Leftovers

• Carl Svensson ☛ Desktop Icons of Yore

  It would, however, be wrong to claim that all icons were better in the past. Some were hideous abominations and should never have seen the light of day. Others were just... uninspired.

  It would also be impossible to cover all GUI systems through the ages and their icons, but I think some deserve a bit of extra attention - such as...

• Unmitigated Risk ☛ Necessity is the Mother of Invention: Why Constraints Invite Innovation

  Without prior expertise, I cycled to the local library, borrowed a book on assembly language, and began methodically reverse-engineering my favorite game’s copy protection. After numerous failed attempts, I discovered the developers had intentionally damaged specific floppy-disk sectors with a fine needle during manufacturing. The software verified these damaged sectors at runtime, refusing to operate without detecting these deliberate defects. Through persistent experimentation and countless hours of “NOP-ing” suspicious assembly instructions, I eventually bypassed the DRM. This experience vividly demonstrated how necessity, persistence, and precise technical exploration drive powerful innovation.

• Stefano Marinelli ☛ Reconnecting After a Decade: A Pizza, Laughter, and a Shared, Shaking Memory

  When I left that house, my real sorrow was losing the closeness with these people. Because, in a moment like that, their first thought was to make sure I was okay. Even risking their own safety.

  I hope it won't be another 10 years before we see each other again. We have some great plans, and I'll do my best to make them happen as soon as possible.

• [Repeat] Ruben Schade ☛ Answering technical questions you wished they asked

  One of the biggest things to understand is that people are rarely transparent with their motivations about running something. This goes as much for for big corporates as it does individuals.

• Jussi Pakkanen ☛ Optimizing page splits in books

  The simplest solution is to decide that a page has some N number of lines and page breaks happen at exact these places. This works (and is commonly used) but it has certain drawbacks. From a typographical point of view, there are at least three things that should be avoided:

  1. Orphan lines, a paragraph at the bottom of a page that has only one line of text.
  2. Widow lines, a paragraph that starts a new page and has only one line of text.
  3. Spread imbalance, where the two pages on a spread have different number of lines on them (when both are "full pages")

• Garrit Franke ☛ No matter what you do, always leave a breadcrumb

  Output always means value, even if it's not immediately apparent. Just keep on laying down those breadcrumbs.

• Fernando Borretti ☛ You Can Choose Tools That Make You Happy

  Emacs is a Gnostic cult. And you know what? That’s fine. In fact, it’s great. It makes you happy, what else is needed? You are allowed to use weird, obscure, inconvenient, obsolescent, undead things if it makes you happy. We are all going to die. If you’re lucky you get three gigaseconds and you’re up. Do what you are called to do. Put ZFS in your air fryer, do your taxes in Fortran.

• Science

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ Product Pseudoscience

    This approach has all the theater of science — “we measured and made decisions on the data, the numbers don’t lie” etc. — but is missing the rigor of science.

    Like, for example, corroboration.

    Independent corroboration is a vital practice of science that we in tech conveniently gloss over in our (self-proclaimed) objective data-driven decision making.

• Career/Education

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Shake Up Your Resources for Reading Lists

    And reading lists are one of our most effective tools because they are centered on a topic and then give a few suggestions- normally with an annotation as to why they are on the list in the first place. This gives the readers choices within a list that catches their attention.

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ Rethinking Compliance: AI, Skill Liquidity, and the Quest for Verifiable Truth

    The journey requires a shift in perspective. Leaders across this ecosystem must recognize the risks of automation asymmetry and the limitations of surface-level tools. The call, therefore, is for them to become true orchestrators of this new compliance liquidity, investing not just in AI tools, but in the expertise, updated frameworks, and cultural shifts that turn AI’s potential into verifiable, continuous assurance. This is how we move beyond the “polished milquetoast” and forge a future where compliance is less about the performance of an audit and more about the verifiable, continuous truth of operational integrity, built on a bedrock of truly accessible expertise.

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang labels US GPU export bans ‘wrong'

    He also thinks the policy will harm humanity, because half of the world’s AI researchers are in China and he rates their output as among the world’s finest. He wants them using on Nvidia hardware so their work can be used around the world.

    “DeepSeek was built on Nvidia,” he said, before describing it as “a gift” due to the many optimization techniques the company used to create its R1 model.

  • The Register UK ☛ AMD teases new Threadripper, Radeon AI Pro workstation kit

    Compared to previous Threadrippers (TR), the 9000 series appears to be a fairly sedate update with most of the gains coming from process improvements and the move to AMD's Zen 5 microarchitecture.

  • Stefano Marinelli ☛ It’s Hard to Find Answers in a World Full of Noise

    The FullHD monitor will go to my office; it'll be efficient and look good on the desk. I'll get another, more suitable one, and chalk this up to experience. Fortunately, there are still ways to interact with real humans. At least for now.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ KVMs with DisplayPort and USB over USB-C

    I have a setup at my home office with two computers: a MacBook Air, and my FreeBSD work desktop. These are connected to a Dell 4K monitor in two ways: [...]

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Bye-bye, Microsoft: Huawei launches its first non-Windows laptop

    By the end of 2024, more than 7.2 million individual developers were developing apps for HarmonyOS, which was installed on over a billion devices, including smartphones and TVs, according to Huawei’s latest annual report.

