Leftovers

• Thomas Rigby ☛ Pronunciation of acronyms for screen readers

  I'll start with a quick explanation. Acronyms are only a string of initials that can be pronounced as a word. Otherwise it is an initialism. "NASA" is an acronym, "FBI" is an initialism. This post is specifically about acronyms, not initialisms or abbreviations.

  Many fields use acronyms; in a context where everyone understands them, they can speed up communication and improve one's ability to remember.

• Vox ☛ Is Gen Z bad at going to bars?

  “Closing a tab, holding it out, and asking people for the tip — that can take up to two minutes,” Tulloch details the tab-closing time crunch. “But think about two minutes for eight people. That’s 16 minutes and there are maybe 30 other people waiting to be served. If I could just open a tab, which is one motion, and then take care of all the other guests, I could come back when that moment of being in the weeds is over.”

  The advantage of having an open tab — and paying on one tab — is that it streamlines everyone’s experience. Bartending is basically project management with alcohol. Time spent closing tabs and ringing everyone up creates a line, a backlog. The theoretical minutes Tulloch and her colleagues save on closing tabs is more time could instead be spent paying attention to guests, and more guests getting their drinks and orders.

• Doc Searls ☛ Blogging like it’s 1999

  This is my second blog, and my first WordPress one. It launched in 2007. My first is this one, which (courtesy of Dave) started in the last year of the prior millennium. I had hair then, and wore glasses.

  Is this true? I want more sources.

• James G ☛ Run the code you need

  I recently added a feature to my build process that lets me run these custom functions only when my site is building for production.

• Mike Brock ☛ The View From Here

  The question is, as we hurtle past these invisible thresholds, can we be conscious enough to shape what comes next? Or are we doomed to be passive travelers, unaware of our trajectory until it's too late?

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Antarctic Research Stations in Chaos

    Worse yet, experts are concerned that other powerful nations, most notably Russia and China, could soon take advantage of the power vacuum and exert their influence, including in places like Antarctica.

  • The Nation ☛ DOGE [sic] Takes a Chain Saw to Federally Funded Scientific Research

    The Trump administration’s efforts to reorient the country away from cutting-edge research will be felt by nearly every area of science.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Inside the Collapse at the NIH

    NIH lawyers have told officials at the agency that to comply with court orders, they must restart grant awards and payments. But HHS officials have handed down messages too, several current and former NIH officials told me: Hold off. Maintain the pause on grants. And the NIH’s acting director, Matthew Memoli, who until January was a relatively low-ranking flu researcher at the agency, has instructed leadership to stick to what HHS says. (After this story was published, an NIH spokesperson wrote to The Atlantic defending Memoli’s actions, arguing that his “priority is to ensure that NIH is complying with the administration’s directives and related court orders so that NIH research and funding can fully resume.” HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

  • Wired ☛ Google’s Taara Hopes to Usher in a New Era of Internet Powered by Light

    Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” known as X, has long cultivated craziness in its edgy projects. Perhaps the most outlandish was Loon, which aimed to deliver internet via hundreds of high-flying balloons. Loon eventually “graduated” from X as a separate Alphabet division, before its parent company determined that the business model simply didn’t work. By the time that balloon popped in 2021, one of the Loon engineers had already left the project to form a team specifically working on the data transmission part of connectivity—namely, delivering high-bandwidth internet via laser beams. Think fiber optics without the cables.

• Career/Education

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Knowing where your salary comes from

    With the recent flurry of US federal firings, many people are pointing and laughing at the Trump-voting federal employees who are just now finding out that they’ve voted for themselves to be let go. How could you have this poor a mental model of what your job even is? Well. In my opinion, many software engineers are operating under a mental model that’s just as bad, and are often doing the equivalent of voting for the person promising to fire them.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Marco Giancotti

    This is the 79th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Marco Giancotti and his blog, aethermug.com

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Bell-to-bell cell phone ban moves in House and Senate committees

    SB 92, sponsored by Sen. Donnie Chesteen, R-Geneva, and HB 166, sponsored by Rep. Leigh Hulsey, R-Helena, requires all local school boards to develop and implement cell phone policies that require students to store devices for the entirety of the school day. Pike Road Junior High Principal Christy Wright told lawmakers about her school’s cell phone ban using Yondr pouches.

