Leftovers

• Sean Monahan ☛ the millennial friend group crisis

  Whereas new opportunities (or tragedies) may have caused your grandparents to move. The next neighborhood, the next church, the next bowling league, the next bridge club was populated by people broadly the same as those that populated your last one: people with kids and jobs and marriages. The neighborhood-based friend group was a strong bond, but inelastic, easily broken by a cross-country move. Yet, it could be easily replicated in any geography because it was always based on who you were in the present. Again: a neighborhood-based friend group is defined by geography, community, and life stage.

  Today, that’s not the case.

• SusamPal ☛ More Purple Links, Please - Susam's Quick Notes

  Visiting a web page and finding purple links in the article is a comforting experience. It means I'm familiar with most of the references the article makes to other content. Each purple link serves as a small marker of a prior journey, a reminder that I've explored certain paths before. This sense of familiarity adds to the comfort and fluidity of browsing the Web.

• Bruce Schneier ☛ Rational Astrologies and Security - Schneier on Security

  John Kelsey and I wrote a short paper for the Rossfest Festschrift: “Rational Astrologies and Security“: [...]

• Career/Education

  • Pro Publica ☛ Conservatives on Texas School Board Escalate Fight Over Textbooks and What Students Learn

    In 2022, conservative groups celebrated a “great victory” over “wokeified” curriculum when the Texas State Board of Education squashed proposed social studies requirements for schools that included teaching kindergartners how Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez “advocated for positive change.”

    Another win came a year later as the state board rejected several textbooks that some Republicans argued could promote a “radical environmental agenda” because they linked climate change to human behavior or presented what conservatives perceived to be a negative portrayal of fossil fuels.

  • The New Leaf Journal ☛ “Like Literally Like”

    My first article about things I overheard on the street tackled like as a verbal tic, specifically the increasing tendency of people to say like every third or fourth word while employing it interchangeably as various parts of speech. I thought of one sentence in particular from that article: [...]

  • Luigi Mozzillo ☛ This is a long story · mzll

    I was a software web developer, a lot of time ago. Then I started coordinating a team of developers and selling customized software products. The company I was collaborating with became part of a holding company to deal with communication (with my ex-partner, then CEO of the newco) and ITC (me, CTO of the newco). It was the end of 2019 and the beginning of a new adventure.

  • Ben Kuhn ☛ Advice for time management as a manager

    As a team lead, this isn’t going to work, because much more of your work is interrupt-driven or gets blocked for long periods of time. One-on-ones! Code reviews! Design reviews! Prioritization meetings! Project check-ins! All of these are subject to an external schedule rather than being the type of thing that you can push on in a single focused block until it’s done.

• Hardware

  • PC World ☛ 6 reasons why wired headphones are better than wireless

    Wired headphones are a more practical and reliable option than the wireless variety. You don’t have to recharge them and they deliver better audio quality because they don’t have to compress sound like Bluetooth models. They’re also more affordable, as they lack the complex components that make up wireless models. Whether you’re looking for superior sound or a more sustainable option, wired headphones are a great choice.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Revelator ☛ In Ohio, Facing a Future Without Clean Water

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Brain-computer interfaces face a critical test

    Implanted BCIs are electrodes put in paralyzed people’s brains so they can use imagined movements to send commands from their neurons through a wire, or via radio, to a computer. In this way, they can control a computer cursor or, in few cases, produce speech.

  • KFF ☛ Americans’ Challenges with Health Care Costs

    About half of U.S. adults say it is difficult to afford health care costs, and one in four say they or a family member in their household had problems paying for health care in the past 12 months. Younger adults, those with lower incomes, adults in fair or poor health, and the uninsured are particularly likely to report problems affording health care in the past year.

• Proprietary

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • The Register UK ☛ Wikimedia Foundation bemoans AI bot bandwidth burden

      That's due to the Wikimedia Foundation's caching scheme which distributes popular content to regional data centers around the globe for better performance. Bots visit pages without respect to their popularity, and their requests for less popular content means that material has to be fetched from the core data center, which consumes more computing resources.

      The heedlessness of ill-behaved bots has been a common complaint over the past year or so among those operating computing infrastructure for open source projects, as the Wikimedians themselves noted by pointing to our recent report on the matter.

    • Nolan Lawson ☛ AI ambivalence | Read the Tea Leaves

      That said, while everybody else was either reacting with horror or delight at the tidal wave of gen-AI hype, I maintained my skepticism. At the end of the day, all of this technology was still just number-crunching – brute force trying to approximate the hidden logic that Chomsky had discovered. I acknowledged that there was some room for statistics – Peter Norvig’s essay mentioning the story of an Englishman ordering an “ale” and getting served an “eel” due to the Great Vowel Shift still sticks in my brain – but overall I doubted that mere stats could ever approach anything close to human intelligence.

