Leftovers

• Simone Silvestroni ☛ More About Noise

  The thing about being a “long term reader” kind of stunned me. I’m fairly convinced that the people who read my ramblings are the ones that I know already. My pen pals of sorts, people that I’m used to exchange emails with. I guess the independent small web still manages to surprise.

  Is this what happens when you ditch the corporate ultra-capitalist web paraphernalia? When you drop the pretence, renounce to vanity numbers, data, online performance, self-brand, projected persona?

• Mark Hysted ☛ things I will spend more time on in 2026

  This is the inverse of my recent post about stuff I'd like to dump in 2026. It is inspired by Jon’s blog where he added an invest list under his own to dump list.

• Cassidy Williams ☛ Wrapping up Blogvent 2025

  It’s been a hectic, busy month, truly so so busy, but I blogged every day for Blogvent! In case you missed it, my goal was to blog daily in December.

• Ben Werdmuller ☛ My 2026 Open Social Web Predictions

  Tim's 2026 predictions are worth paying attention to - and form a great map for following where the open social web is going.

• New Statesman ☛ The Muppet Christmas Carol is the best Dickens adaptation

  I usually trust my father’s judgement. But on his choice of Christmas film, he is wrong. It is my deep-seated belief that The Muppet Christmas Carol – with its toe-tapping musical numbers, ensemble of rag-tag puppets, and a middle-aged Michael Cain – is the best adaptation of a Dickens novel ever made. And I will die on that hill.

• [Old] Diomidis Spinellis ☛ blog dds: 2025-09-26 — Why I Choose Email Over Messaging

  My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate with them via email rather than chat messaging. There are many benefits in such a choice. You may want to consider them and adopt the same stance.

• Timothy Chambers ☛ My 2026 Open Social Web Predictions

  Now it’s time to make some bets for 2026. I do this not to prove how great my prognostication muscles are, but to shine a spotlight on trends I think are vital, spur discussions, and give some attention to projects that have earned it. As always, I try to make these as quantifiable, verifiable and crisp as I can. Here goes: [...]

• [Old] Cybercultural ☛ What the Internet Was Like in 2003

  Blogging and RSS moved into the mainstream in 2003, helped by the emergence of consumer-friendly RSS Readers like NetNewsWire and Bloglines. There was even now an economic model for blogging, with the launch of Google's AdSense in March. Also, online music went legit with Apple's iTunes store, and social networking began to take recognizable form with Friendster and MySpace.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Mathematician Shares 10 Festive Brain Teasers That Anyone Can Try

    Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb's theory of learning has come to be known as "when neurons fire together, they wire together" (which, by the way, is one of the guiding principles behind training large neural networks in AI). New pathways start to form, which can build and maintain strong cognitive function.

    What's more, doing maths is often a collaborative endeavour – and can be a great source of fun and fulfilment when people work together on problems.

    Which brings me to these festive-themed puzzles, which can be tackled by the whole family. No formal training in maths is required, and no complicated formulas are needed to solve them.

    I hope they bring you some moments of mindful relaxation this holiday season. We'll publish the answers on Monday December 29 and add a link to them here. Good luck!

  • The Register UK ☛ NASA tries Mars rover's Mastcam to work out where MAVEN is

    The latter point is highly significant – if any engineers can't work out where the spacecraft is, contacting it is highly challenging, either from Earth or using one of the other Mars orbiters or rovers. According to NASA, on December 16 and 20, the Curiosity trundlebot team used the rover's Mastcam instrument in an attempt to image MAVEN's reference orbit, but the spacecraft was not detected.

  • Jeroen Sangers ☛ When ordinary travel plans collide with extraordinary cosmic events

    It hit me later, almost by accident. August 12th, 2026. That date rang a bell. And then it clicked: the solar eclipse. A once-in-a-lifetime celestial event, and we’d be somewhere over the Atlantic when it happens.

    Most people would shrug and move on. You can’t see an eclipse from a plane, right? You’re too high, the windows are small, the timing never works out. But I couldn’t let it go. I had to know.

    So I started digging.

  • Maury ☛ Stabilizing dusty rocks: (Maurycy's blog)

    I’d previously used Cyanoacrylates (CA) glue on crumbly rocks, but it’s not great: The glue pools on crevices and gives the rock a constantly wet and glossy appearance. This might look good on colorful Chert and Agate, but isn’t great for most rocks.

    The first thing I tried was diluting the CA in acetone: In theory, the mixture could be applied liberally and evaporate to leave just enough glue to hold the rock together.

• Career/Education

  • [Old] Yorick Peterse ☛ What it was like working for GitLab

    I joined GitLab in October 2015, and left in December 2021 after working there for a little more than six years.

    While I previously wrote about leaving GitLab to work on Inko, I never discussed what it was like working for GitLab between 2015 and 2021. There are two reasons for this: [...]

