Leftovers

• Sean Conner ☛ Notes on blocking spam by filtering on ASN

  Unlike the web (or even Gemini or gopher) there isn't one dominant network here—it's all spread out. I don't think it's really worth the effort to block via ASN for spam. At least for my email server.

• Ruben Schade ☛ It’s my birthday 2025, and a silly purchase

  I really should just rebrand this site as a BSD and retrocomputing blog and be done with it.

• Andre Franca ☛ Between Two Languages

  At the same time, writing in both languages without a formal i18n setup feels messy and disorganized. I think readers find it confusing to navigate a site where some posts are in English and others in Portuguese. Consistency matters to me, not just in the quality of my writing, but the user experience. And yet, I keep circling back to the question: Is the trade-off worth it if it means I can better connect with thougts or my Portuguese-speaking audience?

  Another factor I cannot ignore is the nature of online visibility. English content has a higher chance of being discovered, specially through social sharing. Writing exclusively in Portuguese might create a more inclusive space for Brazilian readers, but it risks shrinking my audience significantly. And while I don’t write solely for external validation, Imagining that my posts are being read and appreciated gives me the motivation to keep this site going.

• Ryan Mulligan ☛ Blog Questions Challenge

  Blogging has always been a part of my web experience. Earliest I can remember is building my band a GeoCities website back in high school. I'd share short passages about new song ideas, how last night's show went, stuff like that. I also briefly had a Xanga blog running. My memory is totally faded on what exactly I wrote in there—I'm not eager to dig up high school feelings either—but fairly certain all of those entries are just lost digital history. Having an "online journal" was such a fresh idea at the time. Sharing felt more natural and real before the social media platforms took over. [blows raspberry] I've completely dated myself and probably sound like "old man yells at cloud" right now.

  Anyway, I pretty much stopped blogging for a while after high school. I turned my efforts back to pen on paper, keeping journals of lyrics, thoughts, and feelings mostly to myself. My dev-focused blogging that you may be familiar with really only spans the last decade, give or take a couple years.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Dithering images on my Retro Corner

  They were on the right track. If you open your chosen graphic in the GNU Image Manipulation Program (a program that desperately needs a rebrand), then choose Image → Mode → Indexed, you see this dialogue box: [...]

• [Old] Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Bryan Cantrill (and Friends!) on Technical Blogging

  The impetus for the Technical Blogging episode was me asking Bryan some questions about his blogging: how he got started, why he continues, the most surprising impact, and so on.

  That got Bryan thinking (and writing) about his blogging journey. In true Bryan collaborative fashion, he instantly assembled an impressive panel for an open discussion: [...]

• Science

  • New Yorker ☛ The Government’s Rock Librarian

    Her work was so quiet and fundamental—to academia and industry, all over the world—that Mary believed her job would be safe, even after President Donald Trump started making cuts to the federal workforce in January. There was also the fact that Trump seemed to be fixated on critical minerals. On his first day back in office, he issued an executive order on “Unleashing American Energy” that referenced U.S.G.S. and encouraged federal support for “critical mineral projects.” He was also trying to broker access to Ukraine’s mineral deposits, such as lithium, manganese, and graphite.

  • BBC ☛ Lost manuscript of Merlin and King Arthur legend read for the first time after centuries hidden inside another book

    Now, the 700-year-old fragment of Suite Vulgate du Merlin – an Old French manuscript so rare there are less than 40 surviving copies in the world – has been discovered by an archivist in Cambridge University Library, folded and stitched into the binding of the 16th-Century register.

    Using groundbreaking new technology, researchers at the library were able to digitally capture the most inaccessible parts of the fragile parchment without unfolding or unstitching it. This preserved the manuscript in situ and avoided irreparable damage – while simultaneously allowing the heavily faded fragment to be virtually unfolded, digitally enhanced and read for the first time in centuries.

  • The Register UK ☛ 50 years ago the last Saturn rocket rolled out

    The super heavy rockets were built and used for nine crewed flights to the Moon from December 1968 to December 1972, as well as for launching US space station Skylab in 1973.

  • Wired ☛ The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack

    One of the simplest, most over-studied organisms in the world is the C. elegans nematode. For 13 years, a project called OpenWorm has tried—and utterly failed—to simulate it.

• Career/Education

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ The Value of Experience

    There’s no shortcut to gaining experience. You can’t consume enough content to get it. You have to do.

  • The New Stack ☛ 5 Non-AI Reasons Why You Still Have Toil

    Toil — manual, repetitive tasks and sometimes dubbed “busy work” — had been steadily declining since 2020, thanks to automation and streamlined workflows. But our annual SRE Report revealed a surprising reversal, as the median of time spent on toil has stopped improving in 2025 and actually rose back to 2023 levels.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ The tale of Narcissus

    It's not exactly what's happening with smartphones, but I think about this story pretty frequently these days when the topic of phone addiction comes up. I think smartphones are too good a product to the point that they've maybe circled around to being bad overall (although I'm, not prepared to say that emphatically, it's just a thought). Maybe having an object in our pocket that makes the world's knowledge and entertainment accessible to us in seconds is too compelling a product for us mere humans. The dire state of kids in schools today resonates with me as the husband of a high school teacher who has independently told me very similar things about her students as is discussed in the linked article.

