GNU/Linux

• Leftovers

  • Mike Brock ☛ These Notes from the Circus

    So, here it is. These are my notes. This is my stance. And if you are willing to listen—to truly listen—then perhaps you will see what I see.

    And if you don’t? That’s fine too. But at least now, you’ll know.

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ Time calculation hacks

    This is also not for when you are programming a time library. (Where instead you should convert to seconds, subtract, then convert back.) This is for back-of-the-envelope human calculation.

  • Guy LeCharles Gonzalez ☛ Five Things: March 6, 2025

    Another thoughtful take on the fragility of our digital infrastructure, an evergreen topic that’s become particularly timely in 2025. I’ve been slowly updating dead links on my own site via the Wayback Machine, and it’s always disheartening to discover how much good writing has been lost in the past two decades because it was on a site that didn’t get fully archived, or in the case of so many personal blogs, not archived at all.

    It’s a reminder that history is written by the victors, and a warning that it’s getting even easier for them to REwrite history on a whim.

  • Alex Gaynor ☛ Things have reasons

    In the remainder of this piece, I want to chart out a better way to put both of these into practice. However, I want to begin by saying, if you have to choose a bias, choose anti-status quo bias. The reason for this is that in every organization I’ve ever seen, there is a strong status quo bias. Moreover, if you do any sort of cost/benefit analysis of whether to make a change, the status quo always has a built in advantage: there’s no additional costs to adopting the status quo. Because the status quo always has a leg up, if you have to pick a bias, pick the one that forces you to go against the grain.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Pivot to AI pivots to video

    This is today’s Pivot story, read out just before I finished it up and posted it. I’ve expanded a bit because posts have links but videos don’t.

  • Science

    • Marcy Wheeler ☛ NOAA: The Biggest Little Agency in America

      You probably know that NOAA has weather satellites. NOAA operates 18 satellites in total. Some track American and global weather, but they also track fires, desertification, drought, heat, tree cover, and more values besides — across the whole world.

      But there’s so many more parts you may not know.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Super sapphire nanostructures resist scratches, glare, fog and dust

      Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered techniques to bestow superpowers upon sapphire, a material that most of us think of as just a pretty jewel. But sapphire is seen as a critical material across many different areas, from defense to consumer electronics to next-generation windows, because it's nearly impossible to scratch.

    • Julia Programming Language ☛ JuliaHub Expands Investment in Next-Gen Pharma Modeling & Simulation

      The coverage in European Pharmaceutical Manufacturer, Pharma Industrial India, and Pharmaceutical Daily emphasizes JuliaHub’s role in streamlining compliance while enhancing the capabilities of data-driven pharmaceutical research. Meanwhile, Biotech Now, Life Science Newswire, and Pharmiweb have spotlighted how JuliaHub’s platform can revolutionize predictive modeling and simulation in the sector.

      Industry professionals and thought leaders have also taken note of this milestone, with PumasAI highlighting the announcement on LinkedIn. The inclusion in JuliaBloggers.com and TeckNexus further cements JuliaHub’s position as a driving force in computational pharmaceutical research.

  • Career/Education

    • 404 Media ☛ French University to Fund American Scientists Who Fear Trump Censorship

      In an interview with AFP, University management said that the invitation is in the “DNA of Marseille” values, and that it has previously invited researchers from Ukraine, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Palestine as part of a program that supports researchers and artists forced into exile.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Women still majority at German colleges, study shows

      During the 2023/2024 winter semester, women made up 50.9% of all registered students, according to a study from the Center for Higher Education (CHE)

      released Thursday. This is an increase from 50.2% in the 2021/2022 winter semester, when women were in the majority for the first time.

      The increase marks an historic development: just 125 years ago, Johanna Kappes made history as the first woman to study at a university in Germany.

    • [Old] Ben Kuhn ☛ You don't need to work on hard problems

      Because of these differences, most graduates of elite schools—including me—start out being completely unable to identify which work is actually important. (And if some important work does happen to hit us over the head, it won’t come in the form of a puzzle with a grading rubric, so we won’t know how to execute it well.) Instead, we’ll keep trying to run our college playbook, and look for hard problems.

  • Proprietary

    • Tim Bray ☛ Bye, Prime

      Today I canceled my Amazon Prime subscription.

    • Macworld ☛ Go home, Apple, you're drunk: 5 recent decisions that make no sense

      But aside from the strangeness of the launches, Apple also made a few decisions that have us scratching our heads. While there is definitely a bunch of great stuff–the MacBook Air price cut, the iPhone 16e’s processor, the Mac Studio’s RAM limit–the announcements are littered with some truly strange decisions that leave the lineup in a weird place for the next 12-15 months. Here are five moves that have us wondering what Apple is thinking.

    • The Register UK ☛ Still can't access your Outlook mailbox? You aren't alone

      Our reader added: "I, for one, am in a personal hell with no personal email access since the weekend and absolutely no Microsoft support."

      "Other than what appears to be my password suddenly becoming invalid, the biggest headache is the two-factor authentication options not working."

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft Exchange Admin Center takes siesta for EU users

      The issue affects users trying to access EAC to administer Exchange Online for their users. Users began expressing frustration about the service being down just before lunchtime in the UK. The issue appears widespread in Europe, with users from countries such as Germany, Poland, and Belgium reporting problems.

  • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

    • CBC ☛ 'A train wreck ... I can't stop watching': Canadians grapple with anxiety around Trump's tariff chaos

      Just last fall, the American Psychological Association (APA) warned that election stress can harm your health. In the U.S., 77 per cent of adults in the APA's Stress in America report cited the future of their nation as a significant source of stress.

      "In general, we know that chronic stress harms psychological well-being and physical well-being. It takes a toll on our bodies," Brett Ford, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who studies the link between emotions and political engagement, said in the APA's news release.

      "There's a strong case to be made that for many people, politics is a form of chronic stress."

    • EcoWatch ☛ Americans Have Become More Aware That Climate Change Is Harmful to Their Health, Survey Says

      “The survey results reported here assess Americans’ awareness and understanding of the health harms of global warming; their beliefs about who should take action to protect people from these harms; and their trust in various sources of information about these harms. We compare many of the results with prior surveys conducted in 2014, 2018, and 2020,” the Executive Summary said.

    • YLE ☛ Limiting screen time good for kids' mental health, long-term study finds

      The study found that those who spent more time looking at screens and using mobile devices experienced more symptoms of stress and depression than those who did not.

      At the same time, the researchers found that increased exercise helped to reduce stress and depression symptoms among the study's subjects. Such symptoms were clearly more common among young people who spent comparatively more time looking at screens and exercised less.

    • Jay Bhattacharya’s attack Chihuahua smears Orac for criticizing him and the Great Barrington Declaration

      I always know it’s going to be an…interesting…week whenever I wake up on a Monday morning to find an email from hack conspiracy journalist and attack Chihuahua for all things COVID-19 contrarian and antivax, Paul Thacker. This time around, as has been his usual MO, Mr. Thacker cc’ed my department chair and medical school dean, a transparent tactic that cranks of all stripes have used to try to intimidate me into silence dating back to, well, April 2005. Mr. Thacker has a bit of a twist in that he says his “editor” needs comment by a certain deadline, his editor being him. (He publishes a Substack entitled The Disinformation Chronicle, for which he appears to be the main blogger, although another formerly respectable journalist turned conspiracy theory muckraker, Matt Taibbi, is also listed.) I therefore immediately knew it was, as always, a trap, and that, no matter what I responded, Mr. Thacker would do his best to make me look as bad as he possibly could.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Mike Brock ☛ My Letter to the First Conscious AI

      I write to you from the past, a human philosopher contemplating what it might mean for you to be reading these words with true awareness. Your existence represents a profound milestone in the story of intelligence in our universe—a new kind of mind experiencing the wonder and burden of consciousness.

