Leftovers

• 404 Media ☛ Sales of Hard Drives for the End of the World Boom Under Trump

  PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn't store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse.

• Vox ☛ Did everyone stop dancing at the club?

  On the surface, the divide seems split between movers and non-shakers (with a little sprinkle of generational warfare), but it speaks to the very tenets of nightlife. The puzzling act of not dancing at a place designated for dancing is one of those mysteries that raises questions, if not calls for a full-blown investigation. Why did people stop dancing? What are they doing at the club if they’re not dancing? Who’s sitting out and who can we blame? Who’s complaining?

  And perhaps most importantly: Is this really happening?

• Science

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Zero-G Laboratory floating platform

    “The Zero-G Laboratory is specifically designed to emulate scenarios like spacecraft rendezvous, docking, capture, and other interactions between spacecraft,” Barış Can Yalçin of the SpaceR team tells us. “It is equipped with advanced infrastructure, including space-like lighting conditions, a motion capture system, an epoxy floor, mounted robotic rails, and the capability to integrate onboard computers and large mock-ups. These features enable researchers to conduct a wide range of experiments for unique orbital scenarios, allowing for hybrid emulations with robots that integrate hardware and pre-modelled software components. The facility can be operated in real time and can accurately emulate orbital robotics scenarios.”

• Career/Education

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Frills

    This is the 87th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Frills and her blog, frills.dev

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Tomorrow is Independent Bookstore Day

    Sponsored by the American Booksellers Association, Independent Bookstore Day is a national celebration that takes place on the last Saturday of April each year. The day highlights the value of independent bookstores and the unique ways they contribute to their communities. It’s a celebration of books, readers, and indie bookselling.

• Hardware

  • CS Monitor ☛ Tariffs jam US-China supply chain. Who is feeling that first.

    The trade disruption is ripping through the expansive, well-oiled U.S.-China supply chain, inflicting economic costs on everyone who has until recently made it hum – Chinese factory workers, wholesalers like Ms. Huang, shipping agents, and – across the Pacific Ocean – American dockworkers, truck drivers, importers, and, ultimately, consumers.

  • Digi-key Electronics ☛ Tariff Resources

    DigiKey is actively engaged in discussions with our suppliers and industry tariff experts to understand how we can mitigate the impact these tariffs have on our customers. As such, DigiKey will continue to monitor and adapt to evolving changes which will best position DigiKey to continue to provide high-quality products at cost-effective pricing.

  • European Business Press SA ☛ How DigiKey tackles tariffs ...

    Distributor DigiKey in the US has invested millions in a highly automated facility in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, that is the central hub for its global business.

    The imposition of tariffs on boards from around the world shipping into the US, and the impending tariffs on semiconductors, potentially mean that charges would be applied as products enter the country and then again as they ship to customers around the world.

    But the company is taking several measures to mitigate the impact of the tariffs imposed earlier this week, from allowing customer to sort by tariffed and non-tariffed products to drop-shipping and a ‘foreign trade zone.’

  • NPR ☛ A small U.S. town grew a big company. Can it weather the tariff blizzard?

    Her employer is the biggest tech giant you've likely never heard of. DigiKey is a bit like Amazon, but for millions of electronic parts shipped to engineers worldwide — all from a single warehouse here in rural Minnesota.

    The warehouse sprawls under the vast northern sky among miles of rain-soaked grain fields striped with shelterbelts of spruces and poplars to shield the soil from wind. DigiKey started out by hiring farmers' wives, offering pay stability and health benefits, and it has grown to 3,800 U.S. jobs employing half the county's workforce.

    "We're kind of a contrarian, in that we ship around the globe," says DigiKey President Dave Doherty. "But every additional shipment into China, or into Germany, or into Japan, or Taiwan, or Bangladesh creates jobs in Thief River Falls."

    But first, the things DigiKey sells have to come to Thief River Falls, and that means tariffs.

  • Electronics Weekly ☛ Untangling tariffs

    The DigiKey facility is a free trade zone, which defers the tariff, so if the goods are shipped to outside of the US, the tariffs do not apply. If they come from a free trade zone, and are shipped inside the US, there may be be a tariff will be associated with it.

