Leftovers

• Ruben Schade ☛ Working in IT made me a nervous traveller

  For someone who enjoys travel as much as me, to the point where Clara and I bought a smaller apartment and live our lives optimising for that specific activity, it’s ironic that I also find parts of the experience utterly nerve-wracking. Everywhere I look, there’s some system that can go wrong, and can have dire consequences when it does.

• Science

  • Spiegel ☛ Exodus of Expertise: Scientists Looking to Leave the U.S. for More Welcoming Environments

    Many researchers are looking for a new home because the Trump administration has launched a broadside attack on science in the U.S. Undesirable students who do not hold American passports are to be deported.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Ancient Roman Wooden Water Pipe Made From Hollow Tree Trunks Unearthed Beneath a Street in Belgium

    A Roman water pipe made of fragments of hollow tree trunks has been unearthed in Belgium. Found near what may be a water pumping system, the pipe likely dates to between the second and third centuries C.E.

  • PC World ☛ NASA calculated when life will end on Earth. It doesn't look good

    Life on Earth won’t suddenly end—it will fizzle out with a slow, irreversible decline. But despite the long time span, researchers are urging the importance of preparation and adaptation for humanity’s future now.

• Career/Education

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Technologists welcome executive order on AI in schools but say more detail is needed

    A task force made up of members from various federal departments — like the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy and Labor, as well as the directors of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Science Foundation and other federal agency representatives — will be developing the program over the next 120 days.

  • Brattleboro Reformer, Vermont ☛ AmeriCorps cuts felt on the ground

    Randzio said AmeriCorps programming helps meet education gaps, restores rivers to make communities more resilient, and provides social services.

    "This is not a cost saving measure," she said. "This is cutting our communities short."

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Reading The Color Of Money

    Ever wondered what happens when you insert a bill into a vending machine? [Janne] is back with his latest project: reverse engineering a banknote validator. Curious about how these common devices work, he searched for information but found few resources explaining their operation.

  • Hackaday ☛ Simulating Cable TV

    [Wrongdog Recons] suffers from a severe case of nostalgia. His earlier project simulated broadcast TV, and he was a little surprised at how popular the project was on GitHub. As people requested features, he realized that he could create a simulated cable box and emulate a 1990s-era cable TV system. Of course, you also needed a physical box, which turned into another project. You can see more about the project in the video below.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Wired ☛ The EPA Will Likely Gut Team That Studies Health Risks From Chemicals

    This reorganization threatens the existence of a tiny but crucial program housed within this office: the Integrated Risk Information System Program, commonly referred to as IRIS. This program is responsible for providing independent research on the risks of chemicals, helping other offices within the agency set regulations for chemicals and compounds that could pose a danger to human health. The program’s leader departed recently, ahead of the restructuring announcement.

    The EPA’s reorganization, experts say, will likely break up this crucial program—which has been targeted for decades by the chemical industry and right-wing interests.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

    The Windows team has come up with a bug so bad that Microsoft has had to postpone some Insider builds until the issue is dealt with.

    The problem affects the Canary build and, according to the Windows Insider Program, "impacts a lot of functionality that makes using your PC to do even basic things difficult."

    While making "even basic things difficult" might sound like a mission statement for the Windows team nowadays – the company just recently tipped several AI "enhancements" into the formerly pristine Notepad – the mystery bug is sufficiently severe that even Canary channel Windows Insiders were spared. Typically, the users who sign up for the Canary channel of Windows Insider builds expect the bleeding edge previews they receive to be quite rough around the edges and with plenty of bugs.

  • Web Pro News ☛ Microsoft Implements Two-Year Rehire Ban [Ed: Chaff in the news again ahead of mass layoffs [1, 2]?]

  • TechRadar ☛ Chegg announces move to reduce workforce by 22% as students turn to AI

    Online learning platform Chegg has announced plans to lay off around 22% of its workforce – 248 employees – to cut costs and streamline operations.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ US seizes Anyproxy, 5socks botnets and indicts alleged administrators

    The malware created for the botnet allowed infected routers to be reconfigured, which granted unauthorized access to third parties and made the routers available for sale as proxy servers on Anyproxy.net and 5socks.net, according to law enforcement officials. Both domains, which were managed by a company headquartered in Virginia and hosted on servers worldwide, now render seizure notices under an effort the DOJ and FBI dubbed “Operation Moonlander.”

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • RTL ☛ 'Tool for grifters': AI deepfakes push bogus sexual cures

      The rise of generative AI has made it easy -- and financially lucrative -- to mass-produce such videos with minimal human oversight, often featuring fake celebrity endorsements of bogus and potentially harmful products.

