Leftovers

• Ness Labs ☛ How to Get Unstuck: Simple Somatic Regulation Practices

  There are many ways to feel stuck. Rumination, avoidance, and perfectionism… These loops tend to persist because there’s a mismatch between what the task requires and your current physiological state. Change the state, and the loop often loosens on its own.

  Here are three ways to get unstuck, depending on the kind of “stuckness” you’re experiencing: [...]

• Brandon Rozek ☛ Blogging as an Invitation for Dialogue

  But not all of these methods inherently create a conversation or dialogue. When I write a technical blog post, I don’t expect a reply. Similarly, when I toot on Mastodon, I’m fine if no one favorited the post. As such, (micro-)blogging differs greatly from texting and calling someone and is instead much closer to recording a postcast or uploading a video – a one-way transmission of information.

• Amit Gawande ☛ I keep writing about the same thing

  I’m starting to worry that my attempt to systemise my life is slowly becoming my life. I want to write about living, not about the meta aspects of how I organise my life.

• The New Stack ☛ The New Threats: Attackers Don't Just Break In, They Blend In

  With greater frequency, this is how system compromises happen. Attackers have adapted as infrastructure became more observable. Maintaining visible, normal behavior has become the dominant strategy.

• Aethrvmn ☛ domain

  Everything that has to do with being self-sufficient in the modern world implies [Internet] access.

• Career/Education

  • Small Cypress ☛ the meaning of life: indieweb carnival january 2026

    I teach middle schoolers now, who are starting to hit some of the big questions around life and meaning - or at least starting to understand that adults don't get it and are probably wrong a lot of the time, which makes some of them furious and frustrated and betrayed. Some truly don't care and are kind of sliding through life (happy-ish!); some are even well-adjusted to the horrors of the world enough to know that they still need to do their homework and try a little to muddle through our failed institutions. But that first group, they're my people.

  • Sara Jakša ☛ Conversation about Literature with Zachary Kai and Sara Jakša

    This is the conversation me and Zach have been having between August 2025 and now on the topic of literature and books, by iterating with posing questions and answering them by email. I have to say that I very much enjoy this kind of interview format cowritting and I am looking forward to the next one.

  • James G ☛ Walden

    I wanted to start this blog post with a quote. I started flicking through Walden, which I have just finished reading, for one that would be appropriate. But then I realised any choice would be arbitrary, for the wisdom is so deep within the book that any choice would leave me feeling wanting. With every page I turned, there was something new to make me think. Indeed, if the book Walden was itself a pond, it would both reflect the world back and, in so doing, make me see the world in a new light.

  • Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Simon Willison on Technical Blogging

    New year, new round of tech blogger interviews. Let’s kick it off with Simon Willison: co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette. Over the course of two decades, Simon has built a remarkable body of work at simonwillison.net. His blog ranges from rigorous long-form analyses to pithy link commentaries and lots in between. He’s particularly well-known for offering a pragmatic – and independent – take on AI in software development.

    In past posts, we’ve shared the mantra “You’re not writing enough” (Bryan Cantrill quoting Pat Helland quoting Jim Gray). Simon, who blogged every day for an entire year, sets a high bar for what’s possible here.

  • Ava ☛ beware of the bore-out | ava's blog

    That’s what some jobs are like after a while. Why you’ve stayed there might be due to lack of options, loyalty, or comfort (the evil you know, and so on!). It doesn’t mean you should settle for less and cajole yourself into doing the same soul-sucking digital assembly line for even longer.

  • Lalit Maganti ☛ Why Senior Engineers Let Bad Projects Fail

    In large companies, speaking up about what you see as a “bad project” is a good thing. But only in moderation. Sometimes the mark of seniority is realizing that arguing with people who won’t listen isn’t worth it; it’s better to save your counsel.

• Hardware

  • Clayton Errington ☛ Resetting TPM for an Encrypted Boot Drive

    At the start of the new year, I decided to install openSUSE and it’s been great. I’ve been able to update my firmware and BIOS through regular updates. When I setup my installation I took the benefit of the TPM+Password integration with LUKS. After a few updates I started noticing upon boot, I was entering my password a few times to unlock the disk and then it finally decrypted and continued to boot. One of these updates I remembered was a BIOS and firmware update.

