examine how they work under the hood.

      And now it sounds like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is having some regrets about the company's closed-source approach.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Plaintiffs call for temporary restraining order in OPM email server lawsuit

      The motion largely rehashes the claims made in the plaintiffs’ initial complaint, which accuses OPM, at the orders of special government employee Elon Musk — who is running President Donald Trump’s Department [sic] of Government Efficiency, composed of the tech billionaire’s associates whose official roles and clearance status are unclear — of sidestepping federal law by setting up the server to support mass emails to the entire federal workforce without conducting a privacy impact assessment.

      The lawsuit also cites reports that claim the server is “retaining information about every employee of the U.S. Executive Branch” or potentially doing so through systems linked to it.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Google quietly changes stance on using AI for weapons or surveillance

      The old policy, which the company first released in 2018, stated that it would not pursue any AI developments that were “likely to cause harm,” and it would not “design or deploy” AI tools that could be used for weapons or surveillance technologies. That section is now gone.

      In its place, Google states the onus is on “responsible development and deployment.” This, says Google, will only be implemented with “appropriate human oversight, due diligence, and feedback mechanisms to align with user goals, social responsibility, and widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

    • Wired ☛ Google Lifts a Ban on Using Its AI for Weapons and Surveillance

      Google announced Tuesday that it is overhauling the principles governing how it uses artificial intelligence and other advanced technology. The company removed language promising not to pursue “technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” “weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people,” “technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms,” and “technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

      The changes were disclosed in a note appended to the top of a 2018 blog post unveiling the guidelines. “We’ve made updates to our AI Principles. Visit AI.Google for the latest,” the note reads.

    • Google ☛ Responsible AI: Our 2024 report and ongoing work

      As AI development progresses, new capabilities may present new risks. That’s why we introduced the first iteration of our Frontier Safety Framework last year: a set of protocols to help us stay ahead of possible risks from powerful frontier AI models. Since then, we've collaborated with experts in industry, academia and government to deepen our understanding of the risks, the empirical evaluations to test for them, and the mitigations we can apply.

      We have also implemented the Framework in our Google DeepMind safety and governance processes for evaluating frontier models such as Gemini 2.0. Today we’re publishing an updated Frontier Safety Framework, which includes: [...]

    • The Washington Post ☛ Google’s new AI policy removes promises not work on weapons or surveillance

      Google on Tuesday updated its ethical guidelines around artificial intelligence, removing commitments not to apply the technology to weapons or surveillance.

      The company’s AI principles previously included a section listing four “Applications we will not pursue.” As recently as Thursday, that included weapons, surveillance, technologies that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” and use cases contravening principles of international law and human rights, according to a copy hosted by the Internet Archive.

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ Half-good new Polish Chat Control proposal to be discussed on Wednesday

      Poland, currently presiding over the EU Council, proposes a major change to the much-criticised EU chat control proposal to search all private chats for suspicious content, even at the cost of destroying secure end-to-end encryption: Instead of mandating the general monitoring of private chats („detection orders“), the searches would remain voluntary for providers to implement or not, as is the status quo. Representatives of EU governments will discuss the proposal in the EU’s law enforcement working party on Wednesday.

      “The new proposal is a break-through and a major leap forward when it comes to saving our fundamental right to confidentiality of our digital correspondence”, comments Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party), a former Member of the European Parliament and digital freedom fighter. “It would protect secure encryption and thus keep our smartphones safe. However three fundamental problems remain unsolved: [...]

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Ron Deibert’s “Chasing Shadows”

      Citizen Lab's work is nothing short of breathtaking. For decades, this tiny, barely resourced group at a Canadian university has gone toe to toe with the world's most powerful cyber arms dealers – and won.

      Today, Simon and Schuster publishes Chasing Shadows, Deibert's pulse-pounding, sphinter-tightening true memoir of his battles with the highly secretive industry whose billionaire owners provide mercenary spyware that's used by torturers, murderers and criminals to terrorize their victims: [...]

    • The Register UK ☛ TSA’s airport facial-recog tech faces audit probe

      The Department of Homeland Security's Inspector General has launched an audit of the Transportation Security Administration's use of facial recognition technology at US airports, following criticism from lawmakers and privacy advocates.

      Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari notified a bipartisan group of US Senators who had asked for such an investigation last year that his office has announced an audit of TSA facial recognition technology in a letter [PDF] sent to the group Friday.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Palantir stock climbs as strong earnings and guidance impress investors

      Business highlights in the quarter included Palantir signing a renewed enterprise contract with multinational mining company Rio Tinto Ltd., where Palantir’s Foundry and Artificial Intelligence Platform will optimize autonomous train operations, ensuring efficient routing and maintenance. Palantir also extended its Army Vantage partnership for up to four years, supporting the Army Data Platform Strategy and Joint Multi-Domain Operations to enhance military decision-making.

    • Truthdig ☛ The Dork Lord

      In opposing an [Internet] presidency, it helps to understand the basics of online psychology and 4chan politics.

    • The Register UK ☛ Musk’s DOGE ship gets ‘full’ access to Treasury payment system, sinks USAID

      The Monday actions come as top security chiefs at USAID were placed on leave after refusing to hand over access to its classified materials to Musk's DOGE personnel, who reportedly didn't have high enough security clearance to legally view the documents.

      Musk, described by the White House as a "special government employee," himself was apparently advised last year he is unlikely to get a higher-level security clearance – he is already cleared for top secret – due to concerns over his past drug use and foreign contacts.

    • Scott Jehl ☛ Fast & Smooth Third-Party Web Fonts

      If you're loading fonts from a popular third party provider like Google Fonts or Typekit, the stylesheet link-based loading snippets they offer are not great from a performance perspective. Like any ordinary stylesheet, they block page rendering while they are loading, and for all that delay, the CSS you get merely contains font-face definitions for fonts that may be subsequently downloaded if they're used in that page. These steps add up and can make it hard to keep sites rendering quickly.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Cybersecurity, government experts are aghast at security failures in DOGE takeover

    Elon Musk and employees from DOGE — which is, legally, an external advisory board — have reportedly taken a number of steps since Jan. 20 that could be exposing the personal data of millions of federal employees, violating federal laws against sharing classified or sensitive information with uncleared individuals and creating new cybersecurity vulnerabilities for malicious hackers to exploit, these experts say.

    Chief among these concerns are efforts by Musk’s team to access the Department of the Treasury’s payment system housed in the Bureau of Fiscal Service. This system controls much of the spending by the federal government, including congressionally-mandated spending programs like Social Security.

  • Site36 ☛ Kobanê anniversary in Kiel: Political motive in knife attack against Kurd in German city?

    Kurdish organisations are demanding a thorough investigation after a knife attack and are warning against depoliticisation. Whether the perpetrator really sympathises with the IS is now being investigated.

  • CBS ☛ Police in Sweden say "about 10 people" killed in shooting at school in city of Orebro

    Police in Sweden said Tuesday that "about ten people" were killed in a shooting earlier in the day at a school for adults in the city of Orebro, west of Stockholm. The police offered very little information on the incident throughout the most of the day, saying only that five people were wounded, including the suspected shooter, before suddenly confirming the initial death toll at about 6 p.m. local time (noon Eastern).

    The police stressed that the ongoing investigation was complicated and they were still trying to determine whether there could be a risk to the public. They said they were working to identify the victims, and added that the "total number of injured is currently unclear."

  • [Repeat] Marcy Wheeler ☛ Trump Preparing to Fire FBI Agents Who Treated a Violent Attack on Congress as a Crime

    Emil Bove, the Trump defense attorney who is serving as the Acting Deputy Attorney General until Trump installs another of his defense attorneys in the post, is preparing to purge up to 6,000 FBI Agents who participated in the investigation into the crime scene on January 6.

  • El País ☛ Finland on constant alert against Russia

    The Nordic country has a network of underground shelters unmatched in the West and the largest number of reservists in the European Union

  • [Old] BBC ☛ Senators call for probe into Musk's alleged contact with Russia

    The lawmakers have urged the Pentagon and Justice Department to determine whether Musk's alleged relations with a US adversary while holding major government contracts puts national security at risk.