    Huawei did not disclose which processor it had used to power the newly launched laptops, but it said the computers’ relatively high prices were the result of the cost of new manufacturing technology for the chipset. Huawei did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the chip.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ Far Too Many Americans Googled "What Is a Prostate" Following Joe Biden’s Cancer Diagnosis

    The trend suggests that the sad news about America's 46th president didn't just spark inquiry over prostate cancer and what it means, but that a surprising number of US citizens are unclear on what a prostate even is, which may unfortunately be a glaring indictment of American health education.

  • The Center for Investigative Reporting ☛ A Gun Deemed Too Dangerous for Cops, But Fine for Civilians - Reveal

    Over the past two months, The Trace surveyed more than 60 law enforcement agencies whose officers once used the P320. More than 20 of those agencies—including police departments in Oklahoma City, Denver, and Chicago—have moved to prohibit the gun because of fears about unintentional discharges. Twelve agencies said they resold their P320s to the public after determining the model was unsafe for officers to use.

  • The Verge ☛ The FDA is making it more difficult for Americans to get vaccinated for covid

    “The FDA will approve vaccines for high-risk persons and, at the same time, demand robust, gold-standard data on persons at low risk,” FDA officials write in commentary laying out their plans in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

  • Winnie Lim ☛ Winnie Lim » do we cherish our selves

    If we spend a few moments thinking about this, it is shocking how little space we have to be our selves. Who exactly are our selves anyway? We may not know because we did not have the time, space or permission to unfold. We spend so much time and energy chasing the goals we think we want, without contemplating why we wanted them in the first place.

  • Kevin Wammer ☛ Dead to the moment

    As for me, I’d probably try even harder to answer the question that has occupied me for the past 15 years: What is a good life?

  • Pro Publica ☛ A Teacher Dragged a 6-Year-Old With Autism by His Ankle. Federal Civil Rights Officials Might Not Do Anything.

    A short video taken inside an Illinois school captured troubling behavior: A teacher gripping a 6-year-old boy with autism by the ankle and dragging him down the hallway on his back.

    The early-April incident would’ve been upsetting in any school, but it happened at the Garrison School, part of a special education district where at one time students were arrested at the highest rate of any district in the country. The teacher was charged with battery weeks later after pressure from the student’s parents.

• Security Week ☛ NATO-Flagged Vulnerability Tops Latest VMware Security Patch Batch

  The virtualization technology giant pushed out two separate bulletins documenting at least 7 vulnerabilities in the VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware ESXi, vCenter Server, Workstation, and Fusion product lines.

• APNIC ☛ cPanel’s IPv6 overhaul

  After years of limited support, IPv6 has finally been properly implemented in cPanel/WebHost Manager (WHM), enabling true dual-stack hosting without complex workarounds. Technically, IPv6 was implemented in version 40 of cPanel/WHM back in 2013. However, Server Name Indication (SNI) couldn’t be used to leverage a shared IPv6 address, nor could the server’s IPv6 be in the same prefix as the IPv6 range used to issue addresses to websites on the server.

  With over one million websites now running on a cPanel/ WHM server, it became critical for the software to be updated for modern IPv6 implementations. This post investigates the new deployment, the issues encountered, and the fixes applied along the way.

• The Register UK ☛ Adobe Creative Cloud gets more expensive – blame AI again

  Less than two years after Adobe hiked prices for Creative Cloud All Apps customers, the Photoshop giant has done it again. This time, however, it isn't just increasing prices – Adobe is also renaming Creative Cloud All Apps to Creative Cloud Pro.

  But it doesn't end there. In a move evocative of the latest season of Black Mirror, those who don't want to pay more for the same thing – plus a handful of new video and audio generative AI features – are free to downgrade to Creative Cloud Standard, provided they take action to do so before their next billing cycle.

• Digital Camera World ☛ Adobe is raising prices again – but All App plan users can skip AI features and actually save money

  While the price change is only for the All Apps plan, Adobe will also reduce the number of generative credits included with the Photography Plans from 100 per month to 25. The change is for new subscribers and begins for those who sign up on or after June 17. Once generative credits are used up, creatives have to purchase more if they wish to continue using features like Generative Fill and Generative Expand before the credits renew the following month.

• Stephen Hackett ☛ How Much Longer Will New macOS Versions Support Intel Macs?

  As you can see, the Intel Mac mini and Intel Mac Pro lasted all the way until 2023, with the 2019 Mac Pro being removed from sale less than two years ago, when its Apple silicon-powered replacement was announced at WWDC.

  To predict the future, I like to consider the past, so let’s take a trip back 20 years or so.

• Matt Birchler ☛ The relationship doesn't have to end, it just might need to change

  This rings very true to me. It's the dichotomy of having a strong emotional connection to the products that a company makes without thinking about the company in those same terms. As I wrote last year: [...]

• Scoop News Group ☛ ‘Whatever we did was not enough’: How Salt Typhoon slipped through the government's blind spots

  The story, which was published last September, blindsided company executives and industry insiders. As news of the attack on the country’s broadband networks broke, the scope and severity of the breach became clear. The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee dubbed it “the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history.” The breach, carried out by a Chinese government-linked hacking group, had resulted in a total of around 80 different firms compromised at last count, with the attackers in the networks for potentially years as it siphoned up data from more than 1 million people.

