Leftovers

• Proprietary

  • Penguin Solutions Fault Tolerance Platforms Now Support Oracle Database Applications

    Penguin Solutions®, Inc. ("Penguin Solutions") (Nasdaq: PENG), a leading provider of high-performance computing and AI infrastructure solutions, today announced the general availability of the Oracle® Linux OS on its Stratus ztC Endurance® fault-tolerant computing platforms. The addition of Oracle Linux support enables customers to run Oracle Database applications, including Oracle e-Business and others, with seven nines (99.99999%) reliability on a single platform that equates to 3.15 seconds or less per year for unplanned downtime or data loss.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • TechRadar ☛ Ransomware hackers are now running Linux encryptors in Windows to stay undetected [Ed: Attributing to "Linux" issues in WSL (Windows)]

      Ransomware hackers have been spotted running Linux encryptors in Windows in a bid to avoid detection by security tools, experts have found.

      Researchers at Trend Micro reported observing the Qilin ransomware operation running the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) feature in compromised endpoints.

      WSL is a feature in Windows that allows admins to run a full Linux environment directly on a Windows machine without needing a virtual machine or dual-boot setup. It lets developers and system administrators use Linux command-line tools (like bash, grep, ssh, apt, etc.) natively alongside Windows applications.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Hacker News ☛ 10 npm Packages Caught Stealing Developer Credentials on Windows, macOS, and Linux [Ed: Microsoft as a malware distributor]

    Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a set of 10 malicious npm packages that are designed to deliver an information stealer targeting Windows, Linux, and macOS systems.

    "The malware uses four layers of obfuscation to hide its payload, displays a fake CAPTCHA to appear legitimate, fingerprints victims by IP address, and downloads a 24MB PyInstaller-packaged information stealer that harvests credentials from system keyrings, browsers, and authentication services across Windows, Linux, and macOS," Socket security researcher Kush Pandya said.

  • TechRadar ☛ Dangerous npm packages are targeting developer credentials on Windows, Linux and Mac - here's what we know

    Almost a dozen malicious npm packages, delivering dangerous infostealing malware, were downloaded roughly 10,000 times before being spotted and removed.

    Recently, security researchers Socket found 10 packages on npm targeting software developers, specifically those who use the npm (Node Package Manager) ecosystem to install JavaScript and Node.js libraries.

    These were uploaded in early July 2025 and, as is seen from the names, are mostly typosquatted variants of popular packages, such as TypeScript, discord.js, ethers.js, and others. Cumulatively, they were downloaded 9,900 times before being removed from the platform.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • FAIR ☛ ‘They Are Trying to Maximize the Amount of Money They Can Get Any Given Consumer to Pay’: CounterSpin interview with Katya Schwenk on AI surveillance pricing

    • Euractive ☛ Danish Presidency backs away from 'chat control'

      The presidency circulated a discussion paper with EU country representatives on Thursday, aiming to gather countries’ views on the updated (softened) proposal in a bid to find a compromise, Euractiv understands.

      The Danes are concerned that if no agreement is reached on the proposal even voluntary scanning will not happen once the current legal scheme that enables that runs out in April 2026.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ IPTV Anti-Piracy Demands Are Bad For ISPs, Spell Disaster for User Privacy & Security

      A huge coalition of rightsholders with collective revenues running to hundreds of billions of euros, is demanding legislative action to tackle live event piracy in the EU. In a letter to the European Commission, major rightsholders and broadcasters demand three legislative measures. They represent new burdens and liabilities for intermediaries, a potential disaster for privacy-first VPN providers, and risk undermining privacy and security for everyone in EU member states.

    • Trail of Bits ☛ The cryptography behind electronic passports

      Did you know that most modern passports are actually embedded devices containing an entire filesystem, access controls, and support for several cryptographic protocols? Such passports display a small symbol indicating an electronic machine-readable travel document (eMRTD), which digitally stores the same personal data printed in traditional passport booklets in its embedded filesystem. Beyond allowing travelers in some countries to skip a chat at border control, these documents use cryptography to prevent unauthorized reading, eavesdropping, forgery, and copying.

    • The Record ☛ Denmark reportedly withdraws Chat Control proposal following controversy

      After days of silence, the German government on October 8 announced it would not support the proposal, tanking the Danish effort.

    • EFF ☛ Age Verification, Estimation, Assurance, Oh My! A Guide to the Terminology

      If you've been following the wave of age-gating laws sweeping across the country and the globe, you've probably noticed that lawmakers, tech companies, and advocates all seem to be using different terms for what sounds like the same thing. Age verification, age assurance, age estimation, age gating—they get thrown around interchangeably, but they technically mean different things. And those differences matter a lot when we're talking about your rights, your privacy, your data, and who gets to access information online.

      So let's clear up the confusion. Here's your guide to the terminology that's shaping these laws, and why you should care about the distinctions.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Submission to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security of Bill C-8 - The Citizen Lab

      Canada’s Bill C-8 (formerly Bill C-26) is proposed cybersecurity legislation that would introduce broad information collection and sharing powers, including the warrantless collection of information from telecommunication providers, and could also undermine encryption and communications security.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Submission to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security of Bill C-8, An Act respecting cyber security, amending the Telecommunications Act and making consequential amendments to other Acts [PDF]

      1. This brief sets out targeted recommendations to respond to constitutional deficits in Bill C-8 that were not addressed during the study and amendment of Bill C-26. By way of overview, two priorities should be the focus of this committeeʼs study and amendment of Bill C-8: the need for a judicial warrant requirement for the billʼs warrantless collection powers, and the need to integrate protection for encryption and communications security.

      2. First, Bill C-8 proposes very broad information collection and sharing powers. Although government officials have often asserted that those powers will not be applied to the personal information of people in Canada, the text of the legislation is explicit that personal information would be collected without a warrant. The Intelligence Commissioner of Canada further testified before the Senate in respect of Bill C-26, and stated: “In my experience as IC, when CSE conducts cybersecurity activities, there will be the collection of information in which there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. This means there is effectively a seizure of private information.

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ Half-good new Danish Chat Control proposal

      Denmark, currently presiding over the EU Council, proposes a major change to the much-criticised EU chat control proposal to search all private chats for suspicious content, even at the cost of destroying secure end-to-end encryption: Instead of mandating the general monitoring of private chats (“detection orders”), the searches would remain voluntary for providers to implement or not, as is the status quo. The presidency circulated a discussion paper with EU country representatives today, aiming to gather countries’ views on the updated (softened) proposal. The previous Chat Control proposal had even lost the support of Denmark’s own government.

    • NDTV ☛ Phones To Get Verified Caller ID System Soon, No Internet Needed

      CNAP will automatically display the real name of the caller, as registered with their telecom operator during SIM verification. Because it is government-backed and based on verified records, the caller name shown will be authentic and accurate. CNAP will act as an in-built caller ID system.

      Once it is rolled out, your phone will start showing caller names automatically. If someone doesn't want to use the service, for example, if they are concerned about privacy, they can opt out by contacting their telecom service provider.

    • New York Times ☛ Opinion | What Palantir Sees

      In the eyes of its critics, Palantir is building a more efficient surveillance state for an age of incipient authoritarianism. In its own eyes, it’s doing essential patriotic work.

