Leftovers

• Torrent Freak ☛ Early Pirate Bay Backer Carl Lundström Dies in Plane Crash

  Lundström, who was 64 years old, did not survive.

• Nathan Upchurch ☛ The Blog Questions Challenge

  I’m using Eleventy, AKA 11ty, which is a static site generator. A static site generator is a program that lets you code templates for your website, describe how it should work, and then it spits out pages based on your setup so that you don’t have to code each new page or post. Static sites don’t rely on a server running a content management system; they’re literally just a bunch of files that you can host anywhere. They’re fast and unhackable.

• Lou Plummer ☛ How To Make Me Like Your Blog

  As I spend less and less time on commercial websites and more time exploring the blogs on IndieWeb platforms, I am developing a type and preferences. There's plenty to choose from.

• Josh Withers ☛ I've been learning about SEO and GEO and could help you too

  A friend who is a professional SEO operator took payment for services then never replied to a message after then. Colleagues in the wedding industry took payment for marketing services, then stopped responding when I questioned the low effectiveness of the ads. Countless stories of poor performance. Thousands of dollars wasted on stupid strategies.

  So I’ve taken it upon myself to stop paying people and to learn to do it myself and I’ve spent the last year reading and studying SEO and GEO. SEO is optimisation for the search engines like Google, Bing, Kagi etc, and GEO is optimisation for the LLM AI products like ChatGPT and Claude.

• Howard Oakley ☛ The bicentenary of Hans Gude: 1 Painting Norway

  Tomorrow is the bicentenary of the birth of one of Norway’s greatest landscape artists, Hans Gude. In this and tomorrow’s article I celebrate his life and work with a selection of his paintings.

  Gude was born on 13 March 1825 and was initially educated in Christiania (now Oslo, Norway), and in 1842 started his studies at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Germany. He there joined a recently-formed landscape class taught by Professor Johann Wilhelm Schirmer. Gude rejected conventional teaching that landscape paintings should be composed according to classical or aesthetic principles, preferring instead to paint thoroughly realistically, and true to nature. He also met Karl Friedrich Lessing (1808-1880), one of the German Romantic artists who had in turn been influenced by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840).

• Science

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Firing the refs doesn’t end the game

    I got the vaccine, and then several more. But I tell you what: I had no more rational basis to trust vaccines than I had for mistrusting opioids. I am not qualified to evaluate the scientific claims related to either question, and I know it.

    This is an objectively very frightening situation to be in.

    We navigate so many of these life-or-death technical questions every single day: [...]

• Career/Education

  • Harvard University ☛ At Harvard Library, building a tool that understands

    In the 50 years since card catalogs moved online, the way we search for library materials has stayed much the same. Users enter keywords into a search, the system looks for those keywords and returns results.

    As collections and data have grown exponentially, it’s become more complicated to finetune for the right results. If you search a library catalog for “the history of Apple,” you’ll get results mainly for the fruit rather than the company. The system only understands the words, not the meaning.

    A Harvard Library team is building a new search tool to change that.

  • ARRL ☛ Clubs are Gearing Up for ARRL Ham Radio Open House — Yours Can, Too!

    Momentum is building for ARRL’s Ham Radio Open House — an amateur radio event for clubs to put their most technological foot forward and show the public the true modern state of amateur radio. The events are to be held in April across the United States, on or close to World Amateur Radio Day (WARD) on April 18. This year’s WARD commemorates 100 years of the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU).

  • Kev Quirk ☛ How to Work Better

    Multi-tasking and me do not work well together. I am just shit at it. So I do try to do one thing at a time where possible, but context switching is also a challenge for me. I'm responsible for a large, global team, and my role basically consists of making sure my team has what they need, deflecting shit where required, and making decisions. All of this means lots of context switching on a daily basis, which is really challenging for my rather small brain.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ The ethics of collaborations between academia and commercial parties — Crooked Timber

    With this post, I want to draw attention to this topic (my impression was that it got a bit overshadowed by all the horrible attacks on academic freedom and academic institutions that are currently happening in the US – ALLEA also published a statement on academic freedom in response), but also raise some more questions.