    The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the world's richest person has had "multiple, high level conversations" with Putin since 2022, which the Kremlin has denied.

  • [Old] Politico ☛ Musk has been in secret contact with Putin since 2022, says bombshell new report

    The Russian president even asked the billionaire for a Starlink favor.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Elon Musk’s Attempt to Control the Treasury Payment System Is Incredibly Dangerous

    According to reporting from The Washington Post, CNN, and The New York Times, the Treasury Department’s longtime Fiscal Assistant Secretary David Lebryk has been put on paid administrative leave and plans to resign after refusing to give Musk’s team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, access to the operational details of the Treasury’s payment system and the data it processes.

    In particular, Musk’s DOGE allies have been asking for what the Times refers to as “source code information” since December and had been rebuffed. Per CNN, Musk’s team was specifically inquiring about the technical ability to stop payments.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Elon Musk Is President

    He did not receive a single vote. He did not get confirmed. He does not receive a government paycheck.

    The world’s richest man has declared war on the federal government and, in a matter of days, has moved to slash its size and reach, while gaining access to some of its most sensitive secrets. He has shaped the public discourse by wielding the powerful social-media site he controls and has threatened to use his fortune to bankroll electoral challenges to anyone who opposes him.

  • [Old] The Wall Street Journal ☛ Elon Musk’s Secret Conversations With Vladimir Putin

    Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a linchpin of U.S. space efforts, has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022.

  • [Old] ABC ☛ Elon Musk is in 'regular contact' with Vladimir Putin, new report alleges

    Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who owns Tesla and SpaceX, has allegedly been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since 2022, a new report claims.

  • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ Elon Musk has been in regular contact with Putin for two years, says report

    Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who is now central to Donald Trump’s election campaign, has been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin for the past two years, according to a report in the US.

  • [Old] VOA News ☛ Here's a look at Musk's contact with Putin and why it matters

    A person familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter, confirmed to The Associated Press that Musk and Putin have had contact through calls. The person didn't provide additional details about the frequency of the calls, when they occurred or their content.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Concerns grow as Elon Musk’s DOGE team gains access to yet more sensitive government databases

    After controversially being granted access to the U.S. Treasury’s payments system, Elon Musk and his nongovernmental team of government spending slashers have now gotten their hands on a federal human resources database containing sensitive data on millions of federal employees.

    According to a report by Musk Watch journalists Caleb Ecarma and Judd Legum, Musk’s associates at the Department of Government Efficiency have “illegally” installed a commercial server at the Office of Personnel Management.

    In doing so, they’re now able to access and control a federal database that contains the names, addresses, Social Security numbers and medical histories of countless government employees, the report claims.

  • The Scotsman ☛ Children as young as 10 found carrying weapons by Police Scotland in 'deeply disturbing' figures

    Analysis showed that between April and September last year there were 123 cases where youngsters aged between 10 and 17 were found with a weapons – with this accounting for more than a a quarter of all positive weapons searches by police over the period.

  • Latvia ☛ Baltic, Polish, Finnish parliamentary speakers meet in Tartu

    "We are witnessing an intensification of malign activities carried out by Russia across the Euro-Atlantic area. We strongly condemn Russia´s acts of sabotage, disruption of critical infrastructure, cyber and electronic interference, information manipulation, election interference, and other hybrid operations. Our countries will strengthen cooperation to deter, defend against, and counter Russian hybrid actions, ensuring the resilience and security of our societies and critical infrastructure. To that aim, we will make full use of all means available, considering for instance adopting measures to restrict the movement of Russian diplomats and tightening visa policy towards Russian citizens," the statement says.

  • ANF News ☛ Meeting of ISIS emirs held in Ankara

    The Turkish state, known as the main supporter of ISIS gangs and whose support has been documented dozens of times, is still trying to implement many of its dirty plans against the Kurdish people and the peoples of the region through ISIS. To this end, it feeds, trains, arms and uses the gangs for its own interests.