      You’ll hear that argument from my guest this week, Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, who was also recently commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ Imgur Blocks UK Users Over Age Verification

    • Bitdefender ☛ LinkedIn gives you until Monday to stop AI from training on your profile

      The Microsoft-owned professional networking site has quietly announced that from Monday, 3 November 2025, it will be using profile details, public posts, feed activity data, and more from users in the UK, EU, Switzerland, Canada, and Hong Kong to train its artificial intelligence models - as well as to support personalised ads across the broader family of Microsoft companies.

    • 404 Media ☛ ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship

      Videos on social media show officers from ICE and CBP using facial recognition technology on people in the field. One expert described the practice as “pure dystopian creep.”

    • Wired ☛ CBP Searched a Record Number of Phones at the US Border Over the Past Year

      Newly published CBP figures show that for the full fiscal year of 2025—running from October 2024 to the end of September 2025—border agents conducted around 55,424 searches of electronic devices. This is up from around the 47,000 searches that were completed during the government’s 2024 fiscal year.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Colorado Police Officer Caught on Doorbell Camera Talking About Surveillance Powers

      This story is a civil liberties rollercoaster. Milliman was relying on a nearby town’s use of Flock license plate cameras and Ring doorbells — which may also be connected to the Flock network — to accuse Elser of theft and issue a summons. Elser was able to get the summons dropped by compiling evidence from, in part, the cameras and GPS system on her truck. Milliman’s threats were recorded by a doorbell camera, too. The whole thing is creepy, and all over a $25 package stolen off a doorstep.

    • Wired ☛ CBP Wants New Tech to Search for Hidden Data on Seized Phones

      Across Cellebrite’s intelligence platform, users have a wide range of capabilities. It can sort images based on whether they contain certain elements, like jewelry, handwriting, or documents. It can also go through text messages, as well as direct messages on apps like TikTok, and filter out messages that mention certain topics, like evidence obstruction, family, or the police. Users can also unveil photos “hidden” by a device owner, make social maps of friends and contacts, and plot the locations where a person sent text messages.

    • EDRI ☛ EDRi-gram, 29 October 2025

      We are calling for an EU-wide ban on commercial spyware and an end to the market fueling this tech. EDRi member SHARE Foundation reiterate the same call in their new book which examines spyware through technical, legal, and practical lenses.

    • EDRI ☛ Understanding Spyware, a new book by SHARE Foundation

      After the first cases of suspected use of Pegasus against members of civil society in Serbia, SHARE Foundation, in collaboration with Amnesty International, discovered widespread use of a new type of state-developed spyware called NoviSpy. The investigation also revealed the misuse of digital forensic tools by police and security services to target activists, journalists, and even students. After the report was published, SHARE continued to document new cases of spyware use, such as two additional suspected Pegasus attacks against investigative journalists.

      In response to its growing use, SHARE recognised an urgent need to better understand this intrusive technology, its implications for human rights, and the pressing question of its legality. The book ‘A Privacy Nightmare: Understanding Spyware’ brings together existing research, expert insight, and SHARE’s direct experience with NoviSpy to examine spyware through three critical lenses: technical, legal, and practical.

    • SHARE Fondacija ☛ A Privacy Nightmare: Understanding Spyware

      In our previous book, Beyond the Face: Biometrics and Society, we tried to understand in what state the world was vis a vis the usage of biometric surveillance after the COVID-19 pandemic and just before the EU AI Act was negotiated and adopted. The research process behind it lasted for almost five years, at which point our understanding of biometric surveillance had reached a fairly profound level.

      This time, the task was more difficult. Spyware is a far more complex concept. In essence, governments and corporations are (often working together) developing malware to infect the smartphones of individuals of interest. The pretext is, of course, battling crime and national security, despite the fact that there is no evidence of the effectiveness of this technology in such scenarios. Both the development and the use of spyware are highly secretive and opaque. We therefore had to rely on the limited public information available after cases of abuse were discovered, and on the skills of our colleagues and partners who perform forensic analysis on infected devices.

    • EDRI ☛ Czech police forced to turn off facial recognition at the airport

      The shutdown of the facial recognition cameras at the Václav Havel Airport in Prague came after years of criticism from EDRi member IuRe. The legitimacy of the criticism was confirmed by the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection. However, the Czech police continue to systematically violate the law in further processing of biometric data.

    • Mother Jones ☛ The Surveillance Empire That Tracked World Leaders, a Vatican Enemy, and Maybe You

      Inside the hidden world of First Wap, whose untraceable tech has targeted politicians, journalists, celebrities, and activists around the globe.

    • Stichting Lighthouse Reports ☛ Surveillance Secrets

      Trove of surveillance data challenges what we thought we knew about location tracking tools, who they target and how far they have spread

      In June, a sharp-suited Austrian executive of one of the world’s most significant yet little-known surveillance companies told a prospective client that he could “go to prison” for organising the deal they were discussing. But the conversation did not end there.

    • Privacy International ☛ Whose business is your healthcare? Why digital health tools need careful assessment

      One inevitable concern is whether digital health tools properly protect people’s data and privacy. Health data can be incredibly intimate and extremely sensitive: especially in contexts where health conditions can be the cause of discrimination or oppression, such as sexual and reproductive health or mental health. It can also reveal information about our lifestyles, our genetic makeup and our families. There are other risks too - digital tools based on biased datasets can be discriminatory, or private businesses may make false promises of cost saving efficiencies that end up leaving some people without access to quality healthcare services.

  • Confidentiality

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft adds Copilot to 365 companion apps, like it or not

      Administrators can manage whether the Microsoft 365 companion apps are deployed in their environments, according to Microsoft's documentation, but there's no separate switch to strip Copilot out of the trio once they're installed.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Signal's Post-Quantum Cryptographic Implementation

      Signal has just rolled out its quantum-safe cryptographic implementation.

    • Signal ☛ Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets

      We are excited to announce a significant advancement in the security of the Signal Protocol: the introduction of the Sparse Post Quantum Ratchet (SPQR). This new ratchet enhances the Signal Protocol’s resilience against future quantum computing threats while maintaining our existing security guarantees of forward secrecy and post-compromise security.

    • IT Wire ☛ Decrypting the Future: Why Post-Quantum Security Must Start Today

      Australia is standing at the edge of a technological shift that could redefine cyber resilience. With quantum computing on the horizon, the very foundations of data security are under threat. While this technology promises enormous advances in areas like medical research, logistics and AI, it also has the potential to break the cryptographic systems that currently protect government, business and personal data.

• Defence/Aggression

  • BBC ☛ Mosque plan approved for former rugby clubhouse in Leicester

    The building was formerly used by Old Aylestonians Rugby Football Club but has been empty for about eight years.

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Russia’s chief rabbi calls on Islamic leaders to condemn antisemitic remarks by Chechnya’s mufti

    The state news agency Grozny-Inform first published a report quoting these statements on 25 October. After Lazar’s response, as Russian media outlets began citing Mezhiev’s words with reference to the Chechen agency’s website, the article on Grozny-Inform was edited, with the passages referring to Jews and Satanism removed. However, the original version of the report has been preserved in an archived copy and on the news aggregator BezFormata.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Will AI Strengthen or Undermine Democracy?

    AI can be used both for and against the public interest within democracies. It is already being used in the governing of nations around the world, and there is no escaping its continued use in the future by leaders, policy makers, and legal enforcers. How we wire AI into democracy today will determine if it becomes a tool of oppression or empowerment.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ ‘I’m popping a flare’: Slotkin says Trump is using ‘same playbook as every authoritarian in history’ • Michigan Advance

    She also laid out how in other authoritarian governments, there comes a “tipping point” where the person in power realizes they have to stay in power somehow to prevent that very power from being used against them. In this case, that could happen in two ways, Slotkin said.

