Leftovers

• Science

  • Wired ☛ Scientists Are Mapping the Bizarre, Chaotic Spacetime Inside Black Holes

    In the last few years, physicists have been revisiting the chaos around singularities with new mathematical tools. Their goals are twofold. One hope is to show that approximations that Misner and others made are valid approximations of Einsteinian gravity. The other is to push closer to singularities in the hope that their extremes will help reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics in a theory of quantum gravity, which has been a goal of physicists for over a century. As Sean Hartnoll of the University of Cambridge put it, “The time is ripe now for these ideas to be fully developed.”

  • Daniel Estévez ☛ Analysis of the CAMRAS Venus radar experiment

    Calculation of the Doppler. CAMRAS has published CSV files containing the expected Doppler at each receiver, but they have not published the code to calculate this. Here I will do all the relevant calculations with SPICE.

  • David Rubin ☛ Efficient E-Matching for Super Optimizers

    In this post, we explored the core ideas behind E-Graphs - what they are, why they’re useful, and how enable reasoning over equivalence. We explained the basic ideas required to understand the abstract matching machine, such as discrimination trees and congruence closures.

  • [Old] University of Texas ☛ E.W.Dijkstra Archive: Home page

    Like most of us, Dijkstra always believed it a scientist’s duty to maintain a lively correspondence with his scientific colleagues. To a greater extent than most of us, he put that conviction into practice. For over four decades, he mailed copies of his consecutively numbered technical notes, trip reports, insightful observations, and pungent commentaries, known collectively as “EWDs”, to several dozen recipients in academia and industry. Thanks to the ubiquity of the photocopier and the wide interest in Dijkstra’s writings, the informal circulation of many of the EWDs eventually reached into the thousands.

  • Futurism ☛ The Government Is Now Threatening Academic Journals

    It has also frozen every single research grant at the US National Science Foundation, one of the largest funders of basic research in the world, in order to review the grants' language for terms related to DEI. Some of the "woke" or "partisan" stuff that's been kneecapped by the sweeping cuts include cancer and Alzheimer's research. If the draconian measures were intended to be an out-and-out assault on the scientific community, it's working: with the money drying up, some of the nation's top scientists are starting to consider leaving the country.

  • BoingBoing ☛ DOJ's menacing letter to med journals “a chill down the spine of scientists”

    The Department of Justice recently sent letters to perhaps "tens" of scientific journals, accusing them of being "partisan" and asking whether they are including "competing viewpoints." One such letter went to the journal CHEST, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American College of Chest Physicians that specializes in research focused on chest and diseases, emergency medicine, pulmonology, cardiology, and other related issues. Dr. Eric Reinhart, a social psychiatrist, political anthropologist, and psychoanalytic clinician who has published in numerous academic journals (including Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and more) as well as many popular magazines and news outlets (including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Nation, TIME, Slate, The Atlantic, and more) got a copy of the leaked letter, which was sent to CHEST Editor-in-Chief, Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, from Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Dr. Reinhart then posted about it on his Xitter account.

  • MedPage Today ☛ Medical Journals Get Letters From DOJ

    Adam Gaffney, MD, MPH, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts, said the letter "should send a chill down the spine of scientists and physicians."

    "It is yet another example of the Trump administration's effort to control academic inquiry and stifle scientific discourse -- an administration, it warrants mentioning, that has embraced medical misinformation and pseudoscience to reckless effect," Gaffney said in an email to MedPage Today. "Journal editors should join together and publicly renounce this as yet more thinly guised anti-science poliical blackmail."

• Career/Education

  • [Old] Murat Demirbas ☛ The demise of coding is greatly exaggerated

    This comic strip, from CommitStrip (2016), sums it up well. There will always be coding. The abstraction level may go up, we may start using domain specific languages (DSLs), but we will still need to be precise and comprehensive in our specifications to solve real world problems. The world is very complicated, there are corner cases everywhere.