• Bruce Schneier ☛ DoorDash Hack

  Interesting flaw in the software design. He probably would have gotten away with it if he’d kept the numbers small. It’s only when the amount missing is too big to ignore that the investigations start.

• Lee Peterson ☛ Complaining about Apple but buying their products anyway isn’t helping

  Apple is a corporation that cares about one thing, Money. They don’t care about their customers and as long as everyone keeps buying their products they aren’t going to learn from their mistakes. Tim Cook has really shown his true colours this year, be it cosying up to he who won’t be named or choosing poorly.

  This pattern of making things worse for its platforms and users by prioritising revenue over good products for me has hit the point I say no.

• Financial Express ☛ ‘Almost sociopathic’: Microsoft manager’s hiring post on LinkedIn sparks outrage amid sweeping layoffs

  Microsoft laid off nearly 6000 employees last week amid a continued pivot towards artificial intelligence — its largest round of layoffs since the elimination of 10,000 roles in 2023. But as thousands scrambled to reassemble their lives, others were already applying for new roles with Microsoft. A former employee was left fuming this week after coming across a hiring post ere days after losing their job in the company.

  “This is why I hate Linkedin. I hate the cringe I feel so sorry for you but I’m going to use your misfortune to get some likes, but this post is almost sociopathic. Have some REAL empathy. Is it that hard to ask?” fumed the former employee.

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

  • India Times ☛ Google ramps up AI features in search engine

    Google head of search Liz Reid described the freshly unveiled AI mode, which is now available in the US, as a powerful tool with advanced reasoning, multi-modality, and the ability for users to dive deeper into searches.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ GitHub wants to spam open source projects with AI slop

    We asked a week ago: if AI is such a superior programming method that it’ll produce live quality code for Microsoft and live code for Facebook that actual money relies on — then where are the AI contributions to open source?

    GitHub has decided to gift open source with more AI contributions. You can press a button and GitHub Copilot will automatically generate a bug report for you — for any public project on the site!

  • The Verge ☛ Chicago Sun-Times publishes made-up books and fake experts in AI debacle

    The May 18th issue of the Chicago Sun-Times features dozens of pages of recommended summer activities: new trends, outdoor activities, and books to read. But some of the recommendations point to fake, AI-generated books, and other articles quote and cite people that don’t appear to exist.

  • Macworld ☛ Maybe Apple was right about Siri all along

    This is sort of true and sort of not true. Part of the problem for Apple is that AI has been redefined out from under it. For most, AI is now a user-facing chatbot. That’s it. Sure, there are other, more visual implementations of AI, but the most common implementation is a text-based or verbal chatbot that gives you answers you can’t really trust, but allows CEOs to lay some people off because who cares if our customers are getting good information?

  • Neal Stephenson ☛ Remarks on AI from NZ

    Last week I participated in a panel discussion on AI as part of a private event in New Zealand. The organizers asked me to kick it off by talking for ten minutes, so I pulled together a few ideas on the topic, which I’m going to present in lightly edited form here. The organizers specifically wanted to think in big-picture terms so as to avoid getting fixated on rapidly changing current events, and I think that this reflects that. The objective was to get participants thinking and talking, so I tried to present one or two notions that might be thought-provoking rather than trying to make some kind of heavy ex cathedra statement—which I’m not really qualified to do anyway.

    The event was held under the Chatham House Rule, so I’m free to repeat what I said but not to divulge the identities of other participants or to repeat what they said.

  • Alberto Fortin ☛ After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain • albertofortin.com

    One morning, I decide to actually inspect closely what’s all this code that Cursor has been writing. It’s not like I was blindly prompting without looking at the end result, but I was optimizing for speed and I hadn’t actually sat down just to review the code. I was just building building building.

    So I do a “coding review” session. And the horror ensues.

  • Simon Willison ☛ After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain

    After months of coding with LLMs, I'm going back to using my brain. Interesting vibe coding retrospective from Alberto Fortin. Alberto is an experienced software developer and decided to use Claude an Cursor to rewrite an existing system using Go and ClickHouse - two new-to-him technologies.

  • Defector ☛ Chicago Sun-Times And Philadelphia Inquirer Publish Huge Summer Insert Of Pure, Uncut Chatbot Slop

    404's story does raise, and leave unanswered, some other questions. Buscaglia says he doesn't know which papers will run these promotional sections, which seems to suggest some apparatus in between him and the papers themselves: a middleman, or agency, or clearinghouse for slop. Somebody who—or some machinery that—prompted him to create it, or bought it from him and farmed it out to publications. At any rate it pretty much rules out any scenario in which Buscaglia himself pitched this thing to an editor, or wrote it on spec and shopped it around on his own initiative.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ DEFRA and Natural England creates unusably wrong peat map — with AI!

    Unfortunately, the resulting map was not a success in actually being a success. Many interested parties looked over the map and found a lot of it was just completely wrong.

  • The New Stack ☛ Curl Fights a Flood of AI-Generated Bug Reports From HackerOne

    Earlier this month, Curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg complained on LinkedIn about a flood of “AI slop” bug reports that had been coming in. “That’s it. I’ve had it,” he wrote. “I’m putting my foot down on this craziness.”

