Leftovers

• Andy Hawthorne ☛ The Algorithm Bots Were Smiling

  That's the thing about the internet. Sometimes the Algorithm Bots smile upon you. Sometimes they don't.

  You can't predict it. You can't control it. You can only keep showing up and doing the work.

• IT Wire ☛ iTWire - The hidden triggers of buying: what vending machine data reveals about your impulsive vs. intentional purchases

  Walk past any vending machine, and you’ll see a story unfolding in real time—a person stopping, scanning their options, and making a split-second decision to buy (or not to buy). It seems like a simple process, but behind every purchase is a complex web of psychology, environment, and subconscious triggers.

• Robert Birming ☛ The Rarity of Friendliness

  Today, after a house inspection, a client remarked on how nice and helpful I was. It's not uncommon; I frequently receive positive feedback and high ratings for my work.

  Why does something as simple as friendliness seem to surprise people so much? Shouldn't it be the norm?

  It's not like friendliness requires special skills or a huge investment. It costs neither time nor money. In fact, it can save both.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Blog question challenge: Technology

  A Mastodonian and reader of my ramblings here, and the cogent thoughts over at 82MHz, asked me if I’d be up for answering the same blog challenge linked therein. Why not?

• Ness Labs ☛ Interview with David Tedaldi, CEO of Morgen

  We attracted our first few thousand users from desperately under-served niches. We put Morgen on Linux (we were, and still are, the only planner on Linux), integrated with small CalDAVs, and went cross-platform to serve Windows and Android users.

  While most competitors were layering their solutions over Google Calendar or were all in on the Mac ecosystem only, we connected with a base of people hungry for a solution compatible with their setup.

• Mat Duggan ☛ My Very Own Rival

  I’ve always marveled at people who are motivated purely by the love of what they’re doing. There’s something so wholesome about that approach to life—where winning and losing don’t matter. They’re simply there to revel in the experience and enjoy the activity for its own sake.

  Unfortunately, I am not that kind of person. I’m a worse kind of person.

• Luke Harris ☛ My first digital photo

  I had one too! It was a Mavica FD71, the internal clock was always resetting itself to 1998, and to this day when I use a real camera I subconsciously expect to hear the floppy drive buzzing away after a shot. Many of those photos still live with the wrong dates at the very back of my Apple Photos library.

• Buttondown LLC ☛ Are Efficiency and Horizontal Scalability at odds?

  For this week's newsletter I want to brainstorm an idea I've been noodling over for a while. Say we have a computational task, like running a simulation or searching a very large graph, and it's taking too long to complete on a computer. There's generally three things that we can do to make it faster: [...]

• Doc Searls ☛ It’s still adtech

  So I did a Google Trends search on the three uses, and saw that “adtech” still wins, by a hair, though “ad tech” is close, and was ahead for much of the ‘teens.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ How long does it take me to write a blog post?

  If the question is about how much work and insight goes into a good technical blog post, we need to consider all other activities than just the writing.

  Here are some activities I can think of that contribute to my blog posting: [...]

• Science

  • The Register UK ☛ Oxford team teleports first quantum gate in landmark paper

    Published in Nature, the study doesn't claim to be the first to achieve quantum teleportation - after all, scientists have been teleporting quantum states for years. What is new is the deterministic (e.g., once entanglement is established, the teleportation always succeeds) and repeatable teleportation of a quantum logic gate.

• Career/Education

  • Chris Coyier ☛ Meetings & Space

    But one is probably good:

    "Don’t do team wide standups or sync meetings, except one meeting at the start of every week. Here you can walk through the tasks and discuss how the team feels, what motivates them right now, and if there are any blockers."

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ Your Social Life Could Help You Stave Off Dementia For Years, Study Finds

    Here's another way of potentially postponing the onset of dementia and reducing dementia risk: cultivating an active social life. Meeting up with other people regularly was associated with delaying dementia by up to five years, a new study found.

  • New York Times ☛ Digital Estate Planning: How to Prepare Your Social Media Accounts

    How do you want your social media pages, smartphone photos and computer files handled after you die? While property and money distribution are usually at the top of the estate-planning list, don’t forget to leave instructions regarding your digital accounts and assets — so your survivors are left with more than just random bits and pixels from your online presence.

    Here’s a short guide to getting your digital material in order, as well as advice for dealing with the accounts of those who departed without leaving directions.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Almost daily, I encounter a train passenger using their phone on loud speaker. This week I snapped

    Screen addiction – the literal and metaphorical inability to switch off – is a big part of it. Who can concentrate for two hours without checking their messages or the news? Not that generation of children whose parents gave them iPads to watch Peppa Pig and stop them kicking off in restaurants; they are all grown up now and, having never been told it’s regarded as anti-social, have continued the bad habit.

    More practically, Apple stopped putting headphone jacks in iPhones so people listen to music and podcasts without. Once upon a time, people used to hold their phones up to their ears – I still do – but I notice many have them on speaker and hold them out in front.

• Proprietary

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Crytek lay off 15% of staff with Crysis 4 on hold

    More news on some job losses today following the Unity game engine layoffs, we have Crytek also shedding staff and shelving Crysis 4. On X / Twitter, the official Crytek account posted an image announcement. Crytek said it will affect about 15% of their staff, so about 60 people.

