Leftovers

• Science

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Sun Launches Its Strongest Solar Flare of the Year So Far, Causing Radio Blackouts Around the World

    Solar flares are bursts on the sun’s surface that send electromagnetic radiation, including X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation (EUV), hurtling through space—and sometimes, they’re pointed at Earth. These forms of energy can ionize, or charge, low layers of the planet’s ionosphere on the sun-facing side. That can affect high frequency radio waves used for long-distance communication, because they bounce off the ionosphere’s upper layers to get around the globe. When the lower layers are ionized, however, these waves lose energy or become completely absorbed, causing radio blackouts.

  • Futurism ☛ What Are Alien Dyson Spheres, Why Are They So Janky, and Why Are They Doomed to Go Undetected?

    Lacki's conclusion leaves an intriguing possibility: we may still be able to detect the signatures of already collapsed megastructures orbiting distant stars. However, without that visible technosignature, they would be incredibly difficult to spot.

    As far as harnessing the power of the Sun is concerned, researchers have previously found that we would need to demolish a Jupiter-sized planet to build a Dyson sphere around our host star, an enormous — and likely risky — endeavor.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Living beings emit a faint light that extinguishes upon death, according to a new study

    The light of someone's life might not be just another person, but light in the literal sense. According to a recent study by researchers from University of Calgary, every living system emits light without requiring external excitation due to a biological phenomenon known as ultraweak photon emission (UPE).

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ These Ancient Scrolls Have Been a Tantalizing Mystery for 2,000 Years. Researchers Just Deciphered a Title for the First Time

    Reading the papyrus involves solving several difficult problems. After the rolled-up scrolls are scanned, their many layers need to be separated out and flattened into two-dimensional segments. At that point, the carbon-based ink usually isn’t visible in the scans, so machine-learning models are necessary to identify the inked sections.

  • [Old] Chalmers ☛ Programming in Martin-Lof's Type Theory

    This book was published by Oxford University Press in 1990. It is now out of print. This version is available from www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Research/Logic/book.

  • [Old] David A Wheeler ☛ Don’t Use ISO/IEC 14977 Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF)

    In short, while there would be a big advantage to having a single notation, the community of those who write language specifications have generally rejected ISO 14977 for a variety of reasons. You should be aware of that rejection before committing to using it. Yes, it is published by ISO/IEC, but that does not mean that everyone uses it - or even that they should use it.

    I bear no ill will to those who developed ISO/IEC 14977:1996. However, I think 14977 has a lot of problems, and there are obvious EBNF alternatives that should normally be used instead. One of those alternative specifications is in the W3C Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition). The W3C specification is much more similar to typical regex syntax making it much easier for today's software developers to understand), avoids the key problems of 14977:1996, and is already clearly described. More generally, you would be wise to avoid 14977:1996.

• Career/Education

  • LRT ☛ Edinburgh library launches Lithuanian book section

    Lithuanian speakers in Edinburgh now have a new place to connect with their culture – through books. A Lithuanian-language section was officially opened last weekend at the Leith Library, offering hundreds of titles for readers of all ages.

  • Michigan News ☛ From jail to diploma: IGNITE program marks 100th graduate

    Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson honored the graduate during the program’s 34th graduation ceremony held on May 12 at the jail.

    The event marked a milestone in the educational initiative aimed at reversing generational incarceration.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Why strong engineers are rarely blocked

    Earlier in my career I used to get blocked constantly, but these days it’s rare. What changed?

    At first glance being blocked sounds like it’s outside your control, since it literally means you’re waiting for some other person or event. However, engineers actually have a lot of control over the amount of time they spend blocked. You can see that by the fact that some engineers have a reputation for being “good at unblocking” other engineers. What skills do they have that other engineers don’t?

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ This Robotic Centipede Crawls Farms to Kill Weeds — and Might Join the Military

    The unnerving contraption was designed for fields with difficult terrain, where large-scale automation can't operate, such as extremely steep and rocky wine grape hills.

  • Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Foggy feeds: the decline in my feed reader subscriptions

    I’ve noticed a decline in the thinking across the websites I follow. I have two hypotheses. I kind of hope neither are true and I’m just imagining things, but I worry that they both are.

• Proprietary

  • Nick Heer ☛ Apple’s ‘Private and Secure Payment System’ Warning Notice

    It is not like Apple is taking an elevated level of responsibility for payments made through In-App Purchases, either. This warning tone carried through in documentation may not be lying to users, but it is bullshitting them and that, in most places, is not a sign of trust or respect. Perhaps things are different in Silicon Valley.

