Leftovers

• Mandaris Moore ☛ Discordance

  I have concerns.

  I understand that these things are services and they need to "keep the lites on", but I’m tired of investing in things that have a policy of getting all the money they can make and then turning to poop when they try to squeeze out that last drop of profit.

• Doc Searls ☛ Of possible interest

• David Mead ☛ Using HAProxy to protect me from scrapers

  Therefore architecturally anubis wasn't an option for me. It can't really be that complex to make one of these? Well, no. Ted Unangst made anticrawl which is far simpler, but a bit too simple. So I made something in-between. It just does a simple inline hash calculation, without web workers (the downside of this is it does block the browser UI a bit). But I made it look a little bit pretty.

• BIA Net ☛ Journalist Ceren Kaynak-İskit dies at 38

  “In her memory, we promise to never stop practicing journalism," said the association.

• Daniel Miller ☛ Culture Is What We Collectively Agree upon

  Now there is a new generation of tech-forward kids looking for places to call their own. We’re pointing them to Pika, Ghost, the Fediverse, and freaking Neocities!

  It’s weird living through 2001 again 14 years later, but as the tech world burns again in a very similar fashion4, I’m totally here for it.

• [Old] University of Pennsylvania ☛ How Linus Torvalds Found Fun, and a New Operating System

  There is great faith in human nature underlying this theory. Torvalds earnestly believes that if left to their own devices, most people will apply themselves to something, and that good things – wonderful, unpredictable things – will naturally come of it. As a business outlook, this is a far cry from the world of time clocks, cubicles, scheduled breaks and monitored computer use. It is, instead, an ethos that has become known, thanks to Eric Raymond and Pekka Himanen, as the “hacker ethic,” the principled, dedicated, passionate play that defines the life of the diehard programmer. Just For Fun may be read as an example of the hacker ethic in action. And Torvalds, that reluctant hood ornament, may be read as the hacker ethic’s most popular action figure.

• Science

  • Axios ☛ Ex-NIH chief Francis Collins tells "60 Minutes" why he quit during Trump admin

    Driving the news: Collins said during his "60 Minutes" interview that "almost immediately" after President Trump's inauguration "there were statements made that you were not allowed, for instance, to start any new projects."

    He added: "The ability to order supplies was cut off. Eventually, it was started back up again. But then, they put a $1 limit on what you could order. There's not much you can order for $1."

  • Blake Watson ☛ I’m fascinated by the scale of things in space

    I’m fascinated by videos and other visual mediums that compare the sizes of objects and structures in the universe. I can’t get enough of them. And I’m not exclusively talking about planets, stars, black holes, etc. There is also the vast, yet tiny microcosmos. Unfathomable sizes and distances reign supreme in both the microscopic world and the universe at large.

    Just for fun I thought I would share some of my favorite examples.

  • Rlang ☛ rOpenSci News Digest, April 2025

    Software Peer Review

    There are twelve recently closed and active submissions and 5 submissions on hold. Issues are at different stages: [...]

  • Rlang ☛ proximal sampler

    At the Columbia workshop last week, Andre Wibisono presented work related with a recent arXival on the exponentially fast convergence of both unadjusted Langevin and proximal sampler algorithms under strong [definitely strong] log-concavity assumptions. [...]

• Career/Education

  • The Register UK ☛ NSA, CISA top brass absent from RSA Conference

    Earlier this month, RSA Conference organizers emailed anyone who had signed up for the session, alerting them that the NSA's State of the Hack 2025 had been "canceled and will be removed from your schedule."

    The Register also had an interview scheduled with NSA Director Dave Luber during the conference, and shortly after receiving an email notification about the State of the Hack session being cancelled, an agency spokesperson told us that the talk with Luber was also scrapped: [...]

  • Guy LeCharles Gonzalez ☛ Move Fast and Fix Things: BISG 2025

    The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) is one of the most important organizations serving the book publishing industry, primarily because their mission is explicitly focused on collaboratively solving problems that affect the entire supply chain — including publishers, manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors, libraries, retailers, and industry partners.

    They’re not about advocacy or lobbying; they don’t mistreat or sue anybody; and the only attention they want is from the industry they’re trying to help. With a full-time staff of only three people, it’s a mostly volunteer-driven organization working on important behind-the-scenes challenges like metadata, rights, supply chain, subject codes (BISAC), and workflow.

  • Archive Today ☛ Which programming language should I use? A guide for early-career researchers

    “For a very long time in computer science, a lot of people who work in programming languages have had the ostensible goal of [creating] the ‘one language to rule them all’,” says Rob Patro, a computational biologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. But that’s a bit like a carpenter who, armed only with a hammer, treats everything as a nail: different situations might call for different tools, and there is no single ‘best’ language. Nature asked computer scientists and bioinformaticians what advice they would give to researchers who recognize the need to pick up some coding skills but don’t know where to start. Here are four key questions to help you decide.

