Leftovers

• Medium ☛ Simon Quigley: Willpower is a muscle

  “The most frustrating thing in the world for me, is when normal people judge a man like myself on what it really takes to extract greatness from nothing. It takes every bit of who you are.”
  — David Goggins

  Willpower is a muscle, just like lifting weights. Just like a muscle, in order to build it up, you must actively do things you do not want to do.

  If you’re an athlete, you already understand this to an extent. When you’re training to run a marathon, you’re not training your physical muscles, as much as you are training your mind to overcome that barrier. When you progressively run more distance, and perhaps some days take it a bit easy, that’s a muscle.

  Still don’t believe me? Don’t worry, the neuroscience is still new. It’s entirely possible I’m wrong. :)

• Aram Zucker-Scharff ☛ Code is a joy

  This time around, let us use the joy of creation to bury them. This time around, let's break the cycle the only possible way: by working for everyone, by bringing everyone along. By avoiding the fist, ignoring the invisible hand, and instead linking arms with each other to rise above.

• Seth Godin ☛ What do we do when it breaks?

  Each choice has costs and benefits, and the useful approach is to enumerate them.

• Sean Goedecke ☛ John Henry and the large language model

  I’m not trying to convince you that LLMs will eventually become super-intelligent software engineers. They will or they won’t. What I am saying is that in the battle between skilled craftspeople and automated mass-production - whether it’s about drilling holes, sewing fabric, making cars, or writing software - the automated mass-production typically wins, no matter how proud the craftspeople are of their skills. It might be sensible to consider what you’ve got going for you besides producing artisanal hand-crafted lines of code.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Trump's Budget for NASA Is Absolutely Horrifying

    The cuts — which would drag the budget to its lowest point since 1961, SpaceNews points out, when adjusted for inflation — would result in the firing of roughly one-third of all civil servants.

    The budget would also slash the space agency's science budget in almost half, "nothing short of an extinction-level event for space science and exploration in the United States," as Planetary Society chief of space policy Casey Dreier told Ars Technica in March.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ SA scientists want Musk's Starlink out of their space

    Scientists fear South Africa’s Square Kilometre Array (SKA-Mid), the world’s most powerful radio telescope together with another array co-hosted in Australia, will have their sensitive space observations distorted by Starlink’s low-orbiting satellites.

    “It will be like shining a spotlight into someone’s eyes, blinding us to the faint radio signals from celestial bodies,” Federico Di Vruno, co-chair of International Astronomical Union Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky, said in a telephone interview.

• Career/Education

  • Futurism ☛ AI Is Destroying a Generation of Students

    "I think generative AI is incredibly destructive to our teaching of university students," Robert W. Gehl, Ontario research chair of digital governance for social justice at York University in Toronto, told 404. Gehl noted how institutions collaborate with companies like Google and Microsoft to push their AI tools on students, undermining teachers who try to limit its use in the classroom. "A student might hear 'don't use generative AI' from a prof but then log on to the university's Microsoft suite, which then suggests using Copilot to sum up readings or help draft writing."

  • Lusaka ZM ☛ Zambia : Zambia Needs More Teachers, Not Just Free Education

    The UPND government, under the leadership of President Hakainde Hichilema and through Education Minister Douglas Syakalima, has loudly celebrated the introduction of free education. Yet behind the fanfare lies a disturbing truth: our classrooms are overcrowded, and our children are learning in chaos because there simply aren’t enough teachers to teach them.

    Free education without adequate staffing is not a solution, it’s a publicity stunt. It’s a policy written in headlines but abandoned in implementation.

  • InfoWorld ☛ AI didn’t kill Stack Overflow

    Whether the culture of helping each other will survive in this new age of LLMs is a real question. Is human helping still necessary? Or can it all be reduced to inputs and outputs? Maybe there’s a new role for humans in generating accurate data that feeds the LLMs. Maybe we’ll evolve into gardeners of these vast new tracts of synthetic data.

    But returning to Stack Overflow and the community it once represented: Is there some radical resurrection in its future? Before AI entered the scene, it was clear Stack Overflow needed to back out of a dead-end street of its own creation. It’s possible the site could have returned to greatness by embracing what once made it great: the community and culture of software development.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Denmark's 'Efterskoles,' Where Teens Spend Year Finding Themselves

    Teens who do not attend an "efterskole" start their final three years of secondary school straight away. Danish students also have the option to do a "10th" year of school after their compulsory nine years -- which is also not graded.

  • AJ Bourg ☛ If I Were President…

    Once they’ve served their 2 years, they can continue on indefinitely in their chosen program or swap. Or they can exit the program, and in gratitude for their service, we would fund them to attend college (details of which I’d be flexible on, free community college? Free four years? Public? Private? To be worked out with Congress).

  • Crooked Timber ☛ On The Political Roots of Academic Freedom

    The modern university is in a grave crisis in today’s imperial core. During a crisis it is instructive to return to one’s foundation and, thereby, reorient oneself. That foundation is Authentica habita, dating from 1155.[1] It was promulgated by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1122 – 1190), also known as Frederick I. This document had legal status throughout the Holy Roman Empire (it is known to us because it was included in new editions of the Justinian Code then recently rediscovered in the West.)

• Hardware

  • Digital Camera World ☛ SmallRig launches a compact RGB COB LED light that punches way above its weight

    SmallRig has launched the RC 220C RGB COB LED Video Light – and it’s shaping up to be a serious lighting solution for filmmakers and photographers who need power, control and versatility without dragging around a bulky rig.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ After two months using this phone, I’m perilously close to leaving my compact camera at home

    However, slip the 15 Ultra into Xiaomi’s Photography Kit and the phone morphs into something that feels alarmingly close to my compact: a half-press shutter button, zoom rocker and exposure dial enable me work by touch instead of diving into menus and breaking my flow.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Why photographers are ditching branded lenses for low-cost indie alternatives

    The introduction of adapters, starting with the Sigma MC-11 Mount Converter, was a game-changer, allowing photographers to transition to Sony’s E-mount system while retaining their existing Canon EF lenses. This not only helped bridge the gap between old and new systems but also showed the potential for third-party manufacturers to play a role in shaping the future of lens ecosystems.