  • USMC ☛ AI, advanced tech central to new Marine Corps aviation plan

    Distributed aviation operations focus on coordinating how the Marine Corps uses its aviation squadrons, command-and-control agencies, aviation logistics and ground support units, spread out across battlefields in a way that makes it harder for enemies to target them. This can include pushing command-and-control authorities to lower levels and keeping forces moving.

    The decision-centric aviation operations concept aims to rapidly accelerate how quickly aviation elements make choices using cutting-edge technologies such as AI.

  • RTL ☛ Hundreds of US government sites go offline

    Hundreds of US government websites were offline on Monday, an AFP review showed, including that of the humanitarian agency USAID which President Donald Trump's administration is shutting down.

    From a list of nearly 1,400 federal sites provided by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), more than 350 were unavailable on Monday afternoon.

  • Time ☛ Inside the Chaos, Confusion, and Heartbreak of Trump’s Foreign-Aid Freeze

    Chaos and confusion began to spread through the ranks of USAID, both in Washington, D.C, where there are about 15,000 employees and abroad, where there are thousands more. It also spread among the many nongovernmental organizations and religious groups that receive funds from it, and the small businesses the agency contracts to provide services. Some of them had to guess whether their programs had to be paused under the terms of their agreement with the State Department and others received suspension notices and memos from a variety of different channels.

  • France24 ☛ Trump and Musk move to dismantle top aid agency USAID

    The Trump administration and billionaire ally Elon Musk moved to dismantle top humanitarian agency USAID by shutting its headquarters to staff on Monday following Trump's order to freeze most US foreign aid. The agency distributes billions of dollars of humanitarian aid around the world.

  • Sky News ☛ Trump's 'plans' to shut down USAID will erode American influence in increasingly dangerous world

    Mr Musk said he and the US president were in complete agreement as members of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) now circle the agency's $40bn budget.

    USAID represents just 1% of total US government spending and has largely been free of controversy, enjoying bi-partisan support from members of Congress.

    The idea here is a straightforward one - that aid and development plays an important role in keeping Americans safe in the world - along with defence and diplomacy.

  • RFERL ☛ Trump's USAID Reform Causes Alarm As Musk Weighs In On Foreign Aid

    U.S. President Donald Trump's administration appears to be shuttering Washington's main international aid arm amid a blitz of executive actions targeting government spending, a move international humanitarian organizations have warned could have catastrophic consequences.

  • Axios ☛ What to know about USAID, the federal agency DOGE wants to dismantle

    President John F. Kennedy founded USAID via executive order in 1961 to implement the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which CRS describes as the "cornerstone" of the country's foreign assistance programs.

    USAID brought together several existing foreign assistance programs under one umbrella, per an archived version of the USAID website.

    Building on the Marshall Plan, which assisted postwar Europe's recovery, USAID's early focus was on "technical and capital assistance programs," per its archived site.

    Through the decades, it expanded its scope to promote "human needs" — like nutrition and education — as well as democracy and free markets.

  • The Korea Times ☛ Norway should cede its war windfall to Ukraine

    The basic facts are not up for debate. After the outbreak of the Ukraine war caused natural gas prices to rise sharply in Europe, Norway reaped windfall profits totaling some €108 billion ($113 billion), according to Norway’s Ministry of Finance. That is more than the value of all military and civilian support Ukraine has received from the United States and Germany combined from when the war started through October 2024. It is roughly one-third of the value of the Russian central-bank assets that are currently frozen in the West (and which Western governments have extensively debated channeling to Ukraine for defense and reconstruction).

  • NL Times ☛ Security guards face growing aggression, call for greater protection

    The study, which surveyed 500 security guards, highlighted that incidents most often occur in the hospitality industry, followed by retail and refugee centers. However, even security personnel at universities and receptions are increasingly targeted. "I find this alarming," said Van der Steur.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Wired ☛ Inside the Bust That Took Down Pavel Durov—and Upended Telegram

    The Russian-born CEO styles himself as a free-speech crusader and a scourge of the surveillance state. Here’s the real story behind Pavel Durov’s arrest and what happened next.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Musk, Trump Prosecutor Targeting People Who Divulge Identities of DOGE Staff

