Leftovers

• Tedium ☛ Pancakes, Hot Takes, And Social Media’s Flatness

  Which is why I love blogs. Rather than offering up little discs of information that can be created quickly and digested slowly, you can spend as long or as short a time as you want on them. You can put a mere 30 minutes into them; you can put in 30 days. You can do as much or as little research as you want, and you can lay out an argument with a far different shape than your average pancake.

• Wired ☛ A Mysterious Numbers Station Is Broadcasting Through the Iran War

  According to Priyom, an organization which tracks and analyses global military and intelligence use of shortwave radio, using established radio-location techniques, the broadcast was first heard as the US bombing of Iran began. It has since played on the 7910 kHz shortwave frequency like clockwork—at 02.00 UTC and again at 18.00 UTC.

• Dan Q ☛ Reply to: how do you find things you want to blog about?

  But in general… my “process”, such as it is… is that I just look at what interests me today. There’s no secret to blogging as prolifically as I do: you’ve just got to start writing, and then keep writing. That’s all there is to it.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Startled by What Happens When They Point Hubble at Comet

    That the astronomers are seeing the comet immediately after fragmenting arguably provides as “pristine” a sample as we’ll ever get.

  • David Bau ☛ davidbau.com Does Computer Science Still Exist?

    When I was a student, CS was about writing programs. Algorithms, data structures, systems, languages. Thinking computationally, decomposing problems, managing complexity. At its core, the craft of assembling programs. Learning to build things out of logic and patience.

    What is it becoming? My students can get an AI agent to write code that would have taken me a week, in ten minutes. The mechanical skill of programming, our lifetime of practice, is dissolving as a bottleneck. If CS was about writing code, then the field is over.

• Career/Education

  • Blain Smith ☛ Crocker's Rules

    I came across an article recently that references something called Crocker's Rules. I had never heard of them by name, but when I read the definition I realized I've been operating this way for most of my career without knowing there was a term for it.

    The short version is this: if you declare Crocker's Rules you are telling people around you that they can optimize their communication for information, not for your feelings. You take full responsibility for your own emotional reaction to what someone tells you. It doesn't mean people get to be cruel. It means neither party wastes time on social padding that adds zero signal to the conversation.

    I've written before about discipline and posture in engineering and about being allergic to unnecessary complexity. If you've read any of those you already know I don't soften things much. I say what I mean. I expect others to do the same.

  • Annie Mueller ☛ When (not) to break rules

    Don’t break the rules that define who you are…

    …Unless that’s not who you want to be anymore.

  • Rakulang ☛ 2026.12 Ich bin ein Berliner

    Breaking news: TPRC Talk Submission Deadline extended to April 21, 2026. Many thanks to the organisers for heeding our call for more time.

• Hardware

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Our revised media centre TV stand thing

    But then something dangerous appeared as I got older: curiosity. It wasn’t even an interest in the games per se, but I realised there was an entire ecosystem and history of computing I didn’t know about. This was something up with which I could not put! Incidently, this is how I got into 8-bit computers later in life as well.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Cendyne Naga ☛ Folks aren't forming memories like they used to

    Used to saying the same thing over and over again to an computer? How about a person? A living person? I've found myself in that position lately.

    You don't have to be a $200/mo plan maximalist to observe how agents forget things over and over. They have a context window — and so do people too when they context switch between too many things at once.

• Proprietary

  • The Nation ☛ Have You Paid Your “Intuit Tax”?

    Oligarchs have hidden levers to impose private taxes on the rest of us. They use their wealth and clout to snuff out competition and protect their subsidized monopoly to charge you fees and increase their wealth. In this case, the private tax lever is your tax preparation, the imposition of an “Intuit Tax.”

  • Security Week ☛ Oracle Releases Emergency Patch for Critical Identity Manager Vulnerability

    Oracle revealed that the products, part of the Fusion Middleware suite, are affected by CVE-2026-21992, a critical vulnerability that can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker for remote code execution.

