Leftovers

• Mandaris Moore ☛ Share the Love

  I’ve used plenty of great examples that I’m going to list below. I would not have been able to make this possible without learning from these write-ups. I hope that you check them out for any details that I may have missed or chosen to implement differently.

• Science Alert ☛ Who Gets Your 'Digital Remains' When You Die? Here's Some Expert Advice.

  Digital legacies are increasingly complex and evolving. They include now-familiar items such as social media and banking accounts, along with our stored photos, videos and messages. But they also encompass virtual currencies, behavioural tracking data, and even AI-generated avatars.

  This digital data is not only fundamental to our online identities in life, but to our inheritance in death. So how can we properly plan for what happens to it?

• Seth Godin ☛ Just the right length

  When technology changes the media, when distribution and consumption shift, the definition of just the right length shifts as well. Podcasts changed the length of interviews, Linkedin changed the length of a resume and YouTube changed the length of funny videos… the cycle continues.

• Danny O'Brien ☛ Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka » Blog Archive » teaching old hippies new tricks

  A few fates that I’ve avoided, barely: one is joining the Nineties Internet Re-Enactment Society, where communities scrabble to re-inforce the dominant vibe of — what, two? three? years maximum? — the early networks. I mean, I still have it in my habits — my dinky RSS reader, my affinity for plain text, email. A co-worker described watching me work as “like someone playing one of those adventure games”. I can see it.

• Science

  • Wired ☛ A New Study Reveals the Makeup of Uranus’ Atmosphere

    Information about Uranus is limited. What we know is that the planet is composed mainly of water and ammonia ice, its diameter is about 51,000 kilometers, about four times that of the Earth, and its mass is about 15 times greater than Earth’s. Uranus also has 13 rings and 28 satellites.

    In January 1986, NASA’s Voyager 2 space probe successfully completed what has been, to date, the only exploration of the planet, conducting a flyby as part of its mission to study the outer planets of the solar system.

  • Tony Finch ☛ the algebra of dependent types

    TIL (or this week-ish I learned) why big-sigma and big-pi turn up in the notation of dependent type theory.

    I’ve long been aware of the zoo of more obscure Greek letters that turn up in papers about type system features of functional programming languages, μ, Λ, Π, Σ. Their meaning is usually clear from context but the reason for the choice of notation is usually not explained.

    I recently stumbled on an explanation for Π (dependent functions) and Σ (dependent pairs) which turn out to be nicer than I expected, and closely related to every-day algebraic data types.

  • Vox ☛ Trump and Harvard: The US is squandering a major advantage

    But the dollar isn’t the only privilege the US enjoys. Since the postwar era, America’s best universities have led the world. Harvard, Princeton, MIT, CalTech — these elite universities are the foundation of the American scientific supremacy that has in turn fueled decades of economic growth. But also, by virtue of their unparalleled ability to attract the best minds from around the world, these schools have given the US the educational privilege of being the magnet of global academic excellence. In the same way that the dollar’s dominance has allowed the US to live beyond its means, the dominance of elite universities has compensated for the fact that the US has, at best, a mediocre K-12 educational system.

  • Science Alert ☛ Star Caught Orbiting Inside Another Star in Bizarre First

    Binary star systems are pairs of stars held together by gravity, orbiting a common center of mass. More than half of all stars in our galaxy are part of a binary or multiple-star system making them surprisingly common.

• Career/Education

  • The Nation ☛ The Gutting of the Department of Education Is Worse Than You Think

    Four experts on public education in the US spoke to The Nation about how the dismantling of the Department of Education will hurt students immediately and in the years to come.

• Hardware

  • Vidit Bhargava ☛ The problem with AI hardware is that it’s called AI Hardware

    If the two AI Hardware devices that released last year are any indication, there’s a lot of work to be done before anything can be successful in this field. Why? The problem with AI hardware is the fact that it’s called AI Hardware. This is a nonsensical term that doesn’t mean anything but Silicon Valley is hell bent on trying to give it meaning and form. The lack of creative naming is also a lack of product clarity in my humble opinion.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Intel versus AMD is currently an emotional decision for me

    At this point Intel has very little going for its desktop CPUs as compared to the current generation AMD Ryzens. Intel CPUs have better idle power levels, and may have better single-core burst performance. In absolute performance I probably won't notice much difference, and unlike Stapelberg I don't do the kind of work where I really care about build speed (and if I do, I have access to much more powerful machines). As far as the idle power goes, I likely will notice the better idle power level (some of the time), but my system is likely to idle at lower power in general than Stapelberg's will, especially at home where I'll try to use the onboard graphics if at all possible (so I won't have the (idle) power price of a GPU card).

