Leftovers

• Small Cypress ☛ A Small Web July

  I am putting this out into the ether to see if anyone wants to join me, in any capacity, in some kind of accountability structure (following each others blogs about this on RSS, a 32-bit Cafe thread, sporadic guestbook/cbox comments, idk!) for spending less time on the corporate web for the month of July. I am interested in seeing how my brain wiring shifts with some new rules and a new month.

• Carl Svensson ☛ The Amiga 3000 UNIX and Sun Microsystems: Deal or no deal?

  Amiga lore is full of exciting tales. Many of them are retold to demonstrate how the incompetence of Commodore's management destroyed a platform that, by rights, was destined for success. Coulda, shoulda, and the Amiga woulda risen as rightful ruler of all other computer platforms, forever and ever. Amen.

  One of those stories is about how Sun Microsystems allegedly showed interest in the Amiga 3000 during the early 1990s. It's a classic Amiga anecdote, usually recounted without much reflection, and one I've certainly helped perpetuate.

  Alas, the more I think about it, the less it adds up. Fact or factoid? Let's speculate!

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Oldest Egyptian DNA Reveals Secrets of Elite Potter From Pyramid Era

    "This individual has been on an extraordinary journey."

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ This Dugout Canoe Made From a 12-Foot-Long Log Was Found Bobbing in a North Carolina River

    Now, working in partnership with members of the Coharie Tribe, state officials have successfully recovered the vessel, which could be centuries old. For now, it’s being stored in a secure pond, but it will eventually be transported to a lab for preservation.

  • Daniel Estévez ☛ About FLLs with band-edge filters

    Using band-edge filters for carrier frequency recovery with an FLL is an interesting technique that has been studied by fred harris and others. Usually this technique is presented for root-raised cosine waveforms, and in this post I will limit myself to this case. The intuitive idea of a band-edge FLL is to use two filters to measure the power in the band edges of the signal (the portion of the spectrum where the RRC frequency response rolls off). If there is zero frequency error, the powers will be equal. If there is some frequency error, the signal will have more “mass” in one of the two filters, so the power difference can be used as an error discriminant to drive an FLL.

  • Gunnar Þór Magnússon ☛ Counterexamples of positivity implications in Kähler curvature tensors

    We feel like it would be nice to see explicitly what doesn’t hold here. In this light reading note we work out local examples that show that the reverse of any known positivity implication fails. As other people have noted it would be nice to have compact examples of these failures but it is fairly difficult to get one’s hands on those. Suggestions are welcome.

• Career/Education

  • Digital Camera World ☛ I'm not sure we should share our photography secrets, and I'll explain why | Digital Camera World

    I sometimes think there are more photographers on YouTube than there are people to watch them. They’ve all got free advice (well, maybe sponsored, or with ads, or with links to their paid-for preset packs) about how to achieve amazing effects with your camera. This is all great, right? A bottomless resource of expert advice, often extremely good, and given freely. How can I possibly object to this? How can I possibly suggest they shouldn’t tell people their secrets? How mean am I?

    But let me ask you a question. Do you think photography is best driven by uniqueness or conformity?

  • Dominik Schwind ☛ Thought Leadership

    Great, AI has given you a list of 20 𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐝𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐬 𝐬𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐜𝐡 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐚𝐰 𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐬 – posting this will surely let the world know what a great employee you are. Congratulations. That internal workshop with some “trainer,” who conveniently is the cousin of your head of HR was a real game changer and so inspirational? What did it inspire you to do? Advance your career by posting to LinkedIn?

    Good god.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Random mid-year update

    This is the other side project I have going, currently sailing towards the 100th edition—on July 25th—and the end of year 2—on August 29th. Back when I announced the series I wrote

    "The goal for this project is to keep up the pace for at least a year. 52 weeks, 52 people, 52 blogs. Should be doable but only time will tell."

  • Computational Complexity ☛ A Professor Again

    Also for the first time in 13 years I don't have a "boss". Technically I report to the department chair, who until a few days ago reported to me. But tenure protects my job, I choose my own research agenda, and teaching and service assignments are more of a negotiation than a top-down decision. Freedom!

