Leftovers

• Amos Wenger ☛ More devops than I bargained for

  So I decided to move from an x86_64 dedicated server with 32 gigs of RAM and 16 cores, which cost me about 41 euros per month, to an aarch64 instance with 8 Ampere cores, 16 gigs of RAM, which costs 12 euros a month!

  See, it’s not a significant saving, but it’s the first in my fleet of servers that is arm64 — And I figured, well, I recently set up continuous integration and continuous delivery for my CMS software so that it will build and ship x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu and aarch64-apple-darwin binaries to as Forgejo generic packages and a private Homebrew tap so… what’s one more target?

• Digital Camera World ☛ Gaming the system: I talked to the photographer who tricked the AI industry

  I’m a writer and photographer, blending both on my website, inspired by my travels over almost 13 years. I embrace a nomadic lifestyle, immersing myself in local cultures to get a feel for the place and document whatever I stumble upon in words and pictures.

• Science

  • The Conversation ☛ Nasa and Esa want to bring Martian rocks to Earth. Here’s what will happen to the samples once they get here

    So what will happen to the samples once they arrive on Earth?

    Nasa’s Perseverance rover has already been doing the hard work of collecting the samples. The rover has been exploring a Martian location known as Jezero Crater since landing in February 2021. Along the way, it has used its drill to extract cores – cylindrical samples of rock – from Martian rocks, depositing them in sample tubes on the floor of the crater.

  • Wired ☛ Scientists Claim to Have Brought Back the Dire Wolf

    Colossal has made three dire wolves so far and plans to make a total of seven or eight, according to Lamm. The wolves that WIRED glimpsed, Romulus and Remus, were born in October. (They’re named after the twin brothers from Roman mythology who were nursed as infants by a she-wolf). A third dire wolf, Khaleesi—a nod to Game of Thrones character Daenerys Targaryen—was born in January.

• Career/Education

  • Digital Camera World ☛ This guy used a camera as a webcam for his interview with Canon. Now he designs cameras for a living

    The man in charge of product planning for Canon's EOS R cameras got his job after using a camera as a webcam for his online interview. And it probably helped that his boss was responsible for designing the EOS Webcam Utility software that made it possible.

  • Jeff Bridgforth ☛ Lessons from a yearlong job search

    This week, I’m starting a new role, and I couldn’t be more excited to jump in. I’ve had about three weeks between accepting the offer and my first day, and I’ve used that time to reflect on the past year and think about what I’ve learned, both personally and professionally. Today, I want to share a few of the professional lessons that really stood out to me during my job search.

• Hardware

  • PC World ☛ PC insiders weigh in on tariffs: 'Expect pain at the cash register.'

    For a fuller grasp of the situation, read on. I’ve broken things down into a series of questions and answers, so you can more quickly find the info you most want to know.

    Also, if you’re Canadian, I’m sorry to inform you—this affects you too.

  • Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Typing using my keyboard (the other kind)

    This kind of works for a piano-style keyboard. If you have a full size keyboard, you get 88 keys. You can use 52 of those for the letters you need for English[2] and 10 for digits. Then you have 26 left. That's more than enough for a few punctuation marks and other niceties.

    It only kind of works, though, because it sounds pretty terrible. You end up making melodies that don't make a lot of sense, and do not stay confined to a given key signature.

  • Michał Sapka ☛ How little metal do you need?

    This site is self hosted. It runs in my living room, inside a FreeBSD virtual machine, running on a Synology 920+ NAS. My home internet has 40Mbs upload.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Annie Mueller ☛ Tomorrow might feel better

    Anyway a good rule I read somewhere long ago is something like Never trust how you feel about your life after 9pm.

    I’ve found it helpful to expand the rule a bit.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Trump is gutting the nation's environmental programs: What will it cost Americans?

    Two new reports from environmental watchdog groups outline how the administration's recent regulatory rollbacks, cuts to climate programs and promotion of fossil fuel production will significantly increase the cost of living for millions of people and bring about hundreds of thousands of premature deaths.

  • Wired ☛ States Are Banning Forever Chemicals. Industry Is Fighting Back

    As health and environmental concerns about forever chemicals mount nationally, New Mexico joins a small but growing number of states that are moving to limit—and, in some cases, ban—PFAS in consumer products. New Mexico is now the third state to pass a PFAS ban through the legislature. Ten other states have bans or limits on added PFAS in certain consumer products, including cookware, carpet, apparel, and cosmetics. This year, at least 29 states—a record number—have PFAS-related bills before state legislatures, according to an analysis of bills by Safer States, a network of state-based advocacy organizations working on issues around potentially unsafe chemicals.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Oracle tells customers its public cloud was compromised

    Claims of a cyberattack on Oracle’s cloud service emerged in late March when a miscreant using the handle “rose87168” boasted of cracking into two of Big Red's login servers for customers and harvesting around six million records, which included clients’ private security keys, encrypted credentials, and LDAP entries. The netizen put the info, involving thousands of organizations, up for sale on a cybercrime forum.