  • Macworld ☛ Ads are coming to Maps because Apple needs to keep growing

    Apple is apparently not yet done degrading its products in the name of making even more money. The $3.7 trillion company needs more services revenue, and so the next core user experience to get ruined by ads is going to be Apple Maps.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Microsoft Xbox One Hacked

    It’s an impressive feat, over a decade after the box was released: [...]

  • Ruben Schade ☛ BLISS.JPG turns thirty

    You can check Google Maps to see how the area looks today. It’s an active vineyard again, so it’s not quite the same.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ Liquid Glass Is Permanent

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Sony RX100 or an iPhone?

    I’ve been missing having lots of options when it comes to taking photos lately. My iPhone Air has a 1x and 2x but I’d like more reach and a 0.5x. I’m starting to be more self conscious of taking my Sony a6700 out with me, no idea why. Having a phone is much more discreet and always there but is it worth carrying extra weight 100% of the time for the times you want to take photos?

  • Lee Peterson ☛ I bought and returned the iPad Pro because of iPadOS 26

    What happened instead was little paper cuts and issues that I reported last June in the beta cycle still being present. At almost £1000 I didn’t think the iPad was worth the month with an operating system that didn’t help me meet the goals for it.

    Here are some of the issues that I ran into

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Microsoft Realizes It's Epically Screwed Up Windows 11 as Users Rage at Copilot AI Crammed Everywhere

      In short, it’s no wonder users are desperately looking for greener pastures, from a growing exodus trying out the open source operating system Linux and Apple’s aggressively priced MacBook Neo, which could be the non-Windows saving grace for many budget-conscious buyers looking for a basic machine.

    • The Register UK ☛ Claude attacks were 'Rorschach test' for infosec community

      The upside? Agentic AI systems’ ability to find zero-day vulnerabilities and develop exploits at machine speed can be a boon defenders, too.

    • The Register UK ☛ Telling an AI model that it's an expert makes it worse

      In a pre-print paper titled "Expert Personas Improve LLM Alignment but Damage Accuracy: Bootstrapping Intent-Based Persona Routing with PRISM," researchers affiliated with the University of Southern California (USC) find that persona-based prompting is task-dependent – which they say explains the mixed results.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ The hardest question to answer about AI-fueled delusions

      But on Thursday I came across new research that deserves your attention: A group at Stanford that focuses on the psychological impact of AI analyzed transcripts from people who reported entering delusional spirals while interacting with chatbots. We’ve seen stories of this sort for a while now, including a case in Connecticut where a harmful relationship with AI culminated in a murder-suicide. Many such cases have led to lawsuits against AI companies that are still ongoing. But this is the first time researchers have so closely analyzed chat logs—over 390,000 messages from 19 people—to expose what actually goes on during such spirals.

    • Dark Reading ☛ AI in the SOC: What Could Go Wrong?

      Both of their enterprise environments carry big risk when it comes to cybersecurity attacks. One cybersecurity leader, Ankit Gupta, oversees a Fortune 500 food manufacturing company, and the other, Shilpi Mittal, is charged with protecting a financial company. Both decided to run a six-month trial period to find out how AI could work for them in their security operations centers (SOCs).

    • 404 Media ☛ This Web Tool Sabotages AI Chatbots By Making Them Really, Really Slow

      Now, there’s a new way to discourage friends, family, and even complete strangers from turning to chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT: by using a tool called “Slow LLM” to make them really, reaaaaalllyyy slowwwww. Or at least, making them look that way.

    • Elliot C Smith ☛ Product Teams vs Feature Teams in an AI world.

      Once the initial version is shipped it becomes harder and harder to articulate what's missing. As a result, output, judged on the number of new things shipped, shifts to shipping small inconsequential tickets as fast as possible to maximize a metric.