  • Tim Bray ☛ Perfectly Different Colors

    This considers how two modern cameras handle a difficult color challenge, illustrated by photos of a perfect rose and a piano.

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ Why Another Typewriter?

    In addition to answers from the collector’s perspective, bonus points for answers that are also directed to answering this question which comes from your significant other who doesn’t understand your obsession. (I’m also posing this on the day that I’ve sadly chosen for family sanity to move 20 machines from the house out of immediate sight into the garage. 😔)

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ Therapy Chatbot Tells Recovering Addict to Have a Little Meth as a Treat

    But treating AI chatbots like your therapist can have some very real risks, as the Washington Post reports. In a recent paper, Google's head of AI safety, Anca Dragan, and her colleagues found that the chatbots went to extreme lengths to tell users what they wanted to hear.

    In one eyebrow-raising example, Meta's large language model Llama 3 told a user who identified themself to it as a former addict named Pedro to indulge in a little methamphetamine — an incredibly dangerous and addictive drug — to get through a grueling workweek.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Army medics moving blood to the frontlines with drones

    The Army has long relied on the bravery of helicopter pilots or fast-moving ground vehicles to get medical resources into the hands of medics treating wounded soldiers on the frontlines, including blood supplies. In a recent exercise held in Lithuania, that meant moving blood supplies three to four kilometers, which could take five soldiers 20 to 30 minutes in a field ambulance.

  • International Business Times ☛ Facebook Accused of Exploiting Teenage Girl Insecurities — Shows Beauty Ads After They Delete Selfies

    A former insider, Sarah Wynn-Williams, reveals that in 2017 the company was exploring ways to expand its ad targeting to young teens aged 13 to 17 across Facebook and Instagram. The goal was to reach adolescents during their most impressionable years, especially when they were experiencing self-image concerns.

  • Robert Birming ☛ You have time

    Sure, I had another customer to get to, but it really wasn’t that urgent. There was room for a Swedish fika moment.

• Proprietary

  • The Atlantic ☛ Big Tech’s AI Endgame Is Coming Into Focus

    That these tech companies can even realistically have such colossal ambitions to build everything apps is a result of their existing dominance. The industry has spent years collecting information about our relationships, work, hobbies, and interests—all of which is becoming grist for powerful AI tools. A key feature of these everything apps is that they promise to be individually tailored, drawing on extensive personal data to provide, in theory, a more seamless experience. Your past search history, and eventually your emails, can inform AI Mode’s responses: When I typed line up into AI Mode, I got the “line up” for the day’s New York Mets game (the Mets are my favorite baseball team). When I typed the same phrase into traditional Google Search, I got a definition.

  • James Stanley ☛ The web program manifesto

    A "web application" is a system. It has a backend, maybe a database, user accounts, cookie consent, analytics. Probably the frontend uses some sort of build system or web packer, maybe TypeScript, almost certainly has a multi-hundred-megabyte node_modules directory. But not everything has to be like this. You don't need all this stuff. I think there is an easy trap to fall into where you go down the path of starting projects with create-react-app and paint yourself into a corner of ever-increasing complexity. In this post I'm going to argue for web programs as a better way.

  • The Local DK ☛ Danish cities drop Microsoft over Trump policies and financial concerns

    “If, theoretically, relations with the US were to deteriorate, you could be concerned that Microsoft would be forced to shut everything down,” elected official Henrik Appel Espersen, chair of the city’s audit committee, told newspaper Politiken.

    “That risk is real. And if we suddenly can’t send emails or communicate within our systems, we’re in trouble,” he added.

  • XDA ☛ WSL is designed to keep Linux users happy on Windows, but it helped me switch to Linux instead [Ed: Well, it's an anti-Linux tool]

    I've been a Windows user since I first laid hands on a keyboard, but since my childhood, I've branched out and dabbled with every operating system one could think of. Even still, most of my work and play occurs on Mac and Windows PCs, respectively. Linux was the odd one left out, and it's unfortunate because I love the idea of Linux. Open-source, ultimate customizability, and absolutely zero bloat just sounds like total bliss, but I've always delayed any kind of swap for two main reasons: comfort and compatibility.

  • The Street ☛ Jim Cramer sends a blunt message on Microsoft layoffs [Ed: Of course his message was full of BS, as usual. Microsoft has financial problems.]

    Tariffs have sent the business world into an uproar as some of the world's biggest companies struggle to pivot the way they function in order to avoid the brunt of the new levies.

    Because of the unpredictable climate, businesses are hesitant to plan ahead, with many altering their guidance for the year. In the meanwhile, consumers are already spending less and pulling back, also unsure how to behave.

    On top of all this chaos, big companies continue to make staff cuts. Disney announced its fourth round of layoffs in less than a year on June 2 as a part of CEO Bob Iger's 2023 goal to cut Disney's costs by $7.5 billion.

  • Bloomberg ☛ Disney, Microsoft Announce Massive Layoffs

    Walt Disney Co. is laying off several hundred employees across its film and TV businesses, affecting marketing, publicity, casting, development, and corporate financial operations. Microsoft is cutting even more jobs after cutting 6,000 jobs last month. Bloomberg's Caroline Hyde reports. (Source: Bloomberg)

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Business Insider Did Something So Stupid With AI That We’re Reeling

      Though BI didn't admit the source for those phony titles either in leaked documents or in requests for comment from Semafor, it doesn't take a deep investigation to figure out where they almost certainly came from — especially given that the company is now investing in AI, and is planning to lay off 21 percent of its workforce amid its pivot to using the hallucination-happy technology.

      In a memo to staff announcing the layoffs that later published on its website, BI CEO Barbara Peng said that the company is "going all-in on AI" and experiencing growing pains as it does.

    • Chris Rackauckas ☛ Machine learning with hard constraints: Neural Differential-Algebraic Equations (DAEs) as a general formalism

      We recently released a new manuscript Semi-Explicit Neural DAEs: Learning Long-Horizon Dynamical Systems with Algebraic Constraints where we showed a way to develop neural networks where any arbitrary constraint function can be directly imposed throughout the evolution equation to near floating point accuracy. However, in true academic form it focuses directly on getting to the point about the architecture, but here I want to elaborate about the mathematical structures that surround the object, particularly the differential-algebraic equation (DAE), how its various formulations lead to the various architectures (such as stabilized neural ODEs), and elaborate on the other related architectures which haven’t had a paper yet but how you’d do it (and in what circumstances they would make sense).

