Leftovers

• Nenad Knezevic ☛ The Oxford Comma

  Some use it all the time, others consider it unnecessary. Let’s discuss the Oxford comma!

• James G ☛ A new home page

  I have been thinking about redesigning my website for a while. I wrote a bit about one of the design directions I explored recently. I loved doing the design part of the project, but knew there would be several hours of work to integrate the new style into my website.

• Guy LeCharles Gonzalez ☛ Five Things: December 4, 2025 | As in guillotine...

• Anil Dash ☛ They have to be able to talk about us without us

  That vital task of communicating to a large group gets even more daunting when you inevitably realize that, even if you were to find the perfect wording or phrasing for your message, you’d still never be able to deliver your story to every single person in your target audience by yourself anyway. There will always be another person whom you’re trying to reach that you just haven’t found yet. So, is it hopeless? Is it simply impossible to effectively tell a story at scale if you don’t have massive resources?

  It doesn’t have to be. We can start with one key insight about what it takes to get your most important stories out into the world. It’s a perspective that seems incredibly simple at first, but can lead to a pretty profound set of insights.

• Science

  • Kirill A Korinsky ☛ Kunerth's Algorithm for Modular Square Roots: A Forgotten Method

    Adolf Kunerth’s 1878 and 1880 algorithms for computing modular square roots and solving general quadratic Diophantine equations represent conceptually distinct approaches from modern methods like Tonelli-Shanks, transforming discrete modular arithmetic problems into Diophantine equations seeking integer points on parabolic curves; despite Wikipedia’s 2024 deletion citing non-notability and incomprehensibility based solely on the 1878 preliminary version, the algorithms merit preservation as the only known methods avoiding direct factorization through coefficient based descent rather than group theoretic properties, with the recovered 1880 text revealing mathematical sophistication previously unavailable to scholarship.

• Career/Education

  • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Open Repositories 2026 CFP

    The call for proposals for the next International Open Repositories Conference (OR2026) has been released, and CNI is pleased to once again serve as a cooperating organization.

  • American Library Association ☛ Bicameral Right to Read Act Would Boost Federal Investment in Literacy Programs, Ensure Protections for School Librarians and Teachers

    The American Library Association (ALA) and its division, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), welcomed yesterday’s bicameral reintroduction of the Right to Read Act by Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) and Representative Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ-07). Originally introduced in 2022 by the late Representative Raúl Grijalva, the Congresswoman’s father and predecessor in AZ-07, the Right to Read Act is designed to ensure all students, including low-income and minority students, children with disabilities, and English language learners, have access to an effective school library staffed by a certified school librarian.

  • Ratika Deshpande ☛ Refining the TBR

    Now that I can actually buy books instead of simply wishing for them and know what goes into earning the money I spend on them, the TBR is an important list that needs careful consideration.

  • Pete Warden ☛ How I Screwed Up Sales Hiring

    I founded Moonshine back in 2022, together with Manjunath, another engineer and researcher. My entire career up until that point had been working on consumer products, so I felt very comfortable with how those are sold, and I thought to myself “How hard can B2B sales be?”. The answer, of course, is very hard!

    My investors knew that before I did, and pushed me to hire a senior sales person to make up for my lack of experience. It’s taken me three years and multiple failed attempts to build a working sales team, mostly because I didn’t even know enough to ask the right questions. The biggest mistake I kept making was hiring people with ten or twenty years of enterprise sales experience. This wasn’t because they were bad at their jobs, everyone who made it through our interview process had done amazing things at larger companies, but I set them up to fail at my startup. Here’s why: [...]

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Stephanie Stimac

    This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Stephanie Stimac, whose blog can be found at blog.stephaniestimac.com.

  • Annie Mueller ☛ Fish bowl

    Our very brains, our human nature, our desire for comfort, our habits, our social structures, all of it, pushes us into being fish bowl swimmers. Tiny people moving in tiny circles. Staying in the circumscribed ruts of our comfort. Ignoring a whole big world of what's different and new and interesting just beyond.

• Hardware

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Generative-AI robot unloads trailers at 1,500 boxes per hour

    Humans have long struggled with one of logistics’ most punishing jobs: unloading scorching trailers packed with heavy boxes.

    The work is exhausting, repetitive, and injury-prone. Now, robots are stepping in. The Pickle Robot Company’s AI-powered, one-armed machines can autonomously unload trucks, lifting boxes up to 50 pounds and feeding them onto conveyor belts.