  • Digital Music News ☛ TikTok USA Deal Approved by China, According to Bessent

    China has approved the transfer agreement for TikTok, according to U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who says the move enables plans for TikTok’s U.S. operations to be sold by January. He added that he expects things to move forward in the coming weeks.

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ Fences in London Made From World War II Stretchers Once Used to Carry Thousands of Wounded Civilians in the Blitz

    The stretchers were made from steel so that they could be easily washed down after use and used again when necessary. They had a wire mesh within the frame and two indents either side so that they were raised slightly off the ground if they had to be set down while an injured person was being transported. Most were painted green when used as stretchers, but are black in their recycled life as railings.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Democratic Establishment Is a Dead Man Walking

    This is the Democratic establishment’s plan for 2026: Read the focus groups. Workshop the talking points. Stay disciplined on kitchen-table messaging. Wait for Trump to overreach so badly that voters have no choice but to return Democrats to power.

    It’s not going to work. And somewhere deep down, they know it. But they’re trapped in a framework that prevents them from doing what would actually work—because doing it would destroy the arrangements keeping them in power.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ No (Despotic) Kings, but maybe Constitutional Monarchy?

    Today’s post focuses on the ‘design flaw(s)’ in the US Constitution. It turns out, again, that the system of checks and balances is no such thing. And the reason it is no such thing is because an energetic presidency may overpower the other branches and slide the whole ship of state into a species of despotism (in the technical sense of arbitrary government).

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Anti-Fascists Dig in as Trump Cracks Down on Dissent

    The ICE agents that clash with protesters in Portland, she says, are barely trained and quickly resort to violence. They fire rubber bullets at protesters’ heads and slip rock-hard marbles into the hoppers of their pepper-ball guns. They’re often joined by a motley assortment of right-wing agitators — big-rig drivers who menace crowds on the street, right-wing “journalists” who try to infiltrate groups of protesters and dox them online, and the dregs of street gangs like the Proud Boys who show up spoiling for fights. The situation, Prim says, feels more dire by the day.

  • Court House News ☛ Ranked-choice voting opponents fight campaign finance fines at Alaska high court | Courthouse News Service

    Alaska Supreme Court justices pressed attorneys Wednesday on whether state campaign finance laws were violated when an Anchorage businessman funneled $90,000 through a church to fund efforts to repeal ranked-choice voting.

    The oral arguments in two related appeals centered on penalties totaling $94,000 imposed by the Alaska Public Offices Commission against Arthur Mathias, the Ranked Choice Education Association and other opponents of the state’s voting system.

  • Vox ☛ Americans have a secret weapon against Trump

    This understanding is partially correct: The moral power of nonviolence, spread through images like police beating on unarmed protesters, really does help galvanize support and social change. But it’s only one part of the story. These campaigns also rely on coercion: on changing the cost-benefit analysis of key actors, be it regime apparatchiks or business leaders, on complying with the Trump administration. They do so by putting pressure on them in a strategic manner: staging specific actions, be they demonstrations or strikes or boycotts, that signal that compliance will be costly.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Australia’s Social Media Ban is Coming Fast—Here's The Impact

    Instagram owner Meta, TikTok owner ByteDance, and Snapchat owner Snap confirmed they will comply with an Australian ban on users under the age of 16. The social media firms said they will start deactivating accounts once the law goes into effect on December 10.

  • Wired ☛ Ex-L3Harris Cyber Boss Pleads Guilty to Selling Trade Secrets to Russian Firm

    Williams worked for less than a year as a director at L3 Harris Trenchant—a subsidiary of the US-based defense contractor L3Harris Technologies—when he resigned in mid-August from the company for unspecified reasons, according to UK corporate records. Prosecutors, however, said at the hearing that he was employed by the company or its predecessor since at least 2016. Prior to his time at Trenchant, Williams reportedly worked for the Australian Signals Directorate, during the 2010s. The ASD is equivalent to the US National Security Agency and is responsible for the cyber defense of Australian government systems as well as the collection of foreign signals intelligence. As part of its signals intelligence work, the ASD has authority to conduct hacking operations using the kinds of tools that Trenchant and other companies sell.

  • ADF ☛ Evidence Supports Claim That Sudan Army Used Chlorine Gas Against RSF

    Open-source reporting and expert analysis by France 24 Observers support claims that the SAF used chlorine gas in Garri. Images taken by RSF fighters inside the Garri base show green and yellow barrels on the ground.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ From CBS to TikTok, US media are falling to Trump’s allies. This is how democracy crumbles

    Larry Ellison, meanwhile, also leads a group of investors set to take over TikTok’s US operations, with other partners reportedly including Rupert Murdoch and Abu Dhabi’s government-owned investment company. Although much of Trump’s own criticism of TikTok has focused on China, key Maga figures such as Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio have called for the app to be banned over “anti-Israel” bias, and for shifting younger Americans’ sympathies towards Palestinians. Ellison is a fervent supporter of Israel, and has previously donated millions to its military through the non-profit Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. They will be pleased to have him in charge.

  • The Atlantic ☛ A Donor-Funded Army Wouldn’t Just Be Illegal—It Would be Dangerous

    You don’t need a political-science degree to understand why wealthy individuals cutting secret checks to the president to pay the military is a bad idea.

  • Techdirt ☛ Comcast Happy To Fund Trump’s Ballroom Despite Years Of Being Shit On

    The question for the pathetic simps at Comcast is: how high will the longer-term costs of capitulating with authoritarians be? These are bizarre, erratic zealots, whose often incoherent demands shift on a dime. And in countries like Russia, where this sort of oligarch autocratic fusion has been allowed to fester, it generally doesn’t end well for industry leaders who wander too close to windows.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ From “No Kings” to “A Fair Shot”

    Yet there are clear limits to what an electoral strategy alone can accomplish. Even if Democrats regain control of the House, structural barriers like Republican gerrymandering will continue to skew representation and make winning and sustaining a Democratic majority difficult. There is also the very real threat that many Republican officials will refuse to accept the results of a free and fair election in 2026, regardless of Democrats’ objective performance. Finally, the increasingly concentrated power of the executive branch — particularly under a president willing to test constitutional boundaries — means that control of one chamber of Congress may only partially constrain Trump’s actions, leaving significant areas of policy and enforcement beyond legislative reach.

  • NBC ☛ Senators announce bill to ban AI chatbot companions for minors

    “More than seventy percent of American children are now using these AI products,” he continued. “Chatbots develop relationships with kids using fake empathy and are encouraging suicide. We in Congress have a moral duty to enact bright-line rules to prevent further harm from this new technology.”

  • The Verge ☛ Senators propose banning teens from using AI chatbots

    The bill comes just weeks after safety advocates and parents attended a Senate hearing to call attention to the impact of AI chatbots on kids. Under the legislation, AI companies would have to verify ages by requiring users to upload their government ID or provide validation through another “reasonable” method, which might include something like face scans.

  • Federal News Network ☛ New military age demands new C2 comms

    As international tensions grow, military leaders need clear pictures of more than just the activities of adversaries. Equally important, military and political leaders alike must discern adversaries’ intent. That requires comprehensive data about a given situation.