  • The Register UK ☛ Google backs down after locking out Nextcloud Files app

    Nextcloud expects to release an update to the app shortly, and Schertzinger paid tribute to the broader community for its support.

    Nextcloud's problem was a decision made in late 2024 to revoke its app's "All files access" permission on Android devices. Because the permission gives apps broad access to files on a device, Google is understandably cautious about granting it, preferring developers to use more privacy-friendly access tools, such as the Storage Access Framework (SAF).

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • SBS ☛ How the use of AI in job recruitment may disadvantage some people

      In 2024, 43 per cent of Australian organisations used Artificial Intelligence (AI) "moderately" in their recruitment, while 19 per cent used it "extensively" when hiring new staff, according to The Australian Responsible AI report.

      The use of technology in the hiring process can happen in different ways, such as by analysing CVs or evaluating applicants.

    • India Times ☛ US states oppose AI regulation ban in Trump tax bill

      Top attorneys representing 40 states signed a letter urging leaders in Congress to reject the AI regulation moratorium language added to the budget reconciliation bill.

      "The impact of such a broad moratorium would be sweeping and wholly destructive of reasonable state efforts to prevent known harms associated with AI," the letter states.

    • Futurism ☛ Star Wars' Showcase of AI Special Effects Was a Complete Disaster

      Unfortunately, as highlighted by 404 Media, we just got a preview of what that might look like. Industrial Light and Magic, the legendary visual effects studio behind nearly every "Star Wars" movie, released a new demo showcasing how AI could supercharge depictions of the sci-fi universe.

      And unsurprisingly, it looks absolutely, flabbergastingly awful.

    • Wired ☛ No, Graduates: AI Hasn't Ended Your Career Before It Starts

      The lords of AI are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to make their models think LIKE accomplished humans. You have just spent four years at Temple University learning to think AS accomplished humans. The difference is immeasurable.

      This is something that even Silicon Valley understands, starting from the time Steve Jobs told me four decades ago that he wanted to marry computers and the liberal arts. I once wrote a history of Google. Originally, its cofounder Larry Page resisted hiring anyone who did not have a computer science degree. But the company came to realize that it was losing out on talent it needed for communications, business strategy, management, marketing, and internal culture. Some of those liberal arts grads it then hired became among the company’s most valuable employees.

    • Uwe Friedrichsen ☛ Thoughts on AI and software development - Part 2

      In the previous post, we looked at Steve Yegge’s post where he made a projection from the vibe coding of today to controlling AI agent fleets in the near future that take over all coding reliably. Pondering this projection as a possible future, we realized that this future is not what we need as our actual problems in software development do not lie in a lack of developer productivity (or to be more precise: developer efficiency) but somewhere else.

      However, we all know that decisions are not necessarily driven by what we need. Therefore, we we also need to explore the other forces that drive market movements and decision making. This is the focus of this post.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ How to make a splash in AI economics: fake your data

      It would be nice if the press kept in mind that even though arXiv posters are overwhelmingly honest researchers putting their stuff up in good faith, and a lot of it’s super interesting and even useful — it’s just an unreviewed blog post, and you’ve got to treat it like one.

    • Andrew Stiefel ☛ AI Isn't Taking Your Job – The Economy Is

      Companies aren’t laying people off because AI is replacing them. At least, not yet. If you’re familiar with AI technology, you know both how far and fast it has come — and all the countless ways it hallucinates or falls flat. It makes a great assistant, but a lousy replacement.

      So don’t mistake narrative spin for a technological inevitability.

      AI isn’t coming for your job. Because the CFO already did.

    • University of Victoria ☛ Unlocking web archives: LLMs, RAG, and the future of digital preservation

      Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming how research libraries manage digital preservation and access to web archives. This paper examines the potential and challenges of integrating LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance the searchability and usability of Web ARChive (WARC) files. Traditional keyword-based retrieval often falls short in handling the complexity of web archives, necessitating new AI-driven approaches. The study explores WARC-GPT, an open-source tool developed by the Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab, which applies RAG techniques to enable conversational search across web archives. While WARC-GPT demonstrates promise, it also encounters significant hurdles, including noisy data, hallucinations, and computational inefficiencies. To address these issues, the author develops a bespoke RAG pipeline optimized for research library needs, implementing improvements in data preprocessing, chunking strategies, and hardware acceleration. The results highlight the potential for AI-enhanced discovery while underscoring the technical, ethical, and resource-related challenges that libraries must navigate. This paper argues that while AI-driven tools offer new avenues for digital preservation, their successful deployment requires careful design, iterative refinement, and human oversight. The future of AI in research libraries will not replace human expertise but will instead rely on a balanced interplay between automation and curation.