  • All European Academies ☛ ALLEA Statement on Ethical Problems in Research Collaborations with Commercial Entities - ALLEA

    In this statement, ALLEA outlines key considerations for assessing partnerships with commercial entities, emphasising transparency, institutional alignment, and governance mechanisms. ALLEA calls on research institutions to implement robust ethical frameworks, establish arm’s-length oversight, and regularly review collaborations to safeguard scientific values and maintain public confidence.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post - Scholarship in the Face of Powerful Opposition: Academia Needs a March of the Ents

    In the Lord of the Rings, Ents are mythical tree-like creatures who tend to their forests like shepherds tend flocks. They are immensely powerful, but do not meddle in the affairs of the wider world in any way, instead caring only about their own patches of trees. They speak in ways that are incomprehensible to most, and when they meet, their language is so slow in its expressions, that conversations run on for weeks. In the book, the Ents are slow to respond to large-scale devastation of their forests because of these traits, and because they each tend their own little patch.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Trump’s Assault on Universities Is a Wake-Up Call

    I didn’t worry much about Trump’s threat at the time. I now realize that was a mistake. American universities did not cause the onslaught that the second Trump administration is unleashing upon them. But they would be in a much stronger position today if they had made a proactive case to the public for their own importance—and taken steps to address their very real shortcomings.

  • Vox ☛ Trump’ dismantling of the Education Department, explained

    What’s the big picture? Conservatives have long had a vendetta against the Education Department. Gutting it won’t affect what schools teach — that’s controlled at the state and local level — but, through understaffing, Trump can make it difficult for the department to enforce laws and help schools, districts, and anyone with a student loan. The consequences may be quiet, but they could be enormous.

  • CNN ☛ Education Department cutting nearly half of workforce

    McMahon said later Tuesday that the reductions are the first course of action in shutting down the agency, which Trump has vowed to do, although she acknowledged that fully eliminating the department would require Congress to act. CNN reported last week that White House officials have prepared an executive order directing McMahon to begin the process of dismantling the department.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Education Dept ‘dissolved’ entire units in mass layoffs. Employees take stock of what’s left

    The department laid off nearly half its workforce on Tuesday, as part of Reduction-in-Force (RIF) efforts happening across the federal government.

    A list of eliminated positions obtained by Federal News Network shows the department took major cuts across most of its operations. Employees impacted by the RIF include attorneys, auditors, IT specialists and research analysts.

  • Federal News Network ☛ ‘In DOGE we trust’: House GOP governs by embracing Trump’s effort to cut government

    In fact, the Republicans who control Congress and the White House are governing at lightning speed — over the dismantling of the very government itself.

    As if on cue, as the House was acting Tuesday, the Department of Education axed some 1,300 employees, about half its staff, on its way to unwinding the agency.

  • Deseret Media ☛ In Utah, potential dismantling of the Education Department leaves more questions than answers

    The department's main role is financial, distributing billions in federal money to colleges and schools and managing the federal student loan portfolio. Closing the department would mean redistributing each of those duties to another agency. The department also plays an important regulatory role in student services, ranging from those with disabilities to low-income and homeless students.

    But what would the dismantling of the department mean for Utah?

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Trump guts Education Department, sending California scrambling

    “These reckless layoffs will sow chaos and confusion throughout our nation’s public school system,” said Guillermo Mayer, president and chief executive of Public Advocates, a California-based law firm and advocacy group. “Instead of bolstering learning outcomes, the immediate effect of these actions is quite cruel. It forces millions of parents, especially parents of students with disabilities, to worry about whether their children will receive the services they need.”

  • Harvard University ☛ Johnny can read. Jane can read. But they may not fully comprehend.

    Vocabulary and background knowledge are the strongest predictors of reading comprehension, said Capin. Educators can find practice guides on how to help students build language comprehension skills at What Works Clearinghouse, an initiative of the Department of Education, he said.

