Leftovers

• Robert Birming ☛ New Home for My Blog

  Starting tomorrow, June 1, this blog will have a new home at birming.com.

• Leon Furze ☛ Why Blog?

  The context of the question was a response to a LinkedIn post where I described some Saturday experiments in syndication. Following the POSSE practice of ‘Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere,’ for the past fifteen years or so I’ve had a blog in some form or another as my primary way of communicating with the outside world.

• Career/Education

  • Chris Holdgraf ☛ Why open source foundations try to fund systems, not development - Welcome

    This is a brief reflection on something that I’ve been hearing consistently from the Linux Foundation and its member projects as part of serving on the Board of the Jupyter Foundation. Here’s a point that originally surprised me when I heard it:

    "Most foundations within the Linux Foundation network recommend against using foundation resources for software development. Instead they recommend funding systems that lead to more and better development from volunteer contributions."

    This was counter-intuitive to me at first, and I think may be counter-intuitive to others as well, so I wanted to share how I think about this.

  • Adam Newbold ☛ Come make some candles with me

    Back in elementary school, we learned about life in 18th century America, and one part of the lesson that stuck with me was the reliance upon systems of apprenticeship for virtually all trades and professions. I thought it was neat, the way you could walk out of the one-room schoolhouse at age 12 and begin an exciting career as a printer, butcher, tailor, or candlemaker. You’d learn from a more experienced printer, butcher, tailor, or candlemaker, and eventually be able to do the job as well as they did (if not better). And then one day you’d find yourself in a position to take on an apprentice of your own, completing that particular iteration of the cycle, spreading the craft (and your own spin on it) to the next generation.

  • Alex Ewerlöf ☛ Ephemeral taskforce

    Ephemeral Task Force (ETF) is a selected group of people with cross-functional knowledge, mandate, and responsibility who are assembled for a specific delivery with a clear end in mind. The group is dismantle after the objective is accomplished.

• Hardware

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Government To Regulate Walkie-Talkie Sales

    Following the Pakistan-backed terrorist attack in Pahalgam and Operation Kagar targeting Maoists, the Union ministry of home affairs (MHA) has approved the framing of guidelines and directed the Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) to notify guidelines for the prevention and regulation of illegal listing and sale of radio equipment including walkie-talkies on e-commerce platforms.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-25 [Older] Young adults in Europe are putting away smartphones

• Proprietary

  • Mere Civilian ☛ Experiment: Ecosystem without Apple

    From today, as we speak, I will be remove Apple devices from my ecosystem. For almost 2 years, I have lived a mixed hardware and multi-platform software lifestyle.

    Lately, I have been wondering what it would be like if my ecosystem didn't have Apple products. Instead of wondering, I figured, I may as well give it a go. I am in a lucky position to undertake this experiment without buying additional hardware, etc.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Apple to rename its operating systems

    The next Apple operating systems will be identified by year, rather than with a version number, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That means the current iOS 18 will give way to “iOS 26”, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is still private. Other updates will be known as iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26 and visionOS 26.

  • The Record ☛ Senators call on Trump admin to reinstate cyber review board for Salt Typhoon investigation

    When the CSRB was disbanded, it was in the middle of an investigation into the Salt Typhoon hacks involving Chinese-linked attackers penetrating the networks of at least nine major U.S. telecommunications companies.

    The senators — Mark Warner (D-VA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) — said the board’s dismissal is “depriving the public of a fuller accounting of the origin, scope, scale, and severity of” the Salt Typhoon compromises.

  • Canion dot Blog ☛ Komoot Enshittification Incoming

    Jan-Lukas Else brought to my attention that Komoot, a cycling (and other sports) app I had been trialling recently after seeing good reviews, has been acquired and many staff have been laid off.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • India Times ☛ Meta to use AI for 90% of privacy and safety checks: Report

      The shift has raised concerns internally. A former Meta executive told NPR that faster product rollouts with fewer checks could increase the risk of real-world harm. “Insofar as this process functionally means more stuff launching faster, with less rigorous scrutiny and opposition, it means you’re creating higher risks,” the former executive said on condition of anonymity.

    • Vox ☛ 3 ways artificial intelligence is already making the world better

      But as in so many other areas, the emphasis on the negative in artificial intelligence risks overshadowing what could go right — both in the future as this technology continues to develop and right now. As a corrective (and maybe just to ingratiate myself to our potential future robot overlords), here’s a roundup of one way in which AI is already making a positive difference in three important fields.

