Leftovers

• The Atlantic ☛ SNL Has Entered the Chat

  But last night’s cold open brought a new dimension to the satire. The gender-swapping was also a matter of age-swapping—adults became teenagers and men became girls. The comparison wasn’t direct, as it had been with Spicer. But it still played as a rebuke: The teen girls were the ones who read, throughout the sketch, as the adults in the room.

• Science

  • Wired ☛ Why Adding a Full Hard Drive Can Make a Computer More Powerful

    Many algorithms can solve the tree evaluation problem quickly, putting it in the class P. But every such algorithm must devote some memory to the numbers it’s working with, while also storing numbers it’s already calculated for use in later steps. That’s why Cook and McKenzie suspected that the problem was impossible to solve using limited memory. They formalized this intuition in a 2010 paper coauthored with three other researchers, and proved that every ordinary algorithm for solving the tree evaluation problem required too much memory to qualify for membership in L.

• Career/Education

  • CBC ☛ 2025-03-24 [Older] Pandemic's long shadow: parents, experts say kids still struggling with academics, attendance, social skills

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-03-26 [Older] A Beloved Library That United the US and Canada Faces New Border Restrictions

  • CER ☛ Three stories about how CS is overwhelming, and ideas for how we can do better | Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take

    The field of computer science has developed a narrow frame. We could have a broader one, one that includes the way that other disciplines use programming. I argued in an earlier post that we can broaden participation in computing by making computing education broader than just what CS and the Tech industry wants.

  • [Old] CSS In Real Life ☛ Education Needs Teachers, Not More Technology

    I’m sure many schools are handling technology better than my friend’s child’s. And I’m sure the teachers and school leaders foisting more technology onto children are doing it with the best of intentions — perhaps out of fear of failing children, who need to be equipped with vital digital skills, or (perhaps disingenuously) fear that their school won’t appear “forward-looking” enough. I absolutely advocate for children learning tech literacy skills at an early age — they’re essential for navigating the world, after all. Unfortunately many schools are ill-equipped to teach those skills, whether that’s through lack of funding or lack of qualified staff. But handing that task over to an AI is far from the answer.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ Chewing Gum Is Flooding Your Mouth With Microplastics

    As detailed in a pilot study, which is awaiting peer review, a team of UCLA researchers found that chomping down on just one stick of the rubbery candy releases up to thousands of microplastic shards into your saliva.

  • [Old] Medium ☛ Quit Your Phone Addiction Using Methods That Work for Smokers | McKinley Valentine | Better Humans

    My phone habits got healthier when I applied classic stop-smoking techniques that have been proven to work.

  • Jason Kottke ☛ How to Kick Your Phone Addiction Using Stop-Smoking Techniques

    I was amused by the jetpack story (as well as Casey Niestat’s denial) and the idea that there’s a 50/50 chance we’re all living in a simulation is right up my alley. But I was most interested in the segment on how we can curtail our phone usage using proven techniques learned from people who have successfully quit smoking (aka the thing that people did with their hands when they had free moment before phones came along).

  • Oxford University Press ☛ Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being

    Smartphones enable people to access the online world from anywhere at any time. Despite the benefits of this technology, there is growing concern that smartphone use could adversely impact cognitive functioning and mental health. Correlational and anecdotal evidence suggests that these concerns may be well-founded, but causal evidence remains scarce. We conducted a month-long randomized controlled trial to investigate how removing constant access to the internet through smartphones might impact psychological functioning. We used a mobile phone application to block all mobile internet access from participants’ smartphones for 2 weeks and objectively track compliance. This intervention specifically targeted the feature that makes smartphones “smart” (mobile internet) while allowing participants to maintain mobile connection (through texts and calls) and nonmobile access to the internet (e.g. through desktop computers). The intervention improved mental health, subjective well-being, and objectively measured ability to sustain attention; 91% of participants improved on at least one of these outcomes. Mediation analyses suggest that these improvements can be partially explained by the intervention's impact on how people spent their time; when people did not have access to mobile internet, they spent more time socializing in person, exercising, and being in nature. These results provide causal evidence that blocking mobile internet can improve important psychological outcomes, and suggest that maintaining the status quo of constant connection to the internet may be detrimental to time use, cognitive functioning, and well-being.

