Leftovers

• NYPost ☛ David Hasselhoff’s ex Pamela Bach’s body ‘ravaged with arthritis’ from motorcycle crash before suicide

  "Pam's body was ravaged from arthritis caused by the accident. It continued to spread and wreak havoc."

• Andre Alves Garzia ☛ Why I choose Lua for this blog

  Lua only requires a C99 compiler to bootstrap itself. It is very easy to make Lua work and even easier to make it interface with something.

  JS is a lot larger than Lua, there is more to understand and more to remember. My blog needs are very simple and Lua can handle them with ease.

• Tom MacWright ☛ Introducing the blogroll

  The picks are oriented toward what I’m into: niches, blogs that have a loose topic but don’t try to be general-interest, people with distinctive writing. If you import all of the feeds into your RSS reader, you’ll probably end up unsubscribing from some of them because some of the experimental electric guitar design or bonsai news is not what you’re into. Seems fine, or you’ll discover a new interest!

• Mike Brock ☛ Changes at the Circus

  At its core, Notes From the Circus is about sharing ideas, engaging in deep philosophical exploration, and making meaning in a world that often seeks to strip it away. From the very beginning, I made a commitment: everything I write will remain free to all. That promise hasn’t changed. But to support the continued growth of this project, I’m introducing a structure that gives my subscribers a meaningful way to participate—without creating a paywall that locks people out.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ How personal should a personal site be?

  And so I’m starting to wonder: should I feel some sort of responsibility to share not just the good parts but also the shitty part of my experience as a human being on this hearth?

• Malcom Coles ☛ As Configuration

  And that’s OK. Despite Infrastructure as Code being an imperfect analogy, it’s a really useful analogy. It lets us accomplish a lot using workflows that are familiar. Tools like Terrateam guide us through the places where those workflows do not work exactly like we are used to in our application code. It’s just a lot easier to open up a pull request to make an infrastructure change than learn another piece of software.

• David L Farquhar ☛ Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park

  The Homebrew Computer Club was an informal group of technically minded electronic enthusiasts and hobbyists. They gathered to trade parts, circuits, and information about building your own personal computing devices. Gordon French and Fred Moore founded the group. They both wanted a regular, open forum for people to get together to work on making computers more accessible to everyone.

  The first meeting of the club occurred March 5, 1975, in French’s garage in Menlo Park, California. The subject of the meeting was the MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer, and a review unit was present at the meeting. Steve Wozniak credits that first meeting as the inspiration to design the Apple I. The second meeting occurred at Peninsula School in Menlo Park, California. Subsequent meetings occurred at an auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), until 1978. In 1978, meetings moved to the Stanford Medical School.

• Career/Education

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: James

    This is the 80th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have James and his blog, jamesg.blog

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ MElon ally leading CHIPS Act office purge — only 14% of original staff remain after dismissals

    The tariffs President Trump has placed on China, one of the biggest sources of electronic goods for the U.S., are seemingly forcing companies to move their manufacturing bases outside of the country. TSMC has just announced an extra $100 billion investment in the country; this is on top of the $65 billion that it has already spent on putting up its Arizona fab. Aside from that, the president said that Apple is spending $500 billion to build up a manufacturing plant in the U.S., with OpenAI and Oracle also spending the same amount for AI data servers.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ The AMD Radeon RX 9070’s power efficiency

    When AMD announced their 9000-series Ryzen CPUs late last year, the tech press largely reacted with bemusement and boredom. This was a shame, because as I wrote last August: [...]

  • Robert Breen ☛ On Notebooks and Pens

    I’ve managed to stay away from using fancy pens in my notebooks and journals. I’ve bought a few nice pens over the years, only to realize I didn’t enjoy writing with them. I tried fountain pens but found them fussy and precious. I’ve come to accept that my southpaw scrawl is more suited for ballpoints than nibs and special ink.

