Leftovers

• J Pieper ☛ Separating mjbots.com from jpieper.com

  For many years https://jpieper.com was a home for my personal writings and projects. As some of those projects turned into mjbots, the line became pretty blurry. To try and shore up some personal work/life balance, I’ve moved nearly all posts that in hindsight were “mjbots” related over to https://blog.mjbots.com and removed them from here.

• Annie Mueller ☛ The inevitable result of what we do today

  This quote in particular keeps ringing ringing ringing in my head:

  "The future is not an escapist place to occupy. All of it is the inevitable result of what we do today, and the more we take it in our hands, imagine it as a place of justice and pleasure, the more the future knows we want it, and that we aren’t letting go."

• Science

  • The Nation ☛ People Want Climate Action. This Data Shows It.

    More evidence of this popular mandate keeps emerging. This week, the European Commission released the latest issue of the Eurobarometer, which has been surveying the beliefs of European Union residents since the EU’s founding in 1993. Across the EU’s 27 member states, 85 percent of people said climate change is “a serious problem” and tackling it “should be a priority.” Two out of three people (67 percent) said their national government was “not doing enough.” The survey also contradicted the notion that, despite such stated support, climate is not a priority for voters. People in most EU countries ranked climate change among the top three problems facing humanity — tied with “the economic situation” and trailing only “armed conflict” and “poverty.”

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Why were websites hosting major US climate reports taken down?

    According to AP, websites for the national assessments and the US Global Change Research Program were offline on Monday and Tuesday, with no links, notes or referrals elsewhere.

    The disappearance has sparked concern over transparency, public access to science, and potential risks to communities facing escalating climate threats.

• Career/Education

  • Terence Eden ☛ Process Vs Prejudice

    Look, there's no doubt plenty of bias encoded within processes. All processes should be regularly reviewed and updated. Breaking a process in extremis can be a good idea. When confronted with an inflexible policy, you may feel like a mere cog in a machine - but at least the machine is prevented from discriminating against your type of cogs.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ What happens when engineers work more than one job

    The second reason is a bit subtle. Particularly for more senior engineers, when a company employs you, they’re not just renting the time you spend sitting down and typing code. They’re renting the ambient processing you’re doing for the rest of the workday. Or even the ambient processing you’re doing in the shower, or while you sleep, and so on. I have worked with very effective engineers who only spent an hour or two a day actively “working”. But they were so effective because they spent the rest of the day thinking. When they sat down to work, they had hours and hours of background processing helping them make the right decisions and come up with useful new ideas.

  • Ava ☛ things i don’t like about my job right now

    I generally have a good job. My boss is great, most of my coworkers are good, I am good at the actual tasks, and I can set my own pace and priorities (within a limit). It pays reasonably well for my needs. But there are things that really exhaust me about it. Let me complain today.

• Hardware

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Report: Intel considers moving on from 18A chip manufacturing process

    If Intel does decide to write off the 18A process, it would be seen as a massive blow to Intel’s foundry strategy. The node was described as a “generational leap” for the company that would help it to match the capabilities of TSMC. It’s the first Intel node to feature technologies such as PowerVia backside power delivery and next-generation RibbonFET transistors – cutting-edge innovations that were pitched as the foundation of Intel’s much-vaunted Intel Foundry Services business.

  • Victor Kropp ☛ Transparency

    What’s the moral of the story? Transparency is good until it creates troubles.

  • MB ☛ My Home Command Center

    At some point soon, I’ll get a monitor arm and free up some desk space. Until then, it looks great.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Vox ☛ Medicaid cuts in big, beautiful bill: Is Trump unaware of them?

    Republicans are at varying levels of misleading, avoidance, or denial about this.

  • TruthOut ☛ EPA Has Terminated Over $15 Million in Funding for “Forever Chemicals” Research

    In its big-picture PFAS action plan from 2019, the agency said it would attack this complex problem on multiple fronts. It would, for example, consider limiting the presence of two of the best-known compounds — PFOA and PFOS — in drinking water. And, it said, it would find out more about the potential harm of GenX, which was virtually unregulated.

    By the time Trump was sworn in for his second term, many of the plan’s suggestions had been put in place. After his first administration said PFOA and PFOS in drinking water should be regulated, standards were finalized under President Joe Biden. Four other types of PFAS, including GenX, were also tagged with limits.

  • Wired ☛ Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Would Leave Millions Without Health Insurance

    The number of people without health insurance in the United States nearly halved from 2013 to 2023, falling from around 14 percent to a record low of less than 8 percent, largely driven by coverage expansion under the Affordable Care Act. That rate has held relatively steady over the past few years, with around 26 million people in the US currently without health insurance.

  • Robert Birming ☛ I’d rather be a fake millionaire

    Some people posted their million-dollar smiles on social media, only to be told later that they’d actually won just $11. For about 15 glorious minutes, though, they truly believed they were rich.