  • Ted Gioia ☛ What's Happening to Students? - by Ted Gioia

    How bad is it for educators right now?

    Check out this commentary from one experienced teacher, who finds more engaged students in prison than a college classroom.

    This comes from Corey McCall, a member of The Honest Broker community who recently posted this comment: [...]

• Hardware

  • USMC ☛ Oshkosh Defense unveils new variant of Marine remote fires vehicle

    The Marines first awarded a $40 million contract to Oshkosh to build the unmanned missile launcher after a prototyping phase ended in September 2023.

    Developers removed the JLTV cab and attached a missile launcher to build a mobile firing platform that can be operated autonomously.

  • Wired ☛ How Extropic Plans to Unseat Nvidia

    The company is developing a radical new kind of computer chip that harnesses the thermodynamic fluctuations that naturally occur within electronic circuits—and which are normally a headache for engineers—using them to perform highly efficient calculations with probabilities.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • David Geier: A blast from the antivax past hired to “prove” vaccines cause autism

    The longer President Donald Trump and his lackeys, particularly his Secretary of Health and Human Services, longtime antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., are in power, the more and more US federal science policy and infrastructure descend into a Lysenkoist dystopian hellscape. Sure, a couple of GOP Senators got cold feet about confirming antivax doc Dave Weldon as CDC Director, leading to his nomination being unexpectedly and suddenly pulled, but they had already voted to confirm RFK Jr. The Damage had been done and continues to be done, as Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary were just confirmed as NIH Director and FDA Commissioner, respectively. As you might recall, the CDC announced not too long ago that it would undertake an entirely unnecessary and useless study to test yet again the longtime favorite—and debunked—antivax hypothesis that vaccines cause autism. Of course, they didn’t describe it that way, but given the overwhelming evidence that vaccines do not cause or increase the risk of autism, that’s what the proposed study is: unnecessary, duplicative, and a pointless waste of resources. When I first learned of the study, I predicted that its outcome had been preordained and that it would be positive, because anyone RFK Jr. might pick to lead the study would guarantee it. I must admit that I did not foresee how low RFK would go, just how hard he’d scrape the bottom of the barrel of antivax “researchers” to find someone to provide him with his long-sought study showing vaccines to cause autism. He chose David Geier.

  • University of Michigan ☛ American kids are overmedicated

    As a result, children as young as 2 years old are diagnosed. Reasons have included frequent library chatter and an inability to sit still while listening to music. These are the symptoms of being young and curious, not a major concern meriting medical intervention.

  • EcoWatch ☛ U.S. Honeybee Deaths Reach Record High: Survey

    Honeybee deaths in the United States have surged to record highs, with commercial beekeepers reporting having lost an average of 62 percent of their colonies over the winter, according to an ongoing survey by nonprofit Project Apis m.

    Data for the survey was collected from 702 respondents who are responsible for roughly 1.84 million colonies — about 68 percent of the country’s bees.

  • Science Alert ☛ How You Make Your Coffee Could Affect Your Cholesterol Levels

    The team found that manual methods of brewing coffee generally resulted in lower diterpene levels than grabbing a cup from a machine, whether it be a brewing machine, a liquid-model machine, or a traditional espresso maker.

• Proprietary

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Ukraine Railway Cyberattack: Online Ticketing System Down

    While officials have reassured the public that train operations remain unaffected, work continues to restore the online ticketing service, which has been down for over 24 hours since the initial breach.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Futurism ☛ Tesla Forced to Change Name of "Full Self-Driving" in China, Since Its Cars Can't Fully Drive Themselves

      The carmaker has already run afoul of regulators for its misleading naming convention — after all, as Tesla admits on its website, the "Full Self-Driving" feature doesn't make good on its promise of fully autonomous driving and requires drivers to be ready to take over at all times.

    • Electrek ☛ Tesla drops 'FSD' from name of its driver-assist tech in China

      After a rocky rollout of its “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) system in China, Tesla is dropping “FSD” from the name of the system while it faces increased scrutiny from regulators.

      Last month, Tesla started rolling out a limited version of its FSD system in China, finally allowing driver assist features to be used on urban roads in the country after a long wait.

    • Reuters ☛ Tesla halts driving-assistance software trial in China, pending approval

      But in China, Tesla has been unable to train the system with data from its 2 million EVs because of the country's data laws. In late February, China's industry ministry issued new rules requiring autonomous driving-related over-the-air software upgrades to be subject to regulatory approval.

    • Vox ☛ The rise of chatbot “friends”

      The fact that something is already happening makes it even more important to have a sharper idea of what exactly is going on when humans become entangled with these “social AI” or “conversational AI” tools.

