Leftovers

• Jamie Brandon ☛ 0052: hytradboi videos and post-mortem, zest repo, no internet, on social media, my product is my garden, datafusion and clickhouse jits, books

  All the HYTRADBOI videos are up at hytradboi.com/2025. I also wrote a post-mortem and some musing about talk selection

• Eliseo Martelli ☛ Building in public: Knuth Day 0

  Knuth will be an app designed for those who frequently work with LaTeX formulas, whether you're a student, researcher, or math enthusiast. The goal is to make writing, saving, and interacting with LaTeX formulas as seamless as possible, and feeling mostly like a first party iOS/iPadOS/macOS app.

• Science

  • The Register UK ☛ France offers to take in US scientists

    Aix-Marseille University in the south of France is launching the Safe Place For Science program, offering a "safe and stimulating environment" for American researchers wishing to pursue their work free from persecution.

    At a time where scientists in the United States may feel threatened or hindered in their research, the university says it is launching a scheme dedicated to welcoming those wishing to pursue their work "in an environment conducive to innovation, excellence, and academic freedom."

  • LabX Media Group ☛ DNA Helps Identify Croatian Nun in Sainthood Quest

    For the kinship analysis, the team made two hypothetical family trees using the case findings and sequencing data. Their probability calculations confirmed that the DNA profiles linked the skeletal remains to Kozulić, confirming them as Sisters Marija and Tereza.

  • Fabian Beuke ☛ Twistor Theory

    Twistor theory, conceived by Sir Roger Penrose in the 1960s, represents a radical reimagining of the mathematical foundations of physics. By encoding the geometry of space-time into complex projective spaces known as twistor spaces, this framework challenges conventional notions of locality and offers novel insights into quantum gravity, particle physics, and the unification of fundamental forces.[4] While rooted in abstract geometry, twistor theory has catalyzed advancements in scattering amplitude calculations, integrable systems, and string theory, bridging pure mathematics with theoretical physics.[2] This report synthesizes its core principles, historical evolution, and implications, emphasizing intuitive explanations over mathematical formalism to make its profound ideas accessible to a broad audience.

  • [Repeat] Rlang ☛ Digital Difficulties

    One of the additional challenges in taking puzzles from these older sources is to try to solve them the way a puzzle-solver would have, back in 1924. In this case, I wasn’t successful at finding a pure paper-and-pencil solution, but I did find an elegant modern solution that would have been possible with the computational machines of the era.

• Career/Education

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Over the Last 200 Years, a Small Library Became One of New York City’s Biggest Museums. A New Showcase Tells the Story of Its Unique Legacy

    Today, after 200 years full of name changes and evolutions, that modest community library in Old Brooklyn Heights is known as the Brooklyn Museum, New York City’s third-largest art museum. Housed in a grand fin de siècle edifice by McKim, Mead and White, the architects of the old Penn Station and parts of Columbia University’s neo-Classical campus, the museum of today holds more than 140,000 objects in its collection.

  • Seth Michael Larson ☛ Fediverse Donut Club (#FediDonutFriday)

    I didn't know it at the time, but donut club was an amazing tool for socializing and organizing. We were enjoying our donuts, but we were also strengthening our bonds with coworkers. Some of the people I met in donut club I'm still good friends with. Like all good friends we sometimes discuss labor conditions and help each other with job hunting, negotiating, and being paid fairly.

  • Robert Birming ☛ The Recipe for a Job You'll Love

    None of what I've mentioned requires any special training or skills. These are innate human abilities that most people possess. And when these three—attentiveness, interest, and curiosity—work together, the bonus effect is a given: a job you love!

• Hardware

  • Yordi Verkroost ☛ A Late Bloomer’s Vinyl Story

    Actually buying full albums on a physical medium like CD or vinyl, which required a separate machine to play them? No, that wasn't me. I am a millennial, and the need for such things seemed beyond me. Leave that for the older generation, I thought. You know, those old people who apparently felt the need for all that seemingly unnecessary work—getting up, picking a record, taking it out of its jacket, putting it on the turntable, activating the device… I already got tired just thinking about it.

