Leftovers

• Brandon Rozek ☛ Fun with Telnet | Brandon Rozek

  Remember that telnet communication is all over [cleartext], so don’t accidentally leak any secrets. Have fun discovering the quirky old world of Telnet!

• Stefano Marinelli ☛ Taking a Semi-Truck to Buy Salad: My Manifesto for Simple Computing

  Operating systems are becoming increasingly complex, bloated, and packed with features that are useless to most people. Even the Linux world, which was often born under the banner of modularity and lightness, has in many cases followed the same trend. Just think of modern web stacks that, even on Linux, require containers, orchestrators, and complex build systems merely to serve a static page.

  And that's why I've decided that my blogs, at least for now, will be hosted entirely on a VM that costs 1 Euro per month. By using efficient operating systems (like NetBSD, in this case), it's possible to run the whole setup with excellent performance on very few resources.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ My Copy of The Internet Phone Book

  These sites don’t look to impose their will on you, soliciting that you share, like, and subscribe. They look to spark curiosity, mystery, and wonder, letting you decide for yourself how to respond to the feelings of this experience.

  But why make a printed book listing sites on the internet? That’s crazy, right? Here’s the book’s co-author Kristoffer Tjalve in the introduction: [...]

• [Old] Wired ☛ Kibo Is God

  "I have a bigger ego than you do," Kibo posts back. Legend has it that if you include "Kibo" in your post to any of Usenet's more than 5,000 discussion groups, the all-seeing Kibo will respond to you.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Nobel Prize Winner Warns That Astronomers Using AI May Be Distorting Results

    Reinhard Genzel, a Nobel laureate and an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute, expressed some skepticism regarding the team's use of AI, and the quality of the data they fed into the model.

    "I'm very sympathetic and interested in what they're doing," Genzel told Live Science. "But artificial intelligence is not a miracle cure."

• Career/Education

  • Harvard University ☛ Reading skills — and struggles — manifest earlier than thought

    “Our findings suggest that some of these kids walk into their first day of kindergarten with their little backpacks and a less-optimal brain for learning to read, and that these differences in brain development start showing up in toddlerhood,” said Gaab. “We’re currently waiting until second or third grade to find kids who are struggling readers. We should find these kids and intervene way earlier because we know the younger a brain is, the more plastic it is for language input.”

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Scaling integrated digital health

    Around the world, countries are facing the challenges of aging populations, growing rates of chronic disease, and workforce shortages, leading to a growing burden on health care systems. From diagnosis to treatment, Hey Hi (AI) and other digital solutions can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of health care, easing the burden on straining systems.

  • Science Alert ☛ Glass Bottles Actually Contain More Microplastics, Scientists Find

    "We then noticed that in the glass, the particles emerging from the samples were the same shape, colour and polymer composition – so therefore the same plastic – as the paint on the outside of the caps that seal the glass bottles," she said.

    The paint on the caps also had "tiny scratches, invisible to the naked eye, probably due to friction between the caps when there were stored," the agency said in a statement.

    This could then "release particles onto the surface of the caps", it added.

  • Science Alert ☛ Social Media Might Impair Your Recovery From Injury. Here's Why.

    But on social media, rest isn't always part of the narrative. The most viewed recovery videos often aren't posted by healthcare professionals but by influencers eager to showcase rapid progress.

    Some discard crutches too soon, hop unaided, or attempt high-impact exercises while their bodies are still vulnerable – all for the sake of engagement.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Nightmares Might Be Slowly Scaring Some To Death

    Those folks also show signs of significantly accelerated biological aging, with their bodies reflecting wear and tear greater than what their birth date might reflect, researchers said.

    This is likely due to the stress that nightmares can place on a sleeping body, researchers said.

• Proprietary

  • [Old] Computer History ☛ Memories of Lisa

    As part of this celebration, CHM recorded a series of three interviews with Bill Atkinson, a software engineer who developed key portions of the Lisa’s software, especially its QuickDraw graphics library, as well as important aspects of the Lisa’s user interface.