    • 4Square Media Pty Ltd ☛ Canva Lays Off Technical Writers Amid AI Push [Ed: LLM is not a writer, it is worthless slop. This is about layoffs being spun as buzzwords.]

      Sydney-based design software company Canva has made its first known round of redundancies, laying off 10 of its 12 technical writers just months after encouraging employees to embrace AI tools in their workflows.

  • Social Control Media

    • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Digital Teens Unraveled: Adolescence Series Shocks with Social Media’s Dark Influence

      The adolescence is a four episode series, with each episode one hour long, presenting a blunt look on the repercussions of social media exposure on young minds.

      The show highlights how social media algorithms ensure certain content on our feed despite our choice, and how a single tick or view floods our feed with similar content with no regulations for the exposure of children.

    • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Jalisco cartel lures recruits on social media with fake jobs, kills those who resist

      For that last category, authorities say the cartel uses social platforms — they’ve identified at least 60 pages — to offer fake job opportunities, especially as security guards, with weekly salaries of $600, well above the average for such positions. Once they have the applicants, they force them to join the cartel.

      One recruit who reportedly survived the ranch has said that the cartel picked up recruits at bus stations under false pretenses and took them to the ranch where they were trained for a month in the use of weapons in addition to fitness training, Mexico’s Public Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch said. Those who refused or tried to escape were beaten, tortured and killed.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Shared RSS subscriptions for a software team

    Did you know that by adding .atom to the end of any public GitHub repository’s Releases page URL (like https://github.com/Hamatti/nhl-235/releases.atom), you get a feed of all the updates? It’s quite marvellous. I love how GitHub offers so many feeds for different things without having to reach to their API.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Digital Camera World ☛ The Peak Design Passport is a wallet that fits 3 passports – and yet still fits in a pocket

      Peak Design says the wallet is constructed with TerraShell Ultra, which is an abrasion-resistant material. A magnetic closure keeps the contents in place, while an RFID-blacking shell is also incorporated into the design.

    • FPF ☛ Locking down Signal

      Signal offers end-to-end encryption, meaning only conversational participants can read the messages. While regular phone calls or text messages allow your phone company to unscramble your conversations, even the team behind Signal can’t listen to them.

      You don’t need to take their word for it. Signal is open source, meaning the code is available for anyone to review, and security audit specialists have torn it apart and confirmed as much. Signal retains nearly no metadata, or information about who spoke to whom and when. (The developers proved it in court.)

• Defence/Aggression

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Wisconsin Rejected Billionaire Rule

    Even more obscenely, Musk offered to pay people $100 to sign a petition hawked by one of his organizations calling on voters to reject “activist judges.” He then invited people who had voted to a campaign event in Wisconsin promising to give $1 million to two attendees, resulting in the tasteless spectacle of the billionaire on a stage handing giant checks inscribed “one million dollars” to people who had voted for his preferred candidate.

  • [Old] Stanford University ☛ Yes, Vote-Buying Is Illegal. But Why? - Media Coverage - Stanford Law School

    Well, sure. But the gimmick is perfectly legal. The Supreme Court has long held that the First Amendment protects a candidate’s promise that her victory will mean more money in voters’ pockets. What Cherfilus-McCormick has done is what office-seekers do all the time. A public promise of cash payments to a large number of voters isn’t illegal; a private promise of money just to me would be. As the legal scholar Pamela Karlan memorably put it, candidates are allowed to buy votes wholesale but not retail.

  • [Old] uni Cornell ☛ 18 U.S. Code § 597 - Expenditures to influence voting | U.S. Code | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute

  • Wired ☛ Cybersecurity Professor Faced China-Funding Inquiry Before Disappearing, Sources Say

    Wang regularly collaborated with researchers at the Institute of Information Engineering (IIE) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government-funded cybersecurity research lab. In papers, Wang and his coauthors disclosed that the IIE scholars received funding from sources such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China, but that Wang was being supported by US grants. It’s not uncommon for professors at US institutions to collaborate with researchers in China, and there's no public evidence to suggest that the arrangements were improper.

    According to the unsigned statement’s title and metadata, it appears to have been authored by Ninghui Li, a computer science professor at Purdue who has collaborated on research with Wang since at least 2006. The pair also serve together on the board of the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control (SIGSAC), which aims “to develop the information security profession by sponsoring high quality research conferences and workshops,” according to the Association for Computer Machinery’s website. Li did not respond to emailed requests for comment nor a voicemail left on his office phone.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Why No One Is Challenging Trump's Executive Order That Keeps TikTok Running

    The Republican president's executive orders have spurred more than 130 lawsuits in the little more than two months he has been in office, but this one barely generated a peep. None of those suits challenges his temporary block of the 2024 law that banned the popular social video app after the deadline passed for it to be sold by ByteDance, its China-based parent company.

