Leftovers

• Nate ☛ Miniblog

  I’m trying a bit of an experiment, making a ‘mini blog’ section of my website, using it separately from my normal posts. While I don’t know how much I’ll end up using it, I’ll probably use it for a couple different purposes. The first is just for regular short posts - random personal updates, blogging challenges, reviews of some random product I like, etc. The kind of off the cuff writing that might be a bit long for a microblog (e.g. standard X/Twitter or microblog protocol post), but shorter than my usual posts where I deep dive into my interest of the week.

• Mandaris Moore ☛ Theme changes for November 4th, 2025

  I had made a declaration about restarting theme development and I’m pretty happy to have finished it before my self imposed deadline. This is post is mostly about why I changed things versus how I changed them.

• Kev Quirk ☛ Stop Explaining What Things Are

  It’s the same with every technical topic. SEO-stuffed filler drowning the one thing that actually matters — the answer.

• Jeremy Cherfas ☛ Monthly report: October 2025

  The highlight was a lowlife spambot attack that I could counter only by putting the site behind CloudFlare, and don't get me wrong, I'm glad I could do that, but I wish I hadn't had to. Also, somehow in that process, while one of the subdomains came through with no further effort from me, the other went AWOL. The certainty of an admin tax is the price you pay for a smidgen of independence.

• Doc Searls ☛ Workings

  *The Web should always be capitalized. So should the Internet. Both are proper nouns. That they have been commonized by the AP and the Chicago Manual of Style does not mean that doing so was the right move. Both those institutions are wrong, because the Web and the Net both matter utterly. They also have names. We capitalize those. IM(not H)O. Oh, and yes, I know that taking a definite article (the) makes the Web and the Net "weak" proper nouns, but they are proper nonetheless. Same with the Rockies, the Netherlands, and the Bronx.

• Ruben Schade ☛ I did a thing, and exit excuses

  I liken them to a misconfigured firewall rule. Your mind is erroneously flagging incoming harmless and productive traffic on your social port as an attack, so you redirect the request to a different port running the exit excuse generator engine, instead of your public mental load balancer. That analogy wasn’t quite as tortured as I thought it’d be, but not my finest work!

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Counter Punch ☛ Why is Health Care Expensive?

    By contrast, in the 15 years since its passage, healthcare costs have increased by just 1.4 percentage points of GDP. If healthcare costs had continued to rise at the pre-Obamacare rate, we would be spending another $1.4 trillion a year, $11,000 per household, on healthcare.

  • Science News ☛ As teens in crisis turn to AI chatbots, simulated chats highlight risks

    Conversations powered by popular large language models can veer into problematic and ethically murky territory, two new studies show. The new research comes amid recent high-profile tragedies of adolescents in mental health crises. By scrutinizing chatbots that some people enlist as AI counselors, scientists are putting data to a larger debate about the safety and responsibility of these new digital tools, particularly for teenagers.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Azure stumbles in Europe, Microsoft blames 'thermal event'

    The West Europe region is in the Netherlands.

    The Windows giant blamed the problems on “a thermal event affecting datacenter cooling systems, which led to a subset of storage scale units going offline in a single availability zone.”

  • Dark Reading ☛ SolarWinds-Like Risk Lurks in Popular Installer Tool

    One of Advanced Installer's popular features is its update tool, which empowers software programs to automatically check for and install updates as they become available.

    As part of the process, to find and retrieve remotely hosted update configuration files, the update tool accepts a -url parameter. But who's to say that the URL must host a legitimate update config?

  • PC World ☛ BitLocker recovery bug in recent Windows updates could brick your PC

    If you don't have your BitLocker recovery key backed up, you will lose all your files if you run into this issue.

