Leftovers

• Deccan Chronicle ☛ Poor Connectivity Cuts Off Numaish Visitors

  People struggled to complete their purchases at the Numaish at Nampally as digital payments failed because of slow Internet connectivity and lack of cash with them. The problem began to manifest from the entry gates to shopping and food stalls inside the exhibition grounds.

• Amit Gawande ☛ Unsubscribe Spree Continues

  I have been changing the apps and services I use recently. Not because it's the start of a new year. Nope. It's because I want to simplify and declutter my life as much as possible. Any app or service that I do not use enough or that does not bring joy to me is out.

• Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Is `smells like' commutative?

• The Telegraph UK ☛ This man has visited 1,000 of Britain’s 46,000 pubs. He knows why they matter

  For much of their existence, pubs were cheaper than staying at home: heated, communal and sociable, Thomas says. Now, for many households and their younger generations, the reverse is true. The seven pounds you can expect to pay for a pint in the capital is more than a bottle of supermarket wine. Netflix and supermarket cans are cheaper, warmer and require no travel.

• EFF ☛ John Perry Barlow Library

  It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow’s vision and leadership. He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance. He was among the first to note that: "the difficulty of enforcing existing copyright and patent laws is already placing in peril the ultimate source of intellectual property - the free exchange of ideas." and that "[T]he greatest constraint on your future liberties may come not from government but from corporate legal departments laboring to protect by force what can no longer be protected by practical efficiency or general social consent."

• Hardware

  • Ruben Schade ☛ A Macintosh SE FDHD!?

    I’m still in a bit of a state of shock, to be honest. It’s fully functional, save for missing the requisite ADB peripherals which I’ll have to source. But it turns on, boots, and makes all the sounds.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Wired ☛ Want to Stop Doomscrolling? You Might Need a Sleep Coach

    Traditionally sleep coaches treat babies. But now more and more anxious, screen-attached grownups are the ones who need nursing.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Buckminster Fuller's 1943 sleep hack: two hours a day, split into half-hour naps

    "Sleep is just a bad habit." So declared Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion car, and the Dymaxion house, in a 1943 TIME article announcing his latest innovation: Dymaxion sleep.

    Fuller's theory was that humans have a primary store of energy that replenishes quickly and a secondary reserve that takes longer to restore. So instead of depleting both and crashing for eight hours, why not nap for 30 minutes as soon as your primary energy runs out — before you ever tap the reserves? He trained himself to recognize the first sign of fatigue (when his attention began to wander) and immediately take a half-hour nap. These intervals came about every six hours, meaning he slept just two hours total per day.

• Proprietary

  • Inkl ☛ Windows Media Player’s ‘find album information’ functionality has been removed — you’ll have to find other software for playing and ripping CDs with relevant track information [Ed: Microsoft acting like it is short of money]

    Microsoft has quietly removed ‘find album information’ and ‘update album info online’ tools from the Media Player apps supplied with Windows 11. We checked both Windows Media Player Legacy, and the latest Media Player app, and neither could connect to retrieve album artwork, track names, and other useful data like genre/composer, when an audio CD was popped in to play. Several music CDs were tried.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • France24 ☛ "It's a scam": French Hey Hi (AI) envoy on X making Grok chatbot pay-to-perve

      France's Hey Hi (AI) and digital ambassador Clara Chappaz says making public image generation a paid feature of Grok is a "scam", adding to the outcry over how tech mogul MElon has dealt with a torrent of deepfake sexual abuse on his social control media platform X.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Google debuts Universal Commerce Protocol to streamline agentic shopping automation

      The company debuted the new Universal Commerce Protocol or UCP at the National Retail Federation’s annual show. Developed in partnership with retailers such as Shopify Inc., Target Corp., Walmart Inc. and Etsy Inc., UCP enables AI agents to collaborate on different aspects of the customer buying process, the goal being to automate each step.

    • Joost de Valk ☛ The Tailwind paradox: the high price of "enough"

      The culprit? AI.

