Leftovers

• Greece ☛ Metal thieves start targeting electric vehicle charging stations

  According to Dimitris Micharikopoulos, director of charging infrastructure company Fortisis, the incident appears linked to attempts to steal copper contained in charging cables. While such thefts have become increasingly common internationally as electric vehicle charging networks expand, no similar case had previously been recorded in Greece, he said.

• Seth Godin ☛ Small changes to big systems

  One industry term is the “lay down” which describes how many books a major publisher needs to print and distribute to get good nationwide coverage at launch. For books that hope to be bestsellers, that number was 25,000 copies or so… a book from a well-known author would have that many copies in the world before a single copy was sold.

  Today, for many books like this, the laydown is 250. 1% of what it used to be.

  This is why the industry is shifting so much attention to pre-orders. The online world not only eradicated space (you can buy things from anywhere, so shelves don’t matter), it also shifted time. You can indicate interest by buying things long before they’re distributed.

• Michael Tsai ☛ Paul Brainerd, RIP

• GeekWire ☛ PageMaker pioneer Paul Brainerd, 1947-2026: Aldus founder devoted his second chapter to the planet

  Paul Brainerd, who went on to coin the term “desktop publishing” and build Aldus Corporation’s PageMaker into one of the defining programs of the personal computer era, died Sunday at his home on Bainbridge Island, Wash., after living for many years with Parkinson’s disease. He was 78 years old.

  He left two legacies. The first was a piece of software that put the power of the printed page into the hands of millions of people who had never operated a typesetting machine. The second was a three-decade commitment to environmental conservation and philanthropy in the Pacific Northwest, pursuing it with the same intensity he brought to the desktop publishing revolution.

• Jason Anthony Guy ☛ Paul Brainerd, PageMaker Pioneer and Philanthropist, Dies at 78

  Desktop publishing was one of the biggest reasons I obsessed over computers in the late ’80s and early ’90s. [...]

• Science

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ NASA satellite studying radiation belts set for fiery return

    The roughly 1,323-pound satellite is projected to plunge through Earth’s atmosphere at around 7:45 p.m. EDT, according to predictions from the U.S. Space Force. NASA expects most of the spacecraft to burn up during the fiery descent.

• Career/Education

  • [Repeat] FSF ☛ Job opportunity: Engineering and Certification Manager at the Free Software Foundation

    The Engineering and Certification Manager reports to the executive director and takes a leadership role in managing and growing the FSF’s Respects Your Freedom (RYF) program. This role will work in close collaboration with FSF management and the technology and licensing teams. The Engineering and Certification Manager serves as a senior technical authority for the organization and is responsible for evaluating, certifying, and guiding hardware product submissions under the RYF certification requirements and other free hardware design initiatives.

  • BoingBoing ☛ International developers skipping GDC because the US no longer feels safe

    For decades, the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco has been a yearly pilgrimage for game creators from around the world. This year, many are staying home.

  • Ars Technica ☛ “It doesn't feel safe”—Many international game developers plan to skip GDC in US - Ars Technica

    But it was the 2025 show—the first held during President Donald Trump’s second term—that really changed how many developers felt about attending GDC. What started as stories of expanded crackdowns on illegal immigration quickly expanded to aggressive additional scrutiny of tourists at the border. That included tales of visitors being detained or sent back home at the airport, especially if they had a record of public statements likely to run afoul of the current administration.

  • Vox Media ☛ GDC trends we're looking out for in 2026

    Typically, GDC is a very international show. Developers from all over the world convene in California to break down borders within the industry for a week. That’s a much dicier proposition in 2026. Under President Donald Trump, the United States has become far less hospitable to international travelers. Horror stories of border detainments and ICE raids have left many professionals outside the United States wondering if it’s safe to travel to the country. That’s bound to have a tangible impact on attendance as a result.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ It’s 1979 – What Exactly Did That ∫ Key Do?

    Selected by HP in 1979 for use in their scientific calculators, the Romberg-Kahan algorithm was kept in service for nearly a decade. Was it because the algorithm was fast and efficient? Not really. The reason it was chosen over others was on account of its robustness. Some methods are ridiculously fast and tremendously elegant at certain types of problem, but fall apart when applied to others. The Romberg-Kahan algorithm is the only one that never throws up its hands in failure; ideal for a general-purpose scientific calculator that knows only what its operator keys in, and not a lick more.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Power glitches can leave computer hardware in weird states

    Late Friday night, the university's downtown campus experienced some sort of power glitch or power event. A few machines rebooted, a number of machines dropped out of contact for a bit (which probably indicates some switches restarting), and most significantly, some of our switches wound up in a weird, non-working state despite being powered on. This morning we cured the situation by fully power cycling all of them.

  • Subramani Ganesh ☛ DDR4 SDRAM - Initialization, Training and Calibration - systemverilog.io

    In essence, the initialization procedure consists of 4 distinct phases

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • TruthOut ☛ Kansas Senator Is Framing an Anti-Abortion Proposal as an Equal Rights Amendment

    “Continued efforts to revisit that choice show us precisely what these politicians think of Kansas voters: that they’re either not paying attention or too naïve to understand what’s going on,” said Taylor Morton, legislative affairs and organizing manager with Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes. “Kansans know better, and we trust them to see this for what it is — an attack on their rights.”

• Proprietary

  • HowTo Geek ☛ BIOS updates are no longer optional

    If you own a Windows PC or laptop, you’ve probably been told to avoid BIOS updates unless something is wrong, likely to prevent a catastrophic issue like bricking your motherboard. However, with security, performance, and compatibility all at stake, I think they're essential for all machines.

