Leftovers

• Nate Graham ☛ While you support others, who supports you?

  The world of free and open-source software (FOSS) is full of big-hearted, altruistic people who love serving society by giving away their labor for free. It’s incredible. These folks are supporting so many people by providing the world with high quality free software, including in KDE, my FOSS community of choice.

  But while they do it, who’s supporting them? We don’t talk about this as much.

• Andy Bell ☛ Base-level planning

  Andy Bell is completely redesigning his personal site from scratch and breaking down each part to educate and hopefully, inspire you to build your own corner of the internet.

• Science

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — There's an Elephant in the Room, but Not in Your Usage Reports

    Third-party agentic tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, as well as scholarly content-specific tools like Consensus, Elicit, Scite, and others, can quickly fetch, sort, and organize information that would otherwise take humans weeks or months to collate. In some cases, this means users bypass traditional abstract databases, library catalogs, and full-text content platforms. AI outputs, including summaries, snippets, and citations, are deemed “good enough” — so much so that users are increasingly satisfied with the AI output and do not seek out a publisher platform for the full-text content.

    The result is a dramatic drop in referrer traffic to full-text platforms and a dramatic rise in the “zero-click search,” leading to the “zero-click result.” A zero-click search happens when a user gets what they need from an AI-generated output and does not need to visit a content platform for more information. A zero-click result is the content of that search, which could include a full-text snippet, an abstract, or other bibliographic information about a resource.

  • Hackaday ☛ Does This Electron Make Me Look Fat? Weighing An Electron

    The main idea is to trap an electron using a magnetic field into a circular path. You can then compute the forces required to keep it in that circle, along with some other equations, and combine them. The result lets you compute the charge to mass ratio using parameters you can either control or measure, like the radius of the circular path and the electric field.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: The Future of Mathematics and Mathematicians

    I am writing this email as a young aspiring researcher/scientist. We live in a period of uncertainty and I have a lot of doubts about the decisions I should make. I've always been interested in mathematics and physics and I believe that a career in this area would be a fulfilling one for me. However, with the development of AI I'm starting to have some worries about my future. It is difficult to understand what is really happening. It feels like everyday these models are improving and sooner rather than later they will render us useless.

• Career/Education

  • El País ☛ ADHD overdiagnosis is harming gifted children

    Gifted children process information very quickly and their attention is selective. They concentrate deeply when something interests them, but tune out when faced with monotony, repetition, or slowness. Unlike ADHD, their attention is not impaired, but rather influenced by motivation, challenge, and the complexity of the task. Their divergent thinking may manifest as off-topic questions or creative interruptions, easily mistaken for impulsivity.

  • The Indiana Capital Chronicle ☛ Indiana House panel advances school cellphone crackdown, revised youth social media bills

    In back-to-back votes, the committee unanimously advanced Senate Bill 78, which would require students’ phones and other wireless devices to be powered off and locked away for the full school day.

  • The Georgia Recorder ☛ Democrats defend 'the actual existence of the Department of Education' in forum

    Scott, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Education and Workforce, brought in education advocates and legal voices pushing back against the administration’s ongoing attempts to axe the agency.

    The lawmakers and witnesses expressed particular alarm over the administration’s six interagency agreements, or IAAs, announced with four other departments in November 2025 that transfer several of its responsibilities to those Cabinet-level agencies.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ Breakthrough Study Reveals The Secret of How Exercise Fights Osteoporosis

    Knowing this previously hidden process means scientists might be able to adapt it to combat the bone fragility caused by osteoporosis. While it's been well established that exercise boosts bone health, until now it wasn't fully clear how.

    The researchers, led by a team from the University of Hong Kong, identified a specific protein that acts as an 'exercise sensor' for bones. When activated, it promotes bone growth and reduces fat buildup.

  • Seth Godin ☛ Tip for tap

    The alternative is clarity. Shared understanding instead of intentional pain.

  • Ava ☛ when exercise started helping me

    I realized that today, after again feeling absolutely terrible but then dragging myself out of bed to at least walk on my foldable treadmill. I started wondering when this change exactly happened and what led to it, because I used to hate exercise. I didn't understand people who said it helped with depression. When did it truly start being a reliable way to improve my mental state?

  • Austin White ☛ My Doctor Fired Me

    I thought about it, my overall experience and made one suggestion. I stated that I thought it was odd and gross that a random person would call me a few weeks before seeing the doctor and ask me if I would like to take an additional drug. I declined, and they also agreed and hung up. I said I felt it fed into the notion that the medical community gets kickbacks from the pharmaceutical industry. If this were standard procedure and they let patients know that receiving these calls is part of the process, it would be a better overall approach.

• Proprietary

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • The Register UK ☛ The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

      It most certainly was. SUSE is one of the Policy Summit's Gold-level sponsors, alongside Red Hat. The tagline for the event is "Digital Sovereignty Runs on Open Source" – but apparently SUSE does not run entirely on open source. This leading European vendor of enterprise FOSS runs on Microsoft, or at least it uses Redmond's collaboration services.

      Amusingly, the day before, The Reg sat in the audience at the CentOS Connect event and watched with interest as a Red Hat staffer in the row in front of us opened their laptop, signed into their Red Hat corporate Gmail account, and started going through their work email – occasionally pausing to get the Gemini LLM to emit some custom slop for them to paste into an email.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ The Scientist Who Predicted AI Psychosis Has a Grim Forecast of What's Going to Happen Next

      Now, Østergaard is out with a new warning: that the world’s intellectual heavyweights are accruing a “cognitive debt” when they use AI.