• Hardware

  • ABC ☛ With Intel's latest layoffs, will the Ohio plant ever be built?

    Ohio loses Microsoft plant, union leader worries Intel could be next

  • Intel's New CEO Outlines Strategy Behind Layoff Policy

    Intel Corp has confirmed restructuring, including plans for layoffs, starting in the second quarter of 2025. In a memo, Intel's CEO Lip-Bu Tan did not specify the scale of the layoffs, but he emphasized that the move is to trim unnecessary bureaucracy.

    "I’m a big believer in the philosophy that the best leaders get the most done with the fewest people," Tan said, quoted from Engadget on Monday, April 28, 2025.

    Tan, who has led Intel since mid-March, aims to streamline the middle management layer. Under heavy pressure, the chip manufacturer will grant greater authority to its best talents to make the best decisions according to priorities.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Fujitsu promised not to bid ... what happened?

    It's easy to miss £125 million ($166 million). It could happen to anyone. Take Paul Patterson, for example. In January 2024, the director of Fujitsu Services Ltd emailed the UK government's commercial arm to confirm the Japanese tech services provider would pause bidding for public sector work after the Post Office Horizon scandal became public knowledge.

    The scandal is one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in recent British history, and had recently been the subject of an ITV drama. It remains the subject of a public inquiry.

  • The Register UK ☛ Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit bordering on addiction

    Nobody talks much about Windows 12 because it doesn't matter, it's going to be even worse, it's going to hurt more. You may have more freedom to escape than you think, especially if you plan ahead. Cold turkey isn't the only way to skip free of an addiction. Think ahead to how things will be on recent evidence, then think on.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Verge ☛ Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI | The Verge [Ed: Another failing company with financial issues (Duolingo) distracting from mass layoffs by saying "AI" "AI" "AI" "AI" "AI" "AI"]

      Duolingo will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle,” according to an all-hands email sent by co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn announcing that the company will be “AI-first.” The email was posted on Duolingo’s LinkedIn account.

    • NDTV ☛ 'Godfather Of AI' Reveals The Odds Of Humanity Being Overrun By Machines

      "It will be comparable with the industrial revolution. But instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it's going to exceed people in intellectual ability. We have no experience of what it's like to have things smarter than us," said Mr Hinton at the time.

      "I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control."

    • CBS ☛ "Godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton warns AI could take control from humans: "People haven't understood what's coming"

      According to Hinton, AI companies should dedicate significantly more resources to safety research — "like a third" of their computing power, compared to the much smaller fraction currently allocated.

      CBS News asked all the AI labs mentioned how much of their compute is used for safety research. None of them gave a number. All have said safety is important and they support regulation in general but have mostly opposed the regulations lawmakers have put forward so far.

    • Futurism ☛ The MyPillow Guy's Lawyers Used AI in Court and You'll Never Guess How That Turned Out

      Go figure: the brief was full of misquotes and miscited cases, sometimes referencing case law that simply didn't exist — AI had hallucinated them, as the tech is prone to do in order to "complete" its prompt.

    • New Republic ☛ MyPillow CEO Torched for Hilariously Bad AI-Generated Legal Filing | The New Republic

      After facing accusations from a federal judge, Lindell and his legal team confessed to turning in a brief with “nearly 30 defective citations.” One of Lindell’s attorneys, Christopher Kachouroff, claimed that he “personally outlined and wrote a draft of a brief before utilizing generative artificial intelligence,” according to a legal filing. That final draft, however, pointed to legal cases that never happened.

    • Techdirt ☛ Government Actually Threatens Wikipedia’s Editorial Freedom; Self-Proclaimed Free Speech Warriors Suddenly Have Other Plans

      This latest move follows Martin’s established pattern of constitutional violations, including investigating protected speech by Congress members, attacking the Associated Press, and probing medical journals over their editorial policies.

      But his attack on Wikipedia represents something even more dangerous: a federal prosecutor attempting to control how the [Internet]’s largest collaborative knowledge platform manages its content.

    • PC Mag ☛ Trump-Appointed Atty: Wikipedia Allows Foreign Actors to 'Spread Propaganda'

      In a letter leaked by the Free Press, Martin claims that the online encyclopedia is allowing “information manipulation,” such as “the rewriting of key historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States.”

      In addition, the letter highlighted that Wikipedia is a popular source of training data for large language models (LLMs), but added that this means the platform has “the potential to launder information on behalf of foreign actors.” Earlier this month, Wikipedia said it's faced an influx of AI bots scraping its data, driving up costs.

    • PC Mag ☛ Zuckerberg-Funded Elementary School for Low-Income Kids to Shut Down

      Earlier this year, CZI said it would move away from social advocacy and refocus on science research, namely research at the intersection of biology and AI. The nonprofit, like Meta, also announced it was doing away with its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program (DEI) in February.