  • Macworld ☛ The era of the Apple event is over

    The warning signs for the big Apple event appeared, as with the decline of so many beloved cultural institutions, when normal life shut down for the pandemic. WWDC 2020 was the first of a series of virtual-only Apple events, with risky but exhilarating on-stage demos replaced by safe and dull pre-recorded videos: glorified adverts, really. When restrictions lifted the company understandably decided to retain many aspects of the visual events, blending canned presentations with a few hands-on elements. The benefits of virtual were simply too appealing to leave behind.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Delivering Malware Through Abandoned Amazon S3 Buckets

    But there’s a second dimension to this attack. Because these update buckets are abandoned, the developers who are using them also no longer have the power to patch them automatically to protect them. The mechanism they would use to do so is now in the hands of adversaries. Moreover, often—but not always—losing the bucket that they’d use for it also removes the original vendor’s ability to identify the vulnerable software in the first place. That hampers their ability to communicate with vulnerable installations.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Matt Gemmell is back on the Mac

    It’s a good piece by Gemmell, who has spent most of the last decade being iPad-only. He does a rather exhaustive explanation of the reasons the switch was right for him.

    I found his impressions of the Mac after all this time to be very interesting.

  • YLE ☛ System error: Hundreds of Turku bus passengers overcharged for tickets

    "This problem was exceptional. The [payment] system has otherwise been reliable and worked well. We aim to investigate the problem very thoroughly, because it was so exceptional," Pihlava told Svenska Yle, the public broadcaster's Swedish-language news unit.

    According to the transport authority, the overcharges started last Wednesday (5 February) and the problem continued until the following morning.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • India Times ☛ AI dangerous tool, be it in Chinese or American hands: Delhi HC on plea to ban DeepSeek

      "AI is a dangerous tool in anybody's hand, whether it is Chinese or American, it does not make any difference. It is not that the government is unaware of these things. They are very well aware...," a bench of Chief Justice D K Upadhyaya and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela said.

      The Centre's counsel submitted that the issue requires consideration and urged the court to grant some time to get instructions in the matter.

    • India Times ☛ AI dangerous tool in anybody's hands, observes Delhi HC

      The Delhi High Court highlighted the dangers of artificial intelligence, regardless of its origin, while hearing a PIL to block access to the Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek. The court allowed time for the Centre's counsel to gather instructions for further action by February 20.

    • Futurism ☛ Even the Most Advanced AI Has a Problem: If It Doesn’t Know the Answer, It Makes One Up

      As artificial intelligence becomes integrated into our daily lives, researchers are working to tackle what might be its most glaring and enduring issue: that AI "hallucinates," or boldly spits out lies, when it doesn't know the answer.

      This rampant AI problem is, according to researchers who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, rooted in a reticence to be caught not knowing something.

    • Matt Webb ☛ Extending AI chat with Model Context Protocol (and why it matters) (Interconnected)

      I’ve been trying out a new technique to plug in knowledge and capabilities to AI apps like chat, using an emerging open standard from Anthropic called Model Context Protocol (MCP). It’s early days but it has momentum.

      So I would say that right now is the time for organisations to jump in with some learning through building – let me unpack how I got to that conclusion, what I built, and what I learnt (also: how I can help).

    • Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Knowledge tech that's subtly wrong is more dangerous than tech that's obviously wrong. (Or, where I disagree with Robin Sloan.)

      I disagree with pretty much both the core premise and every step of the reasoning of it

      And, unfortunately, because I’ve long ben a fan, I feel obligated to explain why, which is tedious and generally fruitless because at this point in the AI Bubble debate isn’t going to change anybody’s mind.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Guardian UK ☛ I was a content moderator for Facebook. I saw the real cost of outsourcing digital labour

      A mum of two young children, I was recruited from my native South Africa with the promise to join the growing tech sector in Kenya for a Facebook subcontractor, Sama, as a content moderator. For two years, I spent up to 10 hours a day staring at child abuse, human mutilation, racist attacks and the darkest parts of the internet so you did not have to.

      It was not just the type of content I had to watch that gave me insomnia, anxiety and migraines, it was the quantity too. In Sama we had something called AHT, or action handling time. This was the amount of time we were given to analyse and rate a piece of content. We were being timed, and the company measured our success in seconds. We were constantly under pressure to get it right.

      You could not stop if you saw something traumatic. You could not stop for your mental health. You could not stop to go the bathroom. You just could not stop. We were told the client, in our case Facebook, required us to keep going.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Scammers Exploited Official EU Website for 'Piracy' Scams

      Since the top positions in search results are relatively free of well-known and generally more trusted pirate sites, malicious actors use this void to get piracy-related scams featured instead. To do so, they create keyword-filled pages using titles of high-demand content, paired with keywords such as ‘download’, ‘stream’, ‘free’, and so forth.

      To increase the effectiveness of this tactic, the scammers try to get their shady promotions featured on reputable domain names, such as universities, IMDb, and social media platforms.

      This is a problem we’ve highlighted previously, including frequent targeting and abuse of official European Union websites (europa.eu). The EU is taking countermeasures to limit the abuse but ending it permanently appears to be a challenge.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • India Times ☛ DeepSeek may face further regulatory actions, EU privacy watchdog says

      "Several DPAs (data protection authorities) have already started actions vis-a-vis DeepSeek and there may be further actions in the future," a spokesperson for the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) said in an email after the meeting.

    • The Local SE ☛ Sweden to allow schoolbag searches after mass shooting

      Schools will be required to have emergency plans for violent situations, access to schools will require keys, door codes or badges, and authorisations for camera surveillance will be simplified, Education Minister Johan Pehrson told a press conference.

    • The Nation ☛ The Carceral System Enters Its Smartwatch Era

      Smartwatch is a first in corrections, explained Jon Logan, the CEO of Smart Communications. The incarcerated person wearing the watch can use it for phone calls and text messages—each message costing them 50 cents.