    Few of the 431 members of the House of Representatives and the Senate who voted for the law have complained.

  • Google ☛ DPRK IT Workers Expanding in Scope and Scale

    Since our September 2024 report outlining the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) IT worker threat, the scope and scale of their operations has continued to expand. These individuals pose as legitimate remote workers to infiltrate companies and generate revenue for the regime. This places organizations that hire DPRK IT workers at risk of espionage, data theft, and disruption.

    In collaboration with partners, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified an increase of active operations in Europe, confirming the threat's expansion beyond the United States. This growth is coupled with evolving tactics, such as intensified extortion campaigns and the move to conduct operations within corporate virtualized infrastructure.

  • The Register UK ☛ North Korea’s fake tech workers now targeting Europe

    The hermit kingdom (DPRK) runs a corps of operatives who apply for remote tech jobs and, if they get them, funnel their salaries to Kim Jong Un’s coffers. Some also run malware on company computers, steal their employers’ data, then demand ransom payments. Many just do a bad job – sometimes for several employers at a time – so they can be paid multiple salaries.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Pro Publica ☛ Reps Demand HUD Halt Cryptocurrency Experiments

      Three federal lawmakers are calling on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to stop any initiatives involving cryptocurrency and the blockchain, saying the scantly regulated technologies should be kept far away from the agency’s work overseeing the nation’s housing sector.

      In a letter to HUD Secretary Scott Turner on Wednesday, Reps. Maxine Waters, Stephen Lynch and Emanuel Cleaver sharply criticized the agency for considering such experiments, given cryptocurrency’s volatility and vulnerability to fraud. The Democratic representatives, all members of the House Financial Services Committee, warned of repeating “the same mistakes of the past,” noting that the 2008 financial crisis was triggered in part by the proliferation of risky financial assets in the housing market.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ US electricity prices are surging - These Louisiana companies want out

      “Horrifying.” That’s what one consumer advocate calls a projected 90% increase in electricity prices for customers of electric utility, Entergy Louisiana, between 2018 and 2030.

      Similar spikes in the cost of electricity are happening across the United States driven by the need to run data centers and power-hungry industries, replace old power plants and repair damaged infrastructure from more frequent storms, floods and fires supercharged by climate change.

      “Louisiana is a microcosm of what’s happening nationally, but it is happening at a breakneck speed in a way that residents … are not protected. And that is not OK,” said Logan Atkinson Burke, executive director of the nonprofit Alliance for Affordable Energy.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Northern Michigan — no stranger to wild weather — tries to cope with days of no power

      Schools in several counties were closed again at the top of the Lower Peninsula. Sheriff’s deputies armed with chain saws cleared roads and were even delivering oxygen for the homebound. Drivers idled their vehicles in gas station lines that were blocks long.

    • [Repeat] Tom's Hardware ☛ Arm aims to capture 50% of data center CPU market in 2025

      Arm Holdings hopes to increase its share of the global data center CPU market from 15% to 50% by the end of 2025. Mohamed Awad, senior vice president of infrastructure at Arm, made the claim in an interview with Reuters. The company pins its hopes primarily on AI servers, so consider offerings like Nvidia's GB200 and GB300 machines, custom silicon from large cloud service providers, and Ampere Computing-based systems.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Wired ☛ In Search of the Last Wild Axolotls

      The figures tell it best. In 1998 there were 6,000 axolotls per square kilometer in their natural habitat, the district of Xochimilco in the south of Mexico City. By 2004, that figure had fallen to just 1,000, and by 2008 it was only 100. A 2014 census of Mexico’s wild axolotl population found only 36 of the creatures. Now, a decade later, a new survey is underway. Xochimilco is home to the remnants of a vast canal network built by the Aztecs, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, though the district is facing ecological deterioration as a result of increasing urbanization.

  • Overpopulation

    • [Repeat] OpenRightsGroup ☛ Briefing: Data Use and Access Bill Henry VIII powers threaten democracy and UK adequacy

      This would allow governments to change primary legislation according to the politics of the day, undermining trust in digital verification services and endangering democratic safeguards. It would also introduce significant risks for the retaining of the UK adequacy status: either these powers would never be used, and thus they don’t need be provided, or they would be used in ways that would guarantee the invalidation of the UK adequacy decision.

    • Vox ☛ Would affordable housing boost America’s birth rates?

      As housing supply and birth rates have become twin focal points in America’s policy conversation, a growing number of wonks are drawing connections between these two, arguing that expanding housing supply wouldn’t just ease affordability — it could also help boost fertility.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Recycling more water would help fix Colorado River's woes, report says

      California isn’t recycling nearly enough water, according to a new report by UCLA researchers, who say the state should treat and reuse more wastewater to help address the Colorado River’s chronic shortages.