  • David L Farquhar ☛ IBM PC/XT Model 5160

    At launch time, the PC/XT retailed for $4,995 with 128KB of RAM, a single 360K floppy, and a 10 MB hard drive. A CGA video card cost $244 and the monitor cost $680. So this was not a budget system in 1983 by any stretch. If you wanted to make the baller move and spring for the full 640K of RAM, that cost $700.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • EcoWatch ☛ Climate Change Threatens Earth’s Major Crops, Study Finds

    The study, conducted by researchers at Aalto University in Finland and published in the journal Nature Food, analyzed 30 of the world’s most important crops and modeled how climate change is likely to affect their safe climatic space under different potential global warming scenarios.

    The researchers found that crops growing at lower latitudes, or closer to the equator, will be hardest hit as those areas continue to get hotter and more arid.

  • AAAS ☛ Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it

    Cross-sectional age-skill profiles suggest that cognitive skills start declining by age 30 if not earlier. If accurate, such age-driven skill losses pose a major threat to the human capital of societies with rapidly aging populations. We estimate actual age-skill profiles from individual changes in literacy and numeracy skills at different ages. We use the unique German longitudinal component of the Programme of the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC-L) that retested a large representative sample of adults after 3.5 years. Our empirical approach separates age from cohort effects and corrects for measurement error from reversion to the mean. Two main results emerge. First, average skills increase strongly into the forties before decreasing slightly in literacy and more strongly in numeracy. Second, skills decline at older ages only for those with below-average skill usage. White-collar and higher-educated workers with above-average usage show increasing skills even beyond their forties. Women have larger skill losses at older age, particularly in numeracy.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Oracle outage hits US Federal health records systems

    According to a Veterans Affairs Department statement to the media, Oracle's Federal EHR hit problems at around 0837 Eastern Time on Tuesday. Software froze and users were unable to access applications. Nonetheless, the systems were back up and running by 1400 ET after Oracle restarted the system.

    The outage affected VA medical facilities already using the software in Spokane and Walla Walla, Washington; in Columbus, Ohio; in Roseburg and White City, Oregon; and in North Chicago, Illinois. Facilities run by the Department of Defense, the US Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were also affected, the VA said.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Oops, all AI! Google replaces search with the AI Overview

    What if we made a search engine so good that our company name became the verb for searching? And then — get this — we replaced the search engine with a robot with a concussion?

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ YouTube scares me; I need RAID 1 for my video content

    Fast forward to today, and it seems like AI slop is set to take over the entire platform, proving the Dead Internet Theory right. You have AI videos with AI bots watching and commenting, and YouTube enables it by plastering unskippable ads everywhere! They make money, AI farms make money, everyone's happy!

    ...except for you and me.

  • Joel Chrono ☛ Confessions from a FOSS enthusiast

    Honestly though, I’m somewhat happy where I’m at, I’ve made a lot of concessions, there’re some things I want to get rid of, but sometimes the choice is only between two bad options, just look at Mozilla ruining things for everybody once again.

    Still, I think I can still strive to be more conscious about my decisions and not give in to the dire world of today.

  • Jane Ruffino ☛ Tools should not be borders

    I have beloved peers and friends who are crowdfunding to stay alive, and using food banks. Others are making half a million a year to do the same work we all do (my perspective on this will be even less popular, but is a topic for another day). If you don’t think $16 is a lot of money, and you don’t know anyone for whom that kind of recurring cost puts something out of reach, I think you should sit out this part of the conversation.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Meduza ☛ Russia flooding training data to influence chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude

      A “well-funded” online Russian disinformation network called Pravda put out 3.6 million articles last year, many of which were processed by popular chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, Claude (Anthropic), Meta AI, Gemini (Google), and Copilot (Microsoft), according to a new report from the watchdog group NewsGuard. These chatbots reportedly reproduced narratives spread by Pravda in 33 percent of their responses.

    • Squarespace ☛ A Pro-Russia Content Network Foreshadows the Automated Future of Info Ops [PDF]

      Notably, this latest expansion includes many countries in Africa, the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and North America. It also includes entities other than countries as targets, specifically non-sovereign nations, international organizations, audiences for specific languages, and prominent heads of state. The top objective of the network appears to be duplicating as much pro-Russia content as widely as possible. With one click, a single article could be autotranslated and autoshared with dozens of other sites that appear to target hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

      ASP researchers also believe the network may have been custom-built to flood large language models (LLMs) with pro-Russia content. The network is unfriendly to human users; sites within the network boast no search function, poor formatting, and unreliable scrolling, among other usability issues. This final finding poses foundational implications for the intersection of disinformation and artificial intelligence (AI), which threaten to turbocharge highly automated, global information operations in the future.

