Leftovers

• Mike Brock ☛ I Am Not Envious of Billionaires. I Pity Them.

  What you find, inside that world, is a microcosm culture organized entirely around the appreciation of material attainment. The friendships are real, in their way — but they are friendships built around the spoils. The conversation is the boat, the island, the next acquisition, the comparative assessment of each other’s taste in things. The people are often genuinely intelligent. That is what makes it so surprising, and so sad. They have taken their intelligence and pointed it entirely at the accumulation of objects and the status those objects confer, and they have been so successful at this project that they have forgotten — if they ever knew — that the project was supposed to be in service of something else. Something that might actually fill a life.

• James G ☛ IndieWeb Carnival March 2026: Museum memories

  This month, I invite you to write a blog post about a memory that you have of a museum. It can be any museum: your local art gallery, a museum you visit often, a museum you visited on holiday, a museum dedicated to one of your interests (the sea, video games, transportation, your favourite football team), or a museum at a historic site you have visited.

• Gregory Hammond ☛ Your website can be different, it's ok

  Many websites look very similar, it might be because it’s always been like that, the person creating the website isn’t creative, or you don’t want to change something which could cause the visitor to be confused and go to a different site. I want to challenge that and say there are some things that can be changed, and why it’s worth challenging.

• David Revoy ☛ New RSS Feeds Landing - David Revoy

  I've set up three new RSS feeds for the webcomics!

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Hubble Telescope Entering "Death Spiral"

    According to a graph posted on Bluesky by Harvard astronomer and space tracker extraordinaire Jonathan McDowell, the historic artifact could deorbit sooner than expected, possibly even before 2030. The visualization shows its altitude plunging from around 330 miles to just 300 miles between 2020 and 2026, a major decline compared to more steady downward shifts since the late 1990s — a “death spiral,” in the reckoning of The Register.

• Career/Education

  • YLE ☛ Should all kids learn English as their first foreign language? Finland's second-largest city grapples with a hot-button issue

    While the debate over language instruction may be reflected elsewhere, the capital region differs from most of Finland in that number of children is growing. Espoo in particular has a young population.
    "Reckless population growth based on immigration"

• Hardware

  • Herman Õunapuu ☛ The cloud just stopped scaling

    At this rate, my home server will actually have to become production at work, and my gaming PC has to be converted to a server because it has a whopping 32 GB of RAM and 6 good CPU cores.

• Proprietary

  • Blake Rain ☛ Moving My Site to Bunny CDN

    There’s also some professional reasons to look into moving away from US big tech companies: at Cignpost we operate in a regulated industry, and there may end up being a lot of regulatory compliance issues arising for EU and UK businesses that rely on US tech companies. So, I need to make sure that I have some idea of how to move our core infrastructure to a more compliant and secure location.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-02-20 [Older] Skating between human magic and machine, the fragile fate of generative AI ‘works’

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Components price shock hitting South African PC buyers hard

      DDR5 memory prices have surged by as much as 230% over the past quarter, according to Evetech, while even legacy DDR4 modules – which one might expect to be cheaper – have climbed 150-200% as manufacturers shift production capacity away from older standards. SSDs are up 35-50%, spinning-platter hard drives 5-15% and GPUs 10-20%, with further increases expected.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Frictionless AI comes at a human cost to learning, growth and connection

      Artificial intelligence is rapidly making intellectual work and social interaction easier, but that ease may come at a substantial psychological cost, according to researchers from the University of Toronto. In an article published in Communications Psychology, the authors argue that AI's greatest strength, namely removing friction from work and relationships, is also a liability.

    • [Old] Cleveland ☛ AI slop threatens truth. Trusted newsrooms are the antidote: Letter from the Editor

      I’ve written plenty about how our newsroom is using AI as a tool to go deeper and be more accurate in our journalism, but the other side to AI is the false material getting published all over the place as genuine. The fake stuff is called AI slop -- AI-generated junk content, designed to lure clicks with fake or misleading claims -- and it is showing up in social media, videos and many other places you might visit.

      I’ve long used Facebook not for news but for hobbies and interests. I join groups that seem interesting, just to learn more about topics I find intriguing. The posts I see are a diversion from the news.

      Of late, though, my feed is loaded with AI slop. Phony items about developments in television shows, many of which I don’t watch. False reports about performers touring or being ill. I see so many fake reports that I find myself questioning almost everything I see, even if it’s legitimate. And I don’t want to have to go searching just to know if what I’m reading is real.