• Hardware

  • Framework Computer BV ☛ Framework | Framework Desktop Deep Dive: Ryzen AI Max

    What makes Ryzen AI Max special is a combination of three elements: full desktop-class Zen 5 CPU cores, a massive 40-CU Radeon RDNA 3.5 GPU, and a giant 256-bit LPDDR5x memory bus to feed the two, supporting up to 128GB of memory. Chips and Cheese did an excellent technical overview of the processor with AMD that goes even deeper on this, and we’ll pull out some of the highlights along with our own insights. We’ll start with the CPUs. Ryzen AI Max supports up to 16 CPU cores split across two 4nm FinFET dies that AMD calls CCDs. These dies are connected together using an extremely wide, low power, low latency bus across the package substrate. The CPUs are full Zen 5 cores with 512-bit FPUs and support for AVX-512, a vector processing instruction set otherwise only available on Intel’s top end server CPUs. We’re excited for you to see the multi-core performance numbers these CPUs can do in our upcoming press review cycle!

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Task And Purpose ☛ The Army wants to reduce the weight soldiers carry into battle

    The average infantry soldier carries or wears more than 80 items. The Army wants to reduce that weight to 55 pounds, or “no more than 30%” of their body weight, Kiniery told contractors at an event earlier this month.

    The cuts would impact the Army’s close combat forces, which include infantry, scouts, combat medics, forward observers, combat engineers, and special operations forces.

  • MB ☛ Grayscale Mode?

    I’ve been looking for ways to make my phone less addictive during work hours, and when I wind down before bed. I came across an app called Dumb Phone that piqued my interest. While researching it, I stumbled across a YouTube video where they also talked about leveraging an iPhone Accessibility feature called “Grayscale” mode. I’ve been testing it and I might see if I can set up an automation that will activate grayscale mode when I go into Work focus and Sleep focus. Interesting possibilities.

  • Keenan ☛ The real emotional intelligence is the people we beat up in our heads along the way

    Looking back, I recognize that these fantasies largely subsided as I was able to take the time to work on me, to come to terms with how I experience anger and rage, which, in turn, made it easier to experience unpleasant emotions, to sit with them, rather than force them to simmer under closed lid until everything eventually exploded and there was no hope of reigning them in.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Chinese snoops spotted on end-of-life Juniper routers

    Junos OS is Juniper Networks' operating system and powers most of the vendor's routing, switching, and security devices. It is based on a modified FreeBSD operating system.

  • Google ☛ Ghost in the Router: China-Nexus Espionage Actor UNC3886 Targets Juniper Routers | Google Cloud Blog

    At the time of writing, Mandiant has not identified any technical overlaps between activities detailed in this blog post and those publicly reported by other parties as Volt Typhoon or Salt Typhoon.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Futurism ☛ The Entire Internet Is Being Polluted by AI Slop

      AI slop has made its way into practically every corner of the internet. Just look at Facebook, or what's become of Pinterest. But what about AI-written text? It may not be as flagrantly bonkers as AI images, but it's also started to permeate the web.

    • Fast Company ☛ AI slop is suffocating the web, says a new study - Fast Company

      An analysis of more than 300 million documents, including consumer complaints, corporate press releases, job postings, and messages for the media published by the United Nations suggests that the web is being swamped with AI-generated slop.

    • arXiv ☛ The Widespread Adoption of Large Language Model-Assisted Writing Across Society

      We systematically analyzed large language model (LLM) adoption patterns across four distinct domains: consumer complaints, corporate PR communications, job postings, and governmental press releases (see Supplementary Information for data collection and preprocessing). Our analysis reveals a consistent pattern of initial rapid adoption following ChatGPT’s release, followed by a notable stabilization period that emerged between mid to late 2023 across all domains (Fig. 1).2

    • EFF ☛ Anchorage Police Department: AI-Generated Police Reports Don’t Save Time

      The APD deputy chief told Alaska Public Media, “We were hoping that it would be providing significant time savings for our officers, but we did not find that to be the case.” The deputy chief flagged that the time it took officers to review reports cut into the time savings from generating the report. The software translates the audio into narrative, and officers are expected to read through the report carefully to edit it, add details, and verify it for authenticity. Moreover, because the technology relies on audio from body-worn cameras, it often misses visual components of the story that the officer then has to add themselves. “So if they saw something but didn’t say it, of course, the body cam isn’t going to know that,” the deputy chief continued.