    • Dave Gauer ☛ Go read Peter Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and then come back and tell me that LLMs can replace human programmers

      In this essay, I will perform the logical fallacy of argument from authority (wikipedia.org) to attack the notion that large language model (LLM)-based generative "AI" systems are capable of doing the work of human programmers.

    • Leon Furze ☛ The Myth of Inevitable AI

      It already seems as though Altman and Co. have succeeded in making artificial intelligence unavoidable in schools and universities, from statewide partnerships with Microsoft in Australia to freemium education packages for university students in the US accessing ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, and even on an individual university basis, to students who’ve been mandated to reflect on their use of the technology. Artificial intelligence is everywhere you look.

      But ubiquitous as the technology may seem, educators and students should rightfully be pushing back against discourses of inevitability. Inevitability suggests a certain hopelessness, a sense of having given up. Inevitability is a shrug of the shoulders and a quiet grumbling acquiescence to the way things are, the way things will be.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Trump tariffs taking out AI data centres too

      At least the data centres are paid for by private companies and not bank loans. This means the bubble pop won’t cause a banking crisis too.

  • Social Control Media

    • Eric MacAdie ☛ Moving to a Third Mastodon Server

      I have moved to another Mastodon instance. Now I am at tilde.zone. I was at Fosstodon, and before that I was at the now-defunct Emacs.ch. appeasement latched flatterers

    • Press Gazette ☛ Facebook allows scam ads stealing journalists' identities

      The US tech giant profits from fraudulent adverts that steal the identities of high-profile individuals to exploit their reputations for honesty and financial expertise.

    • Kev Quirk ☛ My Thoughts on the Fosstodon Drama

      I want to stress that this is my own opinion. This is in no way an official statement from Fosstodon, and I'm not speaking on behalf of Mike or the rest of the team here.

      The TL;DR is that I'm done with Fosstodon.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Infosec pro blabs about alleged malware mishap on LinkedIn

      According to reports, Bowie was seen using both a computer for guests and a staff workstation at the hospital. When confronted by hospital employees, he said he needed to use the equipment while visiting a family member undergoing surgery. A forensic review is said to have uncovered malware on one of the PCs, which was quickly removed and reported to authorities.

• Security

  • SANS ☛ SRUM-DUMP Version 3: Uncovering Malware Activity in Forensics, (Sun, Apr 27th)

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Microsoft's AI Secretly Copying All Your Private Messages

      These are good updates, but they won't change the fact that Recall is an inherently invasive tool. And as Ars Technica notes, it also poses a huge risk not just to the users with Recall on their machines, but to anyone they interact with, whose messages will be screenshotted and processed by the AI — without the person on the other end ever knowing it.

      "That would indiscriminately hoover up all kinds of [a user's] sensitive material, including photos, passwords, medical conditions, and encrypted videos and messages," Ars wrote.

      This is perhaps its most worrying consequence — how it can turn any PC into a device that surveils others, forcing you to be even more wary about what you send online, even to friends.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Weaponized Words: Uyghur Language Software Hijacked to Deliver Malware - The Citizen Lab

      Although the malware itself was not particularly advanced, the delivery of the malware was extremely well customized to reach the target population and technical artifacts show that activity related to this campaign began in at least May of 2024.

    • The Register UK ☛ Open source text editor poisoned to target Uyghur users

      That archive contained a Windows version of an open source Uyghur text editor called UyghurEditPP. Citizen Lab thinks members of the WUC know the application’s developer, who has also worked on optical character recognition software for Uyghur script and speech recognition software for the Uyghur language. That prior relationship means recipients would likely trust the sender.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Trojanized Text Editor Software Used In Uyghur Spy Campaign

      The attack started the old-fashioned way – with an email. WUC members received a spearphishing message posing as a partner organization. It offered what seemed like an innocuous task – download and test a Uyghur-language software tool. The email contained a Google Drive link to a password-protected archive. Inside? A booby-trapped version of UyghurEditPP.

      The trojanized app looked and behaved like the real deal, right down to its interface. But hidden under the hood, it deployed malware designed to quietly burrow into the victims’ systems. Once installed, it could scoop up system information, upload or download files, and even run custom plugins for more complex operations.

    • HackRead ☛ Court Dismisses Criminal Charges Against VPN Executive, Affirms No-Log Policy

      Windscribe, a globally used privacy-first VPN service, announced today that its founder, Yegor Sak, has been fully acquitted by a court in Athens, Greece, following a two-year legal battle in which Sak was personally charged in connection with an alleged [Internet] offence by an unknown user of the service.

      The case centred around a Windscribe-owned server in Finland that was allegedly used to breach a system in Greece. Greek authorities, in cooperation with INTERPOL, traced the IP address to Windscribe’s infrastructure and, unlike standard international procedures, proceeded to initiate criminal proceedings against Sak himself, rather than pursuing information through standard corporate channels.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Windscribe Acquitted on Charges of Not Collecting Users' Data

      The company doesn’t keep logs, so couldn’t turn over data: [...]