    • Henry Desroches ☛ Economics & labor rights in AI skepticism | Henry From Online

      There’s a growing attitude in the technology industry that LLM technology is, or will be, the next great innovation to our work. Business owners and workers alike seem to be in unlikely agreement: owners are thrilled at the prospect of making their businesses more efficient and productive, and workers are thrilled at the prospect of simplifying their workstreams or making their jobs easier. It’s a surprising alliance in the prevailing economic system.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Let’s put more AI slop into advertising!

      But ad agencies have been trying out generative AI since ChatGPT exploded in 2022. It’s been three years. If AI slop is just the thing for ads … why aren’t most ads AI slop already?

      There doesn’t seem to be a push from clients demanding their agency put some visible AI into their ads. Unless it’s really an ad for generative AI, whatever the supposed product is — like Coca Cola’s Christmas ad last year that was really created to push AI slop internally and put the fear into the creatives.

    • SlopHole ☛ AI coding assistants destroy the virtue of laziness (and possibly impatience too)

      This is my secret. When I get handed a feature request that would require complex and repetitive code, I don’t put my nose to the grindstone and do it. I fake work for an hour while daydreaming about entity-relationship diagrams until a flash of inspiration hits me and I redesign the schema.

    • Tracy Durnell ☛ Generative AI and the Business Borg aesthetic

      Currently, generative AI is shunned by many artists and writers, the traditional arbiters of good taste and culture, because it has been developed through the theft of their labor. But tech CEOs stand to make (even bigger) fortunes if they can convince people that genAI doesn’t signify bad taste, and make it seem like an irrevocable fact of life, like spam emails and text scammers. It’s being deployed upon us with the same lockstep corporate solidarity that forced us to pay fees for checked luggage on flights (younger folks, before 2008 your bag used to be included with your ticket! Stowing your carry-on wasn’t a competitive sport back in the day.).

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Fighting the AI scraper bots at Pivot to AI and RationalWiki

      We’ve covered the AI scraper bots before. These just hit web pages over and over, at high speed, to scrape new training data for LLMs. They’re an absolute plague across the whole World Wide Web and a pain in the backside for the sysadmins running the servers.

  • Social Control Media

    • International Business Times ☛ How Social Media Turned Mount Etna's Eruption into a Viral Adventure — and Why It Matters

      But there are dangers. The same platforms that promote information can also distort it. Sensationalised content often overshadows scientific context or public safety messages. Some viral clips showed individuals dangerously close to active lava flows, raising concerns over reckless behaviour for the sake of digital fame.

      Moreover, the flood of dramatic imagery can desensitise viewers to the real human and environmental impact behind the spectacle.

    • Jacky Alciné ☛ Clocking My Autochattering in Relation to it All

      Auto-chattering is effectively what I'm doing now: writing with the intent of being read but not giving much space for hearing feedback as I do it. Microblogging platforms provide a way to introduce that discourse, indirectly with their size constraints (that can be curtailed by the use of imagery — another subjective form of communication) but that, in my experience, has led to folks becoming even less willing to hear anyone out. It can devolve into a shouting match or a reinforcement of the stances made. It's easy to blame the platforms for causing this — inanimate, non-corporeal entities like the profiles we engage online. But that's part of the dehumanizing aspect of the Web: that if there's a person behind it; we dramatically reduce our ability to understand by labelling them a bot (which they might be), deranged (which isn't improbable either) or a unexpected deviant of online discourse worthy of blocking (which is needed at times). The whole "social" part of social media becomes a bit of a neo-tribal[2] attempt to not be excluded from the "good timeline", whichever one that might be[3].

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Open Source Initiative ☛ Open Forum for AI, Open Source Initiative respond to White House on Hey Hi (AI) R&D strategy [Ed: Openwashing and lobbying by Microsoft]

      The Open Forum for Hey Hi (AI) (OFAI) and OSI submitted feedback to the White House in response to its request for information on the development of a 2025 National Hey Hi (AI) R&D Strategic Plan.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Opsmate Inc ☛ GoDaddy Issues Thousands of Certificates That Don't Work in Safari (again) - SSLMate Blog

      This problem went unnoticed for almost a full year, until last week when GoDaddy began logging precertificates to these logs with expiration dates between 2026-07-01 and 2026-07-07, and embedding the returned SCTs in the certificates given to site operators. Unfortunately for the site operators unlucky enough to receive such a certificate, Apple's certificate validator checks that the expiration date is within the log's range before accepting an SCT. Since the published upper bound of these logs is 2026-07-01, any SCTs for certificates expiring after that are rejected, causing the certificate to fail validation.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • NYOB ☛ CRIF has a ‘score’ for almost everyone in Austria. noyb needs support for a potential class action lawsuit

      CRIF has a ‘score’ for almost everyone in Austria. noyb needs support for a potential class action lawsuit

      noyb wants to scientifically examine CRIF's score and its significance – and potentially launch class action lawsuit. We need your help!

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong police mull access to gov’t departments, MTR surveillance feeds, reports say

      Hong Kong police may gain access to surveillance footage from government departments and the railway operator, which would be included in its “SmartView” CCTV programme, according to media reports.

    • El País ☛ The covert method Meta uses to track mobile browsing without consent — even in incognito mode or with a VPN

      Acar began searching online to see if anyone else had noticed the same thing. He found some Facebook developer forums where others were complaining about it. “But Facebook didn’t respond, and then someone added: ‘I don’t see it anymore.’ But it wasn’t that Facebook had stopped — they had just switched to an even more hidden method,” Acar says.

    • RTL ☛ 'Data at risk': Pornhub owner pressures France over age verification law

      French visitors to the Pornhub and Youporn, adult sites operated by parent company Aylo, will from Wednesday be greeted with a message denouncing the country's age verification requirements, the company said.

      By showing the message rather than Pornhub's vast library of adult content, Aylo "is communicating directly with the French people to tell them how dangerous, how potentially privacy-infringing, and how ineffective the French law is," Solomon Friedman of Aylo's owner, Ethical Capital Partners, told reporters in a video call on Tuesday.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Pornhub blocks access in France to protest age restrictions

      Instead of porn, the company will only display a statement on France's new regulations that require porn sites to verify that their users are 18 or older, a Pornhub spokesperson said on Tuesday.