  • Dan McQuillan ☛ The role of the University is to resist AI

    AI's impact on higher education come primarily from historical forces, not from its claim to be sci-fi tech from the future. Society can't throw up its hands in shock as students outsource their thinking to simulation machines when fifty years of neoliberalism has masticated education into something homogenised, metricised and machinic. Meanwhile, so-called Ed Tech has claimed for decades that learning is informational rather than relational and ripe for technical disruption.

    When Illich refers to tools, he's taking this broader view. As he writes:

    "I use the term 'tool' broadly enough to include not only simple hardware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements, or motors, and not just large machines like cars or power stations; I also include among tools productive institutions such as factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, and productive systems for intangible commodities such as those which produce 'education,' 'health,' 'knowledge,' or 'decisions'."

    I want to ask the question "What kind of tool is AI?", to help determine whether Illich's ideas can assist us in responding to it.

• Hardware

  • Jeremy Cherfas ☛ I will get fooled again

    It happened again yesterday, to my shame. As usual, it was after getting flustered, this time because I had failed to check my batteries in advance and had to fix that after only a few minutes. Shut down, of course, is easy to detect because whatever you were hearing in the headphones vanishes. With a fresh set of batteries, monitoring was restored, the pretty digital soundwave display did its undulating thing, and off we went again. Except that I failed to put the thing back into record mode.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Ubuntu Disables Spectre/Meltdown Protections

    A whole class of speculative execution attacks against CPUs were published in 2018. They seemed pretty catastrophic at the time. But the fixes were as well. Speculative execution was a way to speed up CPUs, and removing those enhancements resulted in significant performance drops.

    Now, people are rethinking the trade-off. Ubuntu has disabled some protections, resulting in 20% performance boost.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Pro Publica ☛ Trump’s EPA Pulls Back PFAS Protections

    One summer day in 2017, a front-page story in the StarNews of Wilmington, North Carolina, shook up the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The drinking water system, it said, was polluted with a contaminant commonly known as GenX, part of the family of “forever” PFAS chemicals.

    It came from a Chemours plant in Fayetteville, near the winding Cape Fear River. Few knew about the contaminated water until the article described the discoveries of scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency and a state university. Given that certain types of PFAS have been linked to cancer, there was widespread anxiety over its potential danger.

  • International Business Times ☛ Medicaid Cuts Could Leave 17 Million Americans Without Health Insurance

    Donald Trump's so-called 'Big Beautiful Bill' is moving closer to becoming law, potentially putting the health insurance of around 17 million Americans at risk. If passed, the bill would lead to massive cuts to Medicaid, impacting millions of families, including those living in red states that strongly supported Trump during his presidential campaign.

  • Wired ☛ Insurers Aren’t Saying Whether They’ll Cover Vaccines for Kids if Government Stops Recommending Them

    When WIRED then asked 21 of the country’s largest health insurance groups whether they would stop providing cost-free coverage of current routine immunizations in the event ACIP stops recommending them, only Blue Shield of California—a company in the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association—confirmed it would continue coverage.

• Proprietary

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Official EU Website Exploited to Advertise Shady IPTV Services

    The European Commission's Eurostat website has been exploited by third parties who used it to advertise shady IPTV services. The straightforward SEO 'hack' aimed to rank well for various IPTV-related searches, including the top position for "best IPTV providers of 2025". To make matters worse, it confused AI, leading it to suggest that the EU was offering IPTV advice

  • The Register UK ☛ Targeted cyberattack strikes International Criminal Court

    The Register asked the ICC to elaborate on the nature of the attack and who might be responsible.

    Of the major global cyber powers – states capable of and those with a historical willingness to execute sophisticated espionage operations – neither China, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia, nor the US is among the 125 members of the ICC.

  • The Register UK ☛ Cisco scores a perfect 10 for a critical comms flaw

    Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CM) consolidates IP telephony, high-definition video, unified messaging, instant messaging, and Presence status indicators. Its Session Management Edition centralizes dial-plan and trunk aggregation across multi-site deployments.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Top FBI cyber official: Salt Typhoon ‘largely contained’ in telecom networks

    “Salt Typhoon, even though it was [an] espionage campaign, had access to telecommunications infrastructure,” he said. “You can pivot from access in support of espionage to access in support of destructive action.” Advertisement

    The number of telecommunications companies victimized in the United States stands at nine, according to Leatherman. But there have been additional revelations about victim companies as a result of the United States sharing information about breach specifics and Salt Typhoon tactics with nations in Europe and North America, he said.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Marginalized Americans are highly skeptical of artificial intelligence, research finds

      The research calls into question the dominant narrative of AI as a neutral or universally beneficial tool. It urges technologists, companies and policymakers to pause and ask: Who is this technology working for—and who is being left behind?