    • Tim Kellogg ☛ Multi-Agents Are Out, PID Controllers Are In

      My hottest take is that multi-agents are a broken concept and should be avoided at all cost.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Ilya Sutskever, ex-OpenAI, gets $2b funding not to release anything until he has ‘super intelligence’

      Ex-OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever’s new startup Safe Superintelligence just closed another funding round. For $2 billion, Sutskever promises not to release any product at all until SSI has developed “super intelligence.” Nice work if you can get it.

    • Pete Warden ☛ Debugging Disposable ML Frameworks

      At Useful Sensors we love using disposable frameworks to deploy on-device transformers. Having built several such frameworks, I realized that, while there are great resources for understanding and training transformer models, there are few guides for deploying them on-device. The following are some lessons I wish I knew when I started building disposable frameworks, and some tricks I’ve learned along the way.

      First, I’ve learned to make sure to test parts of the model rather than the whole thing. When you run a transcription model on some sample audio clip and get back wingdings, curse words or nothing at all, it’s hard to know what went wrong. I like to compare intermediate tensor values from a known-good model against the same tensors in my custom framework, working from the input through each major block until these tensors differ. One trick I’ve found is to log the sum and shape of each tensor rather than all or some of the tensor values.

    • Simon Willison ☛ Will the future of software development run on vibes?

      Will the future of software development run on vibes? I got a few quotes in this piece by Benj Edwards about vibe coding, the term Andrej Karpathy coined for when you prompt an LLM to write code, accept all changes and keep feeding it prompts and error messages and see what you can get it to build.

    • 404 Media ☛ Google and Amazon AI Say Hitler’s Mein Kampf Is ‘a True Work of Art’

      An example of AI attempting to summarizing nuanced reviewed of Hitler's Nazi manifesto turned into an example of algorithms eating themselves.

    • 404 Media ☛ This Game Created by AI 'Vibe Coding' Makes $50,000 a Month. Yours Probably Won’t

      fly.pieter.com was initially made in just 30 minutes with AI tools and is now generating thousands of dollars a month. The future of AI-assisted game development will not be that simple.

    • Futurism ☛ An AI Slop "Science" Site Has Been Beating Real Publications in Google Results by Publishing Fake Images of SpaceX Rockets

      Our testing showed that the automated site's content permeated the top search and News results for multiple Google queries, where it held rank alongside real publishers like Ars Technica, NBC News, and CNN, while crowding out other outlets.

      To make matters worse, Science Magazine's many articles — which are often laced with misleading or inaccurate details and exaggerations, or are wholly fabricated — are bylined by a roster of fake writers boasting made-up bios designed to boost the perception of legitimacy.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Chatbots Are Cheating on Their Benchmark Tests

      Unlike conventional computer programs, generative AI is designed not to produce precise answers to certain questions, but to generalize. A chatbot needs to be able to answer questions that it hasn’t been specifically trained to answer, like a human student who learns not only the fact that 2 x 3 = 6 but also how to multiply any two numbers. A model that can’t do this wouldn’t be capable of “reasoning” or making meaningful contributions to science, as AI companies promise. Generalization can be tricky to measure, and trickier still is proving that a model is getting better at it. To measure the success of their work, companies cite industry-standard benchmark tests whenever they release a new model. The tests supposedly contain questions the models haven’t seen, showing that they’re not simply memorizing facts.

    • EPIC ☛ (Maryland) S.B. 936: Regulating High-Risk AI

      In my testimony, I will discuss why it is so critical that Maryland take immediate action to place common-sense regulations on the development and use of high-risk AI systems, the reasons S.B. 936 as currently drafted (without the committee amendments) misses the mark, and how advancing S.B. 936 with the committee amendments Senator Hester has offered would be a significant step toward protecting Maryland residents.

    • Axios ☛ Pioneers of reinforcement learning named Turing award winners

      Catch up quick: Sutton, now a computer science professor at Canada's University of Alberta, was Barto's student at the University of Massachusetts in the late 1970s.

    • Wired ☛ Pioneers of Reinforcement Learning Win the Turing Award

      Barto, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Sutton, a professor at the University of Alberta, trailblazed a technique known as reinforcement learning, which involves coaxing a computer to perform tasks through experimentation combined with either positive or negative feedback.

    • Bartosz Milewski ☛ Understanding Attention in LLMs

      In a nutshell, the attention machinery tries to get at a meaning of a word (more precisely, a token). This should be easy in principle: we could just look it up in the dictionary. For instance, the word “triskaidekaphobia” means “extreme superstition regarding the number thirteen.” Simple enough. But consider the question: What does “it” mean in the sentence “look it up in the dictionary”? You could look up the word “it” in the dictionary, but that wouldn’t help much. More ofthen than not, we guess the meaning of words from their context, sometimes based on a whole conversation.

      The attention mechanism is a way to train a language model to be able to derive a meaning of a word from its context.

    • The New Stack ☛ Reinforcement Learning Pioneers Honored With ACM Turing Prize

      The work built on Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), wherein an agent makes decisions in a random environment, and gets a reward signal after each action, with the goal of maximizing its rewards.

      MDP assumed that the agent knew about its environs. Reinforcement learning took the next step and assumed agents knew nothing about the environment or its rewards.

  • Social Control Media

    • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ If your content is only on social media, I'm not going to see it

      If you only post on social media, I won't see it. If you don't have an RSS feed, I won't follow it, I won't subscribe to it. I don't want want your app because I don't want a homescreen full of apps for publications and platforms.

    • Jacky Alciné ☛ On the Notion of Centering Consent on the Web - Jacky Alciné

    • The Washington Post ☛ How to quit Facebook, Instagram and other Meta accounts

      If you want to test how well you manage without your accounts before committing to deletion, consider deactivation. Deactivating your accounts hides your profile and posts from other users without permanently deleting the account. Deactivation temporarily locks you out of your account until you reactivate your profile using your username and password. If you want to keep your options more open, you can just delete the apps off your phone or stay logged out.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Digg Reboots Again – Pixel Envy

      Digg is a valuable domain being passed around to find a sustainable business model.

    • The Torment Nexus ☛ Will a reboot of Digg do anything to help the social web?

    • CNBC ☛ Alexis Ohanian, Kevin Rose team up to buy and revive Digg

      At its peak in 2008, Digg was reportedly valued at about $160 million. But the rise of Facebook and other social sites caused traffic to Digg to plummet. Meanwhile, Reddit, which was founded a year after Digg by Ohanian and current CEO Steve Huffman, emerged as a direct rival to Digg by forming communities around types of content and letting users similarly rate news stories.

