Leftovers

• The Verge ☛ Google is in more danger than ever of being broken up

  Outside the US, Google has incurred fines for anticompetition charges and had to make business changes to comply with international regulations. But none of these have approached what the DOJ is asking for. If the DOJ gets its way, Google and Apple could end one of the most lucrative partnerships in Silicon Valley, while rivals like Microsoft could get access to some of Google’s most valuable data.

  During the first phase of the US antitrust trials, known as the liability phase, Google was defiant in arguing that it has competed fairly to win users with its superior products. In this next phase, Google will be facing judges who have already determined that’s not the case — and Google will be forced to argue for simply limiting the penalties.

  [...]

  The Chicago White Sox, struggling to bolster attendance and owned by the celebrated promoter Bill Veeck, allowed Dahl to stage an event called “Disco Demolition Night.” Fans who brought disco records received admission for 98 cents. Comiskey Park sold out. Between games of a Sox-Tigers doubleheader, Dahl took the field in a jeep, wearing military gear. He led the masses chanting “Disco Sucks” and then detonated thousands of albums, sending shards of vinyl across the outfield.

• Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Fifty Years Ago, This Irresistible Disco Song and Dance Craze Swept the Nation and Changed the Music Landscape

  Disco introduced significant use of synthesizers, electronic pianos and orchestral instruments, such as brassy horns and silky strings, and often featured repetitive lyrics. The rhythm became central to moving people from their seats onto the dance floor, with bass drummers emphasizing a “four-on-the-floor” pulse, hitting all four quarter beats in every measure. At the same time, Philadelphia soul had already introduced a more luxe feel to dance music by adding lush strings to frame the vocalist.

• Mike Brock ☛ The Path Forward

  Emotional security doesn’t come from pretending everything is fine. It doesn’t come from clinging to the illusion of normalcy, or from scrolling endlessly through headlines designed to shock and enrage. It comes from turning our gaze inward and forward—from grounding ourselves in the truth of the present and the possibility of the future.

  Hope is not the absence of fear. It is the refusal to let fear dictate what happens next.

• Justin Vollmer ☛ A Digital Home

  As I’m sure any longtime reader of this site could have guessed by now, the concept of a blog or website as a virtual home is not a new idea, and I’m definitely not the first to use that phrasing. I’ve seen it in multiple places over the years, but in recent weeks it showed up on a few different blogs I follow, and I wanted to elaborate on the topic a bit more.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ You’re Only As Strong As Your Weakest Point

  When you have a seemingly intractable problem — there’s an impenetrable door we can’t open — rather than focus on the door itself, you take a step back and realize the door may be impenetrable but the wall enclosing it is not. A little dynamite and problem solved.

• Jeff Bridgforth ☛ Getting to know me through the treasures in my office

  Several years ago, I gave my teammates a virtual tour of my home office as part of a virtual retreat day. I thought it would be fun to give a tour of my office and share some of the stories about the things you will find on the bookshelves, on the walls, or on my desk.

• Science

  • Wired ☛ Scientists Think They’ve Found the Region of the Brain That Regulates Conscious Perception

    The researchers say that this is one of the first simultaneous recordings of conscious perception, and the information they recorded, they say, offers strong evidence for the hypothesis that the thalamus region acts a kind of gateway to conscious perception. “The findings indicate that the intralaminar and medial thalamic nuclei regulate conscious perception. This conclusion represents a significant advance in our understanding of the network that forms the basis of visual consciousness in humans,” the authors write.

• Hardware

  • India Times ☛ China pits humanoid robots against humans in half-marathon

    Some firms tested their robots for weeks before the race. Beijing officials have described the event as more akin to a race car competition, given the need for engineering and navigation teams.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • PC World ☛ The bewildering world of USB-C charging, explained

      USB Type-C is the most flexible connection for notebooks and smartphones. The most important of its many capabilities is as a charging socket for battery-powered devices. USB-C should finally make everything simple: One socket, one cable, one power supply for all devices – from computers to smartphones and tablets to headphones and other peripherals.

      So much for the theory, which always sounds simple with USB. The reality is much more confusing.