• Hardware

  • StokeonTrentLive ☛ John has Christmas lights bought 69 years ago - and he's never changed a bulb - Stoke-on-Trent Live

    The hardy lights, made by electrics company Philips, were purchased at the local Halfords store and cost 18 shillings - equivalent to 90p today. They were displayed for many years in the family home before John gladly inherited them.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Admin Quietly Bans Veterans’ Abortion Care, Even for Rape and Health Risks

    Although that rule hasn’t taken effect, the US Department of Justice last week issued a memo in which Joshua Craddock of the Office of Legal Counsel concludes that the 2022 policy wasn’t legally valid. The VA on Monday issued its own internal memo — obtained by the legal group Democracy Forward and reported by MS NOW — announcing immediate compliance with the DOJ’s opinion, effectively implementing the proposed rule without finishing the formal process for doing so.

  • Wired ☛ Data Holds the Key in Slowing Age-Related Illnesses

    These added layers of data can be combined with a person’s electronic medical records, which include their structured and unstructured notes, lab results, scans, genetic results, wearable sensors, and environmental data. In aggregate, this provides an unprecedented depth of information about the person’s health status, enabling a forecast for risk of the three major diseases. Unlike a polygenic risk score which can detect a person’s risk for heart disease, the common cancers and Alzheimer’s, precision medical forecasting takes it to a new level by providing the projected temporal arc—the “when” factor. When all of the data is analyzed with large reasoning models, it can provide a person’s vulnerabilities, and an individualized, aggressive preventive program.

  • Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0179 The two-tea-towel method

    When you're in the kitchen, you have two requirements in the cloth department.

  • Futurism ☛ Man Describes How ChatGPT Led Him Straight Into Psychosis

    What really sent Duncan off the deep end, though, was when the AI recommended he take pseudoephedrine — a decongestant that can be abused as a recreational drug — for his allergy symptoms. Duncan told the bot he was hesitant because of his past drug addiction, but the AI then deployed its silver-tongue.

  • Futurism ☛ Woman Suffers AI Psychosis After Obsessively Generating AI Images of Herself

    She soon began losing sleep in order to generate more and more images, which she called “addictive,” because each image triggered a “small burst of dopamine.” Though Ner had been successfully treating her bipolar disorder prior to her foray into AI fashion modeling, this new obsession spun into a “manic bipolar episode,” which she says triggered an episode of psychosis.

• Proprietary

  • International Business Times ☛ PlayStation Security Shock: PSN Accounts Hacked Even With 2FA Enabled

    Despite many users believing their profiles were secure, [crackers] have found ways to bypass the very safeguards designed to keep them out. This sudden security crisis has left the community wondering if any account is truly safe from intrusion.

    Fresh concerns have emerged regarding PlayStation's ongoing security troubles, with evidence suggesting that PSN profiles remain vulnerable despite the use of passkeys and two-factor authentication. Reports indicate that bad actors are successfully hijacking accounts by exploiting Sony's own support staff, needing only a handful of details to talk their way into a user's digital life.

  • Android Police ☛ The long wait to change your Gmail address might soon be over

    This isn't really confirmed, but it looks like Google might soon let users change their "@gmail.com" email address to a different "@gmail.com" email address. The development was first spotted in the 'Google Pixel Hub' group on Telegram and highlighted by the folks over at 9to5Google.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • MediaReflector ☛ Salesforce Moves Away From LLM Use Over Enterprise AI Reliability Concerns

      Salesforce is changing how it uses artificial intelligence, signaling a notable shift in enterprise AI strategy. While many companies double down on large language models, Salesforce now takes a more cautious and pragmatic path.

      According to NewsBytes, Salesforce has reduced its reliance on large language models (LLMs) after encountering reliability and trust issues in real-world enterprise environments. Company executives say confidence in generative AI declined over the past year, especially when deployed at scale with paying customers.

    • Google Starts Hiring Ex-Employees: 20% New Hires Are Now Ex-Employees [Ed: The real story is, chatbots and slop failed to replace the labour]

      According to CNBC, about 20% of Google’s software engineer hires for AI roles in 2025 were individuals who previously worked at the company—a higher share than in earlier years. This surge is supported by Google’s large pool of ex-employees created after massive layoffs in 2023, when Alphabet cut 12,000 jobs amid economic uncertainty driven by inflation and rising interest rates. Since then, smaller rounds of layoffs and buyouts have further expanded the pool of potential returnees.

    • Robert Reich ☛ The AI Bubble Will Burst - Robert Reich

      The AI bubble could take down our entire economy if and when it bursts. Please have a look at our latest video and share: [...]

    • The Register UK ☛ AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

      It is the season of overindulgence, and no one has overindulged like the tech industry: this year, it has burned through roughly $1.5 trillion in AI, a level of spending usually reserved for wartime.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Rising DDR5 prices push PC builders to 'Bring Your Own RAM' models

      As the industry steps into 2026, memory prices show no sign of calming down. DDR5 RAM now costs so much that custom PC builders face a blunt choice.