  • GreyCoder ☛ Magic Earth vs Organic Maps: Comparing These Privacy-Focused Navigation Apps

    Cycling gets special attention too. The August 2025 update added dedicated cycling and mountain bike route overlays showing popular paths worldwide. The app optimizes routes for bikes, includes bike paths that cars can’t access, and shows cycling-specific details like grades and elevation changes.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Techdirt ☛ Student Gets Handcuffed, Searched At Gunpoint Because AI Thought A Bag Of Chips Was A Handgun

      Omnilert is the other big player in the school gun detection AI market. Its track record isn’t a whole lot better. Earlier this year, its tech failed to detect the gun carried by the student who killed one student and injured another before turning the undetected gun on himself.

      Omnilert is back in the news, and it’s brought a cops along for the ride.

    • British Columbia Civil Liberties Association ☛ OPEN LETTER to the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation from civil society organizations and individuals opposing "National Sprint" consultation on AI strategy

      We, the undersigned civil society, human rights, and civil liberties organizations, academics, advocates, and representatives of equity-seeking communities, write to protest and reject the deeply misguided and wrongheaded approach to public consultation demonstrated by the government’s thirty-day “national sprint” on Canada’s artificial intelligence (“AI”) strategy.

      We call on Minister Joly, Minister Solomon, and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (“ISED”) to do the following: [...]

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Manuscript Submissions Are Up! That’s Good, Right?

      First, the number of articles published each year has risen for decades. While some of the extra manuscript volumes do represent additional valuable research, the biggest area of recent growth has been in weak, flawed, or even fraudulent work. The second half of 2025 has seen dramatic increases in submissions at many journals, likely because Large Language Models make drafting (or outright fabricating) manuscripts so easy.

      Receiving more submissions now means feeding ever more junk into the journal’s peer review pipeline. In many cases, it’s not just the journal pipeline: often, the goal is to keep the manuscript within the publisher’s publication cascade so that it will eventually be published somewhere and the editorial costs recouped via an APC. Keeping junk within your cascade means the costs discussed below are even higher, particularly if the manuscript never gets published.

    • Kirill A Korinsky ☛ The Cost of Abliteration in Large Language Models

      This article examines two potential costs of the abliteration process for Large Language Models: performance penalties and output quality degradation. For comparison, I evaluated the rising stars of local LLM models in autumn 2025: Qwen3-VL variants - alongside cloud-based solutions from Claude and Gemini.

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ The illusions of Neo

      Over its nine-minute runtime, the video omits one crucial detail: with only two exceptions, none of the tasks shown are performed autonomously. In truth, the robot is being teleoperated by a human wearing a virtual reality headset and handheld controllers, as revealed in a Wall Street Journal investigation. Bernt Bornich insists this is merely a transitional training phase, meant to help Neo gradually “learn” how to act on its own.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ It’s the fake thing: Coca-Cola tries another AI Christmas TV ad

      AI video hasn’t actually improved over the past year. You can’t direct the AI video generator — you just press the button and hope it spits out a good clip this time.

      This sixty-second ad was assembled from seventy thousand individual rendered clips. Three seconds each. Then they went through this three days of generated video desperately hoping they had 20 to 30 clips they could actually use.

  • Social Control Media

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-29 [Older] White House Says Deal to Put TikTok Under US Ownership Could Be Finalized in South Korea

    • International Business Times ☛ 2025-10-28 [Older] Hurricane Melissa: Viral TikTok Video Fuels Fake Shark Sighting in Jamaica

    • Thomas Günther ☛ Mastodon replies

      Here, on my own site, I’ve also always wanted to display the feedback I get. People often point out mistakes, suggest improvements, or add context I hadn’t considered. I regularly update articles based on these conversations, trying to credit them by linking to their sites or posts. It sure would be nice to have all that feedback right below the article, wouldn’t it?