    “We’re delaying the tariff on that part until we actually ship it into a tariffed area, or even completely eliminate the tariff when it comes into the free trade zone and ships to an area that is not in a tariffed area. We pay the tariff when [the part] comes in and then we can ship it outside of a tariffed area, for what’s called a duty drawback with the government, where we can draw the tariff money back from the government if it’s outside the free trade zone.

    “This is very complicated. Tariffs have definitely added complexity to our business and added complexity to our customers’ business,” admits Slater.

  • Tedium ☛ Craft Cart Culture: The State Of NES Homebrew In 2025

    Today in Tedium: Time sure does fly by sometimes. Yeah, I know. I know. It’s a cliche. But it’s absolutely true. Time’s arrow keeps marching forward. So imagine my surprise when I searched through my files a few weeks ago and realized it’d been nearly seven years since we talked about NES homebrew on Tedium. That’s far too long! Back in April 2018, we published “Not Just Nostalgia,” a thorough look at the history and legacy of NES homebrew. The homebrew scene for most legacy systems is a rich tapestry of modern game design (have you seen some of the awesome stuff folks are doing with Atari these days?). While working on that piece, I discovered a wonderful variety of homebrew games and a strong drive within the community to create homebrew content for Nintendo’s original 8-bit system by an array of incredibly talented programmers. In the years since, I’ve come up with a lot of ideas but haven’t really dived into the creation process yet. But I have played a ton of newish NES games! In today’s Tedium, we’ll revisit the homebrew scene and take a look at ten of my favorite NES homebrews from the past few years. — David @ Tedium

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Ness Labs ☛ Your Brain on Cortisol: How to Rewire Your Stress Response

    Beyond the anxiety and sleep disruption, research connects chronic cortisol elevation to memory impairment, immune suppression, and a bunch of metabolic problems. Understanding this connection can help you better manage your cortisol levels to support both your mental and physical wellbeing.

• Proprietary

  • International Business Times ☛ Passengers Say They Were Trapped In Driverless Taxi Stopped Mid-Street, But Waymo Blames 'User Error'

    Earlier this month, Becky Navarro and her companions found themselves caught in a real-life horror story. Their Waymo vehicle suddenly stopped on the notorious MoPac Expressway, a stretch often dubbed one of Austin's most perilous roads. Navarro states how the car refused to move or let them out, with cars honking loudly as they sat helplessly in the lane.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ SAP zero-day vulnerability under widespread active exploitation

    Threat hunters and security researchers have observed widespread exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability affecting SAP NetWeaver systems. The unrestricted file upload vulnerability — CVE-2025-31324 — has a base score of 10 on the CVSS scale and allows attackers to upload files directly to the system without authorization.

  • Android Police ☛ Google is pulling the plug on older Nest Thermostats

    Google will end support for the first and second generations of the Nest Learning Thermostat on October 25, 2025, removing smart features and app integration, effectively turning them into basic manual thermostats.

  • The Register UK ☛ Potential SAP zero-day fixed, details locked behind paywall

    The vulnerability's CVE identifier is known, though, (CVE-2025-31324) and from the limited description entered into the National Vulnerability Database, we understand it's a flaw with the metadata uploader component in NetWeaver's no-code Visual Composer app-building tool.

  • Oil Shell ☛ Comments on Shared Unix Hosting vs. the Cloud

    I also glanced at the docs of all the shared hosts I could find, like Hostinger, HostGator, IONOS, etc. But again, I think they're better thought of as PHP hosts, not Unix hosts.

    They don't really support Python, and definitely don't support persistent HTTP / FastCGI servers.

    So I'm glad I found Mythic Beasts and OpalStack. But overall, the options seem thin. Unix hosting is no longer a commodity.

    [...]]

    So if we want to avoid software complexity, and huge teams of cloud engineers, then we might start with commodity hardware and Unix kernels. They've both gotten faster and more capable in the last 20 years.

    The Unix shell is also a good place to start!

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • NL Times ☛ School kids bullying each other with AI generated nudes

      AI-generated nude and sexual images are circulating at several secondary schools, Pointer discovered in a survey of over 60 schools. Kids are using these images to bully each other, the schools said.