    • Zimbabwe ☛ Grok AI’s Unprompted ‘White Genocide’ Responses: Everything You Need To Know

      The incident triggered widespread confusion, concern, and scrutiny over how the chatbot operates — and who or what is behind its behavior.

      Here’s a breakdown of what happened, what we know, and what’s still unclear.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Fact check: How trustworthy are AI fact checks?

      xAI blamed an "unauthorized modification" for Grok's obsession with the "white genocide" topic, and said it had "conducted a thorough investigation." But do flaws like this happen regularly? How sure can users be to get reliable information when they want to fact-check something with AI?

      We analyzed this and answered these questions for you in this DW Fact Check.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Grok Deletes 'White Genocide' Posts, Is 'Skeptical' About Holocaust

      “On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot’s prompt on X,” xAI announced Friday in a statement on the platform. “This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI’s internal policies and core values. We have conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance Grok’s transparency and reliability.” The AI firm did not specify that Grok had repeatedly invoked the idea that white people face a campaign of systematic violence in South Africa, a falsehood often promoted by Musk. The same inaccurate notion has become the pretext for the Trump administration to welcome Afrikaners, white South Africans of Dutch descent, into the U.S. as refugees supposedly fleeing persecution.

    • SizeOf(Cat) ☛ Defending technology in the age of AI slop

      I feel we’ve already peaked from a technological point of view, and we’re slowly going towards the point we let technology take the wheel and we’re just going to point it where to go and what to do. We’ve evolved from making Midjourney generate images of a frog on the point where AI can fully write a summary on basically anything, after making research online, bypassing the human input completely. But since God almighty made us in his image, we’ve also made AI in our image, and shouldn’t all go surprised Pikachu face when it’s coming after our butts. After all, it took Tay only 24 hours to turn full nazi.

  • Social Control Media

    • Press Gazette ☛ Facebook deactivated local news journalist's account after posting story about sex offender

      Kate Faulkner is a newsreader and reporter for KMFM and part of her job involves posting links to the local stories that have been run on air on the broadcaster’s Facebook news page (separate to the main KMFM page).

      Faulkner’s personal account was deactivated on Saturday and was only restored on Thursday afternoon after Press Gazette got in touch with the Meta press office.

      Before that, although the KMFM page had been unblocked, Faulkner’s own appeal was rejected and she had been unable to get in touch with anyone from Meta herself. The action also took down her Instagram and Facebook Messenger accounts.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Social Media 'Likes' Serve as Online Piracy Evidence, Judge Concludes

      Sharing information on social media is common for many people nowadays, but it's not always without consequence. In some cases, simple 'likes' can be used as evidence in court, as a Florida man recently discovered. His Star Wars and Minion 'likes' were presented as evidence to support allegations he may be a prolific BitTorrent pirate.

    • [Old] uni Oxford ☛ As social media turns away from the news, publishers meet audiences on other channels

      In an industry still relying on social media for traffic and audience engagement, what does it mean when social media giants start pulling the rug out from under news? I spoke to journalists working for news publishers in the US, Europe and Latin America who have noted this trend and are diversifying their audience development mechanisms away from social media platforms.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • The Record ☛ [Breach] SEC social media account earns 14-month prison sentence for Alabama man | The Record from Recorded Future News

      The 25-year-old Alabama man who executed a SIM-swap attack to allow access to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) account on social media platform X will spend more than a year in prison for the incident.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ Boffins devise privacy-preserving location sharing scheme

      "With ZKLP, users can prove to any third party that they are within a specific geographical region while obfuscating their exact location for utility and privacy," the authors claim. "To the best of our knowledge, ZKLP provides the first paradigm for non-interactive, publicly verifiable, and privacy-preserving proofs of geolocation."