    • Press Gazette ☛ Faked cat in bird nest AI video withdrawn by news agency

      UK-based agency Newsflare has withdrawn a number of fake videos it distributed which appear to have been generated using AI.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI Data Poisoning

      It’s basically an AI-generated honeypot. And AI scraping is a growing problem: [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • The New Leaf Journal ☛ Creators and More and More Content

      I recently read an article in Marketing Brew by Ryan Barwick and Katie Hicks titled How Facebook lost its groove. I am not too interested in how Facebook lost its groove, not least because I have not had a Facebook account for about 15 years. To the extent I have covered Facebook, I recommended using feeds as an alternative to reading news and hot takes on the platform and made fun of its new AI integration dreams in dialogue form. But a few passages jumped out at me in this article – passages which tie in neatly to my recent February 19, 2025 article titled On Peacock’s Plan (referencing its users) to “feed them content” (which was in turn prompted by an article in Morning Brew, a sister publication of Marketing Brew). Before continuing to analyze a few passages from How Facebook lost its groove, please indulge me as I quote me from the Peacock article: [...]

    • Pedro ☛ Hosted in EU | Pedroblog

      I am particularly very happy that now Micro.blog offers the option to host your blog in Germany.

    • [Old] Ted Gioia ☛ The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn't Happening at College

      Scammers and hackers got more tech tools, while users got locked in—because those moves were profitable too.

      This is the context for my musings below on the humanities.

      I don’t want to summarize it here—I encourage you to read the whole thing. My only preamble is this: the humanities aren’t just something you talk about in a classroom, but are our core tools when the human societies that created and preserved them are under attack.

      Like right now.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Hiltzik: Who will own the genetic information held by 23andMe?

      The apparent denouement of this 19-year saga raises a number of questions for investors and consumers — including about Silicon Valley’s predilection for pouring money into what may be pie-in-the-sky healthcare claims, and about what may happen to the personal information that customers have turned over to 23andMe and that might now be sold to the highest bidder.

    • 404 Media ☛ Texans Might Soon Have to Show Photo ID to Buy a Dildo Online

      A new bill introduced by Angela Paxton, wife of Texas AG Ken Paxton, would impose privacy-invading age verification requirements on online sex toy retailers.

  • Confidentiality

    • Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Hitchcock's Notorious, Defence in Depth, and the weakness of Nazis

      When you look at a movie like Notorious made in 1946, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, you would have to remember that the audience at the time knew what was needed to make sure an enemy didn’t find out information that threatened the security of the nation.

• Defence/Aggression

  • YLE ☛ Government to propose deportation law extension

    The legislation was introduced to prevent Russia from using asylum seekers as a tool of "instrumentalised migration," directing them towards Finland's border. The government justified the law based on intelligence gathered by border authorities, though these details were not made public.

  • Techdirt ☛ The Collapse Of Republican Seriousness

    This statement deserves to be examined not merely as one senator’s gaffe but as a window into the complete collapse of serious thought within a once-substantive political movement.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Profiles in Cowardice and Cravenness

    Taken as a whole, this attack on law firms is nothing short of an assault on the very idea of an independent legal profession. For years, the profession has had a set of overarching principles that are thought to guide its members’ conduct. Among them: Clients should be able to hire whom they wish without worrying about government retribution, and lawyers should be free to zealously represent their clients without the threat of government retaliation. To say otherwise is to betray the fundamental value of fairness that undergirds our justice system. Trump’s actions are an attempt, bluntly speaking, to tilt the scales of justice by using the raw power of government coercion.

  • 404 Media ☛ When Your Threat Model Is Being a Moron

    This is all, of course, a very long way of saying that there is no messaging app that can protect you if you are wildly careless, or more generally an idiot. There is no threat modeling that can account for you sending information directly to someone who you do not want to have it, which is exactly what Pete Hegseth, national security advisor Michael Waltz, vice president JD Vance, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and a host of other top administration officials did when texting about their plans to bomb a suspected terrorist’s girlfriend’s apartment building in Yemen. When doing threat modeling from here on out, it is now unfortunately important to consider the question "Am I a moron?"

  • Wired ☛ SignalGate Isn’t About Signal

    As that name becomes a shorthand for the biggest public blunder of the second Trump administration to date, however, security and privacy experts who have promoted Signal as the best encrypted messaging tool available to the public want to be clear about one thing: SignalGate is not about Signal.

  • Politico LLC ☛ How secure is Signal? Cyber experts weigh in on Trump administration’s use of the encrypted app for war planning

    Regardless of app security, experts say communicating the military plans of the U.S. government in a non-classified space creates a massive security vulnerability.

  • The Register UK ☛ Signalgate storm brews up as journalist releases transcripts

    The conversation focused on plans to hit Yemen-based Houthi insurgents with airstrikes on March 15; Goldberg was present in the group during the build up to the assault and the aftermath, and this week disclosed he witnessed on Signal what one would comfortably assume is highly classified military materials.