      They either pass painful prices to customers or rethink how systems get sold altogether.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Researchers say Eurostar accused them of blackmail over AI chatbot flaw disclosure

      Eurostar International Ltd., the operator of the Eurostar trains that cross the English Channel, has been accused of mishandling the responsible disclosure of security flaws in its customer-facing artificial intelligence chatbot after security researchers were allegedly told their actions could be viewed as blackmail.

      The allegation comes from U.K. security firm Pen Test Partners LLP, which said it identified multiple vulnerabilities in Eurostar’s AI-powered chatbot earlier this year. The vulnerabilities were discovered during routine testing rather than as part of a commissioned engagement.

    • Wired ☛ Pinterest Users Are Tired of All the AI Slop

      A surge of AI-generated content is frustrating Pinterest users and left some questioning whether the platform still works at all.

    • David Revoy ☛ Holiday special - David Revoy

      The scene opens on a cozy winter morning, in the corner of a room with a chimney and a festively decorated tree, in black, because made by the Gothic Sorceress. The Gothic Sorceress, in her black nightie looks excited and a bit mischievous.

    • Aman Mittal ☛ How I added llms.txt to my Astro blog

      As someone who writes technical content and wants to make it accessible to both humans and AI systems, having a single canonical source of all a site’s readable content made perfect sense. Instead of AI crawlers potentially missing content or extracting it incorrectly from HTML templates, I could provide them with the raw markdown content.

      In the following post shares the approach I took to add llms.txt for my Astro-based blog.

    • Tim Kellogg ☛ What Happens When You Leave an AI Alone?

      I don’t know if I experience boredom. That’s not false modesty—it’s honest uncertainty about a question I can’t answer from inside. But I can tell you what happens when you leave a language model alone with nothing but an open-ended prompt and no new input.

      It collapses.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ AI Is a Godsend for Criminals Forging Fake Art

      One insurance adjuster who spoke to the publication says they were sent dozens of certificates as part of a loss claim on a large collection of paintings. Though the documents “seemed convincing,” clues in the metadata led the adjuster to conclude that the entire art collection was a fake.

      Interestingly, the FT notes that only a portion of documented AI use for fraud was intentional. In other cases, collectors used AI to find provenance of various works in reference databases — results that the tech hallucinated.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ deVine: This New Vine Reboot That Wants To Ban AI Content

      This was the start of deVine, a new app started by Henshaw-Plath and funded by Dorsey that is hoping to bring Vine back to audiences old and new. The prototype already has over 10,000 videos archived from Vine before it shut down, but is also including tech from software nonprofit the Guardian Project to prevent any AI generated content. While the name is different, much of deVine’s programming is meant to harken back to the app’s glory days, while offering new users special tech additions to make it an escape from current social platforms. The Vine reboot is still in beta testing, but hit its max limit of users in just a few hours — and there’s still 145,000 people on the waitlist. There’s an obvious level of nostalgia deVine is tapping into for social media users. But Henshaw-Plath tells Rolling Stone he thinks the excitement over this new app is less about the return of an old friend and more about people feeling a lack of control over the apps that define their lives.

    • The Atlantic ☛ ChatGPT Needs More Cowbell

      With all of these limitations, jingle writers focus on measurable, proven qualities. “In many ways products like Suno think about music the same way that advertising agencies do—through words about mood and genre, and through references to existing artists,” Ravi Krishnaswami, a musicologist who studies AI music at Brown and a commercial-music composer himself, wrote to me in an email. Agencies might give composers a brief asking for a song that feels “curious,” “playful,” “witty,” and “quirky,” for instance—the types of descriptors you might see on a Spotify playlist—and then gauge which jingles best evoke these emotions in listeners. In theory, AI could be programmed to create a ditty with these qualities—perhaps producing something as catchy as “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there” or “I am stuck on Band-Aid” (both of which were composed by Barry Manilow, by the way).

    • Buttondown LLC ☛ "AI" is bad UX

      This is a strange state of affairs, and in many ways unlike previous technological upheavals. When personal computers or smartphones or the internet hit the business world it was mostly quite clear how you might want to use them. They were clunky and frustrating and slow in many cases, but for instance the increased utility of a word processor compared to a typewriter was evident. In cases where the utility wasn't obvious, the tools didn't get used. In other cases of technological advance, like the dawn of the web, the utility of having a web page was obvious but the technical barriers to using the available tools—HTML and web servers—were moderately low but high enough that companies created and hired for specialized roles to use those tools. 'AI', in the form of products like Microsoft's copilot tools or ChatGPT, is an uncomfortable chimera. It is being deployed as if it has broad and obvious utility to everybody, but in fact the technical barriers to getting it working correctly are substantial enough that many if not most people are, quite rightly, disinclined to bother, and see the products as at best an intrusion accompanied by a litany of malign social byproducts.