    • Don Marti ☛ why privacy-enhancing advertising technologies failed

      In the real world, PETs will be required to get the same kind of consent that other adtech is. Buried in a clickwrap agreement isn’t going to pass inspection. And that’s hard, because…

      Users are about as creeped out by PETs as by other kinds of tracking. Jereth et al. find that "perceived privacy violations" for a browser-based system that does not target people individually are similar to the perceived violations for conventional third-party cookies. Co-author Klaus M. Miller presented the research at FTC PrivacyCon (PDF): [...]

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Now Facebook wants to … scan your face

      According to Meta, the new facial recognition tools will work in two ways. The first is intended to prevent scams involving the faking of celebrities. Public figures may choose to opt in to have their faces – via profile pictures – compared to suspicious ads on Facebook and Instagram. An automated system will then delete the ads if matches are found.

      The second is a video selfie feature that all users can use when they are locked out of their accounts. The short video is compared to profile pictures and access is granted when there is a match. The video is deleted by Facebook after use.

    • India Times ☛ EU to vet Microsoft pledges to avoid Teams antitrust fine

      Microsoft has pledged to further separate Teams from Office products to address EU antitrust concerns. The European Commission is reviewing the commitments, which include lower-priced Office suites without Teams and improved interoperability with rivals. If accepted, these changes could prevent a fine, though penalties remain possible if Microsoft fails to comply.

  • Confidentiality

    • University of Toronto ☛ It's not obvious how to verify TLS client certificates issued for domains

      TLS server certificate verification has two parts; you first verify that the TLS certificate is valid, CA-signed certificate, and then you verify that the TLS certificate is for the host you're connecting to. One of the practical issues with TLS 'Client Authentication' certificates for host and domain names (which are on the way out) is that there's no standard meaning for how you do the second part of this verification, and if you even should. In particular, what host name are you validating the TLS client certificate against?

• Defence/Aggression

  • Techdirt ☛ Supreme Court Pumps The Brakes On Trump’s Use Of The Alien Enemies Act

    Now the Supreme Court has come out with a more detailed ruling in the case, per curiam (meaning none of the Justices put their names directly to it) saying that the Government is simply wrong to use the Alien Enemies Act like this.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ GAO thwarts attempt by DOGE [sic] to set up a team within the watchdog

    The watchdog also sent an email to its staff Friday about the attempt and its response, a GAO source confirmed. According to the text of that email shared with FedScoop, GAO said it sent a letter to DOGE’s [sic] acting administrator “stating that GAO is a legislative branch agency that conducts work for Congress. As such, we are not subject to DOGE [sic] or Executive Orders.”

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Bruce Springsteen speaks out on Trump again at Manchester concert

    Springsteen didn’t oblige. In a resolute three-minute speech from the Co-op Live venue, Springsteen thanked his cheering audience for indulging him in a speech about the state of America: “Things are happening right now that are altering the very nature of our country’s democracy, and they’re too important to ignore.”

    He then repeated many of the lines that he used during a previous Manchester show — the same words that upset Trump to begin with, including the administration defunding American universities, the rolling back of civil rights legislation and siding with dictators, “against those who are struggling for their freedoms.”

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Very disturbing’: Trump receipt of overseas gifts unprecedented, experts warn

    Others argue that the message being sent by the White House is that American foreign policy is being sold to the highest bidder.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Defense officials advocate for diverse target-tracking architecture

    The Pentagon in recent years has been exploring options for shifting some moving target indicator, or MTI, missions traditionally performed by aircraft to satellites. The Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office have been leading studies and launching prototypes to consider the viability and value of space-based options.

  • CommonWealth Beacon, Massachusetts ☛ Boston pushes forward on ranked-choice voting

    The system asks voters to select their candidates in order of preference. In general terms, candidates with the fewest numbers of first choice votes are eliminated over multiple rounds of vote counting, until a candidate emerges with the largest amount of consensus support. In effect, it selects for the candidate most acceptable to most voters.

    “This is about making sure that we are building a better democracy by electing candidates who are able to build a broad majority of support,” City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune said before the vote on Wednesday. Louijeune worked as an election lawyer in Maine during the country’s first ranked-choice voting congressional election in 2018.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Journalists' Persistent Willingness to Chase Trump's Squirrels, Biden Recording Edition

    When the full recording is released, it will show the ways that old geezer Biden caught prosecutors trying to sandbag him, parts of the interview wildly inconsistent with Thompson’s little project (not unlike the time Thompson screencapped himself ignoring evidence that Hunter Biden’s plight, not necessarily age, may have explained Biden’s very worst collapses).