      In a new letter to the editor published in the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica and flagged by PsyPost, Østergaard asserts that AI is eroding the writing and research abilities of scientists who use it.

    • Futurism ☛ Creeps Are Using Grok to Unblur Children's Faces in the Epstein Files

      Some of the worst freaks to walk planet Earth are using Elon Musk’s Grok to “unblur” the faces of women and children in the latest Epstein files, as documented by the research group Bellingcat.

      A simple search on X, Musk’s social media site where Grok responds to user requests, shows at least 20 different photos that users tried to unredact using the AI chatbot, the group found. Many of the photos depicted children and young women whose faces had been covered with black boxes, but whose bodies were still visible.

    • Futurism ☛ AI Is a Burnout Machine

      “We used to call it an engineer, now it is like a reviewer,” Khare told BI. “Every time it feels like you are a judge at an assembly line and that assembly line is never-ending, you just keep stamping those [pull requests].”

      AI, he argued, creates a productivity “paradox” by lowering the cost of production, but increasing the cost of “coordination, review, and decision-making,” all of which falls on a human to solve.

    • Techdirt ☛ Microsoft’s AI-Powered Copyright Bots Fucked Up And Got An Innocent Game Delisted From Steam

      At some point, we, as a society, are going to realize that farming copyright enforcement out to bots and AI-driven robocops is not the way to go, but today is not that day. Long before AI became the buzzword it is today, large companies have employed their own copyright crawler bots, or employed those of a third party, to police their copyrights on these here internets. And for just as long, those bots have absolutely sucked out loud at their jobs. We have seen example after example after example of those bots making mistakes, resulting in takedowns or threats of takedowns of all kinds of perfectly legit content. Upon discovery, the content is usually reinstated while those employing the copyright decepticons shrug their shoulders and say “Thems the breaks.” And then it happens again.

    • The Register UK ☛ Cloudflare turns websites into faster food for AI agents

      Having previously devised a mechanism to make AI crawlers pay to consume website content, the content delivery network is now offering web publishers a way to make it cheaper for AI services to harvest site content by converting HTML to Markdown, the minimalist markup language for representing text mixed with formatting characters in a way that retains legibility.

    • Cloudflare ☛ Introducing Markdown for Agents

      Cloudflare's network now supports real-time content conversion at the source, for enabled zones using content negotiation headers. Now when AI systems request pages from any website that uses Cloudflare and has Markdown for Agents enabled, they can express the preference for text/markdown in the request. Our network will automatically and efficiently convert the HTML to markdown, when possible, on the fly.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ AI is already making online crimes easier. It could get much worse.

      The file contained ransomware, a nasty strain of malware that encrypts the files it comes across on a victim’s system, rendering them unusable until a ransom is paid to the attackers behind it. But what set this example apart was that it employed large language models (LLMs). Not just incidentally, but across every stage of an attack. Once it was installed, it could tap into an LLM to generate customized code in real time, rapidly map a computer to identify sensitive data to copy or encrypt, and write personalized ransom notes based on the files’ content. The software could do this autonomously, without any human intervention. And every time it ran, it would act differently, making it harder to detect.

    • Wired ☛ I Loved My OpenClaw AI Agent—Until It Turned on Me

      Previously known as both Clawdbot and Moltbot, OpenClaw recently became a Silicon Valley darling, charming AI enthusiasts and investors eager to either embrace the bleeding edge or profit from it. The highly capable, web-savvy AI bot has even inspired its own AI-only (or mostly) social network.

    • Mark-Jason Dominus ☛ John Haugeland on the failure of micro-worlds

      One of the better books I read in college was Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea (1985) by philosopher John Haugeland. One of the sections I found most striking and memorable was about Terry Winograd's SHRDLU. SHRDLU, around 1970, could carry on a discussion in English in which it would manipulate imaginary colored blocks in a “blocks world”. displayed on a computer screen. The operator could direct it to “pick up the pyramid and put it on the big red cube” or ask it questions like “what color is the biggest cylinder that isn't on the table?”.

    • 404 Media ☛ Waymo Is Getting DoorDashers to Close Doors on Self Driving Cars

      The program is unusual in that Dashers are more often delivering food than helping out a driving robot. It also shows that even with autonomous vehicles, and the future they promise of metropolitan travel without the need for a driver, a human is sometimes needed for the most simple and yet necessary tasks.

    • David Revoy ☛ Simple solution - David Revoy

  • Social Control Media

    • Kev Quirk ☛ The Internet is a Hamster Wheel

      I wholeheartedly agree with Michael on this, and it's a term I intend to steal. I'm trying to be better with my smartphone usage at the moment, so will be able to step off the hamster wheel...hopefully. So far so good, but it's only been a couple of days.

    • Coyote ☛ Twitterlike is a Bad Shape

      Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn't just a matter of who's in charge; it's a problem with the thing itself. Forcing users to adhere to a tight character limit, discouraging link culture, preventing people from editing their own posts, steering people into sharing things they hate, incentivizing rage bait with trending feeds, subjecting people to decontextualized encounters, encouraging conflict by discouraging tags, and leaving users powerless to clean up the resulting mess—all of this is bad shape.

    • [Old] BBC ☛ Turkey moves to silence jailed Erdogan rival by blocking account on X

      Imamoglu, who is the main rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, can no longer send messages in Turkey to his 9.7 million followers on X. His account is still accessible abroad.

