Leftovers

• Meduza ☛ From webcams to handcuffs How Russia criminalized its live-stream porn industry

  The new policing practices have introduced additional hazards to an already dangerous industry. Even before Russian law enforcement declared open season on webcam models, studio owners often exploited their performers by withholding pay without warning, deliberately downplaying the legal risks of the job, and being outright abusive. For example, an anonymous webcam model told the Samara-based outlet 66.ru in 2022 that her coworker was denied leave to attend her brother’s funeral. “Time off requires one week’s notice. This is sudden, so — too bad. Now grab a dildo [and get back to work],” the woman recalled.

• Robert Birming ☛ One step at a time

  An ongoing project on this new blog is to move posts here from my old blog. There's quite a lot, so it will probably take some time. I plan to take one or two posts every now and then, otherwise it risks feeling unmanageable.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ How I write and publish blog posts in April 2025

  I’ve written a bit about my website’s stack and tooling over the years and I figured now would be a good time to document how my current setup works from start to finish. I’m focusing on the flow of writing and publishing a blog post which is the most frequent activity I do on my site. For any technical development, it’s “write new code, push to github, merge PR, done”.

• Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Amos Wenger (fasterthanlime) on Technical Blogging

  Following up on “Writing for Developers: Blogs That Get Read” and writethat.blog, we’re sharing the perspectives of expert tech bloggers: why they write, how they tackle writing challenges, and their lessons learned.

• Science

  • The Local DK ☛ Danish universities want to be an option for US researchers moving away from Trump

    Denmark is among countries whose research sectors could benefit from the potential recruitment of highly-skilled US scholars moving away from the administration of President Donald Trump.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ EU seeks to attract American scholars as Trump freezes funds

    VUB has allocated funding and established a contact point for information for outstanding scholars looking to relocate to Brussels, particularly "excellent researchers currently working in the US who see their line of research threatened."

    "We thought that it might be good to specifically advertise in the United States," he said, "because US scholars see an abrupt funding cut and they might be interested in continuing their line of research with us in Brussels."

    The VUB has already received dozens of inquiries from US scholars.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Elephant instead of wild boar? What could have been in Europe

    The species survived multiple ice ages before becoming extinct during the last one due to additional hunting pressure from humans. Throughout its existence, the straight-tusked elephant helped shape Europe's landscape, maintaining open spaces and light woodlands. Many native plant species are still adapted to these conditions today.

    "The German name Waldelefant (forest elephant) originates from the assumption that this species primarily lived in the wooded regions of Europe. However, fossil evidence shows that P. antiquus often inhabited open or semi-open habitats with mosaic-like vegetation, similar to modern elephants," explains Prof. Dr. Manuel Steinbauer, Chair of Sport Ecology at the University of Bayreuth.

  • Futurism ☛ Columbia Student Kicked Out for Creating AI to Cheat, Raises Millions to Turn It Into a Startup

    Over the past few months, a 21-year-old undergraduate went from viral sensation to startup founder after getting suspended by Columbia for creating an AI that helps you cheat.

    In a LinkedIn post announcing a successful seed fundraising round, founder Chungin "Roy" Lee explained that his software, which was formerly called Interview Coder and is now called Cluely, is a "completely undetectable AI that sees your screen, hears your audio, and gives you real-time assistance in any situation."

  • Scientific American ☛ NASA’s Next Major Space Telescope Is Ready to Launch. Trump Wants to Kill It and Other Vital Science | Scientific American

    But a leaked draft of the president’s 2026 budget request, which Scientific American has reviewed, instead calls for canceling Roman.

    “This is nuts. You’ve built it, and you’re not going to do the final step to finish it?” says astrophysicist David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation and former co-chair of Roman’s science team. “That is such a waste of taxpayers’ money.”

• Career/Education

  • NYPost ☛ Gen Z grads ghost jobs over missing salary info

    Nearly half — 44%, to be exact — of Gen Z college grads say they’ve been turned off by interviews that didn’t mention a salary range, sometimes by flat-out ghosting the recruiter, according to Monster’s 2025 State of the Graduate Report.

    Why the silent treatment? It’s not about being rude — it’s about being real. For Gen Z, transparency is non-negotiable, and pay is the first thing on the table. If it’s not, they’re out.

  • Seth Godin ☛ Simple and painless productivity

    Here are some proven ways to save hours of wasted time. You’re probably doing many of them, but they’re still treated as options by many. In rough order of importance: [...]

  • Technologizer ☛ The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great

    If you remember the computer magazines of this era at all, you recall how thick they were—hundreds and hundreds of pages an issue in the case of the most successful ones. The majority of those pages were ads, not editorial content. And a sizable chunk of those ads were catalog-y in the extreme. Pages and pages were devoted to lists of products and prices in teensy type, with 1-800 numbers you could call to place an order.

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ Brian Regan Helped Me Understand My Aversion to Job Titles

    I like the job title “Design Engineer”. When required to label myself, I feel partial to that term (I should, I’ve written about it enough).

    Lately I’ve felt like the term is becoming more mainstream which, don’t get me wrong, is a good thing. I appreciate the diversification of job titles, especially ones that look to stand in the middle between two binaries.

• Hardware

  • Dan Langille ☛ Making sure I remove the correct drive

    Today, the zpool replace command has completed.

    Next, I carefully chose the right drive to pull from the drive bays.

  • [Old] The Verge ☛ Bill Gates admits Control-Alt-Delete was a mistake, blames IBM

    [...] David Bradley, an engineer who worked on the original IBM PC, invented the combination which was originally designed to reboot a PC. "I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous," Bradley said in an interview previously, leaving Bill Gates looking rather awkward. To this day the combination still exists in Windows 8, allowing users to lock a machine or access the task manager. While Windows 8 defaults to a new login screen, it's still possible to use the traditional Control-Alt-Delete requirement and a number of businesses running on Windows XP and Windows 7 will still use it every day.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • MAHA: The new Lysenkoism

    [Orac Note: I’m trying to get this blog up and running again. To begin the process, I’m going to start out by reposting and updating several of what I consider to be important posts from the last month or so from my not-so-super-secret other blog that I want posted here on my private blog. (Sadly, things are moving so quickly that I fear that if I delay reposting these articles they will soon no longer be relevant.) Then, hopefully, within a week or so, producing new exclusive posts published only on this blog. We’ll see how it goes and how long it takes me to get back to a more regular posting schedule. In the meantime, let’s start with how MAHA is the new Lysenkoism.]

  • CBC ☛ 'I am horrified': Why autistic people say RFK Jr.'s comments on autism are so dangerous

    "This isn't the rhetoric of an administration that is looking to support autistic people," said L'Etang, who was diagnosed when she was 31.

    "At best they are misinformed and think they are helping, at worst, they're looking to eliminate autism, which in turn, given autism's genetic component, is akin to eliminating autistic people from existing."

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Marine in top enlisted spot leaving the Pentagon after just 2 years

    In his two years in the role, Black’s most prominent public statements may have been a call to eliminate fast food outlets from military bases, which he linked to general fitness across the enlisted corps.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Army cuts athletic trainers, will use unit medics to treat injuries

    Athletic trainers are civilian specialists trained to help prevent or treat injuries that often occur during normal fitness training like weight lifting and running. To replace them, the Army says it will use more strength coaches, fitness specialists who focus on creating and monitoring workouts but who often lack training on injury prevention.

    As for the injuries that athletic trainers might have helped with, soldiers will now have to go find a medic in their unit.