      Then, officials can keep track of their health biometrics, covertly listen to incarcerated people without them knowing, or track locations and re-create who was on scene if, for example, there’s a riot.

    • The Register UK ☛ Larry Ellison wants to put all US data in one big AI system

      If governments want AI to improve services and security for their citizens, then they need to put all their information in one place – even citizens’ genomic data – according to Larry Ellison, the Oracle database tycoon.

      Ellison shared his take on what governments need to do to succeed with AI during a discussion with his buddy former UK prime minister Tony Blair at the World Governments Summit in Dubai today.

    • NYOB ☛ WetterOnline sees "disproportionate effort" in complying with the GDPR

      The highly popular smartphone app WetterOnline shares the personal data of its users with hundreds of third-party companies for advertising purposes. Until a few days ago, this included highly precise location data which can be used to derive a user's place of residence and workplace or even a visit to a military base. This data has ended up on marketplaces where it's openly offered for sale. Only the users themselves don't receive their data. WetterOnline refuses to provide information about processed data, claiming that complying with the GDPR’s right of access would be too costly. noyb is now filing a complaint with the relevant data protection authority in Germany.

    • Techdirt ☛ India Wants Wide Business Use Of Its Huge Aadhaar Biometric Database, Now With Facial Recognition

      Techdirt has been writing about India’s huge Aadhaar database of biometrics, which assigns a unique 12-digit number to all Indian citizens, for a decade now. The system was introduced to make it easier for people in India to access key government services by authenticating their identity, but there were soon plans to allow businesses to deploy it in commercial applications. In an important ruling in 2018, the Indian Supreme Court placed restrictions on how businesses could use Aadhaar. Now the Indian government has introduced an amendment to the original law that unequivocally allows commercial applications of the Aadhaar system (found via TechCrunch). The press release for the “Notification of Aadhaar Authentication for Good Governance (Social Welfare, Innovation, Knowledge) Amendment Rules, 2025” explains how Aadhaar authentication is being widened in order to enhance “ease of living” (emphasis in the original): [...]

    • Wired ☛ This Ad-Tech Company Is Powering Surveillance of US Military Personnel

      Last year, a media investigation revealed that a Florida-based data broker, Datastream Group, was selling highly sensitive location data that tracked United States military and intelligence personnel overseas. At the time, the origin of that data was unknown.

      Now, a letter sent to US senator Ron Wyden’s office that was obtained by an international collective of media outlets—including WIRED and 404 Media—reveals that the ultimate source of that data was Eskimi, a little-known Lithuanian ad-tech company.

• Defence/Aggression

  • FAIR ☛ NYT Advises Trump to Kill More Venezuelans

    Donald Trump is back in the White House, and faux opposition is once again the order of the day for the Western media and the Democratic Party. Whether it comes to criminalizing migrants (FAIR.org, 1/25/25), maintaining US “soft power” via USAID, downplaying anti-democratic power grabs (FAIR.org, 2/4/25) or whitewashing Nazi salutes (FAIR.org, 1/23/25), the centrist establishment seems quite content to normalize Trump or even outflank him from the right.

  • FAIR ☛ ‘There’s More Going On in Our Fight Than Being Reactive to Nonsense Executive Orders’: CounterSpin interview with Ezra Young on trans rights law

    Janine Jackson interviewed TLDEF’s Ezra Young about trans rights law for the February 7, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

  • Axios ☛ Trump gives DOGE more power, orders big cuts to federal workforce

    Zoom out: In addition to the lawsuits, Democratic lawmakers are raising concern about the security implications of DOGE 's potentially unsanctioned access to sensitive government databases.

    Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has described DOGE as "an unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government."

  • VOA News ☛ Scores dead as Islamic State attacks military base in Somalia

    Nearly 100 people were killed and up to 60 others wounded when members of the Islamic State terror group launched a deadly attack on a military base belonging to security forces from Somalia’s Puntland region, officials said Tuesday.

  • Futurism ☛ State Department Insider on Elon Musk Accessing Nuclear Weapons: “If You Make Something Idiot-Proof, the World Will Build a Better Idiot”

    Elon Musk's government takeover is freaking tons of people out — especially as at least one of his DOGE lackeys has reportedly been given access to the same system as the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which safeguards the nation's atomic arsenal.

  • The Verge ☛ How Elon Musk’s Department of Energy access could pose a nuclear threat

    It’s alarming to be at a point where someone has to make this kind of statement, especially because the Trump administration has reportedly lied about DOGE’s access levels before. DOGE’s placement at the DOE even raises a truly bizarre-sounding possibility: that a pseudo-department named after a shiba inu could get actual access to nuclear weapons. Fortunately, despite Musk’s ever-expanding power over government systems, it would take far more than barging into the right office to do this. But at a moment where all kinds of governmental norms are in flux, it’s worth looking at what exactly separates someone like Musk from perhaps the greatest destructive force on the planet — and what other kinds of risks his access could pose.

  • Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Isn’t Just Surviving—It’s Crushing YouTube and Meta

    On average, American TikTok users spend 107 minutes a day on the app, easily outpacing YouTube — the next highest time sink, with 87 minutes per day. That’s also significantly higher than Facebook, which averages 63 minutes per day.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Why I’m leaving

    To date I have worked through the second Obama administration, the first Trump administration, the Biden administration, and now the beginnings of the second Trump administration. In all my time in government, working for both Republican and Democratic presidents alike, I have never seen anything remotely close to the targeted evisceration of the federal government that is currently taking place.