    • Tor ☛ Privacy is possible – even when it feels out of reach | The Tor Project

      Big Tech is wielding unprecedented global power. With wealth built on decades of collecting, selling, and manipulating our personal data, the dominant tech companies have achieved levels of influence that make them seem beyond oversight or control. And even when they go out of business, the data we've handed over is out of our hands, being sold to the next highest bidder.

      In these circumstances, it can feel like it's hopeless to fight back. These companies already have so much—why should we bother to jump through more hoops to protect our personal privacy? Won't this surveillance machine just do its thing anyway?

      This kind of hopelessness benefits the powerful. That you'll give up your privacy for good is Big Tech's biggest hope.

    • Wired ☛ Car Subscription Features Raise Your Risk of Government Surveillance, Police Records Show

      A cache of more than two dozen police records recently reviewed by WIRED show US law enforcement agencies regularly trained on how to take advantage of “connected cars,” with subscription-based features drastically increasing the amount of data that can be accessed during investigations. The records make clear that law enforcement’s knowledge of the surveillance far exceeds that of the public, and reveal how corporate policies and technologies—not the law—determine driver privacy.

    • Lee Peterson ☛ Siri might be the reason I stop using an iPhone

      Before investing in that to see if it helped I thought I’d try to use Siri and iOS 18.

      What I quickly came to realise was, it’s bad – like really bad.

• Defence/Aggression

  • teleSUR ☛ Jihadist activities increase sevenfold in Kayes region, near east of Senegal

    A report by the Timbuktu Institute think tank has indicated that the jihadist activities mainly by the JNIM Jihadi group, have expanded into the region of Kayes between 2021 and 2024.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Trump’s justice department appointees remove leadership of voting unit

    Donald Trump’s appointees at the Department of Justice have removed all of the senior civil servants working as managers in the department’s voting section and directed attorneys to dismiss all active cases, according to people familiar with the matter, part of a broader attack on the department’s civil rights division.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Trump officials dismantle federal voting rights enforcement team

    The staff was ordered to terminate all ongoing voting rights cases including inquiries into election practices in Pennsylvania and Georgia.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ European drone training sites mushroom in nod to Ukraine war tactics

    Drone tactics emerging from the war in Ukraine have inspired other European countries to intensify their military-experimentation campaigns, with a new crop of testing facilities designed to test the small aircraft in war-like conditions.

  • Michigan News ☛ Should Michigan ban smartphones in K-12 classrooms? Lawmakers offer competing plans - mlive.com

    House Republicans and Senate Democrats have introduced competing plans to limit smartphone use in Michigan’s K-12 public schools.

    Both plans seek to limit cellphone distractions in classrooms but go about it differently.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Bernie Sanders Says Americans Aren't 'Dumb,' Defends 'Oligarchy' Talk

    “I think the American people are not quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are,” Sanders said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I think they understand very well, when the top one percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, when big money interests are able to control both political parties, they are living in an oligarchy. And these are precisely the issues that have got to be talked about.”

• Environment

  • CBC ☛ High levels of DDT found in N.B. brook trout decades after spraying

    A pesticide sprayed on New Brunswick forests more than 55 years ago can still be found in some brook trout in the province, according to a new study.

    DDT was sprayed from planes across northern and central New Brunswick — more than half the province — between 1952 and 1968 to control the spruce budworm feeding on coniferous trees.

    And the synthetic insecticide left a residue that hasn't disappeared.

  • US News And World Report ☛ The Vietnam War Ended 50 Years Ago, but the Battle With Agent Orange Continues

    Across Vietnam, U.S. forces sprayed sprayed 72 million liters (19 million gallons) of defoliants during the war to strip the enemy's cover. More than half was Agent Orange, a blend of herbicides.

    Agent Orange was laced with dioxin, a type of chemical linked to cancer, birth defects and lasting environmental damage. Today, 3 million people, including many children, still suffer serious health issues associated with exposure to it.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Telegraph UK ☛ Jeremy Vine stops sharing cycling videos over trolling

      “I enjoy debates but not abuse. It’s strange that getting interested in road safety can actually endanger a person. I see other cyclists facing the same and wonder how they deal with it.”

      Vine said that his road bike was stolen a week ago, adding when he has a new one he will “stay vigilant but won’t share my adventures”.

      He added that police are currently investigating “at least two death threats” made against him.

    • Reuters ☛ Trump could spur central banks to adopt digital coins: Peacock

      A study by the Atlantic Council , opens new tab, published shortly before Trump’s election win last year, found that 134 nations – including the U.S. at the time – representing 98% of the global economy were exploring digital versions of their currencies, with almost half at an advanced stage.

      But Trump then issued an executive order , opens new tab in January prohibiting U.S. agencies from establishing, issuing or promoting a digital dollar, seemingly as part of a drive to promote private cryptocurrencies and stablecoins instead.