    • The New Stack ☛ How AI Is Reshaping Software Engineering: Key Takeaways From DeveloperWeek 2025

      At DeveloperWeek 2025, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel with some of the biggest players in AI — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Augment Code — to tackle this question. We had an insightful discussion on how LLMs are changing the software development process, the new skills engineers need, and what leaders should do to stay ahead.

    • Model Context Protocol ☛ Introduction - Model Context Protocol

      MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs. Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications. Just as USB-C provides a standardized way to connect your devices to various peripherals and accessories, MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools.

    • Tim Kellogg ☛ MCP Demystified

      Where it works: Say you have an API that requests a contract draft from Liz every time the API is called. The MCP server tells the LLM how to call your API. It has a name, description, when it should be used, as well as parameters and also general prompt engineering concerns to elicit a reliable tool call.

    • Uğur Erdem Seyfi ☛ Rethinking AI Pessimism

      You don’t exercise to lift things machines can already lift, you exercise to improve your health and life satisfaction. The same thing applies to fundamental activities like thinking and learning. The moment you start outsourcing what matters to you to AI just because it can do it on your behalf, remember that you may be sacrificing, instead of gaining.

      In the end, I believe the things AI devalues the first are those that derive their worth from being tools, that is to say, things that shouldn’t end in themselves anyway.

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • Red Hat Official ☛ Preparing for the DeepSeek moment in your industry: Adapt to change in 2025

        Let’s ponder a simple question: What is the DeepSeek moment in your industry? 

  • Social Control Media

    • Reuters ☛ Digg to make comeback as co-founder Rose, Reddit's Ohanian bet on AI-driven revival

      Digg founder Kevin Rose has teamed up with former rival Alexis Ohanian to buy the once-popular content aggregator as they bet on an artificial intelligence-powered revival of the platform that once drew around 40 million monthly visitors.

    • 9to5Mac ☛ Digg is returning as it's bought by Digg and Reddit co-founders Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian

      For those not old enough to have used it, Digg was essentially a social news site. Both editors and users could post links, and users would then upvote them (“digg”) or downvote them (“bury”).

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ First Porn, Now Skin Cream? ‘Age Verification’ Bills Are Out of Control

      Fast forward a few years, and these laws have morphed into something else entirely—unfortunately, something we expected. What started as a misguided attempt to protect minors from "explicit" content online has spiraled into a tangled mess of privacy-invasive surveillance schemes affecting skincare products, dating apps, and even diet pills, threatening everyone’s right to privacy.

    • [Repeat] OpenRightsGroup ☛ Home Office announces further delays to the e-Visa scheme

      The term eVisa is misleading. People will not be issued with a digital visa that they can store on their devices to be used as and when they need to prove their status. Instead they have to register for an account that will allow them to generate a share code. As users don’t have a physical or saved digital proof of status, they are susceptible to data errors, system crashes and the stability of Internet connections.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Rayhunter: Device to Detect Cellular Surveillance

      The EFF has created an open-source hardware tool to detect IMSI catchers: fake cell phone towers that are used for mass surveillance of an area.

    • YLE ☛ HSL expands contactless payments to local trains

      Going forward, passengers can use the contactless payment units to buy tickets on commuter trains, trams, the Metro, as well as the Suomenlinna ferry.

      HSL said that it plans to roll out the use of contactless payments on buses in coming weeks.

• Defence/Aggression

  • VOA News ☛ Discovery of WWII bomb disrupts Paris trains

    The discovery of a World War II bomb has disrupted morning traffic to and from Paris' busy Gare du Nord train station, French national railway company TER said on Friday.