    The editor then today released a copy of that private conversation after Team Trump tried to claim his account of the security fiasco was wrong and that the details weren't classified or even that sensitive. Here are the highlights.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Trump Team’s Denials Are Laughable

    This morning, the full context of one of the most stunning security breaches in modern military affairs became even clearer when Jeff and Shane released the texts. The messages show that the entire conversation should have been classified and held either in a secure location or over secure communications. (I held a security clearance for most of my career, and I saw information far less specific than this marked as classified.) Hegseth, in particular, was a volcano of military details that are always considered highly classified, spewing red-hot information about the strikes, the equipment to be used, the intelligence collected in deciding on targets, and the sequencing of events.

    None of this is funny. If any of this had leaked at the moment Hegseth blathered it over Signal, American servicepeople could have died. (As my friend David French at The New York Times wrote on Monday, if Hegseth had any honor at all, he wouldn’t wait to be fired. He’d resign.)

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing

    But ultimately, I think we have to conclude that Obama's strategy was a losing one. By putting his own organization into an induced coma between elections, Obama lost an important source of discipline and feedback that would have told him when his compromises overstepped the tolerance of the electorate – and the fact that Obama didn't have an organized base meant that his Democratic Party rivals and his Republican opponents could force him into bad compromises, as with the ACA.

    Contrast Obama with another "populist outsider" in the Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders. Sanders has never been afraid of his own base or their passion. Members of his staff disproportionately come from community and union organizing backgrounds. Think of the difference between Sanders' "Not me, US" and "Our revolution" slogans and Obama's dotcom URL, "MyBarackObama.com." Sanders' presidential campaigns were always organizing campaigns, and he's kept those going in non-election years.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Further | Absolute Fucking Clown Show | Opinion

    The latest evidence the regime is "a clown car driving against traffic on the interstate of leadership" was met with outrage, including among the GOP's own members and even some at the top: "Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing - Mike Waltz is a fucking idiot." The swift consensus: "Classified information should not be transmitted on unsecured channels – and certainly not to those without security clearances. Period.” Also, "Fubar" - "fucked up beyond all recognition” and, "We knew it was amateur hour, but good grief." Much of the rage was aimed at fascist, smirky, erratic, wildly unqualified Pete Hegseth, who's spent his brief reign erasing black, brown and female military history and braying about "accountability"; before that, he liked to critique Biden for handling classified info “flippantly” and blast Hillary - "Hey, this you?" - for not being in jail. VoteVets on Pete: "Gross incompetence." One critic deemed him "an incompetent, xenophobic, reckless, unprofessional, unserious, ignorant, war- mongering moron. What a prick," thus rendering especially surreal the thread's plaudits: "Good job, Pete!" "Powerful start!"

  • New York Times ☛ Reflecting on TikTok’s Role in Society as New Ban Deadline Approaches

    Last month, Mr. Trump told reporters that he could extend the deadline again. And while ByteDance hasn’t confirmed any plans to sell, Oracle, the data center company, and others have emerged as potential suitors.

  • The Verge ☛ Trump’s plans to save TikTok may fail to keep it online, Democrats warn | The Verge

    Three Democratic senators are urging President Donald Trump to work with Congress to save TikTok from going dark in the US after April 5th, rather than plow ahead with plans that could leave TikTok’s service providers open to hundreds of billions of dollars in liability.

  • Newsweek ☛ TikTok Ban: Senators Urge Trump to Give Company More Time - Newsweek

    The deadline for TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, to divest from its U.S. operations is April 5, 2025. That stems from a law passed in 2024 requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S.-controlled entity or face a nationwide ban.

    The divestment deadline was originally January 19, but President Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office that delayed enforcement by 75 days.

  • Reuters ☛ Senators urge Trump to back Congressional plan for TikTok sale extension

    President Donald Trump in January unilaterally extended the sale deadline from January 19 to April 5 by postponing enforcement of a law passed last year that requires ByteDance to sell a majority stake to U.S. owners or face a ban on the app in the United States.

    Trump said last month that he could further extend that deadline to give himself time to shepherd a deal.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Incompetent or Evil: A False Dichotomy

    But whenever I talk with other people about one of these disasters, I find them arguing about how to think about what’s happening. Are we looking at mind-boggling incompetence on the part of what Dan Drezner, using the technical language of international relations theory, calls “the dumbest motherfuckers alive”? Or are we looking at a sinister plot to destroy America as we know it?

    The answer is “yes.” These people are both incompetent and evil.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Spiegel ☛ Hegseth, Waltz, Gabbard: Private Data and Passwords of Senior U.S. Security Officials Found Online

    Most of these numbers and email addresses are apparently still in use, with some of them linked to profiles on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. They were used to create Dropbox accounts and profiles in apps that track running data. There are also WhatsApp profiles for the respective phone numbers and even Signal accounts in some cases.