      That may leave the door open for other countries to set the rules for CBDCs and other forms of digital money as they evolve.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ No more ‘subway spaghetti’! New Yorkers adjust to first new transit map in 50 years

      Still, the Unimark map is far closer to the feel of many other cities’ subway diagrams, which offer virtually no sense of what a city actually looks like. London’s Tube map, designed in the 1930s by Harry Beck – whom Vignelli called the “father of all contemporary kinds of subway maps” – is known for its beauty and its total irrelevance to reality. As Bill Bryson has pointed out, a tourist reading Beck’s map and trying to get from Bank to Mansion House could ride two lines and six stops – or walk 200ft down the street.

    • The Independent UK ☛ Spain-Portugal power outage live: State of emergency declared amid fears blackout could last up to a week

      While Spain’s prime minister has said the cause of the blackout remains unknown, REN has said there was a "very large oscillation in the electrical voltages, first in the Spanish system, which then spread to the Portuguese system".

    • RTL ☛ Entire Iberian peninsula affected: Power returns to most of Spain, Portugal after massive blackout

      A cascade of infrastructure failures - from paralysed airports to darkened metro tunnels - followed Monday's unprecedented power outage across Spain and Portugal, with effects rippling into France and Belgium amid unresolved questions about its origin.

    • H2 View ☛ Europe blackout exposes grid and security concerns

      Power outages which today hit Spain, Portugal, and parts of France have severely impacted industrial and consumer operations and underlined the need for grid stability and more secure networks.

      Regardless of whether the fault was a systems failure or from a cyber-attack, the widespread outage has upped the stakes over energy security.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Major power outage in Spain and Portugal knocks out subway networks, traffic lights and ATM machines

      The company declined to speculate on the causes of the huge blackout. The Portuguese National Cybersecurity Center issued a statement saying there was no sign the outage was due to a cyberattack.

    • NDTV ☛ Mega Power Outage Hits Spain, France, Portugal, Millions Without Electricity

      The Spanish and Portuguese governments convened emergency cabinet meetings after the outage, which also briefly affected a part of France, which borders northeastern Spain.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ We Can't Kill Our Way Out of a Problem

    • Science Alert ☛ Study Suggests Life Emerges Rapidly in Earth-Like Conditions

      If it started fast here, could it do so elsewhere?

  • Overpopulation

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Tensions over Kashmir and a warming planet have placed the Indus Waters Treaty on life support

      In 1995, World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin warned that whereas the conflicts of the previous 100 years had been over oil, “the wars of the next century will be fought over water.”

      Thirty years on, that prediction is being tested in one of the world’s most volatile regions: Kashmir.

    • CBC ☛ This region nearly ran out of water. Locals and experts say other Canadian towns should pay attention

      The Sunshine Coast is on the mainland of B.C., but the only way to get there is a 40-minute ferry ride from West Vancouver. According to census data, the region grew by 7.3 per cent between 2016 and 2021.

• Finance

  • TechSpot ☛ The reality of today's tech industry: layoffs, long hours, AI threats, and few perks

    It had long been said that a career in tech was the ultimate dream: high salaries, security, and a huge number of perks made for some very happy workers. But things look quite different today. The tech world has seen the highest number of layoffs of any private sector industry this year; perks have been cut; salaries aren't increasing in line with the extra demands; and there's the constant spectre of AI.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Two Years of How Things Work

    As I have mentioned before, the “business model” of this site is a little unusual. Rather than having a full or partial paywall and charging people to read, I have kept everything here free to read. And then I have come to all of you and said: “Hey, if you want this place to exist, and you are not broke, please throw in a few bucks.” It is a quasi-socialist model of media funding. The idea behind this is 1) It is unhealthy, in a civic sense, when access to quality information becomes a luxury good unavailable to lower income people; 2) As a writer I want as many people as possible to read my stuff; and 3) The world would be a better place if more things could be funded in this manner, so I just like to imagine that it will work. In an effort to keep things accessible, I have kept the monthly subscription price at “about a cup of coffee” and the annual subscription price at “about a dinner for two at a mediocre restaurant (no drinks).” There is also an option to become a Founding Member at a higher price point, if you are feeling especially generous.

  • [Old] Internet Archive ☛ My Refund for Unused Windows 95

    I've decided to break this up in date order, so folks can immediately jump to more current information. For newcomers it remains in chronological order, so folks can read it in order without having to back up constantly.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Techdirt ☛ The Untold Story Of How Ed Martin Ghostwrote Online Attacks Against A Judge — And Still Became A Top Trump Prosecutor

    At the heart of the dispute — and the lead defendant in the case — was Ed Martin, a lawyer by training and a political operative by trade. In Missouri, where he was based, Martin was widely known as an irrepressible gadfly who trafficked in incendiary claims and trailed controversy wherever he went. Today, he’s the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and one of the most prominent members of the Trump Justice Department.