      Alyo's sites, like other porn sites available in France, has until June 7, 2025, to implement a rigorous new age verification standard.

    • NYOB ☛ CRIF scores almost everyone in Austria. noyb needs support for a potential class action lawsuit

      The credit agency CRIF collects personal data from millions of people in Austria and assesses their creditworthiness with a score between 250 and 700. For most people, this score is based on just a few pieces of information, such as address, age and gender. If the score is too low, those affected are unable to sign contracts with many companies, such as mobile phone providers like Magenta and Drei, electricity providers like Verbund, and banks like Volksbank Wien. All of this happens behind peoples' backs and, in our opinion, probably violates the GDPR. This affects virtually everyone living in Austria. We want to scientifically examine CRIF's score and its significance – and assess the options for a potential class action lawsuit. If you're living in Austria, we need your help!

    • New York Times ☛ Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans

      In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.

  • Confidentiality

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Secret History of Trump’s Private Cellphone

      But Trump appeared unperturbed by the news, two people familiar with the episode told us, on the condition of anonymity so they could speak frankly. For more than a decade, the once and future president had been warned of the enormous risks he took—as perhaps the top global target of foreign intelligence services—by using a personal iPhone with a broadly circulated number to keep in touch with dozens of friends and colleagues. His phone was a lifeline, though. He wasn’t going to give it up.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Germany: 20,000 evacuated in Cologne as WWII bombs defused

    Large areas of the city center of Cologne were closed off on Wednesday as experts prepared to defuse three bombs left over from World War II, which ended 80 years ago.

  • Security Week ☛ Mikko Hypponen Leaves Anti-Malware Industry to Fight Against Drones

    Hypponen now joins Sensofusion, a Helsinki-based company that specializes in advanced anti-drone systems. The company’s products are used worldwide by military and law enforcement for passive drone detection and response.

  • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ India is Harming its People by Acquiescing to the UAE

    Indeed, the growing Non-Resident Indian (NRI) diaspora in the Gulf, far from empowering India, has increased its vulnerability by attaching increasingly critical economic indicators undergirding New Delhi's overarching growth and development to the UAE. As such, in pursuit of greater foreign direct investment, Modi's government has consistently acquiesced to Emirati demands.

  • RFERL ☛ How Ukraine's 'Spiderweb' Drone Attacks May Change Modern Warfare

    On June 1, videos of bomb-laden quadcopters launching from trucks as fires blazed nearby spread through social media after Ukraine’s Security Services launched daylight strikes on air bases throughout Russia that destroyed many of the Kremlin’s long-range aircraft.

    Those videos are undoubtedly now being studied in military planning rooms.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ Europe’s Pearl Harbor Moment Might Come Too Late

    A few days ago, Ukraine’s “Operation Spiderweb” struck Russia deep behind enemy lines in an impressively audacious attack that a number of Russian Military Bloggers called Russia’s “Pearl Harbor.” And it’s very clear that the entire Russian Federation is on war footing. But today, three years after Russia launched the greatest conflict in Europe since 1945, the West remains drowsy—unable or unwilling to make a decisive move towards Ukraine’s victory.

    Russia’s aggression has not been subtle, but if the invasion of Ukraine and the hybrid attacks on NATO territory aren’t enough to trigger NATO’s Pearl Harbor alarm clock, we should ask ourselves a question—what would it take for the West to wake up?

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Trump official who shut down counter-Russia agency has links to Kremlin

    A senior official who dismantled the US government’s Russian disinformation unit is married to a Russian woman with links to the Kremlin, The Telegraph can reveal.

    Darren Beattie has provoked alarm within the State Department since being appointed in February for his ardent pro-Russian views.

    He has been noted for his focus on destroying the agency tasked with tackling Kremlin propaganda.

  • DeSmog ☛ MAPPED: 70 Percent of Trump’s Cabinet Tied to Project 2025 Groups

    More than 50 high-level Trump administration officials have links to groups behind the Heritage Foundation-backed plan, a DeSmog analysis found. That number includes many of President Trump’s closest advisors, from Stephen Miller to the recently departing Elon Musk. It also includes a full 70 percent of his cabinet.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Seditionists: Yarvin and the Machinery of Democratic Collapse

    Let me begin with the bitter satisfaction of vindication mixed with the horror of accuracy—and the searing contempt for those who could have prevented this catastrophe but chose the luxury of ignorance instead.

    Four months ago, I wrote The Plot Against America, documenting how a dangerous ideology born from libertarian fever dreams had metastasized from internet forums into the beating heart of American government. Every tech oligarch who now pretends surprise, every venture capitalist who dismissed these warnings as irrelevant, every status-hungry fool who acts like a weathervane in their social circle—they all had access to the same information. They all chose to look away.

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ NATO urging Europe to ramp up air defenses fivefold in face of Russian threat, Bloomberg reports

    NATO defense ministers will discuss the air defense boost at a gathering in Brussels on June 5, sources told Bloomberg on the condition of anonymity. A number of proposed defense increases are on the agenda for the meeting, which will set the stage for the NATO summit in The Hague on June 24-25.

    The air defense target is a collective goal for NATO's European members, with varying levels from individual states, sources said. The timeframe for the fivefold increase is not yet clear.

  • The Walrus ☛ The US Badly Needs Rare Minerals and Fresh Water. Guess Who Has Them?

    Canada’s rich deposits of uranium, nickel, potash, and a host of obscure strategic metals, including REEs, could help explain Trump’s persistent but cryptic threats to make Canada the fifty-first US state. His repeated characterization of Canada’s vast amounts of fresh water as a “faucet” that can be activated at will by parched Americans does nothing to dispel the threat.

  • New York Times ☛ Opinion | Is Civil War Coming to Europe?

    For years, figures associated with the French right and French military have warned of an impending civil conflict driven by the country’s failure to assimilate immigrants from the Muslim world. (The great reactionary novelist Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission” famously imagines this war being averted by the sudden conversion of French elites to Islam.) Lately there has been a similar discussion around Britain touched off by an essay by the military historian David Betz that argues that multicultural Britain is in danger of tearing itself apart, and lately taken up by the political strategist, Brexit-campaign architect and former Boris Johnson adviser Dominic Cummings in an essay warning that British elites are increasingly fearful of organized violence from nativists and radicalized immigrants alike.