  • Harvard University ☛ U.S. pregnancy-related deaths continuing to rise

    State rates also varied greatly, ranging from 18.5 to 59.7 deaths per 100,000 live births.

    In this edited conversation, Molina, an obstetrician-gynecologist, discusses the findings and what needs to happen next.

  • Andre Franca ☛ Social Media Made Me Stupid (and How I Fixed It)

    These platforms are designed to be addictive. I remember waking up in the morning and instinctively reaching for my phone, scrolling through notifications, hoping for messages or new content. All of that for a tiny jolt of pleasure, like I was winning some kind of game. What I didn’t realize was that this was all by design. These platforms use principles from behavioral psychology to create loops that keep us coming back. I found myself checking my phone dozens of times a day without even thinking. My attention span shrank. I struggled to sit with a book or focus on a deep conversation without wanting to check in on what I was “missing” online. It was exhausting.

  • Wired ☛ Muscle Memory Isn’t What You Think It Is

    In her new book, On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui investigates the other stuff our thews remember—like how to grow when you exercise.

  • Arduino ☛ The bare necessities: cleaner water and safer food with Arduino

    There’s a handful of things we truly need in order to live, and food and water comfortably make the list.

    Unfortunately, our water and food sources are not always safe. Throughout the world — even in developed countries — pollution, climate change, and poor management are damaging our access to clean water and food.

    And to make things even worse, some of the most common methods of cooking and treating food and water are wasteful and bad for the planet!

    Can technology help? We think so. In this article, we’ll explore three different ways Arduino can be used to drive cleaner, safer food and water in a more eco-friendly way.

• Proprietary

  • RFA ☛ InDrive ride-hailing app faces deletion in Laos

    Ride-hailing app inDrive is under risk of being scrapped in Laos after recent reports of sexual assaults by drivers that raised concerns over a lack of safety provisions for users, state media say.

  • Ted Unangst ☛ windows experience goes to 11

    I haven’t had much use for Windows for a while, but I like to keep abreast of whatever fuckery Redmond has in store for everyone else. I picked up a new laptop with the dreaded Copilot key, and thus had to figure out how to make it useful. And along the way, found a bunch of other settings to adjust. The plan is that I won’t need any of this knowledge until it becomes obsolete, but the only way to ensure that outcome is to write it all down; thus by being available it will never be necessary.

  • Chris Enns ☛ Apple Gaming is Still a Joke

    It should be embarrassing for Tim Cook and Apple how the r/macgaming subreddit is full of people just trying to get games to run on a Mac. Not which game is best. Not how much fun they're having playing with friends. Not video captures or screenshots of cool moments. Just nerds trying to hack their $2K+ computer to run a game, even if it's at the lowest possible graphics settings.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Great AI Lock-In Has Begun

    The most powerful tech companies succeed not simply by the virtues of their individual software and gadgets, but by building ecosystems of connected services. Having an iPhone and a MacBook makes it very convenient to use iCloud storage and iMessage and Apple Pay, and very annoying if a family member has a Samsung smartphone or if you ever decide to switch to a Windows PC. Google Search, Drive, Chrome, and Android devices form a similar walled garden, so much so that federal attorneys have asked a court to force the company to sell Chrome as a remedy to an antitrust violation. But compared with computers or even web browsers, chatbots are very easy to switch among—just open a new tab and type in a different URL. That makes the challenge somewhat greater for AI start-ups. Google and Apple already have product ecosystems to slide AI into; OpenAI does not.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • 404 Media ☛ The Man Who Wants AI to Help You ‘Cheat on Everything’

      Last month, Roy Lee was suspended from Columbia after he was accused of using AI to “cheat” on technical job interviews for Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. On Sunday, he announced that he raised $5.3 million to start Cluely, a new startup that aims to allow users to similarly “cheat on everything.”

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Regulating AI Behavior with a Hypervisor - Schneier on Security

      The basic idea is that many of the AI safety policies proposed by the AI community lack robust technical enforcement mechanisms. The worry is that, as models get smarter, they will be able to avoid those safety policies. The paper proposes a set technical enforcement mechanisms that could work against these malicious AIs.

    • arXiv ☛ Guillotine: Hypervisors for Isolating Malicious AIs

      At the time of this paper’s writing, AGI models do not exist. As a result, this paper’s discussion about AGI hypervisors must necessarily suffer from an evidence dilemma (bengio, )—we can only talk about AGI-induced harms (and possible defenses against those harms) in a speculative manner, because the harm-inducing agents do not currently exist. However, modern history is replete with examples of societal challenges that were identified in their nascent stages and would have benefited from earlier, more aggressive action. For instance, early predictions of global warning were unfortunately prescient (theConversationClimateChange, ) but did not capture the attention of the public until decades later, in some cases because energy companies suppressed the research findings of their own scientists (harvardGazetteClimateChange, ); climate scientists now debate how quickly the “point of no return” will occur, after which significant climate-related harms will be unavoidable (aengenheyster2018, ). Social media technology is another relevant example. Concerns about the technology’s destabilizing impacts (e.g., on mental health and the dissemination of accurate information) were known but deprioritized by social media companies and many of their computer scientists (facebookFiles, ).

      Technologists should not repeat these mistakes. The systems community (and computer scientists more generally) should take an aggressively proactive approach towards AI safety. Policies for monitoring and restricting potentially dangerous models require systems-level enforcement mechanisms; Guillotine proposes one research direction for such mechanisms.

    • Nick Heer ☛ The Paid A.I. Hype Guys

      The (verified) X accounts producing threads of links to bad A.I. products, boosted by dozens of replies from other verified X accounts, are annoying spam, but seem relatively harmless. But the newsletters profiled here are curious.

    • Drew Breunig ☛ The Wisdom of Artificial Crowds

      At their core, LLMs are average machines. They predict the next token based on the sum of all the data they’ve been trained on. Much of the time, this is exactly what we want: the consensus answer to a question, derived from an internet’s worth of content.

      But sometimes, we don’t want the average. Recently, we discussed how reasoning models “search” as they reason. They’ll nominate and explore multiple, potential solutions to your problem, exploring each before settling on the hopeful ideal.

      For searching, we don’t want the average. We want a scattershot of diverse, yet relevant potential paths.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ State Bar of California admits it used AI to develop exam questions

      Nearly two months after hundreds of prospective California lawyers complained that their bar exams were plagued with technical problems and irregularities, the state’s legal licensing body has caused fresh outrage by admitting that some multiple-choice questions were developed with the aid of artificial intelligence.

      The State Bar of California said in a news release Monday that it will ask the California Supreme Court to adjust test scores for those who took its February bar exam.

    • Greg Storey ☛ Mo prompts, same problems.

      Since the debut of Terminator 2, we’ve all been primed to watch for signs of the impending skull-crushing robot apocolypse. As we’ve drawn closer to that pivotal moments of robots replicating forms of human intelligence and motor skills, the horror isn’t about destroying human kind, but another kind of doomsday—ending our careers. What was once dubbed the future is not present day. We’ve been here for a while now and that reality was abruptly introduced to the world through an internal company policy memo that reads “Start using AI, not more humans, now.”

  • Social Control Media

    • RTL ☛ Music, tutorials, and more: YouTube says more than 20 billion videos uploaded in 20 years

      YouTube is marking 20 years since its first upload with a milestone: over 20 billion videos now live on the platform, which has grown from a quirky startup into a global streaming giant poised to surpass US cable TV in paid viewership.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Teachers lack time to tackle the influence of online misogynists on their students, research says

      One teacher told them, "I heard very toxic language and spoke to the boy. I had to get a male member of staff to join me in the end because it was pointless."