  • The New Leaf Journal ☛ Finally Solving My HDMI ARC Problems

    Back in October 2020, I discussed my failure to get an HDMI ARC connection between my Yamaha ATS-1070 soundbar and TCL Roku TV (model 55S25S) working consistently in an article about purchasing an optical audio cable for a more old school connection. My HDMI ARC struggles resurfaced in a couple of other articles on the subject of my TV soundbar. In January 2023, I wrote about temporarily replacing my Yamaha ATS-1070 with a Majority Bowfell soundbar after (A) the optical audio cable port became unusable and (B) I ran into the same issues I had before in trying to get HDMI ARC to work. In September of that same year, I wrote about returning to the Yamaha ATS-1070 after I removed the broken door from the optical audio cable port and secured the cable connection with a Post-It Note. Again, I was fighting with the optical audio cable port because I could not get HDMI ARC working consistently.

    My Post-It Note fix for the optical audio cable port proved to be enduring, with the only flaw being it is annoying to have to re-configure it every time I move my soundbar for dusting. That is to say I did not need to get the HDMI ARC connection, otherwise known as my audio white whale, working in order to use my soundbar. But I finally got it working, and below I will explain how and why.

  • [Old] Brendan Gregg ☛ Intel is listening, don't waste your shot

    Intel's new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has made listening to customers a top priority, saying at Intel Vision earlier this year: "Please be brutally honest with us. This is what I expect of you this week, and I believe harsh feedback is most valuable."

    I'd been in regular meetings with Intel for several years before I joined, and I had been giving them technical direction on various projects, including at times some brutal feedback. When I finally interviewed for a role at Intel I was told something unexpected: that I had already accomplished so much within Intel that I qualified to be an Intel Fellow candidate. I then had to pass several extra interviews to actually become a Fellow (and was told I may only be the third person in Intel's history to be hired as a Fellow) but what stuck with me was that I had already accomplished so much at a company I'd never worked for.

• Proprietary

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] US Group Sues Apple Over Congo Conflict Minerals

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft 365 ups prices in 2026 for extra AI and security

    The last increases came in 2022, and, according to Microsoft, were the first significant increase in a decade. The company has clearly got a taste for price hikes and so will turn the screws a little tighter on its customers in 2026 rather than wait for another ten years.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Intellexa remotely accessed Predator spyware customer systems, investigation finds

    Other findings include confirmation of Predator domains imitating legitimate Kazakhstani news sites, and additional evidence linking Predator spyware to surveillance of prominent Egyptian political activist Ayman Nour and Greek investigative journalist Thanasis Koukakis, according to Amnesty. And the news publications reported on the first reported Predator infection in Pakistan, of a human rights lawyer, and additional targeting in the country.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Sanctioned Spyware Vendor Used IOS Zero-Day Exploit Chain Against Egyptian Targets

    Google researchers partnered with CitizenLab in 2023 to capture and analyze the complete exploit chain after identifying attacks targeting individuals in Egypt. According to metadata, Intellexa referred to this exploit chain internally as “smack,” with compilation artifacts revealing the build directory path including the codename.

  • Security Week ☛ Aisuru Botnet Powers Record DDoS Attack Peaking at 29 Tbps

    Powered by compromised devices such as routers, CCTV cameras, and DVR systems, the botnet is offered under a DDoS-for-hire model. Customers can also use the botnet for residential proxy services, which can be useful for spamming, scraping, and credential stuffing.

  • Macworld ☛ Apple design reset? How a key VP's exit can fix the iPhone

    I’m not pinning all of Apple’s software woes on Dye. But as the company’s Vice President of Human Interface Design, he set the tone for Apple’s entire software ecosystem, and ultimately, the design decisions flow back to him. With him on the way out, a lot of users (myself included) will be hoping for a return to the design glory days of Apple’s past. Here’s what I think went wrong, and what I hope we could see change.

  • Tyler Thorsted ☛ MORE

    The main subject of these posts is about Obsolete software and file formats. I prefer to focus on older software titles and collect them when I can. I have also found older Macintosh software to be particularly interesting as many of the qualities of early Macintosh use is lost today. In researching a very early Macintosh title, I came across an article from 1999 written by the Washington Post, the article, now 26 years old, was already commenting about “antique” software which was less than 20 years old at the time. Is there a term for even more antique? The title of the article? “Old Enthusiasts Are Scouring the Web to Find ‘Antique’ Software”. I feel this hasn’t changed, I still scour the web to find old software, and if the enthusiasts were “old” 26 years ago, then I am ancient.