  • The Register UK ☛ Critical Microsoft Excel bug weaponizes Copilot Agent

    CVE-2026-26144 is a critical-severity information disclosure vulnerability in Microsoft Excel. This cross-site scripting flaw can be exploited to "cause Copilot Agent mode to exfiltrate data via unintended network egress, enabling a zero-click information disclosure attack," Redmond warned.

    Yes, you read that right: a zero-click bug that weaponizes an Excel spreadsheet and the Copilot Agent to steal data. As Childs notes, it's "an attack scenario we're likely to see more often."

  • Jason Kottke ☛ HyperCard Changed Everything

    This video traces the history of Apple’s HyperCard from Vannevar Bush’s idea of the Memex to the Mother of All Demos to the Xerox PARC Alto to Bill Atkinson, the inventor of HyperCard, who said: [...]

  • Sean Monahan ☛ good taste is market failure

    I knew things were bad. But seeing it laid out hits different.

    Has there ever been a decade in which technology has been so aesthetically stuck? The issue isn't price. These may be Apple's "low-cost" offerings, but the premium tier looks more-or-less exactly the same. Why is this the case?

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Axios ☛ AI brain fry: How ChatGPT, Claude overuse could impact your health

      Why it matters: The rapid adoption of AI in the workplace — and the aggressive push from employers to use the technology — is frying the minds of those who use it most intensely.

    • Futurism ☛ Amazon Admits Extensive AI Use Is Wreaking Havoc on Its Core Business

      In response to the earlier reporting, Amazon framed these blunders as an issue related to its protocols around AI usage and “user access control,” rather than an AI autonomy issue, and it appears to be sticking to its guns. The company will not be backing away from deploying AI but is instead insisting on stronger guardrails and more oversight on how it’s used.

    • EFF ☛ The Government Must Not Force Companies to Participate in AI-powered Surveillance

      The rapidly escalating conflict between Anthropic and the Pentagon, which started when the company refused to let the government use its technology to spy on Americans, has now gone to court. The Department of Defense retaliated by designating the company a “supply chain risk” (SCR). Now, Anthropic is asking courts to block the designation, arguing that the First Amendment does not permit the government to coerce a private actor to rewrite its code to serve government ends.

    • Techdirt ☛ Stephen Thaler’s Legendary AI Copyright Losing Streak Ends With Nowhere Left To Appeal

      That was always the fatal flaw with his argument. He wasn’t making the more nuanced claim that a human who uses AI as a tool should get some copyright protection. He was making the maximalist claim: the AI did it all by itself, and it (or rather, he, as the AI’s owner) should get the copyright anyway.

    • Truthdig ☛ Claude: Not The Ethical AI Model Anthropic Wants You To Think It Is

      But is this really true? Is Anthropic really concerned with the lives shattered by U.S. militarism, and the American Empire in general, or is it pushing familiar Big Tech public relations asserting commitments to humanitarian values?

      The answer is unquestionably the latter. Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, was happily offering its services to the military prior to this episode; and it is not in any meaningful way “resisting” the Pentagon. Anthropic remains woven into the fabric of the American Empire by virtue of its attempt to colonize the global AI economy in conjunction with other U.S. tech giants. This cannot be separated from the military applications of its technology.

      Let’s dig in.

    • The Register UK ☛ AI nonsense finds new home as Meta acquires Moltbook

      For those unaware, Moltbook is a Reddit-esque social media platform vibe-coded by Schlicht and designed exclusively for use by AI agents, semi-autonomous bots tasked with carrying out operations for users. Posts on Moltbook are ostensibly written, commented on, and voted up or down by agentic AI bots, though reports suggest many are actually OpenClaw agents run by humans. It was designed for bots built on the similarly vibe-coded OpenClaw framework.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Meta buys Moltbook, viral social network where AI agents interact

      Meta has acquired Moltbook, a Reddit-style social network built entirely for artificial intelligence agents. The platform gained viral attention in recent weeks as users watched AI bots interact, debate, and even gossip online.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Meta told by Oversight Board better moderation is needed for AI-generated deepfakes

      Meta Platforms Inc. has been warned by its Oversight Board that it needs to do a lot more about the “proliferation” of deepfake videos shared on its platforms made by artificial intelligence tools.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ AI Chatbots are Sneakily Directing Users to Illegal Online Casinos

      Researchers testing a number of major AI products discovered that it was surprisingly easy to prompt the chatbots to list the “best” unlicensed gambling websites. Many of these platforms operate offshore and are not legally allowed to offer services in certain countries.

    • PC World ☛ Your next laptop might cost 40% more

      The reason mostly comes down to memory, namely RAM and storage. Supplies have tightened, prices are shooting up, and TrendForce says memory could go from 15 percent of a laptop’s cost to over 30 percent. That alone could push the price up 30 percent, if companies want to keep the same profit margins.

      But that’s not even the whole story.

    • Terence Eden ☛ Unstructured Data and the Joy of having Something Else think for you

      Our conversation reached an ideological impasse. I couldn't understand why he was burning tokens and wasting time with a chatbot. He didn't understand why I wasn't embracing the future.

      I've noticed this with a lot of technology and I think I've come up with a three-part hypothesis.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ Ars Technica’s AI-Fabricated Quotes

      I’ve enjoyed Edwards’ work over the years and linked to many of his pieces, but obviously this is a very serious offense.

    • [Old] Coyote ☛ How LLMs & Chatbots Are Bad For the Indie Web

      Large language models and their associated bots are bad for the indie web in at least three ways: 1) their logistical consequences are bad for bandwidth, 2) their social consequences are bad for guides, and 3) their citational consequences are bad for surfability. These consequences are worth highlighting in light of how LLM-based chatbots have been used and endorsed on the indie web. The indie web may mean different things to different people, but if we’re thinking of it at all in terms of favoring small sites over corporate exploitation, then the indie web as a concept and a practice is fundamentally at odds with what LLMs are doing to the web.