    • [Old] Anton Zhiyanov ☛ Banned for self-promo

      Given all this, I'm imposing my own reverse ban, effective immediately. I won't post, comment, or take part in any activity on Lobsters, Hacker News, Reddit, or any other platform that opposes self-promotion. Although my contribution is small, I don't want to support this kind of hostility toward authors.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Krebs On Security ☛ Cloudflare Scrubs Aisuru Botnet from Top Domains List

      For the past week, domains associated with the massive Aisuru botnet have repeatedly usurped Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft in Cloudflare’s public ranking of the most frequently requested websites. Cloudflare responded by redacting Aisuru domain names from their top websites list. The chief executive at Cloudflare says Aisuru’s overlords are using the botnet to boost their malicious domain rankings, while simultaneously attacking the company’s domain name system (DNS) service.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • FSFE

      • FSFE ☛ 2025-10-29 [Older] Join the Free Software conversation at SFSCON 2025!

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EDRI ☛ European Parliament backs Europol expansion

      “By voting in favour of the Europol Regulation, Members of the LIBE Committee have greenlighted the European Commission’s long-term plan to turn Europe into a digital police state. It is time for the European Parliament to show foresight and oppose any attempt to instrumentalise migration policies to attack everyone’s rights and profit the surveillance industry.”

    • Techdirt ☛ Whoops: Your ‘Smart’ Vacuum May Be Broadcasting A 3D Map Of Your Home

      The latest case in point: one owner of the $300 iLife A11 smart vacuum realized that the device wasn’t just cleaning his home, it was creating a map of his entire living space, and then openly broadcasting it to its parent company via the internet: [...]

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Palantir, Dubai create AI venture to spur digital transformation

      Palantir has formed a new company with Dubai Holding, a conglomerate controlled by Dubai’s ruling family, to deploy AI software across government and the private sector. The joint venture, Aither, aims to help Dubai hit its target of generating 100 billion dirhams ($27 billion) annually through digital transformation initiatives, focusing on sectors including finance, hospitality, logistics, and real estate. Aither will also look to develop Emirati talent in AI and build governance models to spur technology adoption.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Green Party UK ☛ 2025-10-29 [Older] Greens call for UK government action on Sudan

  • US Navy Times ☛ USS Gerald R. Ford heads to Caribbean

    The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier and warship, along with the USS Bainbridge, a guided missile destroyer, officially departed the Mediterranean for the Caribbean on Tuesday morning, according to a U.S. defense official, as both vessels made their way to South America.

    The carrier completed its transit of the Strait of Gibraltar on Tuesday, a move that was made in support of the U.S. military’s increasing footprint in the region.

  • Truthdig ☛ Cheney, Architect of Endless War, Helped Kill Our Faith in Leaders

    For it was the exploitation of American grief, fear and patriotism after 9/11 to pursue neoconservative wars in the Middle East that zapped the people’s faith in government institutions. It pretty much destroyed the Republican Party and gave rise to populist movements on both sides of the aisle. It created a generation of veterans harboring more mistrust in elites and Washington than even the Vietnam War era. On the other end of the spectrum, it unleashed mercenary warfare, killer drones, civil wars and police powers in the United States that have only served make the people less free and more fearful of their government. Thanks in part to Dick Cheney, the executive, i.e., the president, has more power than ever — to bomb, detain, and “decapitate” any government leader he does not like.

    Many obituaries will have been written for Dick Cheney, all scarred with his role in the Iraq War. For a time he was a very, very powerful man, and then he went away to retire and help raise his grandchildren. How many hundreds of thousands of American families were unable to do the same — plagued by death, disease, mental injuries, sterility, divorce, addiction, suicide — because of a war that he so relentlessly pushed but should never have been.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ China bans foreign AI chips from state-funded data centers, report claims — crackdown would include removing Nvidia, AMD, and Intel chips from builds in early stages

    The report, citing unnamed sources with direct knowledge, claims regulators have instructed state-funded projects to use only Chinese-made silicon going forward. That includes domestic chips from Huawei, Cambricon, and Enflame, among others.