    The Safra Catz-run database giant swore blind the claims were false. It turns out the only thing false were the denials.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ Last Week on My Mac: Sequoia Spring

    A stroll through the version numbers of its bundled apps and /System/Library confirms the extent of changes. There was no point in my trying to compile an article listing them, as it might have been briefer to report what hasn’t changed. What’s more to the point is what’s new in 15.4, what are its Spring lambs?

  • Cassidy Williams ☛ Things I learned while upgrading my iPad

    I… learned a lot during this upgrade process, both in good and frustrating ways, and I wanted to pass along my learnings here since I fell down so many YouTube rabbit holes trying to solve my exact wants.

    If you have any knowledge of the Apple trade-in process, or even the common sense that “Apple is Apple” and that they change things a lot to make money… your reaction to this post might be, “well duh, Cassidy,” but I’m WRITING IT ANYWAY.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Apple is still the heavyweight champion of progress bar lies

    Yes, yes, there are -1 files remaining and they will take 9 minutes. Or maybe 17 hours. Who can know for sure. Nothing is real. No notes.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Namanyay Goel ☛ The day I taught AI to think like a Senior Developer

      I realized that AI IDEs don’t actually understand codebases — they’re just sophisticated autocomplete tools with good marketing. The emperor has no clothes, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.

    • Jan Lukas Else ☛ Mandated use of AI at work - Jan-Lukas Else

      But mandating the use of AI and expecting a specific efficiency increase (like a lump-sum improvement of 10%) is a step too much, in my opinion.

      When I write code, I need to understand what it’s actually doing. In my head, I try to go through the steps that the program takes. I definitely want to make sure the code has no unintended side effects.

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft's AI plan: Let OpenAI take the risks

      In a TV news interview last week, Suleyman argued it's more cost-effective to trail frontier model builders, including OpenAI that has taken billions from the Windows giant, by three to six months and build on their successes than to compete with them directly.

    • Daniel Lemire ☛ How helpful is AI?

      Do large language models (AI) make you 3x faster or only 3% faster? The answer depends on the quality of the work you are producing.

    • Antipope ☛ Living in interesting times

      But all that has changed because Trump has completely shat the economic bed. I'm not going to re-hash the reasons why everyone stopped using tariffs as an instrument of trade policy, let alone taxation, nearly a century ago. But the epic stupidity of asking ChatGPT how to use tariffs to balance a trade deficit and then accepting its incorrect answer and using them to set policy is jaw-dropping even by Trumpian standards. But what happens next?

    • The Verge ☛ Shopify CEO says no new hires without proof AI can’t do the job | The Verge

      Using AI effectively is “now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify,” according to Lütke. AI usage questions will also be added to “our performance and peer review questionnaire.”

    • CNBC ☛ Shopify CEO: Prove AI can't do jobs before asking for more headcount

      Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke told employees in a memo that they'll have to show jobs can't be done by artificial intelligence before asking for more headcount and resources.

    • The Verge ☛ Meta gets caught gaming AI benchmarks with Llama 4

      In fine print, Meta acknowledges that the version of Maverick tested on LMArena isn’t the same as what’s available to the public. According to Meta’s own materials, it deployed an “experimental chat version” of Maverick to LMArena that was specifically “optimized for conversationality,” TechCrunch first reported.

  • Social Control Media

    • 404 Media ☛ 'Careless People' Is the Book About Facebook I've Wanted for a Decade

      The biggest question I had for years after this experience was: Does Facebook know what it’s actually doing to the world? Do they care?

• Linux Foundation

  • Infosys (INFY) Advances Responsible AI in Networking Through Linux Foundation Partnership [Ed: Microsoft Infosys instrumentalises 'Linux' Foundation for PR and hype]

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • The Register UK ☛ Stolen SpotBugs tokens sparked the massive GitHub attack

    That massive GitHub supply chain attack that spilled secrets from countless projects? It traces back to a stolen token from a SpotBugs workflow - exposed way back in November, months earlier than previously suspected.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ UK's attempt to keep details of Apple 'backdoor' case secret… denied

      Details of Apple's appeal against the UK's so-called "backdoor order" will now play out in public after the Home Office failed in its bid to keep them secret on national security grounds.

