Leftovers

• Tedium ☛ Bubbling Under Hot 100 History: Billboard’s Chart Overhang

  The tale of the Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart, the place where hits go to die—in some cases, over and over again. Let’s talk about the chart through the lens of its two most iconic artists.

• James G ☛ Subscribing to local news with a web reader

  Most of the websites I follow in my web reader are personal sites like blogs. With that said, recently I subscribed to my local council’s news web page. On that page, they publish various updates – events coming to the region, draft council reports, weather warnings, and more. They advertise that there is an RSS feed available for their news page, which is what lets me follow their news in my web reader.

• Barry Hess ☛ Blogging in a Stream

  When my blog became about Essays, it may not surprise anyone to learn that within months I basically stopped blogging. Thankfully I’ve been off that trip for a long time. I’m a blogger, not an essayist, after all.

• Science

  • The Independent UK ☛ Largest solar radiation storm in more than 20 years could trigger auroras on Earth

    The aurora is forecast at a level eight on the Kp scale. The scale, which measures the aurora's intensity, ranges from zero to nine.

    The best way to view them is to find a north-facing view with a clear horizon at around midnight to 2 a.m. local time.

  • Hackaday ☛ Tolerating Delay With DTN

    The Internet has spoiled us. You assume network packets either show up pretty quickly or they are never going to show up. Even if you are using WiFi in a crowded sports stadium or LTE on the side of a deserted highway, you probably either have no connection or a fairly robust, although perhaps intermittent, network. But it hasn’t always been that way. Radio networks, especially, used to be very hit or miss and, in some cases, still are.

    Perhaps the least reliable network today is one connecting things in deep space. That’s why NASA has a keen interest in Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN). Note that this is the name of a protocol, not just a wish for a certain quality in your network. DTN has been around a while, seen real use, and is available for you to use, too.

• Career/Education

  "" ☛ https://darrengoossens.wordpress.com/2026/01/20/voices-for-the-future-vol-1/ | Source: Darren Goossens

  • Darren Goossens ☛ Voices for the future vol. 1 – DSPACE

    This is a somewhat academic collection of essays about some of science fiction’s most venerated figures, mostly from the ‘golden age’ of the American pulps, the exceptions being Olaf Stapledon and Kurt Vonnegut.

    It is edited by Thomas D. Clareson, and published by Bowling Green University Popular Press in 1976, so it is 50 years old. The authors it covers are: [...]

  • Lionel Dricot ☛ Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots

    Before the exam, I copy/pasted my questions into some LLMs and, yes, the results were interesting enough. So I came up with the following solution: I would let the students choose whether they wanted to use an LLM or not. This was an experiment.

    The questionnaire contained the following:

    Use of Chatbots

    Tell the professor if you usually use chatbots (ChatGPT/LLM/whatever) when doing research and investigating a subject. You have the choice to use them or not during the exam, but you must decide in advance and inform the professor.

    Option A: I will not use any chatbot, only traditional web searches. Any use of them will be considered cheating.

    Option B: I may use a chatbot as it’s part of my toolbox. I will then respect the following rules:
    1) I will inform the professor each time information come from a chatbot
    2) When explaining my answers, I will share the prompts I’ve used so the professor understands how I use the tool
    3) I will identify mistakes in answers from the chatbot and explain why those are mistakes

    Not following those rules will be considered cheating. Mistakes made by chatbots will be considered more important than honest human mistakes, resulting in the loss of more points. If you use chatbots, you should be held accountable for the output.

    I thought this was fair. You can use chatbots, but you will be held accountable for it.

• Hardware

  • Android Police ☛ I used a 40-year-old laptop, and it changed the way I view technology in 2026

    Using the Tandy 102 for work is a magical experience. If you're a writer, it's almost guaranteed to help you write more and faster.

    Its twisted-nematic (more power-efficient than Super Twist) LCD can display only eight lines of text, meaning my thoughts are ever forward.

    It's freeing, since I'm not constantly going back to polish as I write. The idea is to get the thoughts out on the page and worry about the fit and finish of the piece later.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Dan Q ☛ Peripheral Vision

    This phenomenon seems to be most-pronounced when the thing you’re using a single eye to looking at something small and pointlike (like an LED), and where there’s an obstacle closer to your eye than to the thing you’re looking at. But it’s still a little spooky2.