    Natural language is ambigious and not suitable for programming. LLMs still need to generate code to get things done. If not inspected carefully, this incurs tech debt at monumental speed of the computers. The natural language prompts are not repeatable/deterministic, they are subject to breaking any time. This makes "natural language programming" unsuitable for even small sized projects, let alone medium to large projects.

  • Murat Demirbas ☛ What I'd do as a College Freshman in 2025

    Being supported by AI tools is not a substitute for mastery. You can’t borrow skills. You have to earn them.

    Computer science builds vital skills: hacking, debugging, abstract thinking, and quick adaptation. These don’t go out of style.

    Do STEM. It’s LLM-resistant. LLMs can retrieve and remix information, but do you know what to do with them? Like the dog chasing the car, what now? STEM teaches you that. It teaches you to think, to reason, to act. It gets you from information to wisdom. But only after you've mastered the foundations.

    We're heading into the age of π-shaped people: depth in two areas, and generalist across. Building depth first, and then ranging is good strategy.

  • Jeremy Keith ☛ Adactio: Articles—People and Blogs: Jeremy Keith

    An interview about my blog, originally published on the website People and Blogs in April 2025.

  • [Old] University of Texas ☛ E.W. Dijkstra Archive: On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (EWD 1036)

    You don't need to take my proposal seriously because it is utterly unrealistic to try to teach such material to college freshmen. Wouldn't that be an easy way out? You just postulate that this would be far too difficult. But that kite won't fly either for the postulate has been proven wrong: since the early 80's, such an introductory programming course has successfully been given to hundreds of college freshmen each year. [Because, in my experience, saying this once does not suffice, the previous sentence should be repeated at least another two times.] So, let us try again.

    Reluctantly admitting that it could perhaps be taught to sufficiently docile students, you yet reject my proposal because such a course would deviate so much from what 18-year old students are used to and expect that inflicting it upon them would be an act of educational irresponsibility: it would only frustrate the students. Needless to say, that kite won't fly either. It is true that the student that has never manipulated uninterpreted formulae quickly realizes that he is confronted with something totally unlike anything he has ever seen before. But fortunately, the rules of manipulation are in this case so few and simple that very soon thereafter he makes the exciting discovery that he is beginning to master the use of a tool that, in all its simplicity, gives him a power that far surpasses his wildest dreams.

    Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding. Within a few months, they find their way in a new world with a justified degree of confidence that is radically novel for them; within a few months, their concept of intellectual culture has acquired a radically novel dimension. To my taste and style, that is what education is about. Universities should not be afraid of teaching radical novelties; on the contrary, it is their calling to welcome the opportunity to do so. Their willingness to do so is our main safeguard against dictatorships, be they of the proletariat, of the scientific establishment, or of the corporate elite.

• Hardware

  • Wired ☛ Stumbling and Overheating, Most Humanoid Robots Fail to Finish Half Marathon in Beijing

    The slowest time allowed for human runners in the race was 3 hours and 10 minutes, and Tiangong Ultra was the only robot that barely qualified for a human participation award. Most of the humanoid participants didn’t stay in the game for long and disappeared from the live broadcast soon after they took off from the starting line.

  • Chris Hannah ☛ My Ideal Work Laptop

    In a dream world, I'd have a laptop setup so minimally, that each of these were always open, set to be used on their own workspace, and have nothing else installed. This sort of setup would be ideal for a Linux machine, where I could have a real control over how everything is configured, minimising distractions, etc.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ CT Scans Are Causing Quite a Bit of Cancer, Doctors Find

    Their findings, published as a provocative study in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, indicate that CT scans could cause five percent of all cancers in the US, where 93 million CT scans were performed on 62 million patients in 2023.

  • San Fancisco ☛ CT scans may be more harmful than previously thought, UCSF study finds

    That puts CT (computed tomography) scans — which expose patients to ionizing radiation, a known carcinogen — on par with alcohol consumption and excess body weight in terms of contribution to cancer risk, according to the study, which is slated for publication Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.