  • Daniel Fichtinger ☛ OAuth Authentication for Outlook School Email in Third-Party Clients

    If you’re anything like me, you prefer using your own email client. While I’ve written at length about configuring various text editors to synergize with aerc for a pleasant email writing experience, I neglected to mention the (sizable) elephant in the room: sometimes, email providers make it intentionally difficult to access your mail from outside their ecosystem.

  • [Old] Pekka Enberg ☛ Assertions are not the problem; your verification process is

    There's been a lot of discussion about error handling since the Cloudflare incident this week, which took down significant parts of the internet. The incident was a cascading failure: an upgrade to a database system changed the format of a "feature file", which caused a proxy engine using that file to crash because it did not expect the change. However, much of the focus was on the Option::unwrap() call in their proxy engine written in Rust, which many saw as the culprit.

  • National World Publishing Ltd ☛ Edinburgh Airport flights resume but delayed arrivals expected

    Scotland’s busiest airport was plunged into chaos this morning (December 5) after it was forced to ground all flights due to an ‘IT issue with its air traffic control provider’.

  • Newsquest Media Group Ltd ☛ Flights resume after IT issue hits air traffic control at Edinburgh Airport

    Travel was suspended for a time after the issue arose on Friday morning.

    [...]

    It is understood the issue was not linked to the Cloudflare outage.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Edinburgh airport grounds all flights after air traffic control failure

    The IT disruption at Edinburgh airport does not appear to be related to a separate [Internet] crash that caused problems at several popular websites this morning.

    Cloudflare, an [Internet] infrastructure company that helps websites manage traffic, briefly went offline this morning, causing problems with apps such as Zoom and HSBC.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ AI detection tools cannot prove that text is AI-generated

      The runaway success of generative AI has spawned a billion-dollar sub-industry of “AI detection tools”: tools that purport to tell you if a piece of text was written by a human being or generated by an AI tool like ChatGPT. How could that possibly work?

      I think these tools are both impressive and useful, and will likely get better. However, I am very worried about the general public overestimating how reliable they are. AI detection tools cannot prove that text is AI-generated.

    • Rui Carmo ☛ The RAMpocalypse is Nigh

      Much ado is being made about AI being the root cause of the current memory price surge, but the reality is a bit more complex than that. While AI workloads do demand significant memory resources, the underlying issues stem from a combination of factors affecting the entire semiconductor industry–the fact that Micron is shutting down Crucial shocked many PC builders, but if you look at all the charts and ponder the situation, you quickly realize that: [...]

    • Matt Webb ☛ My mental model of the AI race (Interconnected)

      I think we often just draw a straight arrow from “collect training data,” like ingest pages from Wikipedia or see what people are saying to the chatbot, to “now the AI model is better and therefore it wins.”

      But I think it’s worth thinking about what that arrow actually means. Like, what is the mechanism here?

    • Ivan Sagalaev ☛ Have you accepted AI yet?

      Despite the "have the peons already accepted their fate" tone, some people did try to have an earnest discussion. You can read the whole thread, but here's a few of Armin's replies that caught my eye: [...]

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

      Last night, I gave a speech for the University of Washington's "Neuroscience, AI and Society" lecture series, through the university's Computational Neuroscience Center. It was called "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI," and it's based on the manuscript for my next book, "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI," which will be out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next June: [...]

    • Chris Coyier ☛ The Jeopardy Phenomenon

      If you use it to generate code that is outside your expertise, you are likely to think it’s all well and good, especially if it seems to work at first pop. But if you’re intimately familiar with the technology or the code around the code it’s generating, there is a good chance you’ll be like hey! that’s not quite right!

    • Bryan Cantrill ☛ Your intellectual fly is open

      But because I am finding I am spending more time here, we need to have some real talk: too many of you are using LLMs to generate content. Now, this isn’t entirely your fault: as if LLMs weren’t tempting enough, LinkedIn itself is cheerfully (insistently!) offering to help you "rewrite it with AI." It seems so excited to help you out, why not let it chip in and ease your own burden?

      Because holy hell, the writing sucks. It’s not that it’s mediocre (though certainly that!), it’s that it is so stylistically grating, riddled with emojis and single-sentence paragraphs and "it’s not just…​ but also" constructions and (yes!) em-dashes that some of us use naturally — but most don’t (or shouldn’t).