    • Creative Commons ☛ Why CC Signals: An Update

      Some of the input focuses on the specifics of the CC signals proposal, offering constructive questions and suggesting ideas for improving CC signals in practice. The most salient type of feedback, however, is touching on something far deeper than the CC signals themselves – the fact that so much about AI seems to be happening to us all, rather than with or for us all, and that the expectations of creators and communities are at risk of being overshadowed by powerful interests.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Not to be outdone by ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot humiliates itself in Atari 2600 chess showdown — another AI humbled by 1970s tech despite trash talk

      Microsoft Copilot has been trounced by an (emulated) Atari 2600 console in Atari Chess. The late 70s console tech easily triumphed over Copilot, despite the latter’s pre-match bravado. In a chat with the AI before the game, Copilot even trash-talked the Atari’s “suboptimal” and “bizarre moves.” However, it ended up surrendering graciously, saying it would “honor the vintage silicon mastermind that bested me fair and square.”

    • The Register UK ☛ Call center staffers explain how AI assistants aren't great

      The preprint paper, accepted to the 28th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW) in October, attempts to provide an alternative to assessments of AI geared toward management and customer experience, focusing instead on the workers forced to use AI during customer calls.

      One of the findings is that the AI often inaccurately transcribed customer call audio into text thanks to caller accents, pronunciation, and speech speed. The AI also had trouble rendering sequences of numbers accurately, like phone numbers.

    • Alisa Sireneva ☛ Hidden complexity in software development

      Experience shows that it’s anything but easy, but it’s always been hard for me to pinpoint exactly why that is the case. And I think I’ve finally found a good answer.

    • Seth Michael Larson ☛ Open Source Security work isn't “Special”

      He was seeing security reports that seemed convincing but they were also confusing. He asked for my help and together we determined the reports were generated with an LLM and were meaningless. I later published an article about “slop security reports” that other projects were seeing too, including curl, Python, Django, and others. But none of us would know what the others were seeing without sharing.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ How to pass an AI coding benchmark: train on the questions

      The models usually gave the correct answer! But they could only have given the right answer if they had trained on the questions.

    • The New Stack ☛ AI Coding Tools Create More Bugs Than They Fix

      AI-powered coding tools and the so-called “vibe coding” craze have enabled developers to build more code more swiftly than ever before, but lurking underneath all that productivity lie unrecognized security risks.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Maine police caught lying about using AI to alter drug bust photo

      A Maine police department's attempt to add their logo to a drug bust photo backfired spectacularly when citizens caught them lying about using artificial intelligence to alter evidence photos.

    • [Old] Dan McQuillan ☛ AI as Algorithmic Thatcherism

      AI can turn some impressive party tricks, but it's unsuited for solving serious problems in the real world. This is true of predictive AI, whose correlations are data-driven conspiracy theories, and of large language models like ChatGPT, whose plausible waffle is always trying to pull free of the facts. The real issue is not only that AI doesn't work as advertised, but the impact it will have before this becomes painfully obvious to everyone. AI is being used as form of 'shock doctrine', where the sense of urgency generated by an allegedly world-transforming technology is used as an opportunity to transform social systems without democratic debate.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • RIPE ☛ openPenny: Developing an Open-Source Tool for Detecting Non-Spoofed Traffic

      In this article, we introduce openPenny, an open-source traffic checker currently under development as part of the RIPE NCC Community Projects Fund. The goal of openPenny is to help network operators identify non-spoofed traffic arriving at unexpected entry points: this offers a new primitive to detect routing misconfigurations, evaluate policy or commercial adjustments, and defend against security threats such as BGP hijacks.