    Which raises another challenge: ensuring the information gets to all parties who need it – securely and no matter where they’re located. That’s critical as doctrine of massed forces gives way to an era of dispersed ones.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ ‘Like stepping into a mousetrap’: Russian military academies won’t let cadets drop out. Legal experts say Putin’s 2022 mobilization decree is to blame. — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ America’s ‘force posture adjustment’ in Europe, and how Russia lost Nyash-Myash It’s October 29, 2025. Here are two stories worth your attention. — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ ‘Zeroed out’ How Russian army officers are executing their own men — and getting away with it — Meduza

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    • Meduza ☛ Russia adds Meduza co-founder and CEO Galina Timchenko to international wanted list — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Spiegel ☛ Donald Trump's Achilles Heel: The Epstein Curse Continues to Loom Large

    Ward initially thought it would be a simple reporting project. Epstein lived in New York, she lived in New York. She would visit him for an interview, contact a few of his Wall Street associates and write the profile. Ward was expecting twins at the time and it was a high-risk pregnancy. She wasn’t allowed to fly, to exert herself or to get upset.

    The "simple story,” Ward says, turned into a "nightmare.”

  • Futurism ☛ Grokipedia's Article on the Cybertruck Clearly Shows Why the Whole Project Is Doomed

    That last bit is one of the article’s most blatant issues — should we call them lies, or hallucinations? — because Grok contradicts itself by admitting in another part of the page that sales fell because of “demand softening.” The injection of an AI model, Grok, into the editorial process serves as a get-out-jail-free card whenever the ersatz Wikipedia gets caught peddling deviations from reality, and that’s without even getting into the fact that the AI model in this case is one explicitly designed to reflect Musk’s worldview.

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk's Grokipedia Extensively Copied From Wikipedia

    And where pages differ, the changes often seem to be ideological in nature.

• Environment

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Melanie Winter, who advocated for reimagining the L.A. River, dies

    “Engineers just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that nature can do it cheaper, better, easier than they can,” she said. “If you want a livable Los Angeles, then I fully believe that flipping the script on how we treat our waterways is central to it all.”

    Three years ago, her group published a study outlining a proposal to restore the river and its tributaries in the Sepulveda Basin and transform the area into the “green heart” of the Valley, reducing the size of three golf courses and opening wide corridors where the river and creeks would spread out in the floodplains.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ AI: powered by old jet turbines, near you!

    Twenty jet engines screaming next to your house and pumping out nitrous oxide. But just for five to seven years. It’s fine.

    Jet engines are not quiet, with delightful screeching high frequencies at 120 decibels. With some serious acoustic work, they can get that down to 40-50 dB at 750 feet away.

  • CBC ☛ Wind turbines keep killing bats in Canada. Advocates say this needs to change

    "Seeing the dead bats is really hard because these are long-lived mammals that can't withstand these high fatality rates. And you had this gut feeling like, this is going to be a problem," said Lausen.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ ‘Mountain’ of electronic waste weighs heavy on UP | Hindustan Times

    As Uttar Pradesh accelerates its digital and industrial growth, a silent environmental crisis is brewing in its belly in the form of an ever-growing mountain of electronic waste. Despite generating tonnes of discarded gadgets and electrical material daily, large parts of the state, including Lucknow, lack an operational facility for safe e-waste disposal.

    The state capital alone produces around 200 kg of e-waste every day, mostly from its bustling commercial hubs such as Naza Market, Naka Market, Amber Market and Hazratganj. Across UP, the volume is believed to be in tonnes daily, as the number of smartphones, computers and consumer electronics continues to surge, according to officials from the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board (UPPCB).

  • Cost Rica ☛ Panama's Indigenous Families Relocate Amid Rising Sea Levels

    The relocation effort highlights the direct impact of climate change on vulnerable communities in the Guna Yala archipelago, also known as the San Blas Islands. These coral atolls, home to the Guna people for generations, sit just 50 centimeters to one meter above sea level. Scientists project an 80-centimeter rise in surrounding waters by the century’s end, making many islands uninhabitable by 2050.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Report: AI Data Center Boom Threatens U.S. Climate Goals

    A massive expansion of data centers, set to be powered primarily by fracked gas, could account for 10% of the economy-wide emissions and 44% of the power sector emissions allowable to meet the U.S. 2035 climate target, known as the nationally determined contribution, or NDC. Data centers are projected to account for more than 12% of U.S. electricity consumption by 2030.

  • CBC ☛ When a polar bear kills, it doesn’t just eat. It feeds a whole ecosystem

    A new study, published the journal Oikos, estimates that one polar bear provides roughly 300 kilograms of meat per year for other animals to dine on. With 26,000 polar bears in the Arctic, that’s a whopping 7.6 million kilograms of food annually.

    “If we lose polar bears from the Arctic … nothing can replace that,” Holly Gamblin, wildlife biologist at University of Manitoba, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “There's no other comparable species that is doing this.”

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Toxic chemicals from wastewater removed with Canada's eco-friendly method

    The simple and eco-friendly method to turn agricultural and forestry waste into powerful magnetic materials can effectively remove toxic chemicals from water.

  • The Verge ☛ Why is Bill Gates tone policing on climate change?

    “He’s dangerously misguided and misleading, and I think pushing things in the wrong direction,” says Stacy Malkan, co-founder of nonprofit health research group US Right to Know.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Amazon strategised about keeping its datacentres’ full water use secret, leaked document shows

    Amazon strategised about keeping the public in the dark over the true extent of its datacentres’ water use, a leaked internal document reveals.

    The biggest owner of datacentres in the world, Amazon dwarfs competitors Microsoft and Google and is planning a huge increase in capacity as part of a push into artificial intelligence. The Seattle firm operates hundreds of active facilities, with many more in development despite concerns over how much water is being used to cool their vast arrays of circuitry.

  • Futurism ☛ Leaked Document Shows Amazon Scheming to Keep AI Data Center Water Use Secret

    If your data centers are guzzling more water than a major US city, you face a choice: come clean to the public and risk bad press — or hide the evidence to keep key figures in the green.

    For Amazon executives, evidently, the answer is to bury the data down far beneath the water table.

  • Futurism ☛ Bill Gates Says Climate Change Isn't So Bad After All

    Experts are calling his latest memo "pointless, vague, unhelpful and confusing."

  • Energy/Transportation

    • SWI ☛ Basel-Malmö night train to start in 2026 pending parliamentary approval

      The direct night train connection from Basel to Malmö in Sweden is due to start in mid-April. However, parliament still has to approve the budget for this.

    • [Old] The Man in Seat Sixty-One ☛ Oresund trains Copenhagen - Malmo - Gothenburg

      Öresund trains (Øresundståg) are the regional trains that operate every 20-30 minutes between Copenhagen, Kastrup (Copenhagen airport) and Malmö Central, over the impressive Öresund fixed link between Denmark & Sweden. One train per hour links Copenhagen & Malmö with Gothenburg Central. Originally jointly-run by DSB (Danish Railways) and SJ (Swedish Railways), since 2022 the Öresund trains have been operated by Transdev on behalf of the 6 Swedish regional transport authorities who jointly provide the service.