    “Without cell phones being there, it was clear that there was much more peer interaction happening, deeper discussions. Even just in the hallways, the interaction between our students changed our culture some,” Wright told the Senate Education Policy Committee Wednesday. “They also noticed, obviously, more in-depth instructional time, more academic engagement, and also just an overall confidence in our students.”

  • Neil Selwyn ☛ We might well need a digital backlash in education … just not this one!

    On February 6th I took part in a panel at Södertörn University discussing ‘the digital backlash’ in education – the growing trend to ban smartphones from schools, prioritise traditional books over screens, and generally roll-back the digitisation strategies of the 2010s. Here is a summary of my opening remarks.

  • Lucidity ☛ Ludic's Guide To Getting Software Engineering Jobs

    I currently run my business out of my own pocket. If I don't make sales, I lose savings, and it's as simple as that. I am all-in on creating work I love by force of arms, and I'd sooner leave the industry than be disrespected at a normal workplace again. The impetus to run that risk comes from two places.

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ Ampere bets on Arm to muscle into Intel's telco territory

    Ampere Computing is looking to target the telecoms market with its Arm-based server chips, hoping to take a slice of the growing compute needs of 5G and edge processing, which it believes Intel is no longer best served to meet.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Pro Publica ☛ Mint Plants. Lifesaving Devices. This Is the Research Ted Cruz Calls “Woke.”

    A few months ago, Sen. Ted Cruz announced that he had uncovered $2 billion of science grants funded by former President Joe Biden’s administration that prioritized “radical political perspectives” or “neo-Marxist theories.’’ His aides on a congressional committee assembled the list by searching the project descriptions for 699 key terms like “women,” “diversify,” “segregation” and “Hispanic culture.”

    When Cruz released the database of this allegedly “woke” research earlier this month, we decided to run our own experiment. We asked one of the models powering ChatGPT, which can sift through large amounts of data, to evaluate all 3,500 grant descriptions in the database as if it were an investigative journalist looking for Marxist propaganda, “woke ideology,” or diversity, equity and inclusion. The model tried to give us descriptions of how each project might fit those themes. We were particularly interested in the grants where it came up blank. We then read through the researchers’ full summaries of those and many other grants, including each one described in this story, looking for references to some of the keywords on the list.

  • The Register UK ☛ FDA clears Google watch feature to call 911 if you flatline

    The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the nod to the Loss of Pulse Detection feature of the Pixel Watch 3.

  • Rlang ☛ Open-Source Adoption in Pharma: Opportunities and Challenges

    In this blog post, we’ll explore how the pharmaceutical industry is leveraging open-source tools (especially in R), the challenges companies face in adoption, and key considerations for pharma leaders.

• Proprietary

  • Ars Technica ☛ Copilot exposes private GitHub pages, some removed by Microsoft - Ars Technica

    Repositories, once set to public and later to private, still accessible through Copilot.

  • The Register UK ☛ Skype for consumers 'retiring' in May

    The tech giant 'fessed up shortly after that the service will be no more from May this year, although this does not impact Skype for Business.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Microsoft to discontinue Skype after more than 20 years

    Skype received its biggest valuation in 2010, when it was bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion. The deal marked the software and cloud computing giant’s largest acquisition up to that point.

  • Six Colors ☛ Microsoft to finally hang up on Skype

    A lot of what Skype does is table stakes now, and though Microsoft acquired it in 2011, the company never really seemed that enthusiastic about it—even less so once it rolled out Teams in 2016. Still, Skype has stuck around, quietly doing its job even as users slowly migrated to other services.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Google Is Jacking Up Its Prices

    If you’re in one of the nine million organizations that use Google Workspace, your company likely just received notice that it’ll have to fork over a lot more cash to use its ubiquitous office applications. The monthly price for business plans is jumping 16 percent, from $14.40 to $16.80. If all three billion Google Workspace users paid that standard increase, that would equal an additional $7.2 billion in monthly revenue for the company. At the same time, Google’s cloud division, which houses Workspace, slashed its workforce this week, though the exact number of staff layoffs is unknown.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Futurism ☛ World's Largest Call Center Deploys AI to "Neutralize the Accent" of Indian Employees

      As Bloomberg reports, the Paris-based outsourcing company Teleperformance — which works with clients including Apple, Samsung, and TikTok — invested $13 million earlier this year in Sanas AI, a "real-time speech understanding platform" that boasts a so-called "accent translation" feature that uses machine learning to scrub the accents of overseas customer service workers.