    The project was “effectively being DDoSed,” he wrote. And the culprit was volunteers for the bug bounty site HackerOne.

• Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

  • The Record ☛ Cyberthreat to Alabama state government ‘neutralized’

    OIT said it worked with unspecified “cybersecurity experts” to respond to the attack, which was first discovered on May 9.

    A May 16 post said there was “no evidence of exfiltration of the personally identifiable information of Alabama citizens,” and there had been no major disruptions in services.

  • The Record ☛ Ohio’s Kettering Health system facing widespread outages after cyberattack

    CNN reported that a ransom note found by the hospital network’s IT workers allegedly came from the Interlock ransomware gang — which caused alarm last month after shutting down the network of dialysis treatment company DaVita. The group also previously attacked the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and its El Paso counterpart.

  • CNN ☛ Ransomware attack triggers ‘system-wide’ tech outage at large network of medical centers

    The ransom note leads the victim to an extortion site associated with a ransomware gang known as Interlock, which first emerged last fall. Interlock has since targeted a variety of sectors, including tech and manufacturing firms and government organizations, according to Talos, Cisco’s cyber-intelligence unit.

  • Krebs On Security ☛ KrebsOnSecurity Hit With Near-Record 6.3 Tbps DDoS

    KrebsOnSecurity last week was hit by a near record distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that clocked in at more than 6.3 terabits of data per second (a terabit is one trillion bits of data). The brief attack appears to have been a test run for a massive new Internet of Things (IoT) botnet capable of launching crippling digital assaults that few web destinations can withstand. Read on for more about the botnet, the attack, and the apparent creator of this global menace.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ A CISO's guide to modern security observability

    The harsh reality? The security tools we’ve trusted for years just weren’t built for today’s threat landscape, or the threats coming our way tomorrow. They’re leaving organisations vulnerable, and the cost is staggering.

  • The Register UK ☛ Ransomware strikes UK food distributor in latest retail blow

    Managing director Tom Binks said "the transport activities of the business" were continuing to run unchanged, although at the time of the emails sent on May 15, the company had said it wouldn't be processing new orders on that day.

  • The Record ☛ Ransomware attack hits supplier of refrigerated groceries to British supermarkets

    Peter Green Chilled told the BBC the attack took place last Wednesday and that it had not impacted the company’s transport activities, but declined to explain what impact the incident had on the IT systems orders are placed through.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Legal Aid Data Breach Hits Millions, MoJ Warns

    Officials now acknowledge that the cyberattack is far more extensive than initially believed, with information such as contact details, national ID numbers, criminal records, employment status, and financial data possibly compromised.

Pseudo-Open Source

• Openwashing

  • Liliputing ☛ Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source (mostly) [Ed: No, Windows is not open source, and moreover these people help Microsoft]

Privatisation/Privateering

• Lusaka ZM ☛ Zambia : Water Crisis Deepens in Zambia: Government Turns to Private Sector for Solutions

  However, the proposed privatization model has drawn criticism. “Private firms prioritize profit over people,” said Paul Hakoola, Director of a local NGO. “We’ve seen tariff hikes in Kenya and Ghana under similar models, pricing out low-income families.”

Security

• Computing UK ☛ Microsoft rushes out fix for broken Windows 10 security patch [Ed: Too many Microsoft layoffs (of "expensive" staff)]

  The latest Windows 10 patch is locking some PCs and laptops into a boot loop that can’t be escaped without a BitLocker key.

  The Windows 10 22H2 and Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 update, released earlier this month, affects PCs “with Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) enabled on 10th generation or later Intel vPro processors”, Microsoft has warned in an advisory.

  It continues: “On these systems, installing the May 13, 2025, Windows security update (KB5058379) might cause lsass.exe to terminate unexpectedly, triggering an automatic repair. On devices with BitLocker enabled, BitLocker requires the input of your BitLocker recovery key to initiate the automatic repair.”

• Privacy/Surveillance

  • The Register UK ☛ VMO2 fixes 4G Calling issue that exposed user locations

    The confirmation was issued in response to a mobile networking specialist publishing research into the mobile network operator's (MNO) implementation of Voice over LTE (VoLTE), and how it was revealing call recipient data to callers, albeit through a few tricky technical steps.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Rumor suggests Apple may integrate cameras into upcoming AirPods

    Rather, the rumors hint at these being infra-red cameras intended to enhance the versatility of Apple's wearable tech. Camera-equipped AirPods could include low-resolution IR sensors that might detect when the users turns their head, as well as gleaning computer vision information about the surrounding environment, which could then feed information back to your iPhone or Apple Watch for processing, enabling your iPhone to 'see' even when it's in your pocket.

  • Axios ☛ Gen Z's new side hustle: selling data

    Why it matters: Selling data is becoming the new selling plasma.

