Leftovers

• The Register UK ☛ Systemd 259 release candidate flexes musl support

  We suspect that these guarded reservations are why the 259-rc1 NEWS file carefully says: [...]

• APNIC ☛ Three security invariants could prevent 65% of breaches

  I wanted to go deeper. There are other invariants that could prevent even more breaches. My favourite addresses insider risk: Employees or systems can only access customer data if there’s a validated business justification. A customer support agent can only pull up your record if they’re working on an active support case for you. Another is automatic deployment, where all services and applications are automatically deployed from checked-in source code, and your production environment mirrors your source code within two weeks.

• Cloud Four Inc ☛ Responsive Letter Spacing

  Earlier this year, a longtime customer shared a new iteration of their brand guidelines. Of particular interest were changes to typography, including heavier weights for headings, and a request to tighten all letter-spacing by a certain percentage.

  While the latter change worked well in print and certain other applications, it was a bit too aggressive for web and digital. The smaller the text, the more the loss of white space impaired readability: [...]

• Thomas Rigby ☛ #TIL: it's OK to fail

  The unstoppable force hit the immovable object this week and I think I'm done.

  Not with writing, not with blogging, not with learning; just with deadlines.

• Scott Willsey ☛ New Face!

  It is much the same, but huge chunks of the layout have been reworked, the fonts are different, the colors are different, and I like it much better.

• Science

  • LabX Media Group ☛ Tough Moss Spores Weather Space’s Harsh Conditions

    Back on Earth, the researchers found that more than 80 percent of the spores survived across all three groups. Of these, the space exposure with UV group had the lowest germination rate (86 percent). This suggested that visible and infrared light have negligible effects on germination, whereas UV radiation was more of a detrimental factor. “We expected almost zero survival, but the result was the opposite: Most of the spores survived,” said Fujita in the statement. “We were genuinely astonished by the extraordinary durability of these tiny plant cells.”

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ A Hiker Discovered a Trove of Artifacts in Norway's Melting Ice. The Site Turned Out to Be a 1,500-Year-Old Reindeer Trap

    Melting ice in Norway’s mountains has revealed a trove of cut logs, reindeer antlers, iron spearheads and other hunting tools. Experts say the site is a 1,500-year-old reindeer trap. It features two fences made out of large logs, which Iron Age hunters used to trap and kill wild reindeer.

  • SusamPal ☛ Fizz Buzz with Cosines

    Fizz Buzz is a word game that has become quite popular as a simple computer programming exercise. The game is simple. Players say the numbers aloud in order beginning with one. Whenever a number is divisible by \( 3, \) they say 'Fizz' instead. Whenever a number is divisible by \( 5, \) they say 'Buzz'. If a number is divisible by both \( 3 \) and \( 5, \) the player says both 'Fizz' and 'Buzz'. Here is a typical Python program that prints this sequence: [...]

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Factoring Carmichael Numbers

    Carmichael Numbers are the bane of probabilistic primality algorithms. You have to go through extra steps just to handle these relatively rare numbers. But did you know that the Miller-Rabin algorithm not only determines the compositeness of Carmichael numbers but can actually find non-trivial factors? Apparently none of the AI models I tried did either. Feel free, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, to train on this blog post.

• Career/Education

  • American Library Association ☛ ALA Sounds Alarm as White House Undermines Programs Supporting School and Academic Libraries

    This week the White House announced new steps toward dismantling the U.S. Department of Education (ED). Key programs that support school and academic libraries, such as Innovative Approaches to Literacy, will move to other federal agencies. The moves are the latest in a series of actions by the Trump Administration seeking to eliminate the programs and the Education Department.

    ALA President Sam Helmick said, “American students and faculty served by school and academic libraries depend on the Education Department’s expertise and funding. At a time of declining reading scores, we need to invest in proven strategies that strengthen learning.

  • Ness Labs ☛ How to Love Learning Again

    Why do we sometimes love learning while other times we can’t wait to escape and something else? How does this affect how well we actually learn? And what can we do about it?