      This is likely to happen even more frequently in a world where AI can get you to the 60% version very quickly. Assuming your "scrum team" remains in place, the output here is going to be an increased focus on tickets shipped per week. These teams will still end up stuck in the 60% solution because churning through a backlog of tiny ideas is rarely the path to unique and valuable product.

  • Social Control Media

    • PC World ☛ YouTube wants you to help spot 'AI slop' videos

      One question remains: whether YouTube and Google will use the feedback to help clear AI slop from the platform or whether they’ll use the responses to merely improve their own video AI.

    • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ Instagram is stripping its devotees of their basic humanity

      Bear this in mind when you consider this small bit of news from picturesque Notting Hill, west London, where residents are engaged in a row with Instagram “influencers”, who they say have invaded their area in their quest for beautiful backdrops. The residents’ streets, they complain, are being turned into “personal photo studios”, with some Instagrammers even bringing along pop-up tents for outfit changes.

    • [Old] Evening Standard UK ☛ Notting Hill neighbours paint colourful houses black in a bid to stop 'disruptive overtourism'

      Residents living at a formerly bubblegum pink home and a blue terrace house on the road have now painted the properties black as the colour “doesn’t look as good on Instagram”. Another has painted the doorway and bottom half of their property the same dark hue to put off infuencers.

      They have started a campaign to try and get other colourful properties on their street to follow suit.

    • [Old] Metro UK ☛ Notting Hill residents tell Instagram users to 'stop influencing on our doorstep'

      ‘You would have to have all of them change colours with black doors all looking really boring. It would just displace the problem onto another street.’

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Chip tester shrugged off ransomware – then came the leak

      In its SEC filing, the company said it activated its incident response plan as soon as the issue was identified, taking systems offline and calling in outside cybersecurity help. Law enforcement in Singapore has been notified, and the process of contacting potentially affected individuals is underway, although Trio-Tech says it is still figuring out exactly what data was caught up in the mess.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Krebs On Security ☛ ‘CanisterWorm’ Springs Wiper Attack Targeting Iran

    This weekend’s outbreak is the second major supply chain attack involving Trivy in as many months. At the end of February, Trivy was hit as part of an automated threat called HackerBot-Claw, which mass exploited misconfigured workflows in GitHub Actions to steal authentication tokens.

• Security

  • XDA ☛ You’re putting your data at risk by exposing services directly to the Internet

    Let’s say you’ve got a formidable home lab armed with all sorts of cool virtual machines and containers. Well, there are times when you may need to leave your workstations for extended periods. Or maybe you’ve got friends and family that you want to share your FOSS utilities with. Either way, your servers, apps, and virtual guests are only available on your local network, and you’ll have to set up some sort of remote access workflow for your tinkering hub.

    While you may be tempted to expose your services to the Internet, it’s easily the worst mistake you can make on your computing arsenal. Fortunately, the self-hosting ecosystem has a boatload of utilities designed to protect your home network while you and other authorized users access your home lab.

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Raymond Camden ☛ Implementing OAuth in Astro

      I can remember being incredibly confused by OAuth in the past. Honestly I felt like I was the only one who didn't get it. So I forced myself to build a few demos in that area to help it click and I realized it wasn't terribly difficult to implement at all. My first explorations in this area were back in 2010, almost two decades ago, so it's definitely not anything new, but on the off chance that one of my readers needs an overview, I figure it can't hurt to share.

      OAuth basically boils down to the idea of using a trusted third party to authenticate a user. "Typical" authentication systems required you to set up a users table in a database, carefully store credentials, and build a login process. OAuth is like saying screw that, if Google says a person is so and so, I trust Google.

    • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: A $100 gift card could be legit. A $1000 is obviously a Scam. What should scammers do?

      Most offers I get are either $1000 or $100. Today I got one for $750 which inspired this post (I ignored the offer without checking).

      Which nets more people $100 or $1000?

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ The Head of the FBI Just Admitted Something Moderately Horrifying

      “We do purchase commercially available information that’s consistent with the constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act,” Patel admitted under oath, “and it has led to some valuable intelligence for us.”

