Leftovers

• Tedium ☛ Is First-Run Syndication On Its Broadcast Deathbed?

  But a lot has changed in 40 years, and a big decision on the part of NBCUniversal explains why. This week, the company announced it would be shutting down its first-run syndication business, killing Access Hollywood, The Steve Wilkos Show, and other programs. (The still-on-the-air Kelly Clarkson Show, also distributed by NBCUniversal, already announced its plans to end its run this year.)

• Variety ☛ 'Access Hollywood,' 'Steve Wilkos' to End as NBCU Cuts Syndication

  The significant step is a sign of how hard it has become to draw an daytime TV audience in the era of YouTube and massive audience fragmentation. NBCUniversal said flatly that marketplace conditions no longer support the traditional model of syndication. “Access Hollywood,” the entertainment newsmagazine launched by NBC in 1996 to compete with CBS’ “Entertainment Tonight,” will produce original episodes through September.

• Piya Gehi ☛ Productivity system guidelines

  I’ve tried quite a few systems and tools to manage my projects and ideas, and switching gets tiring. I don’t think I’ll stop switching anytime soon though, so here are some guidelines to help me choose which tools to use whenever I feel the urge to try something new.

• Science

  • The Hindu ☛ Pi Day 2026: significance of the mathematical constant π

    Over the centuries, several mathematicians attempted to calculate the value of pi using different methods, including several prominent mathematicians like Archimedes. The Greek letter π was introduced by Welsh mathematician William Jones in 1706 to represent the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The letter was chosen as it corresponds to the Greek words for “periphery” and “perimeter,” and pi is the ratio of a circle’s periphery, or circumference, to its diameter.

  • Rlang ☛ Does every finite string of numbers appear within π ?

    In honor of Pi Day (March 14), I offer the following: Does every finite string of numbers like your social security number eventually appear somewhere within the decimal expansion of π ?

• Career/Education

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-03 [Older] UK stops issuing student visas for 4 countries

  • The Tyee ☛ What Are Universities For?

    Somewhere along the way, universities and colleges also became a kind of subsidy for business, teaching skills that employers had once done themselves with new hires. As several of the authors in this book make clear, a market economy demanded a market university. Education was a private benefit that ought to be paid for like any other good or service.

    McInnis notes, “The neoliberal university defines successful academics more as private entrepreneurs, intent on maximizing individual gain, rather than members of the collective collegium with a broader civic mission.”

  • Seth Godin ☛ “It’s faster to just do it myself”

    Here’s a simple rubric for outsourcing: [...]

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Big tech engineers need big egos

    However, it’s more complicated than “big egos make good engineers”. The most effective engineers I’ve worked with are simultaneously high-ego in some situations and surprisingly low-ego in others. What’s going on there?

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Academia and the "AI Brain Drain"

    This outflow threatens the distinct roles of academic research in the scientific enterprise: innovation driven by curiosity rather than profit, as well as providing independent critique and ethical scrutiny. The fixation of “big tech” firms on skimming the very top talent also risks eroding the idea of science as a collaborative endeavor, in which teams—not individuals—do the most consequential work.

    Here, we explore the broader implications for science and suggest alternative visions of the future.

  • Jim Mitchell ☛ I Really Hate My Dumb Job

    So, that’s the story of how I almost ended up on the radio. It was an interesting experience and makes for a good story whenever someone tells me what a great voice I have.

• Hardware

  • Gough Lui ☛ Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? – Part 2: Methodology & Results

    Now that we’ve covered the contenders for this test, I will cover how this test will be performed and go through the results. It was a long time for me, but for you, it’ll just be a few hours between posts …

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Lionel Dricot ☛ How I fought my smartphone addiction

    Around 2018, I had the same epiphany: I was unable to get out of my house without my phone. In fact, I was so addicted that it was hard not to take the phone with me even inside the house or, God forbid, into the bathroom!