  • Doug Brown ☛ Apple’s long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been found

    Back to the story, though. I also gave Pierre some tips for using the restore CD in an emulator. Nowadays, my advice is outdated because it’s much easier to use Apple restore CDs in at least one emulator — MAME has come a long way in the last few years. He figured out a bunch more stuff on his own after that, including trying it in his own Performa 450 (not 550), but the bottom line was that the recovery partition was nowhere to be found.

    Well, sort of. He found that the process of restoring from the CD actually did create a recovery partition. Here’s a screenshot of the partitioning from inside of Apple HD SC Setup while booted from the Performa CD, after formatting the hard drive by clicking the Initialize button in the main window: [...]

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ India investigates whether Uber makes iPhone users pay more

    Even if rideshare companies are charging iPhone users more, it’s not going to impact most Indian citizens because feature phones and low-cost Android handsets dominate the local market.

  • The Verge ☛ The Sonos app fiasco: how a great audio brand nearly ruined its reputation

    In May 2024, Sonos released a completely rebuilt and overhauled mobile app for Android and iOS. The new software was meant to improve performance, make the app feel more customizable, and allow for new features in the future. But customers immediately complained about countless bugs, degraded Sonos speaker system performance, and features that had gone missing.

  • Riccardo Mori ☛ Rotten for a while now | Riccardo Mori

    So no, I wouldn’t really put Antennagate on the bullshitting list. The subtle bullshitting can be found in all instances of design/manufacturing defects or issues where Apple blatantly downplayed the problem or the number of devices (and thus people) affected by it.

  • Matt Cool ☛ Mattbcool X Account Compromised: That is not Me

    @mattbcool on X is compromised, I got pwned! The new owners managed to change the email associated with my account and X apparently can’t/won’t fix for now.

  • Jonas Brusman ☛ Minecraft cross-play between Playstation, Switch and Mac

    The problem is that the kids play on a PlayStation 5 and a Nintendo Switch, while we parents play on Mac computers, and Minecraft doesn't support cross-play between the Bedrock (consoles) and Java Edition (Mac/PC).

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Axios ☛ AI voice cloning scams remain rampant but largely unregulated

      Why it matters: That tech can have legitimate accessibility and automation benefits — but it can also be an easy-to-use tool for scammers. Despite that threat, many products' guardrails can be easily sidestepped, a new assessment found.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Fruit companies and AI credibility

      Apple’s AI tools were obvious nonsense from the moment they were announced, just as every genAI tool has been. They lost credibility the moment they bought into the hype, not when it failed to deliver in the most foreseeable ways possible.

    • Manton Reece ☛ AI's impact on the open web

      She also gets at something I tried to articulate in one of my posts last year about putting up roadblocks for crawlers. We don’t want to make the web worse in the process of protecting content from AI training. Molly again: [...]

    • Chris Coyier ☛ AI Slop Podcasts?

      This is all making me feel like this show is AI generated slop. “Slop” meaning extremely low effort. Someone downloaded a video of the Bluey episode and fed it to the right LLM with the right prompt, got a script, had the script read, and called it a podcast. Someone pointed me to Eleven Labs as a likely source of the good quality voice.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Send Pivot to AI a beer a month to keep the stories coming

      It’s time to rattle the can and ask you lovely people to send money to Pivot to AI, to keep the daily stories pumping.

    • NL Times ☛ Dozens of women targeted by AI-generated nudes, experts raise alarm

      Reports of digitally manipulated nude images rose from nine in the previous year to 59, marking a significant increase. At the same time, the availability of such AI-powered services grew by 45 percent, with RTL Nieuws identifying 47 apps and websites that allow users to submit photos and receive digitally altered, undressed versions.