    On the bright side, the joy they felt was just as intense as if it had been real.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft changes conditions for Azure startup credits [Ed: Victims of false promises from Microsoft]

    One startup founder who spoke to The Register on condition of anonymity praised the old program, but said some warning would have been useful as this has wrecked budgets and may sink the entire project.

  • Security Week ☛ North Korean Hackers Use Fake Zoom Updates to Install macOS Malware

    The victim then receives an email containing a link to a Zoom meeting, and is instructed to run a malicious script posing as a Zoom SDK update. The script’s execution triggers a multi-stage infection chain leading to the deployment of malicious binaries that SentinelOne collectively tracks as NimDoor.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ WARNING: Don't update your Nikon camera's firmware with third-party lenses – you could brick your gear!

    Installing new Nikon firmware with third-party lenses like Viltrox attached can lead to lens failure. Here's what you need to know to avoid costly damage and frustration

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Cloudflare rolls out ‘pay-per-crawl’ feature to constrain AI’s limitless hunger for data 

    Cloudflare announced Tuesday it will allow customers to block or charge fees for web crawlers deployed to scrape their websites and data on behalf of AI systems.

  • Simon Willison ☛ Rate limiting by IP using Cloudflare's rate limiting rules

    Unfortunately this trick doesn't help for crawlers that are hitting every possible combination of facets on my search page!

  • Six Colors ☛ About that A18 Pro MacBook rumor…

    Well, would you look at that? The A18 Pro is 46% faster than the M1 in single-core tasks, and almost identical to the M1 on multi-core and graphics tasks. If you wanted to get rid of the M1 MacBook Air but have decided that even today, its performance characteristics make it perfectly suitable as a low-cost Mac laptop, building a new model on the A18 Pro would not be a bad move. It wouldn’t have Thunderbolt, only USB-C, but that’s not a dealbreaker on a cheap laptop. It might re-use parts from the M1 Air, including the display.

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Apple’s plan to put an iPhone chip in a MacBook makes sense

    In benchmark tests, which are ways of measuring how powerful a device is, the A18 Pro is impressive.

  • Newsweek ☛ Microsoft's H-1B Visa Applications Questioned Amid Mass Layoffs

    Microsoft is under growing pressure to account for its H-1B visa requests after announced another round of layoffs this week, affecting around 9,000 employees across its global headcount.

    The latest round of layoffs, hitting roughly 4 percent of the tech giant's workforce, comes after two other waves in May and June, affecting another 8,000 in total. The company has laid off nearly 16,000 people in total this year, out of a 228,000-strong global employee base.

    In the weeks that followed those layoff announcements, claims began circulated on X that the company had also applied for upwards of 6,000 high-skilled work visas, or H-1Bs, since October, the start of the current fiscal year. While that number could not be independently confirmed, during the last fiscal year, Microsoft applied for 9,491 H-1B visas. All were approved.

  • Fandom Inc ☛ All The Xbox Games Canceled And Studios Closed In Microsoft's Latest Mass Layoffs

    Microsoft announced mass layoffs on July 2 impacting many areas of the company's sprawling business, including Xbox. Overall, Microsoft is said to be cutting 4% of its staff worldwide, affecting about 9,000 people. Microsoft is an enormous company that employs more than 200,000 people globally.

    The exact number of cuts at Xbox is unknown, but Microsoft has confirmed layoffs at multiple studios, game cancellations, and entire studio closures. Read on to learn more about all the cancelled games and studio closures as a result of Microsoft's latest cutbacks.

    Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer sent a memo to staff today addressing the cuts, claiming the job losses were necessary to allow for the "enduring success" of Xbox.

    "We will end or decrease work in certain areas of the business and follow Microsoft's lead in removing layers of management to increase agility and effectiveness," he said.

  • Vox Media ☛ Microsoft has never been good at running game studios, which is a problem when it owns them all

    Microsoft made large-scale layoffs across its gaming division this week, as part of wider cuts that have seen about 9,000 employees of the tech giant let go. It’s the fourth round of layoffs to hit Microsoft’s gaming operation since the start of last year, and the biggest since the company shuttered four Bethesda studios, including Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks, in May 2024.

  • Report: Romero Games makes layoffs after Microsoft cancels project funding

    Irish studio Romero Games has seemingly laid off a number of employees after suddenly losing project funding.

    Notably, a number of Romero Games workers claim the cutbacks at Romero are a direct result of Microsoft's latest layoff spree—which saw the company make significant redundancies across its video game division.

  • Silcon Republic ☛ Irish jobs cut in Microsoft’s latest layoffs affecting roughly 9,000

    That came less than a year after 650 employees were fired at the company’s gaming division. These cuts mostly affected corporate and supporting functions, according to a statement from Spencer at the time.

    While earlier this year, Business Insider reported that Microsoft was making performance-based cuts, with hundreds affected by the move.