  • [Repeat] NYOB ☛ EU to make GDPR Procedures unworkable

    The EU’s trilogue negotiations for a Procedural Regulation that should harmonise and accelerate enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will probably have the last meeting this Wednesday (21 May). However, the proposal risks undermining the GDPR's enforcement by introducing excessively long deadlines and overly complex procedures. Despite having a Green Party lead negotiator for the European Parliament, the proposal also structurally discriminates user and gives preferential treatment to Big Tech, while consistently giving up the Parliament's positions. The proposed Regulation not only threatens to paralyse enforcement but may also constitute a violation of core elements of the Right to a Fair Procedure and Good Administration. Consequently, noyb is reviewing the options to bringing an annulment procedure if the Regulation passes in its current form.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ More Than 100 Groups And Individuals Oppose GDPR Changes

    Potential GDPR changes for simplifying the data privacy law’s recordkeeping requirements for small businesses could be unveiled as soon as this week. Michael McGrath, EU Commissioner for Democracy, Justice, the Rule of Law, and Consumer Protection, said in March comments to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that the GDPR will be included in EU simplification efforts.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ 23andMe To Be Acquired By Regeneron After Bankruptcy Filing

    While the deal is expected to help stabilize 23andMe’s future, it has also raised questions among privacy advocates, lawmakers, and consumer watchdogs over the fate of millions of customers’ sensitive genetic data.

  • The Record ☛ 23andMe sold for $256 million as buyer pledges to comply with existing privacy policies

    Privacy advocates, lawmakers and the Federal Trade Commission have in recent weeks expressed alarm that a buyer might not adhere to 23andMe’s existing privacy policies, which does not allow genetic information to be shared with insurers, employers, public databases and law enforcement without a court order, search warrant or subpoena.

    The existing privacy policy also allows consumers to delete their genetic data whenever they choose to.

  • 404 Media ☛ Telegram Gave Authorities Data on More than 20,000 Users

    According to its newest transparency report, Telegram complied with more than 5,000 requests from authorities in the first three months of 2025.

• Confidentiality

  • The Register UK ☛ OpenPGP.js bug enables encrypted message spoofing

    The affected versions are 5.0.1 to 5.11.2 and 6.0.0-alpha.0 to 6.1.0. Users are advised to upgrade to either 5.11.3 or 6.1.1 as soon as possible to fix the problem. Versions 4.x aren't affected.

  • Jan Piet Mens ☛ Migrating BIND9 auto-dnssec to dnssec-policy

    Long story short, the BIND software has again changed the way zones are DNSSEC-signed. DNSSEC support has been available since version BIND 9.6 and has continuously been improved and expanded upon. The previous iteration offered auto-dnssec maintain which was very capable, but that was deprecated and has evolved into a Key and Signing Policy, somewhat along the lines of what OpenDNSSEC and Knot DNS implement, first released in December 2022.

Defence/Aggression

• Rolling Stone ☛ Trump Sends Asian Immigrants to Sudan, Violates Court Order: Lawyers

  After an appeals court declined to remove an injunction aimed at barring Donald Trump‘s administration from deporting noncitizens to “third-party countries” — a country that is not their country of origin — without due process, and without giving them chance to raise concerns of persecution, torture, and death, the government allegedly violated that court order days later.

• The Register UK ☛ CISA has a new Number 2: Madhu Gottumukkala

  The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has a new No. 2: Madhu Gottumukkala, stepping in as the nation's lead civilian cyber agency faces budget cuts, a brain drain, and the never-ending task of defending critical infrastructure.

• 404 Media ☛ Scientists Explain Why Trump's $175 Billion Golden Dome Is a Fantasy

  Experts think this is bullshit.

  In March, a team of volunteer scientists at the American Physical Society’s Panel on Public Affairs published a study that looked at how well missile defense could work. The report makes it clear that, no matter what the specifics, Trump’s plan for a Golden Dome is a fantasy.

• Mike Brock ☛ The Whispers and the Wire

  But here's the problem: the house is already underwater.

  The constitutional order is groaning under authoritarian pressure. The Supreme Court is being defied. Federal agencies are being turned into instruments of revenge. The president has accepted foreign emoluments in broad daylight. The machinery of the state is being repurposed to serve a single man and his personal empire. And while all of this happens in public, in full view, we're supposed to whisper our objections behind closed doors and hope, against hope, that someone on the inside is listening.

• Site36 ☛ Maritime militarisation makes companies nervous: Offshore facilities and sea cables turned into surveillance

  With a commitment to co-operate with the military, German wind farms will become legitimate military targets. Submarine cables are to be docked with secret harbours for underwater drones.

• BoingBoing ☛ Kristi Noem defines "habeas corpus" to fit fascist agenda (video)

  "Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason," the New Hampshire lawmaker patiently explained. "Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea."

• Atlantic Council ☛ Unpacking Russia's cyber nesting doll

  As the Putin regime’s illegal war unfolded, however, it quickly belied these hypotheses and collapsed many Western assumptions about Russia’s cyber power. Russia didn’t deliver the expected cyber “kill strike” (instantly plummeting Ukraine into darkness). Ukrainian and NATO defenses (insofar as NATO has spent considerable time and energy to support Ukraine on cyber defense over the years) were sufficient to (mainly) withstand the most disruptive Russian cyber operations, compared at least to pre-February 2022 expectations. And Moscow showed serious incompetencies in coordinating cyber activities with battlefield kinetic operations. Flurries of operational activity, nonetheless, continue to this day from all parties involved in the war—as Russia remains a persistent and serious cyber threat to the United States, Ukraine, and the West. Russia’s continued cyber activity and major gaps between wartime cyber expectations and reality demand a Western rethink of years-old assumptions about Russia and cyber power—and of outdated ways of confronting the threats ahead.