  • EPIC ☛ EPIC-led Group of Law and Technology Experts Urges Ninth Circuit to Rule that Social Media Companies’ Addictive Technology Is Not Protected Expression

    California passed SB 976 to protect minors from “addictive feeds,” which surveil users’ behavior to manipulate them into staying on the platform. This addictive design practice boosts the companies’ revenues by maximizing the number of ads users see but invades users’ privacy, reduces their control over their online experience, and leads to mental and physical harms in minors.

    NetChoice sued to enjoin enforcement of SB 976, claiming, among other things, that the law is unconstitutional because providing addictive feeds is an expressive act protected by the First Amendment. The district court judge rejected NetChoice’s arguments about the addictive feeds portion of the bill. NetChoice is seeking to revive the addictive feeds claim on appeal in the Ninth Circuit.

    The EPIC-led amicus brief explains that NetChoice should lose its appeal for two primary reasons.

  • Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Sale Negotiations Haven't Even Started, Report Says

    At least for now, though, the most pressing of those moving parts concern the sale discussions themselves. It’s not a secret that it’ll be up to the Chinese government (which actually owns a piece of ByteDance) to allow and then sign off on a transaction involving TikTok.

    Nor is it a secret that Beijing might not be inclined to green-light the deal; last month, we covered the Chinese government’s reported “slow-rolling” approach to the TikTok sale.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Missiles to guns: How the Navy learned to fight Houthi drones

    After firing a shipload of extremely costly missiles, some with a price tag as high as $28.7 million per munition, the Navy switched to less expensive options, such as 5-inch main gun rounds, to shoot down drones flying low or close to ships. That’s right, it was literally too close for missiles, so they switched to guns.

  • The Nation ☛ A Warning About the Dangers of Executive Orders—From 40 Years Ago

    In 1983, as Ronald Reagan went on an executive-order spree, The Nation sounded the alarm about very kind of presidential overreach we’re seeing from Trump today.

  • Techdirt ☛ The Uberization Of Nursing Sees The Usual Problems For Gig Workers, But Here Comes ‘Uber For Armed Guards’ Anyway

    Nurses who are gig workers must not only spend time dealing with the online negotiation process, they are also encouraged to bid against each other: [...]

  • Chris Enns ☛ America the Beautiful

    America has always been about expansion, but now the mask is off. Instead of offering opportunity, it’s about grabbing what you want from others.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ It’s the age of regret: gen Z grew up glued to their screens, and missed the joy of being human

    This Friday, parliament will vote on the Labour MP (and former teacher) Josh MacAlister’s private member’s bill on safer phone use, expected to be backed by the government but only after being notably watered down. Though MacAlister originally favoured raising the legal limit for accessing social media from 13 to 16, the bill now only commits ministers to reporting back in a year’s time on the case for doing so, plus conducting further research and publishing fresh guidance on children’s screen time. With X’s CEO, Elon Musk, virtually embedded in the White House, some will suspect ministers of ducking a confrontation with American tech giants. But there are other reasons not to rush in, at least until the complex new Online Safety Act due to come into force this spring has settled down, and ministers have had a chance to learn from similar bans being introduced in Australia and Norway.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Insight Hungary ☛ Orbán blocks joint EU effort on support for Ukraine

      "I told the Secretary of State that Hungary fully supports the ambitions of the President of the United States and his administration", Szijjártó said after he met with Marco Rubio in Washington. According to the Hungarian State News Agency, MTI, Szijjarto and Rubio discussed the United States temporarily suspending military assistance to Ukraine. 'I informed him that there is a conspiracy in Europe, especially in the West, against Donald Trump and his peace plan" the Hungarian Foreign Minister said.

      Szijjarto pledged that at this week's EU summit Hungary will not agree to any decision that would "risk continuing the war." "Of course, we have been snubbed in Europe, but the constant chatter about who is to blame and who is the aggressor is not helpful. This has been going on for three years and it has not helped. Something needs to be done again, peace talks need to be held, and that is why we supported the US peace resolution in the UN."Szijjártó said.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Privacy International ☛ Privacy International’s letter to the UK Home Office demanding transparency on Technical Capability Notices | Privacy International

    Technical Capability Notices are extremely secretive, and it is an offence for Apple to talk publicly about this or tell anyone about the existence or contents of the order.