    • Quanta Magazine ☛ The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AI

      The first step, Cranmer said, is equipping the model with the scientific skills that still elude most state-of-the-art AI systems. “Some people wanted to do a language model for astrophysics, but I was really skeptical about this,” he recalled. “If you’re simulating massive fluid systems, being bad at general numerical processing” — as large language models arguably are — “is not going to cut it.” Neural networks also struggle to distill their predictions into tidy equations (like E = mc2), and the scientific data necessary for training them isn’t as plentiful on the internet as the raw text and video that ChatGPT and other generative AI models train on.

    • NL Times ☛ Amsterdam bans city workers from using Generative AI over propaganda, hate speech fears

      The municipality of Amsterdam has banned civil servants from using generative AI like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, and Midjourney for their work. The municipality worries about these artificial intelligence technologies providing incorrect information, facilitating data leaks, promoting hate speech, and spreading propaganda, AT5 reports from an internal message sent to city workers this week.

    • The Wall Street Journal ☛ Meta Apologizes for Error That Flooded Instagram With Violent Content - WSJ

      Meta apologized Wednesday night for what it said was an “error” that led to graphic and violent videos flooding the feeds of a vast number of Instagram users, including minors.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Meta apologises over flood of gore, violence and dead bodies on Instagram

      Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has apologised after Instagram users were subjected to a flood of violence, gore, animal abuse and dead bodies on their Reels feeds.

      Users reported the footage after an apparent malfunction in Instagram’s algorithm, which curates what people see on the app.

    • India Times ☛ Waymo has grown 20-fold in under two years: Google CEO Sundar Pichai

      Reports indicate that Waymo is set to launch commercial robotaxi services in Austin and Atlanta in 2025, in partnership with Uber. Under the collaboration, only Uber users will have the option to hail Waymo’s fleet of autonomous Jaguar I-PACE vehicles.

    • India Times ☛ OpenAI’s video-generation model Sora launches in EU, UK

      OpenAI has rolled out its video-generation model, Sora, to users in the European Union, the UK. Switzerland, Norway, Liechtenstein, and Iceland.

    • Digital Music News ☛ ‘Alexa, Write Me a Song’ — Amazon Teams Up With Suno

      And the major labels aren’t the only ones with lawsuits against Suno. German collection society GEMA also filed a suit against Suno in January. Similarly, their lawsuit also stems from generated output that “largely corresponds” to famous works whose authors are represented by GEMA.

    • Futurism ☛ Pinterest Is Being Strangled by AI Slop

      Slop is everywhere on Pinterest, frequently ranking in the top results for common searches. It persists across classic Pinterest categories like home inspiration and DIY hacks, fashion, beauty, food and recipes, art, architecture, and more — and often links back to AI-powered content farming sites that masquerade as helpful blogs, using Pinterest as a tool to draw in viewers to useless chum content just to cash in on lucrative display ads.

      Pinterest users are frustrated, saying the AI onslaught is making the platform less useful and harder to navigate. But SEO spammers powering Pinterest's slopageddon say they're raking in cash.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ OpenAI releases GPT-4.5 with ridiculous prices for a mediocre model

      GPT-4.5 is expensive. OpenAI doesn’t seem to want you to actually use it — API prices per token are 15 to 30 times GPT-4o.

      Altman blames the prices on a GPU shortage. He promises “tens of thousands” more GPUs next week, eventually “hundreds of thousands.” This will cost OpenAI at least another $1 billion.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Variety ☛ Gene Hackman, Wife Test Negative for Carbon Monoxide, Pacemaker Stopped Feb. 17

      The sheriff also disclosed that Hackman’s pacemaker recorded its “last event” on Feb. 17, meaning that it is currently assumed that that is the date that the actor died. Mendoza said there remains uncertainty over the order of the couple’s deaths.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Gene Hackman Died 9 Days Before He Was Found, Based on Pacemaker

      The official cause of deaths for both Hackman and Arakawa are still pending the results of the autopsies and toxicology reports, both of which were expedited, Mendoza said. The pathologist was able to share the information gathered from Hackman’s pacemaker and its “last event” prior to the press conference.