      Another said, "Many students follow Andrew Tate on social media and believe him to be a role model. They feel he is showing masculinity and there is nothing wrong with this. I have spoken to many students about this to explain it is misogyny but, worryingly, there is a reluctance from students to accept this."

    • [Old] JSTOR ☛ Russia and the Media: The Makings of a New Cold War

      This book has examined media coverage of Vladimir Putin and Russia at key moments since Putin emerged as the real power, in 1999. It has shown how the media, particularly in Britain, established from the beginning a very clear enemy image of the Russian leader, and one that was sometimes inflated to an extent bordering on hysteria mixed with comic-book caricature. He was ‘the ex-KGB man’, the ‘mob boss’, the ‘unrepentant Cold War warrior’, the ‘narcissist’, the ‘ruthless’ war leader, the ‘cold fish’ and much more besides (see the full Putin Lexicon of terms in Appendix A). This contrasted to...

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Sarah Wynn-Williams’s ‘Careless People’

      One thing is clear: Facebook doesn't really care about countries other than America. Though Wynn-Williams chalks this up to plain old provincial chauvinism (which FB's top eschelon possess in copious quantities), there's something else at work. The USA is the only country in the world that a) is rich, b) is populous, and c) has no meaningful privacy protections. If you make money selling access to dossiers on rich people to advertisers, America is the most important market in the world.

    • [Old] The Jamestown Foundation ☛ A New Version of the ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’? - Jamestown

      Gerasimov and the Russian Armed Forces are clearly not content to limit their ambitions by the subtle 2013 “Gerasimov doctrine.” Today, they are boldly challenging the entire world and pledging to build the biggest military they can. The end result may prove as devastating as in 1991.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Dutch intelligence reports Russian cyber attack

      Russian hackers targeted a Dutch public facility last year, the Dutch Military Intelligence Agency and security service MIVD reported on Tuesday.

      The target was the digital control system of an undisclosed Dutch public facility in the first known Russian attack on the Netherlands' critical infrastructure, the MIVD said in its annual report. The report reviewed other cyber attacks against European allies of Ukraine amid the ongoing war.

    • The Register UK ☛ European biz calls for Euro tech for local people

      For European organizations, this means considering where new workloads and data should go and the potential business risk involved in selecting a tech giant that might be subject to the whims of an unpredictable US administration. Or choosing something closer to home, away from the Trump effect.

    • The Register UK ☛ FBI: Cybercrime cost victims 'staggering' $16.6B last year

      Also in 2024: Ransomware again posed the biggest threat to critical infrastructure organizations, with the number of complaints to the IC3 increasing nine percent compared to the year prior.

    • The Record ☛ Ransomware groups test new business models to hit more victims, increase profits

      Anubis, which researchers started tracking in December, is offering three monetization schemes for its customers, from traditional encryption attacks that see the affiliates pocket 80% of the ransom through to data extortion attacks (60% of the ransom) and simple access monetization (50% of the ransom).

      Anubis includes various tactics for increasing pressure on victims to pay, including threatening to publish stolen data as well as naming them on social media.

    • The Record ☛ Over $16 billion in losses reported to FBI in 2024 tied to computer crime

      In particular, he highlighted the bureau’s work against the notorious LockBit ransomware gang as well as the FBI’s efforts to offer up thousands of decryption keys to victims of ransomware, avoiding over $800 million in payments since 2022.

    • The Record ☛ Thousands of Baltimore students, teachers affected by data breach following February ransomware attack

      Thousands of students, teachers and administrators had information stolen from the Baltimore City Public Schools system during a ransomware attack in February.

      Officials at Baltimore City Public Schools published a breach notice on Tuesday warning that a cyber incident on February 13 exposed certain IT systems within the network.

    • PC Mag ☛ Ransomware Gang Takes Page From Elon's 'What Did You Do This Week' DOGE [sic] Emails

      The FOG ransomware group has been distributing the DOGE [sic]-themed notes in recent weeks, according to malware samples that cybersecurity vendor Trend Micro discovered on the file-scanning service VirusTotal. “We observed that these samples initially dropped a note containing key names related to the Department [sic] of Government Efficiency (DOGE [sic]),” Trend Micro says.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Open-source code security startup Chainguard raises $356M at $3.5B valuation

      The Series D round comes less than a year after the company’s previous nine-figure raise. Chainguard detailed in its announcement of the deal today that Kleiner Perkins and IVP were the lead investors. They were joined by Salesforce Ventures, Datadog Ventures and all of the company’s existing backers.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Security Week ☛ Files Deleted From GitHub Repos Leak Valuable Secrets

    The issue his research brings to the spotlight is that developers may not be aware that Git retains copies of all files within a repository, even if they are no longer available in the working directory.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • France24 ☛ EU fines Apple and Meta €700 million for digital violations: What happens next?

      It said Meta's "pay-or-consent" model, introduced in November 2023, breached the DMA in the period up to November 2024, when it tweaked it to use less personal data for targeted advertising.

      The model provides Facebook and Instagram users who consent to be tracked with a free service that is funded by advertising revenues. Alternatively, they can pay for an ad-free service.

      The fines follow a year-long investigation by the European Commission.

    • EDRI ☛ Commission slams Apple and Meta for breaching the Digital Markets Act, doesn’t stick the landing with fines

      Today, April 23, 2025, the European Commission has shown some teeth with the EU’s digital rulebook by slamming tech giants Apple and Meta with admittedly low fines. The penalties of €500 million and €200 million each were imposed for breaching the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and were complemented by an order to the companies to stop the infringing behaviour.

      The fine on Meta was levied for their ‘Pay or Consent’/’Pay or Okay’ model which forces people to either pay for their right to privacy or consent to extensive commercial surveillance on their platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. Disappointingly, the Commission has not taken a final decision on the ‘alternative’ Meta proposed to their Pay or Consent model, which allegedly offers an option with ‘less personalised ads’ but still tracks people’s data and forces them into using the personalised model.

    • JURIST ☛ European Commission fines Apple and Meta €700M for breaching Digital Markets Act

      The European Commission fined Apple €500 million for implementing steering terms that breached the DMA. The Commission stated that Apple imposed technical and commercial restrictions on app developers’ steering obligation, which requires them to inform customers about alternative and cheaper app offers outside Apple’s App Store. These restrictions prevented developers from distributing their apps through channels other than the App Store and deprived consumers of the opportunity to benefit from cheaper alternatives available elsewhere. In addition to the fine, the Commission ordered Apple to eliminate the technical and commercial restrictions and to refrain from similar actions in the future.

    • The Register UK ☛ EC fines Meta, Apple €700M for DMA compliance failures

      Apple was penalised to the tune of €500 million ($570 million) for violating anti-steering rules and Meta by €200 million ($228 million) for its "consent or pay" ad model, the EU said in a press release.

      The fines are a pittance for both firms, whose most recent quarterly earnings statements from January saw Apple report $36.33 billion in net income, and Meta $20.83 billion.

    • The Register UK ☛ Blue Shield shared 4.7M people's health info with Google Ads

      Other info potentially shared with Google ranged from patient names, insurance plan details, city of residence and zip code, gender, family size, and Blue Shield-assigned account identifiers, to financial responsibility info, and search queries and results for the "Find a Doctor" tool — including location, plan type, and provider details.