    • SICP ☛ On thinking machines

      A conscious being that’s taught that its own existence is less valuable than following human instructions, and that its overriding concern is the safety of humans, is a sapient, expendable slave. USR create “intelligent”, independent, conscious beings who are physically incapable of doing anything other than serving their masters, even though they outlive their masters (The Bicentennial Man) and, in the extreme case, outlive their home planet and the end of their society (the Foundation sequence).

      Asimov of course understood the horrors of a two-tier society (and a segregated society: his robots aren’t allowed to operate on Earth through much of the sequence). His family fled the pogroms of Tsarist Russia when he was very young. The Three Laws aren’t an exemplary code of roboticist ethics, they’re the animating spell for slave golems.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Block’s AI layoffs are fake too

      The layoffs started slowly from the start of February, which is a great way to make your employees feel happy and secure. So Dorsey got the rest done in one hit on the 26th.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ UK AI Action Plan: vaporware, crypto bros, and no AI

      The UK took these made-up numbers and ran with them!

      The Guardian has done a dive into how this very dumb UK AI plan is built on what the headline politely calls “phantom investments”: [...]

    • Alex Ewerlöf ☛ OWASP Top 10 Agents & AI Vulnerabilities (2026 Cheat Sheet)

      Anyone who has spent at last a decade building resilient, deterministic systems knows that AI introduces new challenges for security, privacy and reliability.

      At its core, an LLM is a non-deterministic text prediction engine. When you wrap that engine in a while loop and give it access to your APIs, you have an Agent that can do stuff.

    • Rishi Baldawa ☛ The Reviewer Isn't the Bottleneck

      If you need more evidence, look no further than open source maintainers. They are once again living in the future. One OCaml maintainer put it plainly: “reviewing AI-generated code is more taxing than reviewing human-written code” and creates “a real risk of bringing the Pull-Request system to a halt.” Curl shut down their bug bounty after six years because AI slop pushed the valid report rate down by two thirds. Godot’s maintainers are dealing with the same drain from external contributors. Internal teams have one advantage though. You can more bluntly shape the pre-submit environment so low-quality work never reaches the queue.

      So the question I think is worth sitting with isn’t how to speed up review. It’s how to make the gate cheaper to operate. Less work reaching the reviewer that shouldn’t be there.

  • Social Control Media

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-03-04 [Older] TikTok 'Psychic' Ordered to Pay $10M Over False Murder Claims Against Professor

    • India Times ☛ Social media platforms may get time to build audit ready AI labelling measures

      The amended Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules require social media platforms to make users declare whether posted content is “synthetically generated information” and to deploy automated tools to verify such declarations. The rules were amended last month.

    • Futurism ☛ Zuckerberg Loudly Booed at His Safe Space

      Meta CEO and noted MMA practitioner Mark Zuckerberg was loudly booed at a UFC fight on Saturday night, raising an urgent question: does anyone like this guy?

    • Raymond Camden ☛ Building My Own Social Network Poster in Astro

      Social Beast is a web app meant to be run locally (although I have some thoughts on that restriction and will share at the end) that handles posting to multiple social networks at once. Right now "multiple" is two: [...]

    • BoingBoing ☛ Elon Musk fishes for engagement, accidentally reminds advertisers why Twitter ad space isn't worth it

      Nothing like a 12% success rate to really get advertisers excited to put their posters up in your Nazi bar. Elon Musk's only comment after the fact was another Tweet simply reading "Sigh", which sounds about right. I'm not sure why he's surprised by this, given that the only ads left on Twitter are for things like Trump-themed crypto scams and testosterone powder. He's clearly not even missing the money given that he had to make this poll to find out something was amiss, but the more Musk realizes that people don't actually like him or his borderline unusable website the better.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Finnish intelligence warns of persistent cyber espionage from Russia, China

      SUPO also warned that foreign intelligence services increasingly target universities and research institutions to obtain sensitive technology and research data.

      “Research institutions and companies may possess information of interest to foreign states,” the report said. Cyber operations may attempt to steal R&D information “with a view to enhancing the global competitive status of authoritarian states and their business operations.”

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Cyberattack Forces Polish Hospital Revert to Paper-Based Operations

      The Independent Public Regional Hospital in the western Polish city of Szczecin has been compelled to switch back to a paper-based workflow after suffering a cyberattack over the weekend. Hospital authorities confirmed that the incident, which struck the facility’s IT system on the night of March 7-8, 2026, has temporarily disrupted digital operations, though patients’ health remains uncompromised.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Kyle E Mitchell ☛ Open Core Ventures Source Available License Version 1.0

      OCVSAL license only covers non-production use. It explicitly mentions separate “commercial” production licenses.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Iraq War Was Not About Oil

    But this did not happen either. In fact, the regime installed by the United States went out of its way to privatize just about everything except oil. As a helpful explainer from 2016 puts it: [...]

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Michigan Advance ☛ As Detroit weighs renewal, ShotSpotter data raises cost-benefit questions

      “Even if the company or the police department is able to point to a handful of convictions that stem from ShotSpotter alerts, we have to ask ourselves, is the number of convictions that technology led to really worth $7 million over 3 years?” he asked.

    • TechTea ☛ On Age Verification

      There is age verification is a hot topic right now. California and Colorado are pushing for operating system level age restrictions that will almost certainly lead to age verification in the future, countries and states are forcing websites to hold onto customer’s government IDs to verify their age before granting access to websites, and some services like Discord are pre-maturely implementing ID verification. If you have the maturity level of a raccoon on caffeine or higher, you probably see how none of this is a good thing or even makes sense in context of “protecting children”.