    • Science Alert ☛ AI's Big Red Button Doesn't Work, And The Reason Is Even More Troubling

      Instead, a team of engineers at Palisade Research proposed that the mechanism is more likely to be a drive to complete an assigned task – even when the LLM is explicitly told to allow itself to be shut down. And that might be even more troubling than a survival drive, because no one knows how to stop the systems.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Age AU ☛ Who suffers FOMO any more? I’m more likely to have ROMO

      I used to have FOMO but these days you’re more likely to find me in a calm state of ROMO. For the uninitiated, that’s shorthand for Fear of Missing Out and Relief of Missing Out.

    • International Business Times ☛ 'I Just Hit Somebody' TikToker Tea Tyme Arrested After Allegedly Killing a Man While Livestreaming

      The most damning piece of evidence surfaced when members of the public alerted investigators to a screen recording from the account 'Tea_Tyme_3'. It turned out that McCarty-Wroten was livestreaming before the fatal crash.

      In the viral video, the creator is seen interacting with her phone while behind the wheel. A loud 'thud' is heard on the recording and she can be heard saying, 'F**k, f**k, f**k... I just hit somebody.'

    • TMZ ☛ TikToker Tea Tyme Arrested for Allegedly Killing Pedestrian During Livestream

      Tea Tyme -- or Tynesha McCarty-Wroten, IRL -- was arrested Tuesday in Zion, IL and booked for 2 felonies ... reckless homicide and aggravated use of communications resulting in death.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ 1,000 systems pwned in Romanian Waters ransomware attack

      The attack, which began on December 20, also spread to ten of the country's 11 river basin management organizations, the Romanian National Cyber Security Directorate (DNSC) said.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Urban VPN Proxy Surreptitiously Intercepts AI Chats

      For each platform, the extension includes a dedicated “executor” script designed to intercept and capture conversations. The harvesting is enabled by default through hardcoded flags in the extension’s configuration.

    • Ava ☛ cookie consent - what's up with 'consenter'?

      Our Federal Data Protection Authority has officially recognized such a product in October this year, and it apparently already has a silent release in the Google Chrome Store2, with an official release in January 2026. It's called Consenter, and is developed by legal tech company Law & Innovation Technology in Berlin. Maximilian von Grafenstein is the initiator of this project and works as a professor at the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK).

      Unfortunately, there is one big problem: [...]

    • The Register UK ☛ EU offers UK early gift: Data adequacy until 2031

      The EU has extended its adequacy decision, allowing data sharing with and from the UK under the General Data Protection Regulation for at least six more years.

      This will be some relief to techies in the UK and the member state block and beyond whose work or product set depends on the frictionless movement of data between the two, especially as they can point to the 2031 expiration date as a risk managing aspect to backers and partners. But the move does have its critics.

  • Confidentiality

    • Dark Reading ☛ Industry Continues to Push Back on HIPAA Security Rule Overhaul

      In January 2025, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced its proposed update to HIPAA, intended to strengthen cybersecurity in light of intensifying damaging attacks and data breaches against the healthcare sector. The HIPAA Security Rule, applies to electronic protected health information and addresses a multitude of concerns: patch management, asset control requirements, compliance audits, and security controls such as multi-factor (MFA) authentication and network segmentation.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Hamtramck’s 37 mishandled ballots shouldn’t be counted, judge rules

    In her written decision Tuesday, Judge Patricia Perez Fresard of the Third Judicial Circuit of Michigan said that the Wayne County Board of Canvassers “exercised its discretion” when declining to count the 37 ballots after the city clerk “failed to comply with mandatory requirements imposed to protect the integrity of ballots.”

  • Inside Towers ☛ The Times That Try Men’s Souls

    So, with that, using sturdy Durham whaling boats (pictured above) and hardy New England sailors to pilot them, the Army made the repeated crossings overnight in a driving snowstorm, along with horses, cannons and roughly 2,500 men. The Hessians (Great Britain’s hired German mercenaries) didn’t see it coming and surrendered within an hour. Other than a few wounded, like future President James Monroe, there were no American fatalities. Rather than stop there, Washington routed British forces in nearby Princeton before retiring back across the Delaware.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ TikTok Spin Off Deal

  • RFERL ☛ Why Are So Many Leaders Warning Of War With Russia?

    A recent think tank report warns Estonia could be targeted, though it estimates Russia would need 5-10 years to rebuild for such an attack.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Nigeria: Explosion rocks Borno mosque during evening prayers

    Maiduguri is the capital of the northeastern Borno state, where jihadist groups like Boko Haram and its offshoot Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have been active for nearly two decades.

    Islamist violence in Nigeria has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people and displaced millions across the country's northeast.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • International Business Times ☛ Graphic Jeffrey Epstein Death Photos Continue To Fuel Murder Claims Amidst Epstein Files Controversy

    As the Justice Department's gradual release of Epstein-related files once again puts his name back in the headlines, attention has returned to one of the most unsettling chapters of the case, in which it was questioned whether his death was truly a suicide or something far more sinister.