      Victims experience the same distress as if real nude photos of them were leaked, research shows. The impact is particularly severe for young girls, affecting their self-image and mental well-being. Women make up 99 percent of reported victims.

    • India Times ☛ Apple's Siri boss admits AI delays are ‘ugly and embarrassing’: This was not one of the situations where we … - The Times of India

      Walker acknowledged that the company's decision to promote the technology before it was ready had worsened the situation. "This was not one of these situations where we get to show people our plan after it's done. We showed people before," he said, as reported by Mark Gurman of Bloomberg. The delayed features, which would allow Siri to tap into users' personal data and better respond to queries, were unveiled last June at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. Despite being heavily marketed as a key selling point for the iPhone 16, the company revealed last week that these enhancements would be postponed indefinitely.

    • The New Stack ☛ Poisoning the Well and Other Generative AI Risks

      But it is the owner of the well that concerns this post. Think of the well as all your platform’s public data. That is, anything you or your organisation share with the public. Words, documents, conversations, API, visuals, everything. Keeping the water as clear as possible represents public trust in your organisation. Over the long run, hoping your bike is less attractive to your neighbours is not a long term defensive solution, but poisoning is now a serious problem for all public platforms — and there is a major lesson here.

      The abuse of public data, and thus public identity, can quickly compromise the trustworthiness and functionality of a platform as well as their owners. While copying and summarising isn’t new — I can point to copies or summaries of my own posts from this publication being used in other nebulous online publications or platforms, probably without permission. What is new is the AI-powered ecosystem pipelines that threaten more than just one piece of creative output from one creator at a time. It can quickly subsume both content and identity.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ RIP Mark Klein, the engineer who exposed US domestic spying

      After a life working in telecoms, Klein realized he had helped the NSA wire up a listening station in AT&T's San Francisco switching facility - the infamous Room 641A - that was being used to illegally spy on Americans.

      The evidence he gathered and shared led to two lawsuits that exposed the extent to which US citizens were being spied on by their own government in the post-9/11 world. Klein faced legal pressure, death threats, and the constant fear of ruin, to get his story out and tell the public what was going on. But Klein regretted nothing.

    • The Verge ☛ A DOGE [sic] staffer broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted personal data

      According to the Treasury’s Friday filing, the department analyzed Elez’s laptop and email account, finding that he “did not make any alterations or changes to Bureau payment systems,” but did email a spreadsheet containing “a name (a person or an entity), a transaction type, and an amount of money” to two unnamed officials at the US General Services Administration.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading

      Start with Amazon's excuse for destroying your privacy: they want to do AI processing on the audio Alexa captures, and that is too computationally intensive for on-device processing. But that only raises another question: why does Amazon want to do this AI processing, even for customers who are happy with their Echo as-is, at the risk of infuriating and alienating millions of customers?

    • Privacy International ☛ Our challenge against UK's secret TCN powers

      A month ago, it was reported that the UK government demanded Apple Inc – maker of the iPhone, iPads, Macs and home computing devices – provide access to encrypted data in Apple’s cloud storage service, iCloud. This purported order threatens the privacy and security of users all over the world as it allegedly is global in scope. Apple responded by withdrawing its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) for UK users. Then Apple reportedly took the UK Government to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), a body tasked with reviewing certain surveillance measures.

      On 13 March 2025, we filed our own case with the IPT - alongside Liberty and two individuals - challenging the purported Technical Capability Notice (TCN) served on Apple.

    • [Repeat] OpenRightsGroup ☛ Make the Investigatory Powers Tribunal on Apple Encryption a Public Hearing

      Responding to news that Apple will be before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal on Friday, representatives from Big Brother Watch, Index on Censorship, and Open Rights Group have written to President of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the Rt Hon Lord Justice Singh, calling for the case to be made public.