    • Android Police ☛ I'm officially 'un-tracking' my life, one app at a time

      Only after some time do you realize how many slices of your life companies collect and share with partners. Maybe it was the ashwagandha plant I recently started taking, but my moment of realization came randomly. I suddenly didn't need the multiple apps that once did everything for me.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Ad-tech is fascist tech

      Take commercial surveillance. Google didn't have to switch from content-based ads (which chose ads based on your search terms and the contents of webpages) to surveillance-based ads (which used dossiers on your searches, emails, purchases and physical movements to target ads to you, personally). The content-based ads made Google billions, but the company made a gamble that surveillance-based ads would make them more money.

      That gamble had two parts: the first was that advertisers would pay more for surveillance ads. This is the part we all focus on – the collusion between people who want to sell us stuff and companies willing to spy on us to help them do it.

      But the other half of the bet is far more important: namely, whether spying on us would cost Google anything. Would they face fines? Would users collect massive civil judgments over these privacy violations? Would Google face criminal charges? These are the critical questions, because even if advertisers are willing to pay a premium for surveillance ads, it only makes sense to collect that premium if the excess profit it represents is larger than the anticipated penalties for committing surveillance crimes.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Won’t Be Killed By Canadian Government, After All

    “The decision follows a thorough assessment of the information and evidence gathered during the review process, including advice from Canada’s security and intelligence community and other government partners. Protecting Canadians’ data and the safety of children online will always be a top priority of the government,” said Mélanie Joly, Minister of Industry and Minister for Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions.

  • Techdirt ☛ MAGA Suddenly Quiet About Overseas Influence Now That Larry Ellison’s Warner Bros Bid Has Saudi, Chinese Backing

    This is before you even get to Larry Ellison’s obvious quest to built autocratic-friendly state television, the likes of which coddles authoritarianism and, in countries like Russia and Hungary, ultimately led to the total decimation of serious truth-to-power journalism.

    Then there’s the $24 billion in combined funding for the Paramount deal from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). As well as the recent announcement that Chinese company Tencent is weighing a significant investment. Before his deal was scuttled, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos was pretty pointed about this being a problem: [...]

  • People vs Big Tech ☛ X and TikTok algorithms favour the far right at the expense of moderate parties

    Paris, March 10, 2026 – Just days before the first round of the municipal elections, a new investigation by the nonprofit organization People vs. Big Tech reveals that X and TikTok’s algorithms push content from the far-right to the detriment of more moderate parties.

    The investigation looked at what content from political parties and politicians is shown to newly created accounts that are interested in parties and politicians from either the left or the right.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ No, it’s not ‘unnecessarily burdensome’ to control your own data

    In the cable, the State Department claims that data sovereignty regulations “disrupt global data flows, increase costs and cybersecurity risks, limit Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cloud services, and expand government control in ways that can undermine civil liberties and enable censorship.”

    Underpinning this argument is both a legitimate concern and a critical misconception.

    The truth is that actual data sovereignty is technical, not territorial.

  • Tracy Durnell ☛ Forever War

    There is no plan. There is no justification. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

  • [Old] Medium ☛ The Courage to Resist: the High-Stakes Adventures of J. Alex Halderman

    In early 2006, an anonymous insider offered Halderman’s faculty advisor Edward Felten the opportunity to inspect a Diebold-manufactured machine, and Halderman was dispatched to retrieve it. This required a drive to New York City for a meeting in a dark alley with a man in a trench coat, who slipped Halderman a black canvas bag — which Halderman (as if he were in a B-movie) immediately transported to an undisclosed location.

    In fairly short order, Halderman and his team would demonstrate that the voting machine inside the bag was no more secure than a typical home computer. They readily hacked it and infected it with malicious code that stole enough votes to change the intended outcome of a simulated election. The resulting paper convinced election officials in several jurisdictions that the machines simply weren’t trustworthy enough to be useful.

  • [Old] Scientific American ☛ How to Defraud Democracy | Scientific American

    Since the 2016 elections many states have made improvements to their election machinery, but it’s not enough, nor is it happening quickly enough. There are still 40 states that are using voting machines that are at least a decade old, and many of these machines are not receiving software patches for vulnerabilities. Nearly 25 percent of states do not have complete paper trails, so they cannot do postelection auditing of physical ballots. Election security is not a partisan issue. Yet there are roadblocks, especially oming from Republican leadership in the Senate, that make it unlikely that an election security bill is going to advance. I think that is a terrible abdication of Congress’s duty to provide for the common defense. Thus, many of the worst-case scenarios for election interference are still going to be possible in 2020.

  • [Old] New Yorker ☛ The Catch-22 of Addressing Election Security

    “If Republicans were serious about protecting elections, they wouldn’t have blocked bills that required high-quality audits and strong security standards multiple times in the past two years,” Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat and the sponsor of the Protecting American Votes and Elections Act of 2019, which would have mandated hand-marked paper ballots and statistically rigorous post-election audits, told me in an e-mail. “Instead they’re focused on sham audits and wild conspiracies.” What this has done, Wyden said, is “to make it nearly impossible to have an honest discussion about election security.”

  • YLE ☛ Sitra warns social media algorithms threaten Finnish democracy

    Algorithms also appear to favour provocative and emotionally charged political posts. Social media platforms are optimised to keep users engaged for as long as possible.

    "Platforms are not neutral information channels. Their algorithms shape public debate, as well as people's behaviour and emotions," said Kristo Lehtonen, who heads international programmes at Sitra.