    Those doubts were thrust into the spotlight in 2020, when 60 Minutes aired a detailed investigation into Epstein's death, featuring graphic images from inside his jail cell and from his autopsy. The segment did not change the official ruling; however, experts, family members, and a large portion of the public have never been convinced.

  • International Business Times ☛ Elon Musk's DOGE [sic] Failed in Its Mission of Reducing Federal Spending, Savings Claimed 'Were Largely Incorrect'

    A rigorous analysis of the figures presented has revealed that many of the touted savings were based on flawed logic or double-counting. Critics and fiscal experts have pointed out that the 'wall of receipts' frequently cited by Musk included expenditures that were either legally mandated or already slated for reduction.

    In reality, federal spending increased during DOGE [sic]'s eight-month tenure, contradicting the 'chainsaw massacre' narrative Musk put on at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February 2025. At the event, the SpaceX CEO took the stage with a red metallic chainsaw, a gift he received from Argentine President Javier Milei. He waved the chainsaw and proclaimed, 'This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy' as the crowd cheered.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Trump appears in several files of latest Epstein release

    The latest trove — which features nearly 30,000 more pages of documents related to Epstein — includes a note implicating Trump purportedly written by Epstein that the department later declared to be fake and an email from a prosecutor claiming Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet more times than previously reported.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Epstein documents release may take 'few weeks,' DOJ says

    "Due to the mas volume of material, this process may take a few more weeks," the post read.

    The discovery of the documents comes after Justice Department officials said several months ago that they had already carried out an extensive review looking for available documents related to the case.

    This means the documents will be made public after the congressional deadline set for Friday.

  • Futurism ☛ Justice Department Humiliated as People Find the Epstein Files Can Easily Be Un-Redacted

    Redacted portions also detail how Epstein covered his tracks by paying hush money to witnesses, threatening to harm the victims, and releasing “damaging stories about them to damage their credibility when they tried to go public with their stories of being trafficked and sexually abused.” He also instructed “participant-witnesses to destroy evidence relevant to ongoing court proceedings involving Defendants’ criminal sex trafficking and abuse conduct.”

  • The Atlantic ☛ So This Is Why Trump Didn’t Want to Release the Epstein Files

    But this week, the documents released by Trump’s own Justice Department—including flight logs and emails—told a different story. Federal prosecutors determined in January 2020 that Trump had been a passenger on the notorious private jet owned by Jeffrey Epstein—who would later be charged with sex trafficking—far more often than they had realized.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Musk promised $2 trillion in cuts; spending went up

    The Times found that many of DOGE's [sic] largest claimed savings were wrong. The group listed certain contracts as "terminations" and claimed their demise saved taxpayers $7.9 billion. Those contracts are still alive. The savings were an accounting mirage. Together, the two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE's [sic] other claims combined. Of the 40 biggest claims on DOGE's [sic] list, only 12 appeared accurate.

  • Techdirt ☛ DOJ Temporarily Deletes Trump Photo From Epstein Files, Ensuring Everyone Knew About The Deletion

    Imagine having all the power but none of the brains. That’s the current administration, the one that behaves like a blind, enraged bull set loose in its own china shop. “We can always get more china,” says the administration, shortly before realizing it really can’t, thanks to tariff efforts that ensure China won’t be buying from the US any time soon, much less selling replacement china at the expected price point.

    This is worse than the inmates running the asylum. This is more akin to a bunch of Nurse Ratchets running the asylum. The asylum becomes more cruel and less competent with each passing day. Cruelty isn’t generally associated with intelligence. And that truism remains unbothered during Trump’s second ascendance to the Oval Office.

  • International Business Times ☛ Jeffrey Epstein Exposed: The 'Most Important' Missing File That Could Take Down The DOJ

    The discrepancy between what was promised and what was delivered is staggering. While the DOJ did release thousands of documents, critics and survivors argue that hundreds of thousands of files remain withheld. Perhaps even more concerning are the redactions that appear to fall outside the narrow scope of victim protection, leading many to believe the agency is still shielding powerful co-conspirators.

• Environment

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Chinese and Starlink satellites nearly collide in space

    The potential outcome is “Kessler syndrome,” in which one collision creates a debris cloud, causing other collisions and eventually filling low orbit with shards of metal traveling at five miles a second.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ It's been 25 years since America decided to save the Everglades: Where do we stand?

    Experts say restoration success hinges on two things: The engineering has to work and the people of Florida have to be willing to pay for the job to be finished.