      Not every USB-C power supply is suitable for every device. Not all Type-C ports can be used to charge devices quickly or at all. And not every Type-C cable ensures reliable power transmission.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-04-16 [Older] Sleep Training Is No Longer Just for Babies. Some Schools Are Teaching Teens How to Sleep

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] WHO Members Close to Accord on Tackling Future Pandemics, Sources Say

  • TruthOut ☛ 2025-04-13 [Older] Why Does “National Security” Always Mean More War, Not More Health Care?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] RECOMMENDED — Pollution levels are spiking in Nepal's Kathmandu, leaving its residents with air quality worse than any other city in the world.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Against transparency

    Prop 65 is often presented as a story of overregulation, but I think it's a matter of underregulation. Rather than simply telling you that there's a potential carcinogen nearby and leaving you to figure out whether you've exceeded your risk threshold, a useful regulatory framework would require firms to use their products in ways that minimize cancer risk. For example, if a product ships with a chemical that is potentially carcinogenic for a couple weeks after it is manufactured, then the law could require the manufacturer to air out the product for 14 days before shipping it to the wholesaler.

    "Caveat emptor" has its place – say, at a yard-sale, or when buying lemonade from a kid raising money for a school trip – but routine shopping shouldn't be a life-or-death matter that you can only survive if you are willing and able to review extensive, peer-reviewed, paywalled toxicology literature. When a product poses a serious threat to our health, it should either be prohibited, or have its use proscribed, so that a reasonable, prudent person doing normal things doesn't have to worry that they've missed a potentially lethal gotcha.

    In other words, transparency is nice, but it's not enough.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ HP settles deceptive pricing lawsuit for a pittance

    HP Inc has agreed to pay $4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit in the US that alleged it used deceptive pricing tactics on its website, including fake discounts and misleading limited-time offers.

  • 9to5Mac ☛ Apple rebrands Search Ads business as 'Apple Ads'

    Apple today announced that it has officially rebranded Search Ads as ‘Apple Ads’, reflecting the expanding scope of Apple’s advertising business.

  • Digi Day ☛ Apple's rebranded Apple Ads shows renewed focus on advertising

    Apple’s quiet rebrand of its search ads business to the more assertive “Apple Ads” may seem like a modest semantic update but in the context of platform power plays, language rarely shifts without intention. The move suggests that Apple is no longer content to just collect rent from the ad tech ecosystem it reshaped through privacy policies. It wants a larger piece of the action.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • India Times ☛ Smarter, but less accurate? ChatGPT’s hallucination conundrum

      According to IBM, hallucination in AI is “a phenomenon where, in a large language model (LLM)—often a generative AI chatbot or computer vision tool—the system perceives patterns or objects that are non-existent or imperceptible to human observers, creating outputs that are nonsensical or altogether inaccurate.”

    • Wired ☛ An AI Customer Service Chatbot Made Up a Company Policy—and Created a Mess

      This marks the latest instance of AI confabulations (also called "hallucinations") causing potential business damage. Confabulations are a type of "creative gap-filling" response where AI models invent plausible-sounding but false information. Instead of admitting uncertainty, AI models often prioritize creating plausible, confident responses, even when that means manufacturing information from scratch.

      For companies deploying these systems in customer-facing roles without human oversight, the consequences can be immediate and costly: frustrated customers, damaged trust, and, in Cursor's case, potentially canceled subscriptions.

    • The Register UK ☛ Hacking US crosswalks to talk like Zuck is as easy as 1234

      In Seattle this week, some crosswalks started playing AI-generated messages spoofing tech tycoon Jeff Bezos. In one video clip, a synthetic Bezos voice can be heard introducing himself from the push-button box, and claiming the crossing is sponsored by Amazon Prime.

      Then it veered into parody-turned-social commentary: "You know, please don’t tax the rich, otherwise all the other billionaires will move to Florida too. Wouldn’t it be terrible if all the rich people left Seattle or got Luigi-ed and then the normal people could afford to live here again?"

    • Tim Kellogg ☛ Inner Loop Agents

      Okay, so inner loop agents still do all that parsing. The only difference is that they handle the tool calling themselves instead of letting the client handle the tool call and making another API response.

      But why?