  • Canion dot Blog ☛ Home Ethernet

    With my topology now clear I moved on to testing, slowing spanning outwards from the mac mini that was my listening end of iperf. Starting with a direct connection between it and my laptop, confirming gigabit speeds, then moving out from the server, a network layer at a time, to see where the speeds dropped.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • El País ☛ The EPA will no longer calculate the lives saved thanks to air pollution restrictions

    The decision affects regulations on fine particulate matter (PM₂.₅) and ground-level ozone, two of the most dangerous and widespread pollutants in the country, and has provoked a strong reaction from public health experts, scientists, and environmental organizations.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: How the Light Gets In

    Happiness is self-explanatory – and fleeting. Even in the worst of times, there are moments of happiness – a delicious meal with friends, a beautiful sunrise, a stolen moment with your love. These are the things we chase, and rightly so. But happiness is always a goal, rarely a steady state.

    Optimism, on the other hand, is a toxin to be avoided. Optimism is a subgenre of fatalism, the belief that things will get better no matter what we do. It's just the obverse of pessimism. Both are ways of denying human agency. To be an optimist is to be a passenger of history, along for the ride, with no hope of changing its course.

    But hope? That's the stuff. Hope is the belief that if we change the world for the better, even by just a little, that we will ascend a gradient towards a better future, and as we rise up that curve, new terrain will be revealed to us that we couldn't see from our lower vantage-point. It's not necessary – or even possible – to see a course from here to the world you want to live in. You can get there in stepwise fashion, one beneficial change at a time: [...]

• Proprietary

  • Google ☛ Releasing Rainbow Tables to Accelerate Protocol Deprecation

    Mandiant is publicly releasing a comprehensive dataset of Net-NTLMv1 rainbow tables to underscore the urgency of migrating away from this outdated protocol. Despite Net-NTLMv1 being deprecated and known to be insecure for over two decades—with cryptanalysis dating back to 1999—Mandiant consultants continue to identify its use in active environments. This legacy protocol leaves organizations vulnerable to trivial credential theft, yet it remains prevalent due to inertia and a lack of demonstrated immediate risk.

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ Customizing The Emacs Email Experience With Mu4e

    There are tons of cool blog posts out there about mbsync, mu, and mu4e configuration—this one’s mine. Most focus on how to set up mbsync which is the CLI tool that syncs your IMAP account with a local folder for mu to index. The process is fairly straightforward: the only tricky thing to do is use macOS’s password keyring to store the IMAP password and export a copy of the certificates for the handshake: [...]

  • Michael Tsai ☛ India May Want iOS’s Source Code

  • Reuters ☛ Exclusive: India proposes forcing smartphone makers to give source code in security overhaul

    India proposes requiring smartphone makers to share source code with the government and make several software changes as part of a raft of security measures, prompting behind-the-scenes opposition from giants like Apple and Samsung. The tech companies have countered that the package of 83 security standards, which would also include a requirement to alert the government to major software updates, lacks any global precedent and risks revealing proprietary details, according to four people familiar with the discussions and a Reuters review of confidential government and industry documents.

  • MacRumors ☛ Apple Opposes India's Plan to Access iOS Source Code

    Beyond routine measures like notifying the government of major updates and storing security audit logs, the standards would force manufacturers to hand over source code to government-designated labs to check for vulnerabilities.

    Apple, Google, Samsung, Xiaomi, and industry group MAIT have all reportedly objected, citing a lack of global precedent and concerns about revealing proprietary details.

  • Six Colors ☛ Wish List: SSH keys in Passwords

    Previous to Apple offering features like iCloud Keychain and Password Autofill, I relied on 1Password to store a lot of this information, but in recent years I’ve transitioned in large part to Passwords. But you’ll note I said “largely.” There are still a few things that I use 1Password for and while Apple is generally good about ticking off the lowest hanging fruit and leaving third parties to offer more niche products, I’d argue that authentication and security are important enough to our everyday lives that the Passwords app can afford to take on more responsibility.