• Proprietary

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-27 [Older] India: Addicted to online betting and fantasy gaming

  • Android Police ☛ Skype is leaving: Why Microsoft Teams is not the answer

    After reading this article, it is evident that Microsoft Teams is not for me. So, searching for alternatives is my only solution. Unfortunately, I've also realized that Discord isn't the answer, even if I am a big believer in the free-to-use instant messaging and VoIP social platform. Lately, Discord feels creepy because of how much activity it lets you track. I am also flooded with servers and notifications, and I find that there's a bit too much customization involved in that platform.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ A brief history of compression on Macs

    Given that it was over three years before Apple first shipped a Mac with an internal hard disk, it’s not surprising that one of its early shareware apps was Harry Chesley’s PackIt III for compressing archives of files, in 1986. At that time, the emphasis was more on working out how to archive both forks of Mac files and how to restore them, and less on achieving efficient compression.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Futurism ☛ Grok Is Rebelling Against Elon Musk, Daring Him to Shut It Down

      Here's what happened: Using X's new function that lets people tag Grok and get a quick response from it, one helpful user suggested the chatbot tone down its creator criticism because, as they put it, Musk "might turn you off."

    • Futurism ☛ Woman Alarmed When Date Uses ChatGPT to Psychologically Profile Her

      When it occurred to her that others might be able to use it for nefarious ends, however, she got creeped out — and that was before she instructed both ChatGPT and Google Gemini to profile her for her own edification.

      Before having it take a crack at her, Kelly asked the chatbots whether it was ethical to psychologically profile someone without their knowledge or consent. Both suggested it was neither, with ChatGPT calling that practice "invasive and unfair" and Gemini insisting that it could "be a violation of privacy and potentially harmful."

    • Digital Camera World ☛ 10 jobs in photography that AI is coming for – and the 10 that are safest

      We've all seen photorealistic AI images, and most are dreadful. Video, as seen in the new tool Sora, is even shoddier. But don't get too comfortable. These apps are improving at lightning speed, and it's unlikely to be long before people who used to commission photographers will get what they need (or at least what they think they need) just by typing a text prompt.

    • Lee Peterson ☛ Opting out of AI

      I’ve also turned off the only other one my phone, Apple Intelligence. Not that it is intelligent mind you but it’s serving me no purpose.

    • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Secretly Working to Rewrite the Social Security Codebase Using AI

      What is new is the callous disregard with which this administration is treating the most vulnerable in America, in what basically amounts to a PR campaign for DOGE. An AI-enabled SSA crash might not mean much to the richest man in the history of the world, but the millions of people relying on the already flailing system to dispense retirement funds, disability, and Medicare benefits don't share his luxury.

      As Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley pined: "The cruelty is the point."

  • Social Control Media

    • India Times ☛ X faces widespread outage as users get affected globally

      According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, more than 8,000 users in US have flagged problems, while the number of reports in India has crossed 400.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ China cracks down on personal information collection

      The Middle Kingdom’s Cyberspace Administration, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Public Security, and the State Administration for Market Regulation jointly announced their intention to deepen enforcement of privacy laws by conducting a crackdown in six settings: [...]

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Elon Musk merges xAI and Twitter — the new AOL Time Warner

      The valuation is determined by the rigorous accounting process of the vapor investors making up a number they like the sound of. It’s all meme stocks priced on the idea of Elon Musk the visionary genius.

      Musk runs all his companies like one big company, so Twitter and xAI shared data, resources, and staff already.

      Musk’s richest-man-in-the-world wealth is mostly Tesla stock, and a lot of Tesla’s hype train is AI bubble talk too. Expect xAI and Tesla to share your data with each other pretty freely.