      His social media feed has been his main tool for communicating with his supporters and keeping himself in the public eye.

    • [Old] Politico ☛ Musk’s X suspends opposition accounts in Turkey amid civil unrest

      Some accounts appear to be suspended only in Turkey and not in the rest of the world. Activist Ömer Faruk Aslan created a second account to avoid censorship. "Yesterday, my account was blocked by a court order because the tweets exceeded 6 million views," he posted.

    • [Old] Stockholm Center For Freedom ☛ Turkish opposition figures allege censorship on X, citing sudden drops in followers and reach - Stockholm Center for Freedom

      Prominent opposition politicians and journalists in Turkey have accused social media platform X of suppressing dissenting voices through unexplained declines in follower counts and post visibility, raising concerns over potential “shadow banning” and digital censorship, the Kısa Dalga news website reported.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • SANS ☛ WSL in the Malware Ecosystem

      WSL can be compared to a LOLBIN (living-off-the-land) because it’s implemented by Microsoft and allow many interesting operations. Attackers can drop Linux tools inside the WSL rootfs and execute it! Here is a quick example.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Top enlisted leaders grilled about privatized housing NDAs

    A prominent senator pressed senior enlisted leaders on non-disclosure agreements troops are asked to sign by privatized military housing companies.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Health care access a top complaint among troops, top enlisted leaders tell lawmakers

    “What we’ve all seen over the length of our careers is a gradual erosion in the availability of that health care for our service members and their families,” Wolfe said.

    This has been an issue for years, and problems with health care access have been exacerbated by new Tricare contracts implemented last year.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Utah News Dispatch ☛ Utah’s digital ID program, ‘digital bill of rights’ could lead the nation in privacy framework

      Sponsored by Sen. Kirk Cullimore, R-Cottonwood Heights, the Senate Government Operations and Political Subdivisions Committee unanimously approved SB275 on Wednesday, sending it to the Senate floor. Last year, Cullimore sponsored another digital ID bill to begin research for the program, outline state policy, and establish privacy principles.

      “(Last year’s bill) did three critical things,” Cullimore told the committee. “It declared that identity belongs to the individual and not the state. It embedded strong privacy and anti-surveillance guardrails into the statute, and it also required study and stakeholder consultation before implementation.”

    • Maine Morning Star ☛ Maine advances privacy law amid new immigration data collection concerns

      For the past several years, the Maine Legislature has debated how aggressive the state should be in protecting consumer privacy online. But competing proposals — along with sizable behind-the-scenes influence from lobbyists — have left the state still without a comprehensive policy.

    • Techdirt ☛ ICE, CBP Knew Facial Recognition App Couldn’t Do What DHS Says It Could, Deployed It Anyway

      As one would expect, the Trump administration was never going to be the one to ensure the paperwork arrived ahead of the deployment. As we covered recently, both ICE and CBP are using tech provided by NEC called “Mobile Fortify” to identify migrants who are possibly subject to removal, even though neither agency has bothered to publish a Privacy Impact Assessment.

      As Wired reported, the app is being used widely by officers working with both agencies, despite both agencies making it clear they don’t have the proper paperwork in place to justify these deployments.

    • The Register UK ☛ Posting AI caricatures on social media is bad for security

      Sometimes the model will ask the user for more context before it creates their cartoon image. But even without those extra details, these caricatures signal to an attacker that the person uses an LLM at work - meaning there's a chance they input company data into a publicly available model.

    • The Record ☛ California fines Disney $2.75 million for data privacy violations

      Disney has agreed to a $2.75 million fine with the state of California and implementation of a comprehensive privacy program in response to allegations that it broke the state’s landmark privacy law by making it exceedingly difficult for consumers to opt out of having their data shared and sold.

      California Attorney General Rob Bonta alleged the company’s opt-out process made it impossible for consumers to stop data sharing and sales across all devices, streaming services and platforms associated with their Disney accounts.

    • The Record ☛ FTC push for age verification a ‘major landmark’ for spread of the tool

      The agency is planning to draft a policy statement about how companies can use age verification without violating the COPPA rule as well as a potential amendment to the rule to make clear that age verification is not subject to the regulation under certain conditions, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said at the event.

      Iain Corby, executive director of the Age Verification Providers Association, called the FTC officials’ comments and plans a “major landmark” in the development and spread of age verification implementation worldwide.

    • PC World ☛ TikTok tracks your every move, even if you don't have the TikTok app

      There’s a sophisticated advertising algorithm in the background that’s been particularly active and aggressive since TikTok’s takeover by US investors, namely Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX. It distributes secret little tracking pixels that can track users across multiple websites, regardless of whether they have the TikTok app on their device.

    • BBC ☛ TikTok is tracking you, even if you don't use the app. Here's how to stop it

      In fact, TikTok collects sensitive and potentially embarrassing information about you even if you've never used the app. Over the past week, I've watched websites sending TikTok data about cancer diagnoses, fertility and even mental health crises. It's part of a tracking empire that extends far beyond the social media platform. Now, thanks to a new set of features, TikTok is poised to expand its network and see even more details about your life.

      The change comes just weeks after the sale of TikTok's US operations to a group of companies with ties to US President Donald Trump. The deal has led to fresh privacy concerns from some human rights experts and users, though TikTok says it has transparent guidelines on how it responds to government requests for data.