• Hardware

  • Klara ☛ Is DWPD Still a Useful SSD Spec?

    For those not already familiar, DWPD is an initialism for (total) Drive Writes Per Day, and is intended as a specification for SSD write endurance.

    With very few exceptions, all solid-state drives currently available for purchase are based on NAND flash. At the very lowest level, they work by charging an individual cell to indicate that it stores a 1, or discharging that cell to indicate that it stores a 0.

  • Wired ☛ 4 People Indicted in Alleged Conspiracy to Smuggle Supercomputers and Nvidia Chips to China

    Over the past few years, the US has introduced a series of export control rules designed to prevent Chinese organizations from acquiring computer chips that have become popular for developing AI chatbots. The restrictions aim to slow China in what US officials have described as a race to develop powerful AI systems, including surveillance tools and autonomous weapons. Some Chinese companies have been forced to make do with older or less capable chips, but others have allegedly turned to smugglers.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Task And Purpose ☛ The secret list that’s ending military careers

    Finn, whose name I’ve changed here, is one of hundreds of service members whose cases I’ve become familiar with in my years as a Marine Corps lawyer. The stories echo one another: their careers are ending because of an obscure database of banned “ingredients” called Operation Supplement Safety (OPSS). The site does not contain a full list of “prohibited ingredients and substances” for supplements, but rather provides a search box of a hidden database. The database can’t be searched by brand names, but only for the specific chemical ingredients listed mostly in small print on the back of packaging. The system offers little help or leniency for typos, no matter how long or obscure the word.

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Hepatitis B Vaccine Under Attack By Trump Administration (My Story About Hepatitis B)

    Delaying the Hepatitis B vaccine from infancy until age 4 is not harmless. Infants born to chronically infected mothers are at very high risk of vertical transmission at birth; without timely newborn vaccination and hepatitis B immune globulin (HBIG), up to 90% of exposed infants become chronically infected. Early infant vaccination prevents these lifelong infections. Shifting the first dose to age 4, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proposes, would increase the number of children exposed and the risk of chronic disease.

    Who the Hell even cares how you get it other than we need to know that for other reasons? It’s a horrible illness that nobody should have to face if they have access to medicine.

  • It's FOSS ☛ Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away

    GitHub makes it worse. Achievements, badges, contribution graphs. It gamifies the work. Developers feel compelled to maintain streaks and numbers. The metrics become the measure of worth.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Thunderbird 145 finally adds ‘native’ Exchange support

    What the company means by "native" is that Thunderbird can now talk directly to Microsoft's Exchange Web Services (or EWS for short). At this point, the Microsoft enthusiasts out there are probably shouting at their computers that EWS is deprecated and it's on its way out. Well, yes, it is, and has been since 2018. The Register mentioned it back in 2020 … but as ever, the real story is a little more complicated than that.

  • The Record ☛ FCC spikes Biden-era cyber regulations prompted by Salt Typhoon telecom breaches

    The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to remove several cybersecurity regulations put in place after Chinese [crackers] breached multiple telecommunications giants to steal the correspondence of Donald Trump and JD Vance during campaign season last year.

    In a party line vote on Thursday, the Republican majority of the FCC reversed a declaratory ruling published in January that would have mandated telecoms to better secure their networks and submit annual certifications attesting to the creation of a cybersecurity risk management plan.

  • Chris ☛ Questions for Cloudflare

    Note: This article has earned a lot of criticism for being shallow, reacting too much to a fast preliminary analysis, being dismissive of Cloudflare’s excellent robustness track record, and being biased by hindsight. I’ll answer to all four points in turn: [...]

  • L D Stephens ☛ RE: Why Do You Need Big Tech for Your SSG?

    I get the appeal. Having total control over your own corner of the web is tempting, especially when you’re running a simple 11ty static site like mine.