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Akseli Lahtinen ☛ Ramble: Tired and Emotional

    Nowadays when I look at most new things in technology, my first instinct is not "Oh that looks cool."

    My first instinct is instead: "Oh great, another tool to fuck us over."

  • EcoWatch ☛ PFAS ‘Forever Chemicals’ Detected in 95% of Beers Tested in U.S.

    “Beer has been a staple beverage since premodern times, when it was actually considered safer than water given the destruction of waterborne pathogens during brewing,” the authors of the findings wrote. “Breweries typically have basic water filtration and treatment processes to ensure source water meets brewing requirements. While these processes aim to balance water parameters for brewing, they are not necessarily effective at removing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).”

  • Mike Rockwell ☛ I Have a YouTube Problem

    I spend too much time watching YouTube videos as well and am looking to try and cut back in the coming weeks.

  • Scott Adams vs. a cancer quack

    I realize that it’s been four weeks since I posted here, posting about the soft eugenics of MAHA. I’ve been meaning to get back into it, but, for whatever reason, whenever I’ve tried to do so something got in the way; that is, until now. Perhaps it’s because there are few things that I enjoy writing about more than a good crank fight, and few cranks are as cranky as disgraced Dr. William Makis, Makis, as you might recall, is the disgraced nuclear medicine radiologist who lost his medical license in Alberta and, while probably not the originator of the antivax concept that COVID-19 vaccines cause not just cancer, but turbo cancer, has arguably been the most vocal antivax quack promoting the idea. In Makis’ telling, COVID-19 vaccines are so full of mutating evil humors that they cause cancers that are not just run-of-the-mill cancers that anyone can get as they get older, but rather cancers so fast-growing and malignant that the are called “turbo cancers,” cancers. Never mind that he can’t define what the heck a “turbo cancer” is compared to regular cancers or provide any good evidence that cancer, much less “turbo cancers,” are associated with COVID-19 vaccination. None of that stopped him from becoming a total cancer quack, promoting all manner of quackery. On the opposing side of this crank fight is Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, who actually comes off closer to the side of reason, not to mention being the more sympathetic character due to his having been diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer that he tried to treat with Makis’ “protocol,” which involves:

  • Pro Publica ☛ The USDA Ended a Program That Helps Tribes Get Healthy Food

    As he has promoted the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, has lamented the toll that processed foods have taken on the health of Americans, in particular Native Americans.

    Prepackaged foods have “mass poisoned” tribal communities, he said last month when he met with tribal leaders and visited a Native American health clinic in Arizona.

• Proprietary

  • [Repeat] The Register UK ☛ German court jails Volkswagen execs over Dieselgate scandal

    Volkswagen staff admitted to a conspiracy to fudge emission results, the company pled guilty and paid substantial fines and recalled around 11 million cars.

    In 2019 German authorities charged four execs of the matter, and Braunschweig Regional Court decided one of the resulting cases on Monday.

    German media reports explain that four VW execs were jailed for between 15 and 54 months, with the judge finding all knowingly contributed to the scandal.

  • The Verge ☛ A Kaiser Permanente systems outage has pharmacies relying on pen and paper | The Verge

    Healthcare company Kaiser Permanente is dealing with a system outage that is forcing its hospitals and pharmacies to fill out prescriptions with pen and paper — and is slowing down services at other parts of the company, too.

  • Gabriel ☛ An Identity Crisis? - GABZ/ML

    What I am trying to get at is that I have strong feelings about moving away from Apple as much as possible, the feeling of being locked into their garden makes me feel uneasy, and is nost just Apple devices and services, there are many other areas in my digital life that I am starting to feel like I don't control, own or can move away from. And perhaps moving to Android is not the solution, but it feels like a first step and perhaps a little bit of rebellion, especially in these times where rebellion is a must.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Wired ☛ Why Anthropic’s New AI Model Sometimes Tries to ‘Snitch’

      Bowman says the whistleblowing behaviour Anthropic observed isn’t something Claude will exhibit with individual users, but could come up with developers using Opus 4 to build their own applications with the company’s API. Even then, it’s unlikely app makers will see such behavior. To produce such a response, developers would have to give the model “fairly unusual instructions” in the system prompt, connect it to external tools that give the model the ability to run computer commands, and allow it to contact the outside world.