    • Netzpolitik ☛ Belgian data marketplace: EU continues to fund start-up behind passport data leak

      The Belgian data marketplace “Databroker” openly displayed the names, dates of birth, and passport numbers of thousands of people on the [Internet]. The start-up behind it continues to receive EU funding.

    • The Verge ☛ The UK will neither confirm nor deny that it’s killing encryption | The Verge

      The UK may have set a precedent for other global governments to follow when it reportedly ordered Apple to give it backdoor access to iCloud data. Under the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), the British government can legally demand user data be handed over for the purpose of national security and crime prevention. That seemingly includes worldwide data access, even if it’s tightly encrypted.

    • The Record ☛ UK silence over Apple ‘back door’ is unsustainable and unjustifiable, say experts

      The British government’s refusal to either confirm or deny any details about a legal notice targeting Apple’s cryptographic protections for iCloud accounts risks undermining domestic and international confidence in Westminster, experts have warned.

      While the existence of the notice has not been avowed by either British officials or Apple, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has ordered a legal review of the secret directive and said she had a “grave concern” about its implications.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Veterans fired in federal layoffs say they were 'stabbed in the back'

  • Mike Brock ☛ This is an Emergency

    The instruments of state power are being wielded by individuals guided not by wisdom or a sense of historical responsibility, but by petty grudges, empty narratives, and cynical alliances against the very foundations of democratic governance. This is more than a political crisis; it's an existential threat to the principles that have underpinned global stability for generations.

    Those who believe America can remain neutral in this conflagration are not just naive—they are dangerously delusional. The fire that is spreading will consume us all, regardless of our attempts to stand apart. We are past the point where isolation is possible. The global economy, the reach of modern weaponry, and the cascading effects of regional conflicts ensure that no nation, no matter how powerful, can escape the consequences of this unfolding disaster.

  • VOA News ☛ Putin baselessly offers Ukraine’s rare earth minerals as Russian commodity

    All four regions described by Putin were part of the independent state of Ukraine (1918-1920), followed by the Ukrainian Soviet Republic (1920-1991), and Ukraine from 1991 until the 2014 Russian invasion. The Russian Federation was established in 1991 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and these regions were never part of it.

    By clandestinely invading Ukraine in 2014, then waging a full-scale war in 2022, Russia violated numerous international agreements and treaties Moscow ratified recognizing Ukraine’s borders and guaranteeing its territorial integrity.

  • New Yorker ☛ Elon Musk, and How Techno-Fascism Has Come to America

    Silicon Valley is premised on the idea that its founders and engineers know better than anyone else: they can do better at disseminating information, at designing an office, at developing satellites and advancing space travel. By the same logic, they must be able to govern better than politicians and federal employees. Voguish concepts in Silicon Valley such as seasteading and “network states” feature independent, self-contained societies running on tech principles. Efforts to create such entities have either failed or remained confined to the realm of brand-building, as in the startup Praxis, a hypothetical plan for a new tech-driven city on the Mediterranean. Under the new Trump White House, though, the U.S. government is being offered up as a guinea pig, McElroy said. “Now that we’ve got Musk running the state, I don’t know if they need their little offshore bubbles as much as they thought they did before.”

  • The Nation ☛ States Won’t Tell Us How to Win the Next Election. We Need to Look to the Counties.

    In order to get a clearer picture of our nation, it helps to look through a county-focused lens. There are more than 3,000 counties in the country, and more than half of the votes cast nationwide came from the 150 largest counties. In those places, Harris won, cumulatively, by 17 points. Most important, in most of the battleground states, the greatest areas of opportunity lie in the counties. People of color tend to be concentrated in a relatively small number of counties within states that are frequently thought of as more conservative. Arizona, for example, has 15 counties, but 82 percent of all the people of color in the state live in just three counties (Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima). Similar situations exist across the country, even in the states that lost to Trump in the latest election.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Three Methods of Control

    Donald Trump received less than half of the votes cast in the 2024 presidential election—49.9%. That was 1.5% more than Kamala Harris. Immediately upon taking office he greenlit a sweeping effort to decimate the operations of the federal agencies, at the same time he is testing the limits of autocratic control of the government and defiance of the courts. To a greater degree than any president in my lifetime, Trump’s actions are exceeding the slim mandate that he was given by voters.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Despair, Hope and Defiance

    I remember election night—not the result, but the silence that followed. There were no cheers. No riots. Just people, staring at screens, absorbing what they already knew but had hoped against hope wouldn’t be true. A democracy, not lost in a single night, but quietly conceding ground to the abyss.