      The confirmation comes after the Investigatory Powers Tribunal held a closed-door hearing on March 14, which was presumed to be related to Apple's appeal itself, rather than about whether the appeal itself would be heard in public, the details of which were released today.

      Lawyers representing the Secretary of State, Yvette Cooper, applied to the tribunal to ensure the "bare details" of the case involving a Technical Capability Notice (TCN) being issued to Apple be kept secret. They argued that airing these was not in the public interest and would be prejudicial to national security.

    • India Times ☛ Apple appealing against UK 'back door' order, tribunal confirms

      Apple has long said that it would never build a so-called backdoor into its encrypted services or devices, because once one is created, it could be exploited by hackers in addition to governments, a sentiment echoed by security experts. The iPhone maker in response to Britain's sweeping demands removed its most advanced security encryption for cloud data, called Advanced Data Protection, for new users in Britain.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Scammers Are Exploiting AI—and It’s Just Beginning

      Using minimal details such as name, date of birth, and address, attackers have been able to produce near-perfect replicas of official identity documents. Social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) have been flooded with examples. One user, Yaswanth Sai Palaghat, raised alarm bells by saying,

      “ChatGPT is generating fake Aadhaar and PAN cards instantly, which is a serious security risk. This is why AI should be regulated to some extent.”

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ DIRNSA Fired - Schneier on Security

      The NSA already spies on Americans in a variety of ways. But that’s always been a sideline to its main mission: spying on the rest of the world. Once Trump replaces Haugh with a loyalist, the NSA’s vast surveillance apparatus can be refocused domestically.

      Giving that agency all those powers in the 1990s, in the 2000s after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and in the 2010s was always a mistake. I fear that we are about to learn how big a mistake it was.

    • [Old] Bruce Schneier ☛ Secrets & Lies - Schneier on Security

      Information security expert Bruce Schneier explains what everyone in business needs to know about security in order to survive and be competitive. Pragmatic, interesting, and humorous, Schneier exposes the digital world and the realities of our networked society. He examines the entire system, from the reasons for technical insecurities to the minds behind malicious attacks. You’ll be guided through the security war zone, and learn how to understand and arm yourself against the threats of our connected world.

    • [Old] Kōdō Simone ☛ Why I Make Smart Devices Dumber: A Privacy Advocate's Reflection

      Diogenes was knee-deep in a stream washing vegetables. Seeing him, Plato said, “My good Diogenes, if you knew how to pay court to kings, you wouldn't have to wash vegetables.” — “And,” replied Diogenes, “If you knew how to wash vegetables, you wouldn't have to pay court to kings.”

• Defence/Aggression

  • Insight Hungary ☛ Trump administration expresses 'serious concerns' over corruption in Hungary in trade report

    A recent U.S. government trade report mentioning corruption in Hungary's public procurement system shows the possible reasoning behind the Trump administration’s decision to impose a 20% tariff on the European Union, Válasz Online reports.

    The document, released at the end of March describes the economic practices of individual countries that the United States views as concerning. Though the tariffs apply to the EU, the report singles out Hungary for "stricter-than-EU regulations" and government practices that create bureaucratic barriers for American businesses.

  • RFA ☛ Cambodia reopens naval base after Chinese upgrade – Radio Free Asia

    Cambodia has formally re-opened a naval base on its southwestern coast after a substantial upgrade supported by China, but denies it will allow any foreign country to establish a base on its soil.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Anduril unveils ‘Copperhead’ line of autonomous underwater vehicles

    The vehicle, which can reach speeds greater than 30 knots, can carry a range of payloads, including active and passive sensors and magnetometers, which can detect changes in the Earth’s magnetic field.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ USAID edges closer to shutdown, allows remote work for those still overseas

    The U.S. Agency for International Development is taking its final steps toward shuttering, sending a memo last Thursday to bureau heads focused on recruiting workers on administrative leave to assist with final steps required to decommission the agency.

  • Military.com ☛ Trump Administration Fires Female Vice Admiral Amid Widening Purge of Military Officers | Military.com

    Chatfield, who began her career as a helicopter pilot and was the first woman to be president of the Naval War College, had been serving as a senior official at NATO and was one of just a handful of women who occupied the highest ranks of the Navy.

  • Defense News ☛ Top US admiral at NATO removed amid Trump’s growing military firings

    It’s unclear whether the firing originated from the Pentagon or the White House, which last week removed several national security officials — including Gen. Timothy Haugh, head of the NSA and Cyber Command — after President Donald Trump met with far-right activist Laura Loomer.