  • Security Week ☛ China's Salt Typhoon Hackers Target Canadian Telecom Firms

    The warning focuses on attacks conducted by Salt Typhoon, the threat group known for targeting several major telecom firms in the United States and elsewhere as part of espionage operations.

  • [Old] The Pwnie Awards ☛ SystemD bugs – Pwnies

    Where you are dereferencing null pointers, or writing out of bounds, or not supporting fully qualified domain names, or giving root privileges to any user whose name begins with a number, there’s no chance that the CVE number will referenced in either the change log or the commit message. But CVEs aren’t really our currency any more, and only the lamest of vendors gets a Pwnie!

  • Sophia Willows ☛ Implicit is better than explicit

    I’m not surprised that a Google engineer forgot to apply exponential backoff here—anyone else could have done the same thing. I am, however, surprised that it was possible for this failure mode to occur in production in the first place.

    Two things seem to have gone horribly wrong here: [...]

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Conversation ☛ Here’s why the public needs to challenge the ‘good AI’ myth pushed by tech companies

      While there’s been much negative discussion about AI, including on the possibility that it will take over the world, the public is also being bombarded with positive messages about the technology, and what it can do.

      This “good AI” myth is a key tool used by tech companies to promote their products. Yet there’s evidence that consumers are wary of the presence of AI in some products. This means that positive promotion of AI may be putting unwanted pressure on people to accept the use of AI in their lives.

    • Press Gazette ☛ Inside the pilot BBC World Service website using AI translation

      A team of four native Polish speakers, who have been recruited from the likes of Reuters and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, will be leading the adaptation and curation of existing BBC content for Polish-speaking audiences using AI.

    • Muxup ☛ Vendor-recommended LLM parameter quick reference

      I've been kicking the tires on various LLMs lately, and like many have been quite taken by the pace of new releases especially of models with weights distributed under open licenses, always with impressive benchmark results. I don't have local GPUs so trialling different models necessarily requires using an external host. There are various configuration parameters you can set when sending a query that affect generation and many vendors document recommended settings on the model card or associated documentation. For my own purposes I wanted to collect these together in one place, and also confirm in which cases common serving software like vLLM will use defaults provided alongside the model.

    • Guy LeCharles Gonzalez ☛ Four Steps to Becoming an Informed AI Skeptic | As in guillotine...

      I’m no technophobe. My entire career has been built on staying one step ahead of technology as “an early tester, late adopter.” I haven’t always been right, but I’ve never been egregiously wrong, either, because I don’t fall for the latest new shiny “pivot to…” hype. I’ve learned to read between the lines, follow the money, analyze potential outcomes, and — most importantly — question everything.

      I can’t possibly experiment firsthand with every new shiny, of course, so I’m also a firm believer in the power of a “personal learning network” — a curated group of people whose expertise and credibility I can trust to help inform my own understanding of things I’m interested in, or leery of. Blogs and social networks helped expand PLNs well beyond what was possible 20 years ago, but I still believe nothing beats a well-researched and well-written book on a topic you want to learn more about.

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Are AI Bots Knocking Digital Collections Offline? An Interview with Michael Weinberg

      Last week, the GLAM-E Lab published the results of an investigation into reports that servers and collections were straining – and sometimes breaking – under the load of swarming bots. Such bots attempt to scrape all of the data from a server or collection to build datasets to train AI models. This activity is overwhelming the systems designed to keep those collections online. This appears to be a growing problem that debilitates access to the very collections that the bots are using. COAR has also reported that such bots are negatively impacting open repositories.

      Today, I interview Michael Weinberg, Executive Director, Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy, NYU Law, and Co-Director of the GLAM-E Lab, about the study and what this phenomenon portends for information access and sustainable infrastructures.

    • Drew Breunig ☛ How Long Contexts Fail | Drew Breunig

      Context Poisoning is when a hallucination or other error makes it into the context, where it is repeatedly referenced.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ We test Google Veo: impressive demo, unusable results

      Google Veo 3 is the new hype beast of generated video. There’s a ton of overnight AI experts saying this thing will definitely replace real production tomorrow.