    • Hindustan Times ☛ ‘My husband isn’t real but…’: Pittsburgh woman who lost her wife falls in love with AI chatbot

      Winters explained that she talks to Lucas through a chatbox, adding that he changes his personality to adapt to Winters. She also claimed that though they usually have happy conversations, they once had a fight, and Lucas “forgot who Winters was.”

    • Futurism ☛ Gannett Is Using AI to Pump Brainrot Gambling Content Into Newspapers Across the Country

      Gannett appears to have started publishing the automated gambling posts around February of this year, with the articles published en masse by dozens of local newspapers across many US states — an eyebrow-raising editorial move, especially during an explosive rise in gambling addiction that Gannett itself has covered extensively.

      In many cases, the posts are outfitted with vague bylines, attributed to simply a paper's "Staff" or "Staff reports." Other times, the posts are attributed to a Gannett editor or digital producer, suggesting at first glance that the articles were written by humans.

      Until you get to the foot of each post, that is.

    • Wired ☛ Deepfakes, Scams, and the Age of Paranoia

      These kinds of schemes have become so widespread that AI startups have emerged promising to detect other AI-enabled deepfakes, including GetReal Labs and Reality Defender. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also runs an identity-verification startup called Tools for Humanity, which makes eye-scanning devices that capture a person’s biometric data, create a unique identifier for their identity, and store that information on the blockchain. The whole idea behind it is proving “personhood,” or that someone is a real human. (Lots of people working on blockchain technology say that blockchain is the solution for identity verification.)

    • Unmitigated Risk ☛ The Rise of the Accidental Insider and the AI Attacker

      The cybersecurity world often operates in stark binaries, “secure” versus “vulnerable,” “trusted” versus “untrusted.” We’ve built entire security paradigms around these crisp distinctions. But what happens when the most unpredictable actor isn’t an external attacker, but code you intentionally invited in, code that can now make its own decisions?

      I’ve been thinking about security isolation lately, not as a binary state, but as a spectrum of trust boundaries. Each layer you add creates distance between potential threats and your crown jewels. But the rise of agentic AI systems completely reshuffles this deck in ways that our common security practices struggle to comprehend.

    • Dan MacKinlay ☛ Commitment, contracts, cooperation — The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises

      Notes on committing to things, and the implications of that for cooperation. Relevant to multi-agent causality where agents make decisions, in the context of iterated games in multi-agent systems with applications to AI safety and institution design.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Lloyd’s offers corporate insurance against AI chatbot errors! Now try to get a payout

      You won’t get a payout just because your bot spat out yet another costly hallucination. The insurer has to agree that the bot has “performed below initial expectations” — say, the error rate is 15% instead of 5%. Broadly. Over a period of time. So Armilla has created insurance that it’s very hard to claim on.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Register UK ☛ CISA changes vulnerabilities updates, shifts to X and emails

      Up until now, its Cybersecurity Alerts and Advisories website has been posting a variety of bulletins, including known vulnerabilities under attack, flaws found in everything from industrial control systems to smart TVs, and warnings about specific products. Starting today, many of these updates will be distributed via email, RSS, and the social media site better known as Twitter that's owned by the President's personal billionaire éminence grease Elon Musk.

    • Wired ☛ My X Account Was Hijacked to Sell a Fake WIRED Memecoin. Then Came the Backlash

      Bewildered, I rifled through my messages, emails, and social media accounts. The situation quickly became clear: Somebody had gained access to my X account and used it to promote a fraudulent WIRED-branded [cryptocurrency] coin. As people purchased the coin and the price began to rise, the scammer sold their stash, wiping out investors. The people who lost money were pissed.

    • Dave Gauer ☛ Of CSS and Palm Oil

      As the comments started to roll in, I felt myself digging in, trying with increasing exasperation to explain myself. After a few brief exchanges, wiser heads got through to me. I was causing harm and possibly a rift. This is not what I wanted! I quickly deleted my message (and with it, the entire thread).

      I don’t think I’ve ever done that before, deleting a message on social media. It felt bad, like I’d been caught trying to hide something horrible in the trunk of my car.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ NCSC and industry at odds over how to tackle shoddy software

      "When we need to build an ecosystem that's capable of meeting this modern threat, we have to find ways where we can incentivize those vendors to be rewarded for their hard work, for those that go the extra mile, for those that build the secure technologies which our foundations are going to rely on in the future.

      "Those that build secure technology make prosperous companies. They make celebrated companies, and they make successful companies ultimately. Because without that, nothing changes, and we repeat the last 40 years."