    The company fired 10,000 employees at the start of 2023, followed by laying off 1,900 in its Activision Blizzard and Xbox divisions in 2024. Months later, it fired around 1,000 staff members, including in mixed reality, Azure and Mission Engineering.

  • Forza Motorsport Could Be in Trouble Following Microsoft Layoffs

    It might be the end of an era for racing fans. Microsoft has allegedly slashed the staff at Turn 10 Studios, the developer behind the Forza Motorsport video game franchise. It’s unclear how many people the studio laid off, but reports indicate that nearly half the staff has been let go.

    The Verge is reporting that around 70 people were fired, and it’s unclear how this will affect future installments of the Forza Motorsport franchise. The studio launched the franchise’s latest installment in 2023, simply named Forza Motorsport, for the Xbox Series X/S and PC. It garnered tepid reviews, with some disliking parts of the game’s newer elements, like the RPG-style progression system, which the studio attempted to address.

  • Engadget ☛ Xbox was funding Romero Games' new game, but layoffs have left the project in crisis

    Microsoft was rocked by more than 9,000 job cuts this week. A significant number have come from its gaming division, resulting in the closure of multiple game studios and the cancellation of numerous in-development projects at Xbox and its contracted studios. We’ve already learned that Microsoft has closed the studio that was developing the much-anticipated Perfect Dark reboot, and Rare’s Everwild has also been sunsetted. And now Romero Games — the studio headed up by Doom creator and veteran developer John Romero — is another major casualty of the sweeping cuts.

  • IGN ☛ Romero Games Employee Says 'Whole Studio' Subject to Layoffs After Microsoft Pulls Funding for New Shooter from Doom Co-Creator John Romero

    A Romero Games employee has claimed that Microsoft's decision to pull funding from the studio's in-development project has led to the entirety of the studio being laid off.

    "Today I found out our whole studio is being let go because of the layoffs at Microsoft," the staff member wrote via a post on LinkedIn.

    "A very sad day," wrote another employee impacted by layoffs. "It breaks my heart to say that Romero Games fell victim to the 9,100 Microsoft layoffs today. The best team I've ever worked with and my dream job gone just like that. It really was a great project and it's hard to process that it's over. It's nothing less than tragic."

  • EuroGamer ☛ Doom creator John Romero's next shooter project loses funding following Microsoft cuts

    The next shooter project from Romero Games has lost funding following recent layoffs and studio closures at Microsoft.

    The Galway-based studio, set up by Doom creator John Romero, released a statement earlier today on social media saying its publisher had cancelled funding for its game along with "other unannounced projects at other studios". Romero Games said this decision was "well above our visibility or control".

    As a result, the studio is now evaluating next steps, but the team is "heartbroken" at the decision.

  • The Autopian ☛ Microsoft Reportedly Lays Off Over 70 Employees Behind Forza And Forza Horizon

    Games launched under the Forza banner have been produced by Turn 10 Studios since the beginning, going back 20 years to the original release of Forza Motorsport in 2025. Turn 10 is a subsidiary of Microsoft and has been since day one, which means that larger layoffs at Microsoft have now impacted employees there as well, with numerous artists and producers announcing on LinkedIn that they were let go this week.

    A review of the company’s LinkedIn page shows the “#opentowork” banner across a large number of employees, largely made up of artists and producers, although some developers are there as well. More than a dozen employees have the banner, and many are posting stories on LinkedIn announcing that they’ve been let go as part of the larger Microsoft initiative.

  • The Verge ☛ Xbox hit hard with layoffs: from canceled games to a shuttered studio

    On July 2nd, Microsoft announced sweeping layoffs affecting as many as 9,000 employees, and they had a big impact on the company’s Xbox studios. Microsoft canceled Perfect Dark from The Initiative and closed the studio. Rare’s Everwild, announced in 2019, was canceled, too. And Forza Motorsport developer Turn 10 Studios will lose more than 70 employees.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Simon Willison ☛ Trial Court Decides Case Based On AI-Hallucinated Caselaw

      It's already listed in the AI Hallucination Cases database (now listing 168 cases, it was 116 when I first wrote about it on 25th May) which lists a $2,500 monetary penalty.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Microsoft lays off the staff who make the money to fund AI that doesn’t

      Microsoft says this layoff is to reduce layers of management. But only 17% of those fired from head office in Redmond, Washington, were managers. Microsoft is firing the rank-and-file who do the work.

      Microsoft isn’t replacing these guys with AI. It’s firing them so it can throw even more money at AI. Microsoft plans to spend $80 billion on AI infrastructure in the next year.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘AI doesn’t know what an orgasm sounds like’: audiobook actors grapple with the rise of robot narrators

      In May the Amazon-owned audiobook provider Audible announced it would allow authors and publishers to choose from more than 100 voices created by artificial intelligence to narrate audiobooks in English, Spanish, French and Italian, with AI translation of audiobooks expected to be available later in the year – news that was met with criticism and curiosity across the publishing industry.