    • University of California, Los Angeles ☛ Can water reuse save the Colorado? An analysis of wastewater recycling in the Colorado River Basin states [PDF]

      To this end, through our investigation we have developed a set of recommendations for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other federal and state partners and stakeholders. Additional detail and guidance for these recommendations is presented in the main report body and conclusions. These recommendations include the following: [...]

• Finance

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: What’s wrong with tariffs

    But Trump couldn't have pulled this trick off without the Dem establishment's total unwillingness to confront the hollowness of their economic policies. From Pelosi's "We're capitalists and that's the way it is" to Hillary Clinton's catastrophic campaign slogan, "America is already great," the Dems' answer to workers' fear and anger was, "You are wrong, everything is fine." Imagine having had your house stolen in the foreclosure crisis after Obama decided to "foam the runways" for the banks by letting them steal their borrowers' homes and then hearing Hillary Clinton tell you "America is already great": [...]

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Pivot to AI ☛ OpenAI signs its $40 billion deal with SoftBank! Or maybe $30 billion, probably

    That $30 billion from SoftBank may not exist yet. SoftBank is currently looking for someone to loan them $16 billion to help fund all of this.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Trump-loving network Newsmax is a hot stock on Wall Street

    The early performance of the stock is likely being driven by President Trump’s enthusiastic supporters, who are super-served by Newsmax commentators providing a positive narrative for the White House throughout the day. Newsmax touted the IPO in its programming.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Atlantic ☛ Can I Teach the First Amendment If I Only Have a Green Card?

    Protections on free speech look weaker than they did when I became a permanent resident.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Telegraph takes down Stop Funding Hate article after legal threat

    By the end of Friday The Telegraph offered to remove the article and cover Stop Funding Hate’s legal costs, although it did not accept any liability.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Shared Logic of Censorship

    Whether from religious conservatives or progressive educators, today’s book bans share a common moral claim: some texts are too harmful to circulate. But when ideologies compete to control knowledge, the pluralism and inquiry democracy needs begin to erode.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ supports legal efforts to protect RFE/RL, VOA after Trump executive order

    “For generations, VOA and RFE/RL have delivered reporting that broke the stranglehold of propaganda in closed societies. In doing so, their journalists have empowered millions of people across the world with the facts,” said CPJ Chief Global Affairs Officer Gypsy Guillén Kaiser. “By dismantling USAGM, the U.S. government is weakening the critical role of a free media and causing greater risk to journalists who have already paid a high price for reporting the facts.”

    CPJ’s research shows that RFE/RL and VOA journalists often put themselves at risk by reporting in highly censored countries.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Dissenter ☛ Abducted For Writing An Op-Ed

  • Pro Publica ☛ He Helped Kushners Crack Down on Tenants. Now He Helps Renters.

    The first time I saw Andrew Rabinowitz, it was in April 2017 at Baltimore District Court, where he was representing a property management company owned by the family of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. That day, the company had three cases against tenants at Dutch Village, one of the many large apartment complexes the Kushner Companies owned in the Baltimore area.

    One tenant was a Morgan State University student facing struggles typical of residents in the Kushner complexes. She had given notice that she was moving at the end of March, having tired of the perpetually clogged toilet and the ceiling leak in her closet. But when she paid March rent via the automated system tenants had to use, the money somehow ended up with an adjacent Kushner complex, and the company started eviction proceedings — even though she had already signaled her intent to leave a few weeks later.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Advertising Banned on All Sites Blocked in Russia Starting September

    A bill that aims to further undermine operators of restricted platforms including Meta, Instagram, and X will have a much wider effect when it's expected to come into force in September. The amendments ban the placement of advertising on any blocked site in Russia, regardless of reason. Submitted in 2024, the bill will affect thousands of pirate sites and Russia's rapidly growing influencer market.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Creative Commons ☛ Reciprocity in the Age of AI

    But, with the mainstream emergence of generative AI, that social agreement has come into question and come under threat, with knock-on consequences for the greater commons. Current approaches to building commercial foundation models lack reciprocity. No one shares photos of ptarmigans to get rich, no one contributes to articles about Huldufólk​ seeking fame. It is about sharing knowledge. But when that shared knowledge is opaquely ingested, credit is not given, and the crawlers ramp up server activity (and fees) to the degree where the human experience is degraded, folks are demotivated to continue contributing.

  • The Register UK ☛ Study suggests OpenAI isn't waiting for copyright exemption

    By non-public, the authors mean books that are available for humans from behind a paywall, and aren't publicly available to read for free unless you count sites that illegally pirate this kind of material.

    The trio set out to determine whether GPT-4o had, without the publisher's permission, ingested 34 copyrighted O'Reilly Media books. To probe the model, which powers the world-famous ChatGPT, they performed so-called DE-COP inference attacks described in this 2024 pre-press paper.