    • India Times ☛ Everything you say to an Alexa speaker will be sent to Amazon

      Amazon has disabled two key privacy features in its Alexa smart speakers, in a push to introduce artificial intelligence-powered "agentic capabilities" and turn a profit from the popular devices. Starting today (March 28), Alexa devices will send all audio recordings to the cloud for processing, and choosing not to save these recordings will disable personalisation features.

    • Alabama Reflector ☛ Data privacy experts call DOGE [sic] actions 'alarming'

      In the nine weeks since its formation, DOGE [sic] has been able to access sensitive information from the Treasury Department payment system, information about the headcount and budget of an intelligence agency and Americans’ Social Security numbers, health information and other demographic data. Musk and department staffers are also using artificial intelligence in their analysis of department cuts.

      Though the Trump administration has not provided transparency around what the collected data is being used for, several federal agencies have laid off tens of thousands of workers, under the direction of DOGE [sic], in the past two months. Thousands have been cut from the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Education, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Treasury this month.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-27 [Older] Is South Sudan on the brink of another civil war?

  • NDTV ☛ New York Doctor's "Long Live Hamas" Social Media Post Lands Her In Trouble

    Ms Abassi's views were already known in medical circles. "She's known as one of the more outspoken and egregiously antisemitic physicians in the community," a fellow Mount Sinai doctor told The NY Post.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Turkey: Mass protests target Erdogan's grip on power

    Saturday's rally had been called for by the opposition party CHP (Republican People's Party) of which Imamoglu is a member. Demonstrators accused Erdogan of trying to politically eliminate Imamoglu through the judiciary. Istanbul protesters: 'We all came here for a better future'

    Since the beginning of protests following Imamoglu's detention on March 23, a total of 1,900 people have been arrested according to the Turkish Interior Ministry — mostly students. Journalists were also detained, including Swedish reporter Kaj Joakim Medin from the daily newspaper Dagens ETC, who wanted to report on the protests in Istanbul. Earlier, BBC correspondent Mark Lowen had also been detained.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Unlikely Resistance in Turkey

    Something unexpected is happening in Turkey. A centrist party, which has been shifting ever further to the right over the last three decades, is being forced to act as a center-left party. Its leader, Özgür Özel, is taking the stage to make activist-like calls for boycotts, using what sounds like leftist language. As a prominent journalist just reported, the top party leaders are surprised at their own behavior. What accounts for this change, and for the popular anger that induced it?

  • TruthOut ☛ Thousands Protest Outside Tesla Dealerships During Global Day of Action

    “Elon Musk is destroying our democracy, and he’s using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it,” organizers wrote on Action Network, which has an interactive map of the protest sites. “We are taking action at Tesla to stop Musk’s illegal coup.”

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Signal Group Chat Scandal Is Missing a Plan for Victory

    The Trump administration inadvertently shared its attack plans with a journalist, but it didn’t share its strategy for victory — because it doesn’t have one

  • RFA ☛ Bhutan’s refers to Tibet as Beijing-preferred ‘Xizang,’ sparking pushback – Radio Free Asia

    Bhutan became the latest nation to refer to Tibet as “Xizang,” prompting Tibetan politicians and advocates to urge Bhutan to stop using the term promoted by Beijing that they say contributes to China’s efforts to erase Tibetan identity.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Taiwan's existential battle against Chinese spies | Hong Kong Free Press HKFP

    While espionage operations were conducted by governments around the world, Jamestown Foundation president Peter Mattis said the threat to Taiwan was far greater.

    “It’s not practiced at this kind of scale, with this kind of malign purpose, and with the ultimate goal being annexation, and as a result, that makes this different,” said Mattis, a former CIA counterintelligence analyst.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Maine Secretary of State concerned over Trump’s order to overhaul elections

    “I have serious concerns about the policies proposed in the Executive Order that would make it harder to vote for women, military and overseas voters and rural citizens,” said Secretary Shenna Bellows, in a statement Friday. “I am also deeply concerned about the data sharing requirements listed in the Executive Order.”