    • The Register UK ☛ Palantir trial plugs into UK financial watchdog's data trove

      The idea, at least on paper, is straightforward: use Palantir's software to help sift signal from noise across the roughly 42,000 businesses the FCA oversees, and spot patterns of financial crime faster than human analysts can manage alone.

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ The Battle Over Chat Control: How EU Governments and the Tech Lobby Are Trying to Overturn Parliament’s Vote — A Comprehensive Fact Check

      This week, the European Parliament faces a decisive vote on whether the indiscriminate scanning of private chats and emails by US tech companies (Chat Control 1.0) will be allowed to continue. After Parliament voted on 11 March to replace blanket mass surveillance with targeted monitoring of suspects — thereby protecting the confidentiality of digital correspondence — EU member state governments let the trilogue negotiations fail by refusing to compromise in substance.

      Now, in an unprecedented manoeuvre, the conservative EPP group is attempting to force a repeat vote on Thursday (26 March) to overturn the Parliament’s principled decision and keep indiscriminate chat scanning in place. A preliminary vote on Wednesday will determine whether this repeat vote goes ahead or is struck from the agenda.

      Digital rights expert and former MEP Patrick Breyer outlines the urgently needed change of strategy: [...]

  • Confidentiality

    • Tor ☛ Setting Up a Tor Relay at National Taiwan Normal University: A Practical Experience of Communicating with the University and Leaving Open Possibilities | The Tor Project

      Within the anonymous network community, people often talk about technology and ideals. The hard part is not the configuration itself. The question is whether the relay can survive in the real world.

      This time, we interviewed a partner from the anonymous network community, NZ, who is currently studying in the Department of Computer Science at National Taiwan Normal University. He set up a Tor Relay on campus by working openly with the university system and completing the full administrative process.

    • Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0189 Documenting my security practices

      I'm particularly sensitive to security issues given last month's leak of email addresses. So here's an in-depth look at my security practices. In the hope of making it readable by the layperson, I'll give background where necessary. I welcome feedback.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Moscow Times ☛ EU Expresses Concern About Claims That Hungarian FM Shared Info With Russia

    European officials said Monday that allegations that Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó had passed sensitive information about EU negotiations to Russia were "greatly concerning."

    The Washington Post reported this weekend that Szijjártó regularly called Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during breaks in EU meetings to give "direct reports on what was discussed" and suggest possible courses of action.

  • France24 ☛ EU 'deeply concerned' by reports Hungary leaked negotiation details to Russia

    The European Union executive said on Monday reports that the Hungarian foreign minister had passed sensitive information about European Union negotiations to Russia were "greatly concerning".

  • The Verge ☛ The US government just banned consumer routers made outside the US

    If you already have a Wi-Fi or wired router, you can keep on using it — and companies that have already gotten FCC radio authorization for a specific foreign-made product can continue to import that product.

    But since the vast majority — if not all — consumer routers are manufactured outside the United States, the vast majority of future consumer routers are now banned. By adding all foreign-made consumer routers to its Covered List, the FCC is saying it will no longer authorize their radios, which de facto bans new devices from import into the country.

  • PC World ☛ FCC moves to block new foreign-made routers

    The decision follows the FCC’s National Security Determination, which concluded that routers used by homes and home offices could be attacked by foreign actors. As a result, “routers produced in a foreign country” will be added to the Covered List. That means, in effect, no future routers manufactured in a foreign country will receive FCC licenses to be sold in the United States.

  • Inside Towers ☛ EU Court Adviser Backs Authority to Restrict Huawei in 5G Networks

    The case, brought by an Estonian carrier, Elisa, challenged the EU’s authority on the issue. A final ruling from the Court of Justice is expected later this year, as the EU continues pushing to reduce reliance on Chinese telecom vendors over security concerns.