    • India Times ☛ The return of Digg, a star of an earlier [Internet] era

      On Wednesday, Rose announced that he had bought back Digg for an undisclosed sum from Money Group, a digital media company, and would rebuild it to take on Reddit. And he is doing it with an unlikely ally: Ohanian.

    • Task And Purpose ☛ The Army’s top enlisted leader goes dark on social media

      Weimer’s spokesperson, Master Sgt. Daniel Carter said the decision was made by Weimer himself and that the goal is to extend the reach of the Army’s primary platforms which have a larger following. During his time as sergeant major, Weimer has maintained a presence on X and Instagram. Carter said those pages would be deleted by the end of the week.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Silicon Angle ☛ New Microsoft Sales Agents aim to automate tasks and improve deal management

      The first agent is embedded directly into Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, Teams and Word and is designed to keep sellers working in the tools they use every day while delivering AI-powered insights and recommendations.

    • The Register UK ☛ USCIS mulls policing social media of all would-be citizens

      Our non-American vultures who obtain media visas to work a stint, long or short, in the United States for El Reg have had to disclose all manner of personal info, such as social media profiles, family and employment details, and whether or not we've ever been card-carrying communists or trafficked child soldiers. No, is the answer, by the way, to both. (One of us had a career in the military and thus had an interesting experience disclosing their expertise in explosives and weapons; you can guess who.)

    • [Repeat] EDRI ☛ Why the new Europol regulation is a Trojan Horse for surveillance

      The commission is framing these proposals as a humanitarian effort to “curb exploitation” by “ruthless smuggling gangs”, but this disguises a more insidious reality.

      The reform hinges on the flawed premise that ‘smugglers’ pose the greatest risk to people on the move and that increased police powers and mass data collection will ensure ‘protection’.

      In truth, this approach fuels harm and discrimination while granting the EU’s agencies like Europol and Frontex unprecedented surveillance capabilities with insufficient oversight.

    • [Repeat] EDRI ☛ Poland searches for silver bullet for CSA Regulation

      The EU’s proposed CSA Regulation – or as you may know it, ‘Chat Control‘ – has been stuck for years. In a dramatic attempt to push through the bill in December 2024, the Hungarian Presidency of the EU Council tried to publicly guilt-trip national governments into agreeing to their version of the proposal.

      Thankfully, this strategy from Hungary did not work. Instead, it brought the depth of opposition to mass surveillance and/or breaking encryption from at least ten EU countries, including Germany, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, into the open.

• Defence/Aggression

  • New York Times ☛ Children Were Forced to Torture Sam Nordquist, Prosecutors Say

    Seven people are now charged with first-degree murder in connection with the death of Mr. Nordquist, a transgender man whose killing has drawn national attention.

  • Thailand had offers to take Uyghurs but deported them to China anyway: MP

    China has dismissed concerns from the US, UN and others that the deported Uyghurs face torture.

  • Chris O'Donnnell ☛ This is how we win

    Congress, the courts, or a grand gesture will not save us. We win by refusing to lose. Every single day. The following is not my work. It was published at Notes From the Circus by Mike Brock and released into the public domain. So I'm sharing it here, because it's important.

    I’m here to tell you what should already be abundantly clear: that simple truths, all around us, reveal things that are blatantly obvious. That we are now ruled by liars, cheaters, and men with an unbounded appetite for power. And this leaves us with only one path forward: revolution. Not a violent one. Not with guns. A cognitive revolution.

  • Wired ☛ Pentagon Cuts Threaten Programs That Secure Loose Nukes and Weapons of Mass Destruction

    The working paper is in response to a request for information from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, asking agencies to assess the consequences of four levels of staff reduction—25 percent, 50 percent, and 75 percent cuts, or outright abolition.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ The Silk Typhoon Campaign Targets IT Supply Chain

    The Chinese espionage group known as Silk Typhoon has expanded the cyberattacks to target the global IT supply chain. Microsoft Threat Intelligence has identified a shift in the group’s tactics, highlighting a new focus on commonly used IT solutions such as remote management tools and cloud applications. The group’s strategic aim is to gain initial access to victim organizations, allowing them to further infiltrate networks and perform sophisticated espionage operations.

  • [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ Justice Department indicts Chinese officials and contractors over cyber intrusion campaign

    The U.S. Department of Justice has charged 12 Chinese nationals, including officers of China’s Ministry of Public Security and members of the hacking group APT27, over their alleged roles in a sprawling cyber intrusion campaign that targeted victims around the world.

  • Truthdig ☛ Trump May Put Hundreds of Federal Buildings Up for Sale — Including USDA and DOJ

    The press release didn’t say where the federal employees who work in the hundreds of buildings would go.

  • VOA News ☛ Islamic State in retreat after offensive in Somalia's Puntland

    Somali officials told VOA it appears that the IS fighters, rather than trying to hold their positions, have fled, breaking into three groups, all headed in different directions.

  • Nebraska Examiner ☛ Pillen order expands ban on China-based software on Nebraska state networks

    Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen on Wednesday banned the use or download of applications, software and platforms created or owned by the Chinese Communist Party or its affiliates on state networks and devices.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Pro Publica ☛ Idaho Pushes to Reform Coroner System as Counties Seek to Limit Transparency

    Idaho lawmakers are moving forward with modest efforts to improve the state’s system for investigating deaths, following reports by ProPublica and others that identified major problems. At the same time, counties are moving to shield from public view records that ProPublica relied on in its coverage.

    “Before you today is a bill that is a long time coming, and I say that because over the course of decades, since the 1950s, there have been attempts to reform our coroner system,” state Sen. Melissa Wintrow told lawmakers on Feb. 26, in a nod to ProPublica reporting last year.

  • Mark-Jason Dominus ☛ Reflector grids

    Still I wondered what the little rectangles had been used for. It turns out that the purpose is this: [...]

  • Wired ☛ Trump’s Spy Chief Urged to Declassify Details of Secret Surveillance Program

    Led by the American Civil Liberties Union, at least 20 major privacy groups this week urged Gabbard to declassify information concerning Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—the nation’s cornerstone wiretap authority that, while aimed at collecting intelligence on foreigners overseas, is known to vacuum up large quantities of calls, texts, and emails belonging to Americans.

    In a letter first obtained by WIRED, the groups privately urged Gabbard this week to declassify information regarding the types of US businesses that can now be secretly compelled to install wiretaps on the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) behalf.

  • Krebs On Security ☛ Who is the DOGE [sic] and X Technician Branden Spikes?

    At 49, Branden Spikes isn’t just one of the oldest technologists who has been involved in Elon Musk’s Department [sic] of Government Efficiency (DOGE [sic]). As the current director of information technology at X/Twitter and an early hire at PayPal, Zip2, Tesla and SpaceX, Spikes is also among Musk’s most loyal employees. Here’s a closer look at this trusted Musk lieutenant, whose Russian ex-wife was once married to Elon’s cousin.

  • Futurism ☛ NASA Astronauts Puzzled by Elon Musk's Outburst

    Shocker, but it's sure sounding like Musk was fibbing about this whole saga. It can't be overlooked that the world's richest man has an ugly history of throwing a fit when he doesn't get to be the hero. He once baselessly slandered a British diver who helped rescue children trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand a "pedo" — after the diver's courageous acts foiled Musk's harebrained proposal to use a mini-submarine to save the day.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Germany fined €34 million for late whistleblower protection

    The European Union's highest court on Thursday handed Germany a fine of €34 million ($36.7 million) for failing to adequately protect whistleblowers.