  • Hackaday ☛ Silicone Bakeware Might Be Bad For Your Liver

    The siloxanes that make up silicone bakeware can target “the liver through oral exposure, as well as the liver and lungs through inhalation exposure.” The fat content of the food being baked is also a factor as these compounds are lipophilic, so higher fat foods will absorb more siloxanes than lower fat foods.

    Don’t throw out all your silicone yet, though. The researchers say, “the results showed a consistent decreasing trend in migration levels across consecutive weekly baking sessions, with no increase after the seven-month interval.” So, that dingy looking silicone mat you’ve used a hundred times is safer than a brand new, brightly-colored one.

• Proprietary

  • Android Police ☛ This Gmail feature fixed my least favorite part of email

    Gmail has supported templates for years, but I’d always dismissed them as something meant for sales emails or canned support replies.

    They sounded like overkill for everyday use, so I never bothered turning them on.

  • Games ☛ Elder Scrolls Online's pivot to smaller Seasons "is not in any way a response to" Microsoft's layoffs

    Elder Scrolls Online developer Zenimax Online Studios has disputed that its recent pivot to smaller "season" expansions or chapters is related to Microsoft's layoffs and a smaller team.

  • A former lead of the Assassin's Creed series has filed a lawsuit against Ubisoft, citing "constructive dismissal"

    Marc-Alexis Côté, who was a leading figure in the Assassin's Creed series, has taken legal action against Ubisoft, demanding CAD $1.3 million for what he describes as "constructive dismissal."

    According to a report by CBC Radio Canada, Côté is seeking two years of severance alongside CAD $75,000 in compensation, following Ubisoft's announcement of his "voluntary" departure from the company last October.

    Côté has countered this claim by stating he did not choose to leave, alleging that Ubisoft made the decision to appoint new leadership for the Assassin's Creed series.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Warning that AI could hit first-time jobseekers hardest

      The International Labour Organisation (ILO) released its Employment and Social Trends 2026 report last week. It finds that while the global unemployment rate is projected to stay at 4.9% in 2026 (186 million people) – millions of workers around the world still lack access to quality jobs.

    • Doug Jones ☛ AI, Software Development, and Centralization - Doug Jones

      This aligns well with how I feel about LLMs. I think anyone who cares about computing and the impacts it has on society has a vested interest in seeing that AI does not become centralized. And I agree that there’s too much practical use for LLMs in coding for things to totally evaporate in a cloud of hype. (Don’t take this to mean there isn’t too much hype around LLMs and a ton of worthless AI slop. I think the industry as a whole will see the bubble burst, but, like previous tech bubbles, we will some aspect of the technology make it through.)

    • Ivan Velichko ☛ A grounded take on agentic coding for production environments

      I want to share my very recent experience with agentic coding. Primarily because I was (finally) genuinely impressed by the productivity gains it unlocked. But also because I'm fed up with posts on X claiming that you can now build absolutely anything in no time, with almost no prior domain knowledge or programming experience. While that might be true to some extent for prototyping or throwaway apps you can one-shot, this is not what I'm seeing in real production systems.

      The amount of engineering effort, domain knowledge in general, and familiarity with a project's codebase in particular now likely matter more than ever. Agents generate code extremely fast, and that can be both a blessing and a curse for long-term maintainability and extensibility.

    • Doc Searls ☛ Discourse & Datcourse

      The reverse centaur. That’s where Big AI is the human part, and you’re just the horse part.

      If you have a suspicion that the AI bubble will burst, or even if you don’t, it’s worthwhile to read Cory Doctorow’s AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage, in The Guardian. Some useful metaphors in there. For example…

    • Martin Alderson ☛ Why sandboxing coding agents is harder than you think

      that does the exact same as rm -rf ~. It can now execute this simply by running go test.

      Equally, even git itself can execute arbitrary code via commit hooks. So it could just write to .git/hooks/pre-commit and then do the whitelisted git commit command - to give it full shell access.

    • PC World ☛ Don't like Google's AI answers? Here's how to get rid of them

      These AI-generated summaries have been around for months now, and their aim is to quickly give you a one-stop answer to whatever it is you’re searching for. This is the same kind of AI-generated conversational response you might get from an AI chatbot like ChatGPT—and just as with ChatGPT, the answers in AI Overviews aren’t always kosher.

      Google doesn’t make it easy to disable AI Overviews in its search results, but you do have a few options if you want to avoid the AI summaries.

    • Steve Ledlow ☛ The End of Thinking

      I’ve been saying it to my family for a long time now, but wall-e dystopia is rather quickly approaching us.