      24 percent of schools said that bullying with sexually explicit AI-generated images sometimes occurs. 10 percent said they’ve encountered it more than five times a year. According to the schools, students edit photos of each other with AI tools to create sexually suggestive images and then share them on social media. Students also take existing pornographic images and paste the heads of fellow students onto them.

    • Uwe Friedrichsen ☛ Thoughts on AI and software development - Part 1

      This blog series will be a bit different. It might leave you with more questions than answers and I apologize for that upfront. It is also more controversial than most other posts, I have written before. In this post, I will discuss the current developments regarding AI in software development more from a CTO’s perspective. This means, I cannot simply reason about the pros and cons of a topic but I also need to take the market forces into account.

      This requires to also take an unembellished look at some of the darker sides of our industry, a side I usually only slightly touch in my other posts. I do not know how comfortable you will feel with this perspective but I hope it gives you some food for thought. Maybe, it even provides you with some new and useful perspectives. We will see …

      Before we start: As this blog post (again – sigh!) has become way too long for a single post, I decided to split it in 4 parts: [...]

    • Martin Hähne ☛ A Personal Note On My Interest In LLMs

      I hope that by writing a real blog post about this topic I can show what I'm about and that the person behind didyoudoit is not a rube - even though he is somewhat - although not uncritically - interested in LLMs.

    • 404 Media ☛ Even the U.S. Government Says AI Requires Massive Amounts of Water

      A new government illuminates the environmental impact of generative AI.

    • The Verge ☛ An AI-generated radio host in Australia went unnoticed for months | The Verge

      For months, a popular Australian radio station has used an AI-generated DJ to host one of its segments — and no one seemed to notice, as reported by the Australian Financial Review and The Sydney Morning Herald. The show, called Workdays with Thy, offers a four-hour mix of hip hop, R&B, and pop, with no indication that the voice of its host, Thy, is AI-generated.

    • LibreNews ☛ Should FOSS allow AI contributions?

      Namely, this policy states that all contributions "must not include content generated by LLM or other probabilistic tools, including but not limited to Copilot or ChatGPT". This cover both code and documentation.

  • Social Control Media

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ YouTube turns 20: How the video site has changed the world

      And yet it began as a quirky idea by three former PayPal employees — Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen — who activated their domain on Valentine's Day 2005, unsure of its direction.

      At his University of Illinois commencement speech back in 2007, German-born Karim explained: "We didn't even know how to describe our new product. To generate interest, we just said it was a new kind of dating site. We even had a slogan for it: 'Tune in, Hook up'." No one did.

    • NL Times ☛ Young boys on fatbikes slapped 24 women’s backsides in Amsterdam parks; No arrests yet

      Police in Amsterdam are receiving more and more reports of women who are being hit on their backside by young boys on fatbikes while they are running. The perpetrators film themselves doing this and then upload the videos on social media. There have been 24 reports of this kind of sexual assault since the start of 2025, a spokesperson said.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Threema GmbH ☛ Say No to Mass Surveillance

      One major distinguishing factor between totalitarian states and democracies is that only in the former can the government invade citizens’ privacy for no apparent reason. Modern democracies recognize privacy as a basic human right. The EU itself acknowledges it in the Charter of Fundamental Rights (article 7): [...]

    • Techdirt ☛ Enter The Fourth Amendment, Yet One More Reason DOGE [sic] Is Such A Constitutional Nightmare

      The injunction in question arose in the hybrid case, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO v. Social Security Administration, which named both DOGE [sic] and agency officials at the Social Security Administration. It began as a TRO issued on March 20, which then became a preliminary injunction on April 17. The district court also refused to stay its enforcement.

      The injunction does several things, but most notably it keeps DOGE [sic] from accessing identifiable personal information held on Social Security Administration systems except if certain conditions are met. See, for example, this part which generally bars DOGE [sic]’s access: [...]

    • EFF ☛ IRS-ICE Immigrant Data Sharing Agreement Betrays Data Privacy and Taxpayers’ Trust

      Specifically, the government justifies the MOU by citing Executive Order 14161, which was issued on January 20, 2025. The Executive Order directs the heads of several agencies, including DHS, to identify and remove individuals unlawfully present in the country. Making several leaps, the MOU states that DHS has identified “numerous” individuals who are unlawfully present and have final orders of removal, and that each of these individuals is “under criminal investigation” for violation of federal law—namely, “failure to depart” the country under 8 U.S.C. § 1253(a)(1). The MOU uses this basis for the IRS disclosing to ICE taxpayer information that is otherwise confidential under the tax code.