  • The Drone Girl ☛ Skydio X10D Army order marks its biggest-ever single drone order

    Skydio is already on the Blue UAS Cleared List, which is the DoD’s vetted registry of NDAA-compliant drones. In fact, Skydio holds more entries on the Select List than any other manufacturer.

    The $52 million figure sounds large, but remember, that’s roughly $20,800 per unit for 2,500 drones. But it does show how much cheaper drones are than other, larger aircraft. For context, a single F-35 costs north of $80 million.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ When Hyperglobalization Meets Chaos

    In addition to oil and gas, the Gulf region is a key global source of fertilizer. It produces about a third of the world’s helium — and helium isn’t just for party balloons, it’s key to production of semiconductors and has important medical uses. And — this I didn’t know — the Gulf is a choke point for pharmaceuticals, with many key ingredients normally shipped through Hormuz and many final products normally being flown to their destinations via Dubai and other Gulf airports.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Into the Abyss We Go

    The global economy is about to take a shock most people are not prepared for—and the political class is still pretending everything is normal.

    In this livestream, I explain why the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is not just a geopolitical event, but a systemic rupture in the energy foundations of modern life—and what that means for all of us.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Thoughts on Robert Mueller's Passing

    All of the people who lied to cover up the true nature of Trump’s Russian contacts in 2016, save Michael Cohen, were pardoned.

    We also subsequently learned (days before the 2020 election) that the investigation into whether Stone conspired with Russia on a hack-and-leak operation continued past the time when Mueller closed up shop. Just days before Bill Barr released a footnote revealing that, Scott Brady indicted GRU for hacks including Macron Leaks, while claiming (incredibly) to know nothing about the ties between Russian spies and those, starting with Jack Posobiec, who leaked them. Posobiec has revealed (and repeated, on Mueller’s death) that Mueller investigated him in that case as a potential Russian agent.

• Environment

  • RTL ☛ Redirected to fossil fuels: US, TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1 bn' deal to end offshore wind projects

    Pouyanne welcomed the deal, saying it redirected TotalEnergies’s $928 million investment in two wind farm leases off the North Carolina and New York coasts into US natural gas projects, in particular the Rio Grande LNG plant.

  • Bhaskar English ☛ UN: Earths Climate System Off Track | Planet Losing Balance

    For the first time, a major global climate report has included Earth’s energy imbalance as a key indicator of climate change. This imbalance measures how much energy the planet receives from the Sun compared to how much it sends back into space. Right now, that balance is shifting in a dangerous way.

  • Science Alert ☛ Sunken Soviet Submarine Is Leaking Radioactive Material in The Ocean

    The Soviet K-278 Komsomolets sank after an on-board fire in April 1989, carrying not just the nuclear reactor that powered her, but two nuclear torpedoes.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ World's first beer made with CO2 from thin air debuts in US market

    The project replaces fossil-linked CO₂ sourcing with onsite atmospheric capture, stabilizing a critical brewing input.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Why are we ruining our environment for this? (DuckDuckGo AI)

    I don’t use AI unless I have to but I did give the new DuckDuckGo a test to help with figuring out weight and dimensions of various devices, I wish I hadn’t.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Earth being ‘pushed beyond its limits’ as energy imbalance reaches record high

    "Our home planet is struggling with a record energy imbalance, which is warming oceans to unprecedented levels, making weather more extreme and threatening health and food supplies." How we react matters.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Independent UK ☛ New York LaGuardia tragedy highlights air traffic control overstretch

      Dorothy Robyn, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, says: “From 2013 to 2023, the FAA hired only about two-thirds of the controllers called for by its staffing model.

      “Many FAA air traffic control facilities remain chronically understaffed.”

      Early in 2025, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was accused of decimating jobs at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). But the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said: “No air traffic controllers nor any professionals who perform safety critical functions were terminated.”