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AI screws us over again: memory shortages, Crucial shutting down

      Anyone who follows computer component prices saw this coming. The average price on two 8GB sticks of DDR4-3200 RAM went up from $40–$50 in June to $110 in December. A 1TB M.2 solid-state disk went from $100 to about $125.

    • Alex Ewerlöf ☛ Emergent properties

      Recently I posted about why reducing LLMs to “only predicting the next token” is a fallacy because if we ignore their emergent properties, we miss both their threats and opportunities.

      The comments motivated me to write about the definition of emergence as someone who holds a MSc in interactive systems engineering, builds with AI, and specializes in resilience of sociotechnical systems (my book on the topic).

  • Social Control Media

    • Michael Geist ☛ The Most Unworkable Internet Law in the World: Quebec Opens the Door to Mandating Minimum French Content Quotas for User Generated Content on Social Media

      Further, Bill 109’s previous exception for social media has now been removed. The Bill originally stated at Section 3 that “this Act does not apply to social media and digital platforms whose main purpose is to offer Indigenous content.” It also featured a definition for social media as a “digital platform whose main purpose is to allow users to share content and interact with that content and other users.” During clause-by-clause, the government removed the reference to social media in the Section 3 exemption and deleted the social media definition altogether. Lacombe told the committee that it isn’t currently his intent to regulate social media users but that the Quebec government wants to leave open the door to potential regulation if services offer audio or video services. It goes without saying that many social media services already do.

    • [Repeat] Michael Geist ☛ CRTC Says No Regulatory Action Planned Against Meta For Blocking News Links

      In the months leading up to the effective date of the Online News Act, then-Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge urged the CRTC to investigate Meta’s decision to block news links on its Facebook and Instagram platforms as its method of compliance. Pointing to reports of people screenshotting news articles and the use of other workarounds the blocking of news links that came in response to the Online News Act (Bill C-18), St-Onge said “I cant wait to see what the CRTC will do when the law is fully enforced on Dec. 19.” As the law took effect and the issue grew, the CRTC did indeed send Meta a letter in October 2024 asking for information on how the company was complying with the legislation. I wrote about this request soon afterward, providing a detailed analysis of the law that sought to explain why some news sites might fall outside the scope of the legislation along with the legal grey area of screenshots.

    • Manuel Moreale ☛ Come on John

      You are on your own blog, your own corner of the web, powered by the platform you’re the CEO of, a blog that also serves content via RSS, the thing you’re building a tool for, and you’re telling people to follow the progress on fucking Twitter? Come on John.

    • Marcy Wheeler ☛ SignalGate: "This Chat's Kinda Dead"

      DOD IG has released the unclassified version of the report confirming what was clear months ago: Whiskey Pete Hegseth has no business leading DOD.

      He was wildly uncooperative with the investigation, refusing to be interviewed, refusing to let DOD inspect his phone, refusing to turn over other threads.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Officials warn about expansive, ongoing China espionage threat riding on Brickstorm malware

      CISA, the National Security Agency and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security released an analysis report on Brickstorm, which targets VMware vSphere and Windows environments to conceal activity, achieve lateral movement and tunnel into victim networks while also automatically reinstalling or restarting the malware if disrupted. CISA provided indicators of compromise based on eight Brickstorm samples it obtained from victim organizations.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ LockBit Returns With New Data Leak Site, 7 Victims

      LockBit was once the most feared ransomware group, and it still vastly outnumbers other ransomware groups with more than 2,700 claimed victims over its six-year-history, but a series of international law enforcement actions that began in February 2024 severely disrupted the group, and it has struggled to mount a sustained comeback since.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Cassidy Williams ☛ Goodbye to an 11-year-old Issue

    Today, an Issue I made on a repository 11 years ago was closed. Eleven whole years!