    • Luis Quintanilla ☛ Alternatives to Discord

      A while back I wrote a post about alternatives to WhatsApp, and in some ways this post feels similar. I’m not sure what the core motivation for migrating from Discord is at this time. Maybe it’s the imminent IPO. Maybe it’s the new age verification policy. In any case, it’s encouraging to see people at least looking for alternatives. Preferably ones that are open-source and allow self-hosting.

    • Lee Peterson ☛ Don’t trust Casio with your data when their privacy policy contradicts itself

      When I was setting up the G-Shock GBD-200 to test I always read the privacy policy and always do when it comes to wearables. I was pleased to see the call out that Casio are not selling your data but then I see this

    • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Exclusive: ICE Masks Up in More Ways Than One

      Homeland security is increasing the use of undercover techniques to infiltrate and interact with social media users in order to collect intelligence and target individuals, documents leaked to me reveal.

      The new program, called “masked engagement,” allows homeland security officers to assume false identities and interact with users—friending them, joining closed groups, and gaining access to otherwise private postings, photographs, friend lists and more.

    • Doc Searls ☛ Because Pricing is Getting Too Personal

      Surveillance pricing already has its own page in Wikipedia. It also has its own authority: Abbey Stemler, Associate Professor of Business Law and Ethics and Weimer Faculty Fellow in Business Law & Ethics at Indiana University’s Kelly School of Business. And she’ll be speaking about her work a week from now: [...]

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Everyone is stealing TV

      It’s not fully clear who is manufacturing these devices, what’s on them, or who runs the services that allow people to access all this television without paying for it. We already know that some streaming boxes have been fronts for residential botnets that have been used for illicit activities that run the gamut from avoiding scraper detection to real organized crime. If I wanted to run malware inside the networks of thousands of homes and businesses, this wouldn’t be a bad way to go about it.

  • Confidentiality

    • GreyCoder ☛ Best VPNs With Anonymous Payments (Bitcoin, Monero, Gift Cards, Cash) - GreyCoder

      Here are some of the best VPNs that support anonymous [sic] payment methods like Bitcoin, Monero, gift cards, or even cash.

    • Feld ☛ WolfSSL Sucks Too, So Now What?

      OpenSSL sucks. The BoringSSL and AWS-LC forks are Googled and Amazoned to death; they don't care about anyone but their own use cases. I can't remember ever having a good experience with software using GnuTLS. LibreSSL is incomplete...

    • Terrace Networks ☛ Reports of Telnet’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

      TL;DR: we see no evidence that specific core network autonomous systems have blocked Telnet, contrary to previous reports. We specifically see continued non-spoofable Telnet traffic from networks on which GreyNoise saw 100% drop-off. We suspect initial results may have been measurement artifacts or specific threat actors explicitly avoiding GreyNoise infrastructure, though determining this root cause is impossible without internal data.

• Defence/Aggression

  • RFERL ☛ New US Sanctions Bill Aims To Choke Off Kremlin Oil Revenue

    The measure is designed to close what lawmakers say are persistent loopholes in the current sanctions regime and to curb Moscow’s ability to fund its war in Ukraine.

  • The Nation ☛ What Peter Thiel Saw in Jeffrey Epstein

    In the extensive correspondence between the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and the late pedophile, both men expressed a deep aversion to democracy.

  • New Republic ☛ How TikTok 2.0 Became a Weapon for ICE

    By housing TikTok’s data on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure—a firm whose multibillion-dollar existence is owed in part to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement contracts, and whose co-founder Larry Ellison recently bragged about AI ushering in an era where “citizens are on their best behavior”—the government has finally achieved its aim of securing the app by integrating it into its domestic surveillance dragnet. Considering the drive to secure TikTok was driven by fears of what the notoriously repressive nation of China might do with our private data, this outcome is, at the very least, highly ironic.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Crisis, No. 13

    This is the view from nowhere: the claim that one can occupy a position that has no position. That one can make choices without commitments. That one can see without standing anywhere.

    What if that position does not exist? What if it has never existed? What if the claim to occupy it is not a noble aspiration that falls short in practice, but a fiction — and a dangerous one — that conceals the very commitments it pretends to have transcended?

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Doctors’ union may yet save the NHS from Palantir

    This is a near-miraculous system: an ultra-effective, ultra-cost-effective, Made-in-Britain, open, transparent, privacy-preserving, rigorous way to produce medical research insights at scale, which could be perfected in the UK and then exported to the world, getting better every time a new partner signs on and helps shoulder the work of maintaining and improving the free/open source software that powers it.

    OpenSAFELY was the obvious contender for NHS research. But it wasn't the only one: in the other corner was Palantir, a shady American company best known for helping cops and spies victimise people on the basis of dodgy statistics. Palantir blitzed Westminster with expensive PR and lobbying, and embarked on a strategy to "hoover up" every small NHS contractor until Palantir was the last company standing. Palantir UK boss Louis Moseley called it "Buying our way in": [...]

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Techdirt ☛ Bondi Spying On Congressional Epstein Searches Should Be A Major Scandal

    Yesterday, Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee. Among the more notable exchanges was when Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked some of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims who were in the audience to stand up and indicate whether Bondi’s DOJ had ever contacted them about their experiences. None of them had heard from the Justice Department. Bondi wouldn’t even look at the victims as she frantically flipped through her prepared notes.

    And that’s when news organizations, including Reuters, caught something alarming: one of the pages Bondi held up clearly showed searches that Jayapal herself had done of the Epstein files: [...]