    Indeed, the fact that two rabid sensationalists only presented eight minutes of recording out of five hours to back their claims may explain why these recordings got released in advance — to undercut the possibility that the recordings would instead undermine the claims Hur and everyone else made about Biden (as DOJ’s release of the transcript on the eve of his testimony did).

• Environment

  • JURIST ☛ UN chief raises international alarm over melting of Himalayan glaciers in Nepal

    Guterres addressed the issue that despite Nepal producing a negligible amount of emissions in comparison to other countries, they are feeling the effects of the increased temperatures. Nepal has seen an increase in extreme weather events such as droughts, forest fires, water scarcity, floods, and glacial lake outbursts. In his speech, Guterres highlighted the fact that Nepal has lost nearly a third of its glacial ice in the past 30 years and that its glaciers are melting 65 percent faster in this decade than in the previous ten years.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska fuel shortages lead to federal emergency declaration

    Areas in Kansas and surrounding states are experiencing a fuel shortage, causing long lines at fuel stations, delivery delays and a need for truck drivers to increase the number of hours they can drive to deliver fuel, said an April 30 press release. The short-term changes only apply to drivers who are part of the fuel delivery system.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ As Canada Warms, First Nations Lose Vital Ice Roads

      More than 50 First Nations in Canada—with 56,000 people total—depend on approximately 3,700 miles of winter roads. There are no paved roads connecting these Indigenous communities to the nearest cities. Most of the year, small planes are their only lifeline. But in winter, the lakes, creeks, and marshes around them freeze, allowing workers to build a vast network of ice roads for truck drivers to haul in supplies at a lower cost than flying them in.

      Despite their isolation, the ice roads are community spaces. They guide hockey and broomball teams from small reserves to big cities to compete in tournaments. They enable families to stock up on cheap groceries. They bring people to medical appointments in cities and facilitate hunting and fishing trips with relatives in neighbouring communities.

    • The Record ☛ Feds charge 12 more suspects in RICO case over [cryptocurrency] crime spree

      Twelve more suspects have been charged for their alleged involvement in a spree of cryptocurrency thefts and the subsequent laundering of virtual currency worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

      The charges include RICO conspiracy, which is used to combat organized crime, as well as conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering and obstruction of justice.

    • Business Insider ☛ ChatGPT Uses 17,000 Times More Electricity Than a US Household: Report

      The publication reported that the average US household uses around 29 kilowatt-hours daily. Dividing the amount of electricity that ChatGPT uses per day by the amount used by the average household shows that ChatGPT uses more than 17 thousand times the amount of electricity.

    • Wired ☛ The Trump Memecoin Dinner Winners Are Getting Rid of Their Coins

      Next week, a coterie of [cryptocurrency] investors will share an extravagant dinner with US president Donald Trump at his golf club in Washington, DC. They won their seats at the dinner by purchasing large amounts of Trump’s personal crypto coin. But since their places were confirmed on Monday, almost half have gotten rid of their holdings, whether by selling the coins or transferring them to different wallets, a WIRED analysis shows.

  • Overpopulation

    • Rlang ☛ Animated population pyramids for the Pacific by @ellis2013nz

      A short blog post today which is just all about producing this animation, which I used for a work presentation yesterday: [...]

• Finance

  • Kevin Boone ☛ Kevin Boone: No, eBay: it isn’t “free to sell”

    In October 2024, the UK division of on-line auction site eBay made a big announcement that it would no longer charge fees to private sellers. It would be “free to sell” on eBay. This was a (mostly) true claim until February 2025, when eBay started charging fees to buyers instead. While superficially it looks as if buyers will bear eBay’s costs, in reality the burden will continue to fall mostly on sellers, but in a less transparent way.

    Of course, eBay isn’t a charity. Somebody, either the buyer, or the seller, or both, has to pay to run eBay. The problem is that eBay persists in saying that it’s “free to sell” when, in fact, it isn’t. For some sales, the seller will end up getting less of the value of the item than before.

    Let me explain why.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Wired ☛ US Tech Visa Applications Are Being Put Through the Wringer

    But since Donald Trump took office and began cracking down on immigration, Helgeson says, there has been “an absolute increase in the number and rate of RFE’s” on the visa petitions he has filed. That tracks with what three other immigration attorneys told WIRED. Whether their clients are applying for H-1B visas, O-1 extraordinary ability visas, intracompany visas for foreigners looking to move to a US office, or visas specific to traders and investors, USCIS has been seeking an increased amount of information from applicants.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Local DK ☛ Denmark fines two for desecrating Koran

    The law was drafted after protests that involved desecrations and burnings of the Koran in Denmark and Sweden sparked anger in several Muslim countries.