    • Russell Coker ☛ The Fuss About “AI”

      There are many negative articles about “AI” (which is not about actual Artificial Intelligence also known as “AGI”). Which I think are mostly overblown and often ridiculous.

      [...]

      "People often complain about the apparent impossibility of “AI” companies doing what investors think they will do. But this isn’t anything new, that all happened before with the “dot com boom”. I’m not the first person to make this comparison, The Daily WTF (a high quality site about IT mistakes) has an interesting article making this comparison [1]. But my conclusions are quite different."

      [...]

      NVidia isn’t ever going to have the future sales that would justify a market capitalisation of almost 4 Trillion US dollars. This market cap can support paying for new research and purchasing rights to patented technology in a similar way to the high stock price of Google supported buying YouTube, DoubleClick, and Motorola Mobility which are the keys to Google’s profits now.

      [...]

      Companies spending billions of dollars without firm plans for how to make money are going to go bankrupt no matter what business they are in.

      [...]

      Companies like NVidia that have high stock prices based on the supposed ongoing growth in use of their hardware will have their stock prices crash. But the new technology they develop will be used by other people for other purposes. If hospitals can get cheap diagnostic ML systems because of unreasonable investment into “AI” then that could be a win for humanity.

      Companies that bet their entire business on AI even when it’s not necessarily their core business (as Tesla has done with self driving) will have their stock price crash dramatically at a minimum and have the possibility of bankruptcy. Having Tesla go bankrupt is definitely better than having people try to use them as self driving cars.

  • Social Control Media

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ How technologies of connection tear us apart

      For him, for example, the moderation efforts that platforms employ are the result of a reality in denial: that people — we — are attracted to that horrible content as much as to the “good” content that also goes viral. “The algorithms are adept at reading the human id and satisfying its desires, however twisted,” he writes.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Virginia county says April ransomware attack exposed employee SSNs

      In addition to Social Security numbers, names, driver’s license numbers, bank account information, health insurance numbers and medical information was also stolen during the incident.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ Meta calls €200M pay-or-consent fine 'unlawful'

      But not the European Commission, which handed down a €200 million ($228 million) fine for the Meta's "consent or pay" ad model in April.

      While the sum is a pittance compared to the piles of cash generated by Zuckerberg's empire (AI notwithstanding), Meta has taken issue with the ruling. It said: "The decision mandates that Meta must offer a less personalized ads service for free, disregarding cost, impact, or effectiveness, and imposes a potentially unviable business model.

  • Confidentiality

    • The Register UK ☛ Let's Encrypt rolls out free IP address certificates

      It's not the first CA to do so. PositiveSSL, Sectigo, and GeoTrust all offer TLS/SSL certificates for use with IP addresses, at prices ranging from $40 to $90 or so annually. But Let's Encrypt does so at no cost.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Wired ☛ Trump’s Defiance of TikTok Ban Prompted Immunity Promises to 10 Tech Companies

    Under orders from President Donald Trump, Bondi has refused to enforce a law passed by Congress last year that classifies TikTok as a national security risk because of its ties to China and bars companies from distributing the app to US consumers.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ This July 4, Let’s Resolve to Win an Actual Democracy

    Half a century ago, most Americans, including many on the Left, were under the impression that the United States was a democracy with a political system that would eventually represent majority interests. Neither the civil rights movement nor the New Left and its various offshoots, including the People’s Bicentennial Commission, identified the Constitution as the main obstacle to progressive policies.

    But much has changed. Today constitutional veneration is nowhere near as strong as it was when the Freedom Train and Preamble Express were chugging across the country. In fact, the Constitution’s role in our current political crisis and rising authoritarianism has become “a kind of truism, both within the sort of left of center constitutional law academy, and also . . . the commentariat more generally,” says Rana. “That’s a big shift.”

  • The Verge ☛ Justice Department releases letters to Apple, Google, and others about TikTok ban

    The documents — obtained by Zhaocheng Anthony Tan, a Google shareholder who sued for their release earlier this year — show Attorney General Pam Bondi and her predecessor Acting Attorney General James McHenry III promising to release companies from responsibility for violating the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which required US companies to ban TikTok from app stores and other platforms or face hundreds of billions of dollars in fines. The law was intended to force a sale of TikTok from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, due to national security concerns.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Ghost of Jerry Falwell: Not Dead Enough

    But today we need to exorcise a ghost. The specter of Jerry Falwell Sr. haunts American politics forty-three years after he founded the Moral Majority, and his toxic legacy has metastasized into something far more dangerous than even his critics imagined. The straight line from Falwell’s cynical weaponization of Christianity to Trump’s authoritarian nationalism isn’t coincidence—it’s completion.