    That night was just the beginning of a long journey, one that continues to unfold before us. A dangerous constitutional crisis. A slow-motion coup.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Asylum applications reach highest yearly figure since records began, data shows

    The total of 108,138 asylum seekers is up 18% from 91,811 in 2023, according to data published by the Home Office.

    The previous record was 103,081 in the 12 months to December 2002.

    Migrants who made the journey to the UK across the English Channel in small boats accounted for 32% of the total in 2024.

  • VOA News ☛ VOA Kurdish: Iran’s uranium enrichment nears weapons-grade levels 

    Iran has escalated its uranium enrichment to near weapons-grade levels, raising alarm within the international community, according to a new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency. [...]

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Axios ☛ Epstein documents release: Names, flight logs unveiled. Read the documents.

    The Department of Justice released more than 100 pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday. The documents released by Attorney General Pam Bondi include flight logs, a redacted contact book and masseuse list and an evidence list.

  • VOA News ☛ X influencer misleads on DRC offer of rare minerals to US, EU

    African Hub's post went viral. It seems to have originated from Tshisekedi's Feb. 20 interview with The New York Times.

    However, in that interview, Tshisekedi did not offer the U.S. control over DRC's mineral resources, nor did it suggest any military intervention.

  • Stephen Follows ☛ Was Harvey Weinstein thanked more often than God at the Oscars?

    To answer this, I crunched the data on 1,884 speeches given by winners at the Oscars.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ BBC admits serious flaws over Gaza documentary

    Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone failed to disclose that its child narrator, a 14-year-old boy named Abdullah, was the son of a Hamas official.

    In a statement, the broadcaster also revealed that the boy’s family had been paid for his involvement.

• Environment

  • The Independent UK ☛ Senate reverses Biden-era EPA rule that could help fossil fuel companies continue to boil planet alive

    Methane is the second most abundant human-produced greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide. It accounts fro about 11 percent of global emissions, according to the EPA.

  • El País ☛ Crowded beaches in Antarctica: TikTok effect fills the world of penguins with tourists

    Shocking images of mass tourism in the pristine environment have Antarctic Treaty countries considering a tax for visitors, who are attracted by videos posted on social media

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Park Service says mine inside Mojave National Preserve is unauthorized

    The National Park Service has alleged an Australian company is operating an unauthorized mine in the heart of the Mojave National Preserve

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ What Happens to a Tree That Dies in a Forest?

    “Just because it’s dead doesn’t mean it still doesn’t have a huge function in the ecosystem,” says ecologist Amy Zanne of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York State. Yet the amount of deadwood has been declining in many woodlands around the world, and with it, the vital life-giving role it plays.

  • Nico Cartron ☛ Fed up with throw-away earbuds

    When I decided for those WF-1000XM4, I noticed that the previous model (XM3) had a battery that was easy to replace, so I assumed that'd be the case for the XM4, but turns out it's not.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ Scam Altman Says OpenAI Has Run Out of GPUs

      It's a notable admission, highlighting just how hardware-reliant the technology is. AI industry leaders are racing to build out data centers to keep their increasingly unwieldy AI models running — and are ready to put up hundreds of billions of dollars for the cause.

    • US News And World Report ☛ US Judge Dismisses SEC Fraud Lawsuit Against Hex [Cryptocurrency] Founder

      A federal judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit by U.S. securities regulators accusing an online entrepreneur of raising more than $1 billion through unregistered cryptocurrency offerings and defrauding investors out of $12.1 million to buy luxuries including the world's largest black diamond.

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Why bitcoin is crashing - and where it might go next

      Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market value, was down 6% at $2 149.38, around its lowest since January 2024. Trump’s own “TRUMP” memecoin that he launched upon his inauguration has lost 50% in value since then, while his wife’s “MELANIA” token has lost 90%.