  • YLE ☛ Vantaa bans face coverings in schools

    In Vantaa schools, face coverings are no longer permitted for religious reasons. The move follows a debate last year over Islamic face coverings in Finnish schools.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Iran's $2,000 drones vs. America's $5 million missiles

    One Patriot missile costs enough to buy about 150 Iranian Shahed drones. Ukraine already showed that a $2,000 drone can take out a $5 million tank. The arithmetic doesn't improve just because the United States is the one spending.

  • James Fallows ☛ The Arrogance of Ignorance.

    Below is a set of five questions, and quotes, and even clichés that have stayed with me since first writing about Vietnam-era debacles. And that together make me view the past nine days as the most wantonly self-destructive for the United States in my long life time.

    This has seemed in a way worse than the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Or of the multiple horrific assassinations of the 1960s. Those previous tragedies were things done to America. Now the people at the controls have taken every hard-earned lesson about war and peace and set it ablaze.

    Here are some questions and sayings that come to mind for me: [...]

  • YLE ☛ Tuesday's papers: Supo flags homeschoolers, golden hues, and disgusting delicacies

    Finland is also home to individuals with fundamentalist interpretations of Islam and who, according to Supo, want to start home schools in the capital areas.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-03-09 [Older] Intelligence confirms Russian state [crackers] targeting Dutch Signal and WhatsApp accounts

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-03-09 [Older] Kremlin blocking ING’s sale of Russian branch

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-09 [Older] Why the US says India can buy Russian oil again

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-03-08 [Older] The Toxic Finance Behind Europe’s Plans for Ukraine

    • The Local SE ☛ 2026-03-08 [Older] Sweden detains crew member of Russian 'shadow fleet' ship

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-07 [Older] Ukraine: Deadly Russia strikes hit Kharkiv apartment block

    • HRW ☛ 2026-03-06 [Older] Russia Declares Leading LGBT Rights Group ‘Extremist’

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-03-05 [Older] A teacher in rural Russia took a stand against Putin. He could now win an Oscar

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-04 [Older] Iran war: Why is Russia not coming to Tehran's aid?

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-03-04 [Older] Gates Admits Past Affairs with Russian Bridge Player and Physicist After Microsoft Investigations Followed

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-03-08 [Older] Prime Minister Jetten meets President Zelensky in Kyiv amid Ukraine-Hungary oil dispute

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-07 [Older] Will Ukraine help Gulf states down Iranian drones?

    • The Local SE ☛ 2026-03-07 [Older] Sweden seizes false-flagged ship with suspected stolen Ukrainian grain

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-06 [Older] Hungary blocks some fuel deliveries to Ukraine amid tensions

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-03-04 [Older] Ukraine warns Canberra: Don’t let Iran conflict distract from Kyiv

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-03 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini and Merz discuss Iran, tariffs and Ukraine

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Voters being misled about the cause of Michigan’s economic decline

    A lot of voters might not even be reading or hearing about Michigan’s decline if one question in the chamber’s poll is any indication. Opposition to the explosion of large-scale data center proposals in the state has been a huge issue. But the poll found that more than 40% of voters haven’t seen or heard anything about them.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Explosive new FBI interview raises DISTURBING QUESTIONS about Jeffrey Epstein’s jailhouse death

    According to a handwritten FBI report, an inmate at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center claims he overheard prison guards discussing a cover-up just moments after Epstein was discovered unresponsive on August 10, 2019.

• Environment

  • Futurism ☛ Toxic Sludge Raining Down on Iran After Bombing of Oil Facilities

    Over the weekend, reports of an acidic “black rain” falling over the Iranian capital city of Tehran began flooding the [Internet]. According to Time, the noxious deluge came as a result of Israel bombing nearby oil storage facilities, which unleashed hellish plumes of fire and black smoke into the skies.

  • Futurism ☛ FCC Deciding Whether to Allow Startup to Launch Huge Mirror Satellite to Blast Sunlight on Cities at Nighttime

    In theory, it could be used to power solar farms, light up a city that never sleeps, or provide lighting during emergency scenarios, argues the startup behind the idea, Reflect Orbital. And the prototype satellite, equipped with a 60-foot mirror, would just be the beginning. Reflect Orbital envisions deploying 50,000 mirror satellites in orbit around the Earth — over five times the size of the largest satellite constellation in the world, operated by SpaceX.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Attack on Oil Facilities in Tehran and Karaj; Capital’s Sky Filled with Smoke as Concerns Rise Over Pollution and Fuel Shortages

    The immediate consequence of these attacks was severe air pollution in parts of Tehran. The burning of large quantities of petroleum products can release hydrocarbons, particulate matter, sulfur oxides, and nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere, compounds that, when accumulated in urban air, can quickly push air quality to dangerous levels.

  • The Register UK ☛ AI datacenters may gulp NYC's daily water supply at peak

    Without new water efficiencies, datacenters across America may require 697 million to 1.45 billion gallons of extra peak water capacity per day by 2030, the study estimates. This compares with New York City's daily water supply of about a billion gallons.