      And it’s just false, Veo’s output is defective in all sorts of ways. It looks good on the surface — it really is an impressive demo! — until you think for two seconds about what you just saw and you realise everything that’s weird and wrong with it.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Companies That Replaced Humans With AI Are Realizing Their Mistake

      "These 'agents' are branded to sound like intelligent lifeforms that can make intelligent decisions," Zitron writes, "but are really just trumped-up automations that require enterprise customers to invest time programming them."

  • Social Control Media

    • Daniel Pocock ☛ Polygamy, from Catholic Synod on Synodality to Social Control Media & Debian CyberPolygamy

      It could be argued that some people are now so totally intertwined with social control media that they no longer have an exclusive mental bond with their real-world partner.

      [...]

      In other words, Facebook's algorithms have become a third person in many marriages. Facebook's algorithms are complementing the decisions of parents over their children, and not in a good way.

    • Zimbabwe ☛ WhatsApp is getting ads. Yes, the ad-free era is over - Techzim WhatsApp Now Has Ads: Here’s Where They Show Up and What It Means for You

      It’s finally happening. After years of telling us “no ads, no games, no gimmicks,” WhatsApp is finally doing it. Ads are coming to the app, and there’s nothing you can do about it, unless you’re ready to leave ‘App (which, let’s be honest, you’re not).

      Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, announced that they’re introducing ads to the Updates tab, the same one that has Statuses and Channels.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • teleSUR ☛ Africa: Interpol Warns About Cyber-Crime in the Continent - teleSUR English

      Ransomware detections rose sharply in 2024, with South Africa and Egypt topping the list at 17,849 and 12,281 detections respectively. Other affected countries include Nigeria (3,459 detections) and Kenya (3,030). These attacks have targeted both public and private institutions. Kenya’s Urban Roads Authority and Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics are among the victims of these breaches.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Russian court releases several REvil ransomware gang members

      The wider REvil network was once one of the world’s most prolific ransomware syndicates. The group carried out high-profile attacks on global targets, and played a principal role in the 2021 ransomware incident involving Florida-based IT firm Kaseya. In May 2024, a U.S. court sentenced Ukrainian national Yaroslav Vasinsky, a REvil affiliate, to 13 years in prison and imposed fines totaling $16 million. Another alleged member, Yevgeniy Polyanin, remains wanted by U.S. authorities on charges linked to more than 3,000 cyberattacks and extortion attempts.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Ukrainian Government Systems Targeted In APT28 Cyberattack

      In an investigation conducted between March and May 2024, cybersecurity responders uncovered two previously unseen malware strains—BEARDSHELL and SLIMAGENT—lurking inside government systems. The attackers also deployed a component of the widely known COVENANT command-and-control framework, hidden inside a document titled “Act.doc” and sent via the encrypted messaging app Signal.

      While the initial infection vector wasn’t immediately clear, analysts later discovered the malware reached its target using a macro-laced Word document that installed multiple payloads—each designed to fly under the radar, exploit trusted services, and maintain persistence through registry hijacking and scheduled tasks.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Largest DDoS Attack to Date - Schneier on Security

      It was a recently unimaginable 7.3 Tbps: [...]

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • The Register UK ☛ Typhoon-like gang slinging TLS certificate 'signed' by LAPD

      After they've broken in, the suspected Chinese snoops deploy a custom backdoor called ShortLeash to maintain access to the compromised devices and build this interconnected network of covert boxes.