    • [Repeat] OpenRightsGroup ☛ Joint letter: Make the Investigatory Powers Tribunal on Apple Encryption a Public Hearing

      Dear Lord Justice Singh,

      As organisations committed to defending privacy and freedom of expression rights, we are writing in response to reports that the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (‘IPT’) will be hearing Apple’s appeal against a Home Office Technical Capability Notice (‘TCN’) issued under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (the ‘IPA’) this Friday, 14 March 2025. Although the IPT can choose whether to hold hearings and whether to hold them in public or private, we invite you to make this process more transparent by opening this hearing to the public. [...]

    • Wired ☛ A New Era of Attacks on Encryption Is Starting to Heat Up

      End-to-end encryption is designed so only the sender and receiver of messages have access to their contents—governments, tech companies, and telecom providers can’t snoop on what people are saying. Those privacy and security guarantees have made encryption a target for law enforcement and governments for decades, because officials claim that the protection makes it prohibitively difficult to investigate urgent threats such as child sexual abuse material and terrorism.

      As a result, governments around the world have frequently proposed technical mechanisms to bypass encryption and allow access to messages for investigations. Cryptographers and technologists have repeatedly and definitively warned, though, that any backdoor created to access end-to-end encrypted communications could be exploited by hackers or authoritarian governments, compromising everyone’s safety. Additionally, it is likely that criminals would find ways to continue to use self-made encryption tools to conceal their messages, meaning that backdoors in mainstream products would succeed at undermining protections for the public without eliminating its use by bad actors.

• Defence/Aggression

  • US News And World Report ☛ Critics Warn Staff Cuts at Federal Agencies Overseeing US Dams Could Put Public Safety at Risk

    But a bureau hydrologist said they need people on the job to ensure the dams are working properly.

    “These are complex systems,” said the worker in the Midwest, who is still employed but spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of possible retaliation.

    Workers keep dams safe by monitoring data, identifying weaknesses and doing site exams to check for cracks and seepage.

    “As we scramble to get these screenings, as we lose institutional knowledge from people leaving or early retirement, we limit our ability to ensure public safety,” the worker added. “Having people available to respond to operational emergencies is critical. Cuts in staff threaten our ability to do this effectively.”

  • 404 Media ☛ TSA Says Its Credit Cards for Bomb-Sniffing Dogs Are Cut Off

    The statement follows an alleged internal email which said requests for dog food and vet visits had been put on hold.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Canada Was the First Test

    The collapsing relationship with Canada should be alarming to Americans—not just as a diplomatic crisis, but as a profound revelation of how foreign policy functions in a post-democratic framework. What we're witnessing isn't merely tension between allies; it's the deliberate replacement of institutional relationships with the personal whims of a sovereign executive.

  • VOA News ☛ Chinese officials look to limit social media and screen time in China

    While some youth in China admit to spending an excessive amount of time on the internet, many are skeptical about new government proposals aimed at regulating the time young Chinese spend online and on social media sites.

    In conversations at China’s annual political meetings that wrapped up in Beijing this week, retired international basketball star Yao Ming, called for some limits on internet access for young people in China. Yao was advocating for a plan that would mandate children turn off all electronics for one full day every academic semester and get outside and exercise.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Defense Innovation Unit picks four firms to test one-way drones

    Emeneker told Defense News that DIU picked proposals that took different tacks at addressing the need. While there was a requirement for a flight range of at least 50km, two of the drones have a range of about 100km and the other two can fly more than 1,000km. In its solicitation, DIU said the vehicles should be hard to detect and track, have several pathways for two-way communications and be equipped with mission planning software. It also called for modular systems that can integrate new hardware or software in a matter of hours.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Religious school leader appointed as Ofsted chairman for first time

    While in that role, the school became one of the first in the country to urge pupils to wear a hijab outside of school.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Dissenter ☛ Gabbard Singles Out Media That Allegedly Published 'Politically-Motivated Leaks'

  • Vox ☛ Richard Hanania interview on DEI, MAGA, and Trump

    This episode is not unique. Many Trump 2.0 decisions, from purging the federal workforce to re-hiring a DOGE employee who made racist comments online, have their origins in a small group of ring-wing intellectuals, what Vox’s Andrew Prokop has called the “very-online right.” This group encompasses well-known figures like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, as well as posters like Hanania.