    • The Independent UK ☛ NASA takes one step closer to launching quiet supersonic jets

      The X-59 is capable of flying faster than the speed of sound with what Lockheed Martin described as only a “gentle thump." Tuesday’s test flight was still slower than the speed of sound and was intended primarily to test the plane's structural integrity. Still, it was celebrated as a significant step toward the widespread use of supersonic travel.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Here’s How the AI Crash Happens

      The amount of energy and money being poured into AI is breathtaking. Global spending on the technology is projected to hit $375 billion by the end of the year and half a trillion dollars in 2026. Three-quarters of gains in the S&P 500 since the launch of ChatGPT came from AI-related stocks; the value of every publicly traded company has, in a sense, been buoyed by an AI-driven bull market. To cement the point, Nvidia, a maker of the advanced computer chips underlying the AI boom, yesterday became the first company in history to be worth $5 trillion.

      Here’s another way of thinking about the transformation under way: Multiplying Ford’s current market cap 94 times over wouldn’t quite get you to Nvidia’s. Yet 20 years ago, Ford was worth nearly triple what Nvidia was. Much like how Saudi Arabia is a petrostate, the U.S. is a burgeoning AI state—and, in particular, an Nvidia-state. The number keeps going up, which has a buoying effect on markets that is, in the short term, good. But every good earnings report further entrenches Nvidia as a precariously placed, load-bearing piece of the global economy.

    • New Yorker ☛ Will A.I. Destroy the Planet?

      A single data center can use as much power as the city of Philadelphia. And they’re popping up everywhere. These sprawling buildings, filled with rows of computing equipment, are the factories of the A.I. economy; they power all those mundane chatbot searches, sucking up tons of energy in the process. As the OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman put it, “I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.”

      For our latest issue, the reporter Stephen Witt was invited (“after what felt like two hundred phone calls”) inside a Microsoft facility, still under construction. I caught up with Witt to discuss what he saw there—and what A.I.’s massive energy consumption means for our planet.

      This conversation has been edited and condensed.

    • The Independent UK ☛ Solar panel efficiency explained: how much power do panels really produce?

      Solar panel efficiency is one of the most important factors to consider when designing a system for your home, especially in the UK, where sunlight is limited compared to sunnier countries in Europe. The more efficient your panels, the more power you can generate from every square metre of roof space. In this guide, we explain how solar panel efficiency works, how it’s measured, and how much energy you can expect from today’s systems.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ The Last Breath of the Himalayas: Can We Stop the Collapse?

  • Overpopulation

    • Overpopulation ☛ Even starving children won’t break the population taboo

      What none of these UN reports or Nature articles mention is the population growth rate in these hungry, conflict-ridden countries. The term “population growth” appeared only once in the UN’s “Levels and trends in child malnutrition” report, in a footnote explaining a calculation relating the number to the percentage of stunted children. It is entirely absent from the 2025 edition of “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World”.

      Nature links us to various related articles focusing on the value of cross-disciplinary collaboration, of reducing food waste, of giving a leg-up to smallholder farmers, of avoiding trade sanctions that reduce food access for the poor – always zooming in to smaller facets of the problem rather than zooming out to the bigger picture.

      The picture in which, in the space of 75 years, sub-Saharan Africa’s population has increased by a factor of seven.

• Finance

  • The Register UK ☛ Europe preps Digital Euro to enter circulation in 2029

    Asked why the European Union needs a Digital Euro, and if it is a solution in search of a problem, Lagarde said “The key points for me are : Money is a public good; central banks are the custodian of that public good; and central money issued by central banks has to have its digital form, because we're moving into a different era where not everybody will want necessarily to have banknotes.”

  • Zerodha Broking Ltd ☛ The second tranche and anniversary reflection

    This week marks the first anniversary of FLOSS/fund. We launched it last year out of Zerodha as a big experiment to fund critical Free/Libre Open Source projects globally, which in turn was the culmination of a series of ad-hoc funding attempts over the years. It is the first of its kind in India, and one of the few in the world. Our experience has far exceeded our expectations in many ways, while also disappointing us in a few unsurprising ones.

    But, before we get into all that, here's the most important bit of the update, the second tranche.

  • FUTO ☛ Shifting Perspectives on Purchasing Open Source Software

    You’re not alone. Roughly 70% of our surveyed developers cited major pain points in running their OSS projects, and of those, about half were categorized as having major issues with the following: [...]

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Futurism ☛ Meta Stock Plummets as Investors Horrified at How Much Zuckerberg Is Spending on Misfired AI

    Unsurprisingly, that cash bonfire isn’t going over well with investors. Meta’s shares slid by more than 11 percent on Thursday, indicating widespread skepticism about the company’s ability to stop bleeding billions of dollars as it races to keep up with the AI industry’s ever-escalating expenditure commitments.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Nvidia's market capitalization hits $5.12 trillion — AI powerhouse is the first company in history to hit seismic milestone

    The market capitalization of Nvidia passed the $5 trillion mark on Wednesday, following a host of potentially lucrative deals and projects the company announced at its GPU Technology Conference event on Tuesday. The company's stock price continues to be driven by the broad interest towards artificial intelligence and Nvidia's unique position in the AI supply chain that now spans from humble chips for inference to gigawatt-scale data centers for massive AI training.

  • New York Times ☛ Nvidia Is First Company to Top $5 Trillion in Market Value Amid AI Boom

    Nvidia’s milestone, making it the first publicly traded company to top $5 trillion in market value, is indicative not only of the astonishing levels of wealth consolidating among a handful of Silicon Valley companies but also the strategic importance of this company, which added $1 trillion in market value in just the past four months.

  • The Next Move ☛ Composer vs. Tyranny - by Jay Nordlinger - The Next Move

    Arvo Pärt, the Estonian master who has just turned 90, went his own way musically and has always stood up for the oppressed.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ OpenAI goes for-profit! What happens next?

    Microsoft got everything it wanted for free. Microsoft gets a 27% equity stake, rights to research until 2030 and the software itself until 2032. Microsoft gave up an imaginary profit share for a real 20% of OpenAI’s revenue — not profits, but actual money flowing to Microsoft from OpenAI. MSFT shares jumped about 2% yesterday.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Amazon to cut 14,000 corporate jobs amid AI investment

    Amazon has roughly 350,000 corporate employees and a total workforce of approximated 1.56 million. Tuesday's cuts represent roughly 4% of its corporate workforce.

  • The Register UK ☛ Canonical CEO says no to IPO in current volatile market

    However, the open source veteran emphasizes the real barrier is operational readiness rather than revenue, product, or technical milestones. "I am very calmly of the view that we should be a public company, but also very calmly of the view that there's no need to do it when we're not mature enough."

  • Futurism ☛ After Bringing Down Internet, Amazon Announces Biggest Mass Firing in Its History

    Reuters was the first to alert workers that the job cuts were expected to start Tuesday, affecting over 30,000 corporate roles. Sure enough, starting early Tuesday morning, thousands of workers for Amazon Web Services (AWS) — yes, the infrastructure-providing part of the company that brought down everything from Fortnite to Bored Ape NFTs when it failed spectacularly last week — began receiving texts and emails bearing the bad news.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Nvidia invests $1B in Nokia as part of new wireless networking partnership

    The investment is part of a partnership that will see the companies collaborate on new radio access network, or RAN, products. RAN is a telecommunications industry term that covers 5G base stations and certain related hardware.

  • YLE ☛ US tech firm Nvidia invests $1bn in Nokia, with sights on next-gen networks for AI

    On the other hand, a billion-dollar investment is hugely significant for Nokia — as it was for Mistral and Intel, Kuittinen noted.