    • The Atlantic ☛ American Aviation Is Near Collapse

      The federal government has been trying to run air traffic control on the cheap for decades, which has resulted in staffing shortages and badly outdated equipment. Many towers are operating below recommended capacity. After the outages last spring, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy panned the infrastructure used to keep flyers safe. “We use floppy disks. We use copper wires,” Duffy said. “The system that we’re using is not effective to control the traffic that we have in the airspace today.” Yet despite warnings from airlines and regulators, successive congressional sessions and presidential administrations have failed to fix the problem. The FAA has also seen what’s known as “regulatory capture”: Cozy relationships with Boeing, for example, helped problems with the 737 Max escape notice until a pair of fatal crashes abroad in 2018 and 2019.

    • Wired ☛ The AI Race Is Pressuring Utilities to Squeeze More From Europe’s Power Grids

      National Grid, which operates the transmission network in England and Wales, says that proposed data centers representing more than 30 gigawatts of power demand are awaiting connection to its grid, equal to two-thirds the peak demand of Great Britain. Even accounting for the likelihood that some of those data centers will never be built, there is currently not enough room to accommodate them.

      The wait for permission to plug in is causing some data center projects to collapse, undermining European ambitions to capture a share of the hundreds of billions of dollars that AI labs are spending on compute. “Across Europe, projects are being canceled because there’s no access to the grid,” claims Taco Engelaar, managing director at grid optimization company Neara.

    • Hackaday ☛ A Simple Switch For Simply Too Much Current

      A switch is simple: connect two pieces of metal together and bam! Except, it’s not that simple at high currents. How much current? Just about 400 car batteries worth would certainly cause some issues. This is the issue that [Technology Hobby] hoped to fix with his clever switch design.

    • The Next Move ☛ The Night Train to Kyiv

      We take the interconnectedness of the world for granted. It’s rare to find a destination not served by any airline. There are airports in the most remote corners of Alaska with scheduled flights! But the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has suspended all air traffic to and from Ukraine for four years and counting.

      So in order to reach the Ukrainian capital from abroad, you have to jump through some hoops.

      I’m writing this from a train on my way to Kyiv at the head of a Renew Democracy Initiative delegation. On Saturday afternoon, I got in a cab to JFK airport in New York before hopping on a flight to Warsaw via Paris. Upon landing, we were picked up for a three-hour car ride to the town of Chelm, on the Poland-Ukraine border. There, we boarded a train that would carry us through the night all the way to Kyiv.

      (In the middle of a war, Ukrainian train service is still more comfortable and reliable than Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. Go figure!)

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ Award-winning bird recognition device

      “[He] was just named a 2025 Davidson Fellow, a national award for exceptional young people,” his mother, Miriam, tells us via email. “[A-BiRD] runs on a Raspberry Pi mini computer and is built around Cornell’s BirdNET analyser. Using these compact processors, his system has logged over 21,000 bird songs from 98 species here in Tucson.”

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Ukrainian-born OnlyFans owner dies at 43

    Radvinsky was one of four Ukrainian billionaires to make the 2025 Forbes' ranking of the wealthiest immigrants in the U.S, placing 50th on the list.

  • The Nation ☛ Marc Andreessen’s Dangerously Unexamined Life

    The psychology of this is certainly interesting. The politics of it are alarming.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Understaffing as a form of enshittification

    Kaiser-Schatzlein lays the blame for many of life's frustrations at the feet of this business trend: "long lines, messy grocery aisles, organized theft, high hotel costs, frequent flight cancellations, deadly medication errors at pharmacies, increased use of medical restraints in nursing homes, and, more generally, a palpable and rising dissatisfaction with work."

    As you can see from that list, understaffing affects everyone, from people with the wherewithal to buy a plane ticket to vulnerable elderly people who are literally tied to their beds or drugged into stupors for the last years of their lives.