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-03 [Older] German customs net ketamine cache in golden garden gnomes

• Proprietary

  • Europol ☛ Europol and international partners disrupt ‘SocksEscort’ proxy service - Joint operation targeted malicious proxy service exploiting residential routers worldwide | Europol

    On 11 March 2026, Europol in collaboration with law enforcement agencies from Austria, France, the Netherlands, and the United States, alongside Eurojust, executed Operation Lightning. This coordinated effort targeted the malicious proxy service ‘SocksEscort’, which allegedly compromised over 369 000 routers and Internet of Things devices in 163 countries, and offered ‘SocksEscort’ customers over 35 000 proxies in recent years.

  • TechCrunch ☛ Law enforcement shuts down botnet made of tens of thousands of hacked routers | TechCrunch

    The botnet was composed of around 280,000 routers since last January and was powered by malware called AVRecon, according to cybersecurity firm Black Lotus Labs, which tracked SocksEscort and worked with law enforcement in the takedown operation.

  • Sven Luijten ☛ Daemons and agents on macOS

    This led me to this repository, which piqued my curiosity about how to actually create one of those daemons/agents myself. After some searching I found launchd.info, a what looks to be very extensive explanation of daemons and agents on macOS using Launchd.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Quanta Magazine ☛ Why Do Humanoid Robots Still Struggle With the Small Stuff?

      Don’t get me wrong: I don’t believe that some sock-faced robot zombie is close to taking over my household chores. But stairs and doors? It’s 2026. Why are humanoids still this … hard?

    • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ New report: AI for Government Archives

      A new report is now available that explores how artificial intelligence can help address the major challenge of the rapidly growing volume of born-digital government records (emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, audiovisual files, and social media records). “Sifting the Digital Heap: A scoping study of AI for government archives – access, backlogs, and responsible practice” draws on workshops organized in collaboration with the UK Cabinet Office and 27 interviews with stakeholders across the United Kingdom and the United States; the study examines how AI can support the accessibility and management of digital government records.

    • Zenodo ☛ Sifting the Digital Heap: A scoping study of AI for government archives – access, backlogs, and responsible practice

      AI can play a decisive role in making digital government records more accessible and manageable, provided that its use is grounded in responsibility and clear purpose. Work is already underway across archives and government, where AI is being used to manage scale, improve accuracy, and enhance public access to digital records – including email, PDFs, spreadsheets, images, scanned documents, audiovisual assets, and social media posts. Building on these foundations, the GLOW study identifies four interlinked priorities for responsible and effective adoption.

    • Wired ☛ China’s OpenClaw Boom Is a Gold Rush for AI Companies

      Hype around the open source agent is driving people to rent cloud servers and buy AI subscriptions just to try it, creating a windfall for tech companies.

    • Wired ☛ Palantir Demos Show How the Military Could Use AI Chatbots to Generate War Plans

      An ongoing and heated dispute between the Pentagon and Anthropic is raising new questions about how the startup’s technology is actually used inside the US military. In late February, Anthropic refused to grant the government unconditional access to its Claude AI models, insisting the systems should not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon responded by labeling Anthropic's products a “supply-chain risk,” prompting the startup to file two lawsuits this week alleging illegal retaliation by the Trump administration and seeking to overturn the designation.

    • TechCrunch ☛ Meta acquired Moltbook, the AI agent social network that went viral because of fake posts

      Meta acquired Moltbook, the Reddit-like “social network” where AI agents using OpenClaw can communicate with one another. The news was first reported by Axios and later confirmed to TechCrunch.

    • Mathieu ☛ Issues with AI: the end of caring

      One of the issues that I do not see discussed a lot in the mainstream is LLMs being used as a way to not have to care about the things you tell it to do, to care about the things you would have to learn instead, to care about the source of your information, etc…

      It is a care-terminating product in a way that did not really exist before, as it creates a convincing illusion that you do not need to think about something, and can still do that specific thing.

    • Martin Alderson ☛ How to use the Qwen 3.5 LLMs to OCR documents

      If you want to run it locally, you can try using it with LM Studio, which makes it really easy to install and run local models. Just download it, install, download the model of your choice and start the API server. I'd recommend turning off thinking mode in the settings.

      I used Python code along these lines to do it (you'll want to do this in a loop if you have more than one page!): [...]

    • Anil Dash ☛ What do coders do after AI?