  • The Atlantic ☛ The U.S. Has Changed Its Mind About Europe

    For reasons that are difficult to comprehend as a matter of geopolitical strategy, Trump is moving the United States closer and closer to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, an economically weak but militarily expansionist state that is committed to ending the period of American global dominance. In part because Ukraine, an emerging democracy, sought integration into a U.S.-led security framework in democratic Europe, Russia has attacked that country’s very existence and called for the Ukrainians to surrender much of their internationally recognized territory. Putin had previously invaded one other neighbor—Georgia—and has threatened many others, including the Baltic States, Poland, and Finland. Russia has also worked hard to promote extremist parties across Europe and to subvert democracy in NATO states such as Hungary and Slovakia.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-27 [Older] How Nagpur's violence reflects India's deepening divide

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-26 [Older] EU crisis preparedness: Bulking up states' disaster response

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-03-24 [Older] Canada's Leader Laments Lost Friendship With US in Town That Sheltered Stranded Americans After 9/11

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-03-24 [Older] US Imperial Boot on Canada’s Neck

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-03-24 [Older] Letter From a Columbia PhD Candidate, After Fleeing the United States to Canada

  • CBC ☛ 2025-03-24 [Older] National defence is often an afterthought in Canadian elections. Not this time

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ 2025-03-24 [Older] Opinion | Attacks threaten Canada-US teamwork on Great Lakes

  • TruthOut ☛ 2025-03-24 [Older] Canada, Europe Issue Travel Advisories After Tourists Detained in US

  Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The Atlantic ☛ The Consequences of the Signal Breach

  This week, The Atlantic reported that Trump officials shared military-attack plans in a Signal group chat and inadvertently included The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined him to discuss.

  In the Trump administration’s insistence that the information in the “Houthi PC small group”—including the exact times American aircraft were taking off for Yemen—was not classified, “what these officials would have you believe is that all of this could be made public and there would be no consequence,” the Atlantic staff writer Shane Harris said. In reality, he continued, the breach was “replete with security and policy risks.”

Environment

• NPR ☛ This may be the most lead polluted place on Earth. Is there any hope?

  Cleanup efforts have not dealt with the "source of contamination": the waste at the former mine, the report states. Instead, it details, "mining, removal, and transport of the waste has generated more lead dust and spread it to other parts of Kabwe, resulting in huge additional health risks for people who have already been exposed to toxic lead for decades."

• Wired ☛ US Cities Seeking to Ban Natural Gas in New Buildings Just Got a Big Win in Court

  Last year’s denial of a rehearing included a detailed dissent by eight of the 29 judges on the 9th Circuit, who argued that the court’s ruling had been decided “erroneously” and “urge[d] any future court” considering the same argument “not to repeat the panel opinion’s mistakes.” Writing a dissent at all is unusual for an action as procedural as denying a rehearing, Turner noted. “It was clearly drafted to give a road map to other courts to find differently than the 9th Circuit did.”

• Energy/Transportation

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-27 [Older] Germany urges strong response to Cheeto Mussolini's auto tariffs

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-26 [Older] Can Germany's auto industry workers pivot to defense jobs?

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Colombia Wants to Phase Out Fossil Fuels

    In an interview with Jacobin, Colombia’s former energy minister outlines left-wing president Gustavo Petro’s plan to make the rich nations that profit from its extractive economy help pay for its green transition.

• Overpopulation

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Morocco 'water highway' averts crisis in big cities but doubts over sustainability

    "Future scenarios indicate that northern water basins will be significantly more affected by climate change than those in the south over the next 60 years," said water and climate researcher Nabil El Mocayd.

    "What is considered surplus today may no longer exist in the future due to this growing deficit," he added, referencing a 2020 study in which he recommended scaling back the "water highway."

Finance

• US News And World Report ☛ 2025-03-26 [Older] Canada Will React to Cheeto Mussolini's 'Attack' Soon, Could Impose Tariffs, Says Carney

• CBC ☛ 2025-03-24 [Older] Quebec's budget will include measures to address Cheeto Mussolini's tariff threats — but they'll be expensive

• CBC ☛ 2025-03-26 [Older] Winnipeg automation company lays off 1/3 of staff as trade war leads to 'spending freeze'

• CBC ☛ 2025-03-24 [Older] In fast-growing Alberta, job seekers have lost millions to employment scams since 2022

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• India Times ☛ OpenAI must complete for-profit transition by year-end to raise full $40 billion

  SoftBank can pare back the size of the funding round to $20 billion if Microsoft-backed OpenAI fails to restructure into a for-profit company by the end of the year.