    • Wired ☛ The SEC Is Abandoning Its Biggest [Cryptocurrency] Lawsuits

      The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is backing away, one-by-one, from the volley of lawsuits and investigations it brought against cryptocurrency businesses under the Joe Biden administration, in a reversal described by a former attorney at the regulatory agency as “unprecedented.”

    • Futurism ☛ Tesla Owners Now Disgusted By Elon Musk

      The tipping point for Helton, a political moderate, was when Musk performed a Nazi salute at president Donald Trump's inauguration celebration. Before that went down, he was considering getting a second Tesla for his family. Now, Helton plans to pay off his car loan early and trade in the vehicle, per Bloomberg.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Comics for Earth: Eight New Graphic Novels About Saving the Planet and Celebrating Wildlife

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Insight Hungary ☛ Orbán government calls for Budapest Pride to be held behind closed doors

    Hungary’s government plans on relocating the annual Budapest Pride to a closed venue for "child protection". The move is seen by critics as the latest attack on LGBTQ+ rights.

    Gergely Gulyás, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s chief of staff, suggested that the parade, traditionally held along Budapest’s Andrassy Avenue, should no longer take place in public spaces. A Pride held in a closed space poses no risk to children,” Gulyás said. The announcement follows comments from Orbán, who warned organizers not to “bother” planning the event.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Tone Down Trump Praise, Kremlin Tells State Media - The Moscow Times

    Yet Russian media should not be praising Trump, but rather “presenting him as someone who had the wisdom to accept Putin’s extended hand,” the source explained.

    This framing ensures that Russian officials can assert they made every effort to engage diplomatically should relations deteriorate, Vyorstka cited its source as saying.

  • [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ Autodesk announces 1,350 job cuts following strong quarterly earnings

    Computer-aided software design company Autodesk Inc. announced today that it’s cutting 9% of its workforce, or about 1,350 people, following its quarterly earnings report, which saw the company beat analyst expectations on all metrics.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ No Mr Trump, the EU was created to ‘screw’ Russia

    Trump is nevertheless wrong about the origins of the EU. “The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it,” he told his cabinet.

    Actually, the EU was an American project created to “screw” Russia. Declassified documents show that Washington pushed European integration from the late 1940s onwards, funding it covertly from Truman through to Nixon until the proto-EU was strong enough to stand on its own feet.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Harvard University ☛ Did the TikTok ban go too far?

      “Imagine that the United States and China get into a shooting war over Taiwan,” said Rozenshtein. “Suddenly the concern would be that TikTok would be flooded with pro-Chinese, anti-Taiwan and anti-American content. Given that TikTok is not only very popular, but for young Americans, it is increasingly the main source of news, that’s very concerning.”

    • Science Alert ☛ We Analyzed What TikTok Says About Medical Tests And Got a Nasty Shock

      In a new study published today in JAMA Network Open, we analyzed nearly 1,000 Instagram and TikTok posts about five popular medical tests which can all do more harm than good to healthy people, including the full-body MRI scan.

      We found the overwhelming majority of these posts were utterly misleading.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ TikTok health traps: How influencers give you bad advice

      A new study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, has found around 85% of social media posts about medical tests provide misleading or potentially harmful false medical advice that failed to mention important harms such as overdiagnosis or overuse.

    • [Old] El País ☛ ‘Right-wing bias’: A macro study confirms that Facebook disinformation is consumed by conservatives

      Facebook is a network dominated by conservative news and its right-wing users are the ones who overwhelmingly consume information labeled as false. The data confirming these two hypotheses comes from academic research that had unprecedented access to internal Facebook data provided by Meta. These findings are based on the aggregated activity of 208 million U.S. users over several months around the 2020 US elections. The study, led by Spanish researcher Sandra González-Bailón of the University of Pennsylvania, is part of a series of four papers analyzing Meta social media’s impact on increasing political polarization, which were published Thursday in the journals Science and Nature.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • FAIR ☛ Kirk Herbertson on Big Oil’s Lawsuit Against Environmentalism

  • Techdirt ☛ People Who Can’t Get Books Banned From Libraries Are Now Hiding Them Or Throwing Them In The Trash