  • Wired ☛ Mike Waltz Left His Venmo Friends List Public

    A Venmo account under the name “Michael Waltz,” carrying a profile photo of the national security adviser and connected to accounts bearing the names of people closely associated with him, was left open to the public until Wednesday afternoon. A WIRED analysis shows that the account revealed the names of hundreds of Waltz’s personal and professional associates, including journalists, military officers, lobbyists, and others—information a foreign intelligence service or other actors could exploit for any number of ends, experts say.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal

    These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat—the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz—we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.

    The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.

  • Axios ☛ Trump officials all but dare Atlantic to release Houthi strike texts

    Why it matters: The White House has confirmed the authenticity of the explosive text messages published by The Atlantic, but disputed Goldberg's claim that he withheld "operational details" about U.S. strikes in Yemen out of concern that they were classified.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ ‘Obviously classified’: Experts say Hegseth chat leaks invited danger

    In the chat, Hegseth included time stamps for when F-18 aircraft would launch and arrive at targets and when Tomahawk missiles would be fired at buildings controlled by Houthi members.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Rubio Didn't Raise U.S. Concerns Over Turkey Protests as Stated, Turkish Source Says

    But the source denied that Rubio had voiced concerns quite like that. "The issue was touched upon in a different way than how it was reflected in the social media post," said the source, who requested anonymity and declined to elaborate.

• Environment

  • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ U.S. Climate Youth Lose Decade-Long Lawsuit that Saw Plaintiffs Grow from Childhood to Adulthood

    Juliana v. United States, named after plaintiff Kelsey Juliana—was challenged repeatedly by the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, whose lawyers argued it sought to direct federal environmental and energy policies through the courts instead of the political process.

    Julia Olson, chief legal counsel for Our Children’s Trust, the nonprofit law firm that represented the plaintiffs, said the impact of the lawsuit “cannot be measured by the finality of this case alone.”

    “Juliana sparked a global youth-led movement for climate rights that continues to grow,” Olson said in a statement Monday. “It has empowered young people to demand their constitutional right to a safe climate and future. We’ve already secured important victories, and we will continue pushing forward.”

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Mining is an environmental and human rights nightmare. Battery recycling can ease that.

    Recycling could significantly reduce the need to extract virgin material, a process that is riddled with human rights and environmental concerns, such as the reliance on open pit mines in developing countries. Even beyond those worries, the Earth contains a finite source of minerals, and skyrocketing demand will squeeze supplies. The world currently extracts about 180,000 metric tons of lithium each year — and demand is expected to hit nearly 10 times that by 2050, as adoption of electric vehicles, battery storage, and other technology needed for a green transition surges. At those levels, there are only enough known reserves to last about 15 years. The projected runway for cobalt is even shorter.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ The amount of fresh water available for lithium mining is vastly overestimated, hydrologists warn

    New research into lithium mining in the "Lithium Triangle" of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia—source of more than half of the world's lithium resources—shows that the commonly accepted models used to estimate how much water is available for lithium extraction and what the environmental effects may be are off by more than an order of magnitude.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft dropping datacenter leases isn't AI Armageddon

      However, we'd argue there's a far simpler explanation as to why Microsoft might be pulling back on its datacenter leases: many datacenters can't handle the power and cooling demands created by high-end AI hardware.

      Nvidia's massive NVL72 rack-scale systems promise 30x or better performance for inference workloads, and four times better training performance compared to its Hopper GPUs. That performance comes at the expense of denser racks, higher power consumption and more waste heat production. Racks housing Nvidia’s latest are rated for 120kW of power, three times that of the typical Hopper rack. Liquid cooling is no longer an option but an inescapable requirement.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ China built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused.

      Just months ago, a boom in data center construction was at its height, fueled by both government and private investors. However, many newly built facilities are now sitting empty. According to people on the ground who spoke to MIT Technology Review—including contractors, an executive at a GPU server company, and project managers—most of the companies running these data centers are struggling to stay afloat. The local Chinese outlets Jiazi Guangnian and 36Kr report that up to 80% of China’s newly built computing resources remain unused.

    • The Local DK ☛ Will Europe's high-speed ‘Metro-style’ rail network really happen?

      “A truly integrated rail system is no longer just a matter of convenience; it’s a strategic necessity for Europe’s resilience in the 21st century," reads the 'Starline' report.

      “Designed like a Metro system, Starline changes how Europeans perceive their own continent – not as a collection of distant capitals, but as a single, fast-moving network where every connection, whether for people or goods, is within easy reach.”

    • The Verge ☛ E-bikes banned on London public transport after unsafe mods cause fires

      Transport for London (TfL) has announced that all non-folding e-bikes will be banned from the majority of London’s public transport network. The ban has been driven by the fire risk from regular bikes converted into e-bikes using DIY kits, but extends to purpose-built e-bikes too in the name of easier enforcement.