  • The Register UK ☛ EU Chips Act heading for failure, time for Chips Act 2.0

    It says the European Commission (EC) has made reasonable headway on implementing its strategy, but progress is too slow and hampered by the fragmented nature of the funding, which is largely insufficient for the level of investment required.

    Announcing the report's findings, Annemie Turtelboom, ECA member in charge of the audit, highlighted the huge importance of semiconductors to the modern world, stating that a car alone would likely contain more than 3,000 chips by the end of the decade.

  • The Register UK ☛ IBM pledges allegiance in form of $150B in US ops, R&D

  • The Register UK ☛ Ex-Disney employee gets three years in prison for menu hacks

    Scheuer, a resident of Winter Garden, Florida, was arrested in October and charged with breaking America's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) for accessing Disney IT systems without authorization, and with aggravated identity theft.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Congress passes Take It Down Act to fight deepfake nudes, revenge porn

    The act has its critics, however. Among them is Lia Holland, legislative director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future, who called it “well-intentioned but poorly drafted.”

    Comparing the bill to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires online platforms to remove copyrighted material whenever someone declares it is being illegally used, Holland predicted that bad actors will use Take It Down to scrub from the [Internet] legitimate content they dislike.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ The group chats that changed America

    But their influence flows through X, Substack, and podcasts, and constitutes a kind of dark matter of American politics and media. The group chats aren’t always primarily a political space, but they are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed. The group chats are “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion,” wrote one of their key organizers, Sriram Krishnan, a former partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (typically styled a16z) who is now the White House senior policy adviser for AI.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Dark Matter

    What makes this particularly troubling is how it connects to patterns I've documented in pieces like The Plot Against America, where I traced how a dangerous ideology born from the libertarian movement evolved from fringe theory to governing practice. The same figures who appear in Smith's reporting—Andreessen, Srinivasan, Lonsdale, Thiel's associates—are the key players in that ideological project. These private chats aren't just about political gossip; they're about coordinating the implementation of a specific vision for America's future—one where democracy itself is treated as obsolete technology ripe for “disruption.”

    Several aspects of this phenomenon demand serious reflection: [...]

  • Adam Newbold ☛ Crisis Communications 101: A Crash Course for Privileged Guys in Tech

    My very highest hope is that you, too, might be fortunate enough to one day have a similar experience. If you can stop buying into the prevailing status-quo-preserving mindset of stuff like “the sin of empathy” or the notion that changing your mind is a weakness, you will discover completely new ways of relating to the very many different people that inhabit this world, and you will enjoy your time here that much more.

    But if you can’t manage to do that, at least try to work on the way you respond to the drama. Or even just start by recognizing it as something potentially more important than mere “drama”.

  • Futurism ☛ Experts Alarmed by China's Enormous Army of Robots

    As it turns out, that's exactly what China did to become the robo-mecca, starting in 2015 with a national strategy called "Made in China 2025." As the name implies, the government-led effort laid out performance and quality benchmarks for Chinese manufacturing to hit by this current year, including in sectors like shipbuilding, electric vehicles, and high-speed rail.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Policy-oriented political philosophy

    This cliché is too simplistic. But how does political philosophy relate to policy? And how should it do that, in today’s difficult political environment? These were some of the questions of a workshop that we held last week at the Blavatnik School in Oxford. It brought together a range of scholars whose work relates to the broad label we used, “policy-oriented political philosophy.” And if there is one conclusion that can be drawn, it is that “policy-oriented political philosophy” is alive and kicking, with an incredible range of projects that bring philosophy in dialogue with citizens and policymakers, thereby also changing the ways in which we theorize.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Why Chinese manufacturers are going viral on TikTok

      Video “exposés” like this—where a sales agent breaks down the material cost of luxury goods, from handbags to perfumes to appliances—are everywhere on TikTok right now.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russia Issues Arrest Warrant for TV Rain Journalist Yulia Taratuta

    Russia’s Justice Ministry labeled Taratuta, a presenter with the exiled broadcaster TV Rain, a “foreign agent” in December 2022. The label, which carries Soviet-era connotations, requires designees to submit rigorous financial reports to the ministry and display “foreign agent” disclaimers in publications and social media posts.

  • ANF News ☛ Woman sentenced to 16 years in prison in Tehran

    Nêrgiz Nasirî, a Christian living in Tehran, was charged with “conducting propaganda activities against Islamic Sharia law in communication with foreign countries” and “spreading propaganda against the state.”

  • US News And World Report ☛ Harvard and Trump Administration's Battle Over Freeze of $2B in Grants Will Head Into Summer

    A federal judge on Monday scheduled arguments for July 21 over the university's lawsuit against the government, after both sides met in court for the first time in a brief hearing.

    Harvard sued April 21 after getting letters from the Trump administration calling for broad changes to government and leadership and to the university's admissions policies.