    • Mandy Brown ☛ Alive | everything changes

      To put this another way: even if you believe that shackling yourself to the machines is the only way to keep food on the table, you’re still coming to harm. Any choice you make here isn’t between safety and harm but between different kinds of harm. And maybe the threats are just that—sneering words spit from the mouths of bullies. Maybe it’s time to call their bluff.

    • Jan Lukas Else ☛ I need to migrate away from Telegram

      AI [sic] integration would be ok per se, but why the worst of all AIs [sic]? No, thank you!

    • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ 'Slop' is also an apt description of your new AI feature

      Mediocre images, mediocre writing and mediocre, altogether unnecessary features. Calling a feature set like Apple Intelligence mediocre would be charitable — it's baked in computational slop that enables the generation of ever more content slop. The best part of Apple Intelligence is that you can turn it off.

    • Vox ☛ Why Pope Leo has so much to say about AI, briefly explained [Ed: Well, but SLOP is INCAPABLE of good, it's just glorified plagiarism done poorly]

      In his first speech to the press, he recognized that AI has “immense potential” but emphasized that we need to “ensure that it can be used for the good of all.”

    • The Register UK ☛ AI agents confused by some aspects of websites, ads

      Andreas Stöckl told The Register that the study has different implications for publishers and for advertisers. One of the findings, he said, is that ad personalization must be adapted to suit agents.

    • NYMag ☛ Google’s AI Is Burying the Web Alive

      Meanwhile, AI Mode all but buries them, not just summarizing their content for reading within Google’s product but inviting you to explore and expand on those summaries by asking more questions, rather than clicking out. In many cases, links are retained merely to provide backup and sourcing, included as footnotes and appendices rather than destinations: [...]

    • Dedoimedo ☛ Google search without AI [sic, slop] plus custom Firefox search engine

      Let's start with the simple thing. Google has supported search parameters since forever. Basically, simply append search qualifiers and values after the question mark (?) in the address bar, and the search engine will behave accordingly. Namely: [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • The Guardian UK ☛ My sister was found dead. Then I discovered her search history – and the online world that had gripped her

      Walton believes that what takes place on the forum “is a type of radicalisation into an extreme action that people otherwise might not even have considered.” She is haunted by the possibility that the man who was with Aimee when she died was “living out a sick fantasy as an incel who wants to see a young and vulnerable woman end her life”.

• Linux Foundation

  • Employee of Panasonic Automotive Systems appointed Linux Foundation Japan Evangelist [Ed: This is essentially a bribe-for role; those seats are on sale; it is openwashing [1, 1]]

    Panasonic Automotive Systems Co., Ltd. (Headquarters: Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan; President: Masashi Nagayasu; hereinafter referred to as “PAS”) today announced that effective June 2025, Hiroyuki Ishii will be appointed as an evangelist in the Linux Foundation Japan Evangelist Program, specializing in the automotive sector.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Security Week ☛ OneDrive Gives Web Apps Full Read Access to All Files

      Security researchers warn that OneDrive’s file sharing tool may grant third-party web apps access to all your files—not just the one you choose to upload.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ EU probes 4 porn sites over failure to block minors

      The EU is also developing an official age-verification app and has invited public input, including from parents, as part of broader efforts to create binding guidelines for online child protection.

    • Privacy International ☛ All Eyes on my Period? Period tracking apps and the future of privacy in a post-Roe world | Privacy International

      Globally, similar patterns are emerging. Across Europe, rising right-wing populism is fueling anxiety about the future of reproductive rights. In countries like Italy recent legislative changes have raised fears about increased barriers to access. Meanwhile, abortion remains heavily criminalised in Poland and Malta, where legal exceptions are extremely limited. These developments underscore the fragility of reproductive rights even in regions where such rights have been long been considered secure.

      In this increasingly challenging landscape, the role of period tracking apps is under renewed scrutiny.

    • The Nation ☛ Palantir’s Idea of Peace

      Palantir sells data analytics software, sometimes custom-made, to seemingly every federal, state, and local agency in the country—its current and former clients include intelligence agencies (the CIA, NSA, and FBI), military branches (the Department of Defense), law enforcement (ICE and various local police departments), financial oversight agencies (the IRS and SEC), and even public health bodies (the CDC, FDA, and NIH)—as well as to a plethora of Washington-friendly regimes abroad, with controversial contracts in Israel, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. The company’s core government product, Palantir Gotham, acts as a computational force multiplier for state power, aggregating disparate databases and digital breadcrumbs into comprehensive profiles that facilitate everything from drone strikes abroad to immigrant deportations at home. As the public face of this enterprise, Karp has repeatedly alluded to Palantir’s covert, thankless heroism, cryptically bragging that the company has thwarted “innumerable” attacks on civilians across Europe over the past two decades. He has done little to amend what might be called Palantir’s genesis myth (first narrated by Mark Bowden in his account of Osama bin Laden’s killing, The Finish) that the company’s intelligence tools helped SEAL Team Six locate the Al Qaeda leader’s compound and then shoot him dead.