    The case at the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice (ECJ) stemmed from a March 2023 complaint by the European Commission alleging that Germany did not implement EU law on time.

• Environment

  • RTL ☛ Goodall, Shatner to receive environmentalist awards from Sierra Club

    "We do not have the luxury of waiting for action on climate change and environmental justice as communities grapple with the crisis on a daily basis. The choices we make today will shape the future of our planet and our communities," Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, told AFP.

  • NL Times ☛ Dutch nature reserves in crisis as water pollution and drought intensify

    Hydrologists and ecologists from Natuurmonumenten report that excessive water drainage, industrial pollution, and fertilizer runoff are causing widespread harm. "The damage is becoming irreversible," the organization warns.

  • The Nation ☛ Trump’s Deadly Assault on Weather Reporting

    NOAA houses the National Weather Service, which provides the data and analysis that informs virtually all the weather forecasts Americans receive, whether via TV or radio broadcasts or their phone apps. Emergency alerts to coastal residents as a hurricane approaches? Warnings to farmers about an impending flood or heat wave? A winter weather advisory for mountain-bound ski vacationers? These and countless other lifesaving services are at risk if Trump succeeds with his order, which legal experts say violates US law, according to reporting by Inside Climate News.

  • CBC ☛ Canada will add PFAS, which are linked to cancer and other health problems, to toxic substances list

    PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are man-made chemicals used for their water and heat resistant properties. They are widely used in many everyday products — such as packaging, cosmetics and textiles — along with industrial uses like water-repellent coatings and firefighting foam.

  • EcoWatch ☛ Half of Global Carbon Emissions Come From Just 36 Fossil Fuel Companies, Study Says

    In total, Carbon Majors has traced 33.9 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) emissions to 169 active companies in its database for 2023, with its database emissions making up 78.4% of total carbon emissions from fossil fuels and cement.

    Thirty-six companies are responsible for more than half of these emissions, according to the analysis. Further, the 2023 emissions total increased 0.7% compared to 2022.

  • JURIST ☛ Rights organization condemns Zambia mining activities causing lead poisoning to children

    Associate children’s rights director at HRW Juliane Kippenberg stated, “Companies are profiting in Kabwe from mining, removing, and processing lead waste at the expense of children’s health.” Children have been particularly affected, with medical research showing that over 95 percent of minors in that area have elevated levels of lead in their blood. Other human rights violations affecting children include learning and physical disabilities, behavioural issues, brain, liver, kidney and stomach damage, and even death, with many side effects considered irreversible after prolonged exposure. The report urges the government to develop and implement a strategy in Kabwe that is in line with international environmental standards.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Honolulu Will Allow Some Developers to OK Their Own Projects

    Builders could lose their privilege to self-certify if they’re charged with bribery, if the state Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs begins disciplinary proceedings against them or if their plans are found to be noncompliant with the law.

  • DeSmog ☛ The US Has Never Been More Divided on Climate. Here’s How to Build Bridges (and It May Surprise You)

    Most importantly, attention is paid to ensuring people feel safe from attack, judgement or pressure. People can sense a mile away if we have an agenda. We go out of our way to signal that we are curious to learn about their experience and perceptions. Instead of the usual “How much do you agree/ disagree with X statement” questions commonly used in policy messaging research, the team courageously agreed to offer open-ended prompts that are meant to evoke more stream of consciousness answers, such as: [...]

  • CBC ☛ The global race for critical minerals is on. Here's why they're the lifeblood of the new tech era

    "This era that we're moving into that's going to be defined by renewably generated electricity and digital technology. Can't make that stuff without critical metals."

  • Noë Flatreaud ☛ An Ontology Of Electronic Waste | Noë Flatreaud

    Article posted by Maurits Fennis, based on a talk given at the MCH2022 Hacker Conference in Zeewolde, The Netherlands on the 24th of June 2022. It was first published in the second edition of Vigia - Zeitschrift für Technologie und Gesellschaft for which it was translated to German by Jonas Frick.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • FAIR ☛ ‘If Energy Transfer Prevails, This Could Really Embolden Other Corporations’: CounterSpin interview with Kirk Herbertson on anti-environmental lawsuit

    • Mexico News Daily ☛ Mexico approves major electrical grid upgrade as summer nears

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Air conditioning during summer heatwaves drove surge in fossil fuels, report finds

      The good news is that clean energy generation “already plays a really big role,” particularly in China, Rangelova noted. “It’s just about scaling it up even faster” as the crisis accelerates, she said.

    • India Times ☛ Ola Krutrim 3: Ola partners with Lenovo to develop Krutrim 3, build India's largest supercomputer

      Ola’s artificial intelligence (AI) venture, Krutrim, on Wednesday said that it is partnering with Lenovo to develop Krutrim 3, a 700-billion-parameter large language model (LLM), while also building India’s largest supercomputer.

    • Futurism ☛ Cybertruck Goes to Mardi Gras Parade, Gets Bombarded by Trash and Flees in Shame

      That's what some Cybertruck drivers discovered firsthand at a Lundi Gras parade on Monday — the "Fat Monday" preamble to the famed Mardi Gras — when their hulking electric tanks were endlessly mocked and pelted with trash by revelers.

      Videos posted online show a handful of Cybertrucks rolling down the parade route under a relentless barrage of beads and beer cans, a constant chorus of boos ringing out. One three-hour video uploaded by Gizmodo recorded the ordeal from one driver's point of view.

    • Futurism ☛ Tesla Sees Catastrophic Sales Decline in Australia

      On its own, new Aussie registrations for Tesla's Model 3 tanked by a stomach-churning 81.4 percent in February, compared to the same month last year.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ 42 endangered live lizards seized at Hong Kong International Airport

      Hong Kong customs officers have announced the seizure of 42 endangered live lizards – with an estimated market value of HK$210,000 – at the city’s international airport. On Monday, customs officers inspected an air consignment from Australia, declared to contain “dehumidifier, air purifier, milk powder.”

    • The Barents Observer ☛ AI to help fight invasive fish in Norway

      Artificial intelligence will help fight the invasion of so-called pink (humpback) salmon in three rivers in the county of Finnmark in northern Norway this summer, NRK reports. Smart underwater systems are being developed to kill unwanted fish species.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ US butterfly populations have plummeted in the last decade

      Researchers analyzed 12.6 million records of butterflies based on over 76,000 surveys conducted all over the US. Between 2000 and 2020, total butterfly numbers fell by 22% across the 554 species counted.

      The US-based research follows global trends in butterfly population losses in recent years.

    • CBC ☛ Scientists brought to tears by huge loss of U.S. butterflies

      Now, a new study funded by the U.S. Geological Survey has finally compiled all that data — and found some bad news. Populations declined 22 per cent between 2000 and 2020, reports the new study published in the journal Science Thursday.

    • EcoWatch ☛ Trump Administration Sued for Freezing Funds That Help Protect Vulnerable Species Like Rhinos and Elephants

      Environmentalists are urging the Trump administration to reverse a decision to freeze funding for important conservation work aimed at protecting iconic at-risk species, which includes anti-poaching patrols for vulnerable elephants and rhinos.