    • Jason Becker ☛ An hour of vibecoding in Xcode has convinced me apps may be dead

      At this point, I can't tell if it's because Xcode is terrible, the agentic integration is terrible, or LLMs are bad at writing Swift 6, but the experience has been maddening compared to everything I've done with webprogramming.

    • James Randall ☛ Neural Networks for Developers - XOR (Part 1) | James Randall

      Increasing numbers of us are turning to solutions based on neural networks to help us with a wide variety of tasks. From accelerating software development through to getting advice on personal issues they are becoming almost the goto tool for many people.

      But how do they actually work?

      I figured it would be fun, and perhaps helpful to others, to explore this through a series of practical, interactive, explained, examples of increasing complexity over a fairly short (5 part) series. And I promise that by part 5 we’ll have something pretty cool!

    • Crooked Timber ☛ In the Next Great Transformation AI will not eliminate genuine expertise; rather it will make it more valuable — Crooked Timber

      Tao’s view is that in mathematics the process of discovery is very valuable, even though that process may be slow and involves a lot of possible dead-ends. We may say that during the older process of discovery, one didn’t just learn the truth, but also quite a bit about the tools of the trade that can be used to discover the truth (and how different mathematical objects and fields relate to each other). Now that AIs start reaching truth quickly, or to put it more precisely, without access to the underlying mathematical landscape, we encounter a trade-off between truth and (let’s call it) informativeness.

      In the interview, as reported, Tao never uses the phrase ‘truth.’ Rather, he phrases his analysis in terms of the ‘answer’ the machines provide. It’s worth conveying how he puts it: [...]

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ How LAUSD Supt. Carvalho's bet on AI went bust and led to FBI raids

      Federal agents raided Carvalho’s home and office in an investigation that sources said is linked to the failed chatbot project.

  • Social Control Media

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-17 [Older] Spain to investigate big tech over AI child abuse imagery

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-17 [Older] Ireland launches data protection probe into Grok's deepfakes

    • David Bushell ☛ MOOving to a self-hosted Bluesky PDS

      Mastodon and Bluesky are the social platforms I use. I’ve always been tempted to self-host my own Mastodon instance but the requirements are steep. I use the omg.lol server instead. Self-hosting the Bluesky PDS is much less demanding.

      My setup includes: [...]

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • [Repeat] Krebs On Security ☛ Who is the Kimwolf Botmaster “Dort”?

      In early January 2026, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how a security researcher disclosed a vulnerability that was used to build Kimwolf, the world’s largest and most disruptive botnet. Since then, the person in control of Kimwolf — who goes by the handle “Dort” — has coordinated a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), doxing and email flooding attacks against the researcher and this author, and more recently caused a SWAT team to be sent to the researcher’s home. This post examines what is knowable about Dort based on public information.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-17 [Older] Nigeria investigates Temu for possible data privacy breaches

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-17 [Older] Shein faces EU investigation over products, design features

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-16 [Older] Austria files terror charges in alleged Taylor Swift concert plot

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-17 [Older] Libya: 'I wish I had died,' says migrant after weeks of rape

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-17 [Older] Lower Saxony: AfD state chapter designated extremist group

  • The Local SE ☛ 2026-02-19 [Older] Man faces trial in Sweden for leaving 'Hitler apples' at migration minister's house

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-17 [Older] Bulgaria: How six deaths fueled distrust in the authorities

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-17 [Older] Ceasefire in eastern DR Congo: A chance for peace?

  • Vox ☛ Finland’s Lapua Movement has lessons for US democracy

    Nearly 100 years ago, it had a different kind of near miss — a democratic one, in which the country almost slipped into fascism, but ultimately recovered.

  • Mike Brock ☛ On the Death of a Tyrant

    They swore an oath. Not to a president. Not to a party. Not to a foreign government. They swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States — the document that vests the power to declare war in Congress, not in a man posting videos on Truth Social at two-thirty in the morning. They swore an oath to defend that document against all enemies, foreign and domestic. They held up their hand and made that promise, and then they went where they were told to go, because that is what service means, and we asked it of them.

    And Donald Trump sent them to die without the authorization that document requires.

  • Firstpost ☛ 90% rise in Al Qaeda, Islamic State attacks as terror spikes in West Africa: US think tank

    Terrorists linked to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State are ramping up their attacks on the borderlands between three West African nations: Niger, Benin and Nigeria. The revelation was made in a report by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) project, which was published on Thursday.

    The report argued that the terror groups operating in these nations are turning transit corridors into active conflict zones. It noted that violent incidents involving Islamist groups in the tri‑border area rose to 90 per cent between 2024 and 2025.