      For the New York Times Magazine this Sunday, I talked to Clive Thompson about one of the conversations that I'm having most often these days: What happens to coders in this current moment of extraordinarily rapid evolution in AI? LLMs are now quickly advancing to where they can virtually become entire software factories, radically changing both the economics and the power dynamics of software creation — which has so far mostly been used to displace massive numbers of tech workers.

      But it's not so simple as "bosses are firing coders now that AI can write code".

      For one thing, though there are certainly a lot of companies where executives are forcing teams to churn out slop code, and using that as an excuse to carry out mass layoffs, there are plenty of companies where "AI" is just a buzzword being used as a pretense for layoffs that owners have wanted to do anyway. And more importantly, there are a growing number of coders who are having a very different experience with the tools than those bosses may have expected — and a very different outcome than the Big AI labs may have intended. As I said in the story: [...]

    • Brad Taunt ☛ Snail Mail Sign-Ups

      This got me thinking about possible online sign-up concepts that could be 100% AI or basic bot proof. Well, at least close to 100%. Let’s say ~95%.

      I couldn’t think of any clever “AI detection” setups (ignoring the fact of whether or not I could even build any of these…) that could ever beat the simplicity of a sign-up system running through good ol’ snail mail.

      Let me showcase the general idea.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Three more AI psychoses

      "AI psychosis" is one of those terms that is incredibly useful and also almost certainly going to be deprecated in smart circles in short order because it is: a) useful; b) easily colloquialized to describe related phenomena; and c) adjacent to medical issues, and there's a group of people who feel very strongly any metaphor that implicates human health is intrinsically stigmatizing and must be replaced with an awkward, lengthy phrase that no one can remember and only insiders understand.

      So while we still can, let us revel in this useful term to talk about some very real pathologies in our world.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Grandmother jailed 108 days after facial recognition got it wrong

      Angela Lipps was babysitting four young children at her Tennessee home when U.S. Marshals showed up with guns drawn and arrested her on July 14, 2025. Fargo police had identified her as a bank fraud suspect using AI facial recognition software. The software was wrong.

  • Social Control Media

    • Nick Heer ☛ Social Media’s Walled Gardens

      They are login walls. Sometimes, these platforms will let you see an individual post without having an account or logging in, but very often they do not. This sucks for many reasons, but one thing I remain surprised by is how the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission seems completely okay with Meta using Mark Zuckerberg’s login-walled Facebook and Instagram pages to disclose material information about the company.

    • Don Marti ☛ How to shut down Meta

      The problem is that there are way too many people who are currently only in touch with each other on the Meta sites and apps. So how will a future monitoring trustee manage the process of putting an orderly end to Meta, without imposing unacceptable costs on the people who have gotten into a situation where they depend on Meta’s shenanigans?

      This is how I would handle it if they wanted to appoint me to the monitoring trustee position. I have other stuff going on, but this will help out legit companies like [redacted], and will be a productive step toward ending the problematic attribution cartel thing so I think I can do it fairly.

      So here’s how to do the shutdown. Borrow an idea from airline overbooking.

    • The Verge ☛ Digg’s open beta shuts down after just two months, blaming AI bot spam

      It’s only been a year since Digg founder Kevin Rose, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, and a few others announced the link-sharing site would relaunch, promising a “social discovery built by communities, not by algorithms.” Now, two months after opening its Reddit-like platform to the public, Digg is announcing a “hard reset” that’s shutting down operations and will “significantly downsize the Digg team.”

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Ransomware incident responder gave info to BlackCat cybercriminals during negotiations, DOJ alleges

      In court documents, prosecutors said Martino worked with two other cybersecurity professionals to launch ransomware attacks on behalf of the now-defunct ALPHV/BlackCat cybercrime group.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Privacy at risk? Instagram to kill end-to-end encrypted DMs this May

      The platform will soon remove end-to-end [sic] encrypted messaging from its direct messages feature.

    • The Cyber Show ☛ Creepy creeps discover creepiness

      Rejoice! Rejoice! Finally some real scientists have cracked this long-standing enigma. And they've got a catchy, technically accurate name for it. According to respectable academics with the most impressive title of "professor of marketing" at the prestigious and well known "McCombs School of Business" at The University of Texas, people don't like being abused this way.