  • Politico LLC ☛ Trump fires a top US military official to NATO

    Chatfield had extensive experience with the alliance prior to her latest role. She held the deputy military representative job in Brussels from 2015 to 2017. Prior to that, she was a senior military aide at NATO’s military headquarters in Mons, Belgium. The NATO Military Committee, composed of military chiefs from all 32 members, holds a similar role to the joint chiefs of staff chair. The group advises allies on military matters and nuclear planning.

    She’s not the first high level official the Trump administration has suddenly terminated. Trump fired Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown in February without any stated cause. The Air Force vice chief of staff, Gen. James Slife, and Hegseth’s senior military assistant Air Force Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short were also fired in the February purge.

  • Reuters ☛ US admiral at NATO fired in expanding national security purge

    Chatfield, the U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee, is one of only a handful of female Navy three-star officers and was the first woman to lead the Naval War College, a job she held until 2023.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Russians ‘searched [Internet] for knife attack victim’ days before he was stabbed

    An investigation by ZDF, a German broadcaster, found that the phrases “Michael Stürzenberger stabbed” and “Michael Stürzenberger attack” were used in [Internet] searches in Russia before the attack took place, raising concerns that Moscow had prior knowledge the stabbing would occur.

  • Digital Music News ☛ China Pulls Back On Oh-So Close TikTok Deal After Tariffs

    Now, a group of TikTok investors is suing ByteDance, claiming the company sabotaged the proposed acquisition in order to maintain control over TikTok’s US operations. This, they say, is in violation of antitrust laws.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Nick Heer ☛ Judge Says U.K Hearing Over Compromising iCloud Encryption Must Be Public

    The public copy of the ruling (PDF) is kind of funny to read because of the secrecy rules around the technical capability notice. Presumably, this judge would know whether Apple had been issued this demand, but cannot say so. They therefore extensively refer to media reporting about the demand; in response to U.S. lawmakers’ request to “discuss an alleged technical capability notice”, emphasis my own.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Court rules UK Home Office’s legal battle with Apple over data must be conducted in public

    The Home Office is fighting to access information secured by Apple’s Advanced Data Protection or ADP system, citing the Investigatory Powers Act, which it hopes will force Apple to open a technical “backdoor.” This has drawn criticism from privacy advocates and a handful of U.S. politicians.

    The U.K. government had said that the case is sensitive and should be conducted in private, citing national security issues. Judges Rabinder Singh and Judge Jeremy Johnson didn’t see it that way, stating that keeping the case behind closed doors would have interfered with the principle of open justice.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Virtual reality: The widely-quoted media experts who are not what they seem

    The benefit for the commentators who reply to these journalist requests is a name-check for the brand they are associated with and sometimes even a link – valuable for SEO.

    Press Gazette’s investigation suggests gaming this system has become a major industry which may also be a lucrative one for the brands involved.

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ IPT supports ORG’s call for open hearing in Apple encryption case

    Earlier this year, the UK Government ordered Apple to grant it access to encrypted data stored by Apple users worldwide in its cloud service. The order, known as a Technical Capability Notice, was made under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. In response, Apple pulled its Advanced Data Protection service from the UK, stating it would never build a “back door” into its security measures.

    Apple is challenging the Technical Capability Notice in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, with the Home Office seeking to have the proceedings held entirely in secret.

• Environment

  • The Scotsman ☛ Harry Potter Jacobite steam train engine turned off on first day of tourist season over wildfire risk

    James Shuttleworth, WCR’s commercial director, said: “This is our standard mitigation in the event of risks such as wildfire risk. We will reintroduce the steam engine when the weather is more appropriate for us to do so.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ Skateboarder Grinds on Cybertruck

      This might be the closest that Tesla's Cybertruck ever gets to being cool.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Confirmed: Microsoft stops new data centres worldwide

      The Cambridge, UK site was specifically designed to host Nvidia GPU clusters. Microsoft also pulled out of the new Docklands Data Centre in Canary Wharf, London.

      In Wisconsin, US, Microsoft had already spent $262 million on construction — but then just pulled the plug.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ The Endangered Species Next Door

    • Science News ☛ Some tropical trees act as lightning rods to fend off rivals

      A particularly powerful impact on a liana-covered D. oleifera in 2019 is what cemented the idea of a link between the tree and lightning’s beneficial effects, says forest ecologist Evan Gora of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. “It looked like a bomb went off.” The strike damaged 115 surrounding trees, half of which died within two years. Additionally, all the liana vines that covered the D. oleifera perished. The impacted tree, however, was practically unscathed, standing tall and healthy with its direct competitors removed.