• Security

  • CISA

    • CISA ☛ 2025-11-28 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2025-11-25 [Older] CISA Releases Seven Industrial Control Systems Advisories

    • CISA ☛ 2025-11-25 [Older] Ashlar-Vellum Cobalt, Xenon, Argon, Lithium, Cobalt Share

    • CISA ☛ 2025-11-25 [Older] Rockwell Automation Arena Simulation

    • CISA ☛ 2025-11-25 [Older] Zenitel TCIV-3+

    • CISA ☛ 2025-11-25 [Older] Opto 22 groov View

    • CISA ☛ 2025-11-25 [Older] Festo Compact Vision System, Control Block, Controller, and Operator Unit products

    • CISA ☛ 2025-11-25 [Older] SiRcom SMART Alert (SiSA)

    • CISA ☛ 2025-11-24 [Older] ​​Spyware Allows Cyber Threat Actors to Target Users of Messaging Applications​

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • CBC ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] New location feature on X sheds light on accounts — but also has errors

    • 404 Media ☛ DHS’s Immigrant-Hunting App Removed from Google Play Store

      The app, called Mobile Identify, was launched in November, and lets local cops use facial recognition to hunt immigrants on behalf of ICE. It is unclear if the removal is temporary or not.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ Twitter Fined Under Digital Services Act

      The other parts of the fine are because the DSA wants Twitter to allow researchers access to information about its ads and “the platform’s public data.” The DSA has some interesting requirements for ads. I’d like to see how the other large online platforms and search engines are complying with this. There is still a Twitter API for the public data—maybe the issue is that it’s paid? But most of the data isn’t really public anymore, anyway, since it requires logging in.

  • Confidentiality

    • RIPE ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] Simplification Proposals, Cybersecurity, Post-Quantum and More – EU Regulation Update November 2025

• Defence/Aggression

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ AI chatbots can sway voters better than political advertisements

    A multi-university team of researchers has found that chatting with a politically biased AI model was more effective than political advertisements at nudging both Democrats and Republicans to support presidential candidates of the opposing party. The chatbots swayed opinions by citing facts and evidence, but they were not always accurate—in fact, the researchers found, the most persuasive models said the most untrue things.

    The findings, detailed in a pair of studies published in the journals Nature and Science, are the latest in an emerging body of research demonstrating the persuasive power of LLMs. They raise profound questions about how generative AI could reshape elections.

  • Site36 ☛ EU discusses Frontex deployment in Ukraine - Kyiv pushes for swift agreement

    The European Union has been cooperating with Ukraine on border issues since 2007. The basis is a so-called working arrangement between the EU border agency Frontex, founded three years earlier, and Ukraine’s state border guard. Such arrangements, which Frontex maintains with dozens of states – including the United Kingdom in Europe – permit training and advice for border authorities. Operational deployments or the exchange of personal data are not covered.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] Israel begins West Bank operation amid settlement expansion

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] New Zealand: 'Suitcase murders' mother sentenced to prison for life

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] Peru: Ex-president Vizcarra sentenced to 14 years in prison

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] Pope Leo's first journey: Encountering Islam

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] Can Nigeria restore stability by capitalizing on Islamist infighting?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] Taiwan plans extra $40 billion defense spending to deter China

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] EU rethinks UAE trade deal over alleged arms sales to Sudan

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] 'Berlin Apartment' video game lets users live German history

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Insight Hungary ☛ Szijjártó: I don't care what the Russians think about Hungary's position

      Péter Szijjártó was a guest on ATV's Egyenes Beszed ("Straight Talk") program on Wednesday, and had to answer some tough questions about Hungary's position on the Russian-Ukrainian war. First, the host, Györgyi Szöllősi, stopped him from using the usual "Brussels" rhetoric, as he had to explain what he meant by "Brussels," to which the Minister of Foreign Affairs replied, "the European mainstream." 

      When asked why it is a problem that European countries are arming themselves, especially when Hungary is doing the same and even establishing an arms factory, Szijjártó said he disagrees with arming Ukraine, as the war "cannot be changed on the battlefield."

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ 4 questions utilities need to ask to drive grid modernization efforts

      The need for the grid to change and evolve on both a technical and fundamental level has been recognized by utilities across the nation. While most fully understand the need for greater resilience, the challenge lies in defining the specific path forward when it comes to specifics like the integration of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) or the overhaul of established processes and workflows. Answers to solve these challenges will always be contingent on the questions that are being asked to solve them, and there’s no better place to find those than DTECH, taking place February 2-5 in San Diego. The event features a comprehensive program that includes numerous sessions exploring the most pressing issues in the energy industry.

    • Didier Stevens ☛ Quickpost: USB Electric Razor

      The adapter negotiates 15 volts with the USB power source: [...]

