Leftovers

• PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ ICYMI: SanDisk Introduces World's Smallest USB Flash Drive

• PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ Good Words, Good Deeds, Good News

  Mark’s neighbors found out that he’d been diagnosed with ALS in July, and it was very aggressive. They knew he wouldn’t be able to harvest his sugar beet crop. His sons would harvest, but would most likely be overwhelmed. One hundred neighbors and friends got together and harvested Mark’s beets for him.

• RTL ☛ Unearthed in Paris mansion last year: Long-lost Rubens 'masterpiece' sells for almost 3 mn euros

  The painting was authenticated by German art historian Nils Buttner, known for his research on the master of the Flemish Baroque, Osenat said.

  Its provenance was certified through methods including X-ray imaging and pigment analysis, he added.

• David H ☛ I Finished Something I Started Over 50 Years Ago

  Over 50 years ago, I started reading Doc Savage novels - more about that here. Today I finished the last one.

• Howard Oakley ☛ The earthly delights of Hieronymus Bosch 2

  Bosch’s greatest masterpiece, and one of the greatest paintings in the world, presents an intriguing and intricate vision. Unique in its content, it remains a conversation piece half a millennium after it was painted. Having looked at the structure and higher-level reading of this extraordinarily complex triptych, this article completes my account by delving deeper into some of its details, and trying to put this together in a better understanding of its reading and purpose.

• Science

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-20 [Older] An ancient planet smashed into Earth. We now know its origin

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Two early humans coexisted 3.5 million years ago, fossil foot shows

    Researchers could then conclude that 3.5 million years ago, at a “poorly understood time in human evolution,” according to Reuters, two different hominins lived alongside one another, though they did not walk alike.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Will Fewer Kids mean Fewer Scientists*

    That is, to maintain the existing number of researchers, around 0.3 per cent of a population of 1 billion would need to be in this active class. Taking account of lab and research assistants, technicians and so on, the proportion might rise to 1 per cent. If all countries in the world achieved the 40 per cent rate of attendance common in rich countries, that would require 2.5 per cent of undergraduates to do science degrees with a third of those going on to graduate study.

  • Alisa Sireneva ☛ Faster comparison modulo α-equivalence

    Given a λ-calculus term, suppose we want to find all of its α-equivalent subterms. Terms t1 and t2 are considered α-equivalent (denoted as t1∼t2 in this article) if they are syntactically equal up to a bijection between their bound variables. For example, t1=λx.ax and t2=λy.ay are α-equivalent because the bijection {x↦y} translates t1 to t2, and t1=λx.ax and t2=λx.bx are not α-equivalent because a and b are free in t1 and t2 respectively.

• Career/Education

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Knowing when to leave

    Knowing when to leave is an important skill. You've got to balance your loyalty, and your long-term career, against the objective facts in any situation. Leaving a project early is not a good idea: it sends a message that you're ready to flake out when times get tough. (In a startup situation, times will get tough.) However, if a project: [...]

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ A Holographic Seven-Segment Clock

    Seven-segment displays are one of the most ho-hum ways to display the time. They were cool for a little bit in the 70s, but by now, they’re a little bit old hat. That is, unless you get weird with it. This holographic seven-segment clock from [mosivers] qualifies neatly in that category.

  • Sean Conner ☛ This “Internet” camera is only 21 years old—it should still work, right? Right?

    One of the errands we ran today was stopping by the storage unit to retrieve the Christmas decorations. While there, I saw a box containing a D-Link DCS-900W WiFi-enabled Internet camera. I have no recollection of having ever bought it, nor using it. No clue, but I thought it might be fun to play around with it. How hard could it be?

  • Taranis ☛ Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.

    The short version: this is an absolutely terrible idea, and really makes zero sense whatsoever. There are multiple reasons for this, but they all amount to saying that the kind of electronics needed to make a datacenter work, particularly a datacenter deploying AI capacity in the form of GPUs and TPUs, is exactly the opposite of what works in space. If you've not worked specifically in this area before, I'll caution against making gut assumptions, because the reality of making space hardware actually function in space is not necessarily intuitively obvious.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2025-11-18 [Older] Food Assistance for All

  • Pro Publica ☛ 2025-11-20 [Older] How the Cheeto Mussolini Administration Abandoned Plans for a Major Cut in Disability Benefits for Older Workers

  • Vox ☛ 2025-11-21 [Older] The US is fast-tracking this important HIV drug — for everyone except South Africa

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-18 [Older] Eswatini Is the First African Country to Get Twice-Yearly HIV Prevention Shot

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-20 [Older] Cholera Cases in Africa Surge to 3 Times Higher Than Reported in 2022

  • Small Cypress ☛ five years without alcohol

    Every former drinker has a quitting story, and mine is boring. I was driving south on 95 after another 3am family karaoke-until-someone-starts-a-fight Thanksgiving and I realized I was just done. I had quit for stretches before - Dry January etc. - enough to know that life got exponentially better without drinking, but then I would feel guilty about not drinking with my family, or at a wedding, or some other event where I would "let someone down." I was hanging on to drinking to avoid an awkward conversation with someone else about why I wasn't drinking.