    On Sunday, with Musk’s Department [sic] of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seizing control of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the billionaire vowing to eliminate it altogether, Wired reported the identities of six software engineers with jobs in his wrecking crew. They span in age from 19 to their mid-twenties and have minimal government experience (if any), though most have connections to either Musk or his onetime PayPal colleague Peter Thiel, another right-wing Silicon Valley billionaire whose data analytics firm Palantir holds valuable U.S. defense contracts. They are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • DeSmog ☛ Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage to Speak at ‘Glastonbury for Climate Deniers’

    • Cruise announces layoffs as GM acquires defunct robotaxi company

      Defunct robotaxi company Cruise has begun to lay off employees today, sources tell The Verge. The layoffs come two months after General Motors said it would no longer fund Cruise, and would instead shift its spending toward advanced driver assist and personally owned autonomous vehicles.

    • Futurism ☛ The Value of Trump's Meme Coin Keeps Plummeting

      Trump's "official" [cryptocurrency] venture has lost about thirty percent of its value over the last seven days, and is down well over 50 percent since it was coined days before the inauguration.

    • The Register UK ☛ US datacenters in for shock as Canada mulls cutting the juice over Trump tariffs

      According to Heatmap News, the US imports thousands of gigawatt hours of electricity from Canada every year. While this makes up less than 1 percent of total American power consumption nationwide, "it's a significant and growing source of low-cost, low-carbon power for some regions," it states.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ By Shutting Down USAID, Trump and Musk Will Worsen the Climate and Extinction Crises

    • Science Alert ☛ Magnetic Sense in Animals Could Be Shockingly Close to Quantum Limits

      Earth's magnetosphere is a guiding beacon for a variety of species capable of sensing its presence.

      Physicists have now discovered two types of sensors in animals that can detect magnetic fields close to the quantum limit, information that could improve our own design of magnetometer devices.

• Finance

  • ‘Ugly’ layoffs: It’s not just a tech story

    The world of software-based product development — at least in Big Tech — is chaotic of late. “In early 2025, tech layoffs are not only happening at a rapid clip, but these cuts are also getting ‘uglier.'” Yet according to a recent poll on the professional network Blind, most respondents (over 90% — 324 v. 33 as of the afternoon of February 4) agreed with that descriptor of the recent waves of cuts rocking Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ Alphabet results strong but sullied by growth slowdown

    Google’s parent Alphabet has achieved $100 billion in annual net income for the first time.

    News of all those zeroes came in the mega-corp's fourth-quarter and full-year 2024 financial results, which recorded $96.5 billion in Q4 2024 revenue and $350 billion for the full year, representing year-on-year gains of 12 percent and 14 percent respectively.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ GM lays off half of Cruise employees as it shifts focus to advanced driver assistance

    GM said in a statement that the decision to lay off half of the Cruise workforce was a “difficult decision.” Cruise is believed to have had about 2,300 employees as of the end of 2024.

  • CNBC ☛ GM cuts 50% of Cruise staff after ending robotaxi business

    The plans come two months after GM said it would no longer fund Cruise after spending more than $10 billion on the robotaxi unit since acquiring it in 2016.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ OPM pushes to reclassify chief information officers, opening up position to politics

    Still, the move seems to be focused on making it easier for the government to install outsiders — potentially from the tech industry or those associated with Elon Musk — into the CIO role, similar to the ongoing and highly controversial activities led by the Department of Government Efficiency.

  • Wired ☛ USPS Halts All Packages From China, Sending the Ecommerce Industry Into Chaos

    Previously, packages like the ones Daniel’s company often handles could move freely across the border. Trump’s executive order, though, not only imposes an additional 10 percent tariff on goods from China but also ends a key import tax exemption, one that has enabled the rise of Chinese ecommerce platforms like Temu and Shein.

    Known as de minimis, the rule waives import duties for small packages valued at less than $800 shipped into the US. Originally intended to exempt personal gifts and other items that Americans send home from trips abroad, it has since allowed foreign businesses to more easily sell goods to US consumers without needing to worry about paying import taxes. The number of de minimis packages has soared in recent years as the ecommerce market has become more global, making it difficult—it not impossible—for Customs and Border Protection to keep track of all the parcels flowing into the US.