  • HSP News Service LLC ☛ Link Between CT Scans and Future Cancer Incidence

    “CT can save lives, but its potential harms are often overlooked,” said first author Rebecca Smith-Bindman, MD, a radiologist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), as well as Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences; a member of the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies; and Director of the Radiology Outcomes Research Lab.

    “Given the large volume of CT use in the United States, many cancers could occur in the future if current practices don’t change,” she added. “Our estimates put CT [exposure] on par with other significant risk factors, such as alcohol consumption and excess body weight. Reducing the number of scans and reducing doses per scan would save lives.”

  • International Business Times ☛ Carnival Cruise Urges Guests To Report People Who Do This One Thing 'Immediately' Amid Safety Fears

    While smoking on a balcony might seem harmless, cruise safety experts warn it can be anything but. The combination of sea winds and improper disposal of ash or cigarette butts makes balconies a high-risk zone for fires. In such a contained environment, even a small flame could lead to disaster.

    Hot ash falling onto balcony furniture or decking has been linked to past cruise ship fires, prompting lines like Carnival to adopt a zero-tolerance approach. According to experts cited by MailOnline Travel, guests who ignore rules risk upsetting the crew and endangering everyone on board.

  • Bert Hubert ☛ Out of the Office: Into each life some rain must fall

    You rarely see anything written contemporaneously by people currently felled by very bad news. And, from experience, I know that once the situation settles, some kind of protective amnesia sets in. But this also makes you forget what you learned about what was important. So there is some value in writing up what I feel right now.

• Proprietary

  • The Washington Post ☛ Stolen iPhone victims look to Apple lawsuit to reclaim years of data

    As if the shopping spree the thief went on with her saved credit cards wasn’t bad enough, Davis has never regained access to the crucial files — contacts, photos from her wedding, data related to work “and other essential information” — associated with her Apple account. That’s not just because of the people who stole her phone. It’s also because Apple won’t give it back.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Register UK ☛ Cursor AI support bot hallucinated its own company policy

      But the person on the other end of that email wasn't a person at all, but an AI support bot. And it evidently made that policy up.

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft Copilot shows up even when unwanted

      "Today Copilot enabled itself for all my open VS Code windows without my consent. I have agent mode enabled, so you now may or may not have a copy of all the files containing keys, yaml secrets, certificates and so on. That's not OK."

    • Voice of San Diego ☛ As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond

      She’s far from the only professor dealing with this trend. Ever since the pandemic forced schools to go virtual, the number of online classes offered by community colleges has exploded. That has been a welcome development for many students who value the flexibility online classes offer. But it has also given rise to the incredibly invasive and uniquely modern phenomenon of bot students now besieging community college professors like Smith.

      The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.

    • PC Mag ☛ Community Colleges Hit By Wave of ‘Bot’ Students Using AI to Cheat Student Aid

      Elizabeth Smith, a professor at Southwestern College, a community college in Chula Vista, California, found that just 14 out of the 104 students originally enrolled in her class were real people.

      “I’m not teaching, I’m playing a cop now,” she said, adding that the experience was “surreal.”

      The trend reportedly started in earnest in 2021, when pandemic lockdowns pushed most community college classes online, while more people than ever took the opportunity to sign up for online courses.

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ Is using AI wrong? A review of six popular anti-AI arguments

      Some people really, really don’t like AI. Broadly speaking, being anti-AI is a popular left-wing position: AI1 is cringe, it’s plagiarism, it’s stunting real growth, it’s killing the environment, it’s destroying the careers of artists and creatives, and so on. Is it wrong to use AI? If so, why is AI bad?

      I’m going to go through what I see as the main reasons people are anti-AI: general big-tech backlash, plagiarism, deskilling, climate cost, and impact on the arts. Cards on the table - I use AI and work at a company building AI tooling, but I share a lot of the skepticism and I’m willing to take the anti-AI arguments very seriously.