      The new ban comes into effect on March 31st, and applies to the London Underground, Overground, Elizabeth Line, and DLR. The only e-bikes that will be permitted on those services are folding e-bikes, which TfL says are less likely to have been converted into e-bikes using mod kits. That exemption will be a boon for Brompton and Gocycle, two London-based companies that focus on foldable models.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Giraffes for Peace

  • Overpopulation

    • [Old]

      Medium ☛ ‘Make Room! Make Room!’ Dystopian Warning from Harry Harrison

      The science fiction writers naturally established on the frontier of this movement. Philip K. Dick, Clifford Simak, and many others used their talent to draw pictures of the bleak future that will await us if nothing gonna change. Harry Harrison joined in the process.

      But he did not set out on apocalyptic visions of global proportions. His dystopia is different: a lingering, dreary nightmare of everyday routine hopelessness and despair. All action in the novel is set in New York City in 1999, crowded with 35 million inhabitants trapped in it.

• Finance

  • Rlang ☛ Collecting Stock Data Using R: A Quick Guide

    quantmod: The quantmod package is a favorite among financial analysts. It provides functions for quantitative financial modeling, including the retrieval of historical stock prices from sources such as Yahoo Finance. With quantmod, you can not only automate downloading the price history for a stock but also crank out a handful of charts in your favorite format.

    tidyquant: Another useful package is tidyquant, which unlocks an entire set of useful libraries within the tidyverse, which plays well with financial data. These additional capabilities simplify manipulating data, running basic studies on price action and integrating other visualizations.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Walrus ☛ DEI Was Always Flawed, but the Backlash Is Truly Alarming

    But I’m hardly the first person to have had questions about the gap between DEI’s promise and how it functions in reality. Activist, author, and academic Angela Davis wondered about it when she spoke at the University of Southern California in 2015: “I have a hard time accepting diversity as a synonym for justice,” she said. “Diversity is a corporate strategy. It’s a strategy designed to ensure that the institution functions in the same way that it functioned before, except now that you have some black faces and brown faces. It’s a difference that doesn’t make a difference.”

  • US Navy Times ☛ Some VA employees’ overtime pay will be delayed by software problems

    VA is one of the largest employers in the federal government, with around 480,000 staffers. An overtime pay issue affecting about 2% of that total would still be nearly 10,000 individuals.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ In the wake of Hegseth’s software memo, experts eye further change

    In the two weeks since Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a directive requiring the use of rapid procurement methods and contracting tools for all software acquisition, military officials and industry executives have expressed a mix of optimism and angst about the mandate, while also calling for more sweeping reforms to how the Pentagon develops, tests and funds software-heavy programs.

  • The Register UK ☛ Dell again sheds ten percent of staff in a year

    According to Dell’s Form 10-K, the formal regulatory filing that serves as an annual report rather than the glossy version produced for shareholders, it employed around 108,000 at the end of January. Last year’s Form 10-K revealed 13,000 layoffs and headcount of 120,000.

    Dell therefore let go ten percent of its staff last year and the year before.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ US imposes export restrictions on more Chinese tech firms

    The move was announced by the Bureau of Industry and Security, or BIS, a Commerce Department office tasked with enforcing trade controls. The 80 companies affected by the move are now on the agency’s Entity List database of organizations subject to export restrictions. Companies are added to the list by an interagency committee that includes representatives from the Commerce, Defense, State, Energy and Treasury departments.

  • The New Stack ☛ IT Leaders Brace for Tariff Fallout on Infrastructure and Cloud Costs

    It’s hard to know what’s next and how this will play out exactly, but economists and industry experts predict that most or all these costs will be passed on directly to buyers. This is troubling news for U.S. companies that rely on electronics and materials from across the globe to source technology products, build facilities (like data centers), and arm their workforces with the best productivity tools to compete.

  • The Register UK ☛ India ditches its 'Google Tax', perhaps to tickle Trump

    The tax is called an equalization levy, and since its introduction in 2016 has seen non-resident companies required to pay 6 percent of earnings derived from digital advertising. The measure was nicknamed the "Google Tax" and according to Indian media raised INR 3,343 Cr ($390 million) in the last financial year.

  • [Old] Roy Price ☛ Woke is the New Disco

    You would think that a campaign infused with Hollywood people would be able to make a commercial. But this failure reveals a deeper problem: the underlying contempt for the audience. Wokeness, both in politics and entertainment, carries within it a strong and explicit element of hostility – particularly toward white people and men. While this approach initially gained compliance through social pressure and corporate acquiescence a few years ago, such accommodations were, of course, temporary. Amongst the people, and in courtrooms, by 2024 wokeness has become toxic. To a large part of the audience, it is an embarrassing, widely resented, relic of the past, and the people need to see that acknowledged by candidates. They, especially men, need to see wokeness disavowed.

    At this point, it is not enough to be not woke. One must be anti-woke.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ The cost of getting too big

    Now put those numbers in the context of an Apple, a Microsoft, or a Google. Apple made some 390 billion in 2024, Google around 350, and Microsoft 260. A million is 0.0004% of Microsoft's revenues and 0.0002% of Apple’s. Something life-altering for me is not even a rounding error for a company at that scale. So what does move the needle when you’re that big?