    We are demanding transparency as widespread international media reporting and Apple’s own actions have rendered continued secrecy regarding the existence of the Technical Capability Notice moot

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Stats and Fury, Signifying (Almost) Nothing

    But the first thing you should know is what “in February” means. We’re not looking at a snapshot of the job market on Feb. 28. The Bureau of Labor Statistics asks employers to report payroll for “the pay period that includes the 12th of the month.” Pay periods could be monthly, biweekly or weekly, but in any case we’re probably getting a picture of the employment situation in the first half of February.

  • Mike Brock ☛ "Says who?"

    What makes “says who?” so dangerous is how it weaponizes the constructed nature of meaning. It recognizes that our shared reality is built in the space between us rather than simply discovered, but then attempts to monopolize the construction process. The goal isn't just to establish a particular narrative but to establish power's exclusive right to determine what narratives can even be considered.

• Environment

  • El País ☛ A world without butterflies: The alarming decline of a vital species

    The three Atlantic countries share common challenges that have contributed to this decline: very high human population densities and urbanization, which have reduced butterfly habitats; intensified agriculture, where monocultures do not support species diversity; and the widespread use of pesticides. New threats, such as climate change and the abandonment of rural areas, have compounded these issues.

  • Science News ☛ Warming is chasing cloud forests steadily uphill

    While cloud forests cover just 0.4 percent of Earth’s land, they harbor 15 percent of its bird, mammal, amphibian and tree fern species. Wander into one on a foggy day, and you may find that you’ve walked into a miniature rain shower: Tiny fog droplets condense onto the leaves above and drip to the ground, providing plants with extra water to supplement the rain they receive.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ At least three bills to bolster PFAS remediation efforts headed to full Legislature

    Two legislative committees advanced bills this week that would continue the state’s pioneering efforts to address the spread of and contamination by so-called forever chemicals.

    The legislation will now go before the Maine House of Representatives and Senate to be voted on for passage.

  • Truthdig ☛ Big Oil Drops Renewable Goals, Expands Fossil Fuels

    BP isn’t the only oil giant rolling back its climate commitments. Shell and Norway’s state-controlled Equinor have also made similar moves recently. But, while the news has caught headlines, experts say that the moves will have little impact on the larger renewables industry — and that, from a climate perspective, the companies’ proposed increase in fossil fuel production is much more alarming.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Michigan Advance ☛ Climate activists warn that Trump’s energy policies have cost thousands of clean energy jobs

      Since President Donald Trump’s election on Nov. 7, more than 42,000 clean energy and climate jobs across the nation have been lost or stalled according to a new analysis from the communications firm Climate Power.

    • Krebs On Security ☛ Feds Link $150M Cyberheist to 2022 LastPass Hacks

      On March 6, federal prosecutors in northern California said they seized approximately $24 million worth of cryptocurrencies that were clawed back following a $150 million cyberheist on Jan. 30, 2024. The complaint refers to the person robbed only as “Victim-1,” but according to blockchain security research ZachXBT the theft was perpetrated against Chris Larsen, the co-founder of the cryptocurrency platform Ripple.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Trump Is Planning the Biggest Heist in History

      What’s a rug-pull? A textbook example just happened in Argentina, where Javier Milei, the president, touted a new cryptocurrency called $Libra. The currency’s price soared as thousands of small players bought in, while insiders sold their holdings for huge profits. Then the price collapsed, leaving small players owning worthless bits of code.