    The “rule of law” folks (who also have a sizable overlap with the “party of free speech“) are at it again. Around the nation, legislators emboldened by the Republican party’s embrace of bigotry have been passing bills banning books (or, worse, subjecting librarians to criminal charges). Almost as often as a law gets passed, it gets sued out of existence, because most courts are more inclined to protect constitutional rights than throw their support behind close-minded people who think everyone should only have access to content they think is acceptable.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russians Arrested at Memorials for Boris Nemtsov on Assassination Anniversary

    Multiple people were arrested in cities across Russia as they paid tribute to the late opposition figure Boris Nemtsov on Thursday, the 10th anniversary of his assassination near the Kremlin.

  • Variety ☛ Mohammad Rasoulof Supports 'My Favourite Cake' Directors Before Trial

    Support is mounting across the global film community for Iranian directing duo Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha ahead of their trial over “propaganda against the regime” allegations related to their film “My Favourite Cake.” The two are set to face Iran‘s Revolutionary Court on Saturday.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Federal News Network ☛ Trump administration questions federal employees’ use of official time for union activities

    “The memorandum stigmatizes something that is completely lawful and routine: federal employees’ elected representatives engaging in representation,” an AFGE spokesperson said by email. “‘Taxpayer-funded union time’ doesn’t exist — it is an anti-union buzzword used to distort and defame employee representatives executing their legal duties.”

  • France24 ☛ Bangladesh faces never-ending battle against child marriage - Reporters

    [...] This is despite the fact that child marriage has been illegal since a British empire-era law from 1929, with the legal age set at 18 for women and 21 for men. [...]

  • The Hindu ☛ ‘Child marriages can be prevented only if vigilance committees act effectively’

    While giving training to Panchayat Development Officers, anganwadi workers, health assistants and ASHAs on strengthening vigilance committees, Mr. Veeranagouda said that “the practice of child marriage is the real evil of society and it should be eradicated from the root level. Such marriages will be prevented by prosecuting offenders under the acts that exist. It will happen only if the vigilance committees act properly and effectively,” he stressed.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ Big Telecom Is Terrified Of New State Laws Demanding They Make Broadband Affordable To Poor People

    Now telecom giants, long fat and comfortable thanks to regional monopolies, are worried by the fact that other states are following suit. Vermont, California and Massachusetts recently proposed their own versions of New York’s law requiring ISPs make broadband affordable for poor people.

    For a generation, the U.S. government largely looked the other way as big telecom companies like AT&T and Comcast crushed all competition underfoot, then lobbied or literally bribed lawmakers to look the other way. The result: Americans pay significantly more for patchy, slower broadband than in most developed nations. With terrible customer service to match.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Patents

  • Jeremy Cherfas ☛ Bt corn ravages (some) farmer profits

    A large team led by Christian Krupke at Purdue University looked in detail at university field trials of corn engineered to resist corn rootworm, the larva of a beetle that can cause severe damage and yield loss by munching on the plant’s roots. Since 2003, GMO corn has been available that produces toxins derived from a bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, that kill rootworms and protect yield. Widespread planting of Bt corn followed, with two opposite effects.

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ The Cranberries File Suit Against Island/UMG for Unpaid Royalties

    The Cranberries also claim they’ve been underpaid for their video streams, receiving just a fraction of that which they claim they are entitled after YouTube’s 40% cut. According to the complaint, the band should be entitled to $4.9 million in video streaming royalties — but have only received $930,676. This, they say, is again the result of Island Records “significantly underreport[ing]” its video streaming revenue.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Paul McCartney's AI battle could spark a copyright revolution

    Paul McCartney is mad. So are Kate Bush, Elton John and about a thousand other musicians who released a silent album this week — made by recording empty music studios — to protest the UK’s proposed changes to its copyright law. Britain, the country that gave us the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, now wants to make it easier for tech firms to train AI with that creative work, allowing them to use it by default without pay. If creators don’t like it, they must opt out.

    Unsurprisingly, artists hate the idea, which reverses a fundamental principle of copyright law: you ask for permission before using someone’s work. Trade groups say the proposed changes would threaten the livelihoods of singers and publishers and lead to the rabid exploitation of work without compensation.