• Futurism ☛ Ex-FBI Agent: Elon Musk's Drug Habit Made Him an Easy Target for Russian Spies

  Elon Musk's well-documented drug use made him an easy target for Russian secret service agents, former FBI agent Johnathan Buma told German television broadcaster ZDF during a recently aired documentary.

• Omicron Limited ☛ 1.5°C Paris Climate Agreement target may be too high for polar ice sheets and sea level rise

  The mass of ice lost from these ice sheets has quadrupled since the 1990s and they are currently losing around 370 billion metric tons of ice per year, with current warming levels of around 1.2°C above pre-industrial temperatures, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

  The authors argue that further warming to 1.5°C would likely generate several meters of sea level rise over the coming centuries as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt in response to both warming air and ocean temperatures.

• Scoop News Group ☛ Don’t let DOGE [sic] destroy CISA

  We cannot allow these maniacs to dismantle our protections against cyberattacks. Efficiency cannot come at the cost of security. But DOGE [sic] does not care about security. It cares about destruction.

Environment

• Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ South Africa's Sim card 'washing machine'

  South Africa has a problem with the overproduction of plastic Sim cards, most of which end up in landfill sites or in the environment.

  Dubbed the Sim card “washing machine” by senior executives in South Africa’s telecommunications industry, users purchase Sims pre-loaded with airtime only to use it up and throw away the plastic.

• Website Carbon Calculator ☛ Website Carbon Calculator v3 | What's your site's carbon footprint?

  The [Internet] consumes a lot of electricity. 1021 TWh per year to be precise. To give you some perspective, that’s more than the entire United Kingdom.

  From data centres to transmission networks to the billions of connected devices that we hold in our hands, it is all consuming electricity, and in turn producing carbon emissions equal to or greater than the global aviation industry. Yikes!

• Dave Gauer ☛ The One-Tree Website - ratfactor

  What a wonderful thought. So now I’m imagining there’s a tree out there, maybe even the one I can see out my front window, my tree, which has been given the task of offsetting the carbon produced by this website.

• CNN ☛ Elon Musk is building ‘the world’s biggest supercomputer.’ It’s powered with dozens of gas-powered turbines

  AI is immensely power-hungry, and Musk’s company installed dozens of gas-powered turbines, known to produce a cocktail of toxic pollutants. The company currently has no air permits, appearing to rely on a loophole for temporary turbines — but environmental groups say the exemption does not apply, and residents are angry.

  “Our health was never considered, the safety of our communities was never, ever considered,” said Sarah Gladney, who lives 3 miles from the facility and suffers from a lung condition.

• YLE ☛ Transport minister: Government will fully fund loss-making regional flights

  The loss-making and environmentally-damaging routes have been widely criticised, with Finland's airport operator Finavia calling on the government earlier this year to stop subsidising them.

• MIT Technology Review ☛ The data center boom in the desert

  Much of Nevada has suffered through severe drought conditions for years, farmers and communities are drawing down many of the state’s groundwater reservoirs faster than they can be refilled, and global warming is sucking more and more moisture out of the region’s streams, shrubs, and soils.

  “Telling entities that they can come in and stick more straws in the ground for data centers is raising a lot of questions about sound management,” says Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, a nonprofit that works to protect water resources throughout Nevada and Utah.

• MIT Technology Review ☛ AI could keep us dependent on natural gas for decades to come

  To power the data center, Entergy aims to spend $3.2 billion to build three large natural-gas power plants with a total capacity of 2.3 gigawatts and upgrade the grid to accommodate the huge jump in anticipated demand. In its filing to the state’s power regulatory agency, Entergy acknowledged that natural-gas plants “emit significant amounts of CO2” but said the energy source was the only affordable choice given the need to quickly meet the 24-7 electricity demand from the huge data center.

• Energy/Transportation

  • Renewable Energy World ☛ Why a Central Texas farmer is on a one-man mission to stop renewable energy

    Much of Fleming’s criticism is based on fears about what could occur to his land and business through his own observations, online research he’s conducted independently and the traffic the industry creates with projects.

    Construction clogs the roads with traffic, particularly trucks hauling the panels to the properties. Red-tailed hawks can’t look for rodents to eat on property where solar panels have been installed, he said. Water travels faster to creeks, ditches and tributaries causing flooding and washouts in the area, he said. His land has not flooded because it’s further away.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ AI’s energy impact is still small—but how we handle it is huge

    The rising energy cost of data centers is a vital test case for how we deal with the broader electrification of the economy.

  • Bitdefender ☛ SEC Twitter hack: Man imprisoned for role in attack that caused Bitcoin's price to soar

    A 25-year-old man from Alabama has been sentenced to 14 months in a federal prison for his part in a [breach] that resulted in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency to briefly soar in value.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Musk Confirms Second Memphis xAI Site Could Use One Gigawatt of Power

    It’s unlikely that MLGW and TVA will have that sort of power available by the time the second site is operational, and there’s plenty of evidence to back that up.

  • Simon Willison ☛ We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.