    But after looking at the numbers and comparing the workflows, my answer is: thanks, but no thanks it’s not for me.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Grok Insists That Elon Musk Is More Physically Fit Than LeBron James

      We won’t belabor how you could poke holes in all of this, but to summarize: Musk is obviously not wiry, is not even a physicist let alone a master of the field, and is publicly estranged from his daughter Vivian Wilson. And so, disagreeing with Grok, the user asked the AI to explain itself — and, as an added bonus, to rank Musk among all people in history.

      At which point, Grok completely loses its mind.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Grok Claims Musk Is Fitter Than LeBron James and Could Beat Mike Tyson

      Realizing that Grok is now prone to praising Musk as superior in every respect, X users have taken to baiting it with increasingly ridiculous prompts. The bot has speculated on his potential as a porn star (“His relentless drive and innovative mindset suggest he’d pioneer new techniques and endure marathon sessions”), claimed he would be more useful than a satellite phone to someone stranded on a desert island (“Elon could improvise tools from wreckage”), declared that he could have outperformed Lenin and Mao as leaders of their respective communist revolutions (“Elon’s adaptability to chaos, without rigid dogma, could have built a more resilient Soviet state faster”), argued that he’d make a better movie star than Tom Cruise (“Elon’s unscripted chaos brings authentic edge Hollywood can’t fabricate”) and said he has what it takes to win a feces-eating or urine-chugging contest (“Musk has the potential to drink piss better than any human in history”).

    • EFF ☛ Strengthen Colorado’s AI Act

      In 2024, Colorado enacted a limited but crucial step forward against automated abuse: the AI Act (S.B. 24-205). We commend the labor, digital rights, and other advocates who have worked to enact and protect it. Colorado recently delayed the Act’s effective date to June 30, 2026.

      EFF looks forward to enforcement of the Colorado AI Act, opposes weakening or further delaying it, and supports strengthening it.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Democrats fighting to preserve states’ ability to regulate AI

      Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, told Semafor he’s working to keep that moratorium out of the annual defense policy bill, which often attracts unrelated additions due to its must-pass status on Capitol Hill.

    • The Register UK ☛ State-level AI regulation under threat from Repubs again

      This time around, Republicans in the House of Representatives want to find a way to add a ban on state-level AI regulation to the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The must-pass bill has already made its way through the Senate without an AI ban amendment, and language for such a provision is currently in discussion, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) said earlier this week.

    • The Verge ☛ Grok’s Elon Musk worship is getting weird

      As a number of people have pointed out on social media over the past day, Grok’s public-facing chatbot is currently prone to insisting on Musk’s prowess at absolutely anything, no matter how unlikely — or conversely, embarrassing — a given feat is.

  • Social Control Media

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Is social media subjecting Black women to radicalized digital policing?

      Influencers use oppression, manipulation and weaponization to police Black women on social media, according to new research uncovering the entrenched nature of digital racism.

      The study by Charles Darwin University (CDU) Lecturer in Enabling (Humanities) Vimbai Mutero, whose research explores gender-based violence in various forms, examined the unsolicited advice and digital policing of Black femininity across major social media platforms.

    • Greg Morris ☛ Connecting No One

      Zuckerberg told us this himself recently. He wants AI bots to create content for you to interact with. The human element is just a friction point they are trying to remove. The courts might say they aren't a monopoly on social networking, and perhaps they are right but they aren't doing social networking anymore. They are just fighting TikTok for your empty stares.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Meta Prevails in U.S. Antitrust Case

      To be sure, TikTok is not used in remotely the same way as Facebook and Instagram were, but I will still use it as a retort to the FTC because Facebook and Instagram are now TikTok clones anyway. It is a bad argument, but it is more compelling than the one the FTC presented.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Schools share blame for PowerSchool mega-hack, say watchdogs

      According to the provincial commissioners, roughly 3.86 million Ontarians and more than 700,000 Albertans were swept up in the breach. The exposed information included everything from students' names and contact details to birth dates, education records, identifiers, and in some cases medical information.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ SEC drops case against SolarWinds tied to monumental breach

      The Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday dropped its case against SolarWinds and its chief information security officer over its handling of an alleged Russian cyberespionage campaign uncovered in 2020, an incident that penetrated at least nine federal agencies and hundreds of companies.