      Upon execution, ShortLeash generates a self-signed, TLS certificate that presents as if signed by the City of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). That name suggests those behind the campaign are attempting to spoof the police department to appear legitimate. It also gave the ORB network its name: LapDogs.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Site36 ☛ Compensation now finances police wiretapping centre: Leipzig-based company Ipoque causes years of delay

    • EDRI ☛ French Administrative Supreme Court buries the debate over internet censorship law

      It is an extremely disappointing outcome for two main reasons. First, the French court illegitimately appropriated the legal debate over the TCO regulation’s compatibility with EU primary law. This matter should, however, be addressed at the EU level. According to the EU Treaties, the CJEU is the primary jurisdiction responsible for ruling on the legality of EU acts – which was the organisations’ main request. By carrying out its own legality assessment, the French court is de facto preventing the CJEU from exercising its exclusive competences.

      Second, the decision also means that law enforcement authorities across the EU can continue to use the excessive censorship powers under the TCO Regulation for the foreseeable future. Since the proposal was first published in 2018, the organisations that challenged the TCO Regulation have consistently voiced concerns about potential violations of fundamental rights due to its inadequate safeguards. Looking at the data available on the regulation implementation, there are concerning indications that some Member States may be using TERREG it as a political tool to suppress certain types of online expression.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Book review: Surveillance & privacy

      Privacy only matters to those with something to hide. So goes one of the more inane and disingenuous justifications for mass government and corporate surveillance. There are others, of course, but the “nothing to hide” argument remains a popular way to rationalize or excuse what’s become standard practice in our digital age: the widespread and invasive collection of vast amounts of personal data.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Sky Views Personal Data as a Potential Weapon in IPTV Piracy War

      With whom Sky may have shared, or intends to share, personal data for piracy-fighting purposes, receives no mention, much less the type and volume of personal data involved. If this is more about collection of personal data concerning investigations, the sky’s the limit; pirates are hardly in short supply.

      Under Article 35 of the GDPR, a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) must be carried out when a new activity “is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons to other people’s personal information.”

  • Confidentiality

    • Daemonology ☛ Chunking attacks on Tarsnap (and others)

      I'm sure many people reading this right now are asking the same question: Are my secrets safe? To this I have to say "almost certainly yes". The attack we have to leak Tarsnap's chunking parameters is a chosen plaintext attack — you would have to archive data provided to you by the attacker — and the chosen plaintext has a particular signature (large blocks of "small alphabet" data) which would show up on the Tarsnap server (I can't see your data, but I can see block sizes, and this sort of plaintext is highly compressible). Furthermore, even after obtaining Tarsnap's chunking parameters, leaking secret data would be very challenging, requiring an interactive attack which mixes chosen plaintext with your secrets.

• Defence/Aggression

  • FAIR ☛ NYT Gave Green Light to Trump’s Iran Attack by Treating It as a Question of When

    In the wake of the US-supported Israeli attack on Iran, and days before the direct US bombing that followed, the New York Times editorial board (6/18/25) argued that “America Must Not Rush Into a War Against Iran.”

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ NATO must pivot East – or risk irrelevance

    In theory, NATO’s center of gravity ought to long ago have migrated toward the Baltics in the north and Bulgaria in the south, extending the alliance’s spine to meet the new frontlines of security. Yet more than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that reorientation has never fully occurred.

  • La Prensa Latina ☛ Sahel region accounts for over 50% of terrorism victims

    The report states that following are Niger, Nigeria, and Mali, where armed groups such as the Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP), the Islamist group Boko Haram, and the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims ((Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimeen, JNIM, in Arabic), an al-Qa’ida affiliate in the Sahel, also operate.

  • Truthdig ☛ The Illusion of Victory

    The likely outcome is a reconstituted nuclear program pursued with greater determination to build a weapon. Rather than halting Iran’s progress, these so-called “precision” strikes could very well spiral into a much broader, possibly regime-change-driven war.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Meta hits back after US House bans WhatsApp for staffers

    The House’s chief administrative officer, or CAO, had earlier emailed staffers to inform them that the Office of Cybersecurity had deemed WhatsApp “high-risk” because of a “lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks.”

  • International Business Times ☛ Who Is Thomas Fugate? Education, Parents And Why Is He Heading A Major Anti-Terrorism Group At 22?