  • Barry Hess ☛ No Socials November Fin

    It’s been thirty days since I departed socials. (Well, more like forty-five days, but who’s counting?) I must say that I continue to feel good about stepping away. The daily baseline of anxiety that I feel from the big world and the small worlds I live in is much lower than previously. That feels nice, and I plan to stay off socials at least through the end of the year.

  • Ava ☛ the overstated importance of connectivity

    We can see daily that most of us are just not equipped to handle thousands or more people coming at us online. There’s good reasons why famous people used to have a more filtered access to fans via fan mail, interviews, magazines and the occasional meet and greet, plus a PR team and media training. There is a sweet spot when we have relationships to just enough people to be happy without the attention becoming a burden.

• Proprietary

  • Giz China ☛ Some Windows 11 users cannot update the Microsoft Defender

    Some Windows 11 users are running into a problem with Microsoft Defender. Reports from ITHome say that people using Windows 11 24H2 noticed their virus definitions haven’t updated since November 19, 2025. This is trying to say that their computers might have been open to new viruses and threats.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Airbus Narrows Software Crisis as Airlines Ride Out A320 Recall

    Dozens of airlines from Asia to the United States said they had carried out a snap software retrofit ordered by Airbus, and mandated by global regulators, after a vulnerability to solar flares emerged in a recent mid-air incident on a JetBlue A320.

    But some require a longer process and Colombia's Avianca continued to halt bookings for dates until December 8.

  • The Register UK ☛ Google and Apple ordered to stop fake government TXTs

    The Ministry of Home Affairs announced it had sent the tech giants Implementation Directives that require them to prevent accounts and group chats from displaying names which spoof “gov.sg” or Singapore Government agencies and also filter such messages.

  • Burk ☛ The End of Personal Websites. And why that might be a good thing

    I used to design websites. For me and some clients. It was a blast to play around with all the ideas I had.

    Now, I haven’t touched web design in ages.

    Why?

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Science Alert ☛ Using AI to Find Information Could Diminish Your Knowledge, Study Finds

      However, a new paper I co-authored offers experimental evidence that this ease may come at a cost: When people rely on large language models to summarize information on a topic for them, they tend to develop shallower knowledge about it compared to learning through a standard Google search.

    • El País ☛ If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

      “The trend toward automation and AI could lead to a decrease in tax revenues. In the United States, for example, about 85% of federal tax revenue comes from labor income,” says Sanjay Patnaik, director of the Center for Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution. He suggests that governments address “the risks posed by AI” by increasing capital gains taxation rather than creating a specific tax on it, due to the difficulties in designing such a tax and the distortions it could generate. The repeated use of the conditional tense is because the impact of generative AI, the kind capable of creating content on demand, is still uncertain, both in positive terms — improved productivity and economic growth — and negative terms; job losses.

    • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Does ChatGPT really help programmers?

      Alice who supports developers in industry. She doesn't write code full time now, but she has written plenty before. She thinks that NO, ChatGPT and LLMs DO NOT help programmers.

      Bob is a friend of a friend who writes code for a living and owns a small software/database company. He thinks YES, ChatGPT and LLMs DO help programmers.

      I asked Alice and Bob to discuss the issue over email and make a blog post out of it, or have ChatGPT do it for them. Below is the result.

  • Social Control Media

    • Nicolas Fränkel ☛ My second Cloudflare Tunnel

      I decided to stop using Twitter, but for my own content and supporting Ukraine against its barbarian invaders, I understood the contemporary media landscape was quite fragmented. I bet on Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn. My flow is the following: when I read a piece I find interesting, I schedule it for publication. The problem is that every social media platform has a different scheduler: Mastodon has the Mastodon scheduler, LinkedIn has an in-built feature, and Bluesky has…​ nothing. I had enough.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Eldred Habert ☛ GitHub → Codeberg: my experience

    Spoiler alert: this very site that you’re reading this on is not served from GitHub Pages anymore! At this point, I’d call my migration successful. But it took more than clicking a single button, so let’s talk about the steps involved, at least for me. I’m hoping that it can help be an example for other people, and show that it’s actually not that complicated.

  • [Old] Eldred Habert ☛ Migrating my code to Codeberg

    I have decided to move my code repositories from GitHub to Codeberg.

    This comes following mounting pressure from GitHub pushing AI solutions harder and harder, the ethical and ecological consequences of which I disagree with; partnering with Elon Musk (Grok now being supported); and more.