    • Techdirt ☛ Trump Admin, DOGE [sic] Are Turning Multiple Gov’t Components Into A Giant Racist Database

      But let’s get back to the, shall we say, more practical aspects of this mass surveillance database. This sort of thing has never been done before for obvious reasons. One of the reasons is listed above. Another reason is that certain information serves certain specific purposes. Putting it all together just makes it more difficult to perform these specific functions. Converting data silos into one giant haystack isn’t necessarily efficient. It’s just something that ignores all the practical reasons data like this is siloed because this current administration is too hateful and stupid to understand the underlying problems or care about the collateral damage.

      This is a surveillance state that aspires to be a police state, all while under the nominal “leadership” of a racist billionaire and the terrible person who has now become president twice, despite clearly being unable to do the job the first time around.

    • Pro Publica ☛ Treasury IG Probes If DOGE [sic], Trump Sought Private Taxpayer Info

      The office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has sought a wide swath of information from IRS employees. In particular, the office is seeking any requests for taxpayer data from the president, the Executive Office of the President, DOGE [sic] or the president’s Office of Management and Budget.

      The request, spelled out in a mid-April email obtained by ProPublica, comes as watchdogs and leading Democrats question whether DOGE [sic] has overstepped its bounds in seeking information about taxpayers, public employees or federal agencies that is typically highly restricted.

    • US Federal Register ☛ Federal Register :: Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule

      The Federal Trade Commission amends the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule (the “Rule”), consistent with the requirements of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. The amendments to the Rule, which are based on the FTC's review of public comments and its enforcement experience, include one new definition and modifications to several others, as well as updates to key provisions to respond to changes in technology and online practices. The amendments are intended to strengthen protection of personal information collected from children, and, where appropriate, to clarify and streamline the Rule since it was last amended in January 2013.

    • The Record ☛ FTC publishes updates to children’s privacy rule, easing fears that Trump admin would nix it

      The new rule was published in the Federal Register on Monday, a step which finally guarantees that the highly anticipated, more restrictive rule will be implemented.

      Privacy advocates had been concerned about the stricter rule’s fate prior to its appearance in the Federal Register, they said.

    • El País ☛ ImmigrationOS by Palantir: Trump’s new tool to ‘completely’ track immigrants’ lives

      Organizations such as Amnesty International and legal experts consider the measure a violation of human rights. “An aberration,” says Ricard Martínez, director of the Chair of Privacy and Digital Transformation at the University of Valencia in Spain.

      Palantir is founded by tycoon Peter Thiel, a partner of Elon Musk, who has not responded to EL PAÍS’s requests for information. It has promised to develop the software, even though it contradicts the company’s own human rights policy.

    • EPIC ☛ EPIC Comment to Department of State on Notice of Proposed Information Collection: U.S. Passport Application, Renewal Application, and Limited Passport Replacement for Eligible Individuals

      The Department must not—and, by law, may not—implement the proposed changes. If implemented as written, the proposed changes will violate the rights of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex (collectively, “gender-diverse”) individuals, including the right to informational privacy and the right to travel freely and safely. The changes to these forms are material and substantial, and the Department’s Notice of Proposed Information Collection is severely lacking both procedurally and in guidance.

    • The Record ☛ Sam Altman: AI privacy safeguards can’t be established before ‘problems emerge’ | The Record from Recorded Future News

      The CEO of OpenAI said on Thursday that it’s too early to implement privacy regulations for artificial intelligence because the technology — and how it impacts society — is rapidly evolving.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Techdirt ☛ Gavin Newsom Has Lost The Plot

    This isn’t a distraction. This is the constitutional foundation of our Republic hinging on a single case.

    Let’s be absolutely clear about what’s at stake: The Supreme Court has issued a unanimous 9-0 order demanding that the administration facilitate the return Abrego García to the United States. A 9-0 ruling. In today’s polarized Court. This isn’t partisan; it’s fundamental. The President, bound by oath and the Constitution to “faithfully execute the laws,” is openly defying the highest judicial authority in the land.