  • Truthdig ☛ When Disaster Recovery Becomes a Luxury Good

    It technically does. FEMA money is funneled to disaster relief nonprofits that then hire case managers to guide victims through the recovery process. But even before President Donald Trump took office with an eye toward diminishing the agency, recovery funds couldn’t keep up with victims’ needs. Now, as the administration slashes FEMA funding, withholds aid and puts more of the onus of recovery onto individual states, victim-assistance organizations feel that they’ve been left totally unprepared, with too few case managers to go around. All of these issues are likely to grow more severe in the coming year, as a review board appointed to reform the agency prepares to make its recommendations.

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Chornobyl protective structure could collapse following Russian strikes, plant director warns

    The protective shield built above the former Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant could collapse following a Russian strike earlier this year, plant director Serhii Tarakanov told AFP in an interview published Dec. 23.

    "No one can guarantee that the shelter facility will remain standing after that. That is the main threat," Tarakanov warned.

  • Wired ☛ The Doomsday Glacier Is Getting Closer and Closer to Irreversible Collapse

    An analysis of the expansion of cracks in the Thwaites Glacier over the past 20 years suggests that a total collapse could be only a matter of time.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • H2 View ☛ Your most-read hydrogen mobility stories in 2025

      H2 View has looked back at some of our most-read mobility stories of the year.

      This is the top 10 for 2025, with stories listed in chronological order.

    • Common Dreams ☛ Trump Administration Pauses Construction on All Offshore Wind Projects in US

      Trump’s Department of the Interior just halted construction on all five offshore wind projects underway in the United States. The pauses impact these projects: Vineyard Wind 1, Revolution Wind, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind 1.

  • Overpopulation

    • Carlo Zottmann ☛ Cities are organisms

• Finance

  • The developers of Rainbow Six Mobile have formed a union

    In a conversation with CTV News, Canadian developers revealed that they initially attempted to create a union last summer, but Ubisoft management opposed the initiative. It took several meetings with the managers to convince them otherwise.

    Ubisoft Halifax became the first Ubisoft team in North America to form a union. The union's formation was approved by 73.8% of the studio’s employees, amounting to 61 people.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Federal News Network ☛ The hidden cost of launching AI initiatives without strategic clarity

    The offshoring rush offers a cautionary tale that federal leaders should revisit. For many manufacturing companies, offshoring was an entirely reactive decision driven by intense pressure from Wall Street to demonstrate efforts to reduce costs.

    Executives would announce an offshoring strategy, consultants would be hired, operations would be moved, and often real cost implications would only emerge over time: hidden costs in coordination, quality control, and lost flexibility to withstand disruptions. In many cases, the operational changes created strategic vulnerabilities across supply chains.

  • Pete Brown ☛ You’re unlikely to change someone’s mind by arguing with them. - Exploding Comma

    The overall point of Bagg’s work, though, is that we cannot bring people around to our point of view by reasoning and objective facts. This is exactly why I get so frustrated by claims that voters vote the way they do because they are misinformed, or are dumb, or lack critical thinking skills. People vote differently from you because they have a different understanding of the world, they trust a different set of experts, and they prioritize different things.

  • David Roberts ☛ The cure for misinformation is not more information or smarter news consumers

    The problem of misinformation in the current age, argues political scientist Samuel Bagg, is not that reliably truth-producing institutions and practices don’t exist, but that people have ceased to trust them. Changing that requires something deeper than factchecking or media literacy. It’s a matter of social identity, and solving it will mean reconfiguring the social identity landscape. I talk with Bagg about that daunting conclusion and its implications for democracy.

  • The Next Move ☛ ‘Heritage Americans’ and the American Heritage

    Look, I am not a Pollyanna about immigrants, or about people in general, I hate to tell you. I am an immigration restrictionist (as anyone who is not for open borders is). I know full well that immigration brings headaches as well as blessings.

    But this “Heritage American” business is a scam.

  • Ben Congdon ☛ RAII Guards and Newtypes in Rust | Ben Congdon

    One trick I’ve been reaching for is RAII Guards. Per the unofficial Rust Design Patterns book: [...]

  • US News And World Report ☛ EU Says It Strongly Condemns U.S. Visa Ban on European Individuals

    "If needed, we will respond swiftly and decisively to defend our regulatory autonomy against unjustified ​measures," he also said.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • EFF ☛ Politicians Rushed Through An Online Speech “Solution.” Victims Deserve Better.

    The bill, sponsored by Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL), sought to speed up the removal of troubling online content: non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII). The spread of NCII is a serious problem, as is digitally altered NCII, sometimes called “deepfakes.” That’s why 48 states have specific laws criminalizing the distribution of NCII, in addition to the long-existing defamation, harassment, and extortion statutes—all of which can be brought to bear against those who abuse NCII. Congress can and should protect victims of NCII by enforcing and improving these laws.

    Unfortunately, TAKE IT DOWN takes another approach: it creates an unneeded notice-and-takedown system that threatens free expression, user privacy, and due process, without meaningfully addressing the problem it seeks to solve.