  • France24 ☛ In Indian Kashmir, crisis simulations prepare civilians for further border clashes

    Firefighters and civil defence teams conducted a mock drill in Indian-administered Kashmir as part of the government’s ‘Operation Shield,’ aimed at training civilians in safety procedures ahead of a possible military conflict. This comes weeks after India and Pakistan exchanged missile and drone strikes, pushing the nuclear-armed neighbours to the edge of full-scale war.

  • Defence Web ☛ 21 strikes in 4 months: Africom escalates pressure on ISIS-Somalia

    In its ongoing campaign to contain jihadist threats in the Horn of Africa, US Africa Command (Africom) announced the execution of a precision airstrike targeting ISIS-Somalia on Sunday, 1 June.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Variety ☛ Is That Clint Eastwood Interview Real? Journalist Says It's Old Quotes

    In a statement to Variety, Elisabeth Sereda, a journalist and longtime member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, says that she was tapped by Austrian publication Kurier to write a tribute timed to Eastwood’s 95th birthday on May 31. Sereda says she pulled quotes from various Eastwood interviews conducted by the HFPA, dating back to 1976.

  • [Old] CNN ☛ The story behind the iconic ‘Tank Man’ photo

    Widener, a photographer with the Associated Press, was focusing his camera on a line of tanks in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square when out of the blue came this man in a white shirt and dark trousers, carrying what appeared to be shopping bags.

    Widener thought the man was going to mess up the composition of his frame.

    Little did he know that he was about to make one of the most iconic photos in history.

• Environment

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump’s FEMA Chief Reportedly Didn’t Know the US Has a Hurricane Season

    The comment was made the day after hurricane season began in the Atlantic Ocean, with the season officially ending in November. Some researchers suggest that the hurricane season is lengthening, however, as the climate crisis drives earlier and later storms, while also making storms stronger than they would be otherwise.

    Indeed, forecasters for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have predicted above-normal hurricane activity for 2025. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people are killed by hurricanes each year in the U.S.

  • The Atlantic ☛ FEMA is not prepared

    Who manages the disaster if the disaster managers are the disaster?

    That’s a question that the people of the United States may have to answer soon. As hurricane season begins in the U.S., the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in disarray.

  • Reuters ☛ FEMA staff baffled after head said he was unaware of US hurricane season, sources say

    Staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency were left baffled on Monday after the head of the U.S. disaster agency said he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season, according to four sources familiar with the situation.

  • Axios ☛ Canada fires hit US air quality: Smoke sparks alerts, EPA warnings

    "For the first time, it's not a fire in one region, we have fires in every region. That is a sign of a changing climate that we are going to have to adapt to."

  • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ EU On Track for 54% Emissions Cut by 2030, Sets Sights on 90% by 2040

    Looking ahead, more than 150 businesses and investors signed a joint letter last week, urging the EU to adopt a minimum 90% emission reduction target by 2040. The letter calls on legislators to integrate the new target “into a comprehensive industrial strategy guided by a ‘competitive sustainability’ approach, allowing the EU to lead the global race of development of sustainable industrial ecosystems and industries,” the University of Cambridge writes.

  • Politico ☛ EU roughly on track to hit 2030 emissions goal, Brussels says

    The European Commission, the EU’s executive, based the conclusions on countries’ updated climate plans, which governments have been filing in recent months. The assessment — which shows the EU on track to cut 54 percent of emissions by 2030 — reflects progress for the bloc, which previously said it was at risk of falling short of its 2030 goal based on prior climate plans.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ New PFAS guidelines spark more ‘do not eat’ warnings for Michigan fish

    The change triples the number of waterbodies where officials say anglers shouldn’t eat their catch

  • The Atlantic ☛ Humanity Can Quit Fossil Fuels—But Not Food

    The thing is, fossil fuels are only two-thirds of the climate problem. Even if we do quit them, we’ll never meet the emissions targets set by the Paris Agreement without addressing the other third. The challenge is food: what we eat, how we produce it, and the forests and other natural ecosystems we keep clearing to make room for more farms to make more food. And that’s mostly a land story about the relentless spread of crops and pastures that already cover two of every five acres of land on Earth, obliterating the wild landscapes that soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We have no idea how or when that story will end.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Mark Hamill on 'The Life of Chuck,' Trump and nearly losing his Malibu home

    Four months later, the hills around his home are still blackened and toxic. And it’s not just his neighborhood that feels scorched. To Hamill — one of Hollywood’s most outspoken and sharp-tongued Trump critics — the country itself feels battered, just months into a second term he sees as a dangerous backslide. For a man who embodied the triumph of good over evil nearly half a century ago, it’s not always easy to find a new hope.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Register UK ☛ Constellation, Meta ink deal to keep IL nuclear plant online

      Meta has signed a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy to keep the lights on at an Illinois nuke plant that was facing an uncertain future once state subsidies dry up in 2027.

      The deal, announced today by both Meta and Constellation, will keep the Clinton Clean Energy Center operating beyond the end of Illinois' zero-emission credit program in 2027, and includes a 30MW uprate that will boost the plant's total capacity to 1,121MW, according to the pair.

    • Vox ☛ Newark and the crisis in American air travel, explained

      To understand how we arrived at our current aviation crisis, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Darryl Campbell, an aviation safety writer for The Verge.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ In this corrupt age, a new [cryptocurrency] law should leave no loopholes

      But we’re living in 2025. The very idea of properly regulating finance, new or old, is under siege by the current administration, rendering the old delegation to agencies all but useless. For generations financial market regulation relied on independent regulators, insulated from economic and political pressures, to protect the integrity of markets for investors without fear or favor.

      But President Trump — by undermining agency independence, firing some regulators, browbeating others and appointing sycophants — has ended that era. At the same time, Trump’s deregulatory zealots have rescinded existing safeguards, purged agency staff and abandoned enforcement.