  • CS Monitor ☛ A guide to the Epstein files: Will any new charges result?

    Mr. Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 in what was officially ruled a suicide, is alleged to have run a sex-trafficking ring catering not just to himself but also potentially to some of the world’s most powerful people. More than 1,000 survivors of his alleged crimes have been identified since investigations into Mr. Epstein began in the mid-2000s. Why We Wrote This

    The only person to have been sentenced to prison for Epstein-related crimes is Ghislaine Maxwell, his longtime associate, who is serving a 20-year sentence for her role alongside Mr. Epstein in sex-trafficking operations. Some prominent individuals have faced reputational and employment consequences because of revelations in the files.

  • TruthOut ☛ As Epstein Files Turn Into Partisan Circus, Institutional Power Protects Its Own | Truthout

    Over 150 years later, the startling lack of accountability in the United States following the revelations from the Department of Justice (DOJ) files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein makes it clear why many have labeled our current era “The Second Gilded Age.” The release of the Epstein files has exposed a web of high-powered lawmakers, financial titans, media personalities, and intelligence officials engaged in a spectrum of corrupt and immoral behavior, ranging from financial crimes to systemic sexual abuse. Yet, instead of justice, the headlines tell a story of domestic stagnation: “Epstein revelations have toppled top figures in Europe while US fallout is more muted” and “The Epstein scandal is taking down Europe’s political class. In the US, they’re getting a pass.”

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Mark Zuckerberg Wanted to Keep in Touch With Jeffrey Epstein

    You can see all three of these in the emails that surround a secretive August 2, 2015, dinner featuring Epstein and a host of Big Tech oligarchs, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The dinner, first revealed by Vanity Fair back in 2019, has become one of the biggest Epstein-related stories of the past week, after a photo of the gathering and several emails related to it were unearthed, revealing that a who’s who of the tech sector — a number of whom have become major Donald Trump backers, as the entire industry has lurched far to the right — was there, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Zuckerberg.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ I don't want to answer whether the President partied with young girls

    Absolutely wild stuff in this testimony. I'm not even saying Trump was guilty of everything, but it's not great when the AG is asked point blank if the sitting POTUS partied with underage girls, and the response is "um, let's change the subject."

  • Variety ☛ Cardi B Slams Homeland Security Over Epstein Files, ICE Comments

    Cardi B fired back at the Department of Homeland Security by replying, “If we talking about drugs let’s talk about Epstein and friends drugging underage girls to rape them. Why y’all don’t wanna talk about the Epstein files?”

  • New York Times ☛ The Epstein Files and the Hidden World of an Unaccountable Elite

    That story of impunity is all the more outrageous now in the midst of rising populist anger and ever-growing inequality. The Caligula-like antics of Jeffrey Epstein and friends occurred over two decades that saw the decline of America’s manufacturing sector and the subprime mortgage crisis, in which millions of Americans lost their homes.

• Environment

  • The Indiana Capital Chronicle ☛ Details on long-expected Meta data center campus unveiled

    Meta, which owns technologies like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, will construct 13 total buildings spanning four million square feet on 1,500 acres. That includes 10 data center buildings, as well as facilities for logistics, warehousing and administrative support functions.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Orders Defense, Energy Departments to Reinvest in Coal

    One study showed that coal power plants led to nearly half a million US deaths over a 20-year period.

  • Truthdig ☛ Data Centers Are Scrambling to Power AI Boom With [Fossil] Gas

    Many of these data centers want the kind of flexible, around-the-clock energy associated with combined-cycle natural gas turbines. These heavy-duty machines burn gas to spin turbines and generate electricity, then capture the associated heat and use it to spin the turbines some more. As far as fossil fuel generation goes, they are among the most efficient options for so-called dispatchable baseload power. But with demand for these turbines surging and supply increasingly tight, developers are turning to creative alternatives.

    The upshot of all this creativity is clear: Much of the data center build-out is poised to be powered by natural gas — and the climate consequences that come with it.

  • Common Dreams ☛ House Member Crafting Legislation to Stop Climate Lawsuits

    Following Reports the Oil Industry is Lobbying for Total Immunity from Climate Lawsuits, U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) told A.G. Bondi that She Is Working on A Bill

  • University of Michigan ☛ The U-M data center meeting in Ypsilanti was never about community input

    The University’s proposed data center in Ypsilanti Township has been controversial because U-M officials have consistently provided few details and have left township representatives out of the process. In partnership with LANL, the development is meant to provide high-functioning research capacity for the University. Currently, project leaders are deciding between two potential sites for the project: a property on Bridge Road and Textile Road and one at the American Center for Mobility. They will not pay taxes on the property — which one Ypsilanti resident and accountant had calculated would amount to tens of millions of dollars for the township. They also will not be subject to standard zoning laws since this development will be built by a public university.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ EPA Knew Toxic Oil-Industry Waste Underground Is Dangerous

    The documents show there may be little scientific merit to industry and government claims that injection wells are a safe means of disposal — putting drinking water and other mineral resources in communities across the country at risk of contamination, and jeopardizing local economies and public health.

    The U.S. oil and gas industry produces 25.9 billion barrels of wastewater each year (or 1.0878 trillion gallons), according to the most recent data available, a 2022 report from the Groundwater Protection Council that relies on 2021 data. That’s enough to form a line of waste barrels to the moon and back 28 times.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ It Appears That Immigration Officials Caused the El Paso Airport Shutdown When They Panic-Fired a Powerful Laser Weapon at a Children's Balloon

      The enemy drone swarm turned out to be a simple party balloon, a potentially enormous — and unintentionally hilarious — overreaction, contradicting claims by the White House of an imminent drone incursion from Mexican drug cartels.