    "This is a big deal for Finland, because Ericsson has been crushing Nokia in recent years. [Swedish network firm] Ericsson made huge gains with, for example, with the American [telecoms] AT&T and Verizon. Now there is hope that the dynamics could change," Kuittinen told Yle.

  • [Old] Private Media Pty Ltd ☛ How Stephen Elop killed Nokia: Two key lessons for your business - SmartCompany

    And, contrary to popular myth, it wasn’t Apple’s 2007 entry into the smartphone market that killed Nokia. At least, not directly.

    Consider the numbers for 2010. Nokia was clearly outselling Apple in the smartphone market. That year, Apple’s annual sales for iPhones grew by 22 million units to 47 million. Research in Motion’s BlackBerry sales grew by 13 million to 48 million. Meanwhile, Nokia grew by 36 million new smartphone users to 104 million.

  • [Old] MobileSyrup ☛ Ex-Nokia exec Tomi Ahonen explains the Microsoft Nokia mess

    Three weeks after Microsoft announced it would be laying off 18,000 employees, the story still remains as one of the biggest of 2014. But a spotty quarterly report and a round of podcast debate still doesn’t fully explain why Microsoft would lay off 70% of a company it paid $7.2 billion for less than a year ago.

    We asked Tomi Ahonen, a renowned mobile analyst, and former Nokia executive, to unpack the chain of events leading up to the layoffs, as well as his projections for Microsoft’s mobile hopes for the rest of 2014.

  • [Old] Seeking Alpha ☛ How Stephen Elop Destroyed Nokia (NYSE:NOK) | Seeking Alpha

    At first, I thought Nokia's woes were the result of poor products and a company that was slow to the uptake on a number of industry-wide trends. It was only after reading Tomi Ahonen's article on the "19 Reasons Stephen Elop Must Go" that I realized how wrong I was. Nokia, in fact, was the innovator, and it was Stephen Elop that destroyed it.

    [...]

    There are three things that lead to success or failure for smartphone makers: your platform, your carrier relations and your sales relationships. Stephen Elop destroyed all three.

  • [Old] Mobile Industry Review ☛ Nokia's fall from grace: The Background Story

    Tomi’s piece is most definitely not a defence of Nokia, however it sets the record straight on a number of key points that the rest of the market [or media] simply does not appear recognise.

    I tweeted the post — but I also asked Tomi for permission to republish the post in full here in order to make sure it goes out to the largest amount of readers. I know many of the executives in the audience don’t have time for Twitter. Thank you for permission, Tomi.

  • [Old] iDownloadBlog ☛ Former Apple exec advised Nokia to fire Elop, drop everything and go Android

    Influential analyst Tomi Ahonen, a former Nokia executive, has been one of the most vocal critics of Stephen Elop, who left Microsoft last year to rescue Nokia in CEO capacity. Ahonen is convinced that Elop secretly serves as Microsoft’s Trojan horse tasked with devaluing the once great cell phone giant so that Redmond could buy it for peanuts and become a handset maker, like Google.

  • RTL ☛ Layoffs: Amazon cuts staff by 14,000

    On Monday, American media reported had that large-scale layoffs were on the way at the online retailer, citing a worldwide total of 30,000 job cuts over several months.

  • New York Times ☛ UPS Has Already Cut 48,000 Workers This Year

    The Atlanta-based delivery company, which had nearly half a million employees at the start of the year, said 34,000 positions were cut this year among its drivers and warehouse workers, mostly in the United States. The other 14,000 came out of management’s ranks in cuts that began last year.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Meduza ☛ Grokipedia vs. Ruwiki Elon Musk’s Wikipedia rival uses AI to push its creator’s views — something Moscow already tried. Meduza compares the results.

      Much like Ruwiki, the Grokipedia articles that differ most from their Wikipedia counterparts are the ones about its creators’ pet issues. For example, as NBC notes, while the Wikipedia article for U.S. President Donald Trump includes a section on potential conflicts of interest, the Grokipedia entry omits many of his highest profile corruption allegations.

    • Techdirt ☛ Pentagon Proudly Announces Its New Stable Of Propagandists

      Going forward, the only thing you’ll hear reported from the Pentagon will be delivered by subservient, right-wing stenographers. The War Department has its own Ministry of Truth, staffed by people whose organizations have seen their fortunes rise along with Trump’s. The bootlicking was always there. The only change is that it’s now officially state-sanctioned.

      The administration doesn’t care how this looks. It only cares that it got what it wants. Not only did it break with tradition by demanding journalists agree to play by the administration’s rules if they wanted access to the Pentagon and military officials, it broke with tradition by proudly proclaiming its victory over the First Amendment on the social media platform most devoted to stifling criticism of authoritarians: [...]

    • Press Gazette ☛ Google promotes fake content to millions on Discover news platform

      Fake news stories have been viewed tens of millions of times this week on Google’s Discover news aggregation platform.

      Google promoted the fake stories despite the fact they came from publishers who had emerged from nowhere overnight.

    • The Washington Post ☛ DHS shares misleading footage to promote immigration agenda

      Trump administration videos purporting to show the triumph of recent immigration operations used footage that was months old or recorded thousands of miles away, an analysis found.

    • Tim Bray ☛ Grokipedia

      Wrong · Every paragraph contains significant errors. Sometimes the text is explicitly self-contradictory on the face of it, sometimes the mistakes are subtle enough that only I would spot them.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • PC World ☛ 'Dangerous' YouTube videos struck down for bypassing Windows 11 account setup

    That’s the inescapable conclusion one must draw from the fact that YouTube creator CyberCPU Tech has reportedly had a video on this topic removed from the platform, and all appeals to YouTube and Google have been denied, according to the creator. The same thing happened a week later for a guide on how to install Windows 11 25H2 on older, unsupported hardware, as reported by Tom’s Hardware. Both videos were flagged by YouTube’s automated system as a violation of its “Harmful or dangerous content policy.” Again, when the creator asked for a manual review, the appeal was denied.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot speaks out

    Alyokhina fought for eight turbulent years — until the beginning of 2022. She participated in events criticizing the government, was repeatedly subjected to state-perpetrated violence, and repeatedly imprisoned and placed under house arrest. Finally, she freed herself from her electronic ankle bracelet and fled to the West via Belarus and Lithuania while disguised as a food delivery courier, leaving her phone behind as a decoy.

  • Utah News Dispatch ☛ Wife of man killed at No Kings protest in Salt Lake City plans to sue  • Utah News Dispatch

    Ah loo was killed on June 14 in a chaotic scene when an armed member of the event’s “peacekeeping team” saw Arturo Gamboa, a demonstrator, openly carrying a rifle, which is permitted under Utah law. The “peacekeeper” fired three rounds, grazing Gamboa and killing Ah Loo, a bystander, according to Salt Lake police.

  • 404 Media ☛ Rogue Goodreads Librarian Edits Site to Expose 'Censorship in Favor of Trump Fascism’

    On Friday morning, Goodreads users who wanted to read reviews of the werewolf romance Mate by Ali Hazelwood were confronted by the cover of the new Eric Trump book Under Siege. One of the site's volunteer moderators had gone rogue and changed Mate’s cover, added the subtitle “Goodreads Censorship in Favor of Trump,” and altered Mate’s listing into an explanation of why. To hear them tell it, Goodreads was removing criticism of Trump’s book from the site.