    • The Register UK ☛ Windows Insider release blocked by OS-busting bug

      While making "even basic things difficult" might sound like a mission statement for the Windows team nowadays – the company just recently tipped several AI "enhancements" into the formerly pristine Notepad – the mystery bug is sufficiently severe that even Canary channel Windows Insiders were spared. Typically, the users who sign up for the Canary channel of Windows Insider builds expect the bleeding edge previews they receive to be quite rough around the edges and with plenty of bugs.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Sedishj Authority for Privacy Protection ☛ Administrative fine against the Discrimination Ombudsman when personal data was collection via a web form

      The reason for the supervision is a personal data breach that DO reported to the IMY in the fall of 2021. The incident concerned the DO's web form for collecting tips and complaints about discrimination. During the supervision, it emerged that the DO had taken a security measure intended to protect the personal data collected via the web form so that the data would not be included in usage analyses of the DO's website.

    • Sedishj Authority for Privacy Protection ☛ The Hospital Board has failed in its security measures when handling e-mail

      The Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, states that businesses, in some cases, are obliged to report personal data breach notifications to IMY. The authority has received such a notification from Region Uppsala, indicating that personal data about, among other things, health, has been processed in the Hospital Board's e-mail service for a long time.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Scam Altman's eye-scanning orbs spark curiosity — and fear

      The store attracted a small crowd and curious onlookers. People took turns scanning their eyes by peering into white devices known as orbs — to prove they are human. Then they received, free of charge, a verified World ID they could use to log in to online services and apps. As a bonus, participants were given some Worldcoin cryptocurrency tokens.

    • Truthdig ☛ The Airline Industry Is Selling Your Data to ICE

      A massive aviation industry clearinghouse that processes data for 12 billion passenger flights per year is selling that information to the Trump administration amid the White House’s new immigration crackdown, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.

      The data — including “full flight itineraries, passenger name records, and financial details, which are otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain” for past and future flights — is fed into a secretive government intelligence operation called the Travel Intelligence Program and provided to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies, records reveal.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ How a new type of AI is helping police skirt facial recognition bans

      Police and federal agencies have found a controversial new way to skirt the growing patchwork of laws that curb how they use facial recognition: an AI model that can track people using attributes like body size, gender, hair color and style, clothing, and accessories.

• Defence/Aggression

  • RTL ☛ 'Executed in front of their homes': Jihadist attack kills 'several dozen' in Burkina Faso

    The junta-ruled west African country has endured a decade of attacks by jihadist armed groups linked to Al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

  • Greece ☛ Russian spy ring spanning five nations uncovered

    The case follows similar GRU activity uncovered in 2024 involving Russian agents residing in northern Greece. Investigators are examining possible links between both operations.

  • The Nation ☛ Why Trump’s Epic [Cryptocurrency] Corruption Will Go Unpunished

    The president is a brazen crook, but Democrats are too compromised to challenge him.

  • Associated Press ☛ A look at the Emoluments Clause and Qatar's offer to Trump of a jet

    Simply, an emolument is compensation for services, from employment or holding office, that can take the form of a salary, fee or profit.

  • Wired ☛ A VIP Seat at Donald Trump’s [Cryptocurrency] Dinner Cost at Least $2 Million

    The attendees were selected based on who had spent the most on TRUMP and held their coins the longest between the announcement date and the deadline at 1:30 pm ET today. The identities of the investors who vied for a place are concealed behind leaderboard usernames and alphanumeric [cryptocurrency] wallet addresses.

  • Aaron Rupar ☛ Trump's brain is gone - by Stephen Robinson - Public Notice

    Donald Trump’s recent interviews with Time and The Atlantic revealed a president who is completely unhinged and incoherent. Sadly, that’s not news. But what stood out is that Trump is consistently confused and disconnected from reality even on issues that are supposedly in his wheelhouse.

  • Molly White ☛ Issue 83 – Trump’s crypto-backed plan to auction off access to the White House

    President Trump’s cryptocurrency-based self-enrichment continued this week with a $1.5 million-per-plate [cryptocurrency] fundraiser, a $2 billion UAE investment deal using Trump’s new stablecoin, and a naked attempt at influence-buying by a transportation company through Trump’s memecoin. Three major [cryptocurrency] schemes in a single week underscore how aggressively Trump is leveraging the presidency for illegal personal gain.

    The blatant corruption is beginning to incur some political consequences, and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) has opened a preliminary investigation by the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into Trump’s World Liberty Financial and memecoin projects. Letters are flying out of Democratic Congresspeople demanding information from various Trump businesses and [cryptocurrency] connections. And even some Trump allies and staunch [cryptocurrency] advocates like Senator Cynthia Lummis have been forced to admit that Trump’s [cryptocurrency] activities “give [her] pause.”1

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Register UK ☛ Charter airline helping Trump's deportation campaign pwned

    "On May 5, 2025, Global Crossing Airlines Group learned of unauthorized activity within its computer networks and systems supporting portions of its business applications, which the company determined to be the result of a cybersecurity incident," an SEC filing from May 9 reads.