  • Greg Morris ☛ Apple Hands Siri to Google

    Thankfully Apple is finally picking a lane. They're officially outsourcing Siri's AI to a major competitor, which suggests they're behind on AI and aren't interested in catching up themselves. This doesn't look like Apple buying time to build their own competitive models. A multi-year commitment to have Google's tech power the next generation of Apple Foundation Models feels pretty permanent.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Walrus ☛ Everything Costs More Because the Algorithm Says So

      But the fixation on tariffs and inflation obscures a different shift revolutionizing pricing: algorithms. The Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project warns automated tools are reshaping what Canadians are charged for essential goods and services, including groceries and fuel. Companies can now use software to tailor prices based on everything from our browsing patterns, location, loyalty history, device type, and operating system. The same item can appear at one amount for you and another for someone else, depending on who you are, when you see it online, and what the algorithm believes you are willing to pay.

    • Futurism ☛ ICE's AI Tool Has Been a Complete Disaster

      As headlines teem with stories of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers beating protestors, holding children hostage, and murdering people in cold blood, you might be wondering: who the hell hired these guys? As it turns out, AI played a huge role.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Bandcamp Takes a Stand and Bans AI-Generated Music

      “If you encounter music or audio that appears to be made entirely or with heavy reliance on generative AI, please use our reporting tools to flag the content for review by our team,” Bandcamp adds. “We reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI-generated.”

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Why Joseph Weizenbaum Invented the Eliza Chatbot

      “Some subjects have been very hard to convince that Eliza (with its present script) is not human,” Weizenbaum observed in his 1966 paper.

      This realization alarmed Weizenbaum and crystallized a question that shaped the rest of his career and life. “What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people,” he wrote in 1976. “This insight led me to attach new importance to questions of the relationships between the individual and the computer, and hence to resolve to think about them.”

    • The Register UK ☛ Researchers find fine-tuning can misalign LLMs

      The study shows that modifications to LLMs in a specific area can lead to unexpected misalignment across unrelated tasks. Organizations building or deploying LLMs need to mitigate these effects to prevent or manage "emergent misalignment" problems affecting the safety of LLMs, the authors said.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Standalone Grok app still undresses women after X curbs access to tool

      The company said it had stopped Grok from undressing people on the X platform. Grok’s stand-alone app still does it.

    • Wired ☛ Elon Musk’s Grok ‘Undressing’ Problem Isn’t Fixed

      “We can still generate photorealistic nudity on Grok.com,” says Paul Bouchaud, the lead researcher at Paris-based nonprofit AI Forensics, who has been tracking the use of Grok to create sexualized images and ran multiple tests on Grok outside of X. “We can generate nudity in ways that Grok on X cannot.”

    • Tony Finch ☛ GCRA vs leaky / token buckets

      In this note I’ll show why the rate limit algorithms GCRA, leaky bucket, and token bucket behave the same.

      The parameters of the algorithms are a time window and a maximum quota of usage (e.g. requests or bytes) per window. The quota limits the size of a fast burst of requests. The maximum sustained rate is,

    • Daniel Doubrovkine ☛ Serving Markdown for AI Agents

      Dries Buytaert recently wrote about The Third Audience. For decades, websites have targeted two audiences: humans and search engines. AI agents are now the third audience, and most websites aren’t optimized for them yet.

      AI agents prefer clean, structured content over HTML. Markdown is ideal - it’s readable, semantic, and free of navigation chrome. So I made this blog serve its source markdown files alongside the HTML.

    • J Kenneth King ☛ Agentultra - How I Learned Everything I Know About Programming

      I don’t think you need LLMs to learn programming.

      I recognize that people need different strategies and tools to learn new skills and information. I am responsible for the education of people in my life that have learning disabilities and are neurodivergent. I am not a trained teacher but I have taught numerous people about programming, system design, and so forth. I am well aware that different people learn with different strategies.

      You still don’t need LLMs to learn programming.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Bondholders sue Oracle over OpenAI debt deals

      Now, you might think: hold on, OpenAI’s job is to burn money. They claimed $10 billion annualised revenue as of June last year. Where’s OpenAI going to get $60 billion a year to pay Oracle from? Well, Scam Altman’s confident he’ll work something out. Everyone in the world will buy enough ChatGPT to pay the bill! You just watch.

      Putting Oracle this close to the OpenAI money bonfire is not working out so well for Oracle. They just got sued by bondholders today.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Microsoft now paying customers to train in Copilot AI

      So sunk cost fallacy then. Microsoft is paying tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to train large customers.

      Microsoft swears it’s “seeing strong adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot.” But it also needs to pay people to not just despise this exciting new technology.