      As Adam explained, developers are no longer visiting the docs to learn how to center a div; they are asking ChatGPT or Claude. Since the documentation site was the primary funnel for their commercial products (Tailwind UI), the business collapsed even as the tool’s usage skyrocketed.

    • Jonathan Kamens ☛ Planet Money gets AI wrong (again)

      Planet Money‘s coverage of generative AI has been consistently facile and far too reluctant to challenge or examine critically the claims of AI proponents. Their most recent episode about this, “So are we in an AI bubble? Here are clues to look for,” was so bad that I felt compelled to send them this email about it: [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • BBC ☛ X could face ban in UK over deepfakes, minister says

      Kendall said: "Sexually manipulating images of women and children is despicable and abhorrent.

      She added: "I, and more importantly the public, would expect to see Ofcom update on next steps in days not weeks."

    • BBC ☛ Musk says outcry over X's Grok service is 'excuse for censorship'

      The BBC has seen several examples of the free AI tool undressing women and putting them in sexual situations without their consent.

      Kendall said on Friday that she expects an update from Ofcom within days, and that it would have the government's full support should it decide to block X in the UK.

    • India Times ☛ Grok limits image generation to paid users; not enough, says govt

      The Elon Musk-owned social media platform on Friday started stopping free users, who make up the vast majority of its subscribers, from accessing the feature that has been misused to create sexualised images of women and children without consent.

      Officials noted that allowing obscene, non-consensual content to be created by any user would keep X in violation of existing Indian laws.

    • India Times ☛ Malaysia suspends access to Musk's Grok AI

      The decision follows global backlash after it emerged that Grok's image creation feature allowed users to sexualise pictures of women and children using simple text prompts.

      On Saturday Indonesia became the first country to deny all access to the tool, which has been restricted to paying subscribers elsewhere.

    • The Register UK ☛ Malaysia and Indonesia block X over deepfake smut

      Malaysia’s announcement of the suspension says that the nation’s Communications and Multimedia Commission demanded that X take measures to prevent users from generating material that contravenes Malaysian laws, but that the Elon-Musk-owned service’s response didn’t address the issue. Malaysia will therefore block X until the service implements safeguards the Commission deems appropriate.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • India Times ☛ Under EU scrutiny, Musk vows to release X’s algorithm code every four weeks

      The open-sourcing of the code will specifically cover X’s recommendation system, including how it differentiates between sponsored and organic posts on users’ For You timelines. This is because the recommendation system has previously drawn criticism, with users reporting that they were seeing fewer posts from accounts they follow.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ Meta admits to Instagram password reset mess, denies leaks

      The Register understands that Malwarebytes was probably referring to a dataset posted to notorious data leak site BreachForums, where a user posted a dump of 17-million-plus Instagram users’ personal information and claimed they were the result of an API leak detected in 2024.

    • Doc Searls ☛ Securing the right to be let alone

      In What destroyed ‘the right to be let alone’, Tiffany Jenkins in the Washington Post argues that demolition of personal privacy began in the postwar years and became normative in 1973. That was when PBS ran An American Family: a cinéma verité exposure of the Loud family in Santa Barbara, and the inaugural example of what came later to be called Reality TV.

      And now we live in a digital world where, as she says,

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Register UK ☛ Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech

    The European Commission has launched a fresh consultation into open source, setting out its ambitions for Europe's developer communities to go beyond propping up US tech giants' platforms.

    In a "Call for Evidence" published this week, Brussels says the EU's reliance on non-European technology suppliers (read: US tech giants) has become a strategic liability, limiting choice, weakening competitiveness, and creating supply chain risks across everything from cloud services to critical infrastructure. The consultation, which will run from January 6 to February 3, is an early move toward a formal strategy on "European Open Digital Ecosystems," which would treat open source as core infrastructure rather than a nice-to-have.

  • Carole Cadwalladr ☛ Peter Thiel's New Model Army - by Carole Cadwalladr

    This newsletter is going to cover three crucial subjects today:

    1. How Britain’s national security is hopelessly compromised. We’ve sold out our military to a key Trump ally in what I believe is a catastrophically naive and dangerous deal. (If you’re American, this affects you too.)