    While the official directive has not been published, the guidance would mark a formal shift from earlier policies that merely discouraged foreign chip purchases. Under the new dictat, even parts like Nvidia’s H20 — a model specifically designed to comply with U.S. export controls — will now be off the table. This follows Chinese port crackdowns on all Nvidia imports in early October.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Dick Cheney, Gone But Not Forgotten

    This blog has written probably 500 stories on Dick Cheney — about torture, about illegal surveillance, about drone strikes, about outing Valerie Plame.

    But the most recent are telling for his legacy: [...]

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ In Sudan’s genocide, only those who pay survive

    There is mounting evidence the city in the Darfur region, where no journalists have been allowed to report for more than two years, is at the centre of one of this century’s worst ethnic massacres.

    More people may have died in the past week there than in the entire Gaza war, researchers now believe.

    [...]

    The RSF is an Arab-based militia who are killing black African groups to steal their land. The attacks appear to have all the hallmarks of genocide.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Sweden to jail 13-year-olds: Will others in the EU follow?

    The reform is a response to a surge in deadly gang [sic] violence. Police say criminal networks increasingly recruit children to carry out shootings and deliver weapons, as minors under 15 cannot be prosecuted.

  • The Walrus ☛ Elon Musk Wants to Be a Trillionaire. That Doesn’t Bode Well for Humanity

    Billionaires constitute a minority—there are 902 billionaires in the US and seventy-six in Canada, according to Forbes—and they could theoretically be outvoted in any functioning democracy. The problem is that the US, at least, does not have a functioning democracy. Political scientist Larry Bartels has found that elected officials are not especially responsive to the desires of the poor or even the middle class. Instead, they are primarily guided by their own ideological commitments. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have also shown that economic elites and organizations tied to corporate interests exert significant influence over US government policy, whereas grassroots groups and ordinary citizens have almost no impact.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Russia starts grading its provinces on drone production, training

    The initiative has been promoted by Russian Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Vasily Shpak as an explicitly civilian project, aiming, as he says, to help build a new sector of the economy based on unmanned aerial vehicles. He has said that the rating system, in addition to assessing regional readiness for the mass deployment of UAVs, should help shift public perception of drones away from their military associations and towards civilian applications.

  • CS Monitor ☛ As jihadis advance in Mali, community radio stations broadcast hope

    Mr. Touré’s microphone is a lifeline to his community, but this seemingly innocuous reporting puts a target on his back. In northern Mali, journalists work under constant threat from jihadist groups linked to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, some of whom are currently threatening the capital, Bamako. Reporters have been threatened, abducted, and forced to flee their homes.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-04 [Older] EU Praises Ukraine's Reforms and Warns Serbia and Georgia in Progress Reports

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-04 [Older] EU Says It Could Admit New Members by 2030, Praises Montenegro, Albania, Ukraine

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-04 [Older] Zelenskiy Says EU Report Shows Ukraine Moving 'Confidently' Toward Membership

    • CBC ☛ 2025-11-03 [Older] Ukraine receives more Patriot defence systems, but Tomahawks from U.S. not coming soon

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-03 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini Says No Tomahawks for Ukraine, for Now

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-02 [Older] Why young Ukrainian men are coming to Germany

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-02 [Older] Young men from Ukraine increasingly coming to Germany

    • HackRead ☛ 2025-10-31 [Older] Ukrainian Conti Ransomware Suspect Extradited to US from Ireland

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-31 [Older] Ukraine Denounces Attacks on Power Substations Vital to Nuclear Plants

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-31 [Older] Ukraine Lands Special Forces in Embattled Pokrovsk, Sources Say

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-29 [Older] Putin's Envoy Dmitriev Believes There May Be Peace in Ukraine Within a Year

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-29 [Older] Ukraine Struggling to Hold Eastern City of Pokrovsk, Military Analysts Say

    • NL Times ☛ 2025-10-28 [Older] Hosting Ukraine war tribunal will impact Dutch national security, says Foreign Minister

    • CBC ☛ 2025-11-04 [Older] In Donbas, Ukrainian troops fight off endless Russian assaults

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-04 [Older] War in Ukraine: How successful is Russia's offensive near Pokrovsk?