  • Wired ☛ China Is Investigating Google Over Trump’s Tariffs

    The Chinese government may have strategically chosen to go after Google because it has limited operations in the country, ensuring the hit to the US tech giant would be relatively minimal. The move gives China plenty of room to escalate if the Trump administration announces further tariffs or other trade measures. Google declined to comment.

  • [Old] Paris Marx ☛ The digital revolution has failed

    The [Internet] emerged from the defense research establishment, but as it was breaking out of those constraints in the 1990s to be unleashed onto the wider world, it had to be given a new story — and libertarian capitalists wrote it. Picking up on the melding of libertarianism, technological optimism, and neoliberal economics over the previous couple decades, they deployed a narrative that changed the way we thought about the emerging network and laid the groundwork for the commercial opportunity that followed its privatization in 1995.

    The following year, Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow released a manifesto from the World Economic Forum in Davos — a fact that should’ve immediately set off alarm bells — that became a defining narrative for the era. Cyberspace was to be a virgin frontier, divorced from the realities of the material world it depended on, where people would interact with each other as equals, free from the burdens of race, sex, or wealth, and it was those users who would construct it free from the dictates of the big, bad government. The new virtual world was to be “an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions,” he wrote.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Waiting For The Worms

    But that aside, I think that we've all been missing the boat by diagnosing Musk with a terminal case of "Read Too Much Heinlein". I think that the childhood Boomer media he's actually cosplaying is Pink Floyd The Wall. Think about it!

  • [Repeat] The Next Platform ☛ Azure Can’t Make Up For On Premises Profit Decline At Microsoft

    Yes, that was two years after the GenAI big bang, but Microsoft’s on-premises server business, which is largely transactional in nature, is taking a backset to GenAI in general and to Azure in particular. And that means that the profits in its overall “real” systems business, which includes the Windows Server platform as well as the core infrastructure services of compute, storage, and networking that it sells on the Azure cloud, are under pressure.

    That’s what we immediately see when we look at Microsoft’s second quarter of fiscal 2025, a thirteen week period that ended in December. And from the looks of things, it is not going to get any easier for Microsoft in the coming quarters, either.

  • India Times ☛ Ontario premier rips up contract with Elon Musk's Starlink in response to Trump tariffs

    Valuation, or price-to-earnings (PE) multiple as it is commonly called, is a combination of numbers and narratives. While numbers don't change every day, narratives do change often. Post-Budget 2025, the narrative about some sectors has changed. Should they be valued more or not is a complex question. But there are nuances that will help you figure out whether you should be gung-ho about a sector which has got relief in the budget. Or not.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Coping

    The flood of assaults on government led by billionaires and the vengeful criminal is daunting. I believe that the first step in dealing with it is self-protection. I used to tell my clients that they had to take care of themselves because they couldn’t help anyone else if they didn’t. That’s good advice, and I’ve been trying to take it.

  • India Times ☛ Sam Altman landing to find a spot for Open AI in India's big AI agenda

    OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, will visit India on February 5th to meet government officials, tech entrepreneurs, and investors. This visit aims to position OpenAI within India's growing AI initiatives, including the IndiaAI Mission. Altman’s whirlwind trip to New Delhi is part of his tour, which also includes Japan, South Korea, the UAE, Germany, and France.

  • India Times ☛ Salesforce to cut 1,000 roles: Report

    Salesforce is cutting over 1,000 jobs while simultaneously hiring for new AI product sales. Displaced workers can apply internally. It's unclear which divisions are affected. As of January 2024, Salesforce had 72,682 employees. The company had previously laid off 700 employees in January and 300 more in July 2024. Earnings report is due on Feb. 26.