  • Techdirt ☛ Congress Moving Forward On Unconstitutional Take It Down Act

    The bill started with the entirely reasonable goal of addressing non-consensual intimate imagery online. But then something went wrong. Instead of building on existing successful systems, or within the parameters of the First Amendment, Congress decided to create a new framework combining vague “duty of care” requirements with harsh criminal penalties — a combination that, as we’ve previously detailed, practically begs to be weaponized for censorship.

    Most tellingly, Donald Trump — in endorsing the bill during his address to Congress — openly bragged about how he plans to abuse its provisions to censor content he personally dislikes. When the person championing your anti-abuse legislation is promising to use it for abuse, you might have a problem.

    The bill is so bad that even the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, whose entire existence is based on representing the interests of victims of NCII and passing bills similar to the Take It Down Act, has come out with a statement saying that, while it supports laws to address such imagery, it cannot support this bill due to its many, many inherent problems.

  • EFF ☛ Congress Passes TAKE IT DOWN Act Despite Major Flaws

    Today the U.S. House of Representatives passed the TAKE IT DOWN Act, giving the powerful a dangerous new route to manipulate platforms into removing lawful speech that they simply don't like. President Trump himself has said that he would use the law to censor his critics. The bill passed the Senate in February, and it now heads to the president's desk.

  • The Verge ☛ Take It Down Act heads to Trump’s desk

    The bill is among the only pieces of online safety legislation to successfully pass both chambers in years of furor over deepfakes, child safety, and other issues — but it’s one that critics fear will be used as a weapon against content the administration or its allies dislike. It criminalizes the publication of nonconsensual intimate images (NCII), whether real or computer-generated, and requires social media platforms to have a system to remove those images within 48 hours of being flagged. In his address to Congress this year, Trump quipped that once he signed it, “I’m going to use that bill for myself too, if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”

  • El País ☛ ChinaTargets: Inside China’s machinery of repression — and how it crushes dissent around the world

    Jiang is one of hundreds of Chinese people living overseas that Chinese authorities have targeted directly, through hacking and surveillance — and indirectly, through interrogation of relatives, friends and even former teachers.

    The pressure and control applied to the young activist is part of a sophisticated, global campaign engineered by the Chinese government to coerce and intimidate members of its diaspora in what analysts call “transnational repression.”

  • India Times ☛ India blocks Pakistani YouTube channels after Pahalgam terror attack

    The list of 16 banned channels included those operated by Dawn News, Samaa TV, ARY News, Geo News and more. As per the list shared by ANI, these channels have over 63 million subscribers.

  • Dawn Media ☛ 16 Pakistani YouTube channels banned in India after Pahalgam attack

    The YouTube channels blocked by the Indian authorities include those of Dawn News, Samaa TV, ARY News, Geo News, Bol News, Suno News and Raftar.

    Journalists whose channels were banned included Irshad Bhatti, Asma Shirazi, Umar Cheema, Muneeb Farooq and Rizwan Razi.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ The end of post-socialism and the opportunity for a European public service media house

    In this sense, as much as the slashing of RFE/RL is a tragic event and part of a historic disjuncture in transatlantic relations, it is also an unprecedented opportunity for Europe to take responsibility and secure reliable information outlets for its own citizens and neighbours. It must also offer this information equally, objectively and for free. In an age of paywalls and subscriptions, the right to access reliable news must be a priority for public funding across the continent.

  • The New Leaf Journal ☛ 50 Things I Learned in Five Years of NLJ Articles

    The New Leaf Journal launched exactly five years to the day on April 27, 2020. I knew that I needed to publish something to celebrate this humble perennially virid online magazine’s fifth birthday. In previous years I published a timeline of our first year online, a Justin and Justina birthday dialogue, a birthday reader featuring our most-visited posts, and absolutely nothing in 2024. I must confess I was at a loss until I came across an April 17, 2025 article by Brian Potter of Construction Physics titled 50 Things I’ve Learned Writing Construction Physics. Mr. Potter started Construction Physics in September 2020. In the linked post, he published a collection of some of the most interesting things he has learned about construction while researching and writing 186 essays since launching his online writing project. This blog post inspired in me a eureka moment not unlike the one I had when I was inspired by a different blog post to publish 54 Things I Learned in 2024 just a few months ago. I have learned many things while researching and writing articles for The New Leaf Journal, not to mention serving as site administrator. What better way to go through my writing than to collect things I have learned in five years of writing for and running The New Leaf Journal?