    I simply don’t agree with that platform’s policies, and so wish to pull out, as a form of protest as well. And I’ve also decided to put my money where my mouth is: I am now donating to Codeberg as well, because they aren’t assholes and they’re trying to do the right thing. So they deserve it.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-21 [Older] Eurovision Plans Changes to Voting, Security After Allegations of Israeli Government 'Interference'

    • Cassidy Williams ☛ A pretty good email scam

      But, soon after, he noticed that he wasn’t getting any emails anymore. After getting on a call with him and logging into his account, I noticed that there was email forwarding set up that was very well-hidden.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Alabama Reflector ☛ Homeland Security wants state driver’s license data for sweeping citizenship program

      The U.S. Department of Homeland Security seeks access to an obscure computer network used by law enforcement agencies, according to a federal notice, potentially allowing officials to bypass negotiating with states for the records.

    • Coyote ☛ osteophage | How Online Privacy Has Been Championed by Dreamwidth

      If you care about privacy on the web, then you should care about how anti-privacy laws have been challenged by Dreamwidth. Its unique role in these legal battles hasn’t been getting any dedicated press coverage, and so it falls to people like us to spread the word: Dreamwidth is proactively going to court against anti-privacy laws and highlighting itself as a positive example in order to show how these laws are predicated on assumptions that don’t apply.

  • Confidentiality

    • Covington & Burling LLP ☛ 2025-11-19 [Older] Five major changes to the regulation of cybersecurity in the UK under the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-21 [Older] Germany news: Bremen's church bell recovered after heist

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-19 [Older] Louvre Museum to Add 100 External Cameras by 2026 After Heist Exposed Security Flaws

  • 2025-11-18 [Older] New firearms law has grave implications for public safety

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-21 [Older] India, Israel sign framework to resume trade talks

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-21 [Older] Indian Air Force Tejas jet crashes at Dubai Air Show

  • The Age AU ☛ 2025-11-19 [Older] ‘Increasing our military power’: Ley throws down gauntlet over national security

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-21 [Older] Nigeria: Gunmen abduct students from Catholic school

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ 2025-11-17 [Older] Mass protest against insecurity and the Morena party turns violent in Mexico City

  • TruthOut ☛ 2025-11-17 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini’s Proposed Missile Defense System Is a Weapon of Mass Insecurity

  • The Local SE ☛ 2025-11-18 [Older] IN STATS: How security checks have blocked Swedish citizenship awards

  • HRW ☛ 2025-11-18 [Older] UN Security Council Should Resist South Sudan Attempt to Undermine Peacekeepers

  • International Business Times ☛ 2025-11-18 [Older] Charlie Kirk Security Chief Rejects 'Outrageous' Israel-Mossad Claims: 'I Am An American'

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-21 [Older] FAA Warns All Pilots of Risks of Flying Over Venezuela Over 'Worsening Security Situation'

  • 2025-11-21 [Older] How to Align Security Requirements and Controls to Express System Threats

  • 2025-11-17 [Older] South Africa and Indonesia boost defence ties in landmark state visit

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Murmansk region lost 10 percent of its population during the years of full-scale war

    Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the population of the Murmansk region has decreased by 73,000 people. This follows from the official data of Rosstat.

    As of January 1, 2022, according to officials, 724,500 people lived in the region. By April 2025, just over 650,000 remained. Thus, the Murmansk region, if the statistics are to be believed, has lost 10 percent of its population.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Bombers newly deployed to Kola flew near Sweden’s Gotland

    Three Tu-22M3 long-range bombers performed a more than five-hour mission from the Kola Peninsula, entering the Baltic Sea air space through the narrow corridor between Finland and Estonia, before turning north again after flying near the island of Gotland.

  • New York Times ☛ Lawmakers Suggest Follow-Up Boat Strike Could Be a War Crime

    A top Republican and Democrats in Congress suggested on Sunday that American military officials might have committed a war crime in President Trump’s offensive against boats in the Caribbean after a news report said that during one such attack, a follow-up strike was ordered to kill survivors.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Peter Thiel’s Apocalyptic Worldview Is a Dangerous Fantasy

    Peter Thiel recently generated headlines with his rambling diatribes about the Antichrist. Thiel’s lurid, apocalyptic view of world politics may be ludicrous or even deranged, but his wealth and power mean that we can’t afford to ignore it.

  • France24 ☛ World's arms makers post record $679 billion in sales as wars fuel demand, output lags

    Sales by the world’s top 100 arms makers hit a record $679 billion last year, up 5.9% as wars in Ukraine and Gaza drove demand, researchers said on Monday, though production bottlenecks slowed deliveries. SIPRI said arms revenues have climbed 26% over the 2015–2024 period.