  • India Times ☛ OpenAI's Altman says 'no plans' to sue China's DeepSeek

    OpenAI chief Sam Altman said Monday the US company has "no plans" to sue DeepSeek after warning last week that Chinese companies were trying to replicate its advanced AI models.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Once a Trump critic, Mark Zuckerberg pivots toward the president

    Zuckerberg and other tech leaders have gone out of their way to position themselves in the president’s good graces, knowing he could help or hinder them in the race to develop artificial intelligence technologies.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Deep Research is OpenAI’s latest push into AI agents

    OpenAI is releasing a new artificial intelligence tool that’s designed to carry out time-consuming online research for users about everything from complex science questions to car recommendations — expanding the start-up’s portfolio of AI agents that act on a person’s behalf.

  • India Times ☛ China’s AI wave turns into tsunami

    American cloud providers Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services as well as data service providers such as Databricks and Snowflake have begun hosting Chinese AI models and promising the best inferencing speeds.

  • US Senate ☛ A Bill To amend title 18, United States Code, to prohibit United States persons from advancing artificial intelligence capabilities within the People’s Republic of China, and for other purposes. [PDF]

    This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Decoupling America’s Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act of 2025’’.

  • The Register UK ☛ US senator wants to slap prison term, $1M fine on anyone aiding Chinese AI with ... downloads?

    Americans may have to think twice about downloading a Chinese AI model or investing in a company behind such a neural network in future. A law proposed last month by Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), if successfully passed by Congress, would impose penalties of up to 20 years in prison or $1 million in fines for violating its restrictions on AI-related trade and collaboration.

    And that's for individuals. US enterprises could face fines of up to $100 million if they're caught conducting AI research in the Middle Kingdom or collaborating with Chinese companies on machine learning tech, if the bill is signed into law.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • [Repeat] Bruce Schneier ☛ Deepfakes and the 2024 US Election

      This tracks with my analysis. People share as a form of social signaling. I send you a meme/article/clipping/photo to show that we are on the same team. Whether it is true, or misinformation, or actual propaganda, is of secondary importance. Sometimes it’s completely irrelevant. This is why fact checking doesn’t work. This is why “cheap fakes”—obviously fake photos and videos—are effective. This is why, as the authors of that analysis said, the demand side is the real problem.

    • VOA News ☛ Russia consumer watchdog falsely accuses US of gathering dangerous pathogens in DR Congo

      The claims that the facilities lack infrastructure and pathogens are accumulated without control are false.

      The National Biomedical Research Institute, which uses the French acronym INRB, was founded in 1984 by the Ministry of Health of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for national biomedical research to identify, treat and prevent disease outbreaks in the DRC.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Dissenter ☛ US Judge Upholds First Amendment, Dismisses Lawsuit Against Palestine Chronicle

  • Techdirt ☛ Musk Shows Us What Actual Government Censorship On Social Media Looks Like

    Over the weekend, Wired published an explosive report (which we covered this morning) naming six Elon Musk employees who have effectively commandeered significant portions of the federal government. These aren’t seasoned public servants — they’re inexperienced twenty-somethings between 19 and 24 with unprecedented access to sensitive government systems. As Cathy Gellis correctly points out, this represents a massive cybersecurity breach.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Angela Rayner to set rules on Islam and free speech

    The definition has been criticised for being so widely drawn that it curbs free speech, amounts to a de facto blasphemy law and stifles legitimate criticism of Islam as a religion.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ India revokes nonprofit and tax status of news outlets

    “Journalism is a public service. The Indian government should not abuse regulatory processes to target investigative journalism,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “The government must immediately reverse these orders against The Reporters’ Collective and The File, which could set a dangerous precedent for other non-profit media in India and severely undermine public interest journalism.”

    The Reporters’ Collective (TRC) said in a January 28 statement that the loss of its nonprofit status “severely impairs” its ability to do work and “worsens the conditions” for independent journalism in the country.

  • ANF News ☛ 18 journalists detained, 9 imprisoned in Turkey in January

    “Journalists wake up to new detention operations every day. This picture creates a dark image with regard to press freedom and freedom of expression,” the DFG said, and put particular emphasis on the imprisonment of 8 journalists who had been detained in Van, Mersin and Istanbul along with the raid on Güncel and Martı production company on January 17.

    Also in January, 102 journalists stood trial in 43 different cases, while 12 journalists were sentenced to a total of 31 years in prison.