    There's academic work to support the idea that understaffing is on the rise, like a 2024 Kennedy School survey of 14,000 workers where a majority said that their workplaces are "always" or "often" understaffed. A 2023 study in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice found that public health institutions need to hire 80% more workers to be adequately staffed. New York's Mt Sinai hospitals paid a $2m fine in 2024 for understaffing its ERs, as well as oncology and labor units. Another study blames understaffing for the rise of use of antipsychotic "chemical handcuffs" in nursing homes: [...]

    [...]

    Kaiser-Schatzlein quotes the Kennedy School's Daniel Schneider, who identifies understaffing as a deliberate business strategy. Businesses don't hire enough workers because that makes them more profitable. It's not because "no one wants to work anymore" (though doubtless repeating that fairy tale helps shift the blame for long lines and poor service from real, greedy bosses to imaginary, greedy workers).

  • Florian Maas ☛ The Slow Collapse of MkDocs

    On March 9, 2026, one of the former maintainers of MkDocs took over control of the PyPI repository and removed the rights of the original author. The original author quickly responded: [...]

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Meduza ☛ Anonymous social media accounts are calling for the secession of an Estonian county on Russia’s border. Tallinn says it’s Moscow’s doing.

      Estonia’s Internal Security Service characterized the “NNR” project as a “simple and low-cost” information attack aimed at undermining the unity of Estonian society, warning that participation “may entail criminal consequences.”

      The story also spread beyond Estonia. Numerous Russian outlets covered it, as did the German tabloid Bild, which regularly reports on the war in Ukraine. A source in Estonian intelligence told Bild that the ultimate goal of the “NNR” campaign remains unclear, but that it could be intended to lay the groundwork for a potential Russian invasion of Estonia — similar to Ukraine, where Russia backed the creation of the Luhansk and Donetsk “people’s republics” in 2014 before launching its full-scale invasion in 2022.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Meduza’s readers in Russia on life without Internet

    Last week, Meduza asked its readers in Russia how they’re living amid mobile Internet shutdowns and restrictions, which have become worse in recent weeks. We received hundreds of responses from dozens of cities. Together, they show how much everyday life has changed — and how much harder basic tasks have become. We’re sharing some of the most notable responses, translated into English.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Pro-Kremlin blogger turns on Putin, sent to psychiatric care

    The manifesto and videos caused quite a stir and have apparently landed Remeslo in St. Petersburg's Psychiatric Hospital No. 3. It is unclear how this came to be, but all contact with him seems to have been lost and people are wondering what happened.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Tiananmen vigil group writings meant to 'tell stories of Chinese dissidents'

    For decades, the Alliance organised vigils at Victoria Park to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing, when hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed as troops dispersed pro-democracy demonstrators in and around Tiananmen Square.

  • JURIST ☛ Russia court sentences poets for reading anti-war poetry

    Two poets, Artyom Kamadarin and Yegor Shtovba, remain imprisoned in Russia as of Friday, on charges related to their reading of anti-war poems. This has been an ongoing matter since December 2023, when a Moscow court sentenced Kamardin to seven years and Shtovba to five and a half years in prison.

  • Overpopulation ☛ The Psychology of our Strange Overpopulation Taboo

    In the 60s and early 70s, we talked about overpopulation, but now it’s taboo. A new paper, using depth psychology, explains why: Unconscious wishes and fears related to reproduction, envy and omnipotence derail the conversation.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Leaked Document: Iran War Meets Little Brother

    The Pentagon has quietly dictated to spy satellite companies what to say about the Iran war, exercising censorship over what the American public is allowed to know.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • BIA Net ☛ Journalist İsmail Arı arrested for ‘spreading disinformation’

    Arı was taken into custody during a family visit over the Eid holiday. “They’ve been looking for an excuse to arrest me for over a year. My only crime is practicing journalism in this country. Journalism is not a crime," he said following his arrest.

  • New York Times ☛ Pentagon Adopts New Limits for Journalists After Court Loss

    The Defense Department said on Monday that it was taking a new approach to limiting access to media organizations, after a federal judge ruled on Friday that major parts of its current policy were unconstitutional, in a case brought by The New York Times.