    • Wired ☛ A Group of Young Cybercriminals Poses the ‘Most Imminent Threat’ of Cyberattacks Right Now

      Scattered Spider members have increasingly coalesced around a tactic of using targeted social engineering to get a foothold inside company networks. Attackers may impersonate a staff member who is locked out of their company email account and contact the firm’s IT help desk to get access, before resetting multifactor authentication credentials. Researchers say that the group has also used a tactic of creating convincing phishing websites where the URLs often include the name of the target organization along with words like “okta,” “vpn” or “helpdesk.” Once inside networks, the hackers deploy various types of ransomware or steal data that is used to extort companies.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Piracy Shield Concerns Prompt EU Commission to Engage Italian Govt.

      In a letter to Italy's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Antonio Tajani, the European Commission acknowledges Italy's work against online piracy. However, concerns remain over aspects of the Piracy Shield system, potential non-compliance with the Digital Services Act, and the fundamental right to freedom of expression. The letter follows submissions by tech and telecoms advocacy group CCIA, voicing concerns over safeguards, transparency, and cross-border content removal.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Republican Budget Bill Signals New Era in Federal Surveillance

      "The looming rapid expansion of federal surveillance may signal a step change on a trajectory set in motion after September 11, 2001, with broad implications for the rights and privacy of all Americans."

  • Confidentiality

    • The Register UK ☛ Coming to PostgreSQL – on-disk database encryption

      Percona said it would help customers comply with policies and regulations that require encryption, such as Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires organizations to implement appropriate security measures where storage encryption alone is no longer sufficient to protect personal data at rest.

    • Macworld ☛ Why you need to pack a VPN for your next vacation

      These problems are well understood. But one thing that’s frequently forgotten by traveling techies is data privacy and security. You’ll probably end up using public Wi-Fi in airport lounges, coffee shops, and your hotel room, which can expose your personal data to hackers and identity thieves. This is why you need a VPN.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ California man was member of 'Terrorgram Collective,' prosecutors say

    Noah Jacob Lamb targeted people the group felt were “an enemy of the cause of white supremacist accelerationism,” and included their photograph, home address, and in some of cases, photos of their spouse, as part of the hit list, according to the federal grand jury indictment.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Fearing neighbor Russia, Finland leaves international land mine ban

    On June 19, several days after the Foreign Affairs Committee vote, the full Finnish Parliament passed the bill, overwhelmingly, 157 to 18. The president is expected to sign the bill early this month. But the scenes leading up to that final vote speak to the emotions surrounding the issue – on both sides – and the difficulty of a decision that seems to pit defending freedom against defending human rights.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Republic of Cruelty

    This is evil. Not in some abstract philosophical sense, but in the most practical, immediate sense: it is the deliberate infliction of suffering on innocent people in service of political goals, justified through appeals to necessity that dissolve under the slightest moral scrutiny. And those who enable it, who normalize it, who profit from it while performing sophistication—they have revealed themselves to be complicit in a system that treats constitutional rights as optional, human dignity as negotiable, and American citizenship as meaningless when it becomes inconvenient to political theater.

    Let us examine the evidence with the cold precision it demands.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Welcome to the Age of Disappearance - by Hamilton Nolan

    Donald Trump envisions himself as an all-powerful leader whose will is equal to law. He is bent on revenge against his political enemies. He has installed extreme loyalists in the Justice Department, the FBI, the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and all other security departments. The courts have declined to meaningfully restrain his abuses of these departments. This budget will give him the final piece of the puzzle that he needs to achieve his fever dream: a nationwide army of masked, unaccountable armed agents empowered to snatch anyone they like off the streets, and the physical infrastructure to imprison or deport those people at will. Thousands of men with guns, unrestrained by judges or local police, who do not answer to Congress, who point guns at the press, who arrest whoever they want, for reasons they do not share, and do whatever they wish with those people. The implications of this are going to make America a much darker place.

  • TechTea ☛ June 2025 Review

    Sadly the progress that has been made has been undermined by the Supreme Court and all the yes men around Trump. Even if an action is illegal and unjust, the consequences are mostly fines that come out of taxpayer’s wallets. If this continues the poorest of us will be sucked dry, the rest of us will constantly fear being disappeared by the government (ICE has already ‘deported’ some US citizens and permanent residents), and the rich will profit greatly.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Migrants could be barred from asylum in Britain under deal with France

    The two countries are preparing to announce a deal where the French take back migrants who have illegally crossed the Channel in small boats, while the UK accepts a similar number of asylum seekers from France.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ 29 North Korean laptop farms busted by U.S. Department of Justice — illicit IT workers across 16 states reportedly obtained employment with more than 100 U.S. companies to help fund regime

    The department said on Monday that it had conducted a series of coordinated actions, including "two indictments, an arrest, searches of 29 known or suspected 'laptop farms' across 16 states, and the seizure of 29 financial accounts used to launder illicit funds and 21 fraudulent websites," after North Korean IT workers "successfully obtained employment with more than 100 U.S. companies" with the help of "individuals in the United States, China, United Arab Emirates, and Taiwan."