    • Hackaday ☛ The Death Of Baseload And Similar Grid Tropes

      Anyone who has spent any amount of time in or near people who are really interested in energy policies will have heard proclamations such as that ‘baseload is dead’ and the sorting of energy sources by parameters like their levelized cost of energy (LCoE) and merit order. Another thing that one may have noticed here is that this is also an area where debates and arguments can get pretty heated.

      The confusing thing is that depending on where you look, you will find wildly different claims. This raises many questions, not only about where the actual truth lies, but also about the fundamentals. Within a statement such as that ‘baseload is dead’ there lie a lot of unanswered questions, such as what baseload actually is, and why it has to die.

      Upon exploring these topics we quickly drown in terms like ‘load-following’ and ‘dispatchable power’, all of which are part of a healthy grid, but which to the average person sound as logical and easy to follow as a discussion on stock trading, with a similar level of mysticism. Let’s fix that.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Inside Towers ☛ Nokia Launches Its Largest Fixed Networks R&D Lab - Inside Towers

    Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has opened its largest global R&D facility for fixed networks in Siruseri, Chennai, a major IT and technology hub in the southern India state of Tamil Nadu, The Economic Times reported. The facility aims to create over 200 high-end jobs. Nokia employs nearly 1,000 engineers in Tamil Nadu and has commercial deals with India’s leading mobile network operators including Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea for 5G RAN, according to Inside Towers Intelligence.

  • Mandy Brown ☛ Pseudo-culture

    Our present-day realm of state terror operates through abductions, murders, and content farms. ICE workers raise their cameras as often as they raise their guns, decked out in military gear like a kid trying on mom’s heels, camo stark against the snow, while their bosses confuse retweets for votes, likes for being liked. Don Moynihan dubs this a “clicktatorship,” a cursed word if there ever was one, no less for being accurate. André Gorz, writing more than half a century earlier, terms this “pseudo-culture,” a counterfeit culture that does not arise out of ways of living but seeks to impose itself upon it.

  • Lou Plummer ☛ The Art of Not Living in Fear Revisited

    The power structure in America has a deep investment in keeping people afraid and begging for protection. We accept that roughly half our federal budget disappears into military-related spending or the interest on debts from previous wars. It’s branded as “defense” spending, as if we live in a constant state of imminent invasion and must outspend the rest of the planet just to sleep at night. When we actually do go to war—like in Iraq and Afghanistan—we rack up debts our grandchildren will still be paying off, with little to show for it besides flag-draped coffins and new veterans’ hospitals.

  • The Next Move ☛ Don’t Fear Being Right

    I want to speak with you tonight about The World of Fake Values. The World of Fake Values is the title of my new book, and it is the best description I have for a society that is too self-absorbed to defend its founding principles. It is the big picture look at the cauldron of different issues that have come together to produce the current dilemmas we face in democracy, diplomacy, and technology.

    What are fake values?

    Fake values are foolishness and short-sightedness masquerading as wisdom. Malice passed off as virtue. In essence: a scam.

    We are all raised on stories of good and evil. No one reads The Lord of the Rings and comes out thinking that the Fellowship should have negotiated terms with Sauron.

    Yet in the real world, we hear the appeals to accommodate evil. In this sense, Ukraine has become a litmus test for fake values.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • New Yorker ☛ “If We Don’t Have Free Speech, Then We Just Don’t Have a Free Country”

    There are many brazen falsehoods that have shaped Trump’s second term thus far, but this might be the most offensive lie of them all—because it is this President’s systematic campaign to stamp out dissent and punish those who disagree with him that will be remembered as among the most singularly un-American aspects of his disruptive tenure. Donald Trump relies on the First Amendment when he belittles, denigrates, humiliates, and slurs his opponents. The First Amendment protected him when he lied during the campaign about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, and the First Amendment protected him last week when he reposted a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. But it is now clear that he sees the Constitution as something that applies only to those who agree with him. For everyone else, this is not the free-speech Presidency he promised but a free-speech crackdown without modern precedent.

  • EFF ☛ 🗣 Homeland Security Wants Names | EFFector 38.3

    Criticize the government online? The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) might ask Google to cough up your name. By abusing an investigative tool called "administrative subpoenas," DHS has been demanding that tech companies hand over users' names, locations, and more. We're explaining how companies can stand up for users—and covering the latest news in the fight for privacy and free speech online—with our EFFector newsletter.

  • Techdirt ☛ On Its 30th Birthday, Section 230 Remains The Linchpin For Users’ Speech

    Yet as Section 230 turns 30 this week, there are bipartisan proposals in Congress to either repeal or sunset the law. These proposals seize upon legitimate concerns with the harmful and anti-competitive practices of the largest tech companies, but then misdirect that anger toward Section 230.

    But rolling back or eliminating Section 230 will not stop invasive corporate surveillance that harms all internet users. Killing Section 230 won’t end the dominance of the current handful of large tech companies—it would cement their monopoly power.

  • Project Censored ☛ Frame-Checking “Insurgency” in Minnesota

    Trump administration officials, joined by a chorus of Republican politicians and right-wing media pundits, have been referring to public demonstrations against ICE in Minneapolis as an “insurgency,” a term typically used to refer to violent, armed rebellion, especially when it involves irregular forces opposing a larger, well-equipped military or state power.