  • [Old] ML Genius Holdings LLC ☛ Dead Kennedys – Moral Majority Lyrics

    Blow it out your ass, Jerry Falwell
    Blow it out your ass, Jesse Helms
    Blow it out your ass, Ronald Reagan
    What's wrong with a mind of my own?

  • Robert Birming ☛ Re: IndieWeb is Punk

    A search for “punk philosophy” brings up ideas about self-expression, individual freedom, and a DIY ethic.

    Sounds a lot like a description of the IndieWeb, doesn’t it?

    And I love it!

  • Manton Reece ☛ Is TikTok banned yet?

    The full report from Media Matters is very disturbing. It’s not just a couple videos that fell through the moderation cracks. It’s many videos and millions of views. TikTok is designed for this.

  • The Verge ☛ Racist videos made with AI are going viral on TikTok | The Verge

    Racist videos that appear to be created with Google’s AI video generation tool Veo 3 have raked in millions of views across TikTok, according to findings from the nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters. The AI-generated videos uncovered by the organization are filled with racist tropes, many of which target Black people.

  • CBC ☛ Jan. 6 [insurrectionist] pardoned by Trump gets life in prison for plot on FBI

    Last November, a jury convicted Kelley of conspiring to murder federal employees, solicitation to commit a crime of violence and influencing federal officials by threat.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Cosmic Joke of Kurt Vonnegut's ‘Cat’s Cradle’

    If it had been cloudy in Hiroshima that morning, the bomb would have fallen somewhere else. If POW Vonnegut had been shoved into a different train car, if he had picked a different foxhole, if the Germans hadn’t herded him into the slaughterhouse basement when the sirens sounded—so many ifs that would have ended in death. Instead, somehow, he danced between the raindrops. Because of this, for Vonnegut, survival became a kind of cosmic joke, with death being the setup and life being the punch line.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • DomainTools ☛ From Newsroom to Threat Room: Audra Streetman’s Journey into Cybersecurity

    Audra Streetman’s story stands as proof that the cybersecurity industry is increasingly open to diverse backgrounds. Starting in broadcast journalism, she began noticing a spike in ransomware stories affecting local businesses. One attack in particular the JBS Foods ransomware incident shifted her perspective on cybersecurity as a long-term societal challenge.

  • Ethan Zuckerman ☛ Stalking the Statistically Improbable Restaurant... With Data!

    The existence of the statistically improbable restaurant implies a statistically probable restaurant distribution: the mix of restaurants we’d expect to find in an “average” American city. Of course, once you dig into the idea of an “average” city, the absurdity of the concept becomes clear.

• Environment

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Google’s electricity demand is skyrocketing

    We got two big pieces of energy news from Google this week. The company announced that it’s signed an agreement to purchase electricity from a fusion company’s forthcoming first power plant. Google also released its latest environmental report, which shows that its energy use from data centers has doubled since 2020.

  • Wired ☛ Affluent Travelers Are Ditching Business Class for Business Jets

    As demand for scheduled services increases, carriers like these are expanding their route maps. This May, Aero launched a bicoastal Los Angeles to New York flight (featuring in-flight Erewhon meals and Starlink Wi-Fi). The company says the new route was “built for business travelers, flying from Los Angeles to New York on Monday mornings and returning to Los Angeles on Thursday afternoons.”

  • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ What Would Happen if the Amazon Rainforest Dried Out? A Decades-Long Experiment Has Some Answers

    Understanding how drought can affect the Amazon, an area twice the size of India that crosses into several South American nations, has implications far beyond the region. The rainforest stores a massive amount of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is the main driver of climate change. According to one study, the Amazon stores the equivalent of two years of global carbon emissions, which mainly come from the burning of coal, oil and gasoline. When trees are cut, or wither and die from drought, they release into the atmosphere the carbon they were storing, which accelerates global warming.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Register UK ☛ Tariffs, trade turmoil drive up bitbarn cost and build times

      A survey by datacenter specialist Onnec finds that AI workloads have increased by an average of 42 percent over the past twelve months, with nearly two-thirds of operators saying that requirements to support AI were higher than expected, stretching the capacity of both existing and planned sites.

    • PC World ☛ Firefox is being flooded with [cryptocurrency] wallet scam extensions

      Crytocurrency hasn’t just ruined the hunt for an affordable graphics card, or the conversation at that little bar you used to like. Now it’s come for everyone’s favorite alt browser, too. Dozens of fake cryptocurrency wallet extensions—indistinguishable from their nominally legitimate counterparts—are flooding Firefox’s add-on repository. It’s a problem.

    • FSF ☛ Our small team vs millions of bots

      Some web developers have started integrating a program called Anubis to decrease the amount of requests that automated systems send and therefore help the website avoid being DDoSed. The problem is that Anubis makes the website send out a free JavaScript program that acts like malware. A website using Anubis will respond to a request for a webpage with a free JavaScript program and not the page that was requested. If you run the JavaScript program sent through Anubis, it will do some useless computations on random numbers and keep one CPU entirely busy. It could take less than a second or over a minute. When it is done, it sends the computation results back to the website. The website will verify that the useless computation was done by looking at the results and only then give access to the originally requested page.