      The SEC’s decision brings to a halt one of the more divisive steps under the Biden administration to hold companies’ feet to the fire over their security failings, a groundbreaking suit that a judge last year dismissed in significant measure.

    • Fortra LLC ☛ UK's New Cybersecurity Bill Takes Aim at Ransomware Gangs and State-Backed [Crackers]

      After years of delays, the UK government has finally introduced landmark cybersecurity legislation that could reshape how British organisations defend against digital attacks.

      The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill arrives as cyber-attacks cost the British economy an estimated £14.7 billion annually - approximately 0.5% of GDP.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Whoops! Microsoft’s new Windows AI agent platform lets in malware

      You might foolishly think the purpose of Microsoft Windows was to run your programs so you can do stuff.

      But Microsoft understands that what you really want is an agentic AI-first computer platform. Who wants to get work done when they could be arguing with Copilot?

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Former Google chief accused of spying on employees through account 'backdoor'

      “During their relationship, Schmidt confided that when he worked at Google, he built an insider “backdoor” to Google servers with a team of Google engineers in order to spy on Google employees. Accordingly, the backdoor enabled him to access anyone’s Google account and private information,” the lawsuit says.

      Google is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit and is alleged to “knowingly acquiescing in, failing to remedy, and materially assisting the unauthorized access” into Ritter’s accounts despite being provided notice. Schmidt and the company are accused of violating the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, and a section of the state penal code that prohibits wiretapping.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Roblox Facial Safety Check—Here's How It Works

      The system will first be introduced in Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. It will be rolled out elsewhere starting in January. Notably, images and video used for age estimation checks will not be stored, Roblox said.

    • Kansas Reflector ☛ Kansas, Missouri GOP officials agree to share voter registration details of 6 million people

      Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab and Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins said the partnership would enhance voter roll maintenance by “securely” sharing personal details on 1.87 million registered voters in Kansas and 4.13 million registered voters in Missouri.

    • EFF ☛ How Cops Are Using Flock Safety's ALPR Network to Surveil Protesters and Activists

      It's no secret that 2025 has given Americans plenty to protest about. But as news cameras showed protesters filling streets of cities across the country, law enforcement officers—including U.S. Border Patrol agents—were quietly watching those same streets through different lenses: Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that tracked every passing car.

      Through an analysis of 10 months of nationwide searches on Flock Safety's servers, we discovered that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches through Flock's national network of surveillance data in connection with protest activity. In some cases, law enforcement specifically targeted known activist groups, demonstrating how mass surveillance technology increasingly threatens our freedom to demonstrate.

    • The Register UK ☛ Bots may use your private chats to train themselves

      On Tuesday, she told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations that “we should not assume that they're taking reasonable precautions to prevent incursions into consumers' privacy. Users should not be automatically opted in to having their data used in model training, and developers should proactively remove sensitive data from training sets.”

    • 404 Media ☛ OnlyFans Will Start Checking Criminal Records. Creators Say That's a Terrible Idea

      As reported by adult industry news outlet XBIZ, OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair announced the partnership in a LinkedIn post. Blair doesn’t say in the post when the checks will be implemented, whether all types of criminal convictions will bar creators from signing up, if existing creators will be checked as well, or what countries’ criminal records will be checked.

      OnlyFans did not respond to 404 Media's request for comment.

    • Wired ☛ Vaping Is ‘Everywhere’ in Schools—Sparking a Bathroom Surveillance Boom

      Schools in the US are installing vape-detection tech in bathrooms to thwart student nicotine and cannabis use. A new investigation reveals the impact of using spying to solve a problem.