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AI bot scammers flood California community colleges

      Many community colleges offer online courses. When students flood in, the teachers are delighted! Then they find that out of over 100 students, maybe 15 are real.

      The rest are scammers who signed up to get state and federal financial aid, using a stolen identity.

    • PC Mag ☛ Wikipedia Rolls Out Solution to AI Bots Draining Its Bandwidth

      Amid these issues, the Foundation has announced a partnership with Google-owned firm Kaggle to roll out a new dataset in beta, filled with structured Wikipedia content in English and French. Since the dataset is built with machine learning workflows in mind, Kaggle said it will be “immediately usable for modeling, benchmarking, alignment, fine-tuning, and exploratory analysis.”

  • Social Control Media

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Curse of ChatGPT

      Earlier this week, The Verge reported that OpenAI is developing its own social network to compete with Meta and X. The product may never see the light of day, but the idea has a definite logic to it. People create data every time they post online, and generative-AI companies need a lot of data to train their products. Social networks are also sticky: If you got hooked on an OpenAI feed, you’d be less likely to use competing generative-AI products from Anthropic or Google. (OpenAI, which The Atlantic has a corporate partnership with, did not return my request for comment and has not, to my knowledge, commented on the report elsewhere.)

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Make Tech Easier ☛ 2025-04-11 [Older] Neptune RAT Malware in Windows: Beware of YouTube & Telegram Links

    • The Record ☛ Alleged SmokeLoader malware operator facing federal charges in Vermont | The Record from Recorded Future News

      "Thousands of computers around the world have been infected with the SmokeLoader malware by Moses and over 65,000 victims have had their personal information and passwords stolen by Moses.”

• Security

  • CISA

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-17 [Older] Schneider Electric Trio Q Licensed Data Radio

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-17 [Older] Schneider Electric Sage Series

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-17 [Older] Schneider Electric ConneXium Network Manager

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-17 [Older] Yokogawa Recorder Products

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-16 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-16 [Older] CISA Releases Guidance on Credential Risks Associated with Potential Legacy Oracle Cloud Compromise

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-15 [Older] CISA Releases Nine Industrial Control Systems Advisories

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-15 [Older] Siemens Mendix Runtime

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-15 [Older] Siemens Industrial Edge Device Kit

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-15 [Older] Siemens SIMOCODE, SIMATIC, SIPLUS, SIDOOR, SIWAREX

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-15 [Older] Growatt Cloud Applications

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-15 [Older] Lantronix Xport

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-15 [Older] National Instruments LabVIEW

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-15 [Older] Delta Electronics COMMGR

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-15 [Older] ABB M2M Gateway

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-15 [Older] Mitsubishi Electric Europe B.V. smartRTU

    • CISA ☛ 2025-04-11 [Older] Fortinet Releases Advisory on New Post-Exploitation Technique for Known Vulnerabilities

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • India Times ☛ “Creepy” ChatGPT calls users by name—even when it shouldn’t

      Some users of OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini models report the chatbot using their name unprompted, even when memory settings are turned off. The issue, described as “creepy” by some, has raised fresh privacy concerns. OpenAI’s vision of AI that “gets to know you” adds to the unease around personalisation and transparency.

    • 404 Media ☛ ICE Plans Central Database of Health, Labor, Housing Agency Data to Find Targets

      Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to bring together data from a wide variety of other U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Labor (DOL), Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to make a centralized database to identify immigration targets, according to a document viewed by 404 Media.

    • Ars Technica ☛ That groan you hear is users’ reaction to Recall going back into Windows

      When Recall was first introduced in May 2024, security practitioners roundly castigated it for creating a gold mine for malicious insiders, criminals, or nation-state spies if they managed to gain even brief administrative access to a Windows device. Privacy advocates warned that Recall was ripe for abuse in intimate partner violence settings. They also noted that there was nothing stopping Recall from preserving sensitive disappearing content sent through privacy-protecting messengers such as Signal.