    • Shrivu Shankar ☛ Building Multi-Agent Systems (Part 3)

      In this post, I want to provide an update on the agentic designs I’ve seen (from building agents, using the latest AI products, and talking to other folks in agent-valley) and break down how the architecture has evolved yet again over the past few months.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI-Powered Surveillance in Schools - Schneier on Security

      It all sounds pretty dystopian: [...]

    • [Old] Peter N M Hansteen ☛ I asked ChatGPT to write a pf.conf to spec, 2023-06-07 version

      I will leave it as an excercise to the reader to point out why this would earn an F.

  • Social Control Media

    • India Times ☛ Meta 'turning a blind eye' to illegal gambling ads, UK Gambling Commission says

      Britain's Gambling Commission said on Monday that ‍Meta Platforms, the ​owner of Facebook and Instagram, was turning a ⁠blind eye to illegal online casinos advertising on its sites, indicating it was happy to continue taking money from criminals.

    • C4ISRNET ☛ Hands full at home, Iran is seen slowing cyber attacks on UK

      The implication is that Iran has been pushing the cause of Scottish independence through malign cyber activity in a bid to weaken the UK, but slowed its activity as violent protests raged in Iran.

      “What has been very interesting over the recent period, given the social unrest in Iran, is the drop off in social media activity and chat bot activity focused on Scotland, elections and independence,” Higgins told Defense News.

    • Steve Ledlow ☛ Web, Social Networks, Social Web

      For the sake of thought, I’ll offer my comments on his last paragraph and closing. While I agree that the [Internet] ≠ social media, it’s a take on why we’re better without “social media” at all.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Social media without socializing

      Way back in 1999, Larry Lessig taught us that "code is law." By encoding these restrictions into the feed, Friendster's programmers were putting limits on the kinds of relationships that could be formed using the service. But Lessig's law (code?) is often overidden by an even older principle: William Gibson's 1982 maxim that "the street finds its own uses for things."

      Friendster told its users how to be friends with one another, and Friendster's users treated Friendster's management as damage and routed around it. They created accounts with names like "New York City" and whenever anyone friended that account, it friended them back. Users hacked their own way to form "illegitimate" friendships based on affinity into the system: [...]

    • Rolling Stone ☛ 2016 Nostalgia: Why Our Decade-Old Selfies Hit Different

      Maybe, then, 2016 is the year we finally lost touch with reality. Fake news and viral misinformation became QAnon and election denial and eventually deepfakes and state-disseminated AI slop. We can study our decade-younger faces and find people not numbed to this stuff, who might actually believe that everyone can agree upon certain basic facts. They are anxious and afraid, to be sure, but have tried to convince themselves that reason will survive. And maybe it can, in a society that outlasts Trump and seeks to reverse the profound damage he has wrought.

    • Atharva Raykar ☛ How the Lobsters front page works

      The code is open source, so I had a look at how the front page algorithm works.

      This is it: [...]

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Zimbabwe ☛ Why Cybersecurity, Data Protection and Safe AI Training Must Be Central to Board Induction in Zimbabwe’s Digital Economy

      Cybersecurity is no longer an ICT issue alone, it is a governance and risk issue. A single ransomware attack or systems breach can cripple operations, expose sensitive customer data and result in severe regulatory penalties. Similarly, data protection failures can lead to litigation, loss of public trust and sanctions under local and international data protection frameworks.

    • The Register UK ☛ Don't underestimate pro-Russia hacktivists, warns UK NCSC

      The cyber arm of the UK's sigint specialists at GCHQ specifically highlighted local authorities, including regional governments, and critical national infrastructure (CNI) organizations as being at an acute risk of hacktivist denial of attacks.

      These are typically denial-of-service (DoS) in nature, but the cyber defense crew warned orgs not to underestimate the damage these simple attacks can do.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Cyble 2025 Threat Landscape: Ransomware & Supply Chain

      Cyble’s Annual Threat Landscape Report for 2025 documents a cybercrime environment that remained volatile even as international law enforcement agencies escalated disruption efforts. Large-scale takedowns, arrests, and infrastructure seizures failed to slow adversaries for long. Instead, cybercriminal ecosystems fractured, reorganized, and re-emerged across decentralized platforms, encrypted messaging channels, and invitation-only forums. The ransomware landscape, in particular, demonstrated a capacity for rapid regeneration that outpaced enforcement pressure.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Dark Reading ☛ ChatGPT Health Raises Big Security, Safety Concerns

      And yet, it must be stressed that ChatGPT Health enables the user to connect one's own medical records with it, and those records can be shared with third parties like Apple Health and other wellness apps, if the user opts in. The user would be entrusting a private company with his or her most sensitive information in order to solicit medical advice.