  • Techdirt ☛ FCC Commissioner Gomez Calls Out Administration’s Attack On Free Speech, Warns She May Get Fired

    We mentioned recently that the only remaining Democratic commissioner at the FCC (and the only remaining Dem commissioner across both the FCC and FTC since Trump illegally fired the Democratic FTC Commissioners) has started calling out FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr’s attacks on free speech. In a speech yesterday, she went even further: calling out the administration’s bullshit attacks on free speech, Section 230, DEI… and closing on a remark regarding the likelihood of her getting fire. Given that the entire thing is relevant to Techdirt’s usual content, we’re running the published transcript of her speech. Please read the entire thing.

  • US News And World Report ☛ The Old Slang Term '86' Probably Started as Restaurant-Worker Jargon. Suddenly It's in the News

    He said in a follow-up post that he took it only as a political message since Trump is the 47th president, and to “86” something can be to get rid of it, like a rowdy patron at a bar or something that is no longer wanted.

  • Axios ☛ 8647 meaning: What to know about James Comey's instagram post

    State of play: "86" generally means to throw out or nix. "47" refers to Trump — the 47th president.

  • EFF ☛ The Kids Online Safety Act Will Make the Internet Worse for Everyone

    At the center of the bill is a requirement that platforms “exercise reasonable care” to prevent and mitigate a sweeping list of harms to minors, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance use, bullying, and “compulsive usage.” The bill claims to bar lawsuits over “the viewpoint of users,” but that’s a smokescreen. Its core function is to let government agencies sue platforms, big or small, that don’t block or restrict content someone later claims contributed to one of these harms.

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Online Safety Act: A Guide for Organisations Working with the Act

    This document is intended as a full overview of the Online Safety Act (OSA, or the Act) and how it works for organisations attempting to understand it and its implications. We explain the OSA’s key regulatory provisions as they impact moderation decisions and practices and its knock-on effect on the rights and freedoms of Internet businesses and users. For the enforcement mechanisms available to Ofcom see our detailed analysis of the problems the Act creates, published alongside this guide.

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ How to Fix the Online Safety Act: A Rights First Approach

    In this report, we analyse the Online Safety Act (OSA or ‘the Act’) 2023, which imposes new duties on online service providers to protect children from harmful content, and Ofcom’s guidance to compliance with these duties. The OSA is the UK’s part of an international trend toward increased content moderation and age verification that is reshaping speech on the Internet. Ofcom is the designated regulator for implementing the OSA’s requirements.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Hungary's Orban plans 'transparency law' to muzzle critics

    The draft law on "transparency of public life," as it's known, was presented late Tuesday to the Hungarian parliament. Despite its rather innocuous title, if adopted it would create conditions akin to those in Russia regarding freedom of expression. For example, it would allow for the blacklisting of organizations, including media outlets, if they were deemed to "threaten the sovereignty of Hungary by using foreign funding to influence public life."

  • La Prensa Latina ☛ Syria denounces the disappearance of a journalist

    The 36 years old Khaiti, a native of Douma city, east of the Syrian capital Damascus, went missing on Thursday evening, May 3.

  • JURIST ☛ Press advocacy group urges EU to denounce Hungary restriction on foreign-funded organizations

    CPJ’s deputy advocacy director Tom Gibson argued that the bill is a “chilling signal” that the freedom of the press will be eliminated to allow for the Hungarian government’s unrestricted power. Gibson stated: “This measure amounts to Hungary’s complete abandonment of its responsibilities as a member of the European Union and would fundamentally undermine democracy. European leaders must act swiftly.”

  • JURIST ☛ Peru urged to protect journalists amid 'major offensive' against press freedom

    According to RSF, Peru has become an “increasingly hostile environment” for journalists operating within the country. Notable causes include state-sponsored legal persecution, public attacks by politicians against the media, and new laws that limit public scrutiny and promote impunity against the press.

  • The Local SE ☛ Swedish journalist freed from Turkey hails freedom

    A Swedish journalist jailed in Turkey for nearly two months on a charge of "insulting" President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday hailed his freedom after being released and returning home.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • New Yorker ☛ Arrested for Singing While Female, in “My Orange Garden”

    [...] She speaks with the same clarity and emotion that suffuses her singing: “Suppressing women is the key to control an entire society.”