      At the FSF, we do not support this scheme because it conflicts with the principles of software freedom. The Anubis JavaScript program's calculations are the same kind of calculations done by crypto-currency mining programs. A program which does calculations that a user does not want done is a form of malware. Proprietary software is often malware, and people often run it not because they want to, but because they have been pressured into it. If we made our website use Anubis, we would be pressuring users into running malware. Even though it is free software, it is part of a scheme that is far too similar to proprietary software to be acceptable. We want users to control their own computing and to have autonomy, independence, and freedom. With your support, we can continue to put these principles into practice.

    • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Bill allowing Armenia to nationalise its electricity company passes first reading

      The Armenian Parliament has adopted legislative amendments to nationalise the country’s sole electricity company, Electric Networks of Armenia (ENA), in their first reading. This follows the arrest of the company’s owner, Samvel Karapetyan, on charges of making calls to overthrow the government amidst ongoing tensions between the church and the state.

  • Overpopulation

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft confirms it’s shuttered Pakistan presence

      Pakistan is home to over 250 million people, making it the world’s fifth-most populous country and therefore an obvious target for the technology industry. However, the nation’s politics and governance are tumultuous, with no prime minister in the country’s 75-year history serving a full term.

    • Cost Rica ☛ Protests Rise Over Panama Canal’s New Water Project

      The canal basin, which also supplies drinking water to half the country, was last modernized in 1935. At that time, there were about 6,000 ship transits annually—less than half of today’s total—and Panama’s population was under half a million, compared to the current 4.2 million.

• Finance

  • Jono Alderson ☛ “Performance Marketing” is just advertising (with a dashboard) - Jono Alderson

    What used to be a broad, strategic, and often creative discipline has been reduced to a euphemism for “running ads”.

    Platforms like Google and Meta now refer to their ad-buying interfaces as “marketing platforms”. Their APIs for placing bids and buying reach are called “marketing APIs”. Their dashboards don’t talk about audiences or brand equity or product-market fit – they talk about impressions, conversions, and budgets.

    Let’s be clear: that isn’t marketing. That’s advertising.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Europe's biggest companies call for two-year pause on EU's landmark AI Act

    The chief executive officers of 44 companies, which include Europe’s top AI developer Mistral AI, have asked European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to delay the AI Act for two years. They say its unclear, overlapping rules will discourage European investment in AI and slow down innovation, the Financial Times reported.

  • Linuxiac ☛ Copyleft-Next License Relaunches With New Backing and Renewed Mission

    The world of FOSS licensing is about to undergo a significant revival: the Copyleft-Next project is back in action, revitalized by its creators, Richard E. Fontana and Bradley M. Kuhn. After several months of discussions, they have officially announced their collaboration to relaunch the next generation of copyleft licensing.

  • The Verge ☛ Congress passes Trump budget bill

    While much of the budget fight concerned Medicaid and the national debt, there were also protracted negotiations over a planned 10-year moratorium on states regulating AI systems. Lawmakers ultimately voted against that rule, which was opposed by not only Democrats but many state-level Republican politicians. An excise tax on wind and solar power companies that couldn’t meet strict requirements barring “material assistance” from certain foreign entities including China was similarly removed, although the bill still deals a serious blow to the renewable energy industry. Congress also scrapped a ban on Medicaid funding for gender-affirming care, though it will deny Medicaid funding to reproductive health care group Planned Parenthood.

  • Michael Geist ☛ Canada’s DST Debacle a Case Study of Digital Strategy Trouble

    But more troubling is what might be characterized as a different Canadian DST: digital strategy trouble. If the digital tax debacle sounds familiar, it is because the Canadian government’s misreading of the tech sector has become a recurring problem. Time and again, government leaders talk tough when proposing digital policy, practically dare companies and foreign governments to push back, and then frantically seek an exit strategy when they do.

  • Krebs On Security ☛ Big Tech’s Mixed Response to U.S. Treasury Sanctions

    On May 29, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced economic sanctions against Funnull Technology Inc., a Philippines-based company alleged to provide infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams known as “pig butchering.” In January 2025, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Funnull was designed as a content delivery network that catered to foreign cybercriminals seeking to route their traffic through U.S.-based cloud providers.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ Old Glory is Missing in Action - by Rina Shah

    In the political arena, however, it’s increasingly hard to find a simple, unadulterated American flag flown with pride. Any movement that wants to win should recognize this opportunity. A widely-respected symbol with national appeal is essentially up for grabs! The question is, which side will take it: those working to tear down our democratic institutions, or those fighting to protect them?