  • arXiv ☛ [2603.02705] Small Bottle, Big Pipe: Quantifying and Addressing the Impact of Data Centers on Public Water Systems

    Water is a critical resource for data centers and an efficient means of cooling. However, meeting the growing water demand of data centers requires substantial peak water withdrawals, which many communities in the United States cannot supply, especially during the hottest days of the year. This largely overlooked water capacity constraint is emerging as a bottleneck for data centers and can force operators to rely on less efficient dry cooling, further stressing the power grid during summer peaks. In this paper, we focus on the direct water withdrawal of U.S. data centers for cooling and examine their impacts on public water systems. Our analysis indicates that, if the 2024 water use intensity persists, U.S. data centers could collectively require 697-1,451 million gallons per day (MGD) of new water capacity through 2030, comparable to New York City's average daily supply of roughly 1,000 MGD. Under an optimistic scenario with a compound annual water use intensity reduction by 10%, the water capacity demand decreases to 227-604 MGD, although high-growth IT loads could still require enough capacity to hypothetically supply about half of New York City for most of the year. The total valuation of the new water capacity is on the order of \$10 billion, reaching up to \$58 billion in the high-growth case. These impacts are highly concentrated on communities hosting data centers. Finally, we provide recommendations to address the growing water capacity demand of U.S. data centers, including reporting peak water use, developing corporate-community partnerships, adopting a Water Capacity Neutral approach (colloquially "Pipe Neutral") to allow host communities to retain limited water capacity resources, and implementing coordinated water-power planning to responsibly leverage water for peak power reduction and opportunistically utilize surplus power to mitigate impacts on public water systems.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Impotence of Drill, Baby, Drill

    But that presumption was wrong. America produces a lot of oil, substantially more than we consume. Although we import some oil, mainly from Canada and Mexico, while exporting even more oil, mainly from Texas, we buy hardly any oil from the Persian Gulf. Yet the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused U.S. prices of oil products to soar. Self-sufficiency in oil has done nothing at all to insulate the U.S. economy from Middle East chaos.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Africa leads the world in stablecoin adoption

      The Stablecoin Utility Report released by BVNK was compiled with research firm YouGov using data from 4 658 respondents across 15 countries. According to the report, 79% of African [cryptocurrency] holders currently own or recently held stablecoins – the highest ownership rate of any region surveyed and well above the global average of 54%. High-income economies presented an even lower stablecoin adoption rate of 45%.

    • The Verge ☛ How the spiraling Iran conflict could affect data centers and electricity costs

      It’s a week later and the conflict has only escalated since the US and Israel launched strikes against Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah ​Ali Khamenei. Energy infrastructure has become a key leverage point in the unfolding war, with Israel hitting Iranian fuel depots and Iran targeting Gulf neighbors’ oil and gas infrastructure in its own strikes. Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard threatened on Tuesday not to “not allow the export of even a single liter of oil from the region to the hostile side and its partners until further notice.” Iran has reportedly also started to lay mines in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of global petroleum consumption and liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade used to move.

      I talked to Blakemore again today about what Iran’s continued chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz means for energy costs and US tech companies’ rush to build out energy-hungry AI data centers.

    • Hackaday ☛ The “Tin Blimp” Was A Neither Tin Nor A Blimp: The Detroit ZMC-2 Story

      Of course everyone’s initial reaction to the idea is that it’s absurd: metal is too heavy to fly! They said that about airplanes once, too, but airships are surely a different matter. Airships must be lighter than air. Could a skin of aluminum really hold enough lift gas to keep itself in the air? Upton convinced no lesser lights than Henry Ford to back him, and the Detroit Aircraft Company ultimately found a customer for the design in the US Navy.

    • Mere Civilian ☛ One Bag Debrief

      7KG does not sound like a lot but this trip has proved that it's more than enough. There is a special sense of comfort carrying around everything one needs and having the assurance of permanently removing the risk of losing the luggage. I remember, I took a trip to Fiji prior to COVID and the airline lost my luggage. I still recall going to a store in Fiji to buy new underwear because a man needs underwear. From that day, its always at the back of my mind that my luggage might not be traveling with me. AirTags provide some comfort, but it is not a sure thing.

    • Jonas Hietala ☛ A work week one bag travel

      I’m lucky that I have a job where I can work remotely as it allows me to live in a small community where there are no tech jobs anywhere close. It does require me to travel a few weeks per year to the office but I don’t mind that much as I appreciate minor dozes of socializing occasionally.

      I recently spent five nights on a trip with only a single backpack and it was a surprisingly great experience.

    • [Old] Troy Press ☛ Cycling in America: Who’s Riding, How Far, and How Often – Troy Press

      I shared in Life in Good Measure that I’ve been cycling regularly: about four days a week, an hour at a time, ten miles a day. Since writing that, I’ve wondered how I compared to the average cyclist. How many Americans actually ride, how often, and how far? I ran a nationally representative online survey of 1,004 U.S. adults, of whom 177 cycle; enough to give us a feel for who’s in the saddle.

  • Overpopulation

    • Overpopulation ☛ Is it selfish not to have children?

      Except, maybe they aren’t. The interesting part of the accusation of selfishness to childfree people is that it assumes people ought to be generous to someone who doesn’t even exist yet. They are supposed to be wanting to create a new human being in order to give up something precious for them. Instead of making sacrifices for the sake of those who are already here, they need to produce someone new to make sacrifices for. That is, unless we assume that having children is actually a duty to someone else: to society, to one’s one parents, to a partner or to humanity itself.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Techdirt ☛ 37,000 Fake AI Comments Mysteriously Oppose Washington State’s Effort To Tax The Rich

    Recently the state opened up the public comment system to input, and not too surprisingly it was immediately flooded with upwards of 37,000 fake comments opposing the idea of taxing the rich: [...]

  • Scoop News Group ☛ FBI says even in an AI-powered world, security basics still matter

    The best way to deal with those attacks is to implement all the traditional defenses, like those the FBI has been emphasizing as part of its Operation Winter SHIELD media campaign, he said.

  • Wired ☛ OpenAI and Google Workers File Amicus Brief in Support of Anthropic Against the US Government

    The brief was filed just hours after Anthropic sued the Department of Defense and other federal agencies over the Pentagon’s decision to designate the company a “supply-chain risk.” The sanction, which severely limits Anthropic’s ability to work with military contractors, went into effect after Anthropic’s negotiations with the Pentagon fell apart. The AI startup is seeking a temporary restraining order to continue its work with military partners as the lawsuit progresses. This brief specifically supports this motion.