  • Confidentiality

    • 2025-04-10 [Older] HHS Office for Civil Rights Settles HIPAA Security Rule Investigation; Northeast Radiology agrees to corrective action plan and $350,000 monetary penalty

    • 2025-04-12 [Older] Justice Department Implements Critical National Security Program to Protect Americans’ Sensitive Data from Foreign Adversaries

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] Sudan: Hundreds feared dead in attacks on famine-hit camps

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] Italy sends 40 rejected asylum seekers to Albania

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] Search continues for last living Nazi criminals

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-04-11 [Older] #Hands-On: How to Actually Stop the Cheeto Mussolini Regime’s Onslaught on Democracy

  • Off Guardian ☛ 2025-04-09 [Older] How to be Somewhat Aware and Approximately Awake Among the Normaltons

  • NL Times ☛ 2025-04-11 [Older] Municipalities want event organizers to hire more security guards

  • NL Times ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] Taghi denies using newly arrested lawyer to pass messages from high-security prison

  • Defence Web ☛ 2025-04-14 [Older] Police dismantle multiple drug labs worth R50 million

  • The Age AU ☛ 2025-04-14 [Older] Security guards accused of bashing couple sacked

  • The Age AU ☛ 2025-04-14 [Older] WA news LIVE: Scarborough security guards accused of assaulting patrons

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-04-14 [Older] Vietnam's Party Chief Wants Enhanced Defence, Security, Connectivity With China

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] Greece: Worry as Turks buy property and 'golden visas'

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] Gabon's junta chief expected to win election as polls open

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] Germany plans voluntary military service

  • The Atlantic ☛ Erdoğan Sets His Sights on Israel

    Erdoğan seems poised to use his growing power in service of imperialist aims. He has fused Turkish nationalism and Islamism with a renewed reverence for the Ottoman Empire, reversing the course that Kemal Atatürk, the republic’s founder, once set. Atatürk forged the modern Turkish state from the rump of the Ottoman Empire in part by focusing Turkish identity on nation rather than on faith. What drives Erdoğan is a kind of neo-Ottoman dream, starring himself in the role of sultan cum caliph, or, as he once put it, “a servant of the Sharia.” Despite domestic opposition to his rule, Erdoğan has a plausible path to that ambition. The truth is that many Turks, even secular ones, have a certain affection for their country’s imperial past, when Turks were feared invaders rather than migrants searching for industrial jobs.

    Erdoğan’s grand designs appear to include establishing himself as the Muslim world’s principal champion of anti-Zionism. The president has routinely hosted Hamas leaders for official visits and has referred to the architects of the October 7 attack as a “liberation group.” Late last month, in Turkey’s largest mosque, he reportedly told a crowd of worshippers: “May Allah, for the sake of his name, Al-Qahhar”—the Vanquisher—“destroy and devastate Israel.”

  • US News And World Report ☛ Some Jan. 6 [Insurrectionists] Pardoned by Trump Are Now Embraced as Heroes and Candidates for Office

    Far from being sidelined, those who rioted, assaulted police officers or broke into congressional offices during the violent attack are now being spotlighted as honored guest speakers at local Republican events around the country. They are getting a platform to tell their version of events and being hailed as heroes and martyrs. Some are considering runs for office, recognizing that at least among a certain segment of the pro-Trump base, they are seen not as criminals but as patriots.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Sen. King gives urgent warning on 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride

    “But here’s what’s happening right now,” he said, “is that the executive branch is seizing more and more power.”

    He said “there are two levels of things going on here: one is bad and the other is dangerous. There are bad things like what [the Department of Government Efficiency] is doing and messing around with Social Security and this sending people to El Salvador. That’s really bad, but what’s dangerous is the way it’s being done, by essentially violating the plain intent of the Constitution, by having the President be the legislator and the executive at the same time, that’s a recipe for the loss of our freedom.”

    And for people who are “cheering on his agenda” and saying, “Well, we don’t care that he’s doing all this unconstitutional stuff,” King said, “They’re going to care because eventually the Eye of Sauron is going to turn on them,” referencing the evil, all-powerful symbol in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.”

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Bleeding Constitution

    The context makes this even more alarming. The lower court found the administration in contempt after careful proceedings. The Supreme Court has already weighed in on a related interlocutory matter, affirming the judiciary's authority. For these circuit judges to nonetheless intervene with an administrative stay represents not judicial restraint but judicial complicity in executive overreach.