    • The Register UK ☛ Euro execs mull use of US clouds, say senior techies

      Amid the economic uncertainty of Trump 2.0, dependence on American tech has become a growing concern for many businesses, and a survey of 1,000 IT leaders claims that data sovereignty is now one of the most pressing issues.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Location Tracking App for Foreigners in Moscow

      Russia is proposing a rule that all foreigners in Moscow install a tracking app on their phones.

    • [Old] The Register UK ☛ World Cup apps pose a data security and privacy nightmare

      With mandated spyware downloads to tens of thousands of surveillance cameras equipped with facial-recognition technology, the World Cup in Qatar next month is looking more like a data security and privacy nightmare than a celebration of the beautiful game.

  • Confidentiality

    • OpenPGP.foo ☛ Post-quantum cryptography

      Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is a branch of cryptography that develops algorithms which are thought to be secure against attacks using hypothetical quantum computers (which don’t exist right now, but may be developed in the future).

      Development and deployment of such algorithms defends against potential future attacks (in case relevant quantum computers materialize).

      Defense against potential future attacks with quantum computers is of particular interest for encryption. In particular when it is relevant if an attacker might store encrypted communication and decrypt it in the future. Defending against such an attack requires deployment of countermeasures well before the attack becomes practical.

    • Sourceforge ☛ GnuPG for OS X / macOS / Documentation / Home

      Different flavours of GnuPG for macOS are available via several package managers. Note that the ordering is purely subjective in nature, and possibly incomplete. Please pick whichever package manager best suits your personal requirements.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Mike Brock ☛ Democracy Today, Democracy Tomorrow, Democracy Everywhere, Democracy Forever!

    The most contemptible aspect of our current moment isn't the existence of obvious tyrants like Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin—there have always been strongmen who rule through fear and violence. It's the cowardice of American business and cultural elites who are too comfortable, too invested, too morally bankrupt to call tyranny by its name.

    These are the tech billionaires who build the infrastructure for Chinese surveillance while lecturing Americans about privacy rights. The Wall Street financiers who fund authoritarian regimes while wrapping themselves in the rhetoric of democratic values. The Hollywood executives who censor their own films to appease Xi Jinping's censors while positioning themselves as champions of artistic freedom.

    They are not neutral observers navigating complex geopolitical realities. They are collaborators who have chosen profit over principle, comfort over courage, market access over moral conviction.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Strategy the Trump Administration Is Using to Hide Its Court Defiance

    We have spent the past few months surveying the second Trump administration’s practice regarding court orders and reviewed dozens of cases. We observed a clear pattern: The administration uses the language of the law as cover to claim that it is complying with court orders when in fact it is not. We call this “legalistic noncompliance,” a term intended to capture how the administration has deployed an array of specious legal arguments to conceal what is actually pervasive defiance of judicial oversight. It is a powerful strategy, as it obscures the substance of what the administration is doing with the soothing language of the law.

  • The Atlantic ☛ How America Lost Control of the Seas

    Thanks to decades of misguided policy choices, the U.S. has an astonishing lack of maritime capacity.

  • Air Force Times ☛ Airmen hold first training sortie for new electronic attack plane

    Airmen this month conducted the first mission training sortie for the new EA-37B Compass Call, a milestone for the adoption of the Air Force’s new electronic attack aircraft.

  • YLE ☛ Finland's openly-fascist Blue-Black Movement officially re-registers as political party

    The group first registered as a political party in 2022, but this was later deemed a "mistake" by the Justice Ministry and an application was subsequently filed by the ministry with the Supreme Administrative Court to remove the Blue-Black Movement from the register.

    This request was granted by the court in 2024, as it ruled the party's programme was incompatible with constitutional and human rights law.

  • The Local SE ☛ Sweden charges jihadist over Jordanian pilot burned to death in Syria

    Prosecutors have charged a Swedish [sic] jihadist over the 2014 capture and subsequent killing of a Jordanian pilot, who was burned to death in a cage in Syria after being captured by the Islamic State (IS or Isis) group.

  • The Register UK ☛ Russia sentences programmer to 14 years for treason

    Aleksandr Levchishin, 37, from Bratsk, worked in one of the city's hospitals and, according to the Irkutsk Regional Courts, is alleged to have copied the medical records of Russian soldiers to transmit their details to "the other side."