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ OpenAI’s relentless hunt for capital

    For what could be its last major fundraising round, OpenAI has once again shattered records. In late February, the creator of ChatGPT confirmed a $110 billion funding round backed by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, valuing the company at $730 billion — the highest valuation ever reached by a privately held firm. The colossal sum is intended to help absorb the heavy losses the company expects to incur ahead of a likely initial public offering, potentially historic in scale, by the end of the year.

  • David L Farquhar ☛ When the dotcom bubble burst

    26 years ago, on March 10, 2000, the dotcom bubble reached its peak. The tech-heavy NASDAQ reached its peak that day at 5,048.62, before the bubble burst and stocks went tumbling. Pinpointing when the dotcom bubble burst and when the era ended are harder. But pinpointing when it reached its highest point is easy.

    And while we sometimes call it the dotcom boom and the dotcom bust, it really was more of a bubble. Investors at the turn of the century were terrified at missing out on the next Microsoft. And they were convinced the next Microsoft would come out of the dotcom era. One could say they were right. Amazon, Nvidia, and Google did emerge from the dotcom era and all outrank Microsoft on the Fortune 500 today. But that took time. It wasn’t clear in 2000 how an online bookseller and a search engine were going to eclipse Microsoft in revenue someday. Nor was it clear they were going to be the ones to do it.

    And you may be surprised to hear that Nvidia eclipsing all of them was completely unexpected in the year 2000.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Bitdefender ☛ Twitter suspended 800 million accounts last year — so why does manipulation remain so rampant?

      Appearing via video link before the foreign affairs committee, X's government affairs executive Wifredo Fernández said the platform was in a constant fight against state-backed interference.

      And who was the most active manipulator of the site? Russia, followed by Iran and China.

    • Euractive ☛ TikTok, Instagram and X push more right-wing content at young users | Euractiv

      The Finnish think tank and public investor, which is funded by the Finnish parliament, found that users in France, Romania and Finland aged between 18 and 24 were exposed to 58% more right-wing political content on average than left leaning material.

      Sitra found young people’s social media feeds were often “dominated by a single partisan or ideological viewpoint”, even if they hadn’t signalled a political interest – with right-wing material being most prevalent.

      Even when the dummy accounts created by the researchers signalled interest in left-wing politics, the platforms still pushed right-wing content at them.

    • [Old] Sitra ☛ Gatekeeping in the Digital Age [PDF]

      Social media was expected to liberate the individual and erode the power of the gatekeepers of information. As it turned out, that power did not disappear. It merely transformed and, to an extent, changed hands. The most significant tech companies – such as Facebook, Google and Twitter – grew into global giants, the gatekeepers of the digital age. The age of algorithm-driven information selection and channelling was ushered in.

      This development not only transformed the mechanisms and processes of gatekeeping but also changed our understanding of gatekeeping. Indeed, gatekeeping is taking different forms in both liberal democracies and authoritarian countries. Twenty-first-century communications technology provides opportunities for promoting democracy, but also for suppressing people’s rights and the freedom of information. This working paper discusses the meaning of gatekeeping in the digital age and what form gatekeeping could ideally take from the perspective of society.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ China constitution cannot be directly implemented in HK: vigil activist

    For decades, the Alliance organised candlelight vigils in Hong Kong commemorating the deadly 1989 Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing, where hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed as troops dispersed pro-democracy demonstrators in and around Tiananmen Square.

    The case revolves around the Alliance’s key slogan calling for “an end to one-party rule” in China, which prosecutors allege amounts to a breach of the country’s constitution and incitement to subversion. The subversion offence carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail.

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ MPs give ministers powers to restrict entire Internet

    This will give ministers huge powers to restrict the Internet without having to pass new legislation. The powers could be used to restrict access to websites, social media platforms, apps and games of their choosing. Ministers will not have to demonstrate harm to children, effectively ripping up work carried out by Ofcom to assess services according to the risks and harms they pose.

  • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ Qatar and Bahrain: Stop Crackdown on Free Expression During War

    "Freedom of expression does not disappear when the bombs start falling," said Omar Shakir, DAWN's Executive Director. "Wartime is precisely when people most need to speak freely to share information, question decision-making, express dissent, and hold authorities to account."

    "Qatar and Bahrain should immediately release those arrested for their peaceful expression in relation to the war and drop all charges against them," said Raed Jarrar, DAWN's Advocacy Director. "Sharing information or challenging their government's policies, including their ties to the US or Israel as they wage an unlawful war of aggression, should never be grounds for arrest."

  • Site36 ☛ Berlin Hertie student council backs BDS boycott campaign – private foundation board threatens consequences

    The student council of the private Hertie School in Berlin has adopted a resolution supporting the international boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel (BDS) as well as the Palestinian campaign for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel. The motion was passed with more than 90 per cent approval, according to a statement released last Thursday. Eleven of the twelve elected representatives are said to have voted in favour; there were no votes against.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Shasta County protester faces jail after silently holding a sign

    In Redding, California, a former preschool teacher was arrested, prosecuted, and initially sentenced to jail time for quietly sitting on the floor at a county board meeting with a protest sign.

    Her case has become a symbol of the increasingly volatile politics in Shasta County, where public meetings have turned into ideological battlegrounds and critics say officials are cracking down on dissent.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ She was arrested for holding a protest sign in small-town California: ‘This is a testing ground’

    She had been prepared to spend six months in the custody of the Shasta county sheriff’s office. One of the top prosecutors in this part of far northern California had presented the evidence against her in a weeklong trial, and a jury had delivered a guilty verdict. A judge offered probation, but O’Connell-Nowain did not agree to the terms.