    They quickly run into the same roadblock faced by everyone else who's tried to investigate this: the AI companies themselves remain infuriatingly opaque about their energy usage, making it impossible to produce credible, definitive numbers on any of this.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Finland to move train track gauge to European standard

    It won't happen fast, though. Here's Transport Minister Lulu Ranne: "Of course, we are very pragmatic and realistic, we cannot do this in five years. Planning will continue until the end of the decade, and maybe in 2032 we can start construction."

  • The Scotsman ☛ Green light for ‘vital’ 100-megawatt battery energy storage farm next to Scottish town

    ILI Group said planning consent had been granted for its 100-megawatt Learielaw battery energy storage system project near Broxburn in West Lothian. It marks the company’s first major planning approval of 2025 and follows what it said had been a “strong finish” to 2024, with 350 megawatts (MW) of storage projects consented across North Ayrshire, North Lanarkshire and the Highlands.

  • H2 View ☛ Europe invests €1bn in 15 green hydrogen projects | Policy

    They will now prepare their grant agreement with the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency. Agreements are expected to be signed by September or October.

  • International Business Times ☛ Can Solar Flares Cause Blackouts? NASA Warns Of Power Outage Around The World - What We Know

    According to reports, the recent X2.7-class solar flare—the most intense type—was recorded early Wednesday. It followed another X-class eruption just a day earlier and coincided with shortwave radio blackouts across North America, Southeast Asia, South America, Africa and parts of the Middle East.

  • YLE ☛ E-bike demand plummets after tax perk ends

    "Roughly half of all electric bikes in Finland are sold as part of the bike benefit scheme," Valtonen said.

    Electric bikes account for over half of the annual production at Helkama's factory in Hanko and nearly 80 percent of the company's revenue. Last year, the factory produced more than 20,000 bicycles.

• The Revelator ☛ Armenia: A Small Nation With a Huge Biodiversity Story

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Silicon Angle ☛ The AI life cycle is fast, but Red Hat's staying ahead of the curve

  Bracho spoke with theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Rob Strechay at Red Hat Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Red Hat’s AI strategy, including its focus on building regional skills, fostering ethical and transparent data practices, and supporting evolving models through the open-source community. (* Disclosure below.)

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The meritocracy to eugenics pipeline

  It's kinda weird how, the more oligarchic our society gets, the more racist it gets. Why is the rise of billionaires attended by a revival of discredited eugenic ideas, dressed up in modern euphemisms like "race realism" and "human diversity"?

  I think the answer lies in JK Galbraith's observation that "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

• The Record ☛ Dutch government passes law to criminalize cyber-espionage

  The new legislation, passed over the weekend, extends existing espionage laws that already make it a criminal offense to share state secrets. Under the updated law, leaking sensitive information that is not classified as a state secret or engaging in activities on behalf of a foreign government that harm Dutch interests can also result in criminal charges.

• Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

  • The Record ☛ Senators question Noem about CISA cuts, but get few details | The Record from Recorded Future News

    Noem stuck to answers she has given in previous hearings and speeches, focusing on Trump administration efforts to remove CISA offices that focus on Russian and Chinese disinformation and misinformation campaigns.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Rolling Stone ☛ Trump Is Threatening to Investigate Bruce Springsteen. Here’s Why

  That would be a mistake. Trump’s crusade against the First Amendment and free expression dates back to at least his first four years in the White House, and his 2016 presidential campaign. And Trump’s recurring threat against “The Boss” is yet another front in his second administration’s larger scorched-earth campaign against free speech and democratic values in this country.

• The Independent UK ☛ Tommy Robinson to be released from prison within days after sentence cut

  The sentence comprised a 14-month “punitive” element and a four-month “coercive” element.

• US News And World Report ☛ Jailed UK Anti-Islam Activist 'Tommy Robinson' to Be Released Next Week

  The judge who sentenced Yaxley-Lennon said that four months of the 18-month sentence, half of which was to be served in jail, could be lifted if Yaxley-Lennon took steps to remove 'Silenced' from his social media accounts and elsewhere online.

  Yaxley-Lennon's lawyer Alex Di Francesco told London's High Court that 'Silenced' had been removed from accounts he controlled and that requests had been made to remove interviews in which Yaxley-Lennon repeated the libelous allegations.

• Press Gazette ☛ Social publishing in 2025: Editors vs the algorithm

  In a survey of 30 digital journalists from the Metro, Telegraph, Reach and Joe by creative agency Taylor Herring between January and March, 23% said their social news channels were the main focus for the year ahead while 39% said they were becoming increasingly important.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Deutsche Welle ☛ EU releases funding to keep Radio Free Europe afloat

  The emergency funding would not cover Radio Free Europe across the globe, but only in select European and Asian countries. The pro-democracy outlet's funds were cut off by the Trump administration.

• RFA ☛ Cambodian journalist who exposed illegal logging slapped with incitement charge – Radio Free Asia

  An environmental journalist who had reported on logging in a wildlife sanctuary has been charged with incitement and defamation, in the latest sign of deteriorating press freedom in Cambodia, a human rights group said Tuesday.

  The journalist, Ouk Mao, 49, was arrested at his home in the northeastern province of Stung Treng last Friday by plainclothes officers who did not produce a warrant.