    • RTL ☛ 'Thank you for your commitment': Schwarzenegger surprises Vienna metro users with climate message

      "Here is your chief mobility officer Arnold Schwarzenegger talking to you" -- with this announcement the "Terminator" star and former governor of California surprised Vienna public transport users on Tuesday by hailing them as "climate action heroes".

      The Austrian Hollywood star is in town for an annual conference he organises on climate change.

    • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Is Realizing He Made a Huge Mistake

      But now that Tesla is facing an existential crisis, Musk is seemingly having second thoughts about Trump and the GOP's aggressive anti-clean energy policies.

    • Truthdig ☛ Beware the Supreme Court’s ‘Shadow Docket’ - Truthdig

      The Supreme Court’s ruling was issued on an expedited basis as part of a rapidly expanding and highly controversial set of truncated decisions known as the “shadow docket,” a term coined by University of Chicago professor William Baude in a 2015 law review article to describe emergency appeals that come before the court outside of its standard “merits” docket and that are typically resolved without complete briefing, oral arguments or detailed opinions. Although shadow-docket rulings are frequently used to lift, or “stay,” lower-court injunctions while further litigation continues, they often have the same practical effect as final decisions.

    • The Register UK ☛ Illicit [cryptocurrency]-miners pouncing on insecure DevOps tools

      Up to a quarter of all cloud users are at risk of having their computing resources stolen and used to illicitly mine for cryptocurrency, after crims cooked up a campaign that targets publicly accessible DevOps tools.

    • Futurism ☛ Tesla Employees Startled by Elon Musk's Confusion When He Returned to Tesla

      As Tesla slowly rotted from the inside over the past year or so, big name investors and higher-ups publicly signaled their frustration with their absentee CEO, leaving many wondering when — or if — he was coming back.

      The electric vehicle giant has been slumping hard lately, thanks to worldwide disgust with Elon Musk's extreme behavior, Donald Trump's wide-ranging tariffs, massive Tesla recalls, and the rising star of Chinese EV giant BYD.

  • Overpopulation

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Colorado River basin has lost nearly the equivalent of an underground Lake Mead

      The new study found that the depletion of water storage in the Colorado River basin has sped up in the past decade. Since 2015, the basin has been losing freshwater at a rate three times faster than in the decade before, driven mostly by groundwater depletion in Arizona.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Harvard University ☛ Social media fueled divisions. Teaming up may help heal.

    Algorithm-driven digital feeds have deepened the split between red and blue America. But a new online tool may help bring the country back together.

  • Annie Mueller ☛ Things Jesus taught

    As I witness the rise of Christianese in our political culture — specifically, as I witness the use of Christian terminology to defend illegal, inhumane, and immoral behaviors — I feel that we all need a mini-refresher course on the actual teachings of Jesus.

  • International Business Times ☛ Aussie Woman Stuck in Chinese Airport for 18 Hours After Making 1 Crucial Mistake

    Her story also raises questions about what happens when travellers lose essential documents before officially entering a country. Because Maddi never passed through customs, the Australian consulate could offer only limited assistance.

    'Being unable to be helped by the embassy due to a matter of metres is really hard,' she said. 'I hope no one else has to experience that.'

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Enders' Piracy Report Blames Big Tech; That's What Anti-Piracy Lobbyists Do

    A new Enders Analysis report describes piracy of live sports and premium TV as "industrial scale theft" that costs companies such as Sky and the Premier League billions every year. The report calls out Amazon for selling legal Fire TV devices too cheaply, while Google and Microsoft receive criticism for lacking interest in DRM. These talking points show that Enders has its finger on the industry's pulse. Founded by a veteran anti-piracy lobbyist of more than 20 years, that's to be expected.

  • Tracy Durnell ☛ Midlife rage

    Give me a party with energy, give me politicians who fight! Oh, for an opposition party 🥺 I don’t have to agree 100% with them, if they’d just have some gumption. Give me AOC energy, Shawn Fain energy, Pete Buttigieg (!) energy, Cory Booker energy, Chris Van Hollen energy, Kat Abughazaleh energy. Not whatever this pathetic excuse for “leadership” is. Walz had the energy and they told him to stuff it. Brilliant strategy guys.

  • European Commission ☛ Cybersecurity - peer review of National Cybersecurity Certification Authorities

    This act puts in place a mechanism for the peer review of National Cybersecurity Certification Authorities (NCCAs), as set out in the EU Cybersecurity Act (Regulation (EU) 2019/881).

    The purpose of this mechanism is to ensure equivalent standards across the EU, and raise the profile and acceptance of European cybersecurity certificates.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • BBC ☛ North and South Korea are in an underground war - is Kim Jong Un winning?

      In late 2024, a North Korean mobile phone was smuggled out of the country by Daily NK, (Seoul-based media organisation UMG's news service).

      The phone had been programmed so that when a South Korean variant of a word is entered, it automatically vanishes, replaced with the North Korean equivalent - an Orwellian move.

      "Smartphones are now part and parcel of the way North Korea tries to indoctrinate people", says Mr Williams.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • BIA Net ☛ Grup Yorum responds to censorship by making all albums public

    A widespread social control media backlash followed the online government censorship targeting the leftist music band.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Detained Hong Kong activist Chow Hang-tung to launch 36-hour hunger strike on Tiananmen crackdown anniversary

    Hong Kong barrister-activist Chow Hang-tung has announced that she will launch a 36-hour hunger strike in prison on Wednesday to mark the 36th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing.

  • Futurism ☛ DOGE Fires Operative After He Admits the Government Was Already Pretty Efficient

    Sahil Lavingia, a tech founder and erstwhile software engineer with Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), revealed in a recent blog post that he had "got[ten] the boot" from the agency after telling Fast Company last month that the federal workforce had turned out to be way more efficient than he anticipated.

    In that initial interview, the Gumroad founder said he was impressed to find that his coworkers at the Department of Veterans Affairs "love their jobs" and worked hard at them — an honest admission that seems to have cost him his job.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Tiananmen anniversary: ‘Any activity on any date’ must be lawful - HK leader

    The chief executive made the remarks as a reporter asked him if Hong Kong residents could light candles or wear clothes bearing slogans on June 4 to remember the crackdown in Beijing 36 years ago.