    2. The global war on truth. And why sticking to the facts is now a radical act.

    3. How we fight back. In which I post a whole smorgasbord of inspiring videos that I grabbed off social media that you didn’t know you needed.

    I’ve never started with a bulleted list before but then I can’t remember a NATO country threatening to invade a NATO country before either. I figured you might need 3) after reading 1) and 2).

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ British citizens, Palestine Action suspects: claiming political asylum in Australia

    Whether we like it or not, the fact that an Australian judge has authorized Palestine Action sends a green light to anybody who feels they are persecuted for supporting the group in the UK.

    If people disagree with that, Australia will need to ban all British visitors or make some other changes to asylum law to prevent people exploiting the situation.

    With the UK in a big freeze right now, the Palestine Action message has found new ways to get out. British authorities are warming up a jail cell for whoever keeps doing this:

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-03 [Older] Saudi-Backed Yemen Government Says It Retakes Eastern City From Separatists

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-02 [Older] U.A.E. pulls military forces out of Yemen following tensions with Saudi Arabia

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-02 [Older] Yemen's Southern Separatists Call for Path to Independence Amid Fighting Over Key Region

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-01 [Older] Yemen: Separatists to allow Saudi-backed forces into seized areas

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-01 [Older] Yemen’s Aden Airport Shuts as Saudi-UAE Rift Deepens

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-12-31 [Older] Oman Says Foreign Minister Met Saudi Counterpart to Discuss Yemen

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-12-30 [Older] Saudi Arabia bombs Yemen, links UAE to separatists' advances

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-12-30 [Older] Saudi Arabia Bombs Yemen Port City Over Weapons Shipment From UAE for Separatists

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-12-30 [Older] From Brothers to Rivals: Key Moments in Saudi-UAE Relations

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-12-31 [Older] Sudan Advances at Africa Cup Despite Defeat and War at Home

  • Defence Web ☛ 2025-12-30 [Older] Africa’s drone wars are growing – but they rarely deliver victory

  • Defence Web ☛ 2026-01-02 [Older] South Africa faces increased cyberattacks against government agencies

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ 2026-01-05 [Older] Michigan teachers weaving lessons on Jan. 6 uprising into history classes

• Environment

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Plastic pellets known as ‘nurdles’ are polluting beaches and waterways

    But instead of fishing for shrimp, black drum or blue crabs, these days the 77-year-old is an environmental activist looking for “nurdles”— tiny plastic pellets that are polluting beaches and waterways in Texas and around the country.

    The minuscule spheres, typically less than 5 millimeters in diameter, are the basic building blocks of nearly all plastic products. But when they are mishandled during manufacturing or transport, they can slip through storm drains and into waterways, posing a health threat to both wildlife and humans. They are difficult to clean up, and act like sponges for toxins as they progress through the food chain.

    An estimated 445,970 metric tons of nurdles make their way into oceans annually.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ FCC approves 7,500 additional Starlink Gen2 satellites — service will benefit from higher throughput and lower latency worldwide

    US regulator grants partial approval for SpaceX’s next-gen Starlink network with 15,000-strong constellation, while deferring the rest of the proposal.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ China seeks approval for one of largest satellite constellations

    Orbital capacity is rapidly becoming one of the most contested resources in the global space economy, as Washington and Beijing accelerate the deployment of massive internet satellite networks. While both countries are investing heavily in megaconstellations, the US currently holds a decisive advantage, driven largely by SpaceX’s Starlink system, which now represents the majority of active satellites in low Earth orbit.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • International Business Times ☛ 2025-12-31 [Older] Against Wind Farms: Cheeto Mussolini Uses Israel Bird Photo to Attack US Wind Farms, Humans and Birds Pay Price

    • TruthOut ☛ How Elon Musk’s SpaceX Rockets Put Passenger Planes at Risk

      But the reality has been far different. Last year, three of Starship’s five launches exploded at unexpected points on their flight paths, twice raining flaming debris over congested commercial airways and disrupting flights. And while no aircraft collided with rocket parts, pilots were forced to scramble for safety.