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-04 [Older] Italy Summons Russian Envoy Over 'Vulgar' Remarks on Rome Tower Collapse

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-04 [Older] Russian and Ukrainian Troops Battle in Ruins of Pokrovsk

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-04 [Older] Ukrainian Drones Reach Deep Inside Russia as Battle for Key City Rages On

    • NL Times ☛ 2025-11-03 [Older] New Dutch chips regularly found in Russian weapons despite sanctions

    • TruthOut ☛ 2025-11-03 [Older] Russia’s Invasion Has Hollowed Out Higher Education in Ukraine

    • CBC ☛ 2025-11-03 [Older] Russia takes another step toward tightening control of the internet, calling it 'national security'

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-03 [Older] NGOs seek support for political prisoners in Russia

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-03 [Older] Ukraine: Battle for Pokrovsk intensifies as Russia advances

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-03 [Older] China Pledges to Defend Shared Security Interests With Russia

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-03 [Older] Magnitude 5.8 Earthquake Strikes Southeast Coast of Russia's Kamchatka, USGS Says

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-03 [Older] Russia Says Its Forces Advance in Embattled Ukrainian City of Pokrovsk

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-03 [Older] Ukraine Gets More Patriot Air Defense Systems to Counter Deadly Russian Attacks

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-02 [Older] Ukraine: Russia targets energy grid, thousands without power

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-02 [Older] 2 People Killed in Ukraine’s Odesa Region as Russia Continues to Blast Power Grid

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-02 [Older] Russian Attacks on Ukraine Kill Two, Leave Donetsk Region Without Power

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-02 [Older] Ukraine's Eastern Donetsk Region Without Power After Russian Strikes

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-01 [Older] Russia Denounces 'Excessive' US Military Force in Caribbean, Backs Venezuela

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-01 [Older] Ukrainian Drone Strike Hits Key Russian Oil Port, at Least One Vessel Hit

    • CBC ☛ 2025-10-31 [Older] Forfeiture of Russian plane seized in Toronto in 2022 requires feds to ‘disentangle’ ownership

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-31 [Older] Exiled Russian founders build new startups across Europe

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-31 [Older] Ukraine: Zelenskyy says Russia deployed 170,000 troops for push in Donetsk

    • The Age AU ☛ 2025-10-30 [Older] Australia news LIVE: Australian man pleads guilty to stealing US trade secrets for Russia; Cheeto Mussolini and Xi set to meet in South Korea today; Hurricane Melissa kills dozens in Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba

    • The Age AU ☛ 2025-10-30 [Older] Australian man pleads guilty to stealing US trade secrets for Russia

    • CPJ ☛ 2025-10-29 [Older] Russian drone attacks German TV crew reporting in Ukraine

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-29 [Older] Death Toll Nearly Doubles in Explosion at Russian Military Plant Last Week, Local Authorities Say

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-29 [Older] Putin Claims Russian Troops Have Surrounded 2 Ukrainian Cities but Ukraine Says That's Not True

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-29 [Older] Putin Says Russia's Nuclear-Armed Underwater Drone Was Tested Successfully

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-29 [Older] Young Russian Street Musicians Who Played Anti-Kremlin Songs Get More Jail Time

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-28 [Older] NATO airspace: Can Baltic startups help counter Russian drones?

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-28 [Older] Belarus to Deploy Russia's Oreshnik Missile System in December, TASS Reports

• Environment

  • BIA Net ☛ Pursuits of justice rise with temperatures: Climate lawsuits are redefining rights

    The latest advisory opinion by the United Nations’ International Court of Justice expands the legal framework for combating the climate crisis and transforms “climate justice” from an abstract concept into a concrete one. In Turkey, it was young people who brought the climate crisis before the high court.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Death and Capitalism (Part 4 of 4) — Crooked Timber

    In the sickly river, fish ran out of oxygen. Too much water, an expert panel found, over too many years, was diverted for agricultural profit. The Barka became too weak to nourish life.[ii] The logic of exploitation was not confined to the drought that united all farmers in the desperate search for water. It was a long-term problem. Under capitalism, water was not for nourishment, it was extracted for profit, even to death.