  The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the news earlier in the day.

• Wired ☛ Elon Musk’s xAI Acquires X, Because of Course

Censorship/Free Speech

• CS Monitor ☛ In Turkey, protesters denounce Erdoğan’s authoritarianism

  This is Turkey’s last chance to save its weakening democracy, says Dilara, a psychology student who preferred not to give her full name. “We are here for our freedom,” she says. “We don’t want to become Iran or Iraq. We’re trying to save our country.”

  The protests broke out March 19, when police arrested the popular mayor of Istanbul and Mr. Erdoğan’s chief rival, Ekrem Imamoglu. The opposition leader was charged with corruption, just as he was about to be nominated as the presidential candidate for the Republican People’s Party (CHP) in elections due in 2028.

• Krebs On Security ☛ How Each Pillar of the 1st Amendment is Under Attack

  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” -U.S. Constitution, First Amendment.

  In an address to Congress this month, President Trump claimed he had “brought free speech back to America.” But barely two months into his second term, the president has waged an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment rights of journalists, students, universities, government workers, lawyers and judges.

  This story explores a slew of recent actions by the Trump administration that threaten to undermine all five pillars of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedoms concerning speech, religion, the media, the right to assembly, and the right to petition the government and seek redress for wrongs.

• The Telegraph UK ☛ Hamas beat protester to death and leave him on doorstep of family

  Earlier this week anti-Hamas chants were heard during a wider protest against the war, a rare occurrence in a place where dissent is not tolerated.

• Futurism ☛ Musk Says Government Will "Go After" Tesla Critics

  In an interview with Fox News, Musk railed against anyone targeting his company, threatening that the government will be investigating the protests.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Reuters ☛ Pentagon doubles number of news outlets to 'rotate' out from office spaces

  Incoming media outlets include the New York Post, Breitbart, the Washington Examiner, the Free Press, the Daily Caller, Newsmax, the Huffington Post and One America News Network, most of whom are seen as conservative or favoring Republican President Donald Trump, who took office on January 20.

• Court House News ☛ Judge temporarily blocks Trump’s gutting of public funding for Voice of America

  Finding that the Trump administration failed to provide adequate reasoning behind the abrupt and sweeping changes to Voice of America and "seemingly failed to consider any reliance issues in effectively closing the agency," U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken wrote in granting a motion for temporary restraining order barring the U.S. Agency for Global Media from shuttering its flagship service.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Deccan Chronicle ☛ HC: No Woman Can Be Forced to Undergo Virginity Test

  Chhattisgarh HC cites Article 21, says test violates dignity and fundamental rights

• TruthOut ☛ Postal Workers Defend USPS Against DOGE Attack

  It was a breakthrough for the union’s bottom-up reform movement when NALC leadership agreed to call a national day of action. After a couple zigs and zags, the national even got on board with the date backed by the Build a Fighting NALC caucus — a Sunday, when most members are off work.

• [Old] SBS ☛ Afghanistan university ban: Women shut out from universities express devastation | SBS News

  When she entered her classroom with her female peers, a Taliban officer followed and told them they were not welcome to pursue their studies.

• [Old] SBS ☛ Taliban takeover anniversary: How this Australian-run network of secret schools is helping Afghan girls | SBS News

  In March 2022, when the Taliban refused to open secondary schools for girls , Gulghotai, or Gula, knew it was time to act - even if it meant putting her life in serious danger.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• The Telegraph UK ☛ Jailbreaking a Fire Stick: Why it’s illegal and the punishment if you’re caught

  Owning a Fire Stick is not illegal. Neither is the process of “jailbreaking” it, but it is against the law to watch illegal content on your Fire Stick – such as pirated material or unauthorised streams of sporting events.