    • Sadiq Jaffer ☛ Earth Observation on a Budget: Finding Solar Farms with a 42k-Parameter Model

      Solar farms are expanding rapidly across the UK, but keeping track of where they are, and when they appeared, isn't straightforward. In this post, we'll map them using satellite imagery and a surprisingly small neural network with only ~42k parameters.

      We're going to do this using the Tessera foundation model, a pre-trained AI model that already understands satellite imagery in a similar way to how Large Language Models 'understand' text. Using Tessera is a little different from a Large Language Model in that you don't interact with the model directly but rather use pre-generated embeddings for the areas you want to analyse. These embeddings are available at 10m resolution and form a rich summary of that point on Earth's light and radar reflectance over a calendar year, its temporal-spectral characteristics.

    • [Old] Cavendish Labs Co ☛ Sampling at negative temperature

      In a language model, temperature is used to define how creative text generations are. For instance, in the zero temperature limit, the model should deterministically generate the most likely token. In the infinite temperature limit, all tokens are equally likely and the model output will be random noise. For an interactive explanation, see here.

    • Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti ☛ To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI

      Reconsider the positions you did not open. Or the writers you let go. Reconsider the assumption that AI has solved a problem that, at its core, is deeply human and requires not only concatenating words, but also chasing subject-matter experts and understanding the subtleties of product motions, among many other things.

      Technical writers aren’t a luxury. They are the people who translate what you’ve built into something others can use. Without them, you’re shipping a product that can’t speak for itself, or that lies. Your product needs to speak. AI can generate noise effectively and infinitely, but only a technical writer can create the signal.

      Don’t choose the noise. Get them back. Get them onboard.

  • Social Control Media

    • India Times ☛ Social media sites block 4.7 million underage accounts in Australia

      Initial figures showed platforms were taking meaningful action to remove underage users, Australia's eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said.

    • Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Tips on Using Mastodon

      Eventually I realized the simplest things you can do to have a nice Mastodon experience is to pick some reasonably popular instance (so you known it’s stable and won’t disappear after a while) and some decent third-party client. I never read the local timeline, so in the end I don’t think it matters much which instance you’re end up using. If you don’t want to waste time researching instances just go with the “default” mastodon.social instance. You can certainly do a lot worse, and of course, you can always move your account to another Mastodon instance down the road.

    • The Social Web Foundation ☛ New Social Web Working Group at W3C | Social Web Foundation

      Today the W3C standards organization announced a new working group to advance the ActivityPub and Activity Streams standards. The Social Web Foundation, as a W3C member organization, will be participating in the group. The working group’s goal is to release a backwards-compatible iteration of each specification in Q3 of 2026.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ So, You’ve Hit an Age Gate. What Now?

      At some point, you may have been faced with the decision yourself: should I continue to use this service if I have to verify my age? And if so, how can I do that with the least risk to my personal information? This is our guide to navigating those decisions, with information on what questions to ask about the age verification options you’re presented with, and answers to those questions for some of the top most popular social media sites. Even though there’s no way to implement mandated age gates in a way that fully protects speech and privacy rights, our goal here is to help you minimize the infringement of your rights as you manage this awful situation.

    • New York Times ☛ A.I. Has Arrived in Gmail. Here’s What to Know.

      All of this, of course, has implications for privacy. To make the new features work, Gemini, Google’s A.I. assistant, needs access to a user’s entire inbox. The company insists that while Gemini systems analyze our emails, there are protections in place so that its employees do not read them. To understand what this means for us, I interviewed a Google executive overseeing Gmail as well as privacy experts.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Box unlocks agentic data extraction to help companies dig up insights faster

      AI agents can make a difference, Box says. Box Extract, which was announced in September, provides access to two kinds of data extraction agent, including the Standard Extract Agent that’s focused on rapid, cost-efficient data capture, and the Enhanced Extract Agent that has the deeper reasoning capabilities needed to conduct more exhaustive searches for information.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Predator Spyware Sample Indicates 'Vendor-Controlled' C2

      In a blog post yesterday, mobile security firm Jamf detailed how the infamous Predator spyware uses an elaborate set of anti-analysis features that produce data about failed deployments that operators can use to increase the effectiveness of future attacks. The anti-analysis features also suggest Intellexa, the commercial spyware company that owns Predator, has far more visibility and control over deployments than previously thought.