  • CS Monitor ☛ What is Russia’s ‘shadow fleet,’ and why does it worry Europe?

    The vessels in question are not modern, but rather are primarily aging fuel tankers. Many are not even Russian ships. But they are still raising alarms across Europe.

    Russia has adapted to Western measures to limit its economic and military capacities to wage war on Ukraine, by buying ships, rerouting oil exports from Europe to Asia, and building new markets in Africa and Latin America.

    The fleet has become the linchpin of Russia’s oil exports – with some estimates suggesting that its run-down vessels ship over 80% of Russia’s seaborne crude oil exports. And its efforts to avoid Western sanction enforcement are raising environmental and navigational risks in crowded seaways.

  • PHR ☛ U.S. Foreign Aid Freeze Disrupts Lifesaving Health Care, Services for Survivors of Sexual Violence Midst Deadly Conflict in Democratic Republic of the Congo: PHR 

    The order was issued as the M23 militia moves deeper into eastern DRC after taking Goma, the largest city and the capital of North Kivu, in January, further destabilizing the region’s dire humanitarian crisis. More than 500,000 people in North and South Kivu have been displaced due to the escalation of violence by armed groups, while health facilities have been subjected to indiscriminate shooting and bombing. There is an acute risk of further violence as M23 advances south in DRC and the United Nations has expressed concern about the significant increase of sexual violence. A rapid assessment of health care facilities in and around Goma conducted by the WHO found 45 cases of rape and gender-based violence reported among the displaced and 21 survivors of multiple-perpetrator rape admitted to medical facilities in recent days. The actual number of cases is likely much higher in light of barriers to reporting.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ How USAID employees were blocked from making payments

    Large swaths of workers at USAID have been blocked from implementing payments by being shut out of a pair of web platforms used to assist in agency procurement, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

    Blocking access to the Global Acquisition and Assistance System (GLAAS) and the related Phoenix system constitutes one of the ways that the agency’s activities have largely been put on hold. Those actions, experts have warned, could be illegal. Contractors are now suing the Trump administration for its approach to winding down the agency, while a federal judge also temporarily blocked an effort to put longtime USAID employees on leave.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Marko Elez "Resigned" the Day His Write Access to Payment Systems Was Discovered

    As WSJ itself notes, Elez resigned the same day that Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered that Elez, then still identified as a Special Government Employee, be granted only read-only access to Treasury’s networks. Once Elez no longer worked for the defendants in that case — starting with Scott Bessent — then any access he had would be exempted from the order.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Trump’s Tiktok two-step is a lesson for future presidents

    Remember the Tiktok ban? I know, it was ten million years ago (in Musk years, anyway), so it may have slipped your mind, but let me remind you: Congress passed a law saying Tiktok was banned. Trump said he wouldn't enforce the law. The end.

    No, really. I mean, sure, there's a bunch of bullshit about whether Trump will pick up the ban again after Tiktok's grace period ends, depending on whether they sell themselves to his creepy wax museum pal Larry Ellison. Maybe he will. Maybe Tiktok'll buy so many trumpcoins that he forgets about. Whatevs.

    The important thing here is: Congress passed a (stupid) law and Trump said, "I've decided not to enforce that law" and then that was it: [...]

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russia Eyes Banning Officials From Using Foreign Messaging Apps

    Russia is considering banning government employees from using foreign messaging apps for official communications or contacting citizens, the RBC news website reported Monday.

    The proposed ban — one of dozens of planned legal and regulatory amendments ostensibly aimed at combatting phone and internet scammers — would tighten control over officials’ communications with independent and foreign journalists.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Boko Haram Insurgency in Nigeria and the Quest for a Permanent Resolution of the Crisis - Review

    The paper “Examining the Boko Haram Insurgency in Northern Nigeria & the Quest for a Permanent Resolution of the Crisis” by Joseph Olukayode Akinbi explores a detailed analysis of the causes, impacts, and responses to the Boko Haram insurgency. The study discusses the devastating loss caused by the Boko Haram group in Northern Nigeria.

    The insurgency caused a huge amount of chaos marked by bombings, killings, and kidnappings, creating a humanitarian crisis, displacing millions of people, and threatening the stability of the region.

  • EFF ☛ EFF Sues DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management to Halt Ransacking of Federal Data

    EFF and a coalition of privacy defenders have filed a lawsuit today asking a federal court to block Elon Musk’s Department [sic] of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing the private information of millions of Americans that is stored by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and to delete any data that has been collected or removed from databases thus far. The lawsuit also names OPM, and asks the court to block OPM from sharing further data with DOGE.

  • EFF ☛ EFF Sues OPM, DOGE and Musk for Endangering the Privacy of Millions

    The complaint by EFF, Lex Lumina LLP, State Democracy Defenders Fund, and The Chandra Law Firm argues that OPM and OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell illegally disclosed personnel records to Musk’s DOGE in violation of the federal Privacy Act of 1974. Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked DOGE from accessing a critical Treasury payment system under a similar lawsuit.

    This lawsuit’s plaintiffs are the American Federation of Government Employees AFL-CIO; the Association of Administrative Law Judges, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Judicial Council 1 AFL-CIO; Vanessa Barrow, an employee of the Brooklyn Veterans Affairs Medical Center; George Jones, President of AFGE Local 2094 and a former employee of VA New York Harbor Healthcare; Deborah Toussant, a former federal employee; and Does 1-100, representing additional current or former federal workers or contractors.