      Even in a perfect world with flawless encryption, no prompt injection attacks, an excellent data security track-record, and no severe safety concerns, such a move is arguably risky. And we do not live in a perfect world.

    • Forbes ☛ AI Bathroom Monitors? Welcome To America's New Surveillance High Schools

      Schools across the U.S. are rolling out AI-powered surveillance technology, including drones, facial recognition and even bathroom listening devices. But there’s not much data to prove they keep kids safe.

  • Confidentiality

    • Cyble Inc ☛ How To Delete Saved Passwords In Google Chrome Securely

      That quiet accumulation of saved credentials feels harmless until you stop considering what’s actually at stake. Losing a device, sharing a computer, or falling victim to a remote attack can instantly turn convenience into exposure. Managing and deleting saved passwords isn’t busywork; it’s basic digital hygiene, especially if you want to delete saved passwords in Chrome before they become a liability.

      This article walks through how to remove passwords from Google Chrome, explains how to clear saved passwords in Chrome across devices, and outlines why browser-based password storage is risky, along with safer alternatives that make sense in real-world use.

    • University of Toronto ☛ Single sign on systems versus X.509 certificates for the web

      Modern single sign on specifications such as OIDC and SAML and systems built on top of them are fairly complex things with a lot of moving parts. It's possible to have a somewhat simple surface appearance for using them in web servers, but the actual behind the scenes implementation is typically complicated, and of course you need an identity provider server and its supporting environment as well (which can get complicated). One reaction to this is to suggest using X.509 certificates to authenticate people (as a recent comment on this entry did).

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Strategist ☛ Hybrid risks rise as US withdraws from international organisations

    The danger, then, lies not in this single decision but in the cumulative effects of US disengagement over time. Indeed, Washington’s confidence in multilateral institutions had already plummeted in recent years as China and Russia expanded their grip on them. International partners, if they don’t want the US withdrawal to send the message to Beijing and Moscow that they can further expand their influence, should increase and refocus their engagement to demonstrate the value of the most crucial international bodies.

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ Zero margins: Model shows Europe’s long odds in a Baltic war

    As Washington increasingly adopts a more transactional approach to defence in Europe, the threat to those states on the border with Russia increases. Simulations suggest that while Europe remains more powerful, it may simply be unable to overcome internal differences in time to stop Moscow’s plans.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The U.S. Military Faces a Reckoning on Greenland

    As my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote today, Donald Trump’s threatening message to the Norwegian prime minister should, in any responsible democracy, force the rest of the U.S. political system to act to control him. The president is talking about an invasion that would require “citizens of a treaty ally,” as she put it, “to become American against their will,” all because he “now genuinely lives in a different reality.” And yet neither Congress nor the sycophants in the White House seem willing to stop him.

    The U.S. military is obligated by law, and by every tradition of American decency, to refuse to follow illegal orders. But what about orders that may not be illegal but are clearly immoral and illogical? The president, for example, can order the Pentagon to plan for an invasion of Greenland; such an order would be little more than a direction to organize one more war game. (The military, as it sometimes does during war games, might not even use real place names, but rather use maps that look a lot like the North Atlantic as it organizes an invasion of “Verdegrun” or something.)

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Martin Luther King Jr. once warned of the 'drum-major instinct.' It threatens our nation today.

    This recent spate of colonialist jingoism feels like a wall in a byzantine maze crumbling and connecting a different but similar past to a present that follows tragic behavioral patterns. Recent events may feel different, but they carry echoes from generations past.

    Nearly 60 years ago, in a sermon entitled “The Drum-Major Instinct,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached on the mentality at the center of such violent international escapades. As he said in the sermon: “The parallels are frightening.”

  • Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Planning to Tighten Up Age Checks in Europe

    After testing its new age-detection system in Britain over the last year, TikTok will start rolling out the tech across Europe in the next few weeks, according to a new report from Reuters. The move comes amid increased regulatory scrutiny of the social video platform and its owner ByteDance, especially pertaining to the online safety of children.