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ Why DeepSeek is cheap at scale but expensive to run locally

      This tradeoff comes from the batch size the inference provider chooses for the model: not batching inference inside an individual request, but batching inference across tens or hundreds of concurrent user requests. It’s a peculiar feature of transformer-based LLMs that computing a batch of completions at the same time is almost as fast as computing a single completion. Why is that?

    • Molly White ☛ OpenAI featured chatbot is pushing extreme surgeries to “subhuman” men

      If it sounds like it’s speaking a different language, that’s because it is. This model is using language and ideas from incel and other online manosphere communities, which are populated by men who have developed their own lexicon over years of forum conversations about their troubles with sex, dating, and the world. These GPTs are tailored versions of ChatGPT created by community members with custom instructions and data.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Microsoft and AI: spending billions to make millions

      A message costs one cent. So Copilot Studio is generating at most $2.5 million a month, or $30 million a year. Worldwide. Microsoft is forecast to spend $80 billion on AI in 2025.

      For 160,000 organisations, that’s 52 messages per day each. That’s a few tens of Copilot Studio actions a day, or one or two agent runs. That’s not using Copilot for real work — that’s playing with it to try it out.

    • [Old] (λ (x) (create x) '(knowledge)) ☛ 403: You are not authorized to access this material: Or using lots of little tools to aggressively reject the bots

      This is however, why I keep an out of band monitoring system in the first place. I need to be able to look at historic metrics to see what "normal" looks like. Otherwise it's all just guesswork. And boy did Zabbix have a story to tell me. To get a clear understanding of what I mean, lets take a quick look at the full dashboard from when I redid my Zabbix server after it failed earlier this year. Pew pew flashy graphs right? The important one here is the nginx requests and network throughput chart in the bottom left hand corner of the dashboard. Note that that's what "normal" traffic looks like for my tiny part of the internet.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘One day I overheard my boss saying: just put it in ChatGPT’: the workers who lost their jobs to AI | Artificial intelligence (AI)

      There are still no clear regulations covering its use in Poland. I’m not campaigning for regulation because I lost my job to AI: I’m campaigning because I’m worried about the ethics of all of this; about misinformation and deceiving listeners. I’m a realist – I’m not completely against AI. I think it can be used responsibly to do the boring bits of our job. But we can’t substitute complex thinking with machines. AI can’t replace our curiosity, creativity or emotional intelligence.

    • Futurism ☛ Companies Are Discovering a Grim Problem With "Vibe Coding"

      As Semafor reports, a critical security flaw has remained unfixed for months, allowing practically anyone to access critical information about the site's users, including names, email addresses, and even financial information.

  • Social Control Media

    • Terence Eden ☛ What’s up with this “Please add me on WhatsApp” robocall spam?

      Over the last few weeks, I've received several calls which all have the same modus operandi. A disembodied robotic voice tries to get me to connect on WhatsApp.

    • Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0123 Online reviews are dead

      After leaving my 3-star review, 'Harry' called me multiple times and tried to bribe me, with money, to change my review. (I have a conscience. I declined.)

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Aussie law makes big firms report ransom payments

      The requirements, as set out in the Cyber Security Bill 2024, kicked in on Friday, May 30. Any business turning over more than AUS $3 million ($1.92 million) must report ransomware payments within 72 hours to the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD).

    • The Record ☛ Hospitals in Maine, New Hampshire limit services after cyberattack on Catholic health org | The Record from Recorded Future News

      Covenant Health operates the three hospitals and multiple skilled nursing and rehabilitation centers, assisted living residences, and community-based health and elder care organizations across Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. The organization has nearly 6,000 employees.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • SANS ☛ A PNG Image With an Embedded Gift

      While hunting, I found an interesting picture. It's a PNG file that was concatenated with two interesting payloads. There are file formats that are good candidates to have data added at the end of the file. PNG is the case because the file format specifications says: [...]

    • Rachel ☛ rsync's defaults are not always enough

      The keen-eyed observers out there are probably already thinking "ooh, bit rot" and other things where one of the files has actually become corrupted while "at rest" for whatever reason. Those observers are right! That's totally a problem that you have to worry about, especially if you're using SSDs to hold your bits and those SSDs aren't always being powered.