      Could it also be that people don't like being stalked by masked hunters and gang-raped because it provokes a "powerful emotional response"? Of course I'm just a laymen making a wild, uneducated hypothesis here, but perhaps the same crossing of "perceived boundaries" has something to do with it? Any psychologists care to chip in?

• Defence/Aggression

  • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-03-06 [Older] Conditions in Syria don’t warrant Danish residence permits, says Refugee Appeals Board

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-03-06 [Older] Saudi Arabia And Gulf Allies Reportedly Discussing Withdrawing From US Contracts Amid Rising Iran Tensions

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-03-05 [Older] Iran Nuclear Bomb Bad, Saudi Arabia nuclear bomb good?

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-03-09 [Older] Turkey announces downing of second Iranian missile by NATO defenses

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-04 [Older] Iran war: Iranian missile headed towards Turkey destroyed

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-03-03 [Older] Fuel prices in Turkey set for sharp increase amid closure of Hormuz strait

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-03-03 [Older] War across the border leaves Turkey's Van facing anxiety and economic loss

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-03-02 [Older] Political leaders in Turkey oppose US, Israeli war on Iran

  • Defence Web ☛ Terror groups pressure Sahel capitals

    “The attack was not an isolated security breach, but a deliberate, high-value operation aimed at Niger’s military and strategic infrastructure,” analysts with African Security Analysis wrote shortly after the attack. “The strike represents a notable operational escalation by IS-Sahel.”

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Europe rebukes US for temporarily lifting sanctions on Russian oil

    Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, described Washington’s move to temporarily waive sanctions on Russian oil stranded at sea as “wrong”, as the Trump administration attempted to counter a surge in oil prices.

    Merz said: “We believe it is wrong to ease the sanctions. Unfortunately, Russia continues to show no willingness to negotiate. We will therefore, and must, further increase the pressure on Moscow.”

  • New Yorker ☛ Can We Save Kids from Social Media?

    At first, Haidt’s work met with some critical eye-rolling, partly because a few in the field believed that he had not quite nailed one assertion or another, but more commonly because he seemed to some an alarmist, a techno-Luddite whinging about “kids these days and their devices.” But as the evidence of the harms accumulated—of social disconnection, of a sharp decline in mental health among young people—Haidt’s book became, for so many, essential.

    I last met with Haidt for The New Yorker Radio Hour when his book was published. I wanted to catch up with him to review the political and social ramifications of his work from here to Australia and his own turn from scholar to activist. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

  • Federal News Network ☛ A politicized federal workforce harms every American

    We know it will make federal employees easier to terminate due to the reclassification. We also know it will remove due process protections, eliminating the right to appeal any disciplinary action or termination in front of an independent tribunal. Impartial review is meant to be a safeguard to ensure merit-based decisions — an integral part of the process now to be handed over to political loyalists.

  • Pro Publica ☛ How Oregon Lawmakers Softened Campaign Donation Limits

    Some 78% of Oregon voters approved limiting campaign contributions in 2020. Four years later, the Legislature finally adopted limits, but an advocate for tighter controls says recent changes render Oregon’s contribution limits “illusory.”

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ China's ByteDance to access 36,000 Blackwell GPU cluster through Malaysia cloud operator — Nvidia confirms no objections, deal is in line with US export controls

    The cluster, worth around $2.5 billion and consisting of 500 NVL72 GB200 rack-scale systems, will be formally owned and operated by Aolani Cloud in Malaysia. The hardware will be supplied through Aivres, a company that builds servers based on Nvidia GPUs, according to the WSJ, which cites people familiar with the arrangements. An Aolani spokesperson told WSJ that the company currently operates with roughly $100 million worth of hardware, so the scale of the proposed expansion is vast, but it is not completely clear who is funding it. ByteDance is also reportedly considering additional deployments, such as a cluster containing over 7,000 B200 GPUs at a data center in Indonesia.

  • India Times ☛ TikTok investors set to pay $10 billion fee to Trump administration

    The new investors paid the Treasury roughly $2.5 billion of the fee when the deal closed in January. They plan to pay the rest of the fee in an additional set of payments, one of the people said. The investors include software giant Oracle; MGX, an Emirati investment firm; and Silver Lake, another investment firm, which each own about 15% of the company.