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Record ☛ Austria uncovers alleged Russian disinformation campaign spreading lies about Ukraine

      The campaign was identified during an investigation into a Bulgarian woman accused of spying for Russia earlier this year. The intelligence agency analyzed electronic devices seized from her home, which led to the discovery of the alleged operation.

      According to Austria’s Interior Ministry, Russian intelligence has orchestrated a large-scale disinformation effort aimed at German-speaking countries, including Austria, following Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

    • Modern Diplomacy ☛ TikTok, CPEC and the Digital Battlefield

      The rapid surge in anti-CPEC propaganda on TikTok is alarming. In 2015, the number of such videos was just over 50, but by 2024, this number has exceeded 1,200, accumulating more than 35 million views in Balochistan alone. These groups have learned to manipulate TikTok’s algorithm to ensure their content reaches a wider audience, especially among impressionable youth. The problem is not just the content itself but the way the platform’s algorithm amplifies divisive narratives, allowing anti-CPEC hashtags like #StopCPEC to trend over 500 times, reaching more than 15 million users since 2018. The peak in such content coincides with key phases of the project, indicating a well-coordinated campaign designed to sabotage economic progress and fuel instability.

    • RTL ☛ 'End of cash': ECB's digital euro sparks flurry of online misinformation

      ECB chief Christine Lagarde's recent comments on the digital euro have reignited online misinformation, underscoring growing public mistrust and the communication challenges facing the ECB as it explores a potential launch of the controversial currency.

      European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde's recent remarks on a "digital euro" prompted a fresh wave of misinformation online, highlighting an uphill battle ahead to convince the public of the project's merits.

      The decision to create a digital euro -- essentially an electronic form of cash backed by the ECB -- has not been made yet and any possible launch would be years away.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ Otherwise Objectionable: The Internet At Risk

    Imagine an internet where every website faced an impossible choice: either carefully review every single post before it goes live (making them essentially TV stations), or allow absolutely everything with zero moderation. This nightmare scenario wasn’t hypothetical — it was exactly what the infamous Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy ruling threatened to create, before Section 230 saved us from that fate.

    In the latest episode of our Section 230 podcast series “Otherwise Objectionable,” I spoke with the two people who prevented this disaster — Section 230’s authors Chris Cox and Ron Wyden — along with the lawyer who represented Stratton Oakmont (yes, the “Wolf of Wall Street” firm) in the lawsuit that nearly broke the [Internet].

  • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ Morocco: Activist Sentenced for Peaceful Speech

    A Casablanca Court on March 3, 2025, sentenced a prominent activist, Fouad Abdelmoumni, to six months in prison and fines over a Facebook post, Human Rights Watch, and DAWN said today. Moroccan authorities should urgently end their intensifying repression of activists, journalists, and human rights defenders solely for exercising their right to free speech and overturn his conviction.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Vladimir Kara-Murza discusses Russian fight for democracy

    “If you can assassinate the leader of the opposition in the middle of your capital city and completely get away with it, you can do absolutely anything,” Kara-Murza said. “We are not only speaking about a dictator, we are not only speaking about a usurper, but we’re also speaking about a murderer.”

    Kara-Murza also highlighted key Russian figures who have been imprisoned for speaking out on their critiques of the Russian government, particularly those who oppose the war between Russia and Ukraine.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ: House hearing on PBS and NPR a ‘dangerous mischaracterization’ of U.S. public media

    “Millions of Americans from major cities to rural areas rely on NPR and PBS for news and information on natural disasters, political developments, and so much more,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg in New York. “NPR and PBS provide an essential public service. Casting them as propaganda machines undeserving of taxpayer support is a dangerous mischaracterization that threatens to rob Americans of the vital reporting they need to make decisions about their lives.”

  • RFERL ☛ Court Orders USAGM To Halt Moves To Close Radio Free Europe

    The United States District Court in Washington, D.C. said in its ruling on March 25 that the agency likely acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” in terminating RFE/RL’s grant and that the actions would cause the broadcaster "irreparable harm" if carried out.

  • El País ☛ Trump fulfills Fidel Castro’s lifelong dream by silencing Radio Televisión Martí

    What will happen next with Radio TV Martí remains to be seen. But with this measure, Trump has fulfilled a lifelong dream of Fidel Castro: silencing a media outlet opposed to his government that broadcast from Miami and, since its creation on October 20, 1985, had managed to break the media siege he had imposed on Cuba. The Republican’s order has meant that, for the first time in almost four decades, Radio Martí will not reach Cuban homes, nor will its website publish the denunciation of a political prisoner on the island, nor testimony about an episode of repression against dissidents by the government of Miguel Díaz-Canel.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Meduza ☛ How Russian prison officers are ‘honing their cruelty’ on Ukrainian POWs

    Russian prisons have long been notorious for widespread torture, but over the past three years, the problem has worsened significantly. Human rights advocates say this escalation is directly related to the full-scale war in Ukraine. One activist told the independent outlet Okno Media that police officers and prison guards “hone their cruelty” by torturing Ukrainian prisoners while serving in the military — then bring those same practices back to their civilian jobs. Meduza shares an abridged translation of Okno’s report.