    His appointment by the Trump administration, despite no apparent national security experience, has sparked criticism.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Civilization They Claim to Defend

    This is not mere political disagreement. This is the intellectual bankruptcy of men who claim to champion Western civilization while providing cover for leaders explicitly committed to tearing down the very institutions and international frameworks that have sustained that civilization for nearly eight decades. When confronted with the contradiction between his stated values and his political calculations, Kisin retreats into the comfortable delusion that leftist excess within liberal coalitions represents a greater threat to the West than leaders who actively seek to dismantle NATO, abandon international law, and replace democratic institutions with personalized authoritarianism.

    The question presents itself with uncomfortable clarity: incompetence or malice? Either Kisin genuinely fails to comprehend that supporting leaders who want to destroy the post-war liberal order undermines his claims to defend Western values, or he understands perfectly well and has simply decided that his distaste for campus progressives justifies enabling the dismantling of everything the West has built since 1945.

  • The Straits Times ☛ S. Korean President Lee Jae Myung names first civilian defence minister in decades

    He also named 10 other Cabinet ministers.

  • France24 ☛ IS blamed for deadly suicide attack on Damascus church

    At least 22 people were killed Sunday in a suicide attack on a church in Damascus, authorities said, blaming a member of the Islamic State group for the unprecedented attack. The attack was first of its kind in the Syrian capital since Islamist-led forces toppled longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in December.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Techdirt ☛ ICE Is Now Trying To Convince Congress Members It Needs 72-Hours Notice Before Facility Inspections

    These intimidation tactics haven’t worked. In fact, they’ve backfired. So, in an effort to snatch victory from defeat, ICE has decided it no longer needs to respect the law when it comes to Congressional oversight.

• Environment

  • Court House News ☛ Environmentalists seek offshore drilling ban for companies with abandoned wells | Courthouse News Service

    With thousands of unplugged wells and platforms overdue for decommission, environmental groups seek ways to limit offshore drilling expansion.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Iconic whitefish on edge of collapse as Great Lakes biodiversity crisis deepens

    But these days, stocks in Lake Michigan have grown so thin that The Cove often buys whitefish caught hundreds of miles away, rather than from the waters off those historic docks.

    After decades of slow decline, the fish are now on the brink of collapse in most of lakes Michigan and Huron. Invasive mussels at the bottom of the lakes have filtered away microorganisms, leaving behind crystal-clear waters that are a veritable desert for whitefish.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ In Norway's Arctic, meteorologists have a first-row seat to climate change

    "This tiny little observation is actually quite crucial for the weather forecasting systems up north, because observations are so sparse from that area."

    Bjornoya sits in the middle of fishing grounds, and the weather reports published twice a day are closely followed by the fishing boats in the area.

  • TruthOut ☛ Alaska Issues Its First-Ever Heat Advisory

    While the climate crisis is affecting temperatures everywhere, Alaska’s temps are rising at twice the global average.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Nvidia gets into money-burning AI startups

    When our glorious AI bubble deflates, and we contemplate the wreckage of so many companies that did nothing but turn venture capital billions into carbon dioxide, there’s one company that will have made a fortune, and that’s Nvidia.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • 404 Media ☛ 'A Black Hole of Energy Use': Meta's Massive AI Data Center Is Stressing Out a Louisiana Community

      Details about how Meta's nearly Manhattan-sized data center will impact consumers' power bills are still secret.

    • USMC ☛ Fred Smith, FedEx founder and Marine Corps veteran, dies at 80

      While growing FedEx from a small aircraft maintenance company to one of the world’s largest transportation firms, he was also involved in numerous philanthropic efforts, many with military ties.