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Ideas That Cannot Be Spoken - by Hamilton Nolan

    Sometimes you say what you think, and guess what happens? People get mad. People yell at you. Yes. That goes with the territory. I will put the = hate mail and death threats and angry [Internet] comments that I received during my Gawker years up against anyone’s. And, hey: that’s the fucking job. Whether you write for Gawker or Substack or the New York Times or Harper’s—or whether you are a CEO or tech visionary or a venture capitalist who goes to the Aspen Ideas festival and has a bazillion Twitter followers—the only requirement of the job is to speak your mind honestly. Because, because, by asking the public to listen to you, you are telling the public that they will be getting, as best as you can manage it, your truest ideas. We ask people to give us their attention, and their time, and in turn we give them our honest thoughts. When you are operating in this world and you stop giving people your honest thoughts, you begin ripping people off.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ Keeping the Conversation Moving

    The point is to protect our freedoms before the president starts having journalists and political activists assassinated. If we reach that point, it’s already too late. I won’t repeat here all the ways that this administration has abrogated core American principles, but suffice it to say, that I do believe them to be significant and although I will never shy away from criticizing democrats (or anyone else who deserves it), I also think we should be transparent about the risks posed by some of Trump’s actions and the ways in which they can lead to some of what I saw in Russia. It won’t happen overnight. But trust me, it can happen - the risk is greater than many people care to admit.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Freedom From Religion Foundation ☛ FFRF joins civil rights coalition

    FFRF is one of many organizations proud to be part of “The Pact: A Civil Rights Coalition Unity Commitment,” created by The Leadership Conference to foster solidarity among nonpartisan civil rights groups. The coalition is designed to ensure that its members will work together should any be attacked by the U.S. government, to share knowledge and resources with one another and will stay true to their missions instead of self-censoring out of fear.

  • CBC ☛ 'I lost my legal right to vote': Booths closed early — or didn't open at all — in some Nunavik villages

    But when Lauzon turned up to the polls, she was told it was closing around 2:30 p.m. — seven hours before it was supposed to, as listed under the Canada Elections Act for districts in the Eastern time zone.

    "I was looking forward to that ability, but now you know what, I'm just mad," she said.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Tradwives Are the Harbinger of Systemic Breakdown

    Nostalgia for a bygone gender regime is more than a weird social media trend. It reflects larger system pressures — on elites facing technological disruption that might generate social unrest, and on ordinary women buckling under the weight of modern work.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Google’s military AI deals get DeepMind UK staff to start unionising

    But when you hire people stating you have principles, they may believe you. So 300 DeepMind UK employees are looking to unionise over the change in principles and the defence contracts and join the Communication Workers Union.

  • The Hindu ☛ Central Tibetan Administration leader Penpa Tsering: ‘Dalai Lama may decide on a spiritual successor during 90th birthday events in July’

    Mr. Tsering said the celebratory events, which would go on for a year from July 6, 2025, would be preceded by special prayers and a religious meeting of the heads of all Tibetan Buddhist schools from July 2 to 4 in Dharamshala, when the Dalai Lama is expected to consult them on the reincarnation question.

  • Thomas Günther ☛ Accessibility no-brainers

    I recently had a great discussion in a Kirby partners call. We talked about how important accessibility is, but also how there’s not always a big enough budget for it in projects. Personally, I don’t want to work on “inaccessible” websites anymore because this topic gives me a lot of purpose in my job. But sometimes, for smaller projects, you have to make compromises.

    So I’ve collected some habits that require little to no effort but have a huge impact on accessibility.

    I should clarify some things upfront: I’m talking about projects where you don’t (have to) care about meeting specific WCAG levels. True accessibility requires designers, content editors, and developers working together, with a big enough budget to make it happen. This article is about making real improvements with little effort.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Torrent Freak ☛ DRM-Free OnlyFans Downloads See Widevine Project Nuked From GitHub

    Used by major video platforms including Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu to name just a few, Google content protection system Widevine can be found in leading browsers, games consoles, and most mobile devices. Circumvention has been ongoing for years, but after OnlyFans sent a complaint to GitHub, a Widevine decryption project has been ejected from GitHub.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Spotify Going with More Price Increases—But Not in the US

    Meanwhile, streaming platforms including Spotify have considered charging extra money for early access to music, as executives seek new avenues to cash in on the biggest artists’ most passionate fans.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Open Web Advocacy ☛ Is It Worth Killing Mozilla to Shave Off Less Than 1% From Google’s Market Share?

  Late last year the DOJ won their long running antitrust case vs Google when Judge Mehta ruled in their favor declaring unequivocally that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly”. Last week the remedies part of the trial started. Among the numerous remedies that the DOJ is asking for, is an effective total ban on revenue sharing deals between Google and browser vendors.

  One obvious concern with cancelling these deals is that this will bankrupt Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser and the Gecko browser engine, who is heavily reliant on their search deal with Google. This was directly acknowledged by the court: [...]

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate Site Blocking Demands Shelved as Filmmakers Settle With U.S. ISP

    A pending settlement between movie companies and ISP Frontier has significantly altered the scope of an upcoming copyright trial. The movie studios are expected to withdraw their claims, including their demand for pirate site blocking, leaving Frontier to face only major record labels in court. With the music companies seeking potentially over a billion dollars in damages for subscribers' piracy activities, the stakes remain exceptionally high.