      To confirm the suspected tree-lightning relationship, Gora and his colleagues documented the fate of 93 trees struck by lightning, including nine D. oleifera specimens. After two years, all the D. oleifera trees were doing fine — thriving, Gora says — in stark contrast to a 56 percent mortality rate among the other species.

• Finance

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Even Credit Unions Are in on Banks’ Junk Fee Racket

    Now, following industry lobbying on the issue, President Donald Trump’s top credit union regulator has revoked the junk-fee reporting rule, meaning credit unions will have more leeway to hide how they bilk consumers than the corporate banks to which they’re supposed to serve as an alternative.

  • LibreNews ☛ Trump cuts funding to FOSS projects

    Did you know that more than half of the Tor browser's funding comes from the U.S. government? In the fiscal year 2021-2022, they received more than $3M, whereas individual donations only accounted for 28% of the revenue.

    Similarly, just a few months ago, F-Droid announced that it had won a grant of slightly less than $400k, also paid by the U.S. government. As they explained, this would allow them to "refactor and integrate code with other maintained projects", "establish clear policies and legal strategies", "improve our localization workflows", and so on.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Real Problem With San Francisco, and it's Not Socialism

    Let's be clear about what's actually happened in San Francisco and similar cities over the past several decades. Housing prices didn't skyrocket because of socialist policies. They exploded because of restrictions on housing supply—zoning laws, building height limitations, environmental review processes, and permitting requirements that effectively prevented the construction of adequate housing to meet demand.

    This isn't a free market at work. It's a market failure—specifically, a form of emergent collusion where homeowners, developers, and local governments create a de facto cartel that artificially constrains supply. Not through explicit coordination in smoke-filled rooms, but through the natural alignment of interests among property owners who benefit from scarcity and the politicians who depend on their votes and donations.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Today in Cringeocracy

    Since Musk is too afraid of serial killers to eat in restaurants where the little people could heckle him and ruin his meal, it's important to take the heckling to his "man cave".

  • US News And World Report ☛ Russian Court Fines Telegram App for Refusal to Remove Anti-Government Content, TASS Reports

    TASS added that some of the channels listed in the court documents called for participation in anti-government protests that aimed at overthrowing Russia's government, as well for terrorist attacks on railway transport with the aim of helping Ukrainian forces.

    Telegram, a social media and instant messaging platform, did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment outside business hours.

  • The New Stack ☛ Reframing DevSecOps: Software Security to Software Safety

    Organizations are not to blame. The security industry is promoting more problem-identification tools without improving the quality of the organizational processes or workflow to get better results. Security that is superficially added to existing processes rather than genuinely integrated creates significant operational burden in development workflows. This is DevOps + security — not truly DevSecOps.

    The result is that more valuable developer time is consumed understanding and fixing issues while vulnerabilities, knowingly or unknowingly, pass through the pipelines into production. This cycle of inefficient and largely ineffective security practices, coupled with the constant tension between development velocity and security requirements, leads to burnout among both security and development teams.

  • 404 Media ☛ Wikipedia Editors Call It: It’s the “2025 Stock Market Crash”

    Although there is no definition of a stock market crash it's generally accepted an “‘abrupt double-digit percentage drop in a stock index over the course of a few days’” is a crash (which both have happened),” the editor said, citing Investopedia. “Also this is a really big crash, the last time the smp was at 5000 points was in April of 2024, meaning a year of progress has been wiped out in 48 hours. My personal stock portfolio dropped by 25%. But with that being said it might be better to change the title of the article to something like April 2025 stock market crash as there might be a bigger crash later.”

  • The Register UK ☛ EU may target US tech giants in tariff response

    Speaking ahead of today's extraordinary meeting of the European Union's trade minister, a spokesperson for the French government was clear that the trading bloc's response to blanket tariffs on goods could include services, bringing US tech giants within its scope.

    Sophie Primas told the media late last week that the response to the sweeping US tariffs on EU goods of 20 percent would hit digital services.

  • APNIC ☛ The rise and rise of fibre

    Of course, another component of fibre deployment is its growing adoption for home broadband services worldwide. These services generally fall into two basic categories: Fully symmetric connections, where one customer exclusively uses the bandwidth; or asymmetric models, where the upload path is shared among multiple users. The latter offers significantly lower upload speeds and lower costs, based on the assumption that most home users primarily consume content rather than produce it.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Deutsche Telekom signs long-term integration agreement with Google Cloud

    German telecoms heavyweight Deutsche Telekom has signed a long-term agreement focusing on cloud and AI integration with Google Cloud, extending into 2030.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • CBC ☛ Security officials report a Beijing-linked online operation focused on Carney

      The Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force says it traced the operation to Youli-Youmian, the most popular news account on the social media platform WeChat.