  • Truthdig ☛ ICE and the Dual-State Regime

    Vance’s comments shed light upon the larger legal design behind ICE’s newfound power. In Trump’s second term, the United States is rapidly devolving into what the late German émigré legal and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel called a “dual state,” in which acts of violence perpetrated against designated enemies of the regime are not only tolerated, but often celebrated as acts of valor and redemption.

    A socialist attorney who practiced labor law in Berlin, Fraenkel fled Nazi Germany in 1938, eventually settling in Chicago. There he would write his most famous work, “The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship,” a study of the legal system implemented by the Third Reich in the 1930s.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Greenland? - Robert Reich

  • Molly White ☛ Issue 99 – They’ve bought themselves a Congress

    Last Wednesday afternoon, Coinbase withdrew its support for the Senate’s draft market structure bill, citing concerns about limits on tokenized stocks and stablecoin rewards, burdensome requirements for defi protocols, and excessive authority granted to the SEC.1 Within hours, Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott (R-SC) canceled the markup hearing scheduled for the following day.

    While mainstream news sources are often hesitant to draw cause and effect between two suspiciously timed events, it was too overt even for them, with the New York Times writing that Coinbase had “scuttled” the vote.2 Coinbase further emphasized its degree of control over the Senate when CEO Brian Armstrong stated in an interview with CNBC, “We’ve got a chance to do a new draft and hopefully get back into a markup in a few weeks” — speaking as if Coinbase, not Congress, controlled both the drafting process and legislative calendar.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Big Business Should End Its Faustian Bargain With Trump

    Granted, Trump sometimes appears to back down. We probably won’t be invading Greenland over the next few weeks. But this is only a temporizing tactic while he finds other means to escalate, such as imposing tariffs on countries that came to Greenland’s aid. Overall, Trump 47 is escalating, day by day.

    The persistence of the TACO myth is part of the broader picture: Many people, especially in the business world, are still trying to convince themselves that they’ll do OK despite Trump’s craziness. Hey, the stock market is up, isn’t it? (It is, but US stocks, which are up 16 percent over the past year, have lagged stocks in other advanced countries, which rose 33 percent in 2025.)

    Well, I have news for American business leaders: You will not do OK.

  • Carole Cadwalladr ☛ Stop Normalizing Fascism

    It’s actually unfair to pick on the New York Times on this one though their strategy of making the chocolate chip cookie recipe as big the today-in-fascism story is not, I feel, a very helpful example of communicating news priorities.

    Unfair, because the crisis today is squarely in Europe too and our newspapers are no better. We are in a profound geopolitical crisis. The world that we have known is no more. Not that you’d get this from the front page headlines.

    We are now facing an aggressor in the East - Russia - and an aggressor in the West - the United States. Aggressors, who we now know beyond doubt, are not just aligned but working together.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Starmer says ‘we need to do more’ to protect children from social media

    Sir Keir avoided referring directly to a ban, leaving open other restrictions short of a ban. The Government has previously floated the idea of curfews at 10pm and two-hour caps on the use of individual social media apps.

    Peers in the House of Lords will vote on Wednesday on an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. The amendment would introduce a ban and force the Government’s hand when the Bill comes back to the Commons.

    It is estimated that as many as 70 per cent of Labour MPs would support a crackdown.

  • El País ☛ ‘They don’t even bother using subliminal messages’: Trump administration’s Nazi references spark outrage

    But this was not the only incident to generate controversy. On January 8, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem held a press conference behind a lectern bearing the phrase “One of ours, all of yours,” which has also been denounced as a fascist slogan used to justify collective reprisals by Nazism and the Franco dictatorship during World War II and the Spanish Civil War, although the origin of the phrase is disputed. Even so, its appearance in the midst of the backlash and condemnation of the government’s immigration crackdown — following the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis at the hands of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent — has only intensified the criticism.

• Environment

  • Renewable Energy World ☛ ‘Tale of two snowpacks,’ water supply report shows elevation matters

    Most sites in Montana hit all-time, or near-record amounts of precipitation in December when an atmospheric river released a deluge across the state.

    That’s according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, which released its January Water Supply Outlook Report last week.