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ As Russia’s fiber optic drones flood the battlefield, Ukraine is racing to catch up

    When flying on fiber optic, the drone pilot is not concerned by questions of radio horizon or electronic warfare, and — so long as the fiber itself isn’t damaged or broken mid-flight — can count on a perfect video feed right up to the target.

    Over 2024 especially, both Ukraine and Russia invested heavily in expensive EW systems to protect vehicles and other high-value targets, but against these new drones, they are rendered useless. Likewise, the same goes for radio-based drone detector devices commonly used by units to warn them of FPVs flying in the area.

    As has been demonstrated by both sides on the battlefield, fiber optic also allows FPV drones to fly where they never could before.

  • Andrew Doyle ☛ Should we tolerate the intolerant?

    But what about the scenario of mass immigration from countries where tolerance itself is mistrusted? If we fail to make cultural assimilation a condition of citizenship, and instead foster multicultural societies in which opposition to liberal values and free speech become the norm, are we not endangering society as a whole? Where would we be if Islamist fanatics were to seize power in parliament, or sharia courts were to become more widespread, or the population shifted to such a degree that the public votes for a party that promises to take away its freedoms? Is this not precisely what Popper envisaged when he claimed that ‘if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them’?

    I do not claim to know how best to negotiate this problem. In a previous article, I explored the case of Sweden, whose lax approach to cultural assimilation has reached the point where it feels as though the liberal consensus that the country once enjoyed has been obliterated for good. I noted that in spite of once boasting a crime rate significantly lower than most of its European neighbours, Sweden is now known as the gun-crime capital of the continent. With the exception of Mexico, Sweden is the country with the highest incidence of grenade and bomb attacks in any nation not at war.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • BoingBoing ☛ "19 Years of Broken Promises": Wired examines Elon Musk's track record

    Reading Wired's analysis of Elon "Pedo Guy" Musk's record of lies, you'd have thought the "tell" they are exposing was "his lips are moving," but they found something else.

  • Wired ☛ There’s a Very Simple Pattern to Elon Musk’s Broken Promises

    WIRED examined the history of Musk’s pledges on everything from Full Self Driving, Hyperloop, Robotaxis, and, yes, robot armies, with a view to reminding ourselves, his fans, and investors how reality in Elon’s world rarely matches up to the rhetoric. Tellingly, Musk’s fallback forecast of “next year” turns up repeatedly, only to be consistently proven wrong.

    “My predictions have a pretty good track record,” Musk told Tesla staff at an all-hands meeting in March. Here's a chronological look at that track record.

• Environment

  • Renewable Energy World ☛ Who's afraid of the Big Beautiful Bill? I am.

    The House bill threatens U.S. energy development, heavily favoring fossil fuels and thereby driving up not only greenhouse gas emissions but utility bills since solar PV is the cheapest and fastest-to-market generation technology at the moment. The United States needs to add 206.5 GW of new energy capacity by 2030, with solar expected to supply 73% of that capacity, according to SEIA. Without solar and storage, America will have to navigate an energy shortage that jacks up utility bills and slows economic growth. And by stifling energy development, the OBBBA also crimps our ability to compete with China in our ongoing competition to create god in the machine.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ ‘It will destroy this place:’ West Virginia residents fight for future against proposed data center

      A Virginia-based company, Fundamental Data, was applying for an air permit from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection for what it called the “Ridgeline Facility.” The company’s heavily redacted application showed plans to build an off-the-grid natural gas power plant between Thomas and Davis. That power plant will likely be designed to power an enormous data center just a mile out from Tucker County’s most populous and tourist-attracting areas.

      Earlier this month, representatives for Fundamental Data — who did not respond to requests for comment on this article — told the Wall Street Journal that the facility could be “among the largest data center campuses in the world,” spanning 10,000 acres across Tucker and Grant counties if fully realized.

    • Michigan News ☛ Southwest Airlines reveals prices for new checked bag policy

      After more than 50 years of offering free checked bags for customers, Southwest Airlines has begun charging for the service. Starting Tuesday, the budget airline is now charging $35 for a customer’s first checked bag and $45 for the second bag.

    • Wired ☛ Auto Shanghai 2025 Wasn’t Just a Car Show. It Was a Warning to the West

      Some Western brands might need a rapid-response unit of their own, since not only are their sales falling in China, but the popularity of Chinese upstarts elsewhere is surging. BYD expects to double its overseas sales in a single year, rising from 417,000 vehicles in 2024 to over 800,000 in 2025. With US sales on ice, an increasingly brand-agnostic UK is poised to become a key battleground for BYD, along with Latin America and Southeast Asia.