• Environment

  • Renewable Energy World ☛ Louisiana is latest state to redefine natural [sic] gas -- a planet-warming fossil fuel -- as green energy

    Environmental groups say these new laws are part of a broader push by petrochemical industry-backed groups to rebrand fossil fuel as climate friendly and head off efforts to shift electric grids to renewables, such as solar and wind. It’s “pure Orwellian greenwashing,” said Tim Donaghy, research director of Greenpeace USA.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ As a heatwave grips Europe, the Med is now too hot for summer holidays

    Most of us like a bit of sunshine on our holidays, but when does hot become “too hot”? If ambulances are on standby at resorts, aircon-fuelled “climate shelters” are being set up and the elderly are being advised to stay indoors, you could argue that the answer is: now.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Tesla's Robotaxi Revolution!

      This was apropos of Donald Trump's approach to tariffs and Ukraine, but below the fold I apply the criterion to Elon Musk basing Tesla's future on its robotaxi service.

      Jonathan V. Last's A Song of “Full Self-Driving”: Elon Isn’t Tony Stark. He’s Michael Scott. shows that Musk's bullshitting started almost a decade ago: [...]

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ The Land Is an Ancestor We Refuse to Abandon: In the Shadows of the Hermosa Mine

• Finance

  • Pro Publica ☛ How Changes to Texas Law Will Help Elon Musk’s Companies

    Elon Musk was pleading.

    It was April 2013, and Musk stood at a podium in a small committee room in the basement of the Texas Capitol. The Tesla CEO asked the legislators gathered before him to change state law, allowing him to bypass the state’s powerful car dealership lobby and sell his electric vehicles directly to the public.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Site36 ☛ Riace to lose its mayor: Mimmo Lucano announces resistance to judgement – and would give up seat in EU Parliament

    The Europe-wide known architect of a solidarity-based refugee model in Italy is to be deposed. Right-wing extremist Matteo Salvini was one of the people behind the move. However, there is a last chance. Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Lucano is perhaps best known to German audiences for Wim Wenders’ film ‘Il Volo’.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft kicks off new fiscal year with more layoffs

    Microsoft hasn't formally announced plans to cut staff, and our questions went unanswered, aside from the canned statement Microsoft has been providing multiple outlets for months.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Microsoft cuts 9,000 jobs in latest round of layoffs

    Microsoft Corp. today launched a round of job cuts that is expected to affect 9,000 employees, or about 4% of its workforce.

  • CNBC ☛ Microsoft laying off about 9,000 employees in latest round of cuts

    The software [sic] company also announced layoffs in May affecting around 6,000 people.

  • International Business Times ☛ Microsoft Layoffs Hit Thousands — Sources Say Rare's Everwild Canceled as Xbox Division Takes a Major Hit

    Microsoft has confirmed a new wave of job cuts this year, affecting approximately 9,100 employees, which represents around 4 percent of its global workforce, as reported by The Seattle Times.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Unilever cuts off funding for Ben & Jerry’s foundation amid tensions over Gaza, audit

    Unilever is cutting off millions in funding for Ben & Jerry’s charitable foundation after it refused to provide audit documents, escalating what has become a microcosm for corporate “woke” wars.

  • CPJ ☛ Zimbabwe authorities arrest newspaper editor on charges of insulting the president

    CPJ has documented an ongoing crackdown on dissent in Zimbabwe, amid political tension. In February, authorities arrested Blessed Mhlanga, a journalist with Alpha Media Holdings, and held him for over 10 weeks on baseless charges of incitement in connection with his coverage of war veterans who demanded Mnangagwa’s resignation. The Zimbabwe Independent is a subsidiary of Alpha Media Holdings.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Press Gazette ☛ 2025 journalism job cuts tracked: Latest as Future closes Laptop Mag

  • Press Gazette ☛ Data and tech overhaul paved way for Prensa Iberica expansion

    The company – which publishes 26 newspapers, four magazines, and a host of online brands – implemented the changes to ensure it can remain sustainable in an increasingly competitive environment.