  • BBC ☛ Former pub name honour for first Muslim lord

    The Waggon and Horses pub in Handforth, Cheshire, has been bought by the Cheadle Muslim Association (CMA).

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-16 [Older] The frog poison that killed Alexei Navalny likely lab-made

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-16 [Older] How Epstein got so rich

  • New York Times ☛ Why the Epstein Investigations Took So Long and Did So Little

    That was certainly true for Mr. Epstein, who would die in a jail cell five weeks later. But for the vast majority of the men and women who had either enabled Mr. Epstein or may have committed sexual assault, it turned out that there was little to fear.

    Aside from Mr. Epstein’s longtime conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, none of his friends or associates have been criminally charged in the United States. In the six-plus years since his death, the lack of prosecutions has given rise to outrage and conspiracy theories about why powerful people have gone unpunished.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Iran Things that Got Memory Holed, Including the So-Called Negotiators, Steve and Jared

    There are a number of facts about Iran that are being memory holed by significant swaths of the public.

• Environment

  • Science Alert ☛ Air Pollution Is Wreaking Havoc on Ants, And The Effects Are Alarming

    Scent is essential to ant society: every ant within a colony wears the badge of membership in the form of smelly hydrocarbons. Human air pollution, a new study from Max-Planck Institute researchers suggests, is wreaking havoc on ant society by interfering with these characteristic scents.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-21 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini tariffs: EU grapples with fallout of US court ruling

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Drew Breunig ☛ We're Talking About Terms of Use, But the Issue is Embedded Judgment

    Beneath the Anthropic and Department of War fracas, there is a legitimate & essential conversation to be had about how much control any organization has when deeply adopting an AI model they didn’t train.

    These are probabilistic systems, with near infinite surface area to test, that are intentionally designed. Models are used to inform and make decisions, and they all have embedded perspectives.

  • [Repeat] Benjamin Mako Hill ☛ What makes online groups vulnerable to governance capture?

    The situation in Croatian Wikipedia was well documented and is now largely fixed, but we still know very little about why it was taken over, while other language editions seem to have rebuffed similar capture attempts. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), Zarine Kharazian, Kate Starbird, and I present an interview-based study that provides an explanation for why Croatian was captured while several other editions facing similar contexts and threats fared better.

  • ACM ☛ Governance Capture in a Self-Governing Community: A Qualitative Comparison of the Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias

    What types of governance arrangements make some self-governed online groups more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns? We present a qualitative comparative analysis of the Croatian and Serbian Wikipedia editions to answer this question. We do so because between at least 2011 and 2020, the Croatian language version of Wikipedia was taken over by a small group of administrators who introduced far-right bias and outright disinformation. Dissenting editorial voices were reverted, banned, and blocked. Although Serbian, Bosnian, and Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias share many linguistic and cultural features, and faced similar threats, they seem to have largely avoided this fate. Based on a grounded theory analysis of interviews with members of these communities and others in cross-functional platform-level roles, we propose that the convergence of three features---high perceived value as a target, limited early bureaucratic openness, and a preference for personalistic, informal forms of organization over formal ones---produced a window of opportunity for governance capture on Croatian Wikipedia. Our findings illustrate that online community governing infrastructures can play a crucial role in systematic disinformation campaigns and other influence operations.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-02-16 [Older] Apple Just Bought A Sinister ‘Pre-Speech’ Tech Company Implicated In Genocide

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-02-19 [Older] West Virginia Sues Apple Over ICloud's Alleged Role in Distribution of Child Sex Abuse Material

  • ME Forum ☛ Islamists Hijack U.K. Government Task Force Defining ‘Islamophobia’

    The 34-page investigation, The Islamist Links of the Government’s Working Group on Islamophobia, examines the relationships and public remarks of the five panel members and finds that its four Muslim members, as well as the chair, Dominic Grieve, an Anglican, have ties to Islamists.

  • Morning Star News ☛ Christian in Indonesia Arrested for Comments on Muhammad

    Saputra, a former Muslim, was arrested for allegedly insulting Muhammad via his TikTok account @tersadarkan5758, according to MetroTv.com. Uploaded late last year, the video has been viewed around 1.9 million times and sparked widespread reaction on social media.