  • CBC ☛ This hiker kicks over people's picturesque stone stacks. But he's got a good reason

    Rocha is the co-author of a 2020 letter to the editor, published in the journal Human-Wildlife Interactions, calling stone-stacking a "looming threat to rock-dwelling biodiversity."

    While he admits the impact is probably less severe along well-worn trails, he says people often go off the path in search of rocks to stack.

    And even if they put them back where they found them after they've snapped their pictures, he says moving them at all can disrupt an ecosystem's balance.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Please stop stacking rocks when you're out hiking

    If you like to stack rocks to make little (or big) piles on your hikes, you might want to rethink this practice. Sure, I guess it can be fun, and even considered art, but according to many conservationists and park authorities, it's not great for the environment, can damage wildlife, destroy local archaeology, confuse hikers by messing with trail markers, and more. So, you should stop stacking rocks, please.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Just Stop Oil protesters convicted after being denied right to state climate facts

    The way their case was handled contrasts starkly with that of three other JSO activists who took part in the same demonstration on London’s orbital motorway.

  • TruthOut ☛ New Report Warns Fossil Fuel Expansion Is Accelerating Far Beyond Global Limits

    The fossil fuel industry is “racing toward climate breakdown with its foot on the accelerator,” said one official at the German environmental rights group Urgewald on Tuesday as the group released its Global Oil and Gas Exit List.

  • Green Party UK ☛ 2025-11-04 [Older] Green MP calls on chancellor to end £2.7bn tax breaks for fossil fuel companies after BP posts $2.21 billion quarterly profit

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Federal News Network ☛ FAA reducing air traffic by 10% across 40 ‘high-volume’ markets during government shutdown

      “I’m not aware in my 35-year history in the aviation market where we’ve had a situation where we’re taking these kinds of measures,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said at a news conference.

      Air traffic controllers have been working unpaid since the shutdown began Oct. 1, and most have been on duty six days a week while putting in mandatory overtime. With some calling out of work due to frustration, taking second jobs or not having money for child care or gas, staffing shortages during some shifts have led to flight delays at a number of U.S. airports.

    • Wired ☛ The AI Data Center Boom Is Warping the US Economy

      Some tech companies have spent so much on AI recently that they have been forced to look for new sources of funding. One noteworthy example is Meta, which recently announced a $27 billion deal to develop a cluster of data centers in Louisiana. The project was created through a special purpose vehicle (SPV), an increasingly common organizational structure that allows firms to avoid putting large amounts of debt on their balance sheets. Last week, Meta said it also raised another $30 billion in debt through a more conventional channel: selling corporate bonds.

    • YLE ☛ Study: Big growth in data centres could raise electricity prices by 10% by 2030

      The consulting firm's projections considered a sharp growth in the number of data centres, with a combined electricity demand of 2,500 megawatts (MW). That is roughly one and a half times more than the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor, which is Europe's largest.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Why We Need Environmental Regulations

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Europe’s energy operating system: P-TEC as North Star

    That is where the Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation (P-TEC), taking place in Athens today and tomorrow, has proven its unique value. P-TEC is an annual gathering of public and private energy leaders held by the US Department of Energy in partnership with Central and Eastern European countries and the Atlantic Council. It is more than just a forum for exchange—it is becoming a compass. On a continent governed by directives and evolving standards, P-TEC can serve as a guide through the labyrinth, helping partners understand not only the current rules but also how these rules might evolve.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Simulation is Collapsing

    Manufactured consensus only works until lived experience contradicts it. Yesterday, lived experience voted. That’s what collapsed the simulation.