    • Wired ☛ In Alex Karp’s World, Palantir Is the Underdog

      Recently, WIRED editor at large Steven Levy sat down for an interview with Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Karp defended his company’s contracts with clients like ICE and the Israeli government, which have increasingly gathered criticism. In this episode of Uncanny Valley, we dive into the most revealing parts of the interview and break down how Karp’s techno-state ideology has rippled across Silicon Valley.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Court House News ☛ Muslim civil rights group sues over Texas governor's terrorist group designation

    In a social media post, Abbott said the proclamation bans CAIR from purchasing or acquiring land in Texas and authorizes the state’s attorney general to “sue to shut them down.”

  • US News And World Report ☛ Muslim Civil Rights [sic] Group Sues Texas for Labeling It a Terrorist Organization

    Founded in 1994, CAIR has 25 chapters around the country. It has eight employees and two independent contractors in Texas, according to the lawsuit.

    The proclamation also included the Muslim Brotherhood. Neither the CAIR nor the Muslim Brotherhood is designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. government.

  • US Navy Times ☛ Airman behind famed ‘Burst of Joy’ photo dies at 92

    “Hanoi Taxis,” or C-141s, ferried the sick and wounded out first, followed by the “taxis” for those who had been imprisoned longest. Among the POW ranks were Floyd Thompson, who was shot down in 1963 and retained the undesirable title of the war’s longest-held prisoner; John McCain, the late senator and former presidential candidate; and former senator Jeremiah Denton Jr., who famously blinked out the letters T-O-R-T-U-R-E, in Morse code, while being interviewed for a propaganda film.

  • Truthdig ☛ The Coup Kids Are in Charge Now

    The inability of his regime to push back armed groups — which are believed to control more than half the country and have propelled Burkina Faso to the top of the Global Terrorism Index — has done little to dent his appeal. None of his fans around the world care because that appeal doesn’t come from what he does, or who he is, but his ability to put into words what a lot of people think, and the viral nature of many of his remarks slamming the West and comprador elites across Africa.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ A friendly reminder: Trump’s new Ukraine peace plan is the work of two diplomatic amateurs, Kirill Dmitriev and Steve Witkoff — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ How Donald Trump can still censor the Epstein files

    Two legal loopholes could lead to thousands of crucial pictures, emails and flight logs being redacted

• Environment

  • Michaël ☛ Acidification – r.iresmi.net

    Global ocean acidification mean sea water pH trend map from Multi-Observations Reprocessing from Copernicus.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • University of Michigan ☛ UMich-designed traffic light system reduces Oakland County congestion

      A new traffic signal system designed by University of Michigan researchers is being implemented in Oakland County, with plans to expand across Southeast Michigan. The system uses GPS data to track vehicles as they move through intersections, allowing engineers to regularly adjust signal timing and reflect real-time traffic patterns.

    • Nicolas Magand ☛ Who are they always texting?

      I am reminded of this scene almost every day when I look at cars passing by my kitchen window and see that the majority of drivers, slowly cruising down the street, look at their phone while doing so. Who the hell are they always texting? What are they doing on their phone that couldn’t seemingly wait, or be done a few moments before, i.e. before taking the wheel?

      The exact same observation can be made at red lights: most drivers, once their car is stopped, will immediately grab their phone, making sure, in a way, that these few seconds waiting for the green light are not wasted.

    • Bitdefender ☛ Wind farm worker sentenced after turning turbines into a secret [cryptocurrency] mine

      The unnamed rogue employee, who is in his forties, connected three cryptocurrency mining rigs and two Helium network nodes (a device which acts as both a wireless gateway and blockchain node) to his employer's internal network between August and November 2022.

      The mining rigs were plugged directly into Nordex's router at a substation in Gieterveen, while the Helium hotspots were installed inside the actual wind turbines at the Waardpolder site.