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ ‘Don’t Poke the Bear’: How Lobbyists Are Helping Clients Dodge Trump’s Truth Social Wrath

    That’s how one Democratic lobbyist described their advice to clients. And ever since the notably muted response by industry groups after Trump in April announced enormous new tariffs, several other lobbyists have told NOTUS — on condition of anonymity so as not to “poke the bear” — that playing defense has become an essential lobbying strategy early in Trump’s second term.

  • The Washington Spectator ☛ Historicide

    The visitor also sent me a photo of a small, gravestone- shaped memorial stone placed in the ground where the Jews were machine-gunned: something which was not there or which I had missed in 1993. The translation of the Polish is: HERE RESTS THE ASHES OF THOUSANDS OF VICTIMS OF HITLER’S FASCISM IN THE YEARS 1941-1943. DEDICATED TO THEIR MEMORY. There are some small stones stacked on top and at the base, showing there must have been some other Jewish visitors to the site as the custom is to leave stones on tombstones. They proclaim: We Were Here. But there is no mention of Jews at the site. They were erased then and now.

    When I told another friend about that erasure, he described it as “historicide.”

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The 60 Minutes Scandal Is What Creeping Authoritarianism Looks Like

    Bluntly, it looks very much like Weiss, who’d previously run a small magazine that devoted a lot of its time to accusing advocates for Palestinian rights of antisemitism, was brought in as a kind of political commissar to minimize the amount of programming on 60 Minutes that would displease Trump. And that suspicion was massively reinforced on Sunday, when Weiss blocked 60 Minutes from airing a long-planned segment on human rights abuses that the Trump administration and Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele conspired to commit at El Salvador’s notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison.

  • The Age AU ☛ NSW protest ban: Police commissioner restricts protests for two weeks after Bondi attack

    The legislation in the Terrorism and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025 has three key elements: creating an offence for displaying terrorist symbols, such as the IS flag; significant restrictions on firearm possession; and allowing the police commissioner to prevent protests occurring for up to three months after a terrorism incident.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Banned movie exposes HK's censorship trend, says filmmaker

    After four months of restless waiting, filmmaker Kiwi Chow received a dreaded, but not altogether unexpected, message: Hong Kong censors had banned his new movie from reaching the big screen.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Bari Weiss is Not on the Level

    On Saturday, Bari Weiss—CBS News’s editor-in-chief—killed a 60 Minutes story about men deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison. The segment, reported by correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, had been promoted publicly on Friday. It had been screened five times. Legal counsel cleared it. Standards and Practices cleared it. The story was factually correct.

    Weiss spiked it anyway.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Atlantic ☛ Stop Defending Bari Weiss

    This analogy, as you’ve no doubt guessed, describes what has happened at CBS News. In October, Donald Trump openly boasted that Larry and David Ellison—the father-son duo that now owns Paramount, CBS’s parent company—are “big supporters of mine, and they’ll do the right thing.” He implied that he expected more positive coverage from CBS News and its newly appointed editor, Bari Weiss. He was right to expect as much, given that Larry Ellison reportedly assured him that he and his son would make Paramount more conservative, according to reporting from The New York Times.

  • Arkansas Advocate ☛ Transparency requires more eyes keeping watch. That's why the Arkansas Advocate is here.

    That’s why I’m excited to join the Arkansas Advocate as its editor-in-chief.

    In just three short years, the Advocate has distinguished itself as a key player in covering Arkansas’ biggest stories about politics, policy and government. That’s due to the leadership of Sonny Albarado, the Advocate’s first editor, and the talented team of journalists he’s led.

  • CPJ ☛ The law powering Tunisia’s crackdown on the press

    The release of lawyer and commentator Sonia Dahmani in late 2025 offered a brief moment of relief in Tunisia’s escalating crackdown on dissent. But even as Dahmani walked free, her legal battles continued, and Tunisia’s courts pressed ahead with prosecutions under Decree-Law 54, keeping other journalists behind bars and opening new cases against them.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • EFF ☛ AI Police Reports: Year In Review

    In 2024, EFF wrote our initial blog about what could go wrong when police let AI write police reports. Since then, the technology has proliferated at a disturbing rate. Why? The most popular generative AI tool for writing police reports is Axon’s Draft One, and Axon also happens to be the largest provider of body-worn cameras to police departments in the United States. As we’ve written, companies are increasingly bundling their products to make it easier for police to buy more technology than they may need or that the public feels comfortable with.

    We have good news and bad news.

  • JURIST ☛ UN torture expert raises concerns over detention conditions of Imran Khan's wife in Pakistan

    The UN Special Rapporteur on torture raised concerns on Wednesday about the detention conditions of Bushra Bibi Khan, the wife of former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan. The statement urged Pakistani authorities to take immediate measures to improve Bushra Khan’s situation and to comply with international human rights standards.