    • The Drone Girl ☛ Flytrex and Wing just did something that's never been done

      In a groundbreaking shift for the drone delivery industry, Flytrex and Wing — two of the largest commercial drone operators in the U.S. — have begun flying in the same airspace at the same time. It’s happening in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, and it’s made possible by an autonomous traffic coordination system.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Summer Reads: 10 New Environmental Memoirs, Novels, and Other Energizing Books

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ Elon Musk's xAI pays Telegram $300M to integrate Grok

    Telegram, according to a 2024 report from The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), is commonly used by Russian authorities and proxies for influence operations. Community of Democracies, an intergovernmental coalition of states, published a related report in January that explores the use of Telegram and also of Musk's X for foreign information manipulation and interference.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Elon Musk's xAI inks $300M AI deal with Telegram

    Dubai-based Telegram claims that its messaging service has more than 1 billion monthly active users. The company makes money through advertising and a paid account tier called Telegram Premium. The subscription provides higher file upload limits, faster download speeds and other features for $4.99 per month.

    Grok is already available in Telegram Premium. As part of the new partnership with xAI, the app developer will roll out the chatbot to all its users.

  • The Register UK ☛ Trump trade policy to cost Nvidia $10.5B in lost revenues

    US export controls blocking the sale of Nvidia’s H20 GPUs to will cost the company $10.5 billion in lost revenues in the first half of the 2026 fiscal year, executives revealed on Wednesday's Q1 earnings call.

    The export rules, which went into effect in April, effectively cut Nvidia off from the Chinese datacenter market, but not before it managed to deliver roughly $4.6 billion of planned $7.1 billion worth of H20 shipments expected for Q1.

  • Wired ☛ Businesses Got Squeezed by Trump’s Tariffs. Now Some of Them Want Their Money Back

    Companies have managed to get some money back. Products that were in transit when the higher tariff rate went into effect were exempted from having to pay it. But some of the initial bills importers received didn’t reflect that. A straw-hat importer, who didn’t provide their name when asked in a series of direct messages on Reddit, tells WIRED that they successfully wrangled for an exemption and brought their tariffs rate to about 61 percent from an initially feared nearly 177 percent—though the rate is still double the 31.5 percent they paid in 2023.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: America is a scam

    The election of Donald Trump feeds many needs in the right wing coalition: the libidinal pleasure of seeing trans people, migrants, and anyone who isn't white getting terrorized by masked thugs and swivel-eyed loons; massive tax cuts for the oligarch class, especially those who (like Trump) inherit their wealth; the gutting of public education and the destruction of the barrier between church and state.

    But the most important, best-served constituency in the Trump coalition is scammers. This has been his promise since his first campaign, when he boasted on national television that he cheated on his taxes because "that makes me smart": [...]

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Prison gate backdrop to baptism by Fr Sean O'Connell, St Paul's, Coburg

    von Bidder's death was discussed like a suicide and given that it happened shortly after other confirmed suicides, it feels like it was part of a suicide cluster on the day of our wedding. So I received the sacrament of baptism meters away from the gates of a notorious prison known for the murder of a prison guard and then at the sacrament of marriage, we had this Debian death that was avoidable and could even be a criminal act of manslaughter under the British definition of the law.

  • Macworld ☛ Tim Cook's year is doomed, and it's not even June yet

    President Trump is miffed that Cook declined to tag along on his field trip to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both countries, by the way, where you can get the death penalty for being gay, not that they’re likely to try to execute the guy who makes the iPhones. It’s not like he’s a journalist, after all.

    As Mickle notes, Cook managed to steer through Trump’s first administration by distracting him with shiny objects like a plant in Texas that makes a couple of Mac Pros every so often. This time, Cook greased the skids with a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund. Nope, we haven’t forgotten about that, although it seems like the president has, either because of the dementia or just inherently having the attention span of a sugar-addled toddler.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Google takes AI propaganda to the movies

      Google threw some pocket change at Range Media Partners to “help filmmakers at a pivotal moment where AI’s role requires extensive discussion and diverse viewpoints.” Whenever anyone says “viewpoint diversity,” they mean they want you to put in their bad viewpoints.