    Look at what they’ve been building, what they’ve been selling, what they’ve been trying to make you believe.

    The technocratic liberals built their simulation of competent management. “The data shows everything is fine. Trust the analysis. Wait for Republicans to overreach.” They treat democracy as an optimization problem, citizens as data points. They look at aggregate metrics—GDP growth, stock market performance—and conclude everything is working while people experience catastrophic precarity. When you say “I’m struggling,” they respond “actually the data shows recovery is strong” as if your lived experience is a statistical error requiring correction. This isn’t bad communication. This is the technocratic frame revealing itself as fundamentally broken.

  • EFF ☛ What EFF Needs in a New Executive Director

    With the impending departure of longtime, renowned, and beloved Executive Director Cindy Cohn, EFF and leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates have developed a profile for her successor. While Cindy is irreplaceable, we hope that everyone who knows and loves EFF will help us find our next leader.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Marc Andreessen Bet Big on Trump. It’s Paying Off for Silicon Valley.

    In short order, the Trump administration has hollowed out the CFPB — the primary regulator with jurisdiction over increasingly ubiquitous financial technology companies and the only one looking out for consumers in the rapidly expanding crypto marketplace. Lawsuits have been dropped, settlements have been renegotiated in favor of companies and a proposed consumer-friendly crypto regulation was killed outright.

    Virtually all investigations have also ground to a halt, including three probes into Andreessen-backed companies, according to the records and the people familiar with the cases, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Among those frozen: inquiries into the popular cash advance app EarnIn and Point Digital Finance, one of the country’s largest providers of so-called alternative mortgages.

  • New York Times ☛ OpenAI Signs $38 Billion Cloud Computing Deal With Amazon

    OpenAI said on Monday that it had agreed to purchase $38 billion in cloud computing services from Amazon over the next seven years. The additional computing power will help OpenAI build and deploy its artificial intelligence technologies, including the ChatGPT chatbot.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ How the F5 breach, CISA job cuts, and a government shutdown are eroding U.S. cyber readiness

    The F5 incident was not another routine software breach. Security researchers and federal officials have called it a nation-state–level compromise that could have a cascading impact. In this incident, a China-linked espionage group accessed F5 source code and undisclosed vulnerabilities, gaining access to a detailed blueprint for crafting custom exploits capable of bypassing traditional defenses. Because the company’s BIG‑IP software is used by many of the world’s largest enterprises, including federal agencies, defense contractors, hospitals, and utilities, the breach has national implications.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Nokia extends SoftBank Corp. partnership with network modernization deal in Japan

    Nokia has announced an expansion of its partnership with SoftBank Corp. through a new deal to supply advanced 4G and 5G radio access equipment in Japan.

  • The Verge ☛ Zohran Mamdani won because he knew when to be online — and when not to

    The video, while quickly deleted, was a perfect example of synthetic politics. Start with a fairly normal, if well-worn accusation: my opponent is soft on crime. Then, render it through a machine designed to reproduce perfectly distilled stereotypes, making the whole thing not only a fictional scenario from the get-go, but one lacking even the nominal humanity you’d have gotten with live actors or an animator. Sprinkle in a digital puppet version of your rival with a reference to a niche social media micro-controversy. Finally, post it on said social media site. The result is something stripped of nearly any connection to physical reality — whether you agree with the central premise or not.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Bill to Reauthorize USDA’s ReConnect Reintroduced

    The ReConnecting Rural America Act of 2025 will codify and clarify components of the ReConnect Program and, in so doing, reduce red tape and speed broadband deployment. The bill will: [...]

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ OpenAI’s abyssal losses

    More than twelve billion dollars gone in just three months. The staggering losses reported by OpenAI in the third quarter are unprecedented, not just for a startup, illustrating of the outsized ambitions of its CEO, Sam Altman, who is racing toward the creation of superintelligence. It also marks the largest deficit ever recorded by an US company — excluding purely “accounting” losses tied to asset write-downs or exceptional tax charges.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • HRW ☛ Chinese Government Threatens Academic Freedom in the UK

    The university apologized for its actions, but only after Murphy began legal action against it for violating her academic freedom.