      Does this sound familiar? It should: the $Trump coin, introduced with great fanfare by Trump in January, attracted billions in dollars from MAGA fans, then quickly lost more than 80 percent of its value. The great bulk of $Trump coins were initially bought by a handful of “whales,” large investors, although it’s not clear whether their intent was to scam small buyers or simply to bribe the president.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Trump’s [Cryptocurrency] Reserve Is Really Happening

      “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” is a lofty name for what Trump’s executive order actually has done: taking [cryptocurrency] the government already owns and counting it. Over the years, the United States has seized [cryptocurrency] assets as part of criminal and civil proceedings. The current value of bitcoin alone is estimated to be $17 billion. Why Trump seems set on pushing forward with this idea isn’t hard to see. The mere existence of something called a [cryptocurrency] reserve could benefit the president. Trump himself has gone all in on the [cryptocurrency] industry of late—even releasing his own memecoin, $TRUMP. On Sunday, he previewed his executive order on Truth Social: “I will make sure the U.S. is the [Cryptocurrency] Capital of the World,” he wrote. “We are MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

    • Wired ☛ Trump’s ‘Strategic Bitcoin Reserve’ Plan Comes With a Twist

      At present, the US is estimated to hold around 200,000 bitcoin, worth roughly $17 billion at current prices, but the precise figure has never been confirmed. The executive order requires government agencies to conduct a full audit of their [cryptocurrency] holdings.

      The order confirms that the US will not use money raised through taxation to purchase additional [cryptocurrency] for the reserves. Though it leaves the door open for the Treasury and Department of Commerce to expand the bitcoin reserve by unspecified alternative means, provided they “do not impose incremental costs on United States taxpayers.”

    • The Register UK ☛ Trump signs Bitcoin Reserve order, [cryptocurrency] dips in value

      Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other [cryptocurrency] tumbled, and recovered somewhat, as people processed the announcement. It should be noted the markets in general in the United States are down at the moment due in large part to the White House flip-flopping on import tariffs against America's neighbors and allies. It's therefore not just unhappiness with the President's approach to Uncle Sam holding digital assets that's driving down the value of cryptocurrencies.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Digital Fort Knox: Trump signs executive order for US strategic bitcoin reserve

      It’s estimated that there is close to 200,000 bitcoin held by the U.S. government, although that hasn’t yet ever been a comprehensive audit. The order also asks for a U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile, which, like the bitcoin reserve, will be managed by the Treasury Department. These digital currencies have all at one time been forfeited to the government.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Inadvertently Victorious — How Some Species Persist as the Climate Collapses

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Silicon Angle ☛ HPE to lay off 2,500 staff as stock craters on mixed earnings results and tariffs

    The company, which primarily sells servers, storage arrays and software for enterprise data centers, revealed it’s embarking on a cost-cutting exercise that will result in about 2,500 workers, or 5% of its employee base, being let go. The layoffs will add charges to its second-quarter and full-year results, the company added, causing it to lower its guidance.

  • Stephen Smith ☛ Boycotting US Products and Services

    Due to the way stock market prices are determined and the general jitteriness of the stock market, boycotts of publicly traded companies can be surprisingly effective. If everyone in Canada sticks to their guns and boycotts all things American then this will have a large impact. Throw in support from other countries hit by US tariffs like Mexico, the European Union and China and this will become an unstoppable landslide.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • RFA ☛ China’s propaganda machine raises profile of model soldier Lei Feng

      Lauded by supreme leader Mao Zedong as a role model, 1960s soldier and folk hero Lei Feng is getting renewed attention in China under President Xi Jinping’s push for patriotic education.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Spray-painted pacifist slogan lands Russian man in St. Petersburg jail

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Call for Government of Nepal [PDF]

    Additionally, the Media Council Bill aims to make “digital, online and print journalism more decent, accountable and credible”, sparking worries that independent media could be curtailed and journalists put at risk of being targeted through vague and subjective terms. Similarly, there are concerns around the Social Media Bill regarding lack of clarity in defining social media; overbroad definitions of terms, such as “cyberbullying”; and ambiguous language, such as “sovereignty” and “national security”. The bill could lead to broad and subjective interpretations of the law that excessively criminalises sharing or reposting content if it is deemed to be offensive. Harsh penalties include jail terms of up to five years and fines up to 1.5 million Nepalese rupees (approx. US $10,500). A healthy democracy requires the freedom to express dissent and by targeting critical voices, both bills risk instilling a culture of fear and self-censorship among users – with grave implications for civic space and media freedom in the country.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • FAIR ☛ Eric Blanc on Worker-to-Worker Organizing

  • FAIR ☛ Media Obscure Message of Oscar-Winning Documentary No Other Land

    When No Other Land won this year’s Academy Award for best documentary feature, corporate media outlets didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet.