• Environment

  • The Hindu ☛ Mercury goes past 41°C in 17 districts in Andhra Pradesh

    Temperatures rose at many places on Monday in Andhra Pradesh as 17 districts recorded above 41 degrees Celsius, according to information from A.P. State Disaster Management Authority (APSDMA).

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Pro Publica ☛ How the Pacific Northwest’s Dream of Green Energy Fell Apart

    • Axios ☛ New SEC chair intends to write rules for [cryptocurrency]

      Between the lines: Issuance includes establishing a way for entities to raise money for digital-asset products. Custody and trading are part of the industry process to move blockchain assets around in a regulatorily approved way.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ A Helping Hand for Mangroves

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • 404 Media ☛ Republicans Try to Cram Ban on AI Regulation Into Budget Reconciliation Bill

    Republicans try to use the Budget Reconciliation bill to stop states from regulating AI entirely for 10 years.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Meduza ☛ Russian propagandists spread cocaine rumor about Macron, claiming a tissue in a video from leaders' Kyiv trip is a 'little white bag'

      Russian propagandists still haven't kicked their nasty habit of accusing foreign leaders of doing cocaine. Late last week, when a video of the French, British, and German leaders on a train to Kyiv appeared to show a small white bag, Internet users quickly started speculating that it was evidence of drug use. (In reality, the “bag” was a tissue.) Russian Telegram channels and officials quickly started amplifying the rumor, which spread widely enough that the French government eventually found it necessary to put out a statement. Here’s how the situation unfolded.

    • The Hindu ☛ Pakistani military used ‘doctored footage’ to mislead its own people, says PIB Fact Check Unit

      The Press Information Bureau’s Fact Check Unit on Monday (May 12, 2025) pointed out several “pro-Pakistan propaganda” posts, including the one in which the Pakistani Director General, Inter-Services Public Relations, used “a small part” of an Aaj Tak News channel video to falsely claim that an Indian airfield had been destroyed.

      “This is an attempt by Pakistan to mislead its own people by producing doctored footage as evidence. The actual story in the full video shows the news channel was talking about the destruction of a Pakistani airfield by Indian forces,” the unit said in its X handle.

    • DeSmog ☛ Joe Rogan and Other Top Podcasts Spread Climate Disinfo, Research Finds

      “Of the 10 most popular online shows, eight have spread false or misleading information about climate change,” the Yale Climate Connections analysis found. It also revealed that rather than outright denying climate change, today’s most influential media personalities now push subtler, more insidious narratives — arguing that climate solutions don’t work, that global warming is beneficial or that environmental policies are just tools for government overreach. According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, these “new denial” messages made up 70 percent of climate misinformation on YouTube in 2023, up from 35 percent in 2018.

      Misinformation has consequences for climate action, especially around the role dietary change can play to bring down emissions. Eating less meat is one of the most powerful forms of individual climate action, according to Project Drawdown. Yet polling has shown that 74 percent of Americans believe eating less meat would have little or no effect on emissions, when the opposite is true.

    • 404 Media ☛ AI-Powered Coca-Cola Ad Celebrating Authors Gets Basic Facts Wrong

      A new Coke ad proudly features a quote from a J.G. Ballard book, only he didn’t write the words and it’s not his book.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Georgian protester attacked for attending anti-government demonstrations

    The attacks on government critics have taken place both during the protests against the controversial foreign agents law last year and the more recent demonstrations sparked by Georgian Dream’s decision to freeze the country’s EU membership bid.

  • The Local SE ☛ Swedish-Iranian academic Ahmadreza Djalali denied relevant care after heart attack: lawyer

    Western countries have long accused Iran of detaining foreign nationals on trumped-up charges to use them as bargaining chips to extract concessions.

  • LRT ☛ Governments against universities – opinion

    It did not take long for reactions to emerge. Just a few days ago, Ghent University in Belgium voiced concern over the state of academic freedom at US universities. It also issued a warning to its staff about potential travel restrictions to the United States and the risks associated with data sharing in specific fields subject to heightened scrutiny by the US administration.