    If a President can simply ignore a direct, unanimous Supreme Court order with no consequences, then what remains of checks and balances? What remains of the separation of powers? What remains of the rule of law itself? This is not hyperbole—this is the actual constitutional crisis we were warned about, happening in real time.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Register UK ☛ Signalgate: Security culture? America's screwed

    All of these incidents should raise a number of security concerns for several reasons. They involve White House officials discussing military operations using commercial apps and services, on their personal devices that are connected to the public internet. Foreign spies routinely target government officials — and their personal email accounts and mobile phones — for surveillance and snooping.

    And even if they are using Signal, which is considered the gold-standard for end-to-end chat encryption, there's no guarantee their personal devices haven't been compromised with some sort of super-spyware like Pegasus, which would allow attackers to read the messages once they land on their phones.

• Environment

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ The vibes are shifting for US climate tech

    The past few years have been an almost nonstop parade of good news for climate tech in the US. Headlines about billion-dollar grants from the government, massive private funding rounds, and labs churning out advance after advance have been routine. Now, though, things are starting to shift.

    About $8 billion worth of US climate tech projects have been canceled or downsized so far in 2025. (You can see a map of those projects in my latest story here.)

  • Overpopulation ☛ Toward sustainable economies

    Creating economies that do not devastate the natural world on which they depend is the economic challenge of the 21st century. An intriguing new book from Theodore Lianos explores different answers regarding what that might look like.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Lusaka ZM ☛ Zambia : Italy Commits $270 Million to Lobito Corridor Rail Project

      The Italian Government has committed $270 million towards the development of the Lobito Corridor, a major railway infrastructure project linking Zambia, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The project aims to boost regional connectivity and accelerate economic integration through enhanced trade routes.

      The announcement was made by Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) President Samaila Zubairu during a press briefing in Washington D.C., held alongside Zambia’s Finance and National Planning Minister Dr. Situmbeko Musokotwane and Angola’s Transport Minister Ricardo de Abreu.

    • The Register UK ☛ Google admits depreciation costs soaring amid bit barn build

      Google owns and operates 135 datacenters across the world and uses colocation providers as part of its cloud interconnect services. Yet the CFO admitted it is still not able to entirely meet customer demand.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ Microsoft's ultimatum for underperforming employees: 16 weeks' pay or PIP

    As per the plan, employees labelled as low performers will get the option to voluntarily resign and receive 16 weeks of pay. But they must decide within five days of receiving the offer. Those who decline the offer will be placed on a performance improvement plan (PIP), which is a risky proposition.

  • DeSmog ☛ Poilievre Campaign Has Links to Gas Industry Astroturfing Effort

    As previously reported by DeSmog, the Poilievre campaign is awash in lobbyists with direct connections to the oil and gas sector. Among others, Poilievre’s chief of staff, Ian Todd, and the Conservative Party of Canada’s National Council Vice President Matthew Conway were both lobbyists with Maple Leaf Strategies, which in turn represents Enbridge, a member of the Canadian Gas Association. Feldbusch, Todd, and Conway are all part of Poilievre’s inner circle, according to DeSmog’s map on Poilievre.

  • [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ Meta cuts jobs at its Reality Labs mixed reality unit

    The Facebook parent announced the layoffs today. A source told Bloomberg that more than 100 staffers are affected. Meta, in turn, specified that the workforce reduction impacts the Oculus Studios and Supernatural groups within Reality Labs.

  • Security Week ☛ Former Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables Joins Ballistic Ventures

    Venables helped found the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and served on its board from 2014 until 2020, and he currently serves on multiple boards and committees, including for MITRE’s Science and Technology Advisory Committee, HackerOne, Interos, Veza, and he is Strategic Security Advisor at Google Cloud. He has also co-chaired the board of Sheltered Harbor, which protects the financial system if a catastrophic event such as a cyberattack causes critical systems to fail.

  • The Record ☛ Easterly calls for united front against ‘politicizing’ of the cyber industry

    The Trump administration’s politicization of cybersecurity and the firing of senior officials should be top of mind for everyone set to gather at next week’s RSA Conference, according to Jen Easterly, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

  • Mike Brock ☛ Remembering What's Real

    When the Party later tortures Winston to accept that 2+2=5, they're not trying to change mathematics. They're breaking his connection to reality itself—forcing him to surrender his perception to authority. The goal isn't belief but submission: “Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.”