  • The Washington Post ☛ This app is turbocharging calls to Senators, Representatives about Trump

    “They are absolutely being overwhelmed by the volume of calls,” said Anne Meeker, deputy director of Popvox Foundation, a nonpartisan group focused on social and technology changes in citizen engagement.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Nazify

    Like I keep saying: [...]

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Plot Against America

    DOGE is not about efficiency. It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. It is a coup, executed not with guns, but with backend migrations and database wipes.

    What follows is not speculation or dystopian fiction. It is a carefully documented account of how a dangerous ideology, born in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, has moved from the fringes of tech culture to the heart of American governance.

    The story of how it begins starts sixteen years ago.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Dissenter ☛ Judge: Presidents May Be Immune From Prosecution But Not Transparency

  • Federal News Network ☛ Whistleblowers have more anti-retaliation tools than they realize

    The Whistleblower Protection Act was enacted to protect people who raise issues from retaliation. But it’s not the strongest law in the world, according to Attorney Stephen Kohn of Kohn, Kohn and Colapinto. In a recent National Law Review article, he lists several other tools whistleblowers can also use. Kohn joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin to discuss.

  • [Repeat] American Oversight ☛ New Lawsuit Seeks Musk’s Communications, Pushes Back Against DOGE’s Secretive Efforts to Invade Agencies and Evade Oversight

    The first Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against DOGE will expose and thwart Elon Musk’s efforts to evade accountability and the federal transparency law

  • The Atlantic ☛ DOGE Raises Red Flags for National Security

    Precisely what the DOGE teams are doing with this information, whom they’ve shared it with, and whether they have adequately protected it from falling into the wrong hands remains unknown. But the risks posed by this direct access to the government’s central nervous system are entirely foreseeable.

    “The fact that people are getting access to classified and personally identifiable information who are not being vetted by our national-security system means it is more likely that there are going to be damaging leaks,” Tim Naftali, a counterintelligence expert and presidential historian at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, told me.

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Claimed DOGE.gov Was Filled With Information About His Accomplishments, When In Reality It Was Completely Blank

    Flanked by president Donald Trump and his four-year old son, a stammering Musk defended himself from the charge that he could benefit immensely from his unelected position, gutting agencies that are directly in charge of investigating and regulating his billion-dollar business ventures.

    When asked what mechanisms were in place to guarantee accountability and transparency as DOGE ransacks the federal government, Musk replied that "we post our actions to the DOGE handle on X, and on the DOGE website" — clearly referring to the official government URL, DOGE.gov.

    There's just one problem: the DOGE website had been blank for weeks at that point. When it first launched, it was a single splash page containing an AI-mangled American flag and a simple message proclaiming that "the people voted for major reform," but it was subsequently scrubbed even of the flag graphic.

  • 404 Media ☛ Elon Musk's Waste.gov Is Just a WordPress Theme Placeholder Page

    Musk told reporters all of DOGE's actions are "maximally transparent." The website tracking waste is currently about an imaginary architecture firm.

  • Public Knowledge ☛ Public Knowledge Rejects White House Executive Order To Reduce Federal Workforce

    New Executive Order threatens our constitutional system of government.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Wired ☛ California’s Problem Now Isn’t Fire—It’s Rain

      Torrential rain is expected this week in Los Angeles, which risks producing flash flooding and landslides in areas stripped of vegetation by the recent wildfires.

    • Wired ☛ How to Get PFAS Out of Drinking Water—and Keep It Out

      Filters in water pitchers or under-sink systems capture dangerous chemicals, only for them to be returned to the environment. A researcher from North Carolina is pioneering a new system that could get rid of forever chemicals forever.

    • The Scotsman ☛ 'Dangerous as hell': I cycled this scary Scottish road that campaigners insist must be bypassed

      The campaign is significant because taking your life into your hands over a one-mile section of the B1345 is the only way to get between Drem Station and the growing village of Gullane other than by bike or on foot.

      For 20 years, locals have been lobbying for a separate cycling and walking path between the settlements.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Electricity for the Public Good

      Fortunately, Sandeep Vaheesan’s new book Democracy in Power offers important lessons on how previous generations have organized to bring the electric grid under public control. Jacobin’s Patrick Robbins recently caught up with Vaheesan to discuss how these lessons can help us envision and work toward a future of publicly controlled renewable energy.

    • Daily Kos ☛ Trump team will stop plane crashes by using the word 'men' for pilots

      The collision was the fourth deadly aircraft accident in the U.S. in the span of two weeks: there was the midair collision between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight that killed 67 people, a medevac jet that crashed in Philadelphia that killed seven people, and a commuter flight crash in Alaska that killed 10.

    • The Scotsman ☛ 30 electric buses set for key Scottish routes as part of £14 million investment

      Midland Bluebird, which runs the routes, has announced that it is investing £14 million in the single-decker electric buses from Chinese manufacturer Yutong. It is also investing in the electrification of its Larbert depot to support the transition to zero-emission transport.

    • New York Times ☛ Ford Chief Executive Says Trump Policies May Lead to Layoffs

      Ford has invested heavily in factories to produce batteries and electric vehicles in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee, Jim Farley, the Ford chief executive, said at a conference in New York. If Republicans repeal Biden-era legislation that allocated billions of dollars in subsidies and loans for the projects, Mr. Farley said, “many of those jobs will be at risk.”