    • Howard Oakley ☛ How local network privacy could affect you

      Any process running on your Mac that tries to make a connection to a local network address, to send or receive network packets without being forwarded by a router, requires privilege to do so. Without that privilege being allowed, the system will block it.

      That sounds draconian, but most common uses are subject to exemptions, as a result of which the Local Network section in Privacy & Security settings remains empty.

  • Confidentiality

    • Aethrvmn ☛ email

      Email is not safe. It never was and it never will be. This doesn't mean we have to give up.

• Defence/Aggression

  • RTL ☛ Social media sites block 4.7 million underage accounts in Australia - RTL Today

    Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta said last week it had removed 331,000 underage accounts from Instagram, 173,000 from Facebook, and 40,000 from Threads in the week to December 11.

  • CBC ☛ 4.7M social media accounts deactivated since Australia's youth ban

    Social media companies have collectively deactivated nearly five million accounts belonging to Australian ​youths just a month after a world-first ban on under-16s took effect, the country's internet regulator said on Friday, a sign the measure has had a swift and sweeping impact.

    The eSafety Commissioner said platforms had so far removed about 4.7 million accounts held by under-16s to comply with a law that went live on Dec. ​10.

  • US Navy Times ☛ US Navy to deploy unmanned systems with surface forces this year

    The U.S. Navy is moving swiftly to integrate and deploy unmanned surface vessels, with three USV divisions slated to be created next week and two medium USVs to be operating under fleet control this year.

  • The Nation ☛ Let’s Make Renee Good the Last Person That ICE Kills

    Republican leaders attempted to smear Good as a “domestic terrorist” and claim that Ross acted in “self-defense.” But the incident was caught on video, and we all saw it: an ICE agent murdering a 37-year-old mother. Good was also a US citizen, the demographic that ICE is claiming to protect.

    ICE’s purpose in Minnesota has been to sow chaos and terror, with a focus in Minneapolis, one of the most diverse areas in the state. Many residents feel like they’re living under occupation. ICE agents are snatching residents from bus stops. Black and brown US citizens are carrying their passports everywhere to keep from being kidnapped by federal agents. Businesses are struggling as people are afraid to show up to work. Schools are on lockdown as ICE shows up to harass and assault students and educators. And now ICE has shot and killed a neighbor.

  • The Nation ☛ A Minneapolis Teacher Wants the Whole Country in the Streets

    What is happening in Minneapolis is a fascist shit show, but there is also grassroots resistance. The oppression is all over the news, but the stories of ordinary people fighting back need to be told, too. Dan Troccoli, a public school teacher at Justice Page Middle School and union activist, says that the battle for Minneapolis is not a one-sided rout by ICE—if it was, there would not be these threats to impose martial law.

    “Many people around the city have been going around patrolling and keeping an eye on these agents,” he told me. “There are estimates as high as 10,000 people that have been involved in the city in these efforts in the last six weeks. Given the legacy of the uprisings after [the 2020 police murder of] George Floyd, people in the city have been activated for years now. I would argue we were Trump’s target for that reason, but it’s not going exactly like they planned, and people need to know that.”

  • Robert Reich ☛ How To Mobilize America Against Fascism

    You are needed. Desperately.

    What more can you do beyond protesting, calling your members of Congress, and (if you can afford to) writing checks to candidates who can flip seats?

    Stay politically engaged, but don’t wait for the Democratic Party to get a spine or hope that the Republican Party discovers integrity. We are moving beyond party politics.

    Here’s what you can also do: Mobilize your employers, your organizations, and your congregations — anywhere you work, any group of which you’re a member — and get them to use their influence to end this barbarity.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Minneapolis Crucible

    For a gradual destruction of democracy would have been hard to resist. After all, who wants to rock the boat when there’s money to be made, jobs to keep, perks to be had, convenient bothsideism to be upheld, if you will just be silent and keep your head down?

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Next Move ☛ Free Press, State Media

    Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, “suffered internal bleeding.” No proof. Just the word of some unnamed “US officials.”

    Now, plenty of outlets cite anonymous sources. But those sources must be used judiciously. Here’s what the Associated Press has to say about the practice: [...]

  • New York Times ☛ Read the Clintons’ Personal Letter to Comer

    Bill and Hillary Clinton wrote a lengthy letter to Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the Oversight Committee, refusing to testify in Congress.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Kyiv energy crisis 'extremely serious,' as SBU presents evidence of Russian 'crimes against humanity'

      Maxim Timchenko, CEO of DTEK, Ukraine's biggest private energy firm, wrote on X on Jan. 15 that Ukraine's energy sector is facing an "extremely serious situation" due to "unprecedented attacks by Russia and extreme cold across the country."