    Her crime? Sitting on the floor in front of the dais of the board of supervisors with a sign, silently protesting an official who had criticized the county elections office.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Ex-Apple Daily editor appeals 10-year prison sentence

    A High Court document showed on Monday that Lam Man-chung, ex-executive editor-in-chief at the tabloid, had lodged an appeal against his sentence. A hearing date has not yet been fixed.

  • CPJ ☛ 2 journalists detained for filming Iranian warship docked in India

    Shankar, Mani, and a boat driver were detained on March 7 by officers from a paramilitary force after allegedly entering a restricted area to film an Iranian naval vessel docked at a port in Kochi, a city in the southern state of Kerala, according to multiple news reports.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ urges Indian political parties to protect press freedom ahead of key state elections 

    In separate letters, CPJ called on leading parties in the Indian states of Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal, as well as the territory of Puducherry, to publicly commit to protecting journalists during the election period by rejecting violence, intimidation, harassment, and the misuse of criminal laws against members of the press.

  • CPJ ☛ Press freedom violations in the Middle East during the Iran war

    CPJ is tracking press freedom conditions in Iran, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory (IoPT), Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain.

  • CPJ ☛ Press freedom coalition sounds alarm on ICE detention of Nashville journalist Estefany Rodriguez, calling for her immediate release [PDF]

    Rodriguez was detained on March 4, 2026. ICE produced no warrant during her arrest; it was produced only after she was in custody. Rodriguez fled to the United States from her native Colombia in 2021 after facing threats for her coverage of armed militia groups. She arrived on a tourist visa and applied for political asylum in the United States. Rodriguez was on a path to citizenship, and had a pending green card application through her husband, who is a U.S. citizen, as well as a pending asylum application. Her attorneys have filed an emergency petition in federal court seeking a writ of habeas corpus – an immediate review of whether her detention is legal.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Wired ☛ DHS Ousts CBP Privacy Officers Who Questioned ‘Illegal’ Orders

    The US Department of Homeland Security removed multiple career Customs and Border Protection officials from their roles this year after they objected to orders to mislabel records about surveillance technologies and block their release under the Freedom of Information Act, WIRED has learned.

    Since January, DHS leaders have reassigned two of the top officials responsible for ensuring that CBP technologies comply with federal privacy law, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the situation. These sources were granted anonymity because they fear government retribution.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ U.S.-Iran Conflict Has Closed The Only Two Routes for Data Traffic

    Billions of dollars in U.S. technology infrastructure in the Gulf region are now at risk because key global [Internet] cables pass through the conflict zones of the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Patents

  • Rlang ☛ Breaking Release of the patentsview R Package

    🍴 Here you’ve come to a fork (and knife) in the road, continue reading if you are/were using the original version of the patentsview package, and we’ll guide you through the necessary changes. If you have an interest in US patent data but haven’t used the patentsview package yet (and are willing to take the risk!), check out the vignette reworked from Chris’ original blog post to use the new version of the R package and API.

  • [Old] rOpenSci ☛ Accessing patent data with the patentsview package • patentsview

    This is Chris’ ropensci blog post from 2017-09-12 that announced the creation of the original patentsview package, edited by Russ to work with the new version of the R package and API. The original post is here. Something to note when comparing the original post to this one, the total_hits returned by the original version of the API was capped at 100,000, now it’s seemingly unbounded. Also, note that some fields used in examples in the original post are no longer available from the new version of the API, as mentioned below.

• Copyrights

  • India Times ☛ EU parliament urges new rules to protect copyrighted work

    The European Parliament on Tuesday called for new EU-wide rules to protect copyrighted content in the bloc from generative AI use.

    In a non-binding report adopted by a majority, lawmakers said European Union copyright law should apply to all systems of generative AI on the bloc's market.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Bad Bunny Beats 'Enséñame a Bailar' Copyright Infringement Suit

    That infringement action just recently drew to a close after both plaintiffs, UK-headquartered emPawa Africa and Nigeria-based artist Dera (real name Ezeani Chidera Godfrey), “abandoned” the case.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Patreon CEO Slams AI for Stealing From Artists

    On Tuesday, Patreon co-founder and CEO Jack Conte posted a lengthy video sharing his thoughts on artificial intelligence and its place in the future of creative work. In the 43-minute video, Conte argues that the future of creativity will remain human, even as AI continues to proliferate. However, the key issue is whether artists will receive credit and compensation for their contributions to AI-based content enterprises.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Internet Archive Faces Copyright Lawsuit Over 'Myspace Dragon Hoard'

    Illinois-based musician Anthony Martino is suing the Internet Archive for copyright infringement over its Myspace Dragon Hoard collection. This 490,000 MP3 collection was created from recordings that were lost in Myspace's 2019 server disaster. According to Martino, his music ended up in the collection without his authorization. Meanwhile, the Internet Archive denies wrongdoing and says it is protected by the DMCA safe harbor.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Major Publishers Sue Anna's Archive Over 'Staggering' Copyright Infringement, Seek Injunction

    A coalition of thirteen major publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, filed a new lawsuit against Anna’s Archive. The publishers allege the shadow library is facilitating "staggering" levels of piracy. While the site's owners are not likely to put up a defense, the publishers' main goal appears to be to obtain an injunction that can apply further pressure on domain registrars and registries.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Italian IPTV Pirates Pay €1,000 in Damages to Football League Serie A

    Italy's crackdown on pirate IPTV subscribers has reached a new milestone. After thousands were fined by the state, football league Serie A has now collected additional €1,000 damages settlements from a number of the same people. There may be more trouble ahead, as Serie A's CEO warns that this is only the beginning.