• Finance

  • New Statesman ☛ A diamond ring is one of the worst investments you can make

    There is no central commodities market for diamonds, as there is for gold and silver, and because they’re not homogeneous, there is no open consensus on what they’re worth. As a rule of thumb, I’d say it’s a small fraction of what you will pay a high-street jeweller. Look at the second-hand prices of diamond rings from well-known brands on a website like eBay, and you will see that even carefully provenanced and accredited gems sell for around a tenth of the price of their new retail value. Nothing, not even a brand-new car or a designer dress, depreciates as quickly as a diamond.

    Even the prices paid by “sightholders” – the dealers who buy stones from the mining companies – are effectively synthetic, because diamonds aren’t rare. There are beaches on Namibia’s western coast where they have been deposited for millions of years by the Orange River, and where you might pick them from the sand or dig them up from the gravel beneath. Although you might also not do that, because the whole 200-mile stretch of coastline – the Sperrgebiet (forbidden region) – is closed to visitors and controlled by a partnership between the Namibian government and De Beers.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The New Stack ☛ US Moves To Designate Agency CIOs as Political Appointees

    Observers of the political process note that a successful government provides both types of workers: A bureaucrat will get the job done with ruthless efficiency as per the rule book, with disregard for political influences. But they can be slow to change, even when change is needed. The political appointees bring in fresh change with the will of the voters.

    So! Is the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) to be an agent of change? Or the keeper of the law?

  • The Conversation ☛ DeepSeek: how China’s embrace of open-source AI caused a geopolitical earthquake

    What makes DeepSeek particularly disruptive is its ability to achieve cutting-edge performance while reducing computing costs – an area where US firms have struggled due to their dependence on training models that demand very expensive processing hardware.

  • The Register UK ☛ US govt wants developers to stop coding 'unforgivable' bugs

    In a Wednesday advisory the FBI and Uncle Sam's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) labelled such memory safety flaws “unforgivable” because they’re avoidable if developers stop using outdated and unsafe coding practices and languages.

  • CISA ☛ Secure by Design Alert: Eliminating Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities

    CISA and FBI maintain that the use of unsafe software development practices that allow the persistence of buffer overflow vulnerabilities—especially the use of memory-unsafe programming languages—poses unacceptable risk to our national and economic security.[2] As such, CISA and FBI urge manufacturers to use proven prevention methods and mitigations to eliminate this class of defect while urging software customers to demand secure products from manufacturers that include these preventions. This Alert outlines proven methods to prevent or mitigate buffer overflow vulnerabilities based on secure by design principles and software development best practices.

  • Variety ☛ Microsoft Sets New Head of 'Minecraft' Studio Mojang, Asa Bredin Exits

    Currently, Walters is vice president and head of franchise development at the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Gaming, a leadership position she will continue in as she adds head of Mojang to her title. Federico San Martin will take on day-to-day management of franchise development and report directly to Walters.

  • The Register UK ☛ Gov.uk insiders: AI datacenters may be pricey white elephant

    While bit barns are a crucial part of the modern technological economy, building more in haste may not deliver the desired results.

    "Creating more datacenters will not necessarily lead to higher AI usage in the UK. Certainly, when it comes to the use of AI in public services, there are no clear timelines on how quickly the technology can be implemented, and there is a risk that the impact of AI may be far less than expected," TechMarketView Principal Analyst Simon Baxter previously said.

    This point was raised in a panel discussion at the AI Action Summit in Paris this week, where Alexander Vollert, CEO of AXA Group Operations, claimed AI solutions that have worked well are based on task-specific "classic" AI models rather than the large language models (LLMs), on which all the recent hype and investment has centered.

  • Denmarkification ☛ Help Denmark Buy California – Because Why Not?

    California could be ours, and we need your help to make it happen.

  • Alvaro Montoro ☛ GDPR and AI Act Are Awful

    A humorous review of how some developers see EU tech regulations before and after it actually impacts them.

  • European Commission ☛ Feedbac Open: Geo-blocking Regulation - evaluation

    In particular, it addresses unjustified geo-blocking and other forms of discrimination based on a customer’s nationality, place of residence or place of establishment.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • VOA News ☛ Trump's 'make peace or die' message to Putin is deepfake — yet it fooled Russians

      Speaking on the primetime show 60 Minutes on Rossia-1, the country's most-watched state-owned TV channel, Isayev said Trump reminded Putin about the fate of Libya’s ex-dictator Muamar Qaddafi lynched by a mob after a rebellion overthrew him in 2011.

      Instead of threatening Putin, Trump should remember the fate of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Isayev said, adding that the incumbent American president already faced several assassination attempts.

      “Trump threatened our president rather rudely, it must be said, pressuring to start the negotiations and reminding of Qaddafi’s fate.”

      The claim is false.

    • Marcy Wheeler ☛ "The Fraudsters Complain the Loudest and the Fastest:" Legacy Media Ignores Import of Gaza Condom Fact Check

      The exchange is bad enough: Elon basically confessed, in front of Trump, that a hoax Elon started that traveled first to Trump propagandist Karoline Leavitt and from there, through Jesse Watters’ exaggerations on Fox News, into several repetitions of the false claim by Trump was wrong.

      The entire point of this presser was to substantiate Trump’s false (and undocumented) claim that DOGE [sic] had found billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse and use that to, first, pressure judges who are putting brakes on DOGE and, then, justify giving DOGE [sic] authority to fire a bunch of people via Executive Order.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • JURIST ☛ Europe rights court finds Russia violated free speech by censoring Ukraine conflict news

    The European Court of Human Rights ruled Tuesday against the Russian Federation for violating the right to freedom of expression through fines, prosecution of individuals, and blockage of news outlets. The actions target the publications of “undesirable news” concerning the war in Ukraine.