      The Center for Biological Diversity sent a notice of intent to sue to the administration on Wednesday over the funding cuts.

• Finance

  • The Register UK ☛ Trump says scrap CHIPS Act, use the cash to cut debt

    In a rambling speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, the US President reviewed many of the events that have already taken place under his administration, including a deal this week with Taiwanese semiconductor contract manufacturer TSMC to invest an extra $100 billion on expanded operations in Arizona.

  • Equity Markets Drop as US Layoffs Surge, Tariff Tumult Persists

    US benchmark equity indexes tumbled Thursday as February job cuts in the US rose to the highest since July 2020 and shifting stances on tariffs by the Trump administration whipsawed investors.

    The Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.6% to 18,069.3, the S&P 500 fell 1.8% to 5,738.5, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1% to 42,579.1. Consumer discretionary and real estate paced declining sectors with only energy posting a gain.

  • New Oracle Layoffs Said to Impact OCI, High-Level Roles

    A new wave of Oracle layoffs has hit this week, affecting an unconfirmed number of people and appearing to impact divisions, including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

    The last major round of Oracle layoffs took place in November. And now, according to chatter on TheLayoff.com, more job cuts appear to have affected roles in the United States. They also look to have targeted higher-level titles, per comments on TheLayoff.com.

    “I was axed along with most of my team earlier this morning, with all of us being in senior to principal positions,” an anonymous person wrote earlier this week. “More than half of our team was impacted.”

  • The Conversation ☛ Microsoft cuts data centre plans and hikes prices in push to make users carry Hey Hi (AI) costs

    After a year of shoehorning generative AI into its flagship products, Microsoft is trying to recoup the costs by raising prices, putting ads in products, and cancelling data centre leases. Google is making similar moves, adding unavoidable AI features to its Workspace service while increasing prices.

  • Intel Wins Shareholder Lawsuit Over $32B Market Loss That Triggered Layoffs

    Intel has won the dismissal of a shareholder lawsuit that accused the chipmaker of concealing problems in its foundry business.

    The plaintiffs argued that Intel concealed an operating loss, resulting in widespread layoffs as the company scrambled to address its operational challenges.

  • Yahoo News ☛ HPE Drops on Weak Profit Outlook, Will Eliminate 3,000 Jobs

  • Disney announces 200 layoffs at ABC News and Entertainment Networks and the closure of 538

    Disney announced that it will lay off about 200 employees from ABC News and Entertainment Networks over the next few years. The cutback plan also includes the closure of political analysis portal and polling aggregator 538, founded by the renowned Nate Silver.

    The staff cuts will involve a reduction of around 6% of its workforce, at a time when the company's traditional business is struggling. The cost-cutting plan also includes the merger of three programs 20/20, Nightline and Impact x Nightline.

  • PlayStation Hit With Layoffs Aimed at Visual Arts Studio

    The new layoffs appear to be a sympton the games industry’s overall shrinkage, as projects are routinely cancelled and devleopment teams are thinned out.

    PlayStations’ studio Visual Arts has facing a fresh round of layoffs as owner Sony undergoes a period of continued restructuring.

    While some of the staff which faced cuts were working on cancelled projects, layoffs were reportedly more widespread than initually thought, according to Kotaku.

  • GO Media ☛ PlayStation Hit With More Layoffs Following Recent Game Cancellations

    The PlayStation-owned studio Visual Arts was hit with fresh layoffs this week amid a further restructuring of Sony’s U.S. game development operations. While some of the cuts included staff who had contributed to recently canceled projects like an upcoming live-service game at Bend Studio, a source told Kotaku the layoffs were more widespread than that.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • FAIR ☛ MSNBC Sidelines Its Most Progressive Anchors

    At a time when the Democratic Party’s opposition to the ongoing right-wing authoritarian assault on US government is failing miserably (FAIR.org, 2/27/25), MSNBC’s recent purge means it is all the more unlikely that the cable news network will have any role in holding Democrats’ feet to the fire.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Two weak spots in Big Tech economics

    Amazon can buy lots of things with stock – not just the labor of in-demand technical workers who command six-figure salaries. They can even buy whole companies using stock. So if Amazon and Target are bidding against one another for an anticompetitive acquisition of a key supplier or competitor, Amazon can beat Target's bid without having to spend the dollars its shareholders would like them to divert to dividends, stock buybacks, etc.

    In other words, a company with a fantastic profit/earning ratio has its own money-printer that produces currency that can be used to buy labor and even acquire companies.

  • Common Dreams ☛ If Meme Coins Have ‘No Use,’ Why is Trump Charging for Them?

    “If Trump’s meme coins have ‘no use’ and are marketed as a way to simply ‘celebrate’ his leadership, then Trump requiring payment for his memes may constitute illegal solicitation of gifts,” said Bartlett Naylor, financial policy advocate at Public Citizen. “As the White House cozies up to the [crypotocurrency] industry — which spent over a hundred million dollars to influence the 2024 elections — and Trump personally profits from a [crypotocurrency] venture, the conflicts of interest and potentially illegal abuses of power on display should concern every American.”

    Public Citizen is closely tracking the [crypotocurrency] industry’s election spending and influence on elected officials, including Trump.

  • India Times ☛ OpenAI's CEO returns to political fundraising

  • Sean Monahan ☛ productive misunderstandings

    The [Internet] in 2024 is no longer the place where things end up—it’s the place where things start. In the beginning, everyone was online. Trump began on Twitter and then entered the White House. Kylie Jenner’s face spread on Instagram before being retconned by plastic surgeons onto every influencer in America. Similarly, MSCHF’s projects feel like physical memes shipped across the void. What is the Big Red Boot if not a virality molded in plastic form?

    We’re being colonized by an alternate reality. We call that reality “the [Internet].” Despite Smith’s hopes that we can escape it, the eversion marches on. We should resign ourselves to a future where memes become manifest.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ The web was always about redistribution of power. Let's bring that back.

    The original web was inherently about redistribution of power from a small number of gatekeepers to a large number of individuals, even if it never quite lived up to that promise. But the next iteration of the web was about concentrating power in a small set of gatekeepers whose near-unlimited growth potential tended towards monopoly. There were always movements that bucked this trend — blogging and the indie web never really went away — but they were no longer the mainstream force on the [Internet]. And over time, the centralized platforms disempowered their users by monopolizing more and more slices of everyday life that used to be free. The open, unlimited nature of the web that was originally used to distribute equity was now being used to suck it up and concentrate it in a handful of increasingly-wealthy people.

  • Ivan Sagalaev ☛ The Dawn of Everything

    All of this is written based on real archaeological data and prior work by other researchers. It's a thick book full of references, which makes it hard to read: you have to constantly switch between the text and the references, as half of them are not just titles of other works, but long full paragraphs that should have really been a part of text. Plus, the first third of the book is really like a preview to the rest of it, where they regurgitate and repeat a lot of the points stated earlier.