      But no, this is something you have to worry about *beyond* that. This is about a "sneak path" that you probably didn't consider. I didn't.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Rolling Stone ☛ PBS Sues Trump Administration Over Executive Order to Cut Funding

      Days after National Public Radio (NPR) sued the Trump administration over attempts to cut off its federal funding, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has also filed a lawsuit, claiming that the proposed cuts violate the First Amendment.

    • Federal News Network ☛ Judge hits out at “chaotic” DOGE [sic] move into OPM systems

      They allege OPM violated federal law by granting “unvetted and untrained” DOGE [sic] agents broad access to multiple systems that house personal data on millions of individuals, including current and former federal employees.

    • Bert Hubert ☛ Yeah, it is on YouTube or LinkedIn and has cookies

      We often see journalists, politicians, writers, NGOs and even software developers writing good things on independence from (US) big tech proprietary platforms. But also quite often, their work is hosted or syndicated on the very platforms they decry. Frequently their sites have cookies and trackers too!

      And this grates. A lot.

    • Nick Heer ☛ On Browsers, A.I., and the Web

      A fantastic question. One could easily ask the same about why we would trade the vast surveillance of online advertising for the universal surveillance gestured toward by Perplexity, too. It is all familiar, but more — in ways we might appreciate, and ways we loathe.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-24 [Older] South Sudan crisis: What if the UN lifts its arms embargo?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-24 [Older] Nigeria: Armed gangs kill dozens in northeast

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-24 [Older] Indian forces shoot Pakistani 'intruder' crossing border

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-24 [Older] Hamburg knife attack: Suspect sent to psychiatric clinic

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-24 [Older] Dutch synagogues filled with life 80 years after WWII

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-24 [Older] 5 years since George Floyd murder, Black lives still matter

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Flag on the Moon

    This wasn't just a technological triumph. It was democracy's answer to the fundamental question of human organization. It was proof that you don't need to choose between freedom and greatness, between individual liberty and collective achievement. You can have both. In fact, you can only have both together.

    The Americans who reached the moon weren't just following orders from a central committee. They were free people choosing to unite around a common purpose—engineers and mathematicians and pilots and dreamers who could think freely, argue openly, innovate without permission. The mission succeeded not despite democracy but because of it.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Sir Keir Starmer ‘loses control’ as close to 1,200 migrants cross Channel in single day

    Saturday’s arrival numbers take the total so far this year to more than 14,600 – up more than 30 per cent on the same point last year and the highest numbers for the first five months in a year since small boats started crossing in 2018.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Fiber optic drones could play decisive role in Russia's summer offensive

    The combat effectiveness of fiber optic drones became increasingly apparent amid heavy fighting in Russia’s Kursk region during the early months of 2025. Russia’s campaign to push Ukrainian forces out of the Kursk region used large numbers of fiber optic drones to attack Ukraine’s flanks, cut supply lines, and cripple Ukrainian logistics. This eventually forced Ukrainian troops to retreat, ending an extended incursion into Russian territory that had been hugely embarrassing for Vladimir Putin. Ukrainian troops who fought in Kursk later reported that the only thing capable of stopping fiber optic drones was bad weather.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Iran is boosting its enriched uranium stockpile, UN watchdog says

    Iran has further increased its stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels, a confidential report by the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Saturday. In a separate report, the agency called on Tehran to urgently change course and comply with its years-long probe.

  • RFERL ☛ UN Watchdog Flags 'Serious Concern' Over Iran's Uranium Enrichment Surge

    It's a "short, technical step" from 60 percent to weapons-grade levels of 90 percent, AP reported. It cited the IAEA as saying about 42 kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium is theoretically enough to produce one atomic bomb if enriched further to 90 percent.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ UN watchdog says Iran had secret nuclear activities with undeclared materials; Israel issues warning

    Iran has increased its stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels, a confidential report by a UN nuclear watchdog said on Saturday, calling on Tehran to cooperate and comply with the agency's probe, reported Reuters.

  • France24 ☛ Iran carried out secret nuclear programme, has amassed more near weapons-grade uranium, IAEA says

    Iran carried out a secret nuclear programme with undeclared material and has conducted covert experiments, the United Nations nuclear watchdog has stated in a confidential report to member states. In another report, IAEA said Tehran has now increased its stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ IAEA warns Iran has upped enriched uranium production

    The IAEA quarterly report expressed "serious concern" over the estimated 408.6 kilograms (around 900 lbs) enriched to 60% as of May 17, marking an increase of 133.8 kilograms since the previous report in February.