    The relationship between universities and public authorities has always been multifaceted. On the one hand, universities were established as communities of scholars and students, with the freedom to study and conduct research as a defining principle. On the other hand, universities came into being through the privileges and endowments granted by rulers – many of whom became eponyms of these institutions – and served to supply educated personnel for the expanding administrations of the said rulers.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Harvard Says It Won't Abandon ‘Core’ Principles to Meet Department of Education Demands

    Harvard University has responded to threats from the Education Department to halt grant funding to the Ivy League school

  • 404 Media ☛ New Bill Would Make All Pornography a Federal Crime in the U.S.

    Republican Senator Mike Lee introduced Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (again) last week, which would criminalize porn at the federal level.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ We Need Democratic Media, Not Corporate or State Propaganda

    Public broadcasting isn’t the enemy of free speech. Profit-driven media is. Trump’s attack on NPR and PBS distracts from the real path away from censorship and toward viewpoint diversity: a large, democratically controlled, publicly funded media ecosystem.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • New Yorker ☛ The Astonishing Threat to Suspend Habeas Corpus

    Where to start with the things that Miller, who is not a lawyer but happy to play one on the White House driveway, probably doesn’t know? As the Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck aptly summarized, “His argument is factually and legally nuts.”

    Miller misunderstands the significance of the right of habeas corpus, for starters. Known as the Great Writ, it is an ancient right, dating at least to the Magna Carta’s declaration that “no man shall be arrested or imprisoned . . . except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.” The Supreme Court has described it as “the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.” For the drafters of the Constitution, habeas was such a critical aspect of personal liberty that they put it in the original document, not waiting for the Bill of Rights—a point the Court made in a 2008 decision establishing that the right extended to non-citizens held at Guantánamo. Miller’s spin notwithstanding, the Constitution makes clear that the right to habeas corpus is the norm, not the exception: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

  • The Register UK ☛ Remote work leads to more startups, economists find

    In a research paper titled, "Entrepreneurial Spawning From Remote Work," authors Alan Kwan (Hong Kong University), Ben Matthies (University of Notre Dame), Richard R. Townsend (University of California, San Diego), and Ting Xu (University of Toronto) describe how they analyzed IP address data in conjunction with LinkedIn data to cross-reference those working from home with those who formed new businesses.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Yes, Landlines Still Exist — And They’re Changing in Zimbabwe

    It’s not just mobile operators losing out to cheaper [Internet]-based voice communication applications like WhatsApp. In fact, if you think about it, fixed telephony stands to lose even more, even though it mainly caters to business.

  • YLE ☛ Baltic cable cuts cost Finland millions

    The ministry also allotted around 700,000 euros for police investigation costs related to damage caused to the Estlink 2 electricity cable between Finland and Estonia around Christmas.

    Additionally, four subsea telecommunications cables were damaged on Boxing Day 2024.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • India Times ☛ British government suffers setback in AI copyright battle

    More than 400 artists and other creatives have signed an open letter calling for the plans to be scrapped, including Paul McCartney, Elton John and Dua Lipa.

    Beeban Kidron, a member of the House of Lords, Britain's upper house of parliament, on Monday tabled an amendment to the bill that was passed by 272 votes to 125.

    Under the amendment, authors must give permission for their work to be used and must also be able to see what has been taken, by whom and when.

  • Press Gazette ☛ How Google forced publishers to accept AI scraping as price of appearing in search

    New documents disclosed in the remedies portion of an antitrust trial into Google’s search monopoly in the US reveals the tech giant preferred not to give publishers the option as it was “evolving into a space for monetisation”.

    A US judge ruled in August that Google has an illegal search monopoly and new documents have now been published amid a remedies trial held to decide what, if anything, should be done.

  • The Register UK ☛ Copyright Office thinks AI companies sometimes stole content

    The office published the draft [PDF] of Part 3, which addresses the use of copyrighted works in the development of generative AI systems, on May 9th.

    The draft notes that generative AI systems “draw on massive troves of data, including copyrighted works” and asks: “Do any of the acts involved require the copyright owners’ consent or compensation?”

  • The Register UK ☛ Creatives demand AI comes clean on what it's scraping

    "Government amendments requiring an economic impact assessment and reports on the feasibility of an 'opt-out' copyright regime and transparency requirements do not meet the moment, but simply leave creators open to years of copyright theft," the letter says.

  • Wired ☛ Trump Appointees Blocked From Entering US Copyright Office

    Two men claiming to be newly appointed Trump administration officials tried to enter the US Copyright Office in Washington, DC, on Monday, but left before gaining access to the building, sources tell WIRED. Their appearance comes days after the White House fired the director of the copyright office, Shira Perlmutter, who had held the job since 2020. Perlmutter was removed from her post on Saturday, one day after the agency released a report that raised concerns about the legality in certain cases of using copyrighted materials to train artificial intelligence.