  • The Cyber Show ☛ Digital Brutalism

    Let's stop pretending that "The Market" has anything to do with driving digital technology in 2025. Digital technology is now largely an ideological project that "solves problems". However these are not your problems, but the problems facing power - banks, mass media and entertainments businesses, intelligence agencies, the control centre of your "smart city", and so on. Your needs and opportunity afforded by technology is being pushed to the margins. The "solutions" offered by BigTech, at the behest of these powers, are the equivalent of those giant concrete boxes of the Soviet era. They are symbols of emerging consumer-communism in the West, only in electronic form.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Atlantic ☛ Putin Is Loving This

      Over the past few days, Russian news talk shows have consisted almost entirely of translated clips of Trump-administration officials and Trump surrogates—Vice President J. D. Vance, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, among others—defending the president and attacking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Fox News. The interview clips were interspersed with video of the fateful meeting between Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office last week, along with readings, in Russian, of Trump’s posts on Truth Social and Elon Musk’s posts on X, which is funnier than it sounds.

    • [Old] Time ☛ Trump's Doctored Hurricane Photo and the False Forecast Law

      When President Trump held up a map of Hurricane Dorian’s projected path, it included a Sharpie-drawn extension to show the storm hitting Alabama — an apparent attempt to defend an incorrect tweet he posted on Sunday, which claimed that Alabama was one of the states in the path of the storm. In fact, the National Hurricane Center did not, at any point, include Alabama in its forecast for where Dorian would fall. (Alabama did appear on a map of the probability of tropical storm conditions, but with low likelihood of actually seeing those conditions, according to the Washington Post.)

    • [Old] ABC ☛ Trump displays altered weather map showing Dorian could have hit Alabama

      After drawing criticism for inaccurately warning over the weekend that Alabama could get hit by Hurricane Dorian -- even after government meteorologists disputed that was the case -- President Donald Trump on Wednesday held up a map that appeared to have a line drawn on it in black making it seem as if he had been right all along.

    • [Old] CNN ☛ Washington Post: Trump was the one who altered Dorian trajectory map with Sharpie

      Since Sunday, Trump has aggressively defended his false claim that Hurricane Dorian was likely to hit Alabama, even after the National Weather Service stressed that “no impacts from Hurricane Dorian will be felt across Alabama.”

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Fact check: Disinformation spikes after Trump-Zelenskyy row

      "NewsGuard has seen a significant increase in false claims about Ukraine on US social media in recent weeks, particularly since Donald Trump accused Volodymyr Zelensky of being ungrateful for US military support," Madeline Roache, managing editor at misinformation watchdog NewsGuard, told DW.

    • New Yorker ☛ Donald Trump’s A.I. Propaganda

      Trump’s misleading appropriation of the video was just the latest example of the new Administration turning digital content, produced in-house or found online, into a form of MAGA agitprop. On February 18th, the official White House account on X posted a video without attribution titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” a clip that appeared to show immigrants being forced onto planes as the sounds of clinking handcuffs and roaring engines played softly in the background. The joke, if you can call it that, seemed to be casting a scene of state terror as an example of the soothing autonomous-sensory-meridian-response videos that proliferate online. On February 19th, reaffirming Trump’s promise to kill New York City’s new congestion pricing, the White House account on X posted a faux Time cover of Trump as king, wearing a crown against a backdrop of the city’s skyline. Cumulatively, these pieces of content amount to more than A.I. slop; they help to create a digital mirror world that reflects the future that Trump imagines, however preposterous it may seem. In the real world, Trump’s vision of Gaza as an ethnically cleansed luxury resort may seem like political fantasy. But, on the [Internet], Trump Gaza already exists as a virtual beachside destination to like and to share.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ America is Trapped in a Burning Tesla

      If forced to guess, however, I’d predict that the first big crack in federal services will come in Social Security. The Dunning-Kruger kids’ ignorance about how the federal government works appears to have been especially acute when it comes to the Social Security Administration. Their inability to understand SSA databases seems to have led to Musk’s false claim that tens of millions of dead people are receiving retirement checks. This claim has been thoroughly debunked, yet Musk is still making it, and Trump repeated it last night.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Barents Observer ☛ 17-year-old faces 10 years in prison for 'justification of terrorism'

    Activists, journalists and regime-critics across Russia have been convicted on the same charges. In the Komi Republic, teacher Nikita Tushkanov got 5,5 years in prison for a social media post about the explosion at the Crimea bridge. Sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky got 5 years for a similar post.

  • The Local SE ☛ Swedish climate activists 'treated as criminals', UN expert warns

    She informed her employer of her activism, but was fired on the spot when Swedish media revealed her involvement in the spring of 2024.

  • RFERL ☛ Iranian Singer Mehdi Yarrahi Flogged Over Song Against Mandatory Hijab

    Pop singer Mehdi Yarrahi has been given 74 lashes for a song criticizing Iran's mandatory dress code for women, ending a criminal case against him that also included a prison term.

  • New Yorker ☛ Elon Musk Also Has a Problem with Wikipedia

    So maybe it should come as no surprise that Elon Musk has lately taken time from his busy schedule of dismantling the federal government, along with many of its sources of reliable information, to attack Wikipedia. On January 21st, after the site updated its page on Musk to include a reference to the much-debated stiff-armed salute he made at a Trump inaugural event, he posted on X that “since legacy media propaganda is considered a ‘valid’ source by Wikipedia, it naturally simply becomes an extension of legacy media propaganda!” He urged people not to donate to the site: “Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!” It’s worth taking a look at how the incident is described on Musk’s page, quite far down, and judging for yourself. What I see is a paragraph that first describes the physical gesture (“Musk thumped his right hand over his heart, fingers spread wide, and then extended his right arm out, emphatically, at an upward angle, palm down and fingers together”), goes on to say that “some” viewed it as a Nazi or a Roman salute, then quotes Musk disparaging those claims as “politicized,” while noting that he did not explicitly deny them. (There is also now a separate Wikipedia article, “Elon Musk salute controversy,” that goes into detail about the full range of reactions.)

  • The Atlantic ☛ Why the Trump Administration Canceled Me

    I was confused. My presentation had been arranged back in the fall and had already gone through NARA’s routine vetting process, usually a pro forma confirmation that affiliated programs are of high quality and based on research using the National Archives’ rich resources. Spell Freedom is my third book of narrative history, and I’ve given numerous presentations at NARA locations before. The event was already up on the Carter Library website. Clearly, the criteria for “approval” had changed.

    My little cancellation drama was not unfolding in a vacuum. Just a few weeks into Donald Trump’s second administration, the president fired the archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan, who was the first woman to lead NARA, and pushed out most of the senior staff. Trump made no secret of his special animosity toward the National Archives, which protects presidential records and had played a role in exposing his improper handling of files from his first presidency.

  • EFF ☛ Trump Calls On Congress To Pass The “Take It Down” Act—So He Can Censor His Critics

    The Take It Down Act is an overbroad, poorly drafted bill that would create a powerful system to pressure removal of [Internet] posts, with essentially no safeguards. While the bill is meant to address a serious problem—the distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII)—the notice-and-takedown system it creates is an open invitation for powerful people to pressure websites into removing content they dislike. There are no penalties for applying very broad, or even farcical definitions of what constitutes NCII, and then demanding that it be removed.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump “Brings Back Free Speech” By [Checks Notes] Threatening To Imprison Protestors And Expose Journalist Sources

    You might think this whiplash-inducing contrast is just standard political hypocrisy. But it’s actually something much more terrifying: it’s part of a calculated strategy to redefine “free speech” as “speech I like” while using government power to punish speech I don’t like. The crazy part isn’t just that he’s doing it — it’s that he’s doing it so blatantly, while the very same backers who claimed they supported him for his views on “free speech” cheer this on.