  • Techdirt ☛ MLB Misplaces Its Spine & Alters Language To Its Diversity Programs

    Major League Baseball, it appears, does not. For over a decade, MLB has had a DEI program and a webpage for that program. For a sport that has a celebrated diverse workforce, particularly at the player level, MLB’s program has been touted as quite effective. Last week, however, some changes were made to the program’s webpage.

  • 404 Media ☛ AOL’s AI Image Captions Terribly Describe Attempted Murder

    Many accessibility groups warn that alt text should not just be fully automated like appears to be happening in the AOL article. Like everything else AI, AI for alt text often misses the broader context, gets things wrong, has a wildly inappropriate tone, or generates errors. “Since somewhat accurate alt text is arguably better than no alt text, there’s a defensible use case for generative A.I., particularly when websites have thousands of untagged images,” the Bureau of Internet Accessibility, a company that helps websites comply with accessibility requirements, wrote in a blog post. “For now, though, we strongly recommend writing alt text yourself.”

  • Heather Cox Richardson ☛ March 25, 2025

    In 1933, after the people had rejected Hoover’s plan to let the Depression burn itself out, President-elect Roosevelt asked Perkins to serve as Secretary of Labor in his administration. She accepted only on the condition that he back her goals: unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child labor. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”

    She promised to find out.

    Once in office, Perkins was a driving force behind the administration’s massive investment in public works projects to get people back to work. She urged the government to spend $3.3 billion on schools, roads, housing, and post offices. Those projects employed more than a million people in 1934.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • [Old] Network World ☛ Internet2 at 20: Alive and kicking

    Contrary to any misinterpretations of the Internet2 mission statement, it was not intended to be a replacement or “new” Internet. And because it has been rather quiet lately, some people may have mistakenly figured it was dead.

    Internet2 started out to improve bandwidth to research universities, but it evolved into offering a whole range of services, because if it stuck to just bringing high-speed networks to universities, once they had the high-speed networks, Internet2 would be irrelevant. So it branched out. And because of that, people lost track of what Internet2 was about.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• NYPost ☛ Exclusive | European Union to fine Meta up to $1B or more for breaching Digital Markets Act: sources

  The European Commission, the EU’s antitrust watchdog, is expected to conclude that Meta is not in compliance with the Digital Markets Act, sources close to the situation told The Post on Monday.

  The landmark law took effect in 2023 and applies tough competition rules on Meta and six other companies deemed [Internet] gatekeepers.

• [Old] European Commission ☛ Commission fines Meta

  The European Commission has fined Meta €797.72 million for breaching EU antitrust rules by tying its online classified ads service Facebook Marketplace to its personal social network Facebook and by imposing unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers.

• Copyrights

  • US News And World Report ☛ Judge Allows Newspaper Copyright Lawsuit Against OpenAI to Proceed

    The Times has said OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft have threatened its livelihood by effectively stealing billions of dollars worth of work by its journalists, in some cases spitting out Times’ material verbatim to people who seek answers from generative artificial intelligence like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ New York judge allows New York Times copyright lawsuit against OpenAI to proceed

    A federal judge in New York today rejected OpenAI‘s bid to dismiss a copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times accusing the company of scraping data from its content to train its products.

    U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein narrowed the scope of the case, but the core of the copyright infringement claim will remain. No opinion was given, but Stein said one would come “expeditiously.” The decision will delight the Times, The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which have joined forces on the lawsuit.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Music publishers’ injunction against AI firm Anthropic fails

    This matches how courts are treating AI training cases lately — you’ve got to show the visible harm.

    Raw Story and Alternet lost against OpenAI for not showing actual harm. But Thomson Reuters beat Ross Intelligence’s machine learning system for spitting out large chunks of Westlaw because Ross was a direct competitor ripping off their stuff.

  • Walled Culture ☛ Yes, let’s “Make it Fair” – by recognising that copyright has failed to reward creators properly

    We’ve been here before. Five years ago, I wrote a post about the EU Copyright Directive’s plans for an ancillary copyright, also known as the snippet or link tax. One of the key arguments by the newspaper publishers was that this new tax was needed so that journalists were compensated when their writing appeared in search results and elsewhere. As I showed back then, the amounts involved would be negligible. In fact, few EU countries have even bothered to implement the provision on allocating a share to journalists, underlining how pointless it all was. At the time, the European Commission insisted on behalf of its publishing friends that ancillary copyright was absolutely necessary because: [...]

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Anthropic Scores Preliminary Victory in AI-Copyright Clash Against Music Companies

    In a closely watched battle between music publishers and AI developer Anthropic, a California court has denied a request to halt the use of copyrighted song lyrics with its refusal to grant a preliminary injunction. The court ruled that the music publisher failed to demonstrate immediate and irreparable harm, while the scope of the requested restrictions was "ever-expanding".