    We must recognize this for what it is: the constitutional crisis in action. This is not about legal technicalities or reasonable disagreements about procedure. This is about whether judicial orders have any meaning when issued against an executive that refuses to recognize constraints on its power.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Daniel Pipes ☛ Anti-Hamas Protests Persist

    I published an article on April 4, "Gazans, 'The Bravest People on Earth,' Confront Hamas" about the activities that peaked in late March. The protests continue but the media ignores them, so X provides most information. Here are some captions of recent videos: [...]

• Environment

  • TruthOut ☛ Carcinogen Rising in Rice Supply Due to Climate Change

    Higher temperatures and CO2 levels are increasing rice’s uptake of inorganic arsenic from soil.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] China: High winds see flights canceled and trees felled

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ OpenAI spends millions to process polite phrases such as "Thank You" and "Please" with ChatGPT

      Scam Altman acknowledges this and reports that ChatGPT costs the company tens of millions of dollars just generating responses to these prompts. Taken another way, recent report suggests that even a short three-word "You are welcome" response from an LLM uses up roughly 40-50 milliliters of water.

    • Futurism ☛ Scam Altman Admits That Saying "Please" and "Thank You" to ChatGPT Is Wasting Millions of Dollars in Computing Power

      A late 2024 survey found that 67 percent of US respondents reported being nice to their chatbots. Of those who practice courtesy, 55 percent of American AI users said they do it "because it's the right thing to do," while 12 percent did it to appease the algorithm in the case of an AI uprising.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] UK government to take emergency control of British Steel

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-13 [Older] Housing crisis: Germany plans 'turbo' construction boost

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] IMF, World Bank approve new bailouts for Argentina

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini replaces Obama portrait with one of himself

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] EU's reputation grows among Southeast Asian elites

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-13 [Older] US: Bernie Sanders rally draws record crowd in LA

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-04-13 [Older] Serbia's president calls for order after student protests

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Ground Approaches

    But here's what even the reactionaries don't understand: coherence is not emergent, but ontological. It doesn't arise from our systems; it precedes them. It cannot be manufactured through power or imposed through force. It can only be recognized and aligned with. The structures they're building to replace liberal institutions will suffer the same fate, only faster, because they're even further removed from the coherence they refuse to acknowledge.

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ “Are you an anarchist?”

    I believe that humans sometimes do greedy and malicious things. That’s why market capitalism is a problem in the first place! It amplifies and rewards those impulses in a way that’s a net negative for society.

  • AppleInsider ☛ EU puts Apple fine on hold while US trade talks continue

    The EU is still expected to press ahead with fines and the cease-and-desist orders intended to make Apple and Meta further comply with the Digital Markets Act. However, there is no indication of when the EU will resume its plans.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Barents Observer ☛ The children of Severomorsk are told that neighbouring Nordic countries support Nazism

      "They support Nazism," the poster reads and lists a total of 30 countries that "provide military and financial support to the Nazi regime in Ukraine." All the Nordic countries are on the list.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ Russian Court Sentences Anti-War Activist Who Glued Poem To Ukrainian Statue

    A St. Petersburg court sentenced anti-war activist Darya Kozyreva to nearly three years in prison after ruling she "discredited" the Russian military by gluing a poem to a monument dedicated to a Ukrainian poet.

    Kozyreva, 19, also faced charges stemming from an interview she gave to RFE/RL's North Realities, where she discussed her political views, among other things.

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Cuts Funding for Internet Archive

    The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has proven invaluable to researchers, journalists, and archivists, allowing users to go back in time and see how websites looked in the past.

    According to the Standard, the nonprofit was halfway through an NEH grant of $345,000 when its funding was abruptly cut.

  • The San Fancisco Standard ☛ Bay Area creatives jeopardized by sudden DOGE humanities cuts

    That was just the first DOGE-related funding cut to hit the Internet Archive, which has been busy archiving many of the websites the Trump administration has ordered taken down; its 2023 grant for $250,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services was cut days later. The organization’s other funding streams will keep it afloat, according to Jefferson Bailey, the director of archiving and data services, but he worries about what will happen to smaller nonprofits.