    Today, Explained co-host Noel King recently spoke with Hanania about his journey from anonymously posting racist and misogynist diatribes to wielding real political influence in the early days of Trump’s second administration, and why he’s now grown disenchanted with the movement that adopted his ideas.

• Environment

  • La Prensa Latina ☛ Global concern over increased tourism to the Antarctica

    The Antarctica is a continent without owners, according to the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which designates it as a territory dedicated to peace and science, where the exploration of natural resources is not allowed, Roura recalls.

  • Associated Press ☛ A river ‘died' overnight in Zambia after an acidic waste spill at a Chinese-owned mine

    The spill happened on Feb. 18 when a tailings dam that holds acidic waste from a copper mine in the north of the country collapsed, according to investigators from the Engineering Institution of Zambia.

  • ABC ☛ A river ‘died' in Zambia after an acidic waste spill at a Chinese-owned mine

    The collapse allowed some 50 million liters of waste containing concentrated acid, dissolved solids and heavy metals to flow into a stream that links to the Kafue River, Zambia’s most important waterway, the engineering institution said.

  • Wired ☛ A Tanker Collision Threatens One of the UK’s Most Important Coastlines

    An oil tanker carrying jet fuel was recently hit by a cargo ship while at anchor 13 miles off the east coast of England. This set off a series of large explosions and a huge plume of black smoke, while a still unknown quantity of jet fuel has spilled into the sea.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Register UK ☛ AI bubble? What bubble? Datacenter investors still all in

      According to CoreWeave, its infrastructure using the GPU maker's DGX GB200 NVL72 server platform installed at the site will make it one of the largest Nvidia-based AI deployments in Europe.

      Bulk has secured 400 MW of renewable energy for the facility, with the potential to expand up to 1 GW.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Deep learning technique enhances lightning risk prediction for power grids

      Recently, researchers at the China National Energy Key Laboratory of Lightning Disaster Detection, Early Warning and Safety Protection, as well as the Laboratory of Lightning Monitoring and Protection Technology of State Grid Corporation of China, have made significant breakthroughs in lightning prediction. By developing a deep learning–based newscasting model, they can effectively predict the location and frequency trends of organized thunderstorms, providing robust support for predicting lightning risks to power grids. This research has been published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters.

    • RTL ☛ Electricity grid crash: New nationwide blackout hits Cuba, officials say

      With a worn-out electricity system, the island of 9.7 million inhabitants suffered three widespread blackouts in the final three months of 2024, two of them lasting several days each.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ OpenAI and Elon Musk agree to fast tracked trial over for-profit shift

    The parties agreed to delay a decision on whether the expedited case will be decided by a jury or solely by the judge, said the filing in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Financial technology provider Klarna files for IPO at reported $15B+ valuation

    Klarna’s buy now, pay later service allows consumers to split purchases into multiple monthly payments. The company doesn’t apply interest to transactions that are completed in up to four installments. For large transactions, Klarna provides the option to spread the purchase price across as many as 36 payments.

  • The Washington Post ☛ People love IRS Direct File for free tax filing. But it might die.

    I’ll explain what Direct File is, debunk myths about it and help you decide whether it’s a smart and safe option to file your return.

    However you do your taxes, Direct File’s undecided future is a chance to ask what we want from our government — and whether the tax authority can lead the way for effective online public services.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Spreadsheets of empire’: red tape goes back 4,000 years, say scientists after Iraq finds

    The red tape of government bureaucracy spans more than 4,000 years, according to new finds from the cradle of the world’s civilisations, Mesopotamia.

    Hundreds of administrative tablets – the earliest physical evidence of the first empire in recorded history – have been discovered by archaeologists from the British Museum and Iraq. These texts detail the minutiae of government and reveal a complex bureaucracy – the red tape of an ancient civilisation.