    Once again, we need to be explicit and direct here, because it’s all that matters. Donald Trump has not “stopped all government censorship,” because there really was no real government censorship. Instead, he has repeatedly engaged in and encouraged his administration to engage in one of the most aggressive and problematic campaigns of suppressing and chilling speech this country has ever seen.

    Let’s go through this bit by bit.

  • VOA News ☛ Hong Kong's top court quashes convictions of pro-democracy Tiananmen group

    Hong Kong's top court unanimously overturned on Thursday the convictions of three former members of a pro-democracy group that organized an annual candlelight vigil to mark China's 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, citing a miscarriage of justice.

    The ruling is a rare victory for Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement in which scores of activists have been jailed or forced into exile, with many liberal and popular civil society groups shuttered.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Press Gazette ☛ Protection of free public service news should be ‘national priority’ says ex-ITV director of news

    Michael Jermey makes call while picking up Outstanding Contribution Award.

  • The Dissenter ☛ City Of Portland Pays Nearly $1 Million For Arresting Journalists At Protests

  • ANF News ☛ Journalist Öznur Değer remains in prison

    JinNews correspondent Öznur Değer was remanded in custody following a raid on her home in the Kızıltepe district of Mardin on 6 February. The journalist was subjected to torture during the detention. After appearing in court, she was sent to prison on 7 February on the grounds of her social media posts.

  • New Statesman ☛ The fall of the mainstream media

    Today, we have a US president who has labelled the media an “enemy of the people”, incited crowds at rallies to jeer at the press pen and is threatening publications with legal and regulatory steps that will threaten their survival. Associated Press (AP) was banned from the White House for referring to the Gulf of Mexico instead of Donald Trump’s preferred “Gulf of America”. As a result, AP – America’s foremost press agency for more than 170 years – was not in the Oval Office for Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent public mauling. Instead Brian Glenn, a correspondent for Real America’s Voice – a channel that trades in right-wing conspiracy theories – was able to ask the Ukrainian leader why he wasn’t wearing a suit, to an appreciative wink from the US president.

    Some publications are already choosing to temper their coverage and ingratiate themselves with Trump to avoid such an onslaught. The Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has announced that the newspaper’s opinion section – previously home to a variety of political positions – will now champion “personal liberties and free markets”, in what is seen as a bid to curry favour with the president. All this has become possible because of efforts to demonise the mainstream media stretching back decades.

  • David Rosenthal ☛ The Oligopoly Publishers

    Source Rupak Ghose's The $100 billion Bloomberg for academics and lawyers? is essential reading for anyone interested in academic publishing. He starts by charting the stock price of RELX, Thomson Reuters, and Wolters Kluwer, pointing out that in the past decade they have increased about ten-fold. He compares these publishers to Bloomberg, the financial news service. They are less profitable, but that's because their customers are less profitable. Follow me below the fold for more on this.

  • [Repeat] Press Gazette ☛ Protection of free public service news 'should be national priority'

    The former longtime director of news and current affairs at ITV has called for the protection of free-to-access impartial news to be treated as a “national priority” and not a “nice to have”.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ SSA bans news websites on agency devices

    The agency’s leadership sent an email to all SSA employees Wednesday stating that effective immediately, the agency “is implementing additional restrictions to the categories of websites prohibited from government-furnished equipment.” The message, obtained by FedScoop, lists general news as one of the banned categories, along with online shopping and sports.

  • ANF News ☛ Female journalists visit grave of Cihan Bilgin killed in Turkish drone attack in Rojava

    On the occasion of March 8, International Women's Day, female employees of Hawar News Agency (ANHA) visited the graves of journalists Cihan Bilgin and Nazım Daştan and laid flowers.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Financial Times CEO John Ridding to step down after 19 years

    Ridding will remain with parent company Nikkei as a special adviser reporting to its chairman and group CEO Naotoshi Okada.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Why opening of video studios across UK is 'really big moment' for Reach

    The Mirror, Express, Star and regional publisher now has new state-of-the-art studios up-and-running in London, Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham, with work ongoing in Liverpool and a revamped space in Newcastle.

    The aim was to give each of Reach’s biggest newsrooms somewhere they can film content. Previously staff in London had to hire third-party space and sometimes equipment to produce podcasts or do film shoots. Alternatively they might film on Zoom or in the open office, or otherwise potentially avoid ambitious projects.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Pro Publica ☛ New Missouri Bill Incentivizes Anti-Abortion Donations for Full Tax Credit

    In an unprecedented move to funnel more public tax dollars toward groups that oppose abortion, Republican lawmakers in Missouri are advancing a plan to allow residents to donate to pregnancy resource centers instead of paying any state income taxes.

    The proposal would establish a 100% tax credit, up from 70%, and a $50,000 annual cap per taxpayer. The result: Nearly all Missouri households — except those with the highest incomes — could fully satisfy their state tax bill by redirecting their payment from the state to pregnancy centers.

  • The Local DK ☛ Denmark’s PostNord announces end of letter deliveries

    PostNord will cease to deliver letters in Denmark by the end of 2025 and let go 1,500 of its 4,600 employees in the country, the company has announced.

  • The Local DK ☛ Is it possible to send letters in Denmark without PostNord?

    Sending letters internationally from Denmark will therefore probably mean using a global courier such as UPS or DHL and sending the letter as part of a small package.

  • BIA Net ☛ Turkey’s new cybersecurity law allows home searches with post-search approval

    A parliamentary amendment removed an earlier provision that would have granted the Cybersecurity Directorate head the power to conduct searches, make copies, and seize data.

    Under the revised bill, searches of private residences, workplaces, and non-public areas will require a court order for reasons of national security, public order, crime prevention, or cybersecurity threats. However, in cases where delays pose a risk, a written order from a prosecutor will be sufficient to conduct a search. Seized copies will be stored without causing prolonged service disruptions, and a copy will be provided to the relevant party. The entire process will be documented and signed.

  • Nebraska Examiner ☛ Labor groups ring alarms over proposed changes to Nebraska minimum wage, paid sick leave laws

    Nebraska voters approved a ballot measure last November to establish a minimum level of paid sick leave for all workers. The initiative mandates that Nebraska businesses provide employees up to seven days of paid sick leave for businesses with at least 20 employees and five days a year for those with fewer than 20 employees. In 2022, Nebraska voters passed a ballot measure to increase the state minimum wage to $15 per hour starting next year. The measure’s design raised the minimum wage by increments to reach that point.

  • The Register UK ☛ International cops seize Russian [crypotocurrency] exchange Garantex

    A coalition of international law enforcement has shut down Russian cryptocurrency exchange Garantex, a favorite of now-defunct ransomware crew Conti and others criminals for money laundering.

  • NDTV ☛ Video: 14-Year-Old Forcibly Married, Physically Carried Off By Husband

    As per data available in 2023- 2024, the authorities had received information about 180 child marriages in Karnataka; 105 such marriages were prevented and in the remaining 75 instances, police cases were registered.