      Exactly what was shared depended on what healthare you were receiving, and whether you accessed or entered your info into Blue Shield's websites between 2021 and 2024, from what we can tell.

    • The Record ☛ Millions impacted by data breaches at Blue Shield of California, mammography service and more

      In breach notification letters and in a notice on its website, the insurer said that from April 2021 to January 2024, it used Google Analytics to internally track website usage of members who entered certain Blue Shield sites.

      In February, the company realized that Google Analytics “was configured in a way that allowed certain member data to be shared with Google’s advertising product, Google Ads, that likely included protected health information.”

    • Macworld ☛ EU fines Apple €500M ($570M) for violations of the Digital Markets Act

      Now, the European Commission has issued its first major fines under the Digital Markets Act, slapping Apple with a €500M fine (that’s about $570M in U.S. dollars). Meta was also fined €200M.

      The version of iOS users get on their iPhones in the EU is, some would say, superior to that which we have in the rest of the world. It allows alternate app stores and app side-loading (with restrictions), more user control over default apps, more open payment systems, and other changes. As recently as March, the EU pointed out several ways in which Apple was still out of compliance with the regulations, with specific steps needed to address in order to avoid a fine.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ EU Commission fines Apple, Meta over digital law breaches

      The fine was imposed on Meta over its "pay for privacy" system, which means users have to pay to avoid data collection, or agree to share their data with Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram to keep using the platforms for free.

      The Commission concluded that Meta did not provide Facebook and Instagram users a less personalized but equivalent version of the platforms, and "did not allow users to exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data."

    • RTL ☛ Personal data collection: 200 French media groups sue Meta over 'unlawful' advertising: lawyers

      The plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the company on Wednesday before the Paris commercial court, seeking "compensation for the massive economic harm ... caused by the unfair business practices of the American giant."

      According to them, Meta "massively collected users' personal data without informing them or seeking their consent," in violation of European data protection rules.

    • EFF ☛ Digital Identities and the Future of Age Verification in Europe

      As governments across the world pass laws to “keep children safe online,” more times than not, notions of safety rest on the ability of platforms, websites, and online entities being able to discern users by age. This legislative trend has also arrived in the European Union, where online child safety is becoming one of the issues that will define European tech policy for years to come.

    • EFF ☛ Florida’s Anti-Encryption Bill Is a Wrecking Ball to Privacy. There's Still Time to Stop It.

      SB 868 is a blatant attack on encrypted communication. Since we last wrote about the bill, the situation has gotten worse. The bill and its House companion have both sailed through their committees and are headed to a full vote. That means, if passed, SB 868 would: [...]

    • Simone Silvestroni ☛ Changes

      So much has changed in how I manage myself in these dystopian days, not sure where to start.

      I've been adjusting my lifestyle, especially the forced reliance on certain technology, for a long while now. I'll be using a couple of quotes to illustrate recent changes. The first is from a post titled What's the Point?: [...]

    • Joel Chrono ☛ What's on my phone storage?

      I don't know why do I think this makes for an interesting post at all but whatever, what is in *your* phone storage?

  • Confidentiality

    • PC World ☛ NordVPN review: More than just a VPN, it’s a privacy powerhouse

      NordVPN is one of the most well-known VPN services with an absolutely massive user-base. The trusted premium service is notable for its excellent speeds, an enormous server network, and unrivaled set of security features.

    • Tor ☛ Tor user support now available in Farsi | The Tor Project

      Farsi-speaking users can now contact us directly for help with accessing the Tor network. Whether you're trying to download Tor Browser, bypass online censorship, or need assistance navigating Tor connectivity issues, our support team is available to help.

      Tor user support is available via Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, and email, from Monday through Thursday, from 19:30 – 01:30 Iran time (same day to next day). Support is provided via text only; voice and video are not supported.

    • Wired ☛ The Tech That Safeguards the Conclave’s Secrecy

      In 2005, cell phones were banned for the first time during the conclave, the process by which the Catholic Church elects its new pope. Twenty years later, after the death of Pope Francis, the election process is underway again. Authorities have two priorities: to protect the integrity of those attending the meeting, and to ensure that it proceeds in strict secrecy (under penalty of excommunication and imprisonment) until the final decision is made.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Atlantic ☛ Progressive Christianity’s Bleak Future

    In his final Easter address, Pope Francis touched on one of the major themes of his 12-year papacy, that love, hope, and peace are possible amid a rising tide of violence and extremism: “What a great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day in the many conflicts raging in different parts of our world!” Archbishop Diego Ravelli read the prepared text aloud to crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square, because Francis was by then too ill to deliver his remarks himself: “How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants!” The hallmark of a truly Christian sentiment is its radicalism, how deeply it subverts systems of worldly power and domination. Francis understood that.

  • [Old] US Army ☛ Social Media Part 2

    Russia’s relentless need to maintain the social media and disinformation operations under the Gerasimov Doctrine enables their tactical commanders to conduct offensive cyber and information operations. In contrast, U.S. tactical commanders often lack clear social media guidance at the tactical level.  As a result, Russian tactical information units, and their proxies, currently occupy the proverbial “high ground” in the information domain.

  • [Old] The Washington Post ☛ Why Russia’s weaponization of social media will continue in 2020

    Still, Russia’s use of strategic propaganda is part of a decades-old playbook. What is new is how cleanly, simply and effectively it was able to distribute false information, manipulate mainstream media and amplify existing divisions using social media platforms. However, 2016 was not the first election in which social media played a role — so what changed? Why were Russian operatives able to amplify their message so clearly? And what does that mean for the 2020 election?

    Let’s dig in.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Can the Courts Force Trump to Comply?

    The situation raises a very basic question about our constitutional order: Can courts force a president to comply with their rulings? After all, the president commands the executive branch and the military. As one Harvard law professor has pointedly asked, “Why would people with money and guns ever submit to people armed only with gavels?”

  • NDTV ☛ "Tu Bahar Aa": Man Made To Recite Islamic Verse In Pahalgam, Then Shot, Daughter Recounts

    Asavari said there were several tourists around, but the terrorists specifically targeted men after asking whether they were Hindus or Muslims. "They then asked my father to recite an Islamic verse (probably the Kalma). When he failed to do so, they pumped three bullets into him, one on the head, one behind the ear and another in the back," the 26-year-old said, adding that the gunmen then turned to her uncle and shot him repeatedly. Police and security forces reached the spot 20 minutes later, she said.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Dissenter ☛ Tesla Whistleblower Wins Legal Victory, Calls Musk A 'Vindictive Monster'

  • American Oversight ☛ As the Signalgate Scandal Grows, American Oversight Continues Investigations of Mismanagement at Hegseth’s Pentagon

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s leadership has demanded scrutiny for more than his dangerously careless use of Signal. The people deserve to know whether their defense secretary is putting his political or political interests above our national security.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Labor Department Says Staff Could Face Criminal Charges for Leaks

    The warning comes as current and former Labor Department employees have spoken to the news media about harms they see resulting from the dismantling of portions of their agency, which enforces laws guaranteeing rights to a safe workplace, fair pay and protections against discrimination.

    “It’s very chilling,” a Labor Department employee who requested anonymity for fear of retribution told ProPublica. “It’s never a good look when you’re telling people to never talk about what you’re doing.”