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Talking about energy dominance? Solar would like to have a word

      There’s a lot happening right now in U.S. energy and policy and it’s easy to lose track of the larger picture. I’m going to ask you to turn your attention, at least for a few minutes, to something bigger that’s also happening:

      Solar power is moving toward dominance of the global energy system.

    • Matt Birchler ☛ This post was almost angry, now it's just confused

      The core of Bezos's argument, as I understood it, was creating a parallel between electricity distribution and data center distribution, specifically in the context of AWS and why he thought that worked for data centers. At no point did he mention personal computers, and he certainly didn't express any desire to move all customer data to his cloud. The explicit text of his words was that AWS solved the problem of every business needing its own physical server farm. AWS offered a different solution, one that has been quite successful and convenient on the whole.

    • Howard Oakley ☛ The Dutch Golden Age: Mills

      Both watermills and windmills date back to ancient times, and became widespread in the Middle Ages. By the seventeenth century they were used for grinding grain into flour, processing wool and fabrics, sharpening tools, forging and metalcraft, manufacturing paper, sawing timber, and sundry other purposes.

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Good Questions

      On November 21st Bryce Elder posed Five questions from an ignorant no-coiner about the crypto crash. Each of his five questions identified some interesting apparent anomalies.

      Below the fold I look into each of his questions, asking how anomalous its anomalies really were and whether they have persisted into the New Year.

      TL;DR none of them are really surprising but reaching that conclusion took a good deal of research.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • NDTV ☛ Gates Foundation Unveils $9 Billion Budget And Plans To Cut Staff

    The planned layoffs mark another major shift for one of the largest and most influential foundations in the world at a time when many of its long-term priorities, such as addressing poverty and improving global health, have been undermined by cuts in US government spending by the Trump administration.

  • The Drone Girl ☛ Drone pilots are terrified by the FCC ban on foreign drones

    Pilot Institute, which is a widely regarded education group that offers courses on drones and airplanes, surveyed 8,056 drone operators nationwide from December 9-15, 2025 about how they might feel about a ban on DJI drones.

    Coincidentally, that survey occurred just days before the FCC dropped the ban announcement on December 22. These operators didn’t know the regulatory hammer was about to fall, yet they were already deeply anxious about potential DJI restrictions. Here are some highlights of what the Pilot Institute survey (which you can read in full here) found: [...]

  • Seth Godin ☛ Mad magazine autostereogram, cutecore

    The end result is that pop is not popular anymore. It may never be again. The center was a moment in time, but the edges are now everywhere.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Mexican reporter’s death continues pattern of impunity after 6 journalists killed last year

    According to CPJ research, Mexico consistently ranks among the 10 countries with the highest number of journalist murders, with such crimes frequently not leading to convictions.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Techdirt ☛ Justice Gorsuch Reminds: The Fourth Amendment Isn’t Dead Yet

    The decision at issue is Case v. Montana where a unanimous Court agreed that the Fourth Amendment did not actually apply. The justices agreed that earlier precedent still held: it will not violate the Fourth Amendment for police officers to enter a home without a warrant if they have an “objectively reasonable basis for believing” that someone inside needs emergency assistance. It is a rule that on its face does not necessarily look unreasonable. The problem, though, is that, over time, courts have found more and more rules describing circumstances when it is ok to supersede the Fourth Amendment’s own clear rule that the people should be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” from warrantless searches and seizures. As a result, over time the public has gotten less and less secure as fewer and fewer warrants have been needed by the government.

  • Vox ☛ Can Renee Good’s ICE shooter be prosecuted?

    A woman in Minnesota is dead and there is video of her killing at the hands of an ICE agent. The first response from many thinking Americans was: There will be a legal way of dealing with what happened here. There will be accountability. Why is that our response?

  • Wired ☛ Why ICE Can Kill With Impunity

    Sometimes suspects were seen to have guns, according to the ICE logs I obtained, particularly in the course of Homeland Security Investigations. But three times, ICE documented a suspect’s body, described as “hands/feet/body,” as a weapon.