      Intelligence reports link the Youli-Youmian account to the Chinese Communist Party's central political and legal affairs commission.

    • The Record ☛ Russia arrests CEO of tech company linked to Doppelgänger disinformation campaign

      Cybersecurity researchers have previously linked Aeza to the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign known as Doppelgänger, which has been active in Europe since at least 2022. The network has published fake articles mimicking the websites of major Western media outlets, including Germany’s Der Spiegel and Britain’s The Guardian, in an effort to amplify Russian narratives and sow division in the West.

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Misinformation, Disinformation, and Scholarly Communication (Part 1)

      In the past year or so, some have suggested the existence of another category of mis/disinformation: malinformation. This term is used to describe information that is technically true, but is taken out of context or presented in a partial manner so as to mislead.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Common Dreams ☛ As Republicans Move to Silence Judges Who Rule Against Trump, Stand Up America Warns of Another Threat: 22 New Trump Judges

    By relentlessly testing the limits of executive power, the Trump administration has placed unprecedented strain on our system of checks and balances. In this environment, federal judges are often the first – and sometimes only – defense against Trump’s overreach. So what are Republicans in Congress doing? Holding hearings and advancing legislation to undermine the power of the judiciary and the judges who check Trump’s abuses.

    But one of Republicans’ most dangerous efforts is flying under the radar: the JUDGES Act. This bill would give Trump the power to install 22 new federal judges—handpicked loyalists who would shield Trump from accountability and rubberstamp his extreme agenda, including his attempts to cut essential services like health care, food assistance, and education to fund a tax cut for his billionaire donors.

  • New York Times ☛ Something Else for Europe and the U.S. to Disagree About: ‘Free Speech’

    The E.U. has been investigating U.S. companies under the Digital Services Act, a new law meant to prevent illegal content and disinformation from spreading online. In the first major case to near a conclusion, regulators as soon as this summer are expected to impose significant penalties — including a fine and demands for product changes — on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, saying the law was violated.

    But Mr. Trump’s administration sees the law as a strike against his version of free speech: one that unshackles his allies to say what they want online but restricts types of expression he does not agree with in the real world, like protests at universities.

  • International Business Times ☛ 'We Need Them To Set Us Free': Ben & Jerry's Founders Ask Unilever To Sell Brand Back After 'Woke' CEO Axed

    On 2 April 2025, co-founder Ben Cohen made headlines by launching a daring bid to buy back the company from Unilever, the multinational consumer goods giant that has owned the brand since 2000. With Unilever preparing to spin off its entire ice cream division, Cohen sees a narrow window to bring Ben & Jerry's back under independent control — and back to its original activist ethos.

    But this is more than a business manoeuvre. It's a battle over identity, legacy, and whether a socially conscious brand can thrive outside the grip of corporate giants.

  • The Nation ☛ Why Universities Must Start Litigating—and How

    So, why didn’t Columbia simply tear up the demand letter and sue? The most fundamental reason is that the university receives close to $1.5 billion per year in federal funds, and a vindictive president could try to cut much of that money on some other pretext. In addition to being costly and time-consuming, litigation to recover the $400 million might prove a pyrrhic victory if the government were to respond by inflicting even greater economic pain. Columbia’s board of trustees is a risk-averse, business-oriented group—like most contemporary university boards—and certain trustees may be not just grudgingly acquiescent but genuinely enthusiastic about certain reforms they have made in response to Trump’s demands. But even the most outraged academic leaders must think twice before suing this administration.

  • Common Dreams ☛ 'Hands Off!' Proves Americans Are Fed Up with the Trump Administration's Chaotic Attacks

    Public Citizen Co-President Robert Weissman sparked cheers and excitement from a crowd of roughly 100,000 people during his speech at the D.C. Hands Off! event. Weissman says he feels angry, hopeful and inspired to stop the destruction by the Trump Administration and salvage what remains to keep Americans safe, healthy and thriving.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Millions of Americans 'Disappeared' — Thanks to US Media

    In her post about Saturday’s “Hands Off” protest rallies, Marcy noted the “increasingly constrained media” — coverage by U.S. news media which doesn’t reflect facts on the ground of importance to the public.