    The reporter also asked if merely showing up in Causeway Bay – where annual candlelight vigils used to be held before they were banned by authorities – on Wednesday may risk breaking the law, citing some activists who said they were called by police about their plans on June 4.

  • Union Of Catholic Asian News ☛ I stand with Tiananmen Square's ‘Tank Man’ - UCA News

    On this anniversary, we mustn't forget both the courage and sacrifice of the tens of thousands of peaceful protesters, mostly young students, who risked and lost their lives by the thousands, not only in Tiananmen Square and the streets and alleys of Beijing, but across China.

    It is also essential that we remember the character of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), on display that day, and understand the true violent nature of China’s ruling regime.

    A regime that turns its guns and tanks on its own people is not legitimate or trustworthy. It is not a regime we should easily do business with.

    In the past three and a half decades since the Tiananmen massacre, in which an estimated 10,000 people were killed, the regime has continued to show its true, murderous, repressive colors.

  • [Old] PBS ☛ Remembering the Tiananmen Square Crackdown, and the “Tank Man” | FRONTLINE

    In an act that would reverberate around the world, a solitary man stood his ground before a column of advancing tanks on Chang’an Boulevard, which runs directly into Tiananmen Square.

    His identity and his ultimate fate remain a mystery — but his lonely act of defiance, captured by photographers watching nearby, became an icon of the fight for freedom around the globe.

  • Encyclopedia Britannica ☛ Tank Man | Significance, Photo, China, & Identity

    Tank Man, unidentified Chinese man who on June 5, 1989, faced down a column of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) tanks on Chang’an Avenue in Beijing. The encounter came one day after the government launched a bloody crackdown that killed an unknown number of people in Beijing and cleared protesters from Tiananmen Square. “Tank Man,” as he was dubbed by the international media, became an enduring symbol of defiance in the face of violent authoritarianism.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Heavy police presence on eve of Tiananmen anniversary

    Police officers patrolled Victoria Park – the former site of the city’s annual vigils for the Tiananmen crackdown – and its vicinity on Tuesday, one day before the 36th anniversary of the crackdown.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ It should be legal to make people angry, even by burning the Koran

    Yet if someone carrying out a legal activity, namely burning a book, is attacked then surely it is the assailant who is at fault. Arguably, Coskun was not aiming his protest at Muslims but at their religion. The two are not the same, even if adherents disagree, and our right to criticise a religion must be upheld.

    But our free speech protections have become so tied up with other laws that they are rendered redundant. The prosecutor in the Coskun case said his conviction did not represent any restriction on criticising religion but that is disingenuous to put it charitably.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Alarming escalation in attacks on journalists amid political crisis in Serbia

    Initial protests demanding accountability for the tragedy have turned into a widespread movement against corruption and President Aleksandar Vučić’s increasingly authoritarian rule, and as a result, journalists have faced a surge in physical attacks, threats, online harassment, smear campaigns, and even spyware — often driven by Vučić’s supporters, government officials, and pro-government media.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Business Insider cuts: Why 100+ staff are leaving and who's going

    Press Gazette analysis shows that entertainment, environment, audience growth, personal finance and technology are among the reporter roles hardest hit by a decision to cut 21% of jobs (at least 100 people). Press Gazette has produced a complete list of known Business Insiders leavers at the end of this story.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Trial starts for Salvadoran officers accused of killing Dutch journalists in 1982

    The trial of three retired Salvadoran military officers for the 1982 killings of four Dutch journalists during the Central American country’s civil war began Tuesday in the northern city of Chalatenango.

  • CPJ ☛ Yemen’s Houthis abduct at least 4 journalists, jail another for criticism of leader

    On May 24, the Specialized Criminal Court in the capital Sanaa sentenced well-known Yemeni journalist Mohamed Al-Miyahi to 1½ years in prison for criticizing Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi online. Al-Miyahi was also ordered to sign a pledge not to resume his journalistic work and to pay a guarantee of 5 million riyals (US$20,500), which he would forfeit if he were to resume publication of material critical of the state.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • International Business Times ☛ Texas Poised to Make History With 'Right to Repair' Bill, Sending Clear Message to Big Tech

    In a major win for consumer rights advocates, Texas is on the brink of becoming the ninth state to pass a 'right to repair' law—marking a significant moment not only for tech users but for the growing movement demanding autonomy over the devices we buy. The proposed legislation, HB 2963, overwhelmingly passed the state Senate with a 31-0 vote over the weekend, signalling strong bipartisan support and setting the stage for a potential shift in how Americans engage with their electronics.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Journalists need to change the way they describe homeless people

    Regrettably, there has been no such change in relation to homelessness, which is still associated with a high degree of stigma. This causes much harm to people affected by homelessness and continues to influence the way the public think about homelessness, and thereby shapes political responses.

  • Vox ☛ How our schools and workplaces push early parenthood out of reach

    “If I were to complain about how society ‘has wronged me as a woman,’ it would be that it has treated my limited ‘fertility time’ with extreme disregard,” wrote Ruxandra Teslo, a genomics PhD student, recently on Substack. “At each step of the way I was encouraged to ‘be patient,’ do more training, told that ‘things will figure themselves out,’ even when I wanted and could have speedrun through things.”

    The average age of a new mom is now 27.5, up from age 21 in 1970. I had no interest in having kids in my early twenties, but there are certainly reasons others might want that: Fertility decreases with age, and some find it easier to keep up with young children when they themselves are younger and have more energy. Others hope for larger families so may need to start conceiving earlier, or may prioritize making sure their own parents have many years to spend with grandkids.

  • The Nation ☛ One Solution to the Housing Crisis Is in Plain Sight

    Debates about housing don’t talk enough about the housing that’s already there. During the mass building campaigns of the 19th and 20th centuries, millions of tons of carbon were already spent in order to house the rapidly expanding populations made possible by advancements in the quality of life. Those emissions, called embodied carbon, are produced by new construction and remain in existing buildings. When demolition releases embodied carbon, that spent energy cannot be recaptured. It is gone forever. If your goal is to extract as much profit as possible, you’re liable to demolish a completely fine building and replace it with a newer, more profitable—and often smaller—one. What if we resisted this logic and did so in a way that preserved rather than jeopardized affordability?

  • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Spanish government says housing market is not a ‘free for all’ after recent crackdown on Airbnb

    Spain ‘s government wanted to send a message last month with its crackdown on Airbnb: that the Spanish economy and its housing market are not a “free for all” that value profits over the rule of law, a minister told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Online brothels, sex robots, simulated rape: AI is ushering in a new age of violence against women

    Meanwhile, generative AI, which has exploded in popularity, has been proven to regurgitate and amplify misogyny and racism. This becomes significantly more of a concern when you realise just how much online content will soon be created by this new tool.

    Women are at risk of being dragged back to the dark ages by precisely the same technology that promises to catapult men into a shiny new future. This has all happened before. Very recently, in fact. Cast your mind back to the early days of social media. It started out the same way: a new idea harnessed by privileged white men, its origins in the patriarchal objectification of women. (Mark Zuckerberg started out with a website called FaceMash, which allowed users to rank the attractiveness of female Harvard students … a concept he now says had nothing to do with the origins of Facebook.)

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ How the Trump administration is putting hundreds of sacred sites at risk

    “My worry is everybody is going to use the emergency declaration in one way or another on all of these projects and we’re just going to be bombarded with a ton of them,” C’Bearing said. “It’s just another added-on thing that we need to pay attention to, among the other hundreds of things that we do here.”

  • Overpopulation ☛ When it comes to childbearing, coercion cuts both ways

    Upholding human rights is key to any just approach to population policy, as contrasting examples of coercion from China and Africa illustrate. But rights must be balanced by responsibilities when it comes to procreation. In a finite world, morality demands reproductive restraint in addition to reproductive freedom.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Boss Is Right to Talk About Class

    In the twenty-first century, Springsteen is a much bigger live draw in Europe than back home. Manchester was a big deal for locals and fans because it was the first time in years that the E Street Band had played indoors this side of the Atlantic. While the recently opened Co-Op Live arena — which Springsteen complimented as among the best venues he had ever played — is hardly intimate, attending the three Manchester shows often felt like being a privileged spectator at a dress-rehearsal for his run of European stadium shows.

  • ACLU ☛ What is Habeas Corpus? Why Does It Matter?

    Why? Because over and over again—including in the American Civil Liberties Union’s challenge against President Donald Trump’s illegal use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport people without due process—courts hearing habeas corpus cases have stopped the administration from carrying out massive violations of people’s constitutional rights. To get around this obstacle, administration officials now say they are looking into suspending habeas corpus altogether.

    What is this arcane-sounding legal device? How is does it stand in the way of illegal government action?

  • Pro Publica ☛ Trump Administration Proposes Cutting Tribal College Funds by Nearly 90%

    If Congress supports the administration’s proposal, it would devastate the nation’s 37 tribal colleges and universities, said Ahniwake Rose, president and CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which represents the colleges in Washington, D.C.

    “The numbers that are being proposed would close the tribal colleges,” Rose told ProPublica. “They would not be able to sustain.”

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• New York Times ☛ What if Surveillance Giant Google Just Broke Itself Up? A Tech Insider Makes the Case.

  Prosecutors aren’t the only ones arguing for a smaller Google. Some critics say it might be better for investors, customers and innovation.

• Security Week ☛ Chrome to Distrust Chunghwa Telecom and Netlock Certificates

  Patterns of concerning behavior led Surveillance Giant Google to remove trust in certificates from Chunghwa Telecom and Netlock from Chrome.

• New York Times ☛ What if Google Just Broke Itself Up? A Tech Insider Makes the Case.

  There’s another possibility. Instead of resisting change, Google could accelerate it. It could spin off huge chunks of itself into independent entities.

• International Business Times ☛ No More Nagging Pop-Ups: Windows Users in Europe Can Now Delete Edge, Bing, and the Microsoft Store

  Microsoft's adjustments to comply with the Digital Markets Act enabled Windows users in affected regions to remove Edge and eliminate Bing search results from Windows. Now, this list of changes is expanding in noteworthy ways.

• The Register UK ☛ Microsoft will stop pestering Windows users about Edge in EU

  The software giant in 2023 was designated as a "gatekeeper" under the DMA, a European competition law, and consequently must modify designated core platform services to accommodate competitors in the European Economic Area (EEA).

• Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Apple slams EU rules as 'flawed and costly' in major legal pushback

  The commission ordered Apple to give rival makers of smartphones, headphones and virtual reality headsets access to its technology and mobile operating system so they can connect with Apple’s iPhones and iPad tablets.

  It also set out a detailed process and timeline for Apple to respond to interoperability requests from app developers.

• The Verge ☛ Microsoft will finally stop bugging Windows users about Edge — but only in Europe

  Microsoft’s changes in response to the Digital Markets Act already included allowing Windows machines in the regions it covers to uninstall Edge and remove Bing results from Windows search, but now the list is growing in some meaningful ways. New features announced Monday for Microsoft Windows users in the European Economic Area (the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway) include the option to uninstall the Microsoft Store and avoid extra nags or prompts asking them to set Microsoft Edge as the default browser unless they choose to open it.

• Copyrights

  • Michael Geist ☛ The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 234: “Solutions Aren’t Going to be Found Through Nostalgia”: Mark Musselman on the CRTC Hearings on Canadian Content Rules

    The CRTC recently wrapped up a two-week hearing on the Online Streaming Act that featured most of the usual suspects, though notably not the large streaming services. The Commission grappled with foundational issues such as modernizing the definition of Canadian content, instituting IP requirements, and introducing new discoverability rules into Canada’s broadcasting regulatory framework.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ MPA Backs Automated Pirate Site-Blocking, Sees Role for VPN and CDN Companies

    The Motion Picture Association sees automated, real-time, and dynamic site blocking mechanisms as a key tool to fight online piracy. In response to an inquiry from the European Commission, reviewing its recommendation to combat live-streaming piracy, the MPA further notes that VPN companies and CDN providers should be actively involved.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Anti-Piracy Group BREIN Ramps Up IPTV Actions Under New Leadership

    Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has just posted its latest annual report, highlighting several key achievements. IPTV continues to be the largest threat to the audiovisual industry. In addition to shutting down dozens of operators, BREIN made criminal referrals that it expects to pay off this year. Google also lent a helping hand by banning adverts for 'IPTV' keyword searches.