    “This is really going to impact institutions that we take for granted,” Bailey said, “like our museums, our historical societies, our public libraries, our academic libraries — just a lot of people that keep information free and accessible and online.”

    For individual grantees, the situation is dire.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Conservative Case for Leaving Harvard Alone

    What is the rationale for the IRS revisiting Harvard’s exemption status? A theory is needed, because section 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code says that an organization “shall”—not “may”—be exempt from taxation if it meets criteria listed in the statute. One of those criteria is for an institution to be organized exclusively for “educational purposes.”

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-04-17 [Older] US YouTuber Remains in Custody in India After Visiting Restricted Island With a Diet Coke Can

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-04-11 [Older] Another Foreign Judge Quits Hong Kong's Highest Court Amid National Security Crackdown

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-04-11 [Older] What We Know About the Social Security Administration Listing Thousands of Living Immigrants as Dead

  • TruthOut ☛ 2025-04-11 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini Admin Lists Many Living Immigrants as Dead in Social Security Database

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-04-11 [Older] Bill to Create a Texas Homeland Security Division Passes State Senate

  • NL Times ☛ 2025-04-12 [Older] Schiphol bans 36 XR activists for up to 10 years over protest behind security checkpoint

  • The Vietnamese Magazine ☛ The Silent Passing of Tulku Hungkar Dorje: A Call for Transparency and Justice

    The recent death of Tulku Hungkar Dorje, a revered Tibetan Buddhist lama, in Hồ Chí Minh City has raised serious concerns among human rights organizations and the international community. Known for his efforts to preserve Tibetan culture and education, he died under mysterious circumstances after reportedly fleeing China due to political persecution.

  • TruthOut ☛ Cop Who Alleged Abrego García’s Gang Ties Was Deemed Unfit by State’s Attorney

    This means that the Trump administration has detained Abrego Garcia in the CECOT prison in El Salvador, against the rulings of the Supreme Court and a Maryland District Court, based solely on the word of a cop deemed untrustworthy by the county’s state’s attorney’s office.

  • The Verge ☛ Surge pricing, the scourge of ridehailing, is evolving for the robotaxi era

    But Templeton acknowledged that surge pricing creates winners and losers, particularly if it cannot expand vehicle supply to soften price hikes. Those who can afford surge pricing will pay it; everyone else will have to find another way to travel — or forgo the trip entirely.

    “It does allocate more to the wealthy than the poor,” he said. “That may or may not match public goals” around fairness. This, after all, was the underlying critique of ridehail’s pioneering use of surge pricing, which the companies parried by noting how higher prices expand vehicle availability — something that Waymo and its ilk cannot claim.

  • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ Christians in Egypt face unprecedented persecution, report says

    Christians in Egypt are facing unprecedented levels of persecution, with attacks on churches and the kidnap of girls by Islamist extremists intent on forcing them to marry Muslims, a report says.

  • [Old] Hudson Institute ☛ Are Egypt's Christians Persecuted? Why Some Copts Say No

    Copts also suffer persecution from Islamic extremists. ISIS has targeted them and massacred over 100 in recent years. But, apart from terrorist attacks, radicals or mobs may attack Christian meetings that are not in a church, or when they build or repair churches, or are suspected of doing so, or are public about their faith, or talk to Muslims about their beliefs, or are believed to have insulted Muslims. There are also attacks on Copts, often women, to get them to convert. Converts from Islam, those accused of proselytism, and those accused of a relationship with a Muslim woman, are particularly targeted. In 2013, when then General Sisi overthrew the short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government, the Brotherhood singled out the Copts for particular blame and in three days in August of that year, hundreds of churches, religious sites, businesses and homes were attacked.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Trans boycott nearly put us out of business, says Mumsnet founder

    The founder of Mumsnet has said she feared it would be destroyed by trans activists after she stood up for women’s rights.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Verge ☛ Synology is tightening restrictions on third-party NAS hard drives

    The new restrictions mean that without Synology-approved drives, you might not be able to do things like pool storage between disks or take advantage of drive lifespan analysis offered by the company’s software. The change doesn’t apply to Synology J- and- Value-series devices, and won’t affect consumer-grade Synology Plus devices that were released in 2024 and earlier. Nor will it affect hard drives that are migrated to this year’s devices from its existing NAS systems, according to Synology’s press release.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• India Times ☛ Google makes history with rapid-fire antitrust losses

  Antitrust experts said two big antitrust wins for the government against a single company in such a short time appeared to have no precedent.