• Environment

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-21 [Older] Funerals: From the extraordinary to eco-friendly

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Hindustan Times ☛ ‘Why is Bitcoin, [cryptocurrency] down?’: Panic after sudden crash; ‘risky start to December’

      Several investors on Sunday complained about a sudden crash in several cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Dogecoin. “What is Bitcoin down today?” one of them asked on social media. Another one added: “Is there a reason behind this crash?”

    • India Times ☛ Unpacking India’s data centre boom

      Demand for digital infrastructure fuelled by AI and regional data protection laws have unleashed a new wave of investments in India’s data center industry. Global hyperscalers and Indian conglomerates are set to invest more than $50 billion in the next five to seven years in the domestic data centre industry, taking total capacity to about 9 gigawatts (GW) from 1 GW now.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-18 [Older] Singapore Snares Record Haul of Smuggled Rhino Horns From South Africa

• Finance

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-24 [Older] South Africa's G20 Debt Focus to Be Tested as US Takes the Chair

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-20 [Older] South Africa, EU Sign Critical Minerals Deal, Vow to Defend Multilateralism

  • New Yorker ☛ 2025-11-19 [Older] A Development Economist Returns to What He Left Behind

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-18 [Older] South Africa rises above US snub as G20 nears

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-18 [Older] Africa Expert Panel Proposes a New G20 Debt Refinancing Initiative

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-21 [Older] India: Why is Supreme Court dominated by upper-caste Hindus?

  • India Times ☛ OpenAI partners shoulder nearly $100 billion debt to fund its AI ambitions

    OpenAI’s rapid expansion is being financed largely through heavy borrowing by its partners rather than by the company itself. According to the Financial Times, suppliers and data centre operators linked to OpenAI now carry close to $100 billion in debt, even as OpenAI remains mostly debt-free.

  • Vox ☛ Global progress on extreme poverty is stalling and may reverse soon

    Roser acknowledges that his projections are not prophecy. Change the growth pattern — through better governance, fewer conflicts, more investment, cheap clean energy, or even dramatically expanded migration opportunities — and the projections change with them. The future of extreme poverty depends on whether the countries where the poorest people live can finally begin to grow.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Corporate social responsibility can act as an insurance policy when companies cut jobs and benefits

    For employees, such drastic changes can give rise to a phenomenon known as the "psychological contract breach," a perception that an organization has failed to meet its obligations and promises.

    "To employees, it could mean that the organization didn't deliver on the promise it has made to them, such as salary increases, reliable benefits, and overall long-term stability of their job," says Assistant Professor Haoying (Howie) Xu, who studies organizational behavior and human resource management at Stevens School of Business.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Databricks reportedly in talks to raise $5B at $134B valuation

    Data analytics and artificial intelligence company Databricks Inc. is reportedly in talks to raise $5 billion in new funding on a $134 billion valuation.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Gray Zone ☛ Files expose Britain’s secret D-Notice censorship regime

  • The Barents Observer ☛ The new Russian [Internet]: closed, censored, and “secure”

    Authorities in the Ulyanovsk region have announced the shutdown of mobile [Internet] “until the end of the special military operation.” According to local media, this was stated by the regional government at a press conference. Initially, mobile connections were cut only for short periods during drone attack alerts, but in recent weeks, the [Internet] has been disappearing around the clock across entire districts.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Diana Loginova left Russia after a series of arrests

    The lead singer of the street band Stoptime, Diana Loginova (Naoko), left Russia on the night of 23 November, immediately after being released from the detention centre. The band's guitarist, Aleksandr Orlov, is also out of the country after the end of his third administrative arrest, but his lawyer refrained from commenting on his departure.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Michigan Advance ☛ The Henry Ford offering free admission exhibit marking 70th anniversary of Bus Boycott

    The Henry Ford Museum will offer free admission and free parking on December 1 to honor the 70th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ brave choice to stay seated on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

    The moment became one of the most important events in the Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th Century.

  • HRW ☛ 2025-11-20 [Older] Egypt: African Commission Should Act to Protect Rights

  • HRW ☛ 2025-11-20 [Older] Dominican Republic: Court Ends Security Forces Gay Sex Ban

  • HRW ☛ 2025-11-21 [Older] EU-AU: Make Rights a Priority at Europe-Africa Summit

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-21 [Older] G20: South Africa hosts summit in shadow of US boycott

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-21 [Older] China Warns Citizens Risk Becoming 'Mining Slaves' in Central African Republic Gold Rush

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate IPTV Box Evades Blocking But is Also Critically Vulnerable to Attack

    Following Amazon's announcement that it won't allow the new Firestick to become a piracy free-for-all, some people are seeking out new devices to bridge the gap. Offering lifetime access to movies, TV shows and live sports, an already popular device that claims to evade site-blocking measures may seem like the perfect fit. Unfortunately, mandatory free extras include critical security issues and potential exposure to copyright lawsuits.