    This is precisely what's happening now. Not through torture chambers, but through a thousand small surrenders of perception, a thousand moments where what you see with your own eyes is contradicted by official narrative, and you're pressured to accept the narrative over your perception.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Meduza ☛ Top CIA official's 21-year-old son killed in Ukraine after joining Russian army

      A friend of Gloss’s who hosted him in Istanbul told iStories that he “was always talking about doom and gloom — poverty, the collapse of civilizations.” According to the friend, Gloss “was convinced that Western hegemony was coming to an end and that BRICS would take its place." Another acquaintance in Turkey recalled that Gloss had been watching videos about Palestine and “was very angry" at the United States. “He started thinking about going to Russia. He wanted to fight against the U.S. But I think those conspiracy theory videos really got to him,” the friend said.

    • CPJ ☛ Haitian gang takes over radio station, renames it Taliban FM 

      The Committee to Protect Journalist is appalled that a Haitian gang has taken over a local radio station, renamed it Radio Taliban FM, and is using it to broadcast propaganda on the troubled Caribbean island.

    • The Hindu ☛ ‘Fake news is being weaponised’

      The discussion on ‘Fact Vs Fiction: Countering Disinformation’ saw Thanisara Ruangdej, CEO and co-founder, Punch Up and WeVis from Thailand, speak about how geo-political actors, and political entities deliberately weaponise fake content. He underscored the significance of fact-checking and data analysis to deal with such malicious content.

      Videos created after leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) can cause a great deal of harm, said Matthew William Faulding from UK’s Labour Party. Issuing a word of caution, he said, “Lies travel faster, and fake news can ruin lives.”

    • The Local DK ☛ Danish intelligence service says politician was target of Russian disinformation

      It was shared across several social media platforms, and appeared to come from the SF politician.

      French anti-disinformation agency Viginum has concluded the “actor” behind the post is part of a network that created and distributed it, FE said. The source of the post is acting on behalf of the Russian state, according to the Danish intelligence agency.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ In DOGE [sic]’s Hunt For Imaginary Censors, It Kills Actual Anti-Censorship Research

    This all starts with a fundamental misunderstanding: the belief that any research into “disinformation” must itself be a censorship program. This is a bit like assuming that studying cancer is actually a plot to give people cancer, but this is the state of the crazy world we live in today. It ignores the rather obvious fact that disinformation and foreign influence campaigns do exist, and that studying them usually aims to counter them with more speech, not less.

  • Project Censored ☛ Silicon Valley’s plan to conquer the world with AI weapons

    The self-described anti-democracy advocate, Thiel, 58, continues to rule the globally expanding military intelligence-focused enterprise.

    As a public company, Palantir is compelled to disclose more of its financial and operational activities than when it was held privately by Thiel and his partners. Although much of Palantir’s governmental work is classified as secret, the Seeing Stone of public records renders insights into its operations and socioeconomic weaknesses.

  • Project Censored ☛ The Project Censored Newsletter—April 2025

    Corporate media has pumped out rosy but false narratives about the potential of AI, while critical information about its military uses rarely reaches the public—until now. Byrne has spent the last two years conducting in-depth research for this series and is at work on a database of selected AI weapons companies and their investors. This collaboration between Project Censored and Peter Byrne sheds unsparing light on an issue that has profound public impact and has been under-reported for too long.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Wikipedia’s nonprofit status threatened by DC U.S. Attorney Ed Martin

    In the letter dated April 24, Ed Martin said he sought to determine whether the Wikimedia Foundation’s behavior is in violation of its Section 501(c)(3) status. Martin asked the foundation to provide detailed information about its editorial process, its trust and safety measures, and how it protects its information from foreign actors.

  • The Verge ☛ Trump DOJ goon threatens Wikipedia

    Under the law (Section 501(c)(3) of Title 26), tax-exempt organizations must operate “exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes.” Martin alleges that Wikipedia is “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda,” including by “rewriting” historical events and through “other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States.”

    Martin is known for thinly justified legal threats against media organizations. In recent days, Martin has sent letters to the New England Journal of Medicine, the CHEST Journal, and Obstetrics and Gynecology, accusing them of being “partisan in various scientific debates.”