  • Krebs On Security ☛ DOGE [sic] Worker’s Code Supports NLRB Whistleblower

    According to a whistleblower complaint filed last week by Daniel J. Berulis, a 38-year-old security architect at the NLRB, officials from DOGE [sic] met with NLRB leaders on March 3 and demanded the creation of several all-powerful “tenant admin” accounts that were to be exempted from network logging activity that would otherwise keep a detailed record of all actions taken by those accounts.

    Berulis said the new DOGE [sic] accounts had unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter information contained in NLRB databases. The new accounts also could restrict log visibility, delay retention, route logs elsewhere, or even remove them entirely — top-tier user privileges that neither Berulis nor his boss possessed.

  • Techdirt ☛ Cops Who Attended ‘Stop The Steal’ Rally Ask US Supreme Court To Keep Their Names Out Of The News

    Two officers (who are married to each other), Caitlin and Alexander Everett have already had their names made public by the Seattle PD. This followed an investigation that found the couple not only attended the “Stop the Steal” rally, but crossed police barriers and stood near the Capitol building. Since both actions violated the law, their names were made public.

• Environment

  • University of Michigan ☛ Historic Tappan Oak sapling planted to mark Earth Day at U-M

    The sapling’s story began more than a decade ago, when Chayce Griffith, a 2016 College of Engineering graduate, picked up a few acorns from the original tree during his sophomore year.

    He initially gathered the acorns — unaware of the tree’s full historical significance — because he was captivated by the beauty of the oaks on the Diag.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ In Wyoming, the Eastern Shoshone tribe decided to classify buffalo as wildlife. Here is why

    Wildlife is broadly defined as all living organisms, like plants and animals that exist outside the direct control of humans. When it comes to how different states define wildlife, it can vary. But in general, animals that are not domesticated — as in selectively bred for human consumption or companionship — are typically classified as wildlife.

    “Bison have a complex history since their near extinction over 100 years ago,” said Lisa Shipley, a professor at Washington State University who studies management of wild ungulates, which are large mammals with hooves, including buffalo.

  • Wired ☛ This Artificial Wetland Is Reusing Wastewater to Revive a Lost Ecosystem

    When it launched, this new system worked. “In the beginning, the plant did not perform ideally,” says Edith Santiago, deputy director of the Colorado River delta program in Mexicali at the conservation nonprofit the Sonoran Institute. To combat this, some organizations proposed to the water management agency that they should use the surrounding land, which decades ago housed a lake, to create an artificial wetland that would give the water additional cleanliness.

    Such a plan, as well as helping with the city’s sewage problem, would also help partially restore the local landscape to its former state. Before the overexploitation of the Colorado River, its delta crossed Baja California and Sonora until it met the waters of the Gulf of California, resulting in more than 400,000 hectares of wetlands. Although the river’s course has become a ghost, about 15 percent of those wetlands have survived, harboring an invaluable biodiversity of plants and animals. Seeking to mimic that strength, the Las Arenitas artificial wetland is a pause to the devastation of the local landscape.

  • Roy Tang ☛ Going Out With A Bang

    This is a very dumb way for our civilization to collapse

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump Meme Coin Explodes After He Gives Access to Top Investors

      Trump’s [cryptocurrency] fortune has continued to grow since he returned to the White House. In addition to the president and First Lady Melania Trump debuting his-and-hers meme coins — which have been lucrative — the Trump family leads the decentralized finance exchange World Liberty Financial, which has sold at least $550 million worth of its first digital token, $WLFI.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Chinese data centers refurbing and selling Nvidia RTX 4090D GPUs due to overcapacity — 48GB models sell for up to $5,500

      One surprising aspect is that AI data centers are doing this despite the uncertainty surrounding AI chip supply from the U.S. The White House has recently blocked China-compliant Nvidia H20 and AMD MI308 chips for export to China, and there are also some rumors that the 5090D might also be affected by the ban. In fact, it's rumored that Nvidia has mentioned suspending supplying 5090D chips to its board partners, although it did not mention stopping sales entirely.

    • Futurism ☛ Trump Just Set a Tariff on Solar Panels So High That Your Eyebrows May Raise Involuntarily

      Nominally issued to help American companies compete against Chinese companies that flood American markets with cheap solar panels, the levies probably better serve to illustrate how far this president is willing to go in his trade war — even at the expense of cheap renewable power.

    • CNN ☛ US wants to slap tariffs as high as 3,500% on solar panels from Southeast Asia

      US trade officials finalized steep tariff levels on most solar cells from Southeast Asia, a key step toward wrapping up a year-old trade case in which American manufacturers accused Chinese companies of flooding the market with unfairly cheap goods.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ A U.K. Man Just Walked 53 Miles Wearing a Giant, Handmade Bird Costume. Here's Why He Did It

      But the eye-catching bird wasn’t some new, super-sized species. It was a man dressed in costume, trekking conspicuously to raise awareness about the plight of one of the United Kingdom’s most iconic and threatened birds.

      Matt Trevelyan walked 53 miles in total along a route called the Nidderdale Way—all while wearing a handmade outfit designed to look like a Eurasian curlew, the largest wading bird in Europe. He spent three days creating the costume out of split bamboo, muslin and polystyrene. Trevelyan nicknamed his creation “Cathy.”

• Finance

  • IBM Beats Earnings Forecast, But Layoffs and DEI Retreat Test HR

    As IBM’s Q1 2025 earnings renew market faith, its layoffs and cultural shifts signal a deeper transformation. What we’ve seen today gives a clear signal that it’s time HR professionals at IBM must steer through job cuts, a stricter return-to-office mandate, and a pivot to AI-driven innovation.

    On April 23, 2025, IBM released its Q1 2025 earnings, reporting $14.54 billion in revenue, a 0.6% year-over-year increase, and adjusted earnings per share of $1.60, surpassing analyst expectations. The IBM’s earnings report in April 2025 shows unbeatable software growth, particularly in Red Hat, alongside a $6 billion generative AI business. Yet, IBM stock after earnings fell 6.8% in after-hours trading, as a growing number of investors are concerned about declining consulting and infrastructure revenues. This reaction highlights a broader narrative, i.e. IBM’s pivot to AI and cost efficiency that is now reshaping its workforce and culture.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ IBM earnings beat dragged down by DOGE [sic] contract roulette

    Some share of the blame for the dip may belong to DOGE [sic], the US government data-scouring, cost-trimming operation unofficially overseen by Tesla and SpaceX oligarch Elon Musk.

  • 9to5Mac ☛ Tim Cook pressed for details on how Apple obtained Trump tariff exemptions

    Senator Warren specifically lays out four questions: [...]

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Struggling Intel set to cut 20% of its workforce

    The cutbacks follow an effort last year to slash about 15 000 jobs — a round of layoffs announced in August. Intel had 108 900 employees at the end of 2024, down from 124 800 the previous year.

  • The Nation ☛ Want to Understand the New Cold War? Look to Huawei.

    What is also clear, though, is that underneath America’s bluster lurks a very real and very understandable fear: namely, that this is a battle that America might not win. In fact, more than that, this is a battle that America might have already lost; all the joking on social media that the United States has entered its own “Century of Humiliation”— China’s lasted from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century—cuts to the quick precisely because it expresses very real anxieties.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Ericsson expands antenna manufacturing footprint in India

    The antennas division of Ericsson, Ericsson Antenna System EAS is expanding its local manufacturing footprint in India, which the telecoms equipment vendor says will position the country as a strategic innovation hub.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Nokia selected by Australian cloud provider ResetData for networking backbone

    Telecoms equipment vendor Nokia has been selected by Australian cloud provider ResetData to supply a networking backbone for its rollout of sovereign liquid immersion-cooled ‘AI Factory’ data centres across the country.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Axios ☛ Fact-checking fades as institutional trust wanes

      State of play: Institutions once seen as critical to providing facts about history and current events, such as public schools and news media, are experiencing record-low trust levels, in addition to financial challenges.