• Nick Heer ☛ Apple’s Rebranded Apple Ads Probably Forecasts More Advertising

  I do not think it is nitpicking to dispute calling margins of 35% on hardware “tight”.

• Copyrights

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-04-13 [Older] AG Campos advises CJEU to rule that joint ownership of copyright remains within the remit of national law, not EU law. But is that (still) right?

  • Vox ☛ 2025-04-16 [Older] The real argument artists should be making against AI

  • El País ☛ When Metallica took on Napster: 25 years of the trial that changed the music industry forever

    One of the most widespread arguments in favor of Napster was the platform’s promotional power, especially for artists whose songs weren’t widely played on radio and television. The example of Radiohead is often used as proof of this. Their album Kid A was leaked on the platform in September 2000, three weeks before its release date. It was a difficult album, with no traditional singles or music videos, but it was downloaded by millions of users. When the CD hit stores, it reached number one in sales in the U.S., something the British band had never achieved before. Lead singer Thom Yorke also expressed support for Napster’s role, saying it “fosters enthusiasm for music in a way the music industry has long forgotten to do.” Even their record label, Capitol, supported them in their advocacy of file sharing and considered it crucial in stimulating album sales.

  • CNBC ☛ Napster pioneered music sharing 25 years ago, bought for $207 million

    A quarter century ago, Napster was notorious on the [Internet] for allowing people to swap songs for free, long before the music industry had come up with a model for the digital age.

    The service was shuttered in 2001 amid mounting legal battles, and filed for bankruptcy the following year. But the brand isn't dead.

  • [Old] Gannett ☛ What was Napster? 25 years ago, website changed the way we get music

    "Napster wasn't just a file-sharing service; it was the infinite digital jukebox. And it was free," noted author Stephen Witt in the 2015 book "How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century and the Patient Zero of Piracy."

    As Saturday marks the 25th anniversary of Napster, we look back at the creation of the controversial file-sharing service, the impact it made and where the brand stands today.

  • Futurism ☛ Meta Says It's Okay to Feed Copyrighted Books Into Its AI Model Because They Have No "Economic Value"

    This is emblematic of the chicaneries and two-faced logic that Meta, and the AI industry at large, deploys when it's pressed about all the human-created content it devours.

    Somehow, that stuff is simultaneously not that valuable, and we should all stop pearl-clutching about the sanctity of art, and anyway an AI writes creative prose just as well as a human now — but is also absolutely essential to building our new synthetic gods that will solve climate change, so please don't make us pay for using any of it. That last bit is literally what OpenAI argued to the British Parliament last year — that there isn't enough stuff in the public domain to beef up its AI models, so it must be allowed to plumb the bounties of contemporary copyrighted works without paying a penny.

  • Vanity Fair ☛ This Is How Meta AI Staffers Deemed More Than 7 Million Books to Have No “Economic Value”

    As more than a dozen lawsuits churn ahead, newly unsealed case files reveal the company’s stance: The pirated books Meta used to train its AI, including ones by Beverly Cleary, Jacqueline Woodson, and Andrew Sean Greer, are individually worthless.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ ACE & MPA Quietly Seized Dozens of Pirate Domains in Q1 2025

    Since it's launch in 2017, the Alliance for Entertainment and Creativity has established itself as the most powerful coalition of its type on the planet. In the first three months of 2025, ACE welcomed new members to its ranks but reported just two successful outcomes concerning online enforcement operations. ACE has a track record of underreporting progress, the first quarter of 2025 was no exception.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ People stealing my favorite chimpanzee photo makes me furious – here’s how I deal with copyright theft

    I’ve thought about removing the image from Pixsy altogether just so I can live in blissful ignorance. But two things stop me. First, every now and then it is used by someone we can pursue – and a few hundred dollars here and there is still worth having.