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Hip-Hop Has a History of Misogyny. The Internet is Making it Worse

    On social media, where content creators have been dissecting the case, some commenters have been distressingly sympathetic to Diddy’s defense.

  • EFF ☛ Security Theater REALized and Flying without REAL ID

    Passports and passport cards are not the only alternatives to REAL ID. Additional documentation is also accepted as well: (this list is subject to change by the TSA): [...]

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Some German tourists, fearing harassment or detention, are avoiding U.S.

    Brösche was stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement when she tried to enter the United States near San Diego on Jan. 26 — six days after President Trump’s inauguration. The 29-year-old German national was held at the Otay Mesa detention center for six weeks before she was allowed to fly home.

    “They treat you at the border like you’re a criminal,“ Brösche told The Times after returning to Berlin. “I only wanted to visit a friend in L.A. for a few days.”

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• MacRumors ☛ 2025-05-09 [Older] Apple Files Emergency Motion to Pause ‘Extraordinary’ App Store Ruling on Anti-Steering Injunction

• Business Insider ☛ 2025-05-09 [Older] Tim Sweeney Talks to Peter Kafka, Still Thinks Fortnite Is Coming Back to iOS This Week

• India Times ☛ Epic Games' Fortnite not available on iPhones in EU and the US

  Access to Fortnite via Apple's iPhone Operating System and through its App Store will be unavailable worldwide until Apple unblocks it, Epic Games said.

  Epic Games did not give a reason why Fortnite was blocked, but Apple said it had asked Epic Sweden to resubmit the app update without including the U.S. storefront so as not to impact Fortnite in other geographies.

• India Times ☛ Intel spars with EU regulators over $421 million antitrust fine

  Intel is challenging a €376 million ($421.4 million) EU antitrust fine, calling it "disproportionate and unfair." The penalty, re-imposed after a partial court annulment of a 2009 decision, relates to payments made to HP, Acer, and Lenovo to delay rival products. A ruling from the General Court is expected in the coming months.

• The Verge ☛ Epic asks judge to make Apple let Fortnite back on the US App Store

  In a letter from Apple that Epic shared late Friday, Apple writes that it won’t “take action on the Fortnite app submission until after the Ninth Circuit rules on our pending request for a partial stay of the new injunction.” Epic claims the delay is retaliation for its legal fight with the company, and notes in its filing that Apple “expressly and repeatedly” told it and the court that it would approve Fortnite if the app complied with Apple’s guidelines, which it insists its current submission does.

• Macworld ☛ Fortnite on iOS goes offline worldwide as Apple blocks U.S. App Store return

  The issue is far more complicated than the judge’s ruling. Back in 2020, Apple suspended Epic’s developer account in the U.S. after it broke Apple’s terms by offering a link to buy V-Bucks outside of the App Store. So Epic resubmitted Fortnite to the App Store this week using its EU account, which Apple apparently didn’t appreciate.

  It’s not clear what the next phase of this battle will be. As it stands, Fortnite is unavailable on iOS devices anywhere in the world, including the EU, where it’s delivered directly through the Epic Games Store. Apple allows “alternative app stores” in the EU after a ruling there forced the company to allow so-called [installation].

• Nick Heer ☛ Microsoft’s A.I. Executives Have Gross Ideas About the World

  It did so by illegally advantaging Teams, and what Nadella seems to be saying here is that it would again be happy to use its disproportionate power to push its version of other new technologies.

• Los Angeles Times ☛ Epic Games says Apple blocked 'Fortnite' in U.S. app store

  The dispute comes just weeks after Epic Games and other app developers cheered a judge’s ruling that limited the commissions that Apple makes through third party apps distributed through its app store.

• OpenRightsGroup ☛ Online Safety Act Entrenches Big Tech Market Dominance, New Report Finds

  A new report by digital campaigners, the Open Rights Group, outlines how the Online Safety Act favours big tech, and harms small websites and the general public.

• The Washington Post ☛ Google is quietly giving Amazon a leg up in digital book sales

  Google is making it easier for you to buy digital books from Amazon, the country’s leading book retailer, than from smaller booksellers.

• Copyrights

  • Roger Comply ☛ All your content are belong to AI

    The article referenced in the image above is requested by bots more than 90% of the time. Human traffic is going extinct. That is more or less the trend for all of my content.