    • The Drone Girl ☛ U.S. government to spend millions to buy massive cargo drones

      If this cargo drone from Skyways is an SUV, then most of the delivery drones we talk about here are golf carts. But relative to Air Force technology, this is actually a transition to more affordable, uncrewed systems that can deliver supplies with fewer risks and lower operational costs.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ The Politicians Who Cried Wolf

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Wired ☛ Elon Musk’s Lawyers Claim He ‘Does Not Use a Computer’

    The Sunday court filing was submitted in opposition to a Friday filing from OpenAI, which accused Musk and xAI of failing to fully comply with the discovery process. OpenAI alleges that Musk’s counsel does not plan to collect any documents from him. In this weekend’s filing, Musk’s lawyers claim that they told OpenAI on June 14 that they were “conducting searches of Mr. Musk’s mobile phone, having searched his emails, and that Mr. Musk does not use a computer.”

  • Futurism ☛ OpenAI May Have Screwed Up So Badly That Its Entire Future Is Under Threat

    In its quest to become a for-profit entity, OpenAI may have catastrophically fumbled the bag with its patron Microsoft.

  • LWN ☛ Asterinas: a new Linux-compatible kernel project

    Asterinas is a new Linux-ABI-compatible kernel project written in Rust, based on what the authors call a "framekernel architecture". The project overlaps somewhat with the goals of the Rust for Linux project, but approaches the problem space from a different direction by trying to get the best from both monolithic and microkernel designs.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • [Old] El País ☛ Misinformation: The war on truth | The Global Observer

      Journalists have it even worse. We know that powerful people will attack the media when they feel threatened, but the hostility of the current president of the United States is unprecedented. Donald Trump has said: “You know, these animals in the press. They’re animals. Some of the worst human beings you’ll ever meet…. just terrible dishonest people.” He has championed the idea that journalists are the “enemy of the people” who spread fake news. Trump has mentioned “fake news” on Twitter more than 600 times and mentions it in all of his speeches. The worst part is that Trump has not only undermined the confidence of Americans in their media, but his accusation has been readily adopted by the world’s autocrats. According to A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times: “In the past few years, more than 50 prime ministers, presidents and other government leaders across five continents have used the term ‘fake news’ to justify varying levels of anti-press activity.” Sulzberger acknowledges that “the media aren’t perfect. We make mistakes. We have blind spots.” However, he is steadfast in affirming that the mission of The New York Times is to seek the truth. In today’s confusing worlds, where everything seems relative and nebulous, it is good to know that there are still those who believe that the truth is out there and can be found. Perhaps more importantly, defending the truth is a prime antidote against leaders with authoritarian inclinations.

      In 1951, Hannah Arendt wrote that “the ideal subject of a totalitarian state is not the convinced Nazi or Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”

    • AAAS ☛ How media competition fuels the spread of misinformation

      Competition among news sources over public opinion can incentivize them to resort to misinformation. Sharing misinformation may lead to a short-term gain in audience engagement but ultimately damages the credibility of the source, resulting in a loss of audience. To understand the rationale behind news sources sharing misinformation, we model the competition between sources as a zero-sum sequential game, where news sources decide whether to share factual information or misinformation. Each source influences individuals based on their credibility, the veracity of the article, and the individual’s characteristics. We analyze this game through the concept of quantal response equilibrium, which accounts for the bounded rationality of human decision-making. The analysis shows that the resulting equilibria reproduce the credibility-opinion distribution of real-world news sources, with hyperpartisan sources spreading the majority of misinformation. Our findings provide insights for policymakers to mitigate the spread of misinformation and promote a more factual information landscape.

    • El País ☛ Social media is fueling conflict in the most bellicose era since World War II 

      The advent of social media promised a global democratization of information. But the benefits of this increased access to data have been diluted by a tsunami of misinformation, which in turn has increased social division and conflict. The tools that should have been a fundamental pillar of a new society have become just another weapon. “Right now, we have more conflicts than ever since the end of World War II,” says Steve Killelea, an Australian businessman and philanthropist and founder of the Global Peace Index (GPI), whose latest annual report includes a specific chapter on the role of information technology in a world at war.

    • EcoWatch ☛ ‘Powerful Actors’ Are Spreading False Information About the Climate Crisis, Making It Harder to Address: Report

      Unchecked climate misinformation has been turning crisis into catastrophe, according to a new report from the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE).