  • New York Times ☛ TikTok Investors Set to Pay $10 Billion Fee to Trump Administration

    Investors in a deal to create a U.S.-controlled TikTok are set to pay $10 billion to the U.S. Treasury, the latest example of the Trump administration’s inserting the federal government into corporate deal making in unusual ways.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Dissenter ☛ Reintroduced Espionage Act Reform Bill Honors Ellsberg

    Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg maintained that an unauthorized disclosure could be a “a patriotic act and a service to the country, helping to save lives and preserve core principles of democracy.” But today it is far too easy for the United States government to wield the Espionage Act and suppress individuals, who dare to reveal or publish hidden truths.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-03-09 [Older] Donald Cheeto Mussolini Labels Critics 'Fools' as Oil Prices Surge Past $100 Amid Iran War, Middle East Energy Production Plummets

    • CBC ☛ 2026-03-08 [Older] Critics say Ottawa's sustainable jobs plan offers no new support for energy workers

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-08 [Older] Germany's economy hit by Middle East energy crunch

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-03-08 [Older] Tehran Oil Depots on Fire After Israel Launches First Strike on Iran's Energy Sector

    • CBC ☛ 2026-03-06 [Older] With a crucial oil artery blocked near Iran, can Canada fill the gap in global supply?

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-03-06 [Older] 'If They Rise, They Rise' — Cheeto Mussolini Shrugs Off Surging Pump Prices as Qatar's Energy Minister Warns Oil Could Hit $150 a Barrel

    • Futurism ☛ 2026-03-04 [Older] Polymarket Quietly Takes Down Bet On Nuclear Detonation

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-03-04 [Older] Dutch power companies scrapping fixed-rate energy contracts as gas prices climb

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-04 [Older] Iran attacks on Gulf oil and gas sites trigger energy fears

• Finance

  • Alex Petros ☛ XML is a cheap DSL

    Yesterday, the IRS announced the release of the project I’ve been engineering leading since this summer, its new Tax Withholding Estimator (TWE). Taxpayers enter in their income, expected deductions, and other relevant info to estimate what they’ll owe in taxes at the end of the year, and adjust the withholdings on their paycheck. It’s free, open source, and, in a major first for the IRS, open for public contributions.

    TWE is full of exciting learnings about the field of public sector software. Being me, I’m going to start by writing about by far the driest one: XML.

    (I am writing this in my personal capacity, based on the open source release, not in my position as a federal employee.)

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-03-04 [Older] Nearly four million households in Turkey receive monthly social assistance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-04 [Older] Germany news: Skilled craft sector faces huge labor shortage

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-04 [Older] 'Made in EU' proposals put forward to boost manufacturing

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-04 [Older] Taiwan indicts 62 linked to alleged scam center in Cambodia

  • Warner Bros. Discovery Layoffs Test Merger Integration And Lofty Valuation

    For investors watching Warner Bros. Discovery (NasdaqGS:WBD), the latest layoffs come as the stock trades around $27.43, with a value score of 1 and very large 1 year returns. Over a longer period, the 3 year return is 91.3%, while the 5 year return reflects a 64.5% decline, highlighting how volatile the stock has been over different time frames.

    These new workforce reductions bring the human and operational side of the merger into sharper focus, especially for anyone concerned about execution risk. As the company reshapes teams and processes, it may be useful to track how quickly it establishes a steady operating rhythm and how consistently it delivers on its production and integration plans.

  • The Business Journals ☛ Atlassian lays off 63 WA workers as part of sweeping cuts

    The company's Kirkland-based chief technology officer is also stepping down as part of the layoffs.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • HRW ☛ 2026-03-09 [Older] Don’t Forget Tibet on Anniversary of 1959 Lhasa Uprising

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-04 [Older] Greek court upholds convictions of leaders of neo-Nazi party

  • NDTV ☛ Meta Plans To Layoff 20% Staff As AI Costs Mount: Report

    If Meta settles on the 20% figure, the layoffs will be the company's most significant since a restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023 that it dubbed the "year of efficiency."