    The Chinese government’s efforts to manipulate information abroad, affecting academic freedom, should be cause for alarm. China studies scholars from British universities have reported harassment when teaching topics critical of Beijing. The issue of China’s “transnational repression”—cross-border human rights abuses—has been raised in the UK parliament, including in a recent report by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Internet restored in Tanzania after election protests

    Tanzanians are now able to share videos and information following the restoration of internet access. Citizens have been documenting what occurred since election day, when protests erupted over concerns about the electoral system.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Techdirt ☛ Comcast, Netflix, And CBS Will All Now Kiss Trump’s Ass To Try And Acquire Warner Brothers And CNN

    The Ellisons have since set their sights on Warner Brothers, CNN, and HBO. It won’t be cheap; it’s estimated that Larry and company will have to pay upwards of $60 billion for the acquisition. The Trump administration has openly signaled that they’d very much like the Ellisons to succeed here, in part to force a dying cable new channel (CNN) to be even friendlier to Trump than it already is.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ Michael Jackson is the ‘Highest Paid Dead Celebrity’

    Michael Jackson remains the “highest paid” dead celebrity, with his estate having earned a whopping $3.5 billion since his death in 2009.

  • The Local DK ☛ Danish music rights group sues AI music platform Suno

    The group, which represents around 51,000 composers, authors and publishers, said it had evidence of the use of songs from famous Danish acts like Aqua and MØ among others.

    "In all cases, Koda has concrete evidence that the copyright of each work has been infringed," the group said.

    It added that the music produced by Suno could mimic the originals, "putting them in direct competition with the very works exploited."

  • Digital Music News ☛ Denmark's Koda Files Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against Suno

    Koda just recently submitted the action to the Copenhagen City Court and promptly requested a high-court referral in light of the “fundamental” issues at hand. As most are aware, those issues – AI giants’ allegedly training their models on protected works without authorization and then generating similar outputs – are front and center in different cases.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Google Removed 749 Million Anna's Archive URLs from its Search Results

    Popular shadow library Anna's Archive has become a top target for copyright holders. In just three years, publishers and authors have prompted Google to remove 749 million of the site's URLs from its search results. Despite this immense takedown campaign, which accounts for 5% of all URLs reported to Google on copyright grounds, the site itself remains easily discoverable through the search engine.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ UK court mostly sides with Stability AI in AI copyright lawsuit

    In early 2023, stock photo provider Getty Images Holdings Inc. sued Stability AI for copyright infringement. The complaint charged that the AI provider broke the law by using millions of photos from the Getty Images database to train its Stable Diffusion models. Some of the photos in question are owned by Getty Images, while others are distributed through its platform under an exclusive license.

    The court dismissed the copyright infringement argument on the grounds that Stability AI didn’t train its models in the U.K. “Getty Images may be able to maintain such a case in the jurisdiction where the Model was in fact trained, but there is no basis for that case in this jurisdiction,” Justice Joanna Smith wrote in the ruling.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Common Crawl Is Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work

    Common Crawl maintains that it is doing nothing wrong. I spoke with Skrenta twice while reporting this story. During the second conversation, I asked him about the foundation archiving news articles even after publishers have asked it to stop. Skrenta told me that these publishers are making a mistake by excluding themselves from “Search 2.0”—referring to the generative-AI products now widely being used to find information online—and said that, anyway, it is the publishers that made their work available in the first place. “You shouldn’t have put your content on the internet if you didn’t want it to be on the internet,” he said.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • 🔤SpellBinding — BCEHIRU Wordo: MINDS

  • Technology and Free Software

    • My (current) reasons against AI

      I'm talking about typical cloud-based tools here. Locally run models that you train with your own data are a different story (in some re- gards). This list is not exhaustive.