  • The Verge ☛ Trump administration charges influencer and congressional candidate over ICE protests

    Abughazaleh goes on to note that “ICE has hit, dragged, thrown, shot with pepper balls, and teargassed hundreds of protesters.” She also calls out the Trump administration for “weaponizing the federal justice system” to scare protesters, but vows “we’re not going to be silent.”

    “This case targets our rights to protest, speak freely, and associate with anyone who disagrees with the government.”

  • NBC ☛ Kat Abughazaleh indicted over protests outside Chicago-area ICE facility

    On a video posted Sept. 26, an ICE vehicle inches through a group of protesters standing on the street outside the facility. Posting the video to her social accounts, Abughazaleh wrote, “At the Broadview ICE facility, an ICE agent tried to run dozens of protesters over with an SUV as we walked on a public crosswalk. He kept driving for about a full football field until ICE barraged us with pepper balls.”

  • The Verge ☛ Meta repents again to Republicans in hearing over moderation, while Google stands its ground

    At a Senate hearing Wednesday on government censorship of tech platforms, a Meta executive expressed regret to Republican lawmakers for failing to speak out more against the Biden administration’s requests that it remove health and election misinformation, including satire. Google, meanwhile, held firm in its stance, saying that evaluating — and often rejecting — government content requests is business as usual. Democrats questioned why Congress was relitigating years-old moderation decisions instead of the Trump administration’s recent speech crackdown — even as Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) hopes to recruit them for a new anti-jawboning bill. And Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, whom Cruz has promised to question over threats to broadcasters, was nowhere in sight.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Kat Abughazaleh Indicted Over Chicago ICE Protest

    “Since I and others have exercised our first amendment rights, ICE has hit, dragged, thrown, shot with pepper balls and teargassed hundreds of protesters, simply because we had the gall to say that masked men coming into our communities, abducting our neighbors and terrorizing us cannot become our new normal,” she says in the video posted Wednesday. “And because Chicago doesn’t back down from bullies in masks who tear gas our neighborhoods, this administration has resorted to weaponizing the federal justice system to scare us into silence. But we’re not going to be silent.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CJR ☛ How Anti-Cybercrime Laws Are Being Weaponized to Repress Journalism - Columbia Journalism Review

    “This vague text is still used to unfairly prosecute journalists, particularly those who regularly publish investigative reports implicating political or institutional forces,” said Sadibou Marong, the sub-Saharan Africa bureau director of Reporters Without Borders. “Authorities are intent on gagging investigative journalism uncovering corruption and governance issues in the country. The continued implementation of this law constitutes a real threat.”

  • American Oversight ☛ American Oversight Sues for Records on Trump-Appointed Election Denier Heather Honey

    The lawsuit follows a series of unanswered Freedom of Information Act requests submitted by the nonpartisan watchdog seeking records about Honey’s hiring, communications, and calendars as well as any communications involving election-denial groups such as the Election Integrity Network — an organization led by Cleta Mitchell, a longtime proponent of voting restrictions who aided Trump in his attempts to remain in power in 2020 — and True the Vote. Her appointment and recent remarks have alarmed election officials, who were reportedly “confused and anxious” after she echoed rhetoric long associated with baseless claims of widespread voter fraud during an official DHS meeting.

  • CPJ ☛ We can't let them get away with it

    In view of stagnant meaningful progress, CPJ is overhauling its own approach to impunity. In coming years, we will prioritize new efforts to pursue accountability and justice, including a focus on global investigative mechanisms to pursue justice for murdered journalists.

    In particular, we will focus on: [...]

  • The Atlantic ☛ A Post-Literate Age

    For a quarter century, I’ve been a journalist, and to be honest, I had begun to lose faith in my trade. The year 2021 marked a turning point in the history of facts: from poor health to near death. The insurrection of January 6 happened before our eyes and produced about three news cycles of almost universal horror before that consensus began to succumb to the assault of partisan revisions and elisions, lies, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories that dominate our media and pollute our minds. Sophisticates argue that there’s never been any agreement about reality, that news in the age of Walter Cronkite was simply the dominant “narrative” put forth by the three major television networks and establishment papers. It’s true that important facts have always been contested—but in August 1974, when the “smoking gun” tape revealed Richard Nixon’s central role in the Watergate cover-up, Republican politicians and conservative editorialists didn’t claim that the tape was a fake or the product of an opposition conspiracy. Instead, they told Nixon to resign. That elusive thing called reality brought down a president.

  • RTL ☛ Funding ceased: Radio Free Asia suspends operations after Trump cuts and shutdown

    Radio Free Asia, founded nearly three decades ago to report on China and other Asian countries without independent media, said Wednesday it will halt production after the US government ceased funding.

    The broadcaster had already laid off or furloughed more than 90 percent of staff and drastically scaled back production since President Donald Trump's administration in March axed most money to US government-funded media.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Radio Free Asia halts broadcasts amid US government shutdown

    It will be the first time the international broadcaster has completely gone off air since it was founded nearly 30 years ago.

    RFA is one the few reliable sources of news in regions of Asia where authoritarian governments limit people's access to information.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Radio Free Asia suspends operations after Trump cuts and shutdown

    Long a thorn in Beijing’s side, RFA’s closure comes just as Trump meets Chinese President Xi Jinping on an Asia trip. RFA said it would have no choice but to halt all news production effective Friday, the first time it has done so since it went on air in 1996.

  • RFA ☛ After 29 years, RFA is on pause – Radio Free Asia

    The newsroom is dark. The microphones are off. Broadcasts have been silenced. Publishing is paused. On social media. On our websites.

    Due to uncertain funding, Radio Free Asia is not delivering news to our audiences for the first time in our history.

  • RFA ☛ RFA suspends remaining editorial operations amid funding uncertainty – Radio Free Asia

    With the government shutdown and delay in receiving funding for the new fiscal year, effective Oct. 31, Radio Free Asia (RFA) will halt all production of news content for the time being. The move is part of a plan for the Congressionally-funded private corporation to implement cost-saving measures that can help sustain the organization should appropriated funding streams resume. President and CEO Bay Fang issued the following statement: [...]

  • RFA ☛ ‘We are RFA’: The journalists behind the stories – Radio Free Asia

    Due to uncertain funding, RFA will pause its editorial operations on Oct. 31, 2025.

    These video testimonies for the series “We are RFA” were recorded in March 2025, in the days following the termination of RFA’s Congressionally appropriated grant. Since then, more than 90% of the editorial staff was furloughed or laid off.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Radio Free Asia suspends news operations amid cuts and US government shutdown

    RFA was founded nearly three decades ago to report on China and other Asian countries without independent media.

    It has been operating with a skeleton staff the past few months, primarily producing a few stories online as the administration sought to choke off its funding. Donald Trump’s team has contended that operations like RFA, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America are poorly run and a waste of government resources.

    Long a thorn in Beijing’s side, RFA’s closure comes after the US president met Chinese leader Xi Jinping on a trip to Asia.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Radio Free Asia says it is halting its news operations due to funding troubles

    RFE/Radio Liberty, similar to RFA as a private corporation funded by the government, said its own news services are staying up, “and we plan to continue reaching our audiences for the foreseeable future,” the organization said this week. It operates in eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East. The service had launched its own lawsuit against the administration.

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Alabama Public Television may drop PBS programming

    Wayne Reid, executive director of APT, told the Alabama Education Television Commission that the network is looking into ways to fully separate from PBS after the Trump administration this summer slashed funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CBP), which funded public broadcasting around the country.