    In theory, approximately 42 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium is enough to produce one atomic bomb if it is further enriched to 90%.

  • USMC ☛ Marine Corps to establish attack drone competition

    Before then, the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team will participate in the U.S. Military Drone Crucible Championships. That event is hosted by the U.S. National Drone Association from June 30 to July 3 in Florida.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Drew Breunig ☛ Using ‘Slop Forensics’ to Determine Model Ancestry

    According to Sam, his tool “generats a ‘slop profile’ for each model…then use[s] a bioinformatics tool to infer lineage trees, based on the similarity of the slop profiles.” In a nutshell, by generating and analyzing creative writing output from each model, fingerprints based on the frequent and/or unique phrases used can be constructed and compared.

• Environment

  • Nebraska Examiner ☛ One of state's oldest trees — tourist attraction 'Old Wolf Oak' — has died

    But Nebraska Game and Parks Commission officials say drought conditions in eastern Nebraska have created large areas of dead or declining mature trees, including the stately oak.

    The past two years have seen extreme drought across Nebraska, officials said. While native species like the bur oak are drought-tolerant, prolonged drought causes dieback in the canopy and root systems, weakening tree defenses.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Newt

    Because although it’s not a very big pond — about 3 meters by 2, maximum depth about 70 cm — it has very quickly and suddenly filled up with life. The first water skater appeared literally on day one. Now there are about a dozen of them. We’ve also picked up water beetles, a couple of aquatic snails, some little swimming shrimp-like things, and several of these guys: [...]

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Meduza ☛ At least seven killed in Russian train derailment amid unverified reports of explosion — Meduza

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-24 [Older] France: Power outage hits Cannes region during film fest

    • Bruce Perens ☛ How to Burglarize a Forest River Trailer

      So, what should you do? First, don’t replace your RV door lock with an electronic combination lock. While these add a combination with up to 10 digits, that you would think might be more secure, they also include the same poor-security mechanical lock as a backup, which can entirely bypass the combination keypad. If you look at the replacement keys they sell, they generally offer no more than 60 different key codes. Hopefully these locks don’t admit the master key.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Fusion project uses 3D-printed models to streamline assembly and reduce risk

      The 19-foot toroidal field (TF) magnet carries up to 4 million amps of electric current to stabilize and confine the superhot plasma in fusion experiments. It will eventually connect to 12 TF coils on the outside of the vacuum vessel. Wrapped around it like a slinky is the ohmic heating (OH) coil, a 4-kilovolt magnet that induces an electric field, which drives an electric current into the vessel and helps to heat the plasma.

    • Data Swamp ☛ How to trigger a command on Linux when disconnected from power

      When using a laptop connected to power most of the time, you may want it to power off once it gets disconnected, this can be really useful if you use it in a public area like a bar or a train. The idea is to protect the laptop if it gets stolen while in use and unlocked.

      Here is how to proceed on Linux, using a trigger on an udev rule looking for a change in the power_supply subsystem.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • YLE ☛ Metsähallitus: Record high number of Saimaa ringed seal pups born this spring

      The conservation programme — which yielded a previous-record high number of births in 2023 — involves Metsähallitus experts working alongside volunteers from WWF Finland to make the Saimaa region as optimal as possible for the seals' breeding season.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-24 [Older] The dirty secrets behind Myanmar's rare-earths boom

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-24 [Older] Ethnic Hungarian, Moldovan voters saved Romania's democracy

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-25 [Older] US: Cheeto Mussolini suspends planned 50% tariffs on EU

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-25 [Older] Venezuelans head to polls as opposition urges boycott

  • Semafor Inc ☛ ‘If we don’t innovate, we die’: Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on reviving a 30-year-old dot-com star

    Yet, as Lanzone likes to remind people, the company is still one of the [Internet]’s five busiest destinations, with 3 billion visits last month according to Similarweb — more than the traffic to Amazon. Nearly 90% of online Americans visit Yahoo each month, and almost half of them are Millennials or Gen Z, according to Comscore, which says Yahoo has America’s No. 1 finance site, the country’s second-biggest news and email offerings, and its third-busiest sports site. “We were able to pick up this incredible asset that, if you took the name Yahoo off of it, is one of a kind,” Lanzone says, adding that Apollo picked it up for a “one-time-only, incredible price.”