  • EFF ☛ The TAKE IT DOWN Act: A Flawed Attempt to Protect Victims That Will Lead to Censorship

    TAKE IT DOWN mandates that websites and other online services remove flagged content within 48 hours and requires “reasonable efforts” to identify and remove known copies. Although this provision is designed to allow NCII victims to remove this harmful content, its broad definitions and lack of safeguards will likely lead to people misusing the notice-and-takedown system to remove lawful speech.

  • CPJ ☛ Russia’s repression record

    Since 2017, Russian authorities have designated hundreds of media outlets and journalists as foreign agents, requiring them to regularly submit detailed reports of their activities and expenses to authorities and to list their designation on published content. Failure to comply can result in fines, prosecution, and up to two years in jail.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Axios ☛ AP says it was blocked from Oval Office event over Gulf of Mexico policy

    "Barring AP journalists from an official presidential event because of the news outlet's editorial decisions is an affront to the First Amendment and a free press," PEN America program director Tim Richardson said. "It is retribution, plain and simple, and a shameful attempt to bully the press into ideological compliance." "Today's action by the White House is a direct attack on press freedom. No administration gets to decide how journalists do their jobs. The role of a free press is not to serve as an extension of any administration," National Press Club president Mike Balsamo said.

  • VOA News ☛ RFE/RL journalist released from Belarus jail

    A journalist with VOA’s sister outlet, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was released from Belarus on Wednesday, after spending more than three years imprisoned in a case that was widely viewed as politically motivated.

    Andrey Kuznechyk, a journalist with RFE/RL’s Belarus service, was released from Belarus on Wednesday, the U.S. special envoy for hostage affairs, Adam Boehler, said. Two other individuals were also released, including a U.S. citizen, but Boehler did not specify their identities.

  • US News And World Report ☛ White House Says It Has the Right to Punish AP Reporters Over Gulf Naming Dispute

    The White House’s outright attempt at regulating language used by independent media — and the punitive measures attached to it — mark a sharp escalation in Trump’s often fraught dealings with news organizations.

  • CPJ ☛ Russia preps to block income of ‘foreign agent’ journalists

    So-called foreign agents will not be allowed to withdraw their earnings unless they are removed from the register. However, the government can withdraw money from agents’ accounts to pay fines imposed for failing to apply that label to their published material or to report on their activities and expenses to the government — a legal requirement since 2020.

    While the new law’s full impact remains to be seen, it looms as yet another threat for exiled media outlets already rattled by the prospect of losing funding after U.S. President Donald Trump’s freezing of U.S. foreign aid.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • New York Times ☛ Google Calendar Deletes Black History Month, Pride and Other Cultural Events

    The Calendar controversy followed decisions by Google and Apple to change the Gulf of Mexico’s name to Gulf of America in their map applications after Mr. Trump ordered the name change.

  • Securepairs ☛ Statement on Ruling Upholding Massachusetts Auto Right to Repair Law

    Secure Repairs applauds Tuesday’s ruling by US District Court Judge Denise J. Casper to reject a lawsuit filed by the Alliance for Automotive Innovation challenging the state’s automotive right to repair law.

    Judge Casper’s prompt ruling in the case, upholding the legality of a 2020 ballot measure that expanded Massachusetts auto right to repair law to give vehicle owners access to wireless data needed for vehicle repair and maintenance respects the will of the 74% of Massachusetts voters who approved the ballot measure in November, 2020.

    “This ruling has been a long time coming. We at Secure Repairs are happy to see that Judge Casper saw through empty arguments by the auto industry regarding cyber risks in vehicle repair and endorsed the will of Massachusetts voters,” said Paul Roberts, the founder of Secure Repairs.

  • EFF ☛ Yes, You Have the Right to Film ICE

    Across the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has already begun increasing enforcement operations, including highly publicized raids. As immigrant communities, families, allies, and activists think about what can be done to shift policy and protect people, one thing is certain: similar to filming the police as they operate, you have the right to film ICE, as long as you are not obstructing official duties.

    Filming ICE agents making an arrest or amassing in your town helps promote transparency and accountability for a system that often relies on intimidation and secrecy and obscures abuse and law-breaking.

  • El País ☛ Dismantling of USAID will impact women more intensely

    “And the hangover of what is to come will be even worse, especially for women. They are more vulnerable due to their situation of inequality in almost the entire planet; when there are cuts, they are the ones who suffer the most. Girls become an economic asset for families, so they immediately stop sending them to school, put them to work instead, or marry them off at a younger age. Selling them is also an alternative in contexts of poverty,” she explains.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ Phone Companies Still Suck At Stopping Unwanted Scam Robocalls, Something That Will Get Much Worse Under Trump 2.0

    We’ve also noted how a big reason our robocall problem never gets fixed is because Congress and regulators routinely fixate on scammers and not on the “legit” companies like debt collectors that use the same tactics and routinely undermine reform and enforcement efforts.

    Another major problem is that federal regulators refuse to hold phone companies accountable for their lagging efforts to combat fraud and spam. Case in point: Truecaller’s U.S. Spam and Scam Report found that half of all major U.S. phone companies earned a D or F in their efforts to combat annoying robocalls and scams.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• [Old] Electric Vehicles News ☛ Great American Steetcar Scandal

  In 1948, the United States Supreme Court (in United States v. National City Lines Inc.) reversed lower court rulings and permitted a change in venue from the Federal District Court of Southern California to the Federal District Court in Northern Illinois.