• The Telegraph UK ☛ Foreign state ownership is a systemic threat to a free press

  I had raised the issue in the Lords on a number of occasions and was grateful for her courtesy. Instead I was astonished to learn that she had issued a press release announcing that the Government intended to reverse the decision taken by Parliament last year to ban foreign governments from owning or co-owning British newspapers.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Lusaka ZM ☛ Zambia : Zambia Women's Lab Launched

  And National Association of Media Arts (NAMA) Vice President, Mufaweli Mwambo, added that the training will help females take up leadership roles in film and help fill the gaps in gender equality.

• ANF News ☛ ÖHD: Kurdish should be an official language

  The Association of Lawyers for Freedom (ÖHD) issued joint statements in many cities for 15 May, Kurdish Language Day, listing five demands regarding the Kurdish language.

• Techdirt ☛ DHS Secretary Thinks Habeas Corpus Is The Power To Deport People With No Due Process

  Our Secretary of Homeland Security, tasked with overseeing the detention of thousands of people, doesn’t understand one of the most fundamental protections against unlawful imprisonment in our legal system. And we’re not talking about some obscure technical detail — we’re talking about habeas corpus, a basic right that’s been around since the Magna Carta.

• Hamilton Nolan ☛ Strongman Economics Are Piss

  Once investor capitalism has gotten hold of an economy, as it has in America and on most of Planet Earth, it operates like a machine programmed with those few rules. Its logic is straightforward and does not change. The only way to alter its course is to impose hard limits upon it. If you do not want it to produce, you know, “slavery,” which fits quite well in its logic, you have to make rules against it. If you do not want companies to dump their toxic waste in the lake, you have to enforce regulations against it. Otherwise they will do it, because it lowers expenses and produces higher profits. This simple model explains basically all corporate behavior. We, as a society of human beings, must turn the dials that dictate the limits on capitalism, because capitalism itself is a machine that only does one thing. America’s economic inequality is a result of our failure to restrain the operations of this machine very much. We currently exist at the “You can still be considered a legitimate businessman and make billions of dollars in private equity by buying a hospital and driving down the costs by firing the people who keep all the patients alive” level of regulation. We have a ways to go yet.

• Digital Camera World ☛ “In the cop car, they even told me they liked the art.” Photographer arrested on trespassing charges at New York gallery opening

  Drift added that the police had originally planned to arrest him as soon as he arrived at the gallery, but waited until nearly the end of the opening, which the artist said showed some humanity and an attempt to understand him.

• Axios ☛ Papers please: Trump employs proof of identity tactic to monitor Americans

  The big picture: From an undocumented immigrant registry to proof-of-citizenship for voting, President Trump has attempted to create a landscape in which the government can demand to know — and force people to prove — their identity in radical new ways.

  Between the lines: The data the administration is pushing for can be weaponized against people.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Ubuntu ☛ What is geopatriation?

  Recently, a term has appeared in the cloud services and cloud repatriation circles: geopatriation. But what is geopatriation, and how does it fit into adjusting your cloud services and infrastructure to meet new legal and compliance requirements?

• APNIC ☛ The invisible war: Why securing the Internet is everyone’s responsibility

  When most people think of cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, phishing emails, or the occasional data breach.

  But zoom out for a moment — what about the Internet itself? The actual infrastructure that powers our digital lives? That’s where the real battle is happening, and it’s mostly invisible.

  At the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA), we’ve spent the last decade working to make the Internet safer, not through flashy headlines, but through deep, global infrastructure work. You might not know our name, but chances are you’ve benefited from our efforts.

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Who Broke the Internet? Part III

  The thesis of this four-part series is pretty straightforward: the enshittification of the internet was the result of an enshittogenic policy environment. Platforms always had the technical means to scam us and abuse us. Tech founders and investors always included a cohort of scumbags who would trade our happiness and wellbeing for their profits. What changed was the consequences of giving in to those impulses. When Google took off, its founders' mantra was "competition is just a click away." If someone built a better search engine, users could delete their google.com bookmarks, just like they did to their altavista.com bookmarks when Google showed up.

  Policymakers – not technologists or VCs – changed the environment so that this wasn't true anymore: [...]

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• BBC ☛ How can traditional British television survive the US streamers

  As solutions were thrown around to what many see as an acute funding crisis in the age of global streaming, one of the invitees suggested, in passing, that BBC Studios (the corporation's commercial content-producing arm) could merge with Channel 4 to create a bigger, more powerful force to compete with the likes of Disney Plus, Netflix and Amazon.

  As another diner knocked down the idea, I'm told that Tim Davie, the BBC's DG, asked why it was so ridiculous.

• Wired ☛ ‘A Billion Streams and No Fans’: Inside a $10 Million AI Music Fraud Case

  Then, last September, Smith turned up at the heart of another music streaming incident, this one rather epic. The FBI arrested him and charged him in the first AI streaming fraud case in the United States. The government claims that between 2017 and 2024, Smith made over $10 million in royalties by using bot armies to continuously play AI-generated tracks on streaming platforms. Smith pleaded not guilty to all charges. (Through his lawyer, Smith declined to be interviewed, so this is very much Hay’s side of the story, corroborated by numerous interviews with people who worked with the two men.)