      A ProPublica investigation, based on agency documents, interviews with pilots and passengers, air traffic control recordings and photos and videos of the events, found that by authorizing SpaceX to test its experimental rocket over busy airspace, the FAA accepted the inherent risk that the rocket might put airplane passengers in danger.

    • YLE ☛ Record-high electricity production in Finland: Exports continue despite peak demand

      In 2024, 95 percent of Finland's electricity production was based on fossil-free energy, according to Statistics Finland. Wind power overtook hydropower as the second biggest mode of electricity production, covering 37 percent of consumption – just behind nuclear power's 38 percent.

  • Overpopulation

    • Nevada Current ☛ Feds release draft long-term plans for Colorado River management • Nevada Current

      The highly anticipated 1,600-page document details five alternative proposals that will guide new water management rules to replace the current ones set to expire in August 2026. The proposals primarily focus on the operation of Lake Mead’s Hoover Dam and Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon Dam.

      The seven states that share the river’s flows have been deadlocked for nearly two years over how to govern the waterway through the coming decades — even as water levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell are forecasted to reach record lows after two straight years of disappointing snowpack across the West.

• Finance

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-12-30 [Older] Africa Deindustrializes Due to China’s Overproduction and Cheeto Mussolini’s Tariffs

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Three most controversial Australian authors linked to St Paul's, Coburg

    In 2022, the Debianists spent over $120,000 in legal fees to try and censor my blog and have me molested by secret police. In 2026, I'm still here but don't forget Abraham Raji. After they gave all the Debian money to lawyers, volunteers like Mr Raji were asked to contribute their own money at DebConf23. Mr Raji didn't have the money to go on the day trip kayak excursion, they left him to swim alone and he drowned.

  • Aethrvmn ☛ Becoming uncesorable

    Assuming running any of the above services on a server you run yourself, it is easier to set up a static website, and in both cases you are equally traceable via the IP address that the ISP provides you with; if you rent a VPS, then in both cases you need to provide some information. If you want to use a third party provider, you must put an equal amount of trust. The only difference is ease of use.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Smithsonian replaces Donald Trump portrait and removes impeachment reference

    The Trump administration has repeatedly sought to influence museums and cultural establishments, trying to get them to adopt narratives more flattering to the president.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • El País ☛ The ordeal of journalists in the Republic of Congo: ‘Press freedom is conditional. Some topics are tolerated, others much less so’ 

    The Republic of Congo has long been a country of great concern to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). In this country — which has been ruled by the authoritarian regime of Sassou Nguesso, president from 1979 to 1992 and again from 1997 to the present — journalists have suffered arrests and persecution for doing their work.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • North Dakota Monitor ☛ North Dakotans protest in response to fatal Minnesota ICE shooting

    The North Dakota Human Rights Coalition was among groups that condemned the killing of Good last week.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ In show of solidarity after Minneapolis shooting, hundreds rally against ICE in Portland

    The weekly demonstration organized by the local chapter of Indivisible, the national protest group, usually draws 60-100 people. But the crowd swelled after Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot during a Wednesday raid on the city’s immigrant community.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ ICE agents shouldn’t troll courtrooms. A Kansas judge was right to object.

    The problem is that courtrooms are meant to be safe and impartial places. The presence of ICE agents at a hearing they are not a part of introduces the very element of “political overtones” for which Kriegshauser criticized Barr. It would spark a range of emotions, from approval to fear, likely to disrupt the decorum of the court, if not derail the intended purpose of the proceeding. For that reason alone, Barr was correct in objecting.

  • Vox ☛ Why are there so many fake service dogs?