    • Jan Wildeboer ☛ Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken

      But IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) this also explains the explosion of bot traffic that really cripples a lot of smaller services (like my forgejo instance, that I had to make non-public).

      So if you as an app developer include such a 3rd party SDK in your app to make some money — you are part of the problem and I think you should be held responsible for delivering malware to your users, making them botnet members.

      Unfortunately it is next to impossible for normal users to detect the inclusion of such shady SDKs and the network traffic they cause. Not even mentioning how hard this is for admins of (small) web servers.

    • Jan Wildeboer ☛ Botnet Part 1: Those Stealthy Botnets - Jan Wildeboer’s Blog

      I have recently learned that there is a shady market out there where app developers are offered to include a little “peer to peer proxy” library in their app so that the users of said app “donate” 120-150 kbps of their network traffic to that company.

      The app developer gets paid for including the library (one offer is 18 cents per active user). These shady companies claim that Apple and Google App stores are fine with their libraries. This is one sneaky way how botnets are created out there. There are many others, unfortunately.

  • Social Control Media

    • SBS ☛ From Fortnite to OnlyFans, politicians are going to new lengths for votes

      From joining an adults-only site to video gaming, commuter chats, DJing with influencers, and even a diss track — this year's federal election candidates are resorting to unconventional campaign methods to win over voters.

      However, political experts say it's unclear whether such methods will yield results.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ ChatGPT is now a potent tool for finding the locations of photos, raising doxxing concerns

      This newfound ability of ChatGPT is a great example of the strengthened visual reasoning being brought to the platform with model updates. It can now reason based on the content of uploaded images and perform some Photoshop-esque tasks like cropping, rotating, and zooming in.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ If you report a bug, Apple reserves the right to train Apple Intelligence on your private logs

      There is no opt-out.

      This is not a notice of, say, using machine learning to analyse bug reports. It’s specifically reserving the right to train the Apple Intelligence product on your private logs.

      This seems a good way to discourage bug reports. No reports means no bugs, right?

    • 404 Media ☛ Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional

      Cops have been able to sift through this data to solve crimes. But tower dumps are also a massive privacy violation that flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unlawful search and seizure. When the cops get a tower dump they’re not just searching and seizing the data of a suspected criminal, they’re sifting through the information of everyone who was in the location.

    • Computer Weekly ☛ UK digital identity turns to drama (or farce?) over industry fears and security doubts

      Computer Weekly charted the slow and painful demise of Verify across several years before that point. So it’s disturbing that recent developments around the £400m One Login scheme are starting to raise red flags again. (That’s a further £400m, on top of the costs of Verify, just to be clear).

      Let’s review the latest developments.

    • Computer Weekly ☛ Government faces claims of serious security and data protection problems in One Login digital ID

      According to claims by a whistleblower, many of the security problems that were reported have yet to be resolved.

      One Login is the government’s flagship system for securely accessing online public services, and underpins the Gov.uk digital wallet and the digital driving licence launched by technology secretary Peter Kyle in January this year as part of his new government digital strategy.

    • Identity Week ☛ Alleged flaws with GOV.UK’s One Login pointed out by GDS Information Security employee

      Alleged flaws with GOV.UK’s One Login system have surfaced three years after it became operational. The Government Digital Service has lauded the system for successfully verifying 1.8 million people’s identities since August 2023, but now a whistle blower has broken silence whilst employed by GDS to highlight concerns raised around the shortcomings of the system’s data protection. The problems have been confirmed through an internal investigation by GDS’s Chief Information Security Officer.

      The employee, who works in information security, remains unnamed in the expose article, claiming they wrote to an MP after inaction to investigate the potential problems. An MP addressed the claims with the Cabinet Office, however, the GDS did not disclose its knowledge about prior warnings.