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • CBC ☛ 2025-12-01 [Older] Breath samples collected by drone hold clues to health of North Atlantic right whales

    • The Revelator ☛ New Wildlife Books for Children and Teens (That Adults May Find Interesting Too)

  • Overpopulation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-30 [Older] Germany news: Minister sounds alarm on food security

• Finance

  • CBC ☛ 2025-12-01 [Older] Why excavators may be a tool of choice for some cash-seeking thieves

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] EU ramps up pressure on Shein over child-like sex dolls

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] Germany news: Government under scrutiny amid budget debate

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • FAIR ☛ Alex Main on Honduran Election

  • FAIR ☛ NYT Covers Racism From the Point of View of the Racist

    In the latest installment of sympathetic media profiles in the “Nazi Sympathizer Next Door” genre, the New York Times (11/3/25) offers a more than 3,000-word article on William Hendrix, one of the 12 Young Republican state leaders whose bigoted and violent group chat messages were leaked and reported on in October (Politico, 10/14/25), resulting in a nationwide uproar.

  • FAIR ☛ Media Reaction to a Woman Murdered at Work Is ‘Nothing to See Here’

    Media coverage focuses on violence: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Yeah, but only some violence, sometimes. How much have you read, for example, about Amber Czech?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] Who is Kremlin operative Kirill Dmitriev?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] Young women split on Sanae Takaichi, Japan's first female PM

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] US pushes Latin America trade as EU-Mercosur deal stalls

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-26 [Older] Guinea-Bissau military says president deposed after vote

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Sen. Mark Kelly: Investing in safe, secure AI is key to U.S. dominance

    When asked how the U.S. would get other countries to side with American standards, given the reality that companies must operate in different countries with different laws and regulations, Kelly said moving fast and first when it comes to setting global standards is key.

    “If we create the rules, maybe we can get our allies to work within the system that we have and we’ve created,” said Kelly. “I think we’ll have leverage there, I hope we do.”

  • Nick Heer ☛ Meta Plans Deep Cuts to Metaverse Efforts

    At Meta Connect a few months ago, the company spent basically the entire time on augmented reality glasses, but it swore up and down it was all related to its metaverse initiatives: [...]

  • Nick Heer ☛ Lisa Jackson and Kate Adams Out at Apple, Jennifer Newstead to Join

    A careful reader will notice Apple’s newsroom page currently has press releases for these departures and, from earlier this week, John Giannandrea’s, but there is nothing about Alan Dye’s. In fact, even in the statement quoted by Bloomberg, Dye is not mentioned. In fairness, Adams, Giannandrea, and Jackson all have bios on Apple’s leadership page. Dye’s was removed between 2017 and 2018.

  • [Old] The Nation ☛ Bill Gates Gives to the Rich (Including Himself)

    The documentary’s blind spots are all the more striking in light of the timing of its release, just as news was trickling out that Bill Gates met multiple times with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to discuss collaborating on charitable activities, from which Epstein stood to generate millions of dollars in management fees. Though the collaboration never materialized, it nonetheless illustrates the moral hazards surrounding the Gates Foundation’s $50 billion charitable enterprise, whose sprawling activities over the last two decades have been subject to remarkably little government oversight or public scrutiny.

    While the efforts of fellow billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg to use his wealth to win the presidency foundered amid intense media criticism, Gates has proved there is a far easier path to political power, one that allows unelected billionaires to shape public policy in ways that almost always generate favorable headlines: charity.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Register UK ☛ EU fines X €120M in first-ever DSA penalty payout

      The fine, equivalent to $140 million, comes two years after the EU began investigating X for what the Commission said at the time were concerns over the Musk-owned network's handling of "risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency, and data access for researchers." The fine issued Friday concerns advertising transparency and researcher access to data, as well as X's overhaul of its blue check account verification system, which the EU said violates the DSA's provisions on deceptive design practices.

    • The Record ☛ EU issues €120 million fine to Elon Musk's X under rules to tackle disinformation

      The fine against X is the first issued under the DSA. It is expected to have geopolitical consequences, with the U.S. administration repeatedly complaining that the EU’s regulations are effectively a method to tax American companies and introduce non-tariff barriers to trade. The commission has the power, in extreme, of requesting that access to X is restricted across the EU.

      Shortly after setting out the rules of the DSA last year, the commission informed X that it believed the company broke those rules by misleading users over its paid-for “verified mark” scheme — known as the “blue checkmark” — and by failing to meet transparency requirements over political advertisements and researchers’ access to public data.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Tymscar ☛ Imgur Geo-Blocked the UK, So I Geo-Unblocked My Entire Network

    Imgur decided to block UK users. Honestly? I don’t really care that much. I haven’t actively browsed the site in years. But it used to be everywhere. Back when Reddit embedded everything on Imgur, maybe fifteen years ago, it was genuinely useful. Then Reddit built their own image hosting, Discord did the same, and Imgur slowly faded into the background.