  • Quillette ☛ Islamism: Shooting the Messenger

    If this sounds like a deflection, that’s because it is. It shifts the burden of explanation from the ideology that animates violence to the act of publicly naming that ideology. It makes out that the wrong kind of speech is the cause of murder. The same inversion appears elsewhere in modern Britain: the wrong people are made to carry the moral burden, while the real agents of harm are allowed to fade into the background.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-17 [Older] Czech Republic: Government attacks public television and radio

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine For Accurately Reporting That The Swiss Government Didn't Want Palantir

  • Techdirt ☛ Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine For Accurately Reporting That The Swiss Government Didn’t Want Palantir

    Palantir Technologies, the infamous surveillance and data analytics giant chaired by Peter Thiel, has filed a lawsuit against Republik, a small Swiss online magazine, over a pair of investigative articles published in December. The articles, produced in collaboration with the investigative collective WAV, detailed a years-long, multi-ministry charm offensive by Palantir to sell its software to Swiss federal authorities. The campaign was, by all accounts, a comprehensive failure. Swiss agencies rejected Palantir at least nine times, with concerns ranging from data sovereignty to reputational risk to the simple fact that nobody needed the product.

    The reporting was based on documents obtained through 59 freedom of information requests filed with Swiss federal agencies. The key finding was an internal Swiss Armed Forces report that concluded Palantir’s software posed unacceptable risks because sensitive military data could potentially be accessed by U.S. government intelligence agencies. As the Republik article details: [...]

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-17 [Older] What is the 'rules-based order' and can it survive?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-17 [Older] US civil rights leader Jesse Jackson dies at 84

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-02-17 [Older] Photos Show the Life of Civil Rights Leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson

  • Suspension for solicitor who ran firm without authorisation

    A solicitor who practised as a sole practitioner for over three years without authorisation after her partner left has been suspended for nine months.

    The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) described Michelle Niaz as “an experienced solicitor who was aware of her regulatory responsibilities” and had the procedural knowledge required to replace a partner, as she had done previously.

    As well as her “overarching duties as a solicitor”, Ms Niaz was COLP and COFA of Lewis Mitchell Solicitors in Lancashire and “therefore had enhanced specific responsibilities to ensure compliance”.

  • Law Society Gazette ☛ Partner suspended for running unauthorised sole practice for three years

    Niaz became a partner at Clitheroe, Lancs-based firm, Lewis Mitchell Solicitors Inc Ruth Moores in 2016 and after another partner left in January 2020 and was not replaced, Niaz became the sole partner. She was also the compliance officer for legal practice from December 2016 and the compliance officer for finance and administration from January 2017.

    The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal judgment on the agreed outcome states that between January 2020 and September 2023, Niaz operated as a sole practitioner without authorisation and had held client monies when she was not working in an authorised body.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Arkansas cop rams vehicle transporting child to emergency room

    A cartoonish caricature of the conduct we've decided is acceptable from police officers: [...]

  • Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Inc ☛ Arkansas State trooper used PIT maneuver on car taking child to hospital

    An Arkansas State Police trooper last week used a ramming technique on Interstate 630 in Little Rock to stop the vehicle of a man who had been taking his son to get emergency care for an allergic reaction, the agency said Friday.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Kevin Boone ☛ Can Project Gemini rewind the Web thirty years?

    If you're under forty, most likely you never even think about this, much less think it's a problem. My kids think that getting all your information surrounded by invitations to waste your money on anatomical enhancements is scarcely even worthy of note. It's part of the fabric of everyday life, as is the fact that vast mega-corporations are following our every move. Those of us who do see the problem -- and, thankfully, that number is increasing -- do little except wring our hands.

    So Project Gemini provides some grounds for cautious optimism. Gemini is an attempt to rewind the Web by thirty years, and keep it there. Even if Gemini is not successful in itself -- and I shall be arguing that there are good reasons to think it won't be -- its very existence shows that there are at least some people who are trying to take action.

  • Doc Searls ☛ For Public Parks on the Internet

    But that’s not what Eli is coming here (Indiana, the National Football Champion University) to talk about this Thursday. (Though I’m sure it’ll come up.) The title of his talk is What Might “Public Parks of the Internet” Look Like?

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• IP Kat ☛ 2026-02-23 [Older] Accounts of profits & threats: Luxe World v Touch of Vogue

• Patents

  • 2026-02-17 [Older] Apple v. Squires: USPTO Director Has Unlimited Discretion on IPR Institution

  • Software Patents

    • Yokogawa strengthens Linux‑based offshore automation systems through OIN 2.0

      Expanded open‑source patent protections support long‑term reliability, multi‑vendor integration and remote operations across offshore facilities using Yokogawa’s OpreX platforms.