  • India Times ☛ Meta plans sweeping layoffs that could impact over 20% of workforce

    Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers.

  • Futurism ☛ Iran Declares Google and Microsoft to Be Military Targets

    In a document viewed by Al Jazeera, the IRGC listed a number of US tech companies as “Iran’s new targets,” including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle, as well as a cloud computing companies in Israel and several Gulf countries.

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Orders Sweeping Layoffs as xAI Fails to Catch Up

    In a Thursday tweet, Elon Musk said he was looking to rebuild his AI startup xAI “from the foundations up” after admitting it wasn’t “built right first time around.”

    The news comes amid a major exodus of cofounders, with a striking majority of them jumping ship over the last year. Amid the resulting leadership vacuum, the Financial Times reported on Friday that Musk had omitted a key detail in his latest missives on his social media platform. According to the paper’s sources, he’s ordered a round of sweeping layoffs at the company after becoming frustrated with a lack of progress on its AI coding software.

    Many roles are reportedly being scrutinized. Musk reportedly ordered higher-ups from Tesla and SpaceX, the latter of which xAI was folded into earlier this year, to conduct audits and weed out anybody deemed to be underperforming — likely not what staffers, who were already complaining of burnout, wanted to hear.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-09 [Older] Long before AI, fake photos were already popular [Ed: It's not even "hey hi", they just manufactured a cover for plagiarism]

    • Derek Thompson ☛ Why Can't People Agree on a Shared Set of Facts?

      This gap between reality and interpretation isn’t contained to the news cycle. I’m sure you know friends, partners, colleagues, or lovers who have passionate fights because there is a disagreement over the meaning of something that was said, even if all parties involved can agree on the literal transcript of the conversation.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-04 [Older] Iran strikes highlight Dubai influencers' free speech limits

  • TruthOut ☛ 2026-03-09 [Older] The Fight to Defend Pro-Palestine Speech on Campus Isn’t Over

  • RTL ☛ 'Deliberate shutdown' by government: How Iranians are communicating through internet blackout

    The nature of the blackout shows “this is a government-imposed measure” and not the result of damage from US and Israeli airstrikes, Netblocks research chief Isik Mater told AFP.

    “It is a deliberate shutdown imposed by the authorities to suppress the flow of information and prevent further dissent,” said Raha Bahreini, Iran researcher at Amnesty International.

    Here are some of the ways information is still flowing in and out of Iran.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK court rules subversion trial of Tiananmen vigil activists will go on

    A Hong Kong court has ruled that two Tiananmen vigil activists have a case to answer over calls to “end one-party rule” in China in a subversion trial under the Beijing-imposed national security law.

  • TruthOut ☛ Hegseth Whines About Iran War Coverage, Demands “Patriotic Press” Instead

    Several critics pushed back against Hegseth’s demands for a more “patriotic press” to cover the war to his liking.

    “A critical press is the most patriotic press one can have,” University of South Carolina political science professor David Darmofal wrote in a post on Bluesky. “Hegseth would understand that if he understood America and our form of government.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Pete Brown ☛ Just let me read the damn article, part eleventy-billion

    I was vaguely interested in reading this NYT feature recounting Michael Moore’s controversial-at-the-time/subsequently-proven-entirely-correct speech at the 2003 Oscars denouncing George W. Bush and the Iraq, but it consists of a single image and bunch of stupid text boxes I have to keep scrolling up and up and up to see.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-03-07 [Older] Activists Install Virginia Giuffre Memorial at Buckingham Palace After Displaying Andrew's Arrest Photo at the Louvre

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Anti-ICE protesters accused of being part of antifa found guilty of support for terrorism in Texas

    Nine defendants – Benjamin Song, Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Meagan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Savanna Batten, Ines Soto, Elizabeth Soto and Daniel Sanchez-Estrada – were all tried together in the case. They faced a mix of charges of providing material support to terrorists, rioting, attempted murder, as well as firearms and explosive charges.