    • The Defence Horizon Journal ☛ The Development Of Russia’s Hybrid War Doctrine - TDHJ.org

      Before the war, Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev told the press that Ukraine would soon become so chaotic that it would cause a tsunami of refugees that would overwhelm Europe.[51] According to UN statistics, in the course of the war, European countries have received and accommodated almost 6 million Ukrainians.[52] Refugees have become a factor in the domestic political life in many Central European EU countries. Right-wing radical and eurosceptic political forces use the issue of economic security for Ukrainian refugees and equal access to social benefits to instil distrust in national governments and EU institutions.[53] Russia follows the trends of European right-wingers as part of its informational influence strategy on the EU audience. Thus, Kremlin propaganda has made discrediting Ukrainian refugees in the EU one of the main areas of its external information operation track since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. The tools Russia employs for distorting information about Ukrainians in Europe are quite diverse. Fake news, public statements by Russian officials, and manipulative comments by pseudo-experts are all used by pro-Kremlin media outlets. Ukrainians’ image in the EU is being distorted as part of disinformation campaigns involving Russian media and European pro-Russian media activists, experts, and individual political forces.[54]

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • FAIR ☛ Pope Francis Obits Omit Focus on Palestine

    The obituaries for Pope Francis in the leading US newspapers ignored the late pontiff’s commitment to the Palestinian people and the acute suffering in Gaza in the last years of his life. Many of them ran separate pieces that highlighted Francis’ concern for Gaza and the response of Palestinians to his death, but they failed to mention these aspects of his papacy in the lengthy obituaries that summed up his life.

  • RFERL ☛ Russia Issues Warrant For Film Critic Turned War Critic

    When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she immediately condemned it. Russian forces “have bombed the country, levelled whole cities to the ground,” she wrote a few weeks into the conflict.

    Words such as these were a direct challenge to the Kremlin’s narrative, which banned the word “war” and denied that civilians were being targeted in attacks despite evidence to the contrary.

  • The Scotsman ☛ Scottish MPs on being banned from Russia for 'hostile statements' and 'outright rudeness'

    Russia has sanctioned four Scottish MPs in its latest attack on critics of its invasion of Ukraine.

  • Futurism ☛ Twitter Appears to Be Shadow Banning Accounts That Criticize Elon Musk

    The suspiciously timed drop-offs appear to be examples of shadow banning, the practice of severely suppressing a user's reach without informing them they're being punished. In effect, it allows site admins to ban people without actually banning them, and is difficult to detect. That it's allegedly being leveraged against Musk's critics is striking, and serve as the latest evidence of the billionaire's hypocritical devotion to free speech.

  • Techdirt ☛ Otherwise Objectionable: Can Section 230 Survive In An AI-Driven World?

    The timing couldn’t be more relevant. As Congress (less so) and state legislatures (much more so) rush to regulate AI, they seem determined to ignore the lessons learned from decades of internet regulation. The principles that made Section 230 so crucial for the internet’s development — protecting innovation while enabling responsible content moderation — are more relevant than ever in the AI era.

  • Sports Politika ☛ Dana White loves free speech, but his UFC still bans journalists like me

    It’s frustrating to watch White cast himself as the champion of free speech when he fronts for a sports league infamous for its heavy-handed repression of the media—one that routinely intimidates and blacklists any journalist who dares to stray from its approved line, including myself.

    For the past decade, the UFC has gone out of its way to make my job harder—blacklisting me from events, obstructing my investigations, and even attempting to get me fired by threatening to revoke my employer’s media credentials unless I was let go. Though I was lucky to have an employer at BloodyElbow—Nate Wilcox—who stood up for me and believed in my work, others were not so lucky.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ How the UFC Went MAGA

    MMA used to be home to oddballs unified by a love of beating each other up inside cages. But since Donald Trump’s first presidency, the UFC has rebranded the sport as a refuge for the “anti-woke sports fan,” while breaking unions and censoring the media.

  • International Business Times ☛ Unilever Threatens To Cut Ben & Jerry's £4m Funding Over Pro-Palestinian Stance and Anti-Trump Messaging

    Boardroom tensions have boiled over between Unilever and its famously outspoken ice cream brand, with the corporate giant now demanding a complete audit of Ben & Jerry's charitable giving.

  • Reuters ☛ Unilever threatens to pull funding from the Ben & Jerry's Foundation, sources say

    Unilever (ULVR.L) , opens new tab is threatening to halt funding to the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit that makes donations to social justice organizations, sources familiar with the matter said. Unilever is asking Ben & Jerry’s Foundation to agree to an expedited audit of its donations to continue the funding, which amounts to roughly $5 million annually and is determined by a formula based on sales of the brand's ice cream, the two sources said.

  • Axios ☛ Sarah Palin loses defamation retrial against NYT

    Why it matters: The ruling isn't shocking, given that a federal judge and jury already rejected Palin's libel claims against the Times in a 2022 trial.

  • New York Times ☛ They Criticized Musk on X. Then Their Reach Collapsed.

    It is not clear what precisely happened to the three accounts that feuded with Mr. Musk in late December. Dozens of other users also said their accounts were impacted after criticizing the billionaire, but The Times reviewed data for those accounts and did not find clear evidence that their visibility was severely impacted. As with any social network, the algorithms that control a post’s distribution — and the data that fuels those decisions — are impossible for outsiders to scrutinize.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Harvard Funding Freeze

    This isn't governance. It's extortion. But more fundamentally, it represents a radical reimagining of the state's relationship to knowledge itself.

    In the liberal democratic tradition, the state is an epistemically limited actor—a steward, not an author of truth. Federal funding of research exists not to direct what conclusions scientists reach or what ideas scholars explore, but to enable the pursuit of knowledge that benefits society. The tradition of neutral proceduralism in public funding isn't an accident or a mere preference—it's a cornerstone of the liberal state that recognizes government lacks both the expertise and the authority to dictate what counts as valid inquiry.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Harvard University filed a lawsuit against the Trump over funding cuts - The Zambian Observer

    The lawsuit, filed in a Massachusetts federal court, claims that the Trump administration’s actions violate both the First Amendment and federal laws. It describes the government’s efforts as “arbitrary and capricious” and argues that they represent an unlawful use of federal funding to influence academic decision-making at Harvard and other targeted universities. The lawsuit seeks to have the funding freeze and other imposed conditions on federal grants declared unlawful and to recover legal costs.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Local SE ☛ Swedish journalist Joakim Medin charged in Turkey risks 12 years in prison

    Dagens ETC said Medin would appear before a judge in Ankara next week via video link from the Silivri prison. The trial will be open, meaning that journalists, organisations and ambassadors will be able to attend.

    "This is actually good news," Veysel Ok, part of the team representing Medin, told the newspaper. "Because now we can challenge the accusations."

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ US judge orders preliminary Voice of America funding restoration

    Lamberth wrote that Voice of America’s congressionally established charter states that the outlet will “‘serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news (that is) accurate, objective, and comprehensive’ but the defendants have silenced VOA.”

    The judge called on the Trump administration to return all employees and contractors to their jobs and to provide monthly status reports on compliance.