  • NBC ☛ Fox News, MAGA hats and cookies: Inside Trump's West Wing

    Expecting more privacy in the meeting with the commander in chief, some of the officials came away mystified and a bit unnerved. They quietly discussed among themselves whether the visitors and calls might have compromised sensitive information, with one asking whether they should be concerned about “spillage.”

  • Raw Story ☛ 'Bizarro': Military leaders aghast as Zuckerberg strolls into secret WH meeting

    A bizarre security breach unfolded in the Oval Office when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unexpectedly wandered into a classified meeting about the Air Force's new F-47 fighter jets, according to insiders who talked to NBC News.

    The intrusion left high-level defense experts alarmed — and revealed the Trump administration's increasingly casual approach to national security protocols, the report stated.

  • CBC ☛ Microsoft says it is cutting thousands of jobs in second round of layoffs in recent months

    While the company didn't specify the exact number of people who would be losing their jobs, it did say it was less than four per cent of its total workforce, which would be about 9,000 people at most. (The company employed 228,000 people as of June 2024.)

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Verge ☛ The White House’s favorite source of pro-Trump news is their YouTube channel

      The most frequently curated content on the White House Wire, the Trump administration’s attempt to aggregate pro-Trump “real news” from across the right-wing media, doesn’t come from Truth Social, Breitbart, or even Fox News. It comes from YouTube — notably, from the White House’s own channel.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Digital content moderation law figures as part of US-EU trade talks

  • CBS ☛ Paramount, President Trump reach $16 million settlement over "60 Minutes" lawsuit

    CBS News' parent company worked with a mediator to resolve the lawsuit. Under the agreement, $16 million will be allocated to Mr. Trump's future presidential library and the plaintiffs' fees and costs. Neither Mr. Trump nor his co-plantiff, Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, will be directly paid as part of the settlement.

    The settlement did not include an apology.

  • The Vietnamese Magazine ☛ Facebook Under Scrutiny: Legal Initiatives for Vietnam Presents New Report at IGF 2025

    Việt Nam’s growing crackdown on online dissent has intensified in recent years, with international tech firms caught in the crosshairs. LIV’s research aims to contribute to a broader push for platform accountability and global standards that prioritize user rights over authoritarian demands.

  • Lusaka ZM ☛ Zambia : Mr. President, Criticism Is Not Hatred

    In a democracy, scrutiny is not a threat; it’s a necessity. President Hakainde Hichilema’s recent remarks equating public criticism with hatred risk mischaracterizing legitimate dissent as something malicious. It’s a disservice not only to the critics but to the democratic ideals that brought him to power.

  • BIA Net ☛ Four LeMan journalists jailed over 'Muhammad' cartoon

    Four staff members of the LeMan satirical magazine have been formally arrested in connection with an ongoing investigation over a controversial cartoon allegedly depicting Prophet Muhammad.

  • The Walrus ☛ Alberta’s Book Ban Is a Blatant Act of Cultural Vandalism

    Let’s be clear on our definitions. A book “ban” is “the removal of a title from a library because someone considers it harmful or dangerous,” Emily Drabinski, former president of the American Library Association, told NPR. A book “challenge” is when someone raises an objection to a book. All four titles initially challenged by the government—Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Craig Thompson’s Blankets, and Mike Curato’s Flamer—were quickly removed from school shelves in Calgary and Edmonton. Trustees claim the books have been pulled for review. In the meantime, they are subject to a de facto ban from Alberta’s schools.

  • Techdirt ☛ The NO FAKES Act Has Changed – And It’s So Much Worse

    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.”

    This bill would be a disaster for [Internet] speech and innovation.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Tedium ☛ Jim Spanfeller Can’t Stop The Gawker Diaspora

    All this explains why G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller, having upset a generation of journalists by doing significant damage to what was left of the Gawker Media network, hit folks the wrong way on Wednesday. Crawling out of his abyss after spending half a decade as an internet villain in a suit, he wrote an epilogue, stating that the G/O Media network had been whittled down to just one site. (The Root, technically a Slate expat, in case you were wondering.) Sure, he buried the news during a holiday weekend, but everyone with half a brain knew it was technically dead a long time ago.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • TruthOut ☛ The Supreme Court Delayed a Ruling That Could Shape Voting Rights Across the US

    The court order did not explain the justices’ rationale for seeking a new round of arguments next fall, though it said additional guidance is forthcoming. Experts fear that the court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority is poised to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — widely considered the most important federal law safeguarding the right to vote.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Trump’s not gonna protect workers from forced labor

    As fascism burns across America, it's important to remember that Trump and his policies are not popular. Sure, the racism and cruelty excites a minority of (very broken) people, but every component of the Trump agenda is extremely unpopular with the American people, from tax cuts for billionaires to kidnapping our neighbors and shipping them to concentration camps.