    • Didier Stevens ☛ Quickpost: Power Requirements Of A Keylogger

      I did some tests with a Keelog keylogger, the AirDrive Forensic Keylogger: I wanted to find out how much power that keylogger requires.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • FAIR ☛ WaPo Defends Data Centers—With Few Disclosures That Amazon Depends on Them

    US electricity prices, you may have noticed, keep going up. And in some parts of the country, like here in the DC region, they’re soaring. In Virginia, for example, electricity rates are up 13% this year, an issue Democrats highlighted as they swept back into power in Richmond earlier this month.

  • FAIR ☛ A Seattle Socialist’s Victory Gives Elite Media the Jitters

    New York City isn’t the only city to have elected a democratic socialist as mayor. Seattle voters ousted incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell for community organizer Katie Wilson, who had the endorsements of unions, Democratic clubs and the Stranger (7/2/25), the city’s alt-weekly.

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Stock trading by members of Congress could be banned in bipartisan push

    The House Committee on Administration convened Wednesday morning to hear how existing guardrails laid out in the 2012 STOCK Act fall short and consider the options to revamp it.

    The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, shortened to the STOCK Act, codified that members of Congress, congressional employees and other federal officials are not exempt from federal insider trading laws.

    The law also required that lawmakers and certain congressional staffers must disclose stock transactions that amount to over $1,000 within 45 days.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ EUIPO Study: Major Brand Ads on Pirate Sites Surged 567%

    This includes a European Union-led Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in which several leading advertising companies, including Google, signed up to play their part. The origins of this agreement date back to 2016, and the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) has monitored progress ever since.

  • Wired ☛ Google DeepMind Hires Former CTO of Boston Dynamics as the Company Pushes Deeper Into Robotics

    Google DeepMind has hired the former chief technology officer of Boston Dynamics as the company pushes deeper into robotics. Aaron Saunders, who is partly responsible for giving the world back-flipping and dancing machines, joined as the VP of hardware engineering earlier this month.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Salience Game

    I honestly cannot understand how anybody cannot see that The Free Press is not merely an anti-left-wing rag, but an operation whose mission is to make people who have somewhat of a heart, and money and influence in the greater social strata of the elite classes, vote for right-wing power as the lesser evil. It is, in fact, very clear that this is the editorial goal of The Free Press. For people who worry capitalism will be eliminated by revolutionary Marxists on the far fringes of the left-flank of the Democratic Party, but recognize how evil the Republican Party has become, they provide just enough justification fuel to hold their nose and vote Republican anyway.

  • Groot Koerkamp ☛ Distributing Rust SIMD Binaries

    Initially, most of my code uses Rust’s unstable #![feature(portabe-simd)]. Unfortunately, users and packagers don’t like unstable Rust, so by now I have converted everything to wide (gh, docs.rs). Wide supports types like u64x4 like this (omitting irrelevant details): [...]

  • Krebs On Security ☛ Mozilla Says It’s Finally Done With Two-Faced Onerep

    In March 2024, Mozilla said it was winding down its collaboration with Onerep — an identity protection service offered with the Firefox web browser that promises to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites — after KrebsOnSecurity revealed Onerep’s founder had created dozens of people-search services and was continuing to operate at least one of them. Sixteen months later, however, Mozilla is still promoting Onerep. This week, Mozilla announced its partnership with Onerep will officially end next month.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • RFERL ☛ A Tool Of Russian Propaganda? New Russia-Linked TV Station To Be Launched In Kyrgyzstan

      Nomad TV's editorial leadership includes Anna Abakumova, a Russian journalist who previously worked for the state-funded network RT and is a close associate of Margarita Simonyan, one of the Kremlin's chief propagandists.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Digital Music News ☛ NPR Secures $36 Million in Critical Federal Funding

    NPR claimed the CPB was under mounting pressure from the Trump administration, which caused it to change course. It noted that Public Media Infrastructure is a media coalition that does not exist and wasn’t authorized to receive the funds.