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Hindustan Times ☛ Trump shares wild conspiracy theory suggesting Biden was killed in 2020, replaced by a clone

    • [Repeat] Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Misinformation casts shadow on US-China trade truce

      But an alternate reality [sic] is unfolding across social media platforms, including China’s Douyin and Weibo, where a surge of falsehoods is fueling anti-American sentiment that could undermine the fragile truce.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-24 [Older] Dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi wins best film at Cannes

  • NDTV ☛ Sharmistha Panoli Arrest: Disgrace For Freedom Of Speech: Dutch MP Geert Wilders Slams Influencer's Arrest

    Kolkata Police yesterday arrested Sharmistha Panoli, a 22-year-old law student, over social media videos in which she used abusive and communally-charged language and also targeted Bollywood actors for not speaking out during Operation Sindoor, India's counterstrike to the Pahalgam terror attack that left 26 innocents dead.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Contributor: Three ways the government can silence speech without banning it

    Today, however, the federal government rarely tries to censor speech so crudely. It has less blatant but very effective ways to suppress dissent. The current actions of the Trump administration show how government can silence speakers without censoring them.

    My quarter century of research and writing about 1st Amendment rights has explored the varied tools that governments use to smother free expression. Among the present administration’s chosen tools: making institutions stop or change their advocacy to get government benefits; inducing self-censorship through intimidation; and molding the government’s own speech to promote official ideology.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Pivot to AI ☛ The UK will totally replace two-thirds of junior civil servants with AI chatbots, says the chatbot

    Politico filed a Freedom of Information request. DSIT wouldn’t give Politico details of its full model because it was “highly complex” and answering the FOI request would exceed “cost and resource limits” — which sounds a bit like they don’t understand it either. But they’re working on a releasable version!

  • New Yorker ☛ Trump’s Playbook to Cripple “60 Minutes” and the Press

    Lesley Stahl joined CBS News just in time to cover the Watergate scandal, and went on to become its White House correspondent for three Presidential Administrations. Since 1991, she has been a correspondent for “60 Minutes,” and has reported, in recent years, from Afghanistan, Rwanda, Taiwan, and Bhutan. Stahl is, with thirteen Emmy awards, the senior journalist at the most prestigious news program in television, and, as its owners move to placate the Trump Administration, she is witness to its moment of greatest peril.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Trump admin likely violated Constitution in bid to deport Columbia University activist, judge says

    Farbiarz’s ruling says Rubio likely overstepped his authority when he invoked a rarely used provision of federal law called section 1227 to target Khalil and other student activists for deportation. The statute allows for the deportation of non-citizens if the secretary of state determines their “presence or activities … would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Pete Brown ☛ Not ordering stuff from Amazon

  Even so, I feel like it is not the end of the world. I think the problem with Amazon is not that it exists, but rather that it is ubiquitous and that for so many people, it is the only place they buy anything. I less bad that I order one or two things from Amazon every few months when I regularly see five or ten Amazon boxes at a time on my neighbors’ porches.

• Copyrights

  • Rolling Stone ☛ How Taylor Won

    It can’t be overstated what a victory this is for her, or the ramifications for other artists. This is the independence that generations of musicians have fantasized about, but never gotten close to seeing. “Long Live” hits different today. “New Romantics” hits different today. “Ours” hits different, so does “Dear John,” “All Too Well,” “I Did Something Bad,” and damn, don’t even start about “A Place in This World.” “It’s Time to Go.” All those songs feel bigger right now. It’s one of those “remember this moment” occasions. The patriarchy is having an extremely fucked day. Taylor won. How did this happen?

  • Torrent Freak ☛ IPTV Pirate Fights 25-30 Years Prison, "Facially Absurd" U.S. Govt Calculations

    Five men found guilty of criminal copyright infringement in connection with pirate streaming site Jetflicks remain free after being convicted in 2024. In a sentencing memorandum filed at a Las Vegas court, counsel for group leader Kristopher Dallmann describes the government's loss calculations as "facially absurd" in a case featuring "an egregious incidence of the trial tax problem." The sentencing guideline range for Dallmann is an unprecedented 25 to 30 years.