    • The Telegraph UK ☛ ‘It’s Horizon all over again’: Return of digital IDs sparks security concerns

      One Login, as the system is known, is now live and used by 3m people. Ministers also want banks to adopt it to secure loans and mortgages, and have demonstrated a smartphone app built on top of One Login – called Gov.UK Wallet – that pubs and nightclubs will be able to use to check IDs.

      Yet this week The Telegraph revealed that citizens’ personal data has been potentially put at risk by cyber security failings. Developers were given top level system access without the required level of security vetting and high numbers of defects were reported, according to an audit from 2023.

    • [Old] Jan Wildeboer ☛ Hungary’s Bluff Is Called. Chatcontrol Stays Zombie - Jan Wildeboer’s Blog

      Hungary desperately wanted to have this topic on the agenda. They really tried to force a vote. But it became quite clear that there is no majority for the current proposal. So the vote was postponed (again).

  • Confidentiality

    • University of Toronto ☛ Chris's Wiki :: blog/tech/DANEIsNotGoodDNSUse

      DNS is extremely bad fit for a system where you absolutely want everyone to see the same 'answer' and to have high assurance that you know what that answer is (and that you are the only person who can put it there). It's especially bad if you want to globally limit who is trusted and allow that trust to be removed or limited without severe damage. In general, if security would be significantly compromised should people received a different answer than the one you set up, DNS is not what you want to use.

• Defence/Aggression

  • [Old] Stanford University ☛ Mark Twain, “The War Prayer” (ca.1904-5) | The American Yawp Reader

    The American writer Mark Twain wrote the following satire in the glow of America’s imperial interventions.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ A theocrat's prayer to end democracy

    Satire inspired by the man in white

  • Task And Purpose ☛ 80 years ago, US soldiers captured the center of Nazi Germany

    At this point in the war, advancing Allied forces had a doctrine to avoid being bogged down in urban warfare, preferring to encircle and besiege Nazi-held cities and advance forward, rather than suffer heavy casualties that they knew would come from building-to-building combat. But the push into Germany proper meant that Nazi strongholds had to be taken. Nuremberg in particular was a target due to its importance in Nazi propaganda, having been the site of major rallies by the party prior to the war. Berlin was the capital of Germany but Nuremberg was seen as the Nazi’s political center.

  • The Register UK ☛ DOGE [sic] has failed to cut anywhere near what Musk promised

    But those receipts seem to be a bit, well, questionable. As numerous outlets have reported, the data shared on DOGE [sic]'s website has been riddled with mistakes, with inflated cuts, credit claimed for contracts terminated years ago, and claims of contract cancellations that appeared to be incorrect.

  • International Business Times ☛ Is ICE Targeting Muslim Students? Lawsuits Mount After 1,400 Visas Suddenly Revoked

    Seventeen international students have filed a federal lawsuit in Georgia, accusing ICE of revoking their visas via the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) without due process. The students argue that this not only disrupted their education and careers, but also violated their legal rights. The lawsuit reads: 'ICE cannot misuse SEVIS to circumvent the law, strip students of status, and drive them out of the country without process.'

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Shameless Chinese firms advertise ‘inflatable boats for refugees’

    Chinese companies are selling “inflatable boats for refugees” online and advertising them to people smugglers.

    An [Internet] search returns dozens of suppliers promoting “high-quality refugee boats” on Alibaba, a major Chinese e-commerce site, and promising fast shipping to Europe.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ The MMA fighters removing squatters from holiday homes

    Critics, however, are doubtful that the measure can tackle the scale of the crisis: a recent report by estate agency Idealista estimated tens of thousands of properties are now occupied. It’s an issue that ties into the broader housing crisis, exacerbated by the 2008 financial crash, which left many Spaniards unable to afford basic housing.