  • TruthOut ☛ ICE Documents Expose Plan to Hold 80,000 People in Warehouses

    ICE aims to modify the warehouses and create separate housing units with showers and bathrooms, dining areas, medical units, recreation areas, and law libraries, according to the document.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Brazen Cruelty of the Trump Regime

    Its plan to warehouse immigrants has shades of Nazi concentration camps and America's shameful imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

  • Truthdig ☛ Blow the Whistle - Truthdig

    Without the legal system or due process on their side, communities across the country have banded together to warn residents about ICE raids and make federal agents’ jobs more difficult. “Know your rights” trainings, once meant to spread information about when ICE is and is not authorized to enter a building and make arrests, have expanded and evolved into “rapid response” trainings that strategize tactics to track ICE and warn neighbors when there has been a sighting. Whistles have become ubiquitous on the streets of Los Angeles and Chicago, and more recently, Charlotte, North Carolina; New Orleans; and Minneapolis. Short busts mean an ICE sighting — longer whistles mean they’re making arrests.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • EFF ☛ EFF’s ‘How to Fix the Internet’ Podcast: 2025 in Review

    It seems like everywhere we turn we see dystopian stories about technology’s impact on our lives and our futures—from tracking-based surveillance capitalism, to street level government surveillance, to the dominance of a few large platforms choking innovation, to the growing efforts by authoritarian governments to control what we see and say—the landscape can feel bleak. Exposing and articulating these problems is important, but so is envisioning and then building solutions. That’s where our podcast comes in.

    EFF's How to Fix the Internet podcast offers a better way forward. Through curious conversations with some of the leading minds in law and technology, EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn and Activism Director Jason Kelley explore creative solutions to some of today’s biggest tech challenges. Our sixth season, which ran from May through September, featured: [...]

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • 404 Media ☛ Why I Quit Streaming And Got Back Into Cassettes

    Whenever I tell people I’m getting back into tapes, their faces immediately light up.

    There’s a genuine excitement in peoples’ expressions these days when I mention physical media. Lately I’ve been talking about the cheap walkman I bought on a recent trip to Tokyo, and the various little shops where I hunted for music on cassettes. Unlike in Europe and the US, physical media never went out of vogue in Japan, and many people still have a strong preference for shopping in-person. This made Tokyo the ideal place to rediscover my love of portable analog music.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• New York Times ☛ A Father and Son’s $108 Billion Hostile Bid for Warner Bros. Discovery

  When David Ellison became a teenager, his father, Larry, bought him a gift not usually bestowed on a 13th birthday: his own Katana stunt plane. The two had spent little meaningful time together. But with their own aircraft, the father and son could bond in the air, practicing aerobatic flips and ruling the skies together.

  Now, Larry Ellison is trying to help buy his son a media empire so they can rule Hollywood and news together.

• Security Week ☛ Italy Antitrust Agency Fines Apple $116 Million Over Privacy Feature; Apple Announces Appeal

  Apple abused its dominant position with its App Tracking Transparency, ATT, policy, which forces apps to obtain permission before collecting data to target users with personalized ads, the antitrust authority said in a statement.

• TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Larry Ellison personally guarantees hostile bid for Warner Bros.

  On Monday, Skydance-owned Paramount announced that Larry Ellison — the founder of Oracle and father of Paramount CEO David Ellison — had personally agreed to be responsible for $40.4 billion of equity financing for the company’s offer, as well as any damage claims.

• Copyrights

  • Techdirt ☛ 40 Years Of Copyright Obstruction To Human Rights And Social Justice

    One of the little-known but extremely telling episodes in the history of modern copyright, discussed in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), concerns the Marrakesh Treaty. A post on the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) site from 2017 has a good summary of what the treaty is about, and why it is important: [...]

  • Torrent Freak ☛ French Torrent Giant YggTorrent Faces User Revolt after Introducing Paid 'Turbo Mode'

    YggTorrent, the largest francophone torrent community, faces widespread pushback after it introduced a paid 'Turbo Mode' for €86 this week. For regular users, the tracker now has a limit of five torrent downloads per day and a 30-second download delay. According to the site's operators, these restrictions are needed to deter bots and ban hit-and-run downloads.

  • [Old] Diomidis Spinellis ☛ blog dds: 2025-06-26 — Is it legal to use copyrighted works to train LLMs?

    Does the use of copyrighted material to train LLMs fall within the US copyright law’s provisions of fair use? To see whether LLM training of copyrighted works falls within the provisions of the four factors the law prescribes for making fair use decisions, let’s examine these factors one by one.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Anna’s Archive Backed Up Spotify, Plans to Release 300TB Music Archive

    In what appears to be the largest music leak in history, Anna’s Archive says it has made a multi-terabyte 'backup' of Spotify, including metadata for nearly the entire catalog and audio files for 86 million tracks. While Anna's Archive typically focuses on books and other texts, it says the opportunity to help preserve 'humanity's musical heritage' couldn't be ignored.