  • El País ☛ ICE used arrest quotas and surveillance technology in Oregon immigration raids, rare court testimony shows

    The information emerged during hearings for a class-action lawsuit filed by the immigrant rights organization Innovation Law Lab, which challenges the practice of detaining people without a warrant or probable cause. The case compelled agents to testify in court, offering a rare glimpse into internal tactics that are not typically made public.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ AI companies try to pay staff in AI tokens, not money

    The idea is that instead of getting paid dollars to work for an AI company … you get paid in AI tokens. The units that the AI vendor charges API access in. You have to use these tokens in your job, too.

    This is not in any way a “new” idea. It’s company scrip — a company’s own made-up money that you can only spend in the company store. Company scrip was always just a scam, and paying workers in company scrip has been illegal in the US since 1938. But you know these guys don’t care.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Digital Music News ☛ Live Nation Responds to ‘Gouging Chats,' Both Men Still Employed

  Yesterday, Digital Music News covered a tranche of previously hidden documents revealing Live Nation employees bragging about “gouging” customers and “robbing them blind” with fees for ancillary services. Now, the company is doing damage control, still trying to keep the messages out of the ongoing state attorneys general vs. Live Nation proceedings.

• Michigan Advance ☛ Tlaib introduces legislation to protect whistleblowers, journalists from targeting by Espionage Act  • Michigan Advance

  The bill seeks to establish the Daniel Ellsberg Press Freedom and Whistleblower Protection Act, named after the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and was subsequently charged under the Espionage Act, though he was not found guilty of those charges.

  “Alerting the public to government wrongdoing is not a crime,” the Detroit Democrat said in a press release from her office. “The Espionage Act has been abused by administrations of both parties to target whistleblowers and journalists for sharing critically important information with the public. With whistleblowers, journalists, and civil liberties under significant attack and government decision-making shrouded in increasing secrecy, reining in the abuses of the Espionage Act could not be more urgent.”

• The New Stack ☛ F-Droid says Google's Android developer verification plan is an 'existential' threat to alternative app stores

  Attention, any developers hoping to sell their apps to the world’s 3.3 billion Android phones. “Google is changing the way you install apps on your device!” warns the free and open-source Android app repository F-Droid.

  And it threatens the existence of some alternative Android app stores that are used by millions of people. The New Stack spoke with Marc Prud’hommeaux, a member of the board of directors at F-Droid, who also created the website Keep Android Open. In an interview this week, Prud’hommeaux shared the latest news on how their fight is going, the threats being overlooked, the results of their discussions with Google’s Android team — and what developers can do now to help.

• DNA Lounge ☛ DNA Lounge: 13-Mar-2026 (Fri): Wherein Live Nation / Ticketmaster slips the noose again

  There are a lot of things to be angry about in the world today, but Ticketmaster is always one of them. Spare them a little rage if you have any left to give. When, two years ago, we heard that DOJ was moving forward with their anti-trust suit against Live Nation we all knew it was too good to be true, and, yup, it was too good to be true. The DOJ folded with not even a slap on the wrist.

• BoingBoing ☛ Amazon faces criminal trial in Italy over €1.2 billion tax evasion

  In every previous case involving international companies, Italian prosecutors dropped criminal investigations once a financial settlement was reached. This is the first time they've pressed ahead anyway.

• Reuters ☛ Exclusive: Italian prosecutors seek trial for Amazon, four execs over alleged $1.4 billion tax evasion

  In all previous cases involving other international groups, once a settlement was reached and payment ​made, prosecutors closed related criminal investigations, either through plea deals or by dropping the ⁠cases. This time, however, Milan prosecutors did not share the tax authority's approach and decided to press ahead with their ​probe, leading to a request that the suspects be sent to trial.

• Copyrights

  • FSF ☛ The FSF doesn't usually sue for copyright infringement, but when we do, we settle for freedom

    The Free Software Foundation (FSF), like many others, received a notice regarding settlement in the copyright infringement lawsuit Bartz v. Anthropic. It is a class action lawsuit claiming that Anthropic infringed copyright by downloading works in Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror datasets for purposes of training large language models (LLMs). According to the notice, the district court ruled that using the books to train LLMs was fair use but left for trial the question of whether downloading them for this purpose was legal. Apparently, the parties agreed to settle instead of waiting for the trial and they are now reaching out to potential copyright holders to offer money in lieu of potential damages.