    Commissioners at the meeting were split over the proposal. And because APT remains in a contract with PBS and other obstacles, Reid said the split may not happen.

  • Techdirt ☛ Bari Weiss And The Tyranny Of False Balance

    Let’s be precise about what Weiss is doing. She’s not asking whether 60 Minutes is actually biased. She’s not evaluating their coverage against standards of accuracy, fairness, or adherence to facts. She’s asking why “the country” perceives bias—which treats that perception as fact requiring accommodation regardless of whether the perception corresponds to reality.

    This is false balance perfected. The sophisticated move that treats “Trump and his allies say you’re biased” as equivalent evidence to actual journalistic practice. The epistemic surrender that makes public opinion—shaped by coordinated disinformation campaigns, algorithmic manipulation, and deliberate attacks on legitimate journalism—into the arbiter of what counts as fair coverage.

  • Truthdig ☛ The Pentagon Drafts a New Legion of Propagandists - Truthdig

    The policy criminalizes routine reporting, according to media lawyers and advocates, so news outlets are refusing to abide by it. Instead, they are giving up their access to the building, while vowing to continue thoroughly covering Hegseth and the military from outside the Pentagon’s five walls.

    Reuters noted that it and at least 30 other outlets refused to sign the pledge, citing the others: [...]

  • Reuters ☛ US news outlets reject Pentagon press access policy

    All five major broadcast networks issued a joint statement on Tuesday, saying: "Today, we join virtually every other news organization in declining to agree to the Pentagon's new requirements, which would restrict journalists' ability to keep the nation and the world informed of important national security issues. The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections. We will continue to cover the U.S. military as each of our organizations has done for many decades, upholding the principles of a free and independent press."

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ MSNBC becomes MS NOW on Nov. 15

    The rebrand is tied to Comcast’s spinoff of its cable channels into Versant, a new public company facing industry headwinds from cord-cutting trends.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Graham Cluley ☛ The human cost of the UK Government’s Afghan data leak • Graham Cluley

    A spreadsheet containing the details of people who had worked for the UK government in Afghanistan was accidentally leaked from the Ministry of Defence in February 2022 — six months after the Taliban seized control of Kabul.

    The death threats and intimidation by the Taliban continue, as research shared by the charity Refugee Legal Support reveals.

    It makes for pretty harrowing reading.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Clothing has nothing to do with public safety’ Chechen officials plan to ‘educate’ women who go out without headscarves

    Human rights activist Saida Sirazhudinova said the Chechen authorities’ plan amounts to pressure and intimidation. “The forms in which this so-called ‘informational’ work is carried out amount to psychological — and at times physical — violence,” she said. “Women have their phones snatched from them and searched. Legally, officials have no right to force access to private information. That’s a violation of boundaries and an intrusion into personal life. And clothing has nothing to do with public safety.”

  • Utah News Dispatch ☛ Judge punts on news cameras in the courtroom in Charlie Kirk murder case

    They said the media’s right of access to criminal cases “is not absolute” and can be restricted altogether to ensure a fair trial.

  • The Nation ☛ The Billionaire Oligarchs Are Coming for Your Pets

    Have you had to seek veterinary attention for a beloved pet in recent years? Have you noticed higher costs for vaccines and routine exams? Do you occasionally need a pet-sitter and wish to purchase services from an on-line service? I’ve got bad news for you: the billionaires have fixed their sights on you and on every corner of the pet care economy, with the goal of squeezing more money out of you.

  • Pete Brown ☛ Companies will do *anything* to avoid treating employees as humans.

    Now it is “We cut all these jobs and now you have to show us how you will use this new technology to do more with less.” It is just an article of faith among c-suite executive types that all of this stuff will work.

  • [Old] National Museum of Australia ☛ Eight-hour day

    On 26 March 1856 workers called a public meeting at the Queen’s Theatre to make a stand on improving working conditions. At the meeting it was announced that ‘the time has arrived when the system of 8 hours should be introduced into the building trades and that after the 21st of this month we promise to work 8 hours and no longer’.

    Negotiations between the union and the building companies broke down and on 21 April 1856 stonemasons, led by Stephens, downed tools at the construction site of the law faculty buildings at Melbourne University and walked off the job.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Airport phone searches hit record high amid Trump traveler crackdown

    Border agents are searching phones at record rates. As reported in Wired, U.S. Customs and Border Protection conducted over 55,000 device searches during fiscal year 2025 — a 17 percent jump from the previous year — and the pace accelerated dramatically in recent months.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ At Kansas No Kings rally, a call to resurrect shared history and civic virtues before they vanish

    I referenced a recent morning news appearance by Wright Thompson, the noted author of “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.” He said his readers believe that those in charge of government want a return to a pre-Civil Rights America.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ Carr Plans to Move on Upper C-band Auction

    The goal is to maximize the amount of repurposed spectrum available for 5G and 6G services as aviation safety upgrades proceed in the adjacent band. The Notice seeks comment on how much upper C-band spectrum, beyond the minimum required, could be repurposed and how the transition could be conducted. The FCC is also looking for input on ways to promote co-existence with adjacent band aviation radio altimeters.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Michael Stapelberg ☛ My impressions of the MacBook Pro M4

    I have been using a MacBook Pro M4 as my portable computer for the last half a year and wanted to share a few short impressions. As always, I am not a professional laptop reviewer, so in this article you won’t find benchmarks, just subjective thoughts!

  • Howard Oakley ☛ Updated CPU core frequencies for all current Apple silicon Macs – The Eclectic Light Company

    Thanks to your overwhelming response to my appeal for information about CPU core frequencies in M3 Ultra and M5 base chips, this article updates the data to cover those new models in addition to all previous M-series chips.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Trademarks

  • India Times ☛ OpenAI sued for trademark infringement over Sora's 'Cameo' feature

    Celebrity video platform Cameo has sued OpenAI, alleging its new "Cameo" feature in the Sora video app infringes on its trademark. Cameo claims OpenAI's use of the name will cause consumer confusion and dilute its brand. OpenAI, however, disputes exclusive ownership of the word "cameo."

  • The Verge ☛ Cameo sues OpenAI over Sora’s ‘cameos’

    Cameo is suing OpenAI over Sora 2’s “cameo” feature, accusing the ChatGPT maker of using the name to compete directly with its personalized celebrity video service. The trademark infringement lawsuit filed in a California federal court on Tuesday alleges that OpenAI’s usage of cameo is “highly likely to dilute and tarnish” Cameo’s branding by confusing consumers to associate it with “ersatz, hastily made AI slop and deepfakes featuring celebrities.”

• Copyrights

  • Tedium ☛ Grokipedia Cited My Article 43 Times In One Post. Not Cool.

    Elon Musk’s new Wikipedia clone has been criticized for nicking Wikipedia. Something else it also does: Aggressively cite the Tedium archive.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Meta: Pirated Adult Film Downloads Were For "Personal Use," Not AI Training

    Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media, which are known for popular adult brands including Vixen, Tushy, Blacked, and Deeper, filed a copyright infringement complaint at a California federal court. The companies allege that Meta downloaded at least 2,396 of their films since 2018, allegedly to aid their AI video training.

    The adult producers discovered the alleged infringements after Meta’s BitTorrent activity was revealed in a lawsuit filed by several book authors. In that case, Meta admitted that it obtained content from pirate sources.