    Adding to the complexity is the legal distinction between okupas – people who break into empty homes – and inquiokupas, tenants who stop paying rent and claim legal vulnerability, making them harder to remove as their right to housing is protected under the Spanish constitution.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Pentagon Chief Hegseth Shared Yemen War Plans In Family Group

    The revelations of a second Signal chat raise more questions about Hegseth's use of an unclassified messaging system to share highly sensitive security details and come at a particularly delicate moment for him, with senior officials ousted from the Pentagon last week as part of an internal leak investigation.

  • The Verge ☛ Pete Hegseth reportedly spilled Yemen attack details in another Signal chat

    But in this case, according to the Times, the chat was one that Hegseth made in January before he was Defense Secretary:

    "Unlike the chat in which The Atlantic was mistakenly included, the newly revealed one was created by Mr. Hegseth. It included his wife and about a dozen other people from his personal and professional inner circle in January, before his confirmation as defense secretary, and was named “Defense | Team Huddle,” the people familiar with the chat said. He used his private phone, rather than his government one, to access the Signal chat."

  • Reclaim The Net ☛ Whistleblower Alleges Major Flaws in GOV.UK One Login

    UK’s digital ID scheme, GOV.UK One Login, allegedly contains a host of serious vulnerabilities affecting security and data protection, that are “built in” and present in the system since its launch.

    These claims come from a whistleblower, a security expert who worked for the Government Digital Service (GDS, a part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology). The most grave consequences stemming from the flaws – that the whistleblower first pointed out through proper channels in 2022, only to be ignored – would include data breaches.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Trump is shifting cybersecurity to the states, but many aren’t prepared

    States and localities are taking steps to address the problems, such as establishing new penalties for tampering with critical infrastructure, centralizing state IT personnel and setting standards in areas from elections to health care.

    But the Trump order and federal funding cuts, a shortage of IT experts at the local level and an overall lack of preparedness could weaken their efforts.

  • The New Stack ☛ Cloud Service: What the Pope Thinks About AI

    In January, the Vatican, under the auspices of Pope Francis, posted a document, “Antiqua et Nova” or “Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence.”

    It serves as the [Catholic] Church’s response to the emergence of AI, which the Church admits is bringing about a profound “epochal change” across numerous aspects of human life.

  • Drew DeVault ☛ Resistance from the tech sector [Here we have another example of PERVERTS trying to paint themselves as tech warriors]

    And still, this glitz and razzle dazzle act obscures the more profound and dangerous applications of tech hegemony to fascism. Allow me to introduce public enemy number one: Palantir. Under the direction of neo-fascist Peter Thiel and in collaboration with ICE, Palantir is applying the innovations of the last few decades of surveillance capitalism to implementing a database of undesirables the Nazis could have never dreamed of. Where DOGE is hilariously tragic, Palantir is nightmarishly effective.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • JURIST ☛ Russia court sentences 19-year-old activist for poetic protest of Ukraine conflict

    Kozyreva began her anti-war activism in 2022, the year that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. That December, she was detained for spray-painting the words “Murderers, you bombed it. Judases” on a sculpture representing the historic ties between St. Petersburg and the Ukrainian city of Mariupol—which Russia had heavily bombarded that year. In early 2024, she was fined and expelled from university for criticizing the “imperialist nature of the war” in a social media post.

  • The Atlantic ☛ PBS Pulled a Film for Political Reasons, Then Changed Its Mind

    “I never would have described myself as a political filmmaker, or as a social-justice filmmaker, or even as a journalistic filmmaker,” Wagner told me. Indeed, PBS’s decision to withhold Break the Game appears to be a function of its timing: The original April 7 airdate would have come a bit too soon after the DOGE [sic] subcommittee hearing. A few of the documentary films that have already aired during the current season of POV, before Trump’s second inauguration, are explicitly left wing. Twice Colonized, which was broadcast last October, tells the story of an Indigenous-rights activist from Greenland (of all places) who, according to the synopsis, “works to bring her colonizers to justice.” That film’s discussion guide, which remains available on PBS.org, invites viewers of the film to think about how they understand the terms cultural erasure, institutional racism, and mental colonization. Another film on the current slate, Who I Am Not, which premiered in December, tells the story of an intersex South African beauty queen and an intersex activist.