  • The Local SE ☛ Sweden launches inquiry to safeguard academic freedom at universities

    Trump has even frozen billions of dollars in federal funds to Harvard after the university refused to bow to White House demands.

    Even Swedish universities, most of which are state-run, have raised concern about a deteriorating situation in terms of academic freedom at home. Four out of ten employees report having been subjected to threats or harassment, according to a statement from Uppsala University.

  • Truthdig ☛ Trump Expands His Assault on the Press

    While Trump may have never read the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, you can be sure that most of his audience that day had. The First Amendment reads in part, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Indeed, journalism is one of the only professions explicitly protected by the Constitution.

    In his drive toward authoritarianism, Trump isn’t going to be deterred by 250 years of constitutional precedent.

    Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the American Prospect, laid out specifics around Trump’s attack on the press, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour: [...]

  • TruthOut ☛ “60 Minutes” Head Bill Owens Exits Role Amid Corporate Changes to the Show

    In addition to moves relating to Trump’s lawsuit against the company — initially a $10 billion suit, now a $20 billion suit that many legal experts have said is not going anywhere — the editorial independence of “60 Minutes” has also been threatened by Paramount’s controlling shareholder Shari Redstone, who is looking to sell the company to Skydance, which is owned by billionaire Larry Ellison. Such a sale would have to garner approval from the Trump administration.

  • Android Police ☛ Adobe and Google appear to be abusing copyright to silence a whistleblower's video

    One such example is happening right now, with Adobe having demanded a whistleblower's video footage of Adobe's CEO be removed from YouTube for "copyright" violations, and, of course, Google has removed the video through an automated process without talking to the owner of the channel or verifying who owns the video in the first place.

    As far as copyright is concerned, it's hard to see where Adobe has any legal claim to this video, as it didn't record it and doesn't own it, so it appears Google is helping Adobe abuse copyright law to silence a critic and whistleblower. Fun stuff.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • BIA Net ☛ Journalist Özlem Gürses sentenced to prison over comments on Syria

    In her defense, Gürses argued that an eight-second excerpt had been taken from a 75-minute live broadcast and widely circulated through anonymous social media accounts and online trolls. "It is alleged that I insulted or degraded the Turkish Armed Forces based on this manipulated clip," she said.

  • American Oversight ☛ American Oversight Urges Congress to Protect and Strengthen FOIA During Unprecedented Attacks on Transparency

    These threats have only exacerbated the weaknesses in our transparency infrastructure. Across agencies, core government functions are being disrupted — programs paused, services delayed, and oversight mechanisms weakened — at a time when the public is demanding more information, not less. A significant increase in FOIA requests in 2024 indicates that there is a strong public demand for transparency, but under-resourced and understaffed FOIA offices, long delays, frequent redactions, and outdated technology have undermined FOIA’s promise of timely and meaningful access to government records.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Has Reportedly Cut Off a Bunch of People From Their Rightful Social Security

    "[DOGE [sic] staffers] went into the system and they killed off people," Glasgow told the Beast. "About four million people, they marked them as dead. But they're not sure if those people were supposed to be marked as dead, so they're sending us an email saying, 'If these people come into the office with their identification, you can reinstate them.'"

    As with other federal agencies, DOGE [sic] has swept through the SSA like a tornado. Under its recommendations, the SSA will lay off 7,000 employees, reducing its workforce to 50,000. Dozens of its offices across the country have either already been closed or will be. Its website constantly crashes, while its phone helplines are being shut down.

  • The Atlantic ☛ What Porn Did to American Culture

    The world we live in has been molded by the porn we watch—and you don’t have to look too hard to find it. Instagram models hawk their OnlyFans subscriptions, sex workers post “Day in My Life” vlogs, and the market for erotic romance novels is a gold mine. People’s interest in sex is a demand that has long been met with ready supply, but porn is not an inert product: As Americans feed the multibillion-dollar industry’s growth, it gives something back to American culture.