  • CPJ ☛ Yemeni journalist handed 4-month prison sentence over social media post

    “The sentence against Al-Ahmadi is yet another example of the escalating intimidation of journalists in Yemen, where legal tools are being weaponized to silence critical reporting on local issues,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna in New York. “Authorities in Shabwa province must allow journalists to work freely and without fear of retaliation.”

  • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ Listening to Yemen's Forgotten Voices

    Seventeen years ago, I embarked on a journey as a journalist, driven by a desire to uncover the complexities of Yemen, my homeland, for an international audience. Over the years, I have witnessed the ebb and flow of Yemen's tumultuous history—uprisings, wars, humanitarian crises—and with each event, I have found myself grappling not just with the challenges of reporting on the country, but also with the glaring inconsistencies in how the world perceives Yemen.

  • CPJ ☛ Hungarian authorities detain, charge 2 journalists seeking to question PM Orbán

    “Hungarian authorities should conduct a swift and transparent investigation into the detention of Telex journalists Dániel Simor and Noémi Gombos at an event attended by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán”, said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “It is unacceptable to use police force to obstruct reporters from asking questions of public officials. This marks a clear escalation of intimidatory tactics, previously unheard of in Hungary.”

  • VOA News ☛ British environmental journalist denied entry to Cambodia

    A journalist who covers environmental issues from Cambodia has been banned from entering the country where he has been based for the past five years.

    British reporter Gerry Flynn told VOA that immigration officials denied his re-entry to Cambodia on Jan. 5, when he tried to return after a vacation in Thailand.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Unionized Grocery Workers Are a Sleeping Giant

    Colorado Kroger workers are striking this week, and 130,000 union grocery workers are bargaining contracts this year. Reformers see it as a chance to transform the UFCW from America’s largest private sector union into a fighting force.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ U.S. Space Force Awards Viasat Satellite Internet Contract

    Satellite communications provider Viasat says it’s secured its first task order worth $3.5 million under a new U.S. Space Force contract designed to leverage commercial space internet services. The award falls under the Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (PLEO) satellite services contract, managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency and the Space Force’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office.

    The contract ceiling was recently increased from $900 million to $13 billion, reflecting surging demand for satellite-based broadband services, according to Viasat. Some 20 vendors were selected to compete for orders over a five-year base period, with an option to extend for an additional five years, notes SpaceNews.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Register UK ☛ China to probe Google, tax imports in response to US tariffs

  The State Administration for Market Regulation launched the investigation into whether Google had violated Chinese antitrust rules, minutes after the Trump administration implemented an extra 10 percent import tax on Chinese goods to the US, the Associated Press reports.

• The Verge ☛ Apple’s attempt to intervene in the Google Search antitrust trial is denied

  US District Court Judge Amit Mehta denied Apple’s emergency request to halt the Google Search monopoly trial that could dismantle their lucrative search that’s reportedly worth as much as $18 billion a year. The order came in late Sunday, with Judge Mehta saying Apple hasn’t demonstrated satisfactory reasons for its emergency motion to stay that was filed on January 30th.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ LaLiga: Cloudflare, Google and X Are Essential Piracy Facilitators

    In a submission to the U.S. Trade Representative, LaLiga accuses Google, Cloudflare, and X of enabling pirate services to thrive. The submission is unusual; the Special 301 process requests recommendations concerning foreign countries. LaLiga also stands out for its country-specific complaints, nominating the UK and Germany for the Priority Watch List over piracy challenges.

  • EFF ☛ Open Licensing Promotes Culture and Learning. That's Why EFF Is Upgrading its Creative Commons Licenses.

    Without tools like Creative Commons, copyright is frequently a roadblock to sharing and preserving culture. Copyright is ubiquitous, applying automatically to most kinds of creative work from the moment they are “fixed in a tangible medium.” Copyright carries draconian penalties unknown in most areas of U.S. law, like “statutory damages” with no proof of harm and the possibility of having to pay the rightsholder’s attorney fees. And it can be hard to learn who owns a copyright in any given work, given that copyrights can last a century or more. All of these make it risky and expensive to share and re-use creative works, or sometimes even to preserve them and make them accessible to future generations.