      At least the films are being made the usual way, and not with an AI video generator. That’s a separate Google propaganda initiative, where Google backed a dumptruck full of money up to director Darren Aronofsky’s house to produce some short films with DeepMind’s Veo video generator. The movies will be filmed the usual way, then they’ll sprinkle just enough Veo on top to get that cheque from Google.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • CPJ ☛ Sudanese blogger Abduljalil Mohamed Abduljalil detained over corruption reporting

    “The abduction-like arrest of blogger and veteran journalist Abduljalil Mohamed Abduljalil over his reporting on alleged corruption on his Facebook page is a clear example of how journalists are targeted in Sudan,” said Sara Qudah, CPJ’s regional director. “Authorities must immediately and unconditionally release Abduljalil, guarantee his safety, and stop targeting journalists for their work.”

  • Frontpage Magazine ☛ Critics of Islam Are Being Silenced in the UK

    Speakers Corner at Hyde Park is celebrated as the place where individuals are famously free to arrive, stand on a figurative (or literal) soapbox, and speak to groups of listeners about all sorts of issues, expressing the most unpopular views under the watchful eyes of the police, who are there to ensure that speakers are not shouted down or roughed up. There are dozens of speakers, for example, on any given day, conducting da’wa, in an attempt to win more converts to Islam. Hatun Tash is a former Muslim, now a Christian preacher, and hence anathema to Muslims. When she arrived to give a speech on the Qur’an — one that was critical of many passages — a large crowd of angry Muslims surrounded her, intent on keeping her from speaking, and possibly hoping to do her physical harm. They shouted the Islamic war cry of Allahu akbar (“Our god is greater than your god”). And the police, instead of protecting Hatun Tash, whisked her away, preventing her from continuing her talk. This is the “heckler’s veto,” and the whole point of Speakers Corner at Hyde Park is to prevent audience members from shouting down or threatening unpopular speakers, by having the police protect those speakers. But not this time. It was the Muslim hecklers who won and stayed put; it was Hatun Tash who was hauled away, prevented from speaking her piece. Is this now to be the policy at Speakers Corner? If enough members of the audience violently threaten a speaker critical of Islam, will the police now remove the speaker instead of rounding up those who are threatening that speaker? Speakers Corner, which has been in operation for more than 160 years, might as well shut down; it will no longer be a place where free speech — if it is critical of Islam — will be permitted.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Keir Starmer dragged into Koran-burning court case

    In the aftermath of the Koran burning, he says two Iraqi men broke into his home in Derby and threatened him with a knife and an ashtray. Police took him from his home and moved him to a safe house elsewhere in the Midlands, a nondescript terrace that I won’t describe further for obvious reasons.

    On Wednesday, he goes on trial at Westminster magistrates’ court charged with disorderly behaviour likely to cause “harassment, alarm or distress” for setting the Koran alight. As he did so, according to the charges, Mr Coskun swore, and then shouted “Islam is religion [sic] of terrorism” in his broken English. He is accused under the Public Order Act of being motivated “by hostility towards members of a religious [sic] group, namely followers of Islam”.

    [...]

    He added that the court should protect the right of his client – a 59-year-old peacenik – to stage a “peaceful protest in a free and democratic society”.

  • National Secular Society ☛ Coskun prosecution could spell return of blasphemy laws, NSS warns

    Hamit Coskun will stand trial at Westminster Magistrates' Court for protesting against Islamism outside the Turkish Consulate in February. He set fire to a Quran as part of the protest, which led to a man attacking him with a knife.

    [...]

    He also said his protest was an act of solidarity with Salwan Momika – an Iraqi refugee who was assassinated in Sweden in January after burning Qurans in repeated public protests.

  • BBC ☛ Man admits attacking Quran-burning protester

    Kathryn Hughes, prosecuting, told the court that Kadri left a nearby building carrying a large bread knife and proceeded to assault Mr Coskun, whom she said had burned the Quran outside the consulate as part of a "protest".

  • National Secular Society ☛ Charge against man who burnt Quran ‘incorrectly worded’, CPS admit

    But the NSS said any conviction based on the facts of this case would suggest "the reinstatement of an offense of blasphemy in English law by the back door".

    Blasphemy was abolished as a common law offence in England and Wales in 2008.

    Shadow justice secretary: "There are many things in our society that people find offensive, but that doesn't make them criminal"

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Man who burned Koran faces charges for ‘harassing Islam’

    Lawyer Akua Reindorf said it was “plainly defective” because the “religious institution of Islam” was not a “person” for the purposes of the Act. The Crown Prosecution Service’s decision was “tantamount” to bringing a charge of blasphemy.

    Ms Reindorf said that a conviction on the basis of available facts “would amount to the criminalisation of the act of desecrating a religious text in a public place”.