    On the surface, the use of the term to characterize these demonstrations appears aimed at justifying Donald Trump’s invocation of the Insurrection Act, which grants presidents authority to deploy military forces domestically to suppress civil disorder. But a closer analysis of how the use of “insurgency” frames the demonstrations reveals even higher stakes.

    As an interpretive frame for making sense of events in Minneapolis, “insurgency” characterizes demonstrators as military adversaries of the United States and thus legitimizes federal agents’ use of physical force against them. Frames are central organizing ideas for making sense of events and suggesting what is at stake.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Death Sentence of Yaghoub Karimpour Upheld by the Supreme Court

    Based on information received by HRANA, Branch 9 of the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence of Mr. Karimpour, a citizen adhering to the Yarsan faith. The ruling was formally communicated to him in Urmia Prison on Tuesday, February 10, 2026. In December of this year, Branch 1 of the Revolutionary Court of Urmia, presided over by Judge Sajjad Doosti, had sentenced him to death on the charge of “corruption on earth” (efsad-e fel-arz) through espionage in favor of Israel. His trial was held via videoconference.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ A note about personal security

    I have been using my full name on Signal — and I’m the only Ben Werdmuller in the world. In the less than 24 hours that I was a part of the group, the entire group’s membership was downloaded and investigated by a right-wing community. They ultimately released details about my location (not specific, but specific enough to let me know they know where I live) as well as some vague threats about personal harm.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Robert Reich ☛ The tragic end of CBS News

    Producer Alicia Hastey departed CBS News Wednesday, saying the work she came to do was “increasingly becoming impossible,” as stories were now evaluated “not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.”

    Whose ideological expectations was Hastey referring to? Would it be impertinent for me to suggest it’s the sociopath in the Oval Office?

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Most Americans don’t pay for news and don’t think they need to

    Meanwhile, the people most likely to pay directly for news are older, wealthier, liberal Democrats. Again, not a surprise, but useful to have it laid out like this; many newsrooms I’ve spoken to are trying to figure out how to move away from a base of older, wealthier, left-leaning people, and, well, it’s not just them. Maybe it’s worth leaning into that for funding and concentrating on finding a broader audience for the news itself.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Futurism ☛ Economist Warns That the Poor Will Bear the Brunt of AI's Effects on the Job Market

    To set up his argument, Reich briefly considers comments from business tycoons like Zoom’s Eric Yuan and JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, who argue that four- and even three-day work weeks will become the norm thanks to new automation tools.

    “All of this is pure rubbish,” Reich writes. “Here’s the truth: The four-day workweek will most likely come with four days’ worth of pay. The three-day workweek, with three days’ worth. And so on.”

    As evidence, he references the productivity-pay gap, the measure of a society’s economic output compared to its wage growth. In the United States, productivity keeps going up — but the share of that productivity going to workers hasn’t really budged since the 1970s. Workers, in other words, have been getting shafted by their bosses for decades, and there’s no reason to think AI will change that.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Rise of the ‘Slave Power’ Conspiracy

    As the “Slave Power” was ascending, the Republic was declining. Sycophants had replaced statesmen to do the bidding of a “coarse and sordid oligarchy.” Violence and intimidation had overtaken discussion and persuasion. In addition to Brooks’s attack on Sumner, Quincy noted that a Tennessee minister had been forced to leave his church after denouncing the beating of an enslaved person, and a Virginia politician had been barred from returning home after attending a northern political convention. The corrosive effects extended well beyond politics. Northern publishers expurgated literary texts for fear of offending slaveholders; antislavery publications were barred from being mailed in the South. “In the blighting shadow of Slavery,” Quincy wrote, “letters die and art cannot live.”

    His essay did not dwell in despair, however. Quincy closed by arguing that the “success of the conspiracy” was not “final and eternal,” but instead that its stridency was a response to the strength of a growing opposition. “We discern the confession” of the opposition’s might “in the very extravagancies and violences of the Slave Power,” Quincy wrote. “It rages, for its time is short.”

  • The Indiana Capital Chronicle ☛ Indiana Senate sends ‘Let Kids Be Kids’ child supervision bill to governor

    The Indiana Senate voted 48-0 on House Bill 1035, one of the first of the 2026 session to reach the governor. It remained unchanged from the version approved 93-0 by the House in January.

    Dubbed a “Let Kids Be Kids” measure, bill author Rep. Jake Teshka, R-North Liberty, said the goal is to draw clearer lines between ordinary, age-appropriate independence and actual neglect.

  • JURIST ☛ Attorney of woman shot by ICE agent accuses officials of fabricating evidence

    The attorney of Marimar Martinez, shot by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents multiple times in Chicago in October, argued Wednesday that released evidence shows that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lied about information tied to investigations.

    Attorney Christopher Parente detailed instances in which he said DHS lied about circumstances of the shooting and about Martinez’s past. Parente stated that a diagram of the altercation drawn by an ICE agent—meant to show how Martinez allegedly rammed into an ICE vehicle—depicted vehicles that “don’t exist.”

  • The Washington Spectator ☛ How Clarence Thomas Bamboozled His Way Onto the Supreme Court

    How it came to be that Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first Black Supreme Court Justice, was replaced by Thomas, is a story worth examining. It is the story of how the architect of the NAACP legal campaign that broke the back of Jim Crow, and won passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, was succeeded by someone who as a GOP political appointee had a demonstrated record of opposition to affirmative action and the anti-discrimination laws he was supposed to enforce.