    • Namanyay Goel ☛ AGI Will Make Humanity Optional | N’s Blog

      This path frightens me. We can still understand what today’s AI creates, but that won’t last.

      Have you seen this meme? It depicts the “Shoggoth” from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, a monstrous, tentacled creature that is beyond our understanding. It’s being used to describe AGI.

      AGI will be like that, an intelligence that we cannot comprehend, even though it might smile at us as we ‘align’ it us. We’ll face an intelligence that makes all humans combined look simple. We’ll be like ants watching humans build a city.

    • The New Stack ☛ What Is LLM Observability and Monitoring?

      Let’s discuss the differences between LLM observability and LLM monitoring and their importance in the AI industry. Then we’ll explore how LLM observability and monitoring work, while highlighting key concepts. Finally, we’ll look at the benefits and challenges in LLM observability and monitoring.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Cursor AI assistant tells vibe coder: learn to code

      Cursor told Swist to go learn to code.

      What happened here? Cursor’s token context window overflowed. It can’t work in chunks as large as 800 lines.

      If you’ve got an 800-line function, it’s probably doing too many things. You need to understand step by step what you’re trying to achieve. That is: computer programming.

    • Gergely Nagy ☛ A season on Iocaine

      Unlike proof-of-work solutions, it has zero adverse effect on legit visitors. It doesn’t make the site more expensive to render for the human visitor, it does not require javascript, and it does not make screen readers unusable, either.

      It will not save you from all bad visitors, but it will significantly reduce the load on your servers. Give it a try. Lets poison the plagiarism machines together.

    • Macworld ☛ Siri isn't an assistant, it's an embarrassment

      In other words, Apple is still at least a year and probably two away from delivering the experience its competitors are today. By the time Apple catches up, those competitors will have advanced even further.

    • Lee Peterson ☛ I’ve stopped using AI tools

      So, I’m taking a step back from these tools. I’m fed of it being put into places and apps that it’s not needed and I don’t want to contribute more to my carbon footprint.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Dhole Moments ☛ On The Insecurity of Telecom Stacks in the Wake of Salt Typhoon

      To recap: An employee of SignalWire (which develops FreeSWITCH) came right out and said they would let people who aren’t paying for FreeSWITCH Advantage stay vulnerable until their regularly scheduled release (sometime in the Summer).

      There are about 8,300 hits on Shodan for FreeSWITCH as I write this. I highly doubt they’re all paying for enterprise support, so we’re talking about potentially thousands of telecom stacks around the world that SignalWire has decided to keep vulnerable until the Summer, even after they published the patches on GitHub.

      While such a decision might be perfectly legal, it really does not inspire trust in the stewards of this software project to give a shit about the harm their careless coding practices inflict upon their users.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Futurism ☛ Trump's Attempt to Help Tesla May Backfire Spectacularly

    On Tuesday, president Donald Trump appeared in front of the White House as part of a bizarre sales pitch for Elon Musk's embattled carmaker Tesla.

    [...]

    "Just because the corruption plays out in public doesn't mean it's not corruption," he tweeted.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ In Memoriam: Mark Klein, AT&T Whistleblower Who Revealed NSA Mass Spying

      When the New York Times reported in late 2005 that the NSA was engaging in spying inside the U.S., Mark realized that he had witnessed how it was happening. He also realized that the President was not telling Americans the truth about the program. And, though newly retired, he knew that he had to do something. He showed up at EFF’s front door in early 2006 with a simple question: “Do you folks care about privacy?”

    • C4ISRNET ☛ Space Force eyes commercial options for space surveillance mission

      The service reached out to industry last year for concepts for satellites and sensors that can track activity and objects in space from geosynchronous orbit, about 22,000 miles above Earth. The Space Force already has sensing systems in GEO through its Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, or GSSAP. But these new satellites would be small, potentially refuelable and lower cost than existing capabilities.