  • Techdirt ☛ Brendan Carr Launches Baseless ‘Investigation’ Into PBS, NPR, And BBC To Try And Silence Criticism Of His Weird, Unpopular Boss

    Donald Trump’s FCC boss Brendan Carr is opening a fake new “investigation” into PBS, NPR, and BBC in the hopes of suppressing journalistic criticism of the country’s increasingly unmoored and unpopular President. Carr first leaked word of the fake investigation to right wing propaganda website Breitbart.

    In a letter to all three outlets (pages 1, 2), Carr indicates that his bogus inquiry is focusing on a minor edit made in a year-old documentary broadcast by the BBC about the president’s support of a violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

  • Press Gazette ☛ UK public service journalism heroes recognised at British Journalism Awards

    Public Service Journalism is one of four premier awards announced at the end of the night. The others are: Scoop of the Year, Journalist of the Year and News Provider of the Year.

  • CPJ ☛ Indian authorities raid Kashmir Times’ Jammu office, seize equipment

    “Reports of a raid on the Kashmir Times office are deeply troubling and raise concerns about increasing pressure on media outlets in Jammu and Kashmir,” said CPJ Asia-Pacific Program Coordinator Kunal Majumder. “Authorities must clearly explain the legal basis for this action and ensure that any investigation is conducted with transparency and full respect for due process. News outlets should not face punitive action simply for doing their journalistic work.”

  • CPJ ☛ Thailand indicts journalist Murray Hunter on criminal defamation charges at Malaysia’s request

    Hunter, a Thailand-based journalist who has contributed to various international news publications, was indicted on criminal defamation charges in Bangkok on November 17 following a complaint by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission regulator, according to multiple news reports, the journalist, and the journalist’s lawyer, who communicated with CPJ via messaging app.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Tennessee Lookout ☛ Tennessee National Guard allowed in Memphis while state appeals • Tennessee Lookout

    Davidson County Chancellor Patricia Head Moskal issued a temporary injunction Monday blocking Lee’s deployment of the national guard, agreeing with the plaintiffs that it likely violated the “terms and conditions of Tennessee’s Military Code.” But she told the state that if they appealed her ruling, which they did, she would lift the injunction during the appeal process.

    Moskal formally lifted her injunction on Wednesday.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Judge orders Trump administration to end Guard deployment in DC

    District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued to challenge the Guard deployments. He asked the judge to bar the White House from deploying Guard troops without the mayor’s consent while the lawsuit plays out.

  • The Nation ☛ If Condé Nast Can Illegally Fire Me, No Union Worker Is Safe

    Condé Nast illegally fired me from Bon Appétit for posing questions to a human resources manager. On November 5, I was part of an effort by our union to get answers about layoffs. Two days earlier, Condé announced the near-shuttering of Teen Vogue, which entailed letting go of eight people. My termination and that of three of my coworkers were clearly retaliatory, and if Condé can get away with this—and with President Donald Trump sabotaging the National Labor Relations Board, the company appears to be betting that it can—it will send a message to unions and employers across our industry that the foundations of labor law are collapsing.

  • [Repeat] PHR ☛ ICE Tactics and Deportation Fears Limit Access to Health Care for Children of Immigrants: Survey

    The survey finds:

    • 84 percent of surveyed health care workers report significant or moderate decreases in patient visits since January 2025 executive orders on immigration.

    • 26 percent of clinicians report that immigration enforcement has directly affected patient care.

  • Common Dreams ☛ We Go As We Please: What the Fuck Is Wrong With Y'all

    The American Gestapo's brutish, racist, unholy crusade rampages on. They've now left Chicago - trailing tear gas, court losses, manifest lies, the wrath of a people - to terrorize diverse blue Charlotte NC with its "cowardly fascist pigs doing cowardly fascist pig things." In a new "offense to history," they even named their latest depravity Operation Charlotte's Web. its author E.B. White, a stirring voice for democracy and inclusion who decried the "smell" arising from those who "adjust to fascism," weeps.