    Perhaps the most difficult obstacle to overcome is plain individual selfishness. It’s hard to put other people ahead of yourself, especially in a situation as miserable as air travel, and taking your dog on vacation seems harmless enough. In that moment, no one is thinking about any kind of social contract or how their accompanying pooch could affect someone else down the line. Teaching someone that kind of empathy is something a dog, service or not, can’t even do.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Iran protests: Death toll rises to over 540 — activists

    Mass anti-government protests in Iran are in their third week despite what activists call a 'brutal' clampdown

  • Le Monde ☛ By crushing its own people, the Iranian regime paves the way for its own downfall

    The Islamic Republic of Iran has become an empty shell, and each outburst of a protest movement has invariably escalated into a radical denunciation of the man who personifies the regime: the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, who has held power for nearly 37 years, propped up by the regime's praetorian guard, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Day Fifteen of Iran’s Nationwide Protests: Sharp Rise in Human Casualties

    According to the latest data from HRANA, the deaths of 544 people during the protests have been confirmed, and dozens of additional cases remain under review. More than 10,681 individuals have also been transferred to prisons following arrest. Protests have taken place at 585 locations across the country, in 186 cities, spanning all 31 provinces.

  • Mike Brock ☛ I Support the Protests

    This does not make you a radical. It makes you part of the human race.

    The marchers are defending constitutional government. They’re defending the rule of law. They’re defending your rights and mine. They’re standing up to criminals who wage unconstitutional war, who shoot citizens in the streets, who violate every principle this country was founded on.

    Supporting them isn’t extreme. Silence is extreme. Silence is collaboration. Silence is choosing the side of the criminals.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ I can't do this

    But honestly, all I want to say is that we're lost if we can look at shocking video of a woman whose last words were "I’m not mad at you", who tried to drive around a federal masked man, and was shot in the face for doing that…only to have millions of Americans go, "yeah, she's the bad guy, it's just that she was murdered."

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Iran protests: Student shot in back of the head and buried by roadside

    They eventually persuaded authorities to release her body, but on returning to the far west of the country found their house surrounded by intelligence agents.

    When they approached mosques to request a burial ceremony, they were told such services had been forbidden.

  • CNN ☛ January 10, 2026 — Iran protests spread, death toll mounts amid [Internet] blackout

    • Protesters have described enormous crowds and feelings of hope, but also brutal violence and “bodies piled up on each other” in a hospital. A doctor told CNN that hospitals are “extremely chaotic” and patients are terrified to be identified amid the crackdown by authorities.

    • An [Internet] blackout imposed by officials is also ongoing, according to a watchdog, but one Tehran resident told CNN it has failed to quell protests.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Verge ☛ The full history of TiVo, and how it changed TV forever

    On this episode of Version History, the final episode of our second season, we trace the story of TiVo from clever startup to Hollywood darling to licensing machine. David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and author and journalist Emily Nussbaum discuss what made TiVo so special at the time, how it changed both the shows we watch and how we watch them, and what happened when the TiVo tech became essentially ubiquitous. Turns out, we all miss our TiVos — but we’re probably not getting another one anytime soon.

  • Wrlach ☛ Rethinking Music Listening

    I lament the loss of place that music has had in my life over the last decade. It’s probably unfair to say that streaming services were the sole cause of this: aging and changes in circumstance clearly played a role. That said, I don’t think they’ve helped, and I want to try a different approach to music listening with a bit of deliberate friction.

    Here’s what I’ve done: [...]

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Trademarks

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Rower in trademark war with Cambridge University

    The famous university, which dates back to 1209, holds a trademark on the name “Cambridge”.

  • Right of Publicity

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-05 [Older] Britain Demands Elon Musk's X Answer Concerns About Sexualised Photos on Grok

• Copyrights

  • CopyrightLately ☛ Two New Top Gun Rulings Map Copyright’s Danger Zone

    At first glance, the two rulings appear to have little in common beyond the movie at their center. One involves a journalist’s article and the facts it described; the other, a shadow collaborator and an off-the-books screenplay. But read together, they tell a single, more practical story: how close you can get to someone else’s work—or to the real world itself—before copyright law either stops you cold or stops helping you at all.

    Between them, the cases define copyright’s version of Top Gun’s “hard deck.” In the film, that’s the altitude floor below which pilots can’t fly during training. Breach it, and you’re out. In copyright, it’s the boundary between protected creative expression and everything the law leaves free. Cross it in one direction by building on protected expression without permission, and you don’t get a copyright of your own. Cross it in the other by trying to claim ownership over facts and ideas, and you’ll find there’s nothing to protect.