    This has been a problem since at least the buildup to the Iraq War, when massive anti-war protests took place and little coverage emerged in mainstream media, or Occupy Wall Street’s prolonged resistance with little reporting documenting its activities.

  • Gannett ☛ Travelers fear social media and photos may now trigger deportation

    However, recent cases have brought to light that public activity relating to free speech, like social media posts on political issues, are now being subject to searches and subsequent visa issues.

    "In some ways, they might be, but there's also another rule where if you show any indication that your conduct could be contrary to the interests of the United States in terms of security and foreign policy, a lot of this is sort of being mixed together right now," Heubel said.

    "People who are very loud and open about their opinions here are starting to get in trouble," she added. "Now we're starting to see what I would call really, not an assault, but an infringement on what I think every normal person would call free speech."

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Tedium ☛ The Case For Burying The Lede (Sometimes)

    However, we’re in a moment where even news junkies have tuned a lot of stuff out, because things have gotten that bad. In the case of the Gumroad piece, it would have just been easy to say, “Hey, read this Wired piece” and be done with it. But that ultimately is not what Tedium is. Consider the end users who actually use Gumroad—they are not necessarily reading every Wired story. They’re often just trying to create things, and they might have missed it because their creator circles don’t necessarily land on Wired stories.

    I’m not saying I presented my POV perfectly, but my goal was to hit them on their level. And the post did well, and reached those people. So yeah, I think that my unusual way of presenting that information kind of worked, oddly enough.

  • BIA Net ☛ Journalists' union denied visit to jailed reporter Elif Akgül

    The Journalists’ Union of Turkey (TGS) has been denied permission to visit journalist and bianet's former freedom of expression editor Elif Akgül, who was detained on Feb 18 in connection with an investigation into the Peoples’ Democratic Congress (HDK), an umbrella group of leftist and pro-Kurdish political organizations.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Gen Z news outlet RocaNews 'proving young people will pay'

    He and two friends, Max Towey who he knew from college and Max Frost who was working with Towey at the American Enterprise Institute, decided to start a news company that “solved this problem”.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Jacky Alciné ☛ The Assumed Wealth Of the Social Web Participants

    I think a lot about how connectivity works, in theory, in places like Cuba; a country who's so feared by the United States in developing an socioeconomic order that China's made more concrete, that the failed embargo system still impacts how folks can access the rest of the world, namely United States-based services. Despite the United States delaying the deployment of a undersea cable and fear of the Internet being good to Cuban economic development, connectivity still grows, at a low 30% of the population. If Cuban Internet technology was capable of growing independent of the United States (which isn't possible, given how the Internet, as it stands, is one of the United States' biggest exports and means of control), how would have things like domain names work? IP address allocation? How do you build something that works independently of a central authority (like the Internet and most social networks currently rely on)?

  • The Moscow Times ☛ American in Russia Forcibly Sent to Psychiatric Hospital Ahead of Criminal Trial - The Moscow Times

    A medical commission from Moscow's Alexeyev Psychiatric Clinical Hospital found on March 15 that Tater exhibited “tension, impulsiveness [and] delusional ideas,” including a sense of persecution and “a lack of critical attitude toward his state,” according to the report.

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Walmart Vizio TVs Scream At Immigrants to Leave America

    Walmart Vizio TVs Scream At Immigrants to Leave America

    I have a Vizio TV. It is a 2015 model I got on Black Friday. The original had the screen crap out two weeks in, so Vizio replaced it under warranty.

    As such, I’ve not bought a TV in a while because this one has managed to hold up over the last ten years.

    Apparently much has changed since 2015, and not for the better.

    My TV has some of those stupid “Smart Apps” but they’re so dated they don’t even do much anymore, and I don’t give the TV an internet connection. I stuck a Roku in it mostly for DLNA casting support, but for the most part I just watch the antenna channels and discs.

    Now, according to Jamie Zawinski, who referenced Reddit (Archive Today) and Vizio themselves (Archive Today), Vizio TVs have some sort of “feature” called “Scenic Mode”.

  • BBC ☛ Teaching was too stressful so I left to become a lorry driver

    Stuart Youens says that when he became a secondary school teacher 20 years ago he loved the job.

    But gradually the effect of budget cuts, the reduction in classroom assistants, the increase in additional support needs, and a rise in bureaucracy took its toll.

    Two years ago he chose to leave the profession and become a lorry driver – and says he's a lot happier in his new job.

    Figures seen by BBC Scotland News suggest that the number of days teachers have been absent because of stress has risen dramatically in the past six years.