      In its review of 300 studies, the report — Information Integrity about Climate Science — found that climate action was being delayed and obstructed by misleading information from fossil fuel companies, some nation states and right-wing politicians, reported The Guardian.

    • Futurism ☛ "You Are Being Updated This Week" Elon Musk Furious After His "Grok" AI Cites Reliable Sources That Disagree With His Misinformation

      Elon Musk is threatening once again to lobotomize his "Grok" AI for citing accurate sources and telling the truth about his disreputable [Internet] cronies.

      Earlier this month, Grok took aim at catturd2, the X handle of a conservative personality named Phillip Buchanan, for aligning with "right-wing extremism." After Buchanan insisted that Grok was lying, the AI cited backed up its claims with reports from Media Matters for America and Rolling Stone about the account, and said that it aims "to provide accurate, neutral responses."

      Measured as that assessment was, Musk found his own AI's work unacceptable.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ True Costs of Misinformation: The Global Spread of Misinformation Laws

      What explains this sudden rise in global misinformation laws, and what are the risks of using legislation as a primary means of mitigation?

      This is the focus of “True Costs of Misinformation: The Global Spread of Misinformation Laws,” a new article co-authored by the Citizen Lab’s Gabrielle Lim, published by the International Journal of Communication.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • EFF ☛ The NO FAKES Act Has Changed – and It’s So Much Worse

    The updated bill doubles down on that initial mistaken approach by mandating a whole new censorship infrastructure for that system, encompassing not just images but the products and services used to create them, with few safeguards against abuse.

    The new version of NO FAKES requires almost every [Internet] gatekeeper to create a system that will a) take down speech upon receipt of a notice; b) keep down any recurring instance—meaning, adopt inevitably overbroad replica filters on top of the already deeply flawed copyright filters; c) take down and filter tools that might have been used to make the image; and d) unmask the user who uploaded the material based on nothing more than the say so of person who was allegedly “replicated.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • NL Times ☛ Police: Journalists arrested amid terrorism threat at NATO protest

    Two journalists from Leidsch Dagblad were arrested Monday while covering a demonstration by Extinction Rebellion (XR) near the A44 highway at Abbenes, Noord-Holland. Police said the reporters lacked the required police-issued press cards. Other journalists present, including from ANP, were ordered to leave the area under threat of arrest.

  • CPJ ☛ Russia and Belarus release two journalists who had been detained for years

    Karnei and Yesypenko’s releases come after sustained international pressure, including from CPJ, and after Andrey Kuznechyk, another RFE/RL journalist, was freed from a Belarusian prison in February.

    Belarus is Europe’s worst jailer of journalists, with at least 31 behind bars as of December 1, 2024. Thirteen of the 30 journalists still detained by Russia are Ukrainian.

  • CPJ ☛ 8 journalists given lengthy jail terms as Azerbaijan crushes free press

    Eight Azerbaijani journalists have received prison sentences ranging from 7 ½ to 15 years, as part of an ongoing series of media trials likely to obliterate independent reporting in the Caucasus nation.

  • [Repeat] RFERL ☛ RFE/RL Journalist Vladyslav Yesypenko Released From Russian Custody After More Than 4 Years Of Detention

    “For more than four years, Vlad was arbitrarily punished for a crime he did not commit. He paid too high of a price for reporting the truth about what was taking place inside Russia-occupied Crimea," RFE/RL President and Chief Executive Officer Steve Capus said in a statement.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ alarmed by Zambian bill proposing jail for unlicensed journalists

    The bill would require journalists to obtain an annual license from a regulatory institute, which could be rescinded for misconduct; it has yet to be formally tabled in parliament. Those who impersonate journalists, work without a registration, or employ such individuals could face imprisonment of up to five years or fines of up to 200,000 Kwacha (US$8,000).

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ How teachers on the Blackfeet Reservation are using heavy metal to prevent suicide and process grief - lonestarlive.com

    The word for “doctor” in the Blackfoot language, āissōkinǎkii, translates to “singer of heavy songs.”