  • The Nation ☛ Harvard Stands Up

    Leading the global rush of media coverage, The New York Times headlined “Harvard’s Decision to Resist Trump Is ‘of Momentous Significance’”—and then ran nearly a dozen in-depth stories in two days, from how and why Harvard decided to fight, to the moves Trump made next when he realized the university would not bend to his will: first, suspending $2.2 billion in federal funds to the university, then backpedaling, before shifting to a threat to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status as an educational institution.

  • [Old] Newsweek ☛ Neil Young Fears US Ban Over Trump Criticism - Newsweek

    His remarks arrive amid increasing scrutiny of border practices and the alleged politicization of immigration enforcement. In recent weeks, a French scientist and the British punk band UK Subs were each denied entry into the U.S., both having previously expressed anti-Trump sentiments.

  • [Old] Variety ☛ Neil Young Fears Anti-Trump Statements Will Get Him Barred From U.S.

    Young’s message Tuesday followed one he posted just the day before, on March 31, titled “I love music, but that’s only half the story,” in which he wrote: “Our rights to free speech are being taken away and buried by our government. Reporters who do not agree with our government have been banned from interviewing our President. Canadian-Americans like me have had their freedom threatened by activities such as taking private info from their devices and using it to block them from entering our country – ie: If you don’t agree with our government, you are barred from entering or sent to jail. …

  • [Old] The Independent UK ☛ French scientist denied entry to US after officials find ‘hateful’ texts about Donald Trump on his phone

    A French scientist was refused entry to the U.S. after airport immigration officers found messages on his phone criticizing the Trump administration, the French government said.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Techdirt ☛ Pushing The ‘Shoplifting Crime Wave’ Narrative Allowed Cops To Stock Up On LEO Goodies

    The Appeal has amassed a collection of public records related to this so-called shoplifting crime wave. Crime data shows the problem was always overstated. These documents show just how much law enforcement agencies profited from pushing a narrative that increased public fear while simultaneously exposing how useless cops are when it comes to deterring criminal activity.

  • The Appeal ☛ Shoplifting Panic Let Police Buy New Military and Surveillance Gear

    The “crime panic” was a myth. But an analysis by The Appeal shows the narrative helped local police buy facial recognition software, drones, license plate readers, social media surveillance tech, and more.

  • Kyle E Mitchell ☛ The Fourth Circuit's Opinion in the Abrego García Case

    I not an immigration lawyer, or even a lawyer who handles court cases. I advise and negotiate outside court, and pride myself on keeping clients clear of those places. It’s still part of my job to follow and understand what the courts are doing, especially the written decisions of judges that come out of them. But it’s not any part of my day-to-day to know all the twists and turns of court procedure, much the less the state of the metagame in any particular area. Still, I’m hardly the only lawyer peering over to follow this case.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • PC World ☛ I block every ad on YouTube. I'm not ashamed to admit it

    I block every single ad on YouTube. And I’m a hypocrite for doing it. But I’m not ashamed. Because through a series of blunders and malicious decisions, Google has systematically made YouTube a worse and worse viewing experience, abusing its monopoly position as the de facto home of video on the web.

  • Tedium ☛ When Smart Gadgets Stop Working, What’s The Plan B?

    We now have a lot of examples of cloud-enabled smart devices that don’t work anymore. What we don’t have is a plan B that prevents old gadgets from becoming garbage.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ The Piracy Pandemic: COVID-19 Led to a Surge of New Pirates

    New research published in the Journal of Cultural Economics documents how the COVID-19 pandemic created a surge in "new pirates". Contrary to simple narratives, increased online piracy during the pandemic isn't always associated with less legal consumption. In fact, the relationship between piracy and legal markets is far from straightforward.