  • FAIR ☛ Farewell to Bill Moyers, Who Showed What Public TV Could Be — FAIR

    Bill Moyers died last week at the age of 91. His career began as a close aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, serving as LBJ’s de facto chief of staff and then his press secretary, but Moyers spent most of his life in journalism. After the Johnson administration, he was briefly publisher of Long Island’s Newsday, which won two Pulitzers under his tenure before he was forced out for being too left (Extra!, 1–2/96).

  • CPJ ☛ Iranian media under siege after Israel war, [Internet] disrupted

    London-based Iran International TV spokesperson Adam Baillie said the new law would “widen the legal dragnet” against journalists and criminalizes contact with media outlets based abroad.

    Journalists trying to report within Iran also face [Internet] restrictions.

  • Variety ☛ Paramount to Pay Trump $16 Million to Settle '60 Minutes' Lawsuit

    Paramount Global said late Tuesday that the company willl pay $16 million to President Donald Trump to settle a lawsuit tied to “60 Minutes,” betting that the payment will help the company’s fortunes and speed a planned deal with Skydance Media even if it risks tarnishing one of the media giant’s most storied brands.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ How the Dalai Lama is planning to use his death to thwart China

    He was taken to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and installed in the Potala palace, the complex where the Dalai Lamas resided for centuries. He was just 15 when the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1950 and he formally assumed the role as the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan people.

  • The Hindu ☛ Line will continue after me, no other authority can interfere: Dalai Lama makes statement as 90th birthday celebrations begin

    The spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism asserted that the Gaden Phodrang Trust has sole authority to recognise the future reincarnation, adding that “no one else has any such authority to interfere in this matter”

  • Daniel Pipes ☛ Updates on the Persecution of Alawites

    My article "'Are you Alawite?': A Call to Prevent Genocide in Syria" covers the experience of Alawites under the Sunni regime that came to power in December 2024. This blog continues coverage of that topic.

  • [Old] Computer Weekly ☛ AI will create a thousand Post Office scandals | Computer Weekly

    Moreover, thanks to the internal complexity of their millions of parameters, there’s no ironclad way to figure out why an AI system came up with a particular answer. AI doesn’t even need to get to court to create problems of legality; this inherent opacity is the antithesis of any kind of due process.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Record ☛ California jury orders Google to pay $314 million over data transfers from Android phones

    A California jury has ordered Google to pay $314 million for collecting data from Android phones while they were connected to cellular networks, a practice that plaintiffs said equated to stealing a resource that they had paid for.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Carr Rejects Efforts to Extend Lifeline Waiver

    The Lifeline program provides support for communications services to qualifying low-income customers. Participating companies may claim Lifeline support for voice and broadband services only if the subscriber has recently used the service.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Register UK ☛ Exchange, Skype for Business subscription editions launched

    Running an organization on an unsupported platform is a huge no-no, not least from a regulatory standpoint, but for organizations that can't or won't make the move to Microsoft's cloud, where Exchange Online and Teams can be found, the company's on-premises products have fulfilled a critical need.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ NASA’s epic space footage is coming to Netflix this summer – but you can already watch it now, for free

    NASA+ is expected to come to Netflix later this summer. But space enthusiasts can already find the content – subscription-free – by visiting the NASA+ website. Or, viewers can access the content from the NASA app, which is available on iOS and Android, as well as on smart TVs and streaming devices with Apple, Amazon, Google/Android, and Roku.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• MacRumors ☛ Brazil Recommends Sanctions for Apple Over App Store Rules

  The recommendation was issued by the General Superintendence of Brazil's Administrative Council for Economic Defense (SG/CADE), the technical body of the federal antitrust authority. In a public statement translated from Portuguese, SG/CADE determined that Apple's conduct with iOS constitutes a violation of Brazilian competition law and urged CADE's internal tribunal to impose penalties, including financial fines and mandatory changes to Apple's policies.