  • BoingBoing ☛ EPA: Elon's methane-powered xAI datacenter illegally generating electricity

    The turbines harm air quality and increase the risk of cancer, asthma and respiratory diseases. The neighborhood is historically poor and black; targeting such communities is a longtime strategy for heavy industry and the energy sector looking for places to site polluting or otherwise risky facilities without facing significant local opposition. But in this case they found just that, and then some. Here's Abre' Conner, the director of environmental and climate justice for the NAACP, which filed a lawsuit against xAI last July claiming its unpermitted turbines violated the Clean Air Act.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Small Cypress ☛ weeknote 3 | small cypress

      This week has been dominated by the $800 utilities bill that came in the mail, which follows up last month's $600 bill. Half of the bill is the cost to deliver natural gas to our house on our city's aging infrastructure. There's a lot I need to learn about as far as making sure I am insulating our home enough for the Maryland winter as a person new to seasonal living - and I need to figure out how the hell we do something long-term about affordable (maybe not even fossil fuel!) heating.

  • Overpopulation

    • Deseret Media ☛ China's population drops for fourth year as fewer babies born

      China's population fell by 3.39 million in 2025, marking a fourth year of decline.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ To Give Birth or Not to Give Birth

      Global fertility decline has made reproduction a site of reactionary family policies and moralized childlessness. But a healthy society would let people choose to have children or not without turning that choice into a moral adjudication.

• Finance

  • [Old] Derek Thompson ☛ Are Young People Screwed?

    But on closer examination, the “young people are screwed” narrative is only true enough to be dangerous. Some of the evidence behind it is dead-on. Much of it is incomplete or incorrect. Trust me that I know exactly how annoying it is for a middle-aged guy to “actually…” young people who say they’re struggling. So, I thought I would try to do the fairest thing: Provide a rigorous, highly visual, one-stop evaluation of the argument, illustrating both the strongest case for and the strongest case against.

  • The Register UK ☛ ERP isn't dead yet – but most execs are planning the wake

    Seven out of ten C-suite leaders see a life beyond ERP as businesses have come to know it, but are divided on what the future holds for this big-ticket item critical to organizational performance.

    Research conducted by Censuswide among 4,295 CFOs, CISOs, CIOs, and CEOs worldwide found the majority of organizations (70 percent) do not see traditional ERP as the future.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack

    It's just that you couldn't find a bigger culture clash between top-down and bottom-up if you invested a billion euros on a 27-nation research project. Finding the sweet spot where EU involvement can make the biggest difference to FOSS enterprise adoption, while maintaining the essential spark of agility and freedom that brings FOSS alive, that's where technical, economic and cultural engineering needs to happen. Fast.

    Open source by itself is no guarantee of independence. Linux is the giant hogweed of European open source, even if it started four years before its home nation of Finland joined the EU. It has kept the [Internet] and supercomputing free of commercial or state monopoly. The best it could do in mobile, though, is maintenance of an American OS duopoly. In the enterprise and public sector, it has done nothing to crimp Microsoft's tendrils. Which is where the EU most desperately needs it to succeed.

  • Wired ☛ The Race to Build the DeepSeek of Europe Is On

    As Europe’s longstanding alliance with the US falters, its push to become a self-sufficient AI superpower has become more urgent.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Lawmakers Advance Six Public Safety Communications Bills

    The House Communications and Technology Subcommittee passed six public safety communications bills onto the full Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday. All measures passed by voice vote with no amendments.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Citizen Lab ☛ London PR Firm Rewrites Wikipedia for Governments and Billionaires - The Citizen Lab

      Blatant changes are easily identified, but “small Wikipedia edits punch above their weight,” says Fittarelli. “These kinds of edits make narratives seem credible precisely because they are hardly noticeable. Once that enters the information stream, it becomes really hard to claw it back.”

    • The Bureau of Investigative Journalism ☛ London PR firm rewrites Wikipedia for governments and… | TBIJ

      Now, we can reveal Wikipedia has been subject to shady, paid-for edits ordered by partners at an elite London PR firm with links to Downing Street. And the clients who benefitted from this “wikilaundering” are some of the world’s richest and most powerful people.

      The firm in question is Portland Communications, whose founder Tim Allan is now the director of communications for Keir Starmer. And it has been busted once already for this practice, which is in breach of the British PR professionals’ code of conduct.

      But after the firm was exposed, former employees told us, it simply started hiring middlemen instead. As one of them put it: “No one said, ‘We should stop doing this.’ The question was how we could keep doing it without getting caught.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russia Blocks Record 1.3M Web Pages in 2025 - The Moscow Times

    The biggest increases were seen in materials related to tools for bypassing [Internet] restrictions, which jumped 1,235% to more than 93,000 items, the regulator, Roskomnadzor, told the Vedomosti business daily on Monday.