    Unions and education experts say many teachers are leaving altogether as a result.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ Pentagon Divided on Freeing Up Spectrum

    The Department of Defense (DoD) is proposing to make some of its spectrum available for commercial use, marking some progress between the Pentagon and carriers and lawmakers who want more 5G frequencies, according to Punchbowl News. However, testimony to Congress last week by military personnel shows not everyone’s on board.

    The DoD made a proposal to telecommunications carriers to free up a total of 420 MHz, 100 MHz between the 3.55 GHz to 3.65 GHz frequencies and 125 MHz between 7.125 GHz and 7.25 GHz, according to a DoD document obtained by Punchbowl News. Those are critical frequencies to boost 5G service in the U.S. and have been coveted by carriers. And while it likely still isn’t sufficient for the telecom industry, this marks the first significant step in negotiations over spectrum with the Pentagon, according to the account.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • PC World ☛ I still love computer files, even as modern apps leave them behind

    Preserving your own files can be a countermeasure against these kinds of scenarios. But beyond just data preservation, files provide a kind of freedom to choose the best tool for a given job.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• New York Times ☛ Google Says Employees Can Discuss Antitrust Case

  When Google lost its landmark antitrust trial in August, Kent Walker, its top lawyer, reminded employees, for the third time, that they were not allowed to discuss the case with one another or anyone outside the company.

  On Friday afternoon, Google rescinded the command as part of a settlement with the Alphabet Workers Union, a group representing some of its employees and contractors, according to an email that Google sent to workers and that was viewed by The New York Times. Alphabet is the parent company of Google.

• The Register UK ☛ Legal spat over alleged Microsoft license abuses may reopen

  Microsoft has weeks to produce a multi-tenant hybrid cloud for service providers in Europe – a failure to do this or to even out alleged anti-competitive pricing for its software licenses could again put it in a legal dogfight with smaller rivals.

• Patents

  • The Scotsman ☛ Using IP [sic] as security is now easier after change to laws

    A company’s intellectual [sic] property [sic] rights [sic] (IP), which may patents or design rights, copyright in software or relate to the company’s branding and trademarks, may often be a key asset and indeed more valuable than any physical asset it owns. However, to date there have been challenges when a company seeks to use its IP as security for funding.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ DAZN Pirate IPTV Action Coincided With Massive Public DNS Blockade

    daznLike many similar reports published most weeks by newspapers in Europe, an article published by Belgian media outlet L’Echo late Saturday evening pulled few punches.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ French Court Orders Cloudflare to 'Dynamically' Block MotoGP Streaming Piracy

    In the seemingly endless game of online piracy whack-a-mole, a French court has ordered Cloudflare to block several sites illegally streaming MotoGP. The ruling is an escalation of French blocking measures that began increasing their scope beyond traditional ISPs in the last few months of 2024. Obtained by MotoGP rightsholder Canal+, the order applies to all Cloudflare services, including DNS, and can be updated with 'future' domains.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Cloning Premier League's Pirate Site DMCA Subpoena Toolkit

    Aside from their intended purpose, DMCA subpoenas can provide useful clues about future anti-piracy strategies. When subpoenas are contested by intermediaries, subpoena applications sometimes become copyright cases in their own right. From a rightsholders’ perspective, in some cases they may be the only potential source of information yet to be exhausted.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Studio Ghibli AI trend is a privacy nightmare in disguise, warn experts

    The trend took off after OpenAI's GPT-4o model, which enables users to recreate personal images in the artistic style of the beloved Japanese animation studio, Studio Ghibli. While the tools behind the transformation are user-friendly and the results often magical, experts warn that the fine print in terms of service agreements and the way data is handled could have serious implications for users' privacy.

  • Associated Press ☛ ChatGPT's viral Studio Ghibli-style images highlight AI copyright concerns

    But the trend also highlighted ethical concerns about artificial intelligence tools trained on copyrighted creative works and what that means for the future livelihoods of human artists. Miyazaki, 84, known for his hand-drawn approach and whimsical storytelling, has expressed skepticism about AI’s role in animation.

  • CNN ☛ ChatGPT: Viral Studio Ghibli-style AI images showcase power – and copyright concerns – of update

    “I am utterly disgusted,” he says in the video, responding to a video of a monster character generated using text prompts. “If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it, but I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.”

  • Business Insider ☛ Studio Ghibli Has Few Legal Moves Against OpenAI ChatGPT Image Feature - Business Insider

    The rules around using Studio Ghibli's movies to train OpenAI's models are not yet legally settled, and copyright laws generally allow artists to mimic a visual style, they say.