  • The Local DK ☛ ETA application glitch bars entry to UK for some British dual-nationals

    In April the UK will expand its Electronic Travel Authorisation to include EU, EEA, Swiss and Norwegian citizens, but as travellers begin to make their applications for the electronic visa waiver, some British dual-nationals have encountered a problem that is effectively barring them from entry to the UK.

  • [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ Google submits AI policy suggestions to the White House

    The two companies drafted the recommendations in response to an AI-focused executive order that President Donald Trump signed earlier this year. The order calls for the creation of a policy framework, dubbed the AI Action Plan, that will determine how the administration approaches the AI market. In February, the White House asked tech firms and other interested parties to submit ideas for the policy framework.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Day That Never Ends

    The contortion is as brazen as it is revealing. Under the National Emergencies Act, Congress has the power to terminate presidential emergency declarations—like the one Trump used to impose these tariffs. The law requires committee consideration within 15 calendar days after a resolution is introduced and a floor vote within three days after that.

    Republican leaders, however, inserted language into a procedural measure declaring that “Each day for the remainder of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day” for the purposes of this emergency. In other words, time has legally stopped flowing, creating a perpetual today where tomorrow never comes.

    This would be merely absurd if it weren't so profoundly dangerous.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • [Old] Center for Democracy & Technology ☛ Overview of the NetzDG Network Enforcement Law - Center for Democracy and Technology

    Providers have to maintain a procedure for handling complaints about purportedly unlawful content. That procedure has to take immediate notice of the complaint, and providers are obligated to remove or block access to “manifestly unlawful” content within 24 hours of receiving the complaint.

    For content that is unlawful but not “manifestly unlawful,” providers have a seven-day deadline to remove or block access to the unlawful content.

    Providers that receive more than 100 complaints about unlawful content per year will have to publish two German-language reports annually detailing the mechanisms in place to report unlawful content and the criteria used to evaluate the reported content, how the provider handled the complaints, and the number of complaints received.

  • [Old] Tech Policy Press ☛ Most Comments Deleted from Social Media Platforms in Germany, France, and Sweden Were Legal Speech — Why That Should Raise Concerns for Free Expression Online

    In the age of ubiquitous social media, the power to shape public discourse lies in the hands of a few digital giants. Yet, recent European regulations intended to curb "torrents of hate" online could be stifling free expression. As policymakers tout these measures as necessary for a safer internet, a critical question emerges—is legally permissible speech being removed from social media platforms?

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Official Refuses to Say Whether He Thinks Protest Is “Deportable Offense”

    After a few rounds of back and forth with Edgar giving similar responses about the immigration process, Martin asked: “Is any criticism of the United States government a deportable offense?”

    Edgar responded by implying that participating in a protest, one of the core tenets of free speech rights, is an offense that warrants punishment by the federal government.

  • TruthOut ☛ They Came for Mahmoud Khalil in the Night, and They Will Come for Us, Too

    Notably, the extremist group Betar US has claimed credit for Khalil’s detention, telling The Guardian that the organization has provided the Trump administration with a “deportation list” that includes “thousands of names” of students and faculty at U.S. colleges and universities who the organization says should be deported. The group claims to be in communication with Rubio, White House Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, Attorney General Pam Bondi and other members of the administration. The group recently issued a warning on X that the public should expect “naturalized citizens to start being picked up within the month.” (The administration does not have the legal authority to deport U.S. citizens, but Trump has expressed that his administration is “looking at” whether or not there’s a way to do it.)

  • Business Insider ☛ Meta's Defense on 'Careless People' Book Draws More Attention to It

    Sarah Wynn-Williams worked at Facebook from 2011 to 2017 — and her book, "Careless People," details what she said were a bunch of bad things the company did. It also contains allegations that Joel Kaplan — who is now Meta's chief global affairs officer — sexually harassed her. (Meta said this week that Kaplan had been cleared of the harassment allegations in 2017 after it investigated Wynn-Williams' complaint.)