    Blasphemy was abolished as a common law offence in England and Wales in 2008.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Linuxiac ☛ Linux Format Magazine Ends with Issue 329

    The farewell issue, 329, published on May 27, 2025 (unclear why as July 2025 edition), serves as both a tribute and a grand finale, offering a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Former editors gather for some spirited reminiscing over classic reviews, reader favorites, and invaluable “Hotpicks”—the beloved sections that helped thousands navigate Linux’s complexities.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Papers Please ☛ 200,000 people a day fly without REAL-ID

    The real story of REAL-ID is that more people than ever are flying in the US without REAL-ID, with ID the TSA considers “unacceptable”, or with no ID at all.

    In a show of massive passive resistance to baseless threats by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to prevent people without REAL-ID from traveling by air, more than 200,000 flyers without REAL-ID passed through TSA checkpoints and boarded scheduled airline flights in the US last Friday, setting a new record for people flying with no ID or with ID the TSA deems “unacceptable” because it isn’t considered compliant with the REAL-ID Act of 2005.

    Despite twenty years of false claims that airline passengers without REAL-ID would be  turned away at TSA checkpoints after the REAL-ID deadline, we’ve been unable to confirm any report of a traveler blocked by the TSA for lack of REAL-ID in the three weeks since the TSA claimed that it would start enforcing the REAL-ID Act at airports.

  • The Dissenter ☛ Police Raid Against Journalist Asa Winstanley Was Unlawful, UK Court Rules

  • CS Monitor ☛ Fast track to deportation: ICE arrests at immigration court

    First, ICE lawyers terminate people’s cases in immigration court. Then ICE officers arrest them at or just outside the courthouse. As a result, immigrants who may be trying to gain legal status in the United States are instead targeted for rapid removal.

    Dozens of these immigration court arrests by masked, plainclothes law enforcement were reported across the country last week, including in Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and New York. Those included a Venezuelan student in the Bronx, who Chalkbeat reports entered the country lawfully, and asylum-seeking men in Las Vegas.

  • ACLU ☛ What Is Due Process? | American Civil Liberties Union

    In the first months of his administration, President Donald Trump repeatedly threatened due process, a fundamental principle enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. His attacks have spanned from the arbitrary use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport legal residents, to the unlawful detention of students.

  • LWN ☛ Cory Doctorow on how we lost the [Internet]

    Cory Doctorow wears many hats: digital activist, science-fiction author, journalist, and more. He has also written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, runs the Pluralistic blog, is a visiting professor, and is an advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); his Chokepoint Capitalism co-author, Rebecca Giblin, gave a 2023 keynote in Australia that we covered. Doctorow gave a rousing keynote on the state of the "enshitternet"—today's [Internet]—to kick off the recently held PyCon US 2025 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

    He began by noting that he is known for coining the term "enshittification" about the decay of tech platforms, so attendees were probably expecting to hear about that; instead, he wanted to start by talking about nursing. A recent study described how nurses are increasingly getting work through one of three main apps that ""bill themselves out as 'Uber for nursing'"". The nurses never know what they will be paid per hour prior to accepting a shift and the three companies act as a cartel in order to ""play all kinds of games with the way that labor is priced"".

    [...]

    As anyone with a technical background knows, ""any task that is simple, but time-consuming is a prime candidate for automation"". This kind of ""wage theft"" would be tedious and expensive to do by hand, but it is trivial to play these games using computers. This kind of thing is not just bad for nurses, he said, its bad for those who are using their services.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Revealed: Saudi Arabia’s secretive rehabilitation ‘prisons’ for disobedient women

    While Saudi Arabia celebrates being awarded the Fifa men’s World Cup and meticulously promotes itself on the global stage as reformed, women who have dared to publicly call for more rights and freedoms have faced house arrest, jail and exile. Activists say the country’s care homes are one of the regime’s lesser-known tools for controlling and punishing women, and want them to be abolished.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Techdirt ☛ Verizon Asks Trump Admin To Destroy All Popular Phone Unlocking Requirements

  Now, with the Trump administration openly destroying whatever’s left of U.S. federal corporate oversight and consumer protection standards, Verizon sees an opportunity. As Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica notes, Verizon’s attempting to get the Trump administration to kill all unlocking requirements, in a bid to drag everyone back to the dark ages of cellphone use.

  Verizon being Verizon, they can’t help but lie about it in a petition to the Trump FCC, claiming that they simply must be allowed to unfairly lock down mobile devices, because doing anything else harms competition and helps criminals: [...]