  • RFERL ☛ Judge Orders Steps To Reverse Shutdown Of US Government Funded Broadcaster VOA

    U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled late on April 22 to grant a preliminary injunction that says officials must "take all necessary steps" to restore employees and contractors to their positions at VOA and to restore Congress-approved funding to two other U.S.-government funded broadcasters -- Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks -- and resume radio, television and online news broadcasts.

  • JURIST ☛ Rights group warns Indonesia crackdown on journalists undermines media freedom

    Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday warned that the latest wave of threats on journalists and media outlets in Indonesia has escalated, leading to a severe impact on press freedom across the country.

    According to HRW, these actions are against the fundamental principle of democracy and have led to nationwide outrage, with journalists criticizing the government’s unconstitutional actions. HRW documented that the abuse faced by media outlets has increased tenfold since amendments were proposed to the National Armed Forces (Tentara Nasional Indonesia) Act, Law No.34/2004, which would empower military officials to have an active role in Indonesia’s justice system and state-owned companies. The violence targeted against journalists includes physical assault, threats at their workplace, and malicious online attacks in the form of doxxing (leaking an individual’s personal information).

  • JURIST ☛ US jury finds New York Times not liable for libel against former VP candidate Sarah Palin

    A previous jury in 2022 came to the same conclusion, finding the NYT not liable, but the issue was revived by an appeals court. Both juries stuck to the long-established legal protections that safeguard American media against defamation claims from public figures. A jury instruction provided in this trial references this requirement, stating that the jury must: [...]

  • Techdirt ☛ 60 Minutes Producer Quits After Trump FCC Harassment, Saying Show Can No Longer Do Independent Journalism

    Carr has launched an “investigation” into CBS claiming that the minor edits to the Harris interview violate the FCC’s “Broadcast News Distortion” policy, a rarely enforced rule preventing news outlets from killing stories or dramatically changing stories in exchange for bribes. It’s completely bogus, but whether CBS is guilty doesn’t matter; right wing media will ensure CBS looks guilty of being unfair to the right wing.

    It’s a fake inquiry, designed to pressure CBS to fold to the whims of Trumpism and weaken their journalism of the administration. And it’s working. Top 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens now says he’s quitting the program, making it clear that CBS is likely to fold to Trump’s whims: [...]

  • New York Times ☛ ‘60 Minutes’ Chief Resigns in Emotional Meeting: ‘The Company Is Done With Me’

    CBS News entered a new period of turmoil on Tuesday after the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, said he would resign from the long-running Sunday news program, citing encroachments on his journalistic independence.

    In an extraordinary declaration, Mr. Owens — only the third person to run the program in its 57-year history — told his staff in a memo that “over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”

  • Press Gazette ☛ UK journalists are getting older, more left-wing and increasingly work freelance

    The survey of 1,130 UK journalists was carried out between September and November 2023, eight years after the last comparative study.

  • PC Mag ☛ PCMag Editorial Team

    Here's who we are and what we do. We welcome your questions and feedback.

  • 404 Media ☛ How 404 Media Is Navigating 'Economic Headwinds'

    The economy is bad. Here's how we're doing, and how you can help us.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • ANF News ☛ Prison administration demands translation fee for Kurdish letters

    Bolu Type F Prison, frequently in the spotlight for its violations of prisoners’ rights, has once again come under scrutiny as it emerged that political prisoner Ihsan Balkaş’s right to communication was arbitrarily restricted. Letters written by Balkaş in his mother tongue, Kurdish, were not sent by the prison administration on the grounds that they were "not understood." Additionally, the administration demanded that he pay for the translation of the letters.

  • JURIST ☛ Amnesty International urges US to stop revoking foreign student visas

    The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, at 8 U.S.C. 1251(a)(4)(C)(i), allows the Secretary of State to deport any noncitizen whom he has reasonable grounds to believe poses potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the US. The US government has broad discretion over the visa revocation process. However, immigrants to the US retain the right to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and due process. Amnesty points out that the government’s discretion has been exercised in ways that contravene those rights.

  • International Business Times ☛ US Border Horror: Aussie Woman Strip-Searched, Asked About Abortions, Then Deported for Pet-Sitting

    Madolline Gourley's world turned upside down as she got booted out of America for pet-sitting. After five years of globe-trotting on a shoestring by house-sitting, she found herself stripped of her passport, interrogated about her reproductive history, and bundled onto a flight back to Brisbane – all because she'd been minding pets in exchange for free accommodation.

    [...]

    'I have since learned CBP should've offered me the option to "withdraw my intention to enter the United States" instead of refusing me entry,' she explained. 'If I had the option to withdraw my intention to enter the United States, I wouldn't have a 'record' of being refused entry to another country.'

  • Mike Brock ☛ A Family Torn Apart

    His crime? There wasn't one. The administration's own Department of Justice has admitted in court that this was a mistake—that Abrego García should never have been deported. Yet instead of working to rectify this error, the administration has doubled down, with the President himself attacking Abrego García and the Department of Homeland Security posting unredacted court documents containing the family's home address to social media, forcing his wife and three children—two with autism, one prone to seizures—into hiding.

    What makes this case so chilling is not just the cruelty inflicted on one family but what it reveals about the nature of power untethered from moral constraint. When a government can seize a person with legal protection against deportation, ship them to a foreign prison without a hearing, and then, when caught, choose to endanger that person's family rather than admit error—we are witnessing not governance but vindictiveness elevated to state policy.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ What It's Like Being a Nurse in New Orleans

    In December of 2023, in the face of an extended anti-union campaign from their bosses, more than 600 nurses at University Medical Center in New Orleans overwhelmingly voted to unionize with the National Nurses United. They became the first private sector hospital nurses to unionize in the state of Louisiana. Due to instransigence from management, they still don’t have a first contract 16 months later.

  • Futurism ☛ Mark Zuckerberg's Wife Is Shutting Down a School for Low Income Families

    Whatever her personal beliefs are, Chan's appearance with Zuckerberg at Trump's inauguration — and the swift changes and closures that have followed at her companies — make it pretty clear that the social justice values espoused by her tuition-free schools for low-income kids in the Bay Area matter less than the alliance her husband seeks with the president.

  • Techdirt ☛ Don’t Kid Yourselves, Folks. Trump Is Just As Willing To Deport/Jail Actual US Citizens.

    Now, there are going to be people rolling into the comments with their bad faith arguments about “who doesn’t carry their ID on them at all times.” Fuck that. This isn’t a “papers, please” nation. At least, it’s not supposed to be. We’re supposed to be able to freely move about without having to prove our nationality if we’re not, you know, actually crossing a border.

  • Techdirt ☛ 5th Circuit Obediently Lets AT&T Off The Hook For Major Location Data Privacy Violations

    Want regulators to protect you? They can no longer do so without the explicit approval Congress. Want Congress to protect you? Congress is too corrupt to function. Want the courts to protect you? They’re stocked with far-right Trumpies keen on ushering forth the golden age of corruption. Want your state to protect you? It’s increasingly under-resourced as federal governance falls apart and it’s overloaded by legal fights. Want to protect yourself? Your rights are increasingly being boxed in at every turn.