    The book was released with hardly any pre-publishing fanfare: It was announced by its publisher, Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan, only a few days before it came out Tuesday. That's an unusually short timeline.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • RFERL ☛ Trump Signs Executive Order For Major Cuts To 7 Agencies, Including RFE/RL Overseer USAGM

    The USAGM is an independent US government agency that oversees the broadcasting of news and information in almost 50 languages to some 361 million people each week.

    The total budget request for the USAGM for Fiscal Year 2025 was $950 million to fund all of its operations and capital investments.

    This includes media outlets such as RFE/RL, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio Marti), Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN) and the Open Technology Fund.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Trump's cuts hit Voice of America, Radio Free Europe

    Workers at Voice of America (VOA) received an email on Saturday placing them on paid administrative leave "until otherwise notified" and instructing them not to enter the VOA offices or access its internal systems.

    Meanwhile, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, which are also funded by the US government, have seen their funding cut. All three outlets focus on broadcasting free information to audiences outside the US, including conflict zones like Ukraine, US rivals such as China and Russia, or dictatorships such as North Korea.

  • RTL ☛ Trump freezes VOA, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe

    President Donald Trump's administration on Saturday put journalists at Voice of America and other US-funded broadcasters on leave, abruptly freezing outlets long seen as critical to countering a Russian and Chinese information offensive.

    Hundreds of reporters and other staff at VOA, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe and other outlets received a weekend email saying they will be barred from their offices and should surrender press passes, office-issued telephones and other equipment.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ urges US Congress to stop Trump from gutting VOA parent as ‘mass suspensions’ begin

    In addition to VOA, USAGM funds Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and Radio Free Asia. VOA recorded weekly global audiences of more than 350 million in 2023, and RFE/RL reaches more than 47 million people in 23 countries every week. The agency operated with a budget of more than $886 million in 2024 and employed more than 3,500 people. USAGM also subsidizes annual training for hundreds of media professionals around the world.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Trump Signs Order to Gut Voice of America, Other Agencies

    The order instructs the agencies - largely little-known entities including one that provides funding for museums and libraries and one tackling homelessness - to reduce their operations to the bare minimum mandated by the law.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Dictator Trump declares it's "illegal" to criticize him the way CNN does (video)

    After checking off all the other boxes on his authoritarian road map, I was wondering when Trump would get around to threatening reporters for reporting the news.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • VOA News ☛ UN: Iran using drones to enforce hijab law

    A Friday report by the United Nations says Iran is using advanced technology, including drones, facial recognition and a citizen-reporting app to crack down on violations of its mandatory hijab laws.

    A key element of the effort is the government-backed Nazer app, which enables the police and "vetted" members of the public to report alleged violations by women in vehicles, including those in ambulances, mass transit and taxis.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ How Spotify's Premium Piracy Panic Played Out & What Pirates Did Next

    Reports of a major outage at Spotify spread like wildfire last week. Then a curious picture began to emerge, one of outages only affecting those using modified Spotify apps designed to provide the Premium service at the free tier price. News that the problem has now been fixed and those in need can download new pirate apps, means that many are rushing to do so. Whether that will end well seems to hang in the balance. Could go this way, or could go that.

  • The Register UK ☛ Pirate Bay backer Carl Lundström dies in plane crash • The Register

  • Heather J Meeker ☛ How to Get Lawyers to Use AI [Ed: How to Get Lawyers to Use LLM slop, according to a Microsoft-connected revisionist]

    Lawyers love to talk about using new technology to make their practice more efficient. All during my career, I’ve heard law firms touting the great benefits or knowledge management, Hey Hi (AI) (generative and non-generative) research and writing tools, and of course, getting lawyers to do their own administrative work. But unfortunately, they are better at talking … Continue reading "How to Get Lawyers to Use AI"