  • CPJ ☛ Bahá’í photographer arrested in Iran amid [Internet] blackout

    The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Iranian authorities to immediately release freelance documentary photographer Navid Zarrehbin Irani, and to halt the systematic harassment and intimidation of journalists in Iran.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Davos’s Duty - Robert Reich

    In reality, Trump’s lawsuit has nothing to do with any so-called “debanking.” Trump is suing JPMorgan Chase because last week Dimon came out publicly against Trump’s criminal probe of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, and apparently Trump worries about what Dimon might say at Davos.

    Dimon’s opposition to the criminal investigation was couched in the mildest of terms: “Anything that chips away at [the Fed’s independence] is not a good idea. And in my view, will have the reverse consequences. It’ll increase inflation expectations and probably increase rates over time.”

    Yet Dimon’s comment infuriated Trump.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Harassed at home, convicted abroad: Pakistan steps up prosecution of overseas journalists

    Pakistan’s government has stepped up the use of in absentia convictions and arrest warrants against Pakistani journalists living overseas since late 2025, highlighting an escalating crackdown by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government on critical reporting and commentary that extends beyond domestic borders.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • El País ☛ Bruce Springsteen speaks out against ICE and dedicates a song to Renee Good

    During a surprise performance in New Jersey, the musician condemned the deployment of federal agents in American cities and remembered the woman killed in Minneapolis

  • [Old] Arena Group ☛ Quaker Groups Sue Trump Administration Over ICE Church Raids

    The lawsuit, brought by five Quaker groups, alleges the Trump order infringes on their First Amendment right to freedom of religion by instilling fear in congregants and leading to the cancellation of services. The lawsuit states that the potential of ICE raids is sending a "chilling effect" across immigrant worshippers at Quaker services.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Martin Luther King Jr. was ahead of his time in pushing for universal basic income

    To address inequality – and out of growing concern for how automation might displace workers – King became an early advocate for universal basic income. Under universal basic income, the government provides direct cash payments to all citizens to help them afford life’s expenses.

  • JURIST ☛ UN condemns 'alarming' global execution increase

    The report addressed the conduct of several countries, including Iran. The UN estimated that at least 1,500 individuals were executed in Iran in 2025–at least 47 percent for drug offenses. Türk said this figure suggests a “systemic use of capital punishment as a tool of State intimidation.” Iran Human Rights Monitor reported similar concerns in December and said that “political death sentences” have especially targeted ethnic minorities, including Kurds and the Baloch.

  • The Nation ☛ An Administration Official Says It Won’t Investigate the Killing of Renee Good

    Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, however, was not surprised. “No, I wasn’t shocked, because this is what we’ve been hearing on the ground for days,” he told me Monday morning. “I was glad to hear him say it, because we can bring it to a court.”

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ Behind the disturbing image of ICE snatching a half-naked, elderly Hmong American from his home

    It’s an image that will knock you sideways: As snow falls, an elderly man wearing nothing but blue boxers and white Crocs with his hands restrained behind his back is forced out of his home by ICE agents. In the photo captured by photojournalist Leah Millis, you can see a red and white plaid blanket is draped around the man’s shoulders, but his chest is completely bare, exposing him to the harsh elements. It’s something out of a nightmare. It’s something that happened in St. Paul on Sunday.

    ChongLy Scott Thao, also known as Saly, is a Hmong American born in Laos who has lived here most of his life. Born in a Laos refugee camp, he’s a US citizen, and St. Paul, Minnesota is his home. His mother Choua, who passed away just three weeks ago, was a nurse who helped American troops during the Laotian Civil War and brought her family stateside post-war as part of a large wave of Southeast Asians seeking refuge. Despite his status, Thao was subjected to the ultimate indignity when federal immigration agents broke down his door Sunday, terrorizing him, his wife and his five-year-old grandson, his family has confirmed. Though he ended up being returned, the damage is done and the message has been sent: If you’re not white, you’re not safe.

  • The Record ☛ Iranian state TV feed reportedly hijacked to air anti-regime messages | The Record from Recorded Future News

    Media reports said the unauthorized broadcast lasted around 10 minutes. The group responsible was not immediately identified, and Iranian authorities had not publicly commented on the incident.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ What it’s like to be banned from the US for fighting online hate

    But she added that they also quickly realized, “Okay, it’s the old playbook to silence us.” So they got to work—starting with challenging the narrative the US government was pushing about them.