    Keeping this fact in mind is essential if we are to nurture hope's embers, and fan them into the flames of change. Trumpism is a coalition of people who hate each other, who agree on almost nothing, whose fracture lines are one deft tap away from shattering: [...]

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ The shocking truth about slavery in the Islamic world today

    In its most recent report, from 2023, Walk Free’s Global Slavery Index reported that Arab states have the world’s highest prevalence of slaves (10.1 per 1,000 people), ahead of Asia and the Pacific (6.8), Europe and Central Asia (6.6) and Africa (5.2). The countries in the region with the highest numbers of people trapped in modern slavery were Saudi Arabia (740,000), Iraq (221,000), Yemen (180,000) and Syria (153,000).

    The history of slavery and the slave trade in the Islamic world is as long as the history of Islam. Whereas the notorious Atlantic slave trade lasted from the 15th to the 19th centuries and enslaved 11-14 million Africans, the slave trade practised within the geographical heart of the Muslim world, centred on North Africa and the Middle East, lasted from the seventh century until the 20th and enslaved 12-15 million, perhaps even 17 million. Vast numbers of men, women and children were taken overwhelmingly from sub-Saharan Africa, together with Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucasus during the Ottoman period. More covertly and in much smaller numbers, slavery – if not institutionalised trafficking – continues today.

  • CBC ☛ The Dalai Lama has shared plans for his succession. China has other ideas

    Fears that the death of the aging Dalai Lama would cause his spiritual office to falter under Chinese pressure have intensified in recent months, and it's widely believed that eventually there will be two competing Dalai Lamas — one identified by senior Tibetan monks and the other chosen by Beijing.

    There is already a precedent: the 11th Panchen Lama, another high-ranking spiritual authority in Tibet, disappeared shortly after he was recognized by the Dalai Lama. The six-year old and his family were never seen again, and Beijing appointed another boy in his place. The replacement, who is often quoted in Chinese state-run media praising the country's policies on Tibet, is seen as an imposter by many Tibetans.

  • CS Monitor ☛ The Dalai Lama’s real worth in China

    As with China’s many popular beliefs, from Confucianism to Buddhism to Christianity, people practicing them do so for internal motivations, such as spiritual growth. As the Dalai Lama stated in his July 2 decision, he has been clear as far back as 1969 “that concerned people should decide” if the tradition of a dalai lama should continue. Followers of Tibetan Buddhism, he stated, requested a successor for him.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Bruce Lee Club closes archive doors citing operating costs

    At least temporarily, all the assorted ephemera related to the Hong Kong icon will be boxed up and stored.

    Born in San Francisco in 1940, Bruce Lee was raised in British-run Hong Kong and had an early brush with fame as a child actor. He later became one of the first Asian men to achieve Hollywood stardom before his death at the age of 32.

  • [Repeat] RFA ☛ Dalai Lama says he will have a successor who won’t be picked by China

    His statement did not mention China by name, but it said that selecting the next Dalai Lama should be carried out “in accordance with past tradition.”

    “No one else has any such authority to interfere in this matter,” he said.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • [Repeat] APNIC ☛ Everyone, everywhere, all the time — Nepal’s push for rural broadband inclusion

    Nepal has made significant progress in broadband connectivity. As of now, 47% of its population is online via broadband, placing it ahead of its South Asian neighbours, and even among the leaders in parts of South East Asia. Of roughly 7M households, around 3M now have fixed-line broadband access. This is achieved using infrastructure and customer premises equipment comparable to those found in more developed economies, but delivered at a price point aligned with Nepal’s Gross Domestic Product and affordability constraints.

    What makes this particularly noteworthy is the level at which these deployments are being carried out — often by local teams working in difficult conditions to deliver physical layer (Layer 1) connectivity across varied and often extreme terrain.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Bruce Lawson ☛ Bruce Lawson's personal site  : Up the kriek: Apple gets punchy in Brussels DMA compliance workshop

  The first session was looking back at the first year of DMA, and Apple’s interoperability. Kyle Andeer, vice president of products and regulatory law at Apple, came out fighting immediately. He said Apple does not believe “that the lawmakers intended for the EC’s DMA teams to be the final arbiters of user safety and security”, and that the Commission clearly doesn’t know how to do its job: [...]

• India Times ☛ Google makes new proposal to stave off EU antitrust fine, document shows

  The US tech giant has been under pressure after being hit in March with European Union antitrust charges of unfairly favouring its own services such as Google Shopping, Google Hotels and Google Flights over competitors.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ '28 Days Later' is a Hit on Pirate Sites... 23 Years Later

    Post-apocalyptic horror film '28 Years Later' is doing well at the box office, with $100 million in revenue in its first two weeks. The latest installment in the horror franchise also renewed interest in the previous films, with '28 Weeks Later' showing up in various streaming charts. The original '28 Days Later' is less widely available due to licensing issues, so many have turned to pirate sites instead.