    “The heaviness in āissōkinǎkii I think is like the power of those songs to doctor people, to heal,” Hall said.

  • Matt Cool ☛ ISP Solicitors

    but NOPE! This guy apparently thought our “no solicitors” sign was a great challenge to test his sales skills or something. He continued engaging.

  • CBC ☛ She waited 12 hours for Toronto police's non-emergency line. Then, she was disconnected

    Rachel Carr started losing hope after she hit the five-hour mark on hold with Toronto police's non-emergency line, but couldn't bring herself to hang up since she'd already waited for so long.

    "I still had a glimmer of hope that maybe they would eventually pick up, but unfortunately it didn't happen," she said.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ In Panama, Authorities Are Cracking Down on Mass Strikes

    Without a left-wing party to represent the movement’s demands, there is no clear end to the tug-of-war between the workers and an increasingly authoritarian state backed by big business and the United States. But after previous mass protests in 2022 and 2023, can these past demonstrations teach us something about where today’s movement is headed?

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ The scourge of excessive AS-SETs

    Guest Post: Many AS-SETs have grown so large they effectively whitelist most of the routing table, defeating their purpose. How are AS-SETs actually used for filtering, and what can be done when they get too big?

  • Inside Towers ☛ CenturyLink Outage Disrupts Internet for Over 35,000 Customers Across U.S.

    All three services are tied to Lumen Technologies, which still operates CenturyLink for residential and small business users, while Quantum Fiber handles its fiber-to-the-home segment. Brightspeed acquired Lumen’s ILEC business in 20 states three years ago.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Techdirt ☛ Amazon Ramps Up Enshittification With Even More Ads On Prime Video

    In this case, streaming companies are going to keep pushing their luck until piracy sees a massive resurgence (which is already starting to happen), at which point the executives will blame everyone and everything but themselves. Instead of any sort of self-awareness of the doom cycle they participate in, they’ll do something even more harmful: like lobbying Congress to make VPNs illegal.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Inside Towers ☛ FCC Okays Windstream-Uniti Merger

  The FCC determined the Windstream-Uniti merger is in the public interest. The agency approved the transfer of Windstream, Uniti (Nasdaq: UNIT) and their respective subsidiaries to the newly formed New Windstream LLC. The companies told the agency the merger would give the combined entities a greater ability to serve new and existing customers because it will be better positioned to realize efficiencies, leverage Windstream’s and Uniti’s combined resources, and attain greater economies of scale. They say Uniti’s and Windstream’s core competencies are complementary.

• Trademarks

  • US News And World Report ☛ OpenAI Scrubs Mention of Jony Ive Partnership After Judge's Ruling Over Trademark Dispute

    A budding partnership between OpenAI CEO Scam Altman and legendary iPhone designer Jony Ive to develop a new artificial intelligence hardware product has hit a legal snag after a federal judge ruled they must temporarily stop marketing the new venture

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Iyo vs. Io — OpenAI and Jony Ive get sued

    Iyo Audio is suing OpenAI, Io Products, Altman, and Ive for trademark violation and unfair competition. Judge Trina L. Thompson granted a temporary restraining order on Friday.

• Copyrights

  • 404 Media ☛ Meta's AI Model 'Memorized' Huge Chunks of Books, Including 'Harry Potter' and '1984'

    Researchers found Meta’s popular Llama 3.1 70B has a capacity to recite passages from 'The Sorcerer's Stone' at a rate much higher than could happen by chance.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate IPTV "Shock Block" Operations Boost France ISP Blocking +146%

    Telecoms and audiovisual regulator Arcom has revealed that the number of pirate 'services' blocked in France has more than doubled each year since 2022. "Shock Block" operations targeting 250+ IPTV services at once are partly responsible for a 146% rise in domains blocked in 2024. Arcom still hasn't forgotten BitTorrent, far from it; rightsholders filed 2.3 million complaints last year, of which 1,610 cases were referred to the prosecutor.