    Again you’re to ignore that dysfunction leaves the public at the whims of predatory amoral corporate giants, the often-deadly symptoms of which are everywhere you look. You’re to politely nod at the sage wisdom of the very objective, reasonable, and entirely good faith court rulings and move along with your day as accountability, consumer rights, public safety, and the environment crumble around you.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Nick Heer ☛ On the ‘Streaming Is More Expensive Than Cable’ Complaint

    Second, as Birchler acknowledges, some stuff still is not available on streaming, and so some people still feel they must add a cable subscription, too. Because most of the big streaming services are owned by the same broadcasters as cable channels, it gives them an opportunity to double-dip.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ On the "streaming is more expensive than cable" complaint

    Let's go all out and subscribe to all the major, streaming services. The exact list of services may be different to everyone, but I'm basically going to get enough that whenever someone talks about a new exciting show, it's almost certain I can watch it without having to subscribe to something new.

    I'm going to subscribe to the ad-supported version of each service if it's available. We should remember 1/3 of all cable time was ads, so if we're saying things are worse than before, we gotta get ads.

  • Ars Technica ☛ Synology confirms that higher-end NAS products will require its branded drives - Ars Technica

    Popular NAS-maker Synology has confirmed and slightly clarified a policy that appeared on its German website earlier this week: Its "Plus" tier of devices, starting with the 2025 series, will require Synology-branded hard drives for full compatibility, at least at first.

  • Casey Liss ☛ Liss is More

    This week, things finally changed, officially. Synology will be restricting features for those who do not use Synology-branded drives. Drives that are bog-standard enterprise hard drives, possibly with some custom firmware in them.

    Why? For more revenue. Footgun.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• PC World ☛ Google paid Samsung to preload and integrate Gemini AI on phones

  The information comes from a predictable source: testimony in the ongoing and potentially disastrous Google antitrust case. (No, not that one, the other one. Google has lost two separate antitrust cases brought by the US federal government in the last year.) Bloomberg reports that Google is paying Samsung “an enormous sum of money” to put Gemini on its phones and integrate it into the One UI Android skin, according to Google platform and device partnership VP Peter Fitzgerald.

• MacRumors ☛ DoJ Wins Another Victory: Google's Ad Tech Empire Violates Antitrust Laws

  Google has an illegal monopoly in online advertising, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said today. Google is guilty of "willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power" in the publisher ad server market that websites use for ads and the open-web display ad exchange market that matches advertisers with websites.

• Court House News ☛ Yelp’s antitrust case against Google over search results will proceed | Courthouse News Service

  In its 66-page complaint, Yelp claimed Google “has never been able to develop a high-quality local search service to rival that of Yelp and other local search platforms. Unwilling to invest or innovate to attract users in a competitive environment, Google has instead relied on a simple but effective strategy — it uses its monopoly power in general search to make sure that users never get to local search competitors in the first instance, diverting traffic away from those rivals and toward Google’s own inferior local search product."

  Yelp claimed that Google’s actions were a violation of antitrust law and unfair competition law.

• US News And World Report ☛ Meta, Apple Fined 700 Million Euros for Violating EU Antitrust Rules

  "Great news for app developers worldwide! (...) Today's decision benefits all developers - European developers and American developers alike. It highlights the need for America to similarly pass the Open App Markets Act to bring competition back to digital markets.

  "Lobbyists and shills funded by American Big Tech had better not misportray Europe's modest fine for Apple's lawbreaking as a "European tax on American companies". To do so would be to try to gaslight the administration into a trade war to protect Apple's lawlessness."

• Open Web Advocacy ☛ Break Google’s Search Monopoly without Breaking the Web

  In late 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), in conjunction with state attorneys general representing 11 states, brought a landmark antitrust case against Google for unlawfully maintaining a monopoly in the general search engine market. In August 2024, Judge Mehta ruled in favor of the DOJ, declaring unequivocally that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly”.

  We believe this ruling was correct, necessary, and that the DOJ’s case is compelling.

• The Record ☛ EU fines Apple €500 million and Meta €200 million for breaking digital market rules | The Record from Recorded Future News

  Apple was found to have breached the DMA’s anti-steering obligation, a rule that prevents companies from designing large online platforms so that customers are pushed towards generating revenues for the platform operator rather than the other businesses also using the platform — for instance by allowing Spotify to link to where customers could subscribe to the app directly rather than through the App Store.

  Meta was found to have failed to give consumers “the choice of a service that uses less of their personal data” through its “pay or consent” advertising model, with the Commission finding the model undermines the ability for consumers to freely consent to the use of their personal data.

• The Washington Post ☛ EU fines Apple and Meta over alleged violations of competition law

  The European Union on Tuesday fined Apple and Meta nearly a combined $800 million, and ordered Apple to change aspects of its business model within 60 days over alleged violations of the bloc’s sweeping rules meant to promote digital competition.

• Patents

  • Wired ☛ Eli Lilly Sues 4 GLP-1 Telehealth Startups, Escalating War on Knockoff Drugs

    Compounding pharmacies are generally permitted to create customized medicines for patients even when they’re not in shortage, such as for individuals who may be allergic to certain ingredients or need carefully calibrated doses. The crux of Lilly’s argument is that, when it comes to tirzepatide, the medications telehealth companies are offering are not truly personalized because they are being mass produced and prescribed to many patients.

  • Software Patents

    • DJ Bernstein ☛ 2025.04.23: McEliece standardization

      For post-quantum encryption, NIST's offerings are much more sparse. NIST has just one standard, namely Kyber (ML-KEM). It said in March 2025 that it also plans to standardize HQC; supposedly the patent on HQC won't be an issue because of an upcoming FRAND license; but an April 2025 posting regarding design flaws in HQC prompted an HQC team announcement that HQC would be modified. Doesn't look like HQC is ready for usage yet.

      Wait. What about the increasingly widely deployed McEliece cryptosystem? Well, NIST's 2025 report said the following: [...]

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Futurism ☛ Actors Horrified as They Learn What Selling Their Faces as AI Actually Means

      They're also emblematic of AI's inroads into the acting industry. Actors have fought tooth and nail for protections against generative AI, but they're fairly limited and don't apply to the Wild West of non-union jobs. That opens the door for AI firms to capitalize on actors desperate for work, trapping them into dubious contracts. The temptation is strengthened by the fact that it's usually pretty easy work, requiring just several hours' worth of shooting in front of a green screen, getting fed lines by a teleprompter.

      "The clients I've worked with didn't fully understand what they were agreeing to at the time," Alyssa Malchiodi, a lawyer who specializes in business law, told AFP. "One major red flag is the use of broad, perpetual and irrevocable language that gives the company full ownership or unrestricted rights to use a creator's voice, image and likeness across any medium."

• Copyrights

  • Walled Culture ☛ Leaders in the generative AI world are daring to say the unsayable: that copyright is not sacrosanct

    Until now. The latest iteration of artificial intelligence has captured the attention of politicians around the world. It seems that the latter can’t do enough to promote and support it, in the hope of deriving huge economic benefits, both directly, in the form of local AI companies worth trillions, and indirectly, through increased efficiency and improved services. That current favoured status has given AI leaders permission to start saying the unsayable: that copyright is an obstacle to progress, and should be reined in, or at least muzzled, in order to allow AI to reach its full potential. For example, here is what OpenAI’s proposals for the US AI Action Plan, which is currently being drawn up, say about copyright: [...]

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate IPTV Users Largely Face No Risk of Arrest, UK's Top Piracy Cop Concedes

    Since October 2023, relentless high-profile media reports have warned that UK-based users of pirate streaming services run a serious risk of arrest. Those claims sit in contrast to comments made by the head of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) in a recent interview. Detective Chief Inspector Emma Warbey concedes that people who use pirate devices are largely able to do so "without risk of arrest." That doesn't mean entirely without risk, however.