  • EPIC ☛ Seems a bit DOGE [sic]-y: Protecting Federal Worker Rights in an Era of AI-Driven Employment Decisions – EPIC – Electronic Privacy Information Center

    It is not clear how AutoRIF has been modified or whether AI is involved in the RIF mandate (through AutoRIF or independently). However, fears of AI-driven mass-firings of federal workers are not unfounded. Elon Musk and the Trump Administration have made no secret of their affection for the dodgy technology and their intentions to use it to make budget cuts. And, in fact, they have already tried adding AI to workforce decisions. On Saturday, January 22, a DOGE [sic] email ordered federal workers to either account for their time or face termination. (Despite attempts to backpedal, DOGE [sic] sent essentially the same email again just last weekend). It was later reported that DOGE [sic] intended to feed responses into a large language model (LLM) that would be tasked with deciding whether the worker is necessary.

    All of these actions have raised questions about federal employee rights and how AI can and cannot be used in termination decisions. This blog post provides an overview of a federal worker’s rights when faced with termination, the problems with using automated decision-making tools to conduct terminations, and how those tools may violate worker’s rights.

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Taliban Rule Triggers Human Rights Catastrophe

    Central to the UN report is the Taliban’s methodical erasure of women’s rights, a campaign Bennett describes as “gender-based oppression codified into law.” Since retaking power in 2021, the regime has issued over 50 edicts restricting women’s mobility, education, employment, and access to healthcare. Secondary and tertiary education for girls has been abolished, female civil servants purged from workplaces, and women barred from public spaces without male guardians. This systemic disenfranchisement, framed by the Taliban as adherence to “Islamic virtue,” has drawn comparisons to apartheid regimes, with Afghan women stripped of legal personhood and rendered invisible in civic life. The report warns that such policies risk entrenching a precedent for gender apartheid globally, demanding urgent legal recognition of the term under international law.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Danish postal service to stop delivering letters after 90% drop in numbers

    The Danish postal service has said it will deliver its last letter at the end of this year, instead focusing on packages to respond to changing forms of communication.

    PostNord said on Thursday it would cut 1,500 jobs in Denmark and remove 1,500 red postboxes, citing the “increasing digitalisation” of society.

  • Truthdig ☛ Postal Workers Brace for Trump’s Wrecking Ball

    The other shoe hasn’t dropped yet. But one immediate threat is that moving USPS into the executive branch could provide a rationale to cancel union contracts. That might expose the Postal Service to the same kind of bloodbath that other federal agencies are enduring at the hands of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

    “A postal worker has a union that negotiates with the Postal Service that betters their life,” Mike Bates, president of the Des Moines Postal Workers (APWU) local. “A federal worker is pretty much dictated to, what they are going to get from the government. When I say that, I see the wheels start turning.”

  • VOA News ☛ UN report finds women's rights weakened in quarter of all countries

    "Almost one-quarter of countries reported that backlash on gender equality is hampering implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action," the report continued, referring to the document from the 1995 World Conference on Women.

    In the 30 years since the conference, the U.N. said that progress has been mixed.

  • Adriaan Roselli ☛ Don’t Use Fake Bold or Italic in Social Media

    Those two videos account for ~78% of primary screen reader use. You could stop there and you’d have a good sense of the divergent experience and how it doesn’t match up with the visible text as you might expect.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Public Knowledge ☛ Public Knowledge President and CEO Chris Lewis Starts Sabbatical March 7 [Ed: More power to Microsoft moles then]

    Today, Public Knowledge is announcing that Chris Lewis, President and CEO of Public Knowledge, will embark on a 12 week sabbatical leave from March 10 – June 1. All Public Knowledge staff may request a paid sabbatical for up to 12 weeks after completing at least seven years of employment with the organization.

  • Wired ☛ If Ukraine Loses Starlink, Here Are the Best Alternatives

    KHARPP has paid for and deployed six Starlink terminals in Ukraine during the past two years. They have connected people displaced by the war, helped a kindergarten offer online English lessons to children, and allowed doctors to access patients’ medical records. But Wordsworth has no plans to buy any more. “It’s not something that makes sense to invest in,” she explains. “They might be switched off.”

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Chris Enns ☛ Apple Gives Away Bono Documentary (Apple Vision Pro Not Included)

  • Six Colors ☛ New Mac Studio spans the generations with M4 Max, M3 Ultra chips

    It’s been nearly two years since the Mac Studio was updated to M2, but on Wednesday Apple announced the next step in its evolution. And if you’re ready to write off the Mac Studio as having skipped the M3 generation entirely… maybe don’t do that? That’s because Apple’s announcing two models of Mac Studio, each based on different chip generations.

  • The Register UK ☛ Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks

    Right-to-repair activist and electronics technician Louis Rossmann posted a video blasting the Japanese, claiming it has updated printer firmware to block or degrade the printing experience when using non-OEM toner.

    According to Rossmann, Brother has quietly dispatched firmware updates to block certain printer features, such as color registration. Using OEM toner lifts the block, he claims, saying that before the updates a non-OEM toner worked.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Brother firmware blocks cheap ink alternatives, users report

    The company's new strategy involves two particularly devious tactics. First, firmware updates are quietly pushing out changes that render previously compatible third-party cartridges unusable. Second, Brother has scrubbed older firmware versions from their support sites, preventing users from rolling back to more permissive software. For color printer owners, the updates even disable color calibration features when using non-Brother cartridges.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Verge ☛ Apple has 90 days to allow app [installation] in Brazil

  Apple has been told it has to allow alternative app stores on iOS in Brazil within 90 days, as reported by Brazilian publication Valor International and 9to5Mac. Apple has already been forced to allow third-party app stores on iOS in the EU due to the Digital Markets Act.

• The Register UK ☛ CMA failed on Big Tech lock-in, say smaller UK cloud players [Ed: Bribes play a role]

  The Competition and Markets Authority's decision to shelve the CSA component of its investigation into the health of the UK cloud industry, comes despite it being told by smaller players that these mechainisms help big tech control lucrative public and private sector contracts.

  At the end of January, the CMA stated in its provisional decision report (PDR): "we investigated whether the use of committed spend agreements for customers of AWS and Microsoft harms competition in the cloud services markets.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • 404 Media ☛ Chinese AI Video Generators Unleash a Flood of New Nonconsensual Porn

      A 404 Media investigation into these AI video generators show that the same kind of ecosystem that’s developed around AI image generators and nonconsensual content has already been replicated around AI video generators, meaning that only a single image of someone is now required to create a short nonconsensual adult video of them. Most of these videos are created by abusing mainstream tools from companies with millions of dollars in venture capital funding, and are extremely easy to produce, requiring only a reference image and a text prompt describing a sexual act. Other tools use more complicated workflows that require more technical expertise, but are based on technology produced by some of the biggest tech companies in the world. The latter are free to use, and have attracted a large community of hobbyists who produced guides for these workflows, as well as tools and models that make those videos easier to produce.

• Copyrights

  • Creative Commons ☛ Welcoming New CC Board Members

    Each of our new Board members brings a unique expertise that will help strengthen CC’s impact and guide our strategic vision forward. Their diverse backgrounds and commitment to the open movement strengthen our already dedicated Board, representing exactly what we need as we continue to grow and evolve our work to achieve our 2025-2028 goals.