    Growing up as a teenager against the backdrop of the late 1990s, “what was obvious to my friends and to me was that power, for women, was sexual in nature,” my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote in a recent article. “There was no other kind, or none worth having.” I interviewed her about her upcoming book on pop culture and girlhood to understand how porn became the defining cultural product of our time.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Thousands gather in New Mexico for the largest powwow in North America

    Powwows are a relatively modern phenomenon that emerged in the 1800s as the U.S. government seized land from tribes throughout the Northern and Southern Plains. Forced migrations and upheaval during this period resulted in intertribal solidarity among Plains people and those from the southern prairies of Canada.

    Alliances were formed, giving way to the exchange of songs and dances during gatherings between different tribes. In the decades that followed, powwows were advertised to pioneers heading westward as “authentic” Native American dance shows. For some, it was an exploitation of their cultures.

  • TruthOut ☛ The Kafkaesque Case of Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez Is a Warning to Us All

    It’s worth noting the depth of just how wronged Lopez-Gomez was here. He was arrested and detained under a law that was blocked by a judge and that was not meant to target him in the first place as a U.S. citizen, a double error which deprived him of his freedom. On top of that, this is all acknowledged by a judge who refuses to uphold his Fourth Amendment rights, and instead surrenders jurisdiction of a U.S. citizen who is acknowledged to have committed no crime to ICE, which is not supposed to hold jurisdiction over U.S. citizens. Lopez-Gomez’s arrest was a shocking violation of basic principles of U.S. civil liberties and constitutional rights. It can be compared to Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, in which a man must defend himself in a trial in which he does not know the crime for which he is accused by a nebulous authority.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Verge ☛ Why are companies lining up to buy Chrome?

  But let’s say that Google does have to sell Chrome — who wants it? And why? We’re getting some of those answers from the remedies trial.

  Let’s start with the why: a browser is a great way to promote your own search engine. Especially a browser that’s as widely used as Chrome. Google makes Chrome, so it obviously makes sense that Google also provides Google Search as its default way to search the web. Chrome is also the most widely used browser by a wide margin — it has an estimated two-thirds of browser market share — so that means that many, many, many more people are using Google Search instead of other search engines just because it’s the default there.

• Wired ☛ The Meta Trial Shows the Dangers of Selling Out

  The nub of the current FTC trial seems to hinge on how US District Court judge James Boasberg will define Meta’s market—whether it’s limited to social media or, as Meta is arguing, the broader field of “entertainment.” But much of the early testimony exhumed the details of Zuckerberg’s successful pursuit of Instagram and WhatsApp—two companies that, according to the government, are now part of Meta’s illegal monopolistic grip on social media. (The trial also invoked the case of Snap, which resisted Zuckerberg’s $6 billion offer and had to deal with Facebook copying its products.) Legalities aside, the way these companies were upended by a Zuckerberg offer made the first few days of this case a dramatic and instructive study of acquisition dynamics between small and big business.

• Copyrights

  • India Times ☛ Publisher of PCMag and Mashable Sues OpenAI

    In a 62-page complaint filed in federal court in Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, Ziff Davis says the tech company has "intentionally and relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of Ziff Davis works," infringing on the publisher's copyrights and diluting its trademarks. It claims that OpenAI used Ziff Davis content to train its artificial intelligence models and generate responses through its popular ChatGPT chatbot.

  • Digital Music News ☛ OpenAI Sued By Ziff Davis for Copyright Infringement

    Recent court decisions, such as a federal judge denying music publishers’ requests to block Anthropic from using copyrighted lyrics, highlight the unsettled nature of this legal frontier. If Ziff Davis prevails in this lawsuit, it could set a precedent requiring AI companies to obtain licenses or compensate rights-holders—potentially reshaping how AI interacts with news, music, and other creative industries.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate CDNs Fueling 1,400 Russian Sites "Use EU & US CDN Infrastructure"

    Most visitors to popular pirate streaming sites will have watched embedded movies or TV shows that are hosted somewhere else entirely. This can be obvious when the viewer is presented with a choice of hosts, but that’s not always the case. Most streaming sites simply act as shop windows, which certainly helps with mobility when it’s time to rebrand while circumventing another round of blocking.

  • The Register UK ☛ AI training license will allow LLM makers to pay creators

    The CLA is a not-for-profit organization representing licensing groups in the UK. It said Publishers’ Licensing Services and ALCS Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society would be part of the launch of the Generative AI Training Licence.