    And in at least a dozen cases, I uncovered evidence suggesting that the shooting victims were unarmed.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Schrödinger's Mask

    Aren't masks amazing? When it comes to disease, their use is an imminent threat to an officer's health and safety, but when it comes to accountability, their absence is an imminent threat to an officer's health and safety.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ DOJ Continues to Let DHS Pick and Choose Screen Shots Pertaining to Their Assaults

    Generally, DHS has permitted — encouraged, seemingly — DHS officers to use their own personal phones and to use Signal. And whether officers are using their own or government phones, DHS ditched its archiving software last year; it is relying on officers’ taking screen caps of relevant communications.

  • The Nation ☛ The Defiance Is Steadily Building, in Increasingly Unlikely Places

    On Monday four lawyers in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division resigned, because their unit wasn’t involved in the putative investigation. The division normally takes a leading role into law enforcement shootings. On Tuesday, an astonishing six lawyers in the Minnesota US Attorney’s office also resigned, because they had been assigned to look into the political affiliations of Good’s wife, Becca, and not into the actions of murderer Jonathan Ross, according to The New York Times. I’m sorry, I’m not using “allegedly” to modify murder, because I’ve seen all the videos, even the one the administration thought exonerated Ross—merely because it showed Becca Good to be a protesting lesbian, and Renee Good to be unafraid of ICE.

    “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” she told Ross. Those were her last words.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ ‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid

    It apparently looks a lot like Google Maps, but designed to show the richness of an area for “targets”, populated in part by density of immigrants. And then you can dig in: [...]

  • EFF ☛ Report: ICE Using Palantir Tool That Feeds On Medicaid Data

    “Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a “confidence score” on the person’s current address,” 404 Media reports today. “ICE is using it to find locations where lots of people it might detain could be based.”

  • Wired ☛ GoFundMe Ignores Own Rules by Hosting a Legal-Defense Fund for the ICE Agent Who Killed Renee Good

    The crowdfunding platform GoFundMe is allowing a fundraising campaign tied to the potential legal defense of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who fatally shot a civilian to remain online, despite company rules barring fundraisers connected to violent crimes and past enforcement actions against similar campaigns.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • PC World ☛ Spotify just hiked prices again. There are cheaper options

    It’s worth noting that music streaming prices aren’t soaring at the same rate as those of video streamers like Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max. For now, individual music-streaming rates are still hovering within a few bucks of $10 a month, which was pretty much standard for a decade.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: It’s not normal

    6 years, 5 months and 22 days after Fox aired "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," Bill Clinton signed a new bill into law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).

    Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it's a felony to modify your own property in ways that the manufacturer disapproves of, even if your modifications accomplish some totally innocuous, legal, and socially beneficial goal. Not a little felony, either: DMCA 1201 provides for a five year sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Techdirt ☛ Trump, Ellison Wage War On ‘Woke Netflix’ In Effort To Scuttle Warner Brothers Deal, Dominate U.S. Media

  Warner Brothers rejected Ellison’s higher $108 billion offer for Netflix, citing Saudi money involvement and dodgy financial math as something that might make approval more difficult. When that failed, Ellison attempted a hostile takeover attempt with the help of the president’s son in law and the Saudis. When that didn’t work, Ellison tried to sue Warner Brothers.

  With that going nowhere, Ellison has clearly turned to right wing propaganda to help portray the Netflix acquisition as somehow “woke” and dangerous: [...]

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • The Verge ☛ Grok undressed the mother of one of Elon Musk’s kids — and now she’s suing

      St. Clair is one of the many people over the past couple weeks who have found themselves undressed without permission by X’s AI chatbot, Grok. The chatbot has been gingerly complying with users’ requests to remove clothing from many women and some apparent minors, or put them in sexualized poses or scenarios. The feature has caused an uproar from policymakers around the world who have launched investigations and vowed that new and existing laws should prevent this kind of behavior. But so far, The Verge has found, the bot continues to comply with requests.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ French Court Orders Popular VPNs to Block More Pirate Sites, Despite Opposition

    A new order from the Tribunal Judiciaire de Paris requires several popular VPNs to block access to live sports streaming sites. The order, directed at CyberGhost, ExpressVPN, NordVPN, ProtonVPN, and Surfshark, confirms that VPNs are now classified as "technical intermediaries" under the French Sports Code. In addition, the "no-log defense" is not seen as a blocking hurdle by the court.