    And ironically, it is the story of how Marshall, the civil rights icon who at the time of his retirement in 1991 was seen by many as the Supreme Court’s most liberal justice, was replaced by Thomas, who has devoted his time on the court to unraveling the achievements of his predecessor, and is now widely viewed as the High Court’s most conservative jurist.

  • Vox ☛ How to talk to kids about ICE

    It’s not just kids from immigrant families who are experiencing anxiety, Byrne said. “I am seeing it across the board with all of my patients of all backgrounds,” Byrne said.

    There’s no sugarcoating the risk that many families around the country are facing right now. Still, experts say there are ways for parents, educators, and other adults to support kids and give them back a sense of autonomy during frightening, unpredictable times. It starts with talking to them about what’s going on and not trying to sweep it under the rug.

    “Ignoring it doesn’t mean that the child is not experiencing it,” Vázquez Baur said. “This is not just an issue for immigrant families, it’s an issue for all families.”

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Union Coordination Is Essential to Organizing Amazon

    Unions have the resources to organize Amazon and are already working to do so. Building Amazon “labor tables” in key metro areas — regular meetings where unions agree to coordinate their efforts — will be crucial to advancing organizing efforts further.

  • 404 Media ☛ Cops Are Buying ‘GeoSpy’, an AI That Geolocates Photos in Seconds

    404 Media has obtained a cache of internal police emails showing at least two agencies have bought access to GeoSpy, an AI tool that analyzes architecture, soil, and other features to near instantly geolocate photos.

  • YLE ☛ Wolt finally hires couriers as employees – with exceptional terms

    However, the terms of employment are exceptional by Finnish legal standards. Under the terms, Wolt couriers will only be paid for time spent actually transporting deliveries, not the time they spend awaiting orders – and they must use their own vehicles without compensation.

    According to labour law expert Keijo Kaivanto, Finnish firms usually either provide workers with equipment or reimburse them for the use of their own tools.

  • Law Society Gazette ☛ SRA makes emergency compensation payments to PM Law clients

    The Solicitors Regulation Authority has already started to make emergency payments from the compensation fund to distressed former clients of law firm network PM Law.

    The regulator revealed today it had received more than 50 applications to the fund and had begun issuing payments to clients with the most urgent need.

    The fund is usually earmarked to reimburse money that has been stolen or not been accounted for by a firm, or where the firm did not have insurance in place. But emergency funds are available where clients have made a deposit with a firm and need immediate access to that money – for example in a property transaction - and claimed back later.

  • Law Society Gazette ☛ New blow to SRA as solicitor cleared of 'SLAPP' behaviour awarded costs [Ed: They go after the wrong firms]

    The solicitor whose tribunal conviction over a 'without prejudice' email was overturned on appeal last month has been granted a costs order against the Solicitors Regulation Authority, court papers have revealed. In a consent order dated 5 February, Mrs Justice Collins Rice required the regulator to make an interim payment of £400,000.

    Media lawyer Ashley Hurst was fined £50,000 in 2024 when the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal found that he had improperly attempted to stop solicitor and tax commentator Dan Neidle from publishing or discussing correspondence over the tax affairs of his client, former chancellor of the exchequer Nadhim Zahawi. The SDT also ordered Hurst to pay £260,000 costs.

    [...]

    The ruling is the second adverse costs ruling this month against the SRA over a SLAPP prosecution. The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal last week ordered the regulator to pay the costs of Carter-Ruck partner Claire Gill following the summary dismissal of the SRA's case.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ 3D Printer Surveillance

    I get the policy goals here, but the solution just won’t work. It’s the same problem as DRM: trying to prevent general-purpose computers from doing specific things. Cory Doctorow wrote about it in 2018 and—more generally—spoke about it in 2011.

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: E-Book/Audiobook Advocacy Tools via RAILS and Becky's Reminder That Our History of Bad Communication Is to Blame

    My home library system, Reaching Across Illinois Library System (RAILS), has created a set of advocacy tools that clearly explain the breadth of the pricing problem on eBook and eAudio books for libraries, and take the conversation directly to our patrons.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world

  That's the value of platforms. The danger of platforms is when they grow so powerful that they usurp the relationship between the parties they are supposed to be facilitating, locking them in and then extracting value from them (someone should coin a word to describe this process!): [...]

• Copyrights

  • New York Times ☛ Olympic Figure Skaters Are on Thin Ice Over Music Copyright Rules

    What most of those in attendance at the Milano Ice Skating Arena on Monday didn’t know was that the thumping beats they enjoyed were the result of a sudden change the duo had been forced to make to the routine that they had originally practiced for this month’s Winter Olympics in Italy.

    Just weeks earlier, Lagha and Lajoie learned that they were at risk of breaching copyright law because of their use of a musical composition featuring hits by the Australian rockers AC/DC that they had not been cleared to use. So they pivoted.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Argentina Blocks Pirate Streaming Services Magis TV and Xuper TV, VPN Usage Skyrockets

    An Argentine court has expanded the crackdown on pirate IPTV services Magis TV and Xuper TV, blocking more than 70 domains, while ordering Google to disable sideloaded Android apps. As the pirate services suddenly went dark across the South American country over the past days, VPN usage in Argentina skyrocketed. Notably, the enforcement action follows shortly after a new US-Argentina trade deal was signed.