    Within a few hours, Ballon and von Hodenberg had issued a strongly worded statement refuting the allegations: “We will not be intimidated by a government that uses accusations of censorship to silence those who stand up for human rights and freedom of expression,” they wrote. “We demand a clear signal from the German government and the European Commission that this is unacceptable. Otherwise, no civil society organisation, no politician, no researcher, and certainly no individual will dare to denounce abuses by US tech companies in the future.”

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Remembering Beyond Vietnam on MLK Day

    A good friend introduced me to Martin Luther King Jr's Beyond Vietnam speech some time ago. It was not well-received by the mainstream press at the time (more about that in a moment) but I think it's prescient and, unfortunately, timely.

    At the Riverside Church in New York City, he delivered a blistering response to America's war in Vietnam that went beyond the war itself to discuss the values of the nation and its impact at home and abroad: [...]

  • [Old] American Rhetoric ☛ American Rhetoric: Martin Luther King, Jr: A Time to Break Silence (Declaration Against the Vietnam War)

    We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

  • New York Times ☛ Opinion | What the ‘Dude’ Who Shot Renee Good Couldn’t Hear

    Did the ICE agent kill Ms. Good because he feared her? Or did he kill her because she didn’t fear him?

    The man, with his face covering, his tactical vest, his handgun and his shorn hair, was kitted up to playact in a war against unarmed everybodies. He was frailty wrapped in fatigues.

  • The Atlantic ☛ ‘Abolish ICE’ Is Back

    A growing number of Americans disagree with how the agency is handling its mission. But where many Democrats hear “Abolish ICE” as a righteous call to action, others in the party register the clanging of alarm bells. These anxious Democrats believe that such a maximalist demand plays directly into Republicans’ hands by making the party seem unserious about immigration. Some of them are pleading with members of their party to avoid adopting the motto. “Unless you truly believe that the United States should not have an agency that enforces immigration and customs laws,” reads a memo from the center-left think tank Searchlight Institute, “you should not say you want to abolish ICE.”

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Power of Private Museums

    Through detailed explanations of the role that slavery played in every region of early America, you learn that Delaware passed a law prohibiting free Black people from moving to the state. You learn that in 1730, almost half of all white residents of New York personally owned an enslaved person. You learn that by the mid-18th century, enslaved people made up 70 percent of Charleston’s population.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Why South Africa's [Internet] boom isn't driving an economic boom

    According to oft-quoted research by the World Bank, it has been shown in some studies that a 10% increase in broadband penetration can result in GDP uplift of more than a percentage point. However, South Africa’s fixed broadband penetration has grown slowly, increasing from 17% in 2022 and is expected to grow by only four percentage points this year, despite aggressive private sector roll-out.

    Oosthuysen said fibre deployments are taking longer than anticipated, with rural areas and smaller towns remaining the most difficult to connect. He estimated that near-complete broadband penetration is still about five years away.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Sigma Star gmbh ☛ TPM on Embedded Systems: Pitfalls and Caveats

    Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chips have been around since the release of the TPM 1.2 specification more than 20 years ago, and the TPM 2.0 specification1 was released in 2014. The technology is now seeing widespread adoption in various computing sectors. TPMs have been a standard feature in PCs, particularly notebooks, for some time. With integration into tools like systemd’s tooling for LUKS/dm-crypt and legal requirements like EU’s CRA, TPM functionality is also now making its way into the embedded Linux sector. In this post, we’ll highlight common pitfalls and considerations for using TPM chips on embedded devices.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ NVIDIA Contacted Anna’s Archive to Secure Access to Millions of Pirated Books

    NVIDIA executives allegedly authorized the use of millions of pirated books from Anna's Archive to fuel its AI training. In an expanded class-action lawsuit that cites internal NVIDIA documents, several book authors claim that the trillion-dollar company directly reached out to Anna's Archive, seeking high-speed access to the shadow library data.

  • CopyrightLately ☛ Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees.

    Last February, I wrote about a troubling trend: estates and rightsholders making aggressive (and legally questionable) claims to works that have entered the public domain. From Tintin to Charlie Chaplin to Sherlock Holmes, the playbook is consistent: send threatening letters, cite convoluted legal theories, and expect recipients to back down rather than fight.

    A year later, the pattern continues. Now, it’s the work of Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian. And this time, the estate’s legal argument is more Dada than De Stijl.