    • 404 Media ☛ Saudi Arabia Buys Pokémon Go, and Probably All of Your Location Data

      A company owned by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund just bought the most popular AR video game of all time.

    • Nebraska Examiner ☛ A proposed school book database law moves forward in Nebraska statehouse

      Under the bill, parents also could opt in for automatic email notification or another form of electronic notification when their student checks out a book. The book title, author and due date to return the book would be included in the notice.

    • Wired ☛ Chinese Companies Rush to Put DeepSeek in Everything

      In recent weeks, over 20 Chinese automakers (and at least one bus maker) have said they are putting DeepSeek’s chatbot into their vehicles, according to local news reports. Some 30 medical and pharmaceutical companies said they are using DeepSeek in clinical diagnoses and research, among other applications. Dozens of banks, insurance companies, and brokerage firms across the country also disclosed they are using DeepSeek to train customer service reps, design investment strategies, and handle similar kinds of tasks.

    • 404 Media ☛ The 200+ Sites an ICE Surveillance Contractor is Monitoring

      A contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and many other U.S. government agencies has developed a tool that lets analysts more easily pull a target individual’s publicly available data from a wide array of sites, social networks, apps, and services across the web at once, including Bluesky, OnlyFans, and various Meta platforms, according to a leaked list of the sites obtained by 404 Media. In all the list names more than 200 sites that the contractor, called ShadowDragon, pulls data from and makes available to its government clients, allowing them to map out a person’s activity, movements, and relationships.

  • Confidentiality

    • Wired ☛ How to Use Signal Encrypted Messaging

      Signal’s popularity often spikes in times of strife or when alternatives seem more precarious. In May 2020, as police brutality protests swept US cities, daily Signal downloads nearly tripled from their average, according to analytics company Apptopia. It saw another surge in January 2021 after WhatsApp, which end-to-end encrypts personal chats using the Signal Protocol, botched the messaging around a privacy policy update. Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates that Signal downloads in the US jumped by 20 percent on Android and 50 percent on iOS in January and February of this year, compared to the first two months of 2024.

      All of those people can take advantage of end-to-end encryption, which means that no one—not the government, their phone company, or Signal itself—can read the contents of messages as they pass between devices.

• Defence/Aggression

  • VOA News ☛ US sanctions Sweden-based gang with links to Iran

    Sweden's Sapo intelligence service announced last May that it believed Iran had recruited Swedish [sic] criminal gang members as proxies to commit "acts of violence" against Israeli and other interests in Sweden.

  • New Yorker ☛ Trump Is Still Trying to Undermine Elections

    Now that Trump has installed election deniers throughout his Administration, he has been busy dismantling the guardrails protecting voting and voters.

  • VOA News ☛ IS in Sahel expands terror threat beyond strongholds

    In November, a similar terrorist cell was dismantled in the Spanish cities of Seville and Ceuta.

    The connection? Both Moroccan and Spanish authorities said the groups were aligned with Islamic State in The Sahel.

  • Wired ☛ The Violent Rise of ‘No Lives Matter’

    The US Department of Justice classifies Com and 764 as a “Tier One” terrorism threat, the highest priority afforded to an extremist group, ideology, or tendency in American law enforcement’s internal rubric. Intelligence documents reviewed by WIRED show a stream of concern from analysts about the group’s harm to juvenile exploitation victims and the growing exhortations to physical violence that embody the No Lives Matter ethos.

  • [Old] Ulla Jordan ☛ The end of the Winter War – March 13, 1940 | Ulla Jordan

    Reluctantly accepting the reality that Western aid would not arrive in time, the Finnish government signed an armistice with Russia on March 12, 1940. A ceasefire came into effect all along the front the next day, March 13. This was the Peace of Moscow.

    When the terms of the peace were announced, flags in Finland flew at half mast.