  • RFERL ☛ Afghan Survivors Speak Out: What The Taliban Does To Imprisoned Women

    [...] These stories often go untold, as most victims of the regime are threatened or forced into silence.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Strike, or Else

    The most important thing about a union contract is that it is a contract. It is a legally binding agreement. It is not a passing fancy. It is not an empty promise, a public relations ploy. It is a contract. It is a guarantee. The things that are laid out in the contract are guaranteed, for the length of the contract. Abiding by its provisions is mandatory, not optional.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Washington Post ☛ Did America’s least-hated printer brand take a turn for the worst?

    We’re increasingly finding that as more products are connected to the [Internet], you never fully own them. At any moment, manufacturers of your car, music speaker, baby bassinet, digital books and, yes, printers can flip a switch to demand more money, restrict your product or siphon your personal data.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Brother accused of locking down third-party printer ink cartridges via forced firmware updates, removing older firmware versions from support portals

    Fabled RepairTuber and right to repair crusader Louis Rossmann has shared a new video encapsulating his surprise, and disappointment, that Brother has morphed into an “anti-consumer printer company.” More information about Brother’s embrace of the dark side are shared on Rossmann’s wiki, with the major two issues being new firmware disabling third party toner, and preventing (on color devices) color registration functionality.

  • Ars Technica ☛ Brother denies using firmware updates to brick printers with third-party ink

    On March 3, YouTuber Louis Rossman posted a video saying that “Brother turns heel & becomes anti-consumer printer company.” The video, spotted by Tom’s Hardware, has 163,000 views as of this writing and seems to be based on a Reddit post from 2022. In that post, Reddit user 20Factorial said that firmware update W1.56 caused the automatic color registration feature to stop working on his Brother MFC-3750 when using third-party cartridges.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Brother denies firmware blocks third-party toner and ink use

    Reading between the lines, there may indeed have been some user confusion, but Brother’s admitted preference for using genuine toner/ink for troubleshooting sounds somewhat pushy for a device many consider(ed) to be open to equipping third-party supplies. Genuine toners and ink cartridges can be costly, especially if a complete set is required, and users might find it hard to justify such a purchase for a malfunctioning device, not knowing what a troubleshooter might recommend.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Wired ☛ The DOJ Still Wants Google to Sell Off Chrome

  The proposal, filed Friday afternoon, says that Google must “promptly and fully divest Chrome, along with any assets or services necessary to successfully complete the divestiture, to a buyer approved by the Plaintiffs in their sole discretion, subject to terms that the Court and Plaintiffs approve.” It also would require Google to stop paying partners for preferential treatment of its search engine.

• Valor Econômico ☛ Circuit court reinstates antitrust ruling against Apple

  The Federal Regional Court of the 1st Region (TRF-1) has overturned a trial ruling and reinstated an injunction imposed by the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (Cade) on Apple, as part of an investigation into alleged abuse of dominant position in the app distribution market for iOS devices. According to the ruling, the company will have 90 days to implement the changes mandated by the antitrust authority.

  At the end of November, Cade's General Superintendence launched an administrative proceeding against Apple to investigate suspicions of dominant position abuse and issued a series of injunctions to allow, for example, apps to inform users about alternative means of purchasing the products they offer.

• 9to5Mac ☛ Brazilian court gives Apple 90 days to allow sideloading [sic] on iOS

  In November 2024, the Brazilian antitrust regulator “Cade” ruled that Apple can no longer prevent developers from selling content and distributing apps outside the App Store in Brazil. The company would have 20 days to comply with Brazil’s antitrust legislation, otherwise it would be fined more than $40,000 a day.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Nintendo Defeats Filehoster '1Fichier' at French Supreme Court

    Nintendo celebrated victory over French file-hosting service 1fichier.com this week. The French Supreme Court denied the filehoster's appeal and upheld a piracy liability ruling in favor of the gaming company. The ruling confirms that hosting platforms can be held liable if they fail to remove pirated content when asked.