  • 404 Media ☛ ICE Says Critical Evidence In Abuse Case Was Lost In 'System Crash' a Day After It Was Sued

    It should be noted that ICE and Border Patrol agents continued to be paid during the government shutdown, that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” provided $170 billion in funding for immigration enforcement and border protection, which included tens of billions of dollars in funding for detention centers.

    People detained at the facility are suing the government over alleged horrific treatment and living conditions at the detention center, which has become a site of mass protest against the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

  • Mike Brock ☛ A Man Died Hog-Tied in ICE Custody. They Called It Suicide.

    The official story: suicide by hanging.

    The autopsy: found hog-tied with bedsheets binding his hands and feet behind his back, cloth around his neck.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Digital Music News ☛ Live Nation Moves to Dismiss Entire US DOJ Antitrust Case

  Live Nation claims this structure ignores how concert business competition actually works, that “made-for-litigation markets plainly do not encompass ‘the area of effective competition’ that the law requires.” It points out that rival ticketing companies like SeatGeek, AXS, Eventim, and Paciolan compete broadly and do not restrict their efforts to the DOJ’s definition of a venue.

• Reuters ☛ Meta defeats antitrust case over Instagram, WhatsApp acquisitions

  Facebook parent company Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab defeated a U.S. attempt to unwind its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp on Tuesday when a federal judge ruled the company does not hold a social media monopoly.

• CBS ☛ Meta prevails in historic FTC antitrust case, won't have to break off WhatsApp, Instagram

  U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued his ruling Tuesday after the historic antitrust trial wrapped up in late May. His decision follows two separate rulings that branded Google an illegal monopoly in both search and online advertising, dealing yet another regulatory blow to the tech industry that for years enjoyed nearly unbridled growth.

• NBC ☛ Meta prevails in FTC antitrust case, won't have to break off WhatsApp, Instagram

  WhatsApp and Instagram helped Facebook move its business from desktop computers to mobile devices, and to remain popular with younger generations as rivals like Snapchat (which it also tried, but failed, to buy) and TikTok emerged. However, the FTC has a narrow definition of Meta’s competitive market, excluding companies like TikTok, YouTube and Apple’s messaging service from being considered rivals to Instagram and WhatsApp.

• CNBC ☛ Meta wins FTC antitrust trial that focused on WhatsApp, Instagram

  • Meta has won its case against the Federal Trade Commission, seven months after the trial began.

  • A judge in Washington, D.C., has determined that Meta does not have a monopoly in the social networking market.

  • The FTC claimed that Meta shouldn’t have been allowed to buy Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014.

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The long game

  Well, this fucking sucks. A federal judge has decided that Meta is not a monopolist, and that its acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp were not an illegal bid to secure and maintain a monopoly:

  https://gizmodo.com/meta-learns-that-nothing-is-a-monopoly-if-you-just-wait-long-enough-2000687691

  This is particularly galling because Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly, explicitly declared that these mergers were undertaken to reduce competition, which is the only circumstance in which pro-monopoly economists and lawyers say that mergers should be blocked.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Operation Endpoint: Pirate IPTV Services Down After Raids & Several Arrests

    A law enforcement operation carried out by multiple law enforcement agencies in Brazil is being celebrated as a success. Five arrest warrants led to three arrests, nineteen search and seizure warrants targeted multiple locations, with various assets and cryptocurrency running to millions of dollars secured by the authorities. The disappearance of three very popular streaming brands is also viewed as a big plus.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Tokyo Court Finds Cloudflare Liable For Manga Piracy in Long-Running Lawsuit

    Japanese manga publishers have declared victory over Cloudflare in a long-running copyright infringement liability dispute. Kadokawa, Kodansha, Shueisha and Shogakukan say that Cloudflare's refusal to stop manga piracy sites, meant they were left with no other choice but to take legal action. The Tokyo District Court rendered its decision this morning, finding Cloudflare liable for damages after it failed to sufficiently prevent piracy.