  • [Old] Ulla Jordan ☛ November 30, 1939: the 85th Anniversary of the Winter War | Ulla Jordan

    Despite being badly outnumbered and short of everything from shells to anti-tank guns, the Finnish army held on for 105 days. The Finns sought help from their Scandinavian neighbours and from Britain, France, and America. Help did arrive in the form of volunteers, medical personnel, and offers to take in Finnish children, but not the military aid the Finns desperately needed.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Geospatial-intelligence agency aims for more AI resources in 2025

    NGA’s mission is to turn data from satellites, radars and other sources into usable intelligence for military decision makers and operators. Given that mission and its lead role in the Defense Department’s high-profile Maven data and image processing system, AI has long been a part of the NGA’s focus.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • [Repeat] American Oversight ☛ American Oversight Applauds Court Ruling that DOGE’s [sic] Inner Workings Cannot Be Concealed from Public View - American Oversight

    In response to a lawsuit brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction finding DOGE [sic] is likely subject to FOIA, requiring the preservation of documents.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft's latest Quantum computing claims have been named 'unreliable' by scientists

    Frolov said that Microsoft's planned presentation next week won't answer all the questions and concerns raised by experts based on what his contacts told him. He also added that the company's Majorana results are questionable — and without that, then the topological qubit that it claims will not work.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft's quantum breakthrough claim labeled 'unreliable'

    Henry Legg, a lecturer in theoretical physics at the University of St Andrews in the UK, recently published a pre-print critique that argues the software giant’s work “is not reliable and must be revisited.”

    Vincent Mourik, an experimental physicist at the German national research organization Forschungszentrum Jülich, and Sergey Frolov, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh in the US, took to YouTube to criticize “distractions caused by unreliable scientific claims from Microsoft Quantum.”

• Environment

  • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ Norway Will Let Cities Introduce Zero-Emission Zones

    Norway tops the charts in passenger electric vehicle adoption, with 96% of all new cars registered in January being battery-powered. But freight electrification is lagging, with 70% of vans sold in Norway running on carbon-intensive, polluting diesel, reports The Telegraph.

    To reduce diesel traffic in their streets, Oslo, Bergen, and Trondheim sought federal permission to begin mandating zero-emission zones within their boundaries, which they secured on March 4.

    The next steps will be to iron out the technical, legal, and practical aspects of the mandates, Transport and Communications Minister Jon-Ivar Nygård said in a press release. The Norwegian Public Roads Administration will prepare a legislative and regulatory proposal, which will then undergo public consultation.

  • Court House News ☛ This ‘Dune’ isn’t fiction. It’s the longest conveyor belt in the US and moving sand in Texas | Courthouse News Service

    Atlas Energy Solutions, a Texas-based oil field company, has installed a 42-mile long (67 kilometers) conveyor belt to transport millions of tons of sand for hydraulic fracturing. The belt the company named “The Dune Express” runs from tiny Kermit, Texas, and across state borders into Lea County, New Mexico. Tall and lanky with lids that resemble solar modules, the steel structure could almost be mistaken for a roller coaster.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Elon Musk's assault on wildfire protection is part of a bigger plan

    What happens to our public lands will be felt in cities and suburbs too. The most destructive wildfires, including those that just laid waste to parts of Southern California, are fought mainly in the interface between urban areas and public lands — with the help of employees like those who were just dismissed.

    Wildfire smoke, moreover, causes health problems in metropolises such as L.A., the Bay Area, Chicago and New York City. The health of the watersheds we all drink from also depends on forest and range management.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Vintage Everyday ☛ Amazing Photos of the 1951 Studebaker Woody

      Designed initially as a four-door sedan, the one-of-a-kind 1951 Studebaker Woody showcases an extraordinary custom transformation that reimagines American automotive design. This remarkable vehicle began as an unfinished project from the collection of Joe MacPherson before being acquired by notable collector Dennis Varni.

    • The Register UK ☛ Amazon, Meta, Google want to triple nuclear power by 2050

      A group of large-scale energy users including Amazon, Meta, and Google has thrown its weight behind efforts to ramp up global nuclear capacity – aiming to triple it by 2050 – to meet increasing energy demands.

    • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ Wind-Powered Ship Aims for 80% Emissions Reduction

      The 136-metre Neoliner Origin can carry 5,300 tonnes of cargo and is purpose-built to make its journeys through emissions-free sail power, writes The Loadstar, a supply chain newsletter. Now undergoing trials in the Mediterranean in preparation for its maiden voyage across the North Atlantic this summer, Neoliner Origin isn’t one of those behemoth container ships, but rather a so-called “ro-ro.” Smaller and relatively fast, these “roll on, roll off” vessels are mostly used to ship wheeled goods like cars and agricultural equipment.

    • Vox ☛ How Elon Musk’s alliance with Trump launched a Tesla boycott

      Public opinion is starting to crystalize against Tesla because Musk is the face of the company, and many people aren’t happy with what he’s doing politically. The problem for Tesla (and Musk) is when public opinion has catalyzed against something, it can be very hard to reverse course.

      And so then the question becomes: Does Elon Musk care about that?

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Wired ☛ One Photographer’s Quest to Redefine the Shark

      There are about 536 known species of shark in the world, and 316 of them are endangered by fishing. Sometimes they are caught illegally, and in other cases they are killed incidentally, by fishers in pursuit of other fish. They have a frightening side, but they are also animals with admirable traits. The jaws of the largest of them can exert a force of up to 1.8 tonnes. On their sides, they have cells that can detect movement in the water from meters away, and their textured skin reduces water friction. They are also very sensitive to electric fields. They come in all sizes: The dwarf shark fits in the palm of a hand while whale sharks are up to 12 meters long.

  • Overpopulation

    • Overpopulation ☛ Canceling the Demographic and Health Surveys and Ending USAID’s role in Family Planning and Reproductive Health Programs: Why it Matters

      In a world with changing demographic trends, does the retreat by the U.S. government from international population and family planning programs matter? Our answer is a resounding yes.

• Finance

  • Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Switching my pricing to Euro, but also making it tax-inclusive

    The first is that I’m switching to tax-inclusive pricing, which is a bit unfamiliar to many Americans but is the norm in Europe (indeed, it’s a legal requirement for consumer pricing). That means that even though a straight-up switch from $35 USD to €35 EUR could at the moment be effectively a 10% price hike, if you’re in a country that has a %10 VAT on ebooks, the switch is effectively a wash: the effective price is roughly the same.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • US News And World Report ☛ Meta's Zuckerberg Held Meetings at White House on Wednesday, Source Says

  • The Register UK ☛ OpenInfra joins the Linux Foundation

    The vote was unanimous. It was also unthinkable a few short years ago when OpenStack (as it was known then) and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) were fierce rivals for the hearts and minds of developers and customers. Where OpenStack was all about an open source cloud infrastructure on which applications could run, CNCF's Kubernetes provided a vendor-neutral way of orchestrating container-based applications.

  • Jon Seager ☛ Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu

    This package provides utilities which have become synonymous with Linux to many - the likes of ls, cp, and mv. In recent years, there has been an effort to reimplement this suite of tools in Rust, with the goal of reaching 100% compatibility with the existing tools. Similar projects, like sudo-rs, aim to replace key security-critical utilities with more modern, memory-safe alternatives.

    Starting with Ubuntu 25.10, my goal is to adopt some of these modern implementations as the default. My immediate goal is to make uutils’ coreutils implementation the default in Ubuntu 25.10, and subsequently in our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, if the conditions are right.

  • EFF ☛ EFF Sends Letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee Opposing the STOP CSAM Act

    At its core, STOP CSAM endangers encrypted messages – jeopardizing the privacy, security, and free speech of every American and fundamentally altering our online communications. In the digital world, end-to-end encryption is our best chance to maintain both individual and national security. Particularly in the wake of the major breach of telecom systems in October 2024 from Salt Typhoon, a sophisticated Chinese-government backed hacking group, legislators should focus on bolstering encryption, not weakening it. In fact, in response to this breach, a top U.S. cybersecurity chief said “encryption is your friend.”

Monopolies/Monopsonies