    Except it never fully disappeared. And since the block, I keep stumbling across Imgur links that just show “unavailable.” It’s mildly infuriating.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • International Business Times ☛ ICE Barbie Accused of Hiring 'Barely Read or Write' Agents to Meet Surge Quotas

    Internal documents cited by media outlets suggest that in the rush to expand the workforce, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has processed candidates with a history of criminal convictions, failed drug tests, and medical disqualifications.

  • Michael Green ☛ Part 1: My Life Is a Lie

    And so now, let’s tug on that loose thread… I’m sure many of my left-leaning readers will say, “This is obvious, we have been talking about it for YEARS!” Yes, many of you have; but you were using language of emotion (“Pay a living wage!”) rather than showing the math. My bad for not paying closer attention; your bad for not showing your work or coming up with workable solutions. Let’s rectify it rather than cast blame.

  • Papers Please ☛ TSA Confirm.ID: TSA plans to charge air travelers without ID or without REAL-ID $3B a year in extra fees for extra questioning

    Since scare tactics haven’t gotten everyone in the U.S. to sign up for REAL-ID or show ID whenever they fly, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is turning to extortion through the threat of a new $45 fee to fly without “acceptable” ID.

    The proposed fee and the modified “ID verification” program it would pay for are being described by the TSA as a fait accompli. But even if they were authorized by Congress and Constitutional — which we don’t think  they are — they have several months-long procedural hurdles to clear before they could legally be put into effect, and even then they would face the possibility of litigation by travelers, states, airlines, and perhaps others.

  • The Age AU ☛ 2025-11-27 [Older] Security fears over Chinese-made Brisbane buses dismissed as xenophobic

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ The Impossible Equation

    I grew up in a house where reading was not optional. Being dyslexic, dysgraphic, and dysnumeric made it painful, but my parents had a simple rule: read, explain, defend. No written reports. Just me, standing there, trying to make sense of something complicated. One of the books they handed me was Plato’s Republic. What stayed with me was not the philosophy. It was the realization that people have been struggling to govern complexity for thousands of years. The names of the problems change, but the core tension between power, understanding, and human nature does not.

    That early lesson was not about Plato. It was about learning how to think. And it is why the unraveling of the global [Internet] feels so familiar. We built something wildly complex, assumed it would stay coherent, and then stopped paying attention to whether anyone still understood how it worked.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Macworld ☛ Apple may be the biggest loser in the Netflix-Warner Bros deal

    This could also mean that Apple will no longer license future Warner Bros content. The announcement implies that the studios for Netflix and Warner Bros will merge into one unit, which could mean that anything this studio produces will be made for the Netflix service. It could license out shows it no longer wants to be associated with for whatever reason–a rare occurrence that is an exception to the business model. In any case, Apple can no longer count on a major studio for content.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Chamberlain Closing the (Garage) Door on Smart Home Integration - 512 Pixels

    If you live in America and have a garage and want smart home control of your garage door, you probably already know that Chamberlain is pretty hostile to folks using its openers with HomeKit and other smart home ecosystems.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • Mozilla ☛ When a video codec wins an Emmy [Ed: Software patents trap, that's all it it.]

      It’s not every day a video codec wins an Emmy. But yesterday, the Television Academy honored the AV1 specification with a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award, recognizing its impact on how the world delivers video content.

• Copyrights

  • International Business Times ☛ 2025-11-25 [Older] Taylor Swift Hit With Second Copyright Lawsuit — Disney+ Eras Tour Docuseries Release in Jeopardy

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-11-28 [Older] Blending character traits in a cauldron may not be copyright infringement, says US Court of Appeals

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-12-01 [Older] Two AI copyright cases, two very different outcomes – here’s why

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Belgium's Latest Pirate Site-Blocking Order Spares DNS Providers

    The Brussels Business Court has issued a new site-blocking order, targeting popular pirate sites including 1337x and Soap2day. Surprisingly, this latest order only requires major ISPs to take action. This is a notable change, as the initial blocking order under this regime also required DNS resolvers to take action. Whether this is a formal retreat or merely a pause has yet to be seen.