  In 1949, the defendants were acquitted on the first count of conspiring to monopolize transportation services, but were found guilty on the second count of conspiring to monopolize the provision of parts and supplies to their subsidiary companies. The companies were each fined $5,000, and the directors were each fined one dollar. The verdicts were upheld on appeal in 1951.

  In 1970, Robert Eldridge Hicks, a Harvard Law student working on the Ralph Nader Study Group Report on Land Use in California, compiled and correlated these earlier events to expose the conspiracy. It was first reported publicly in Politics of Land, published in 1973.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Futurism ☛ Scarlett Johansson Disgusted by AI-Generated Video of Her Condemning Kanye West

      "We must call out the misuse of AI, no matter its messaging," she continued, "or we risk losing a hold on reality."

      Unfortunately, Johansson is all too familiar with the dangers presented by this burgeoning technology.

      Towards the end of 2023, the "Black Widow" star accused OpenAI of cloning her voice — which she used in her inimitable performance of an AI in 2013's "Her" — without her consent. Not long after, she said the company had asked her to use her voice, and even though she declined, OpenAI went forward with using "Sky," an eerily similar-sounding voice assistant, anyway.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Ozzy Osbourne sued for using own likeness – genuine copyright infringement or just a shot in the dark?

      The music publication’s website quoted the lawsuit: “The accounts are key components of defendant’s popular and lucrative commercial enterprise (...) Defendant has over 12 million followers on [Facebook], and over 6 million followers on [Instagram], and over 5 million followers on [X] — all of which are monetized and provide significant financial benefits to defendant.”

• Copyrights

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Thomson Reuters wins AI training copyright ruling — what this does and doesn’t mean

    “None of Ross’s possible defenses holds water. I reject them all,” Judge Stephanos Bibas ruled.

    Ross was using machine learning to build a legal search engine. Ross asked to license Westlaw’s content — copyrighted headnotes that summarized uncopyrightable judicial opinions — but Westlaw refused. So Ross got another company, LegalEase, to collect 25,000 “Bulk Memos” that included Westlaw content. Thomson Reuters found out and sued.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Thomson Reuters Scores Major Legal Win in AI 'Fair Use' Case

    In far more words, the plaintiff has accused now-defunct defendant Ross Intelligence of lifting protected materials from that database sans permission to create a law-focused AI search engine.

    Technically, this lifting was allegedly performed by a third-party legal-services provider. For obvious reasons, when approached by Ross with a licensing proposal, Thomson Reuters had opted against providing the relevant content (including headnote summaries) directly to its competitor.

    But unsurprisingly, given the years-long showdown, those materials ultimately wound up with Ross and factored into its AI search product, according to the plaintiff.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Thomson Reuters wins 'fair use' AI copyright ruling

    Judge Bibas found that Ross infringed 2,243 summaries, saying “actual copying” in these cases was “so obvious that no reasonable jury could find otherwise”. These headnotes were “substantially similar” with language that “very closely tracks” the Bulk Memo question but not the language of the original case opinion.

  • Thompson Reuters Foundation ☛ No. 1:20-cv-613-SB [PDF]

    I grant partial summary judgment to Thomson Reuters on direct copyright infringement for the headnotes in Appendix A. For those headnotes, the only remaining factual issue on liability is that some of those copyrights may have expired or been untimely created. This factual question underlying copyright validity is for the jury. I also grant summary judgment to Thomson Reuters against Ross’s defenses of innocent infringement, copyright misuse, merger, scenes à faire, and fair use. I deny Ross’s motions for summary judgment on direct copyright infringement and fair use. I revise all parts of my prior opinions that conflict with this one. I leave undisturbed the parts of my prior opinion not addressed in this one, such as my rulings on contributory liability, vicarious liability, and tortious interference with contract.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Photographer sues over copyright infringement over iconic portrait of “King of New York“ rapper The Notorious B.I.G.

    Photographer Barron Claiborne took the famed portrait of the rapper Christopher George Latore Wallace, also known as Biggie Smalls just three days before his death in 1997 from a drive-by-shooting in Los Angeles, age 24.

    According to documents filed on February 04 in federal court by members of the Notorious B.I.G. LLC, the estate alleges that Target and Home Depot illegally sold prints produced iCanvas, a company that the estate claims showed a “complete disregard for celebrities’ personal rights, lack of respect for artists’ efforts, and disdain for intellectual property law, when distributing the image.

  • Walled Culture ☛ Copyright madness: YouTube seems to doubt whether Shakespeare is in the public domain

    There are several issues here. One concerns the cavalier manner in which YouTube dealt with this situation – sadly, by no means an isolated incident. As the Public Citizen post explains, one of the video takedown victims was John Underwood, who had posted on YouTube videos of Shakespeare performances by a local non-profit group called Shakespeare by the Sea. When he received notice that two of his videos had been removed because a takedown notice sent by Coallier, Underwood followed the DMCA rules, and sent a counter-notice. He not unnaturally assumed that would resolve such a clear-cut case, not least because Shakespeare by the Seas assured him that it had not relied on Coallier’s claimed version of the Shakespeare plays for their performances. But YouTube ignored the official DMCA procedures and refused to acknowledge Underwood’s counter-notice, or even forward it to Coallier. This was not a one-off: other targets of Coallier’s take-down had also had their counter-notices ignored by YouTube. So Underwood contacted Coallier directly: [...]

  • Nick Heer ☛ Thomson Reuters Wins A.I. Copyright Case

    I am still unsure copyright law or, for that matter, robots.txt are the best tools for creators to control A.I. training, but this ruling sure seems to complicate the fair use justification upon which the entire field is currently based.