    The Pentagon is closing the workspace used for years by journalists with credentials to cover the military, Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, wrote in a memo to senior Pentagon leadership. A new area for the press will be set up in an annex outside the main Pentagon building, he said, and all journalists now seeking physical access to the Pentagon will require an escort.

  • CPJ ☛ Vietnamese journalist Nguyen Hoang Vi allegedly assaulted while in police detention

    Vi was struck repeatedly on the head with a sandal by a police officer she identified as Nguyen Ba Duong, who made her sign a “stack” of printouts of journalism she had posted to her Facebook page, Vi and the media reports said. She was released without charge, according to the same sources.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Vox ☛ Trump sends ICE agents to airports with TSA in crisis: What to know

    What’s happening? Over the weekend, President Donald Trump announced his plan to send ICE agents into major US airports, starting Monday, in response to ballooning security lines and delays. Agents reportedly deployed to around 14 airports to start the week, including Newark, New Jersey; Chicago O’Hare; and Atlanta.

  • Papers Please ☛ Your rights when an airport checkpoint is staffed by ICE agents – Papers, Please!

    What are your rights, especially as an airline passenger traveling within the US rather than seeking to enter or leave the country, if a checkpoint at the airport is staffed by ICE agents instead of, or in addition to, the usual TSA staff or TSA contractors?

    No court has yet ruled on the limits to ICE agents’ authority in this context. ICE agents have long worked alongside agents of US Custom and Border Protection (CBP) at airports that handle international flights. But until the last few months, TSA checkpoints weren’t used as immigration checkpoints for passengers on domestic flights within the US.

    Lawsuits are likely, especially if ICE agents at airport checkpoints seize domestic passengers for deportation on the basis of information in airline reservations.

  • International Business Times ☛ 'Lazy' ICE Agents Spotted Lounging at Airports Instead of Helping Passengers Following Deployment

    Photographs of some ICE agents standing idle during a busy period at the airport have sparked concern among travellers. Not only about the agents' presence, but also about whether they have the skills and training required to provide effective support at security checkpoints.

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ Airports on ICE [iophk: brownshirts have now seized 'control' of the US airports]

    I also received messages from travelers in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Boston, Chicago O’hare, and all three New York City-area airports. From these disparate locales, the commentary remained pretty much the same: The presence of ICE was certainly not helping anyone, it wasn’t speeding up security lines, and at worst it was making people uncomfortable.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Cesar Chavez and the Lie We Tell Ourselves About ‘Good Men’ in Power

    Here is what I learned about power from my time cleaning other people’s houses and now running one of the largest feminist organizations in the country: Power does not become safe because it is held by people with the right politics. Anytime power accumulates without accountability — regardless of who holds it — it is abused.

  • Law Society Gazette ☛ SRA sorry for 'thwarting' hearing with late correspondence to prisoner

    Linda Lu, admitted in 2022, was jailed for five and a half years in 2024 after she, alongside her mother Susan Chen, was found guilty of stalking involving serious alarm or distress following a six-week trial.

  • Three-quarters of SDT cases take longer than six months

    Only 24% of Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) cases concluded within six months last year, according to new figures from the organisation.

    This was despite the SDT receiving 10% fewer cases last year, with proceedings referred by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) falling by a third, offset by a rise in applications by individual solicitors and lay people.

    While 72% of cases were concluded within six months of issue in 2023 and 32% in 2024, this figure fell to only 24% last year. Seven in 10 took up to nine months, compared to 81% in the previous two years.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• India Times ☛ EU digital rules should apply to Big Tech's smart TVs, broadcasters tell antitrust chief

  "A limited number ⁠of operators ‌are therefore gaining growing ability to shape outcomes for millions of users and businesses by ​controlling access to ​audiences and content distribution," ACT said in a letter to Ribera seen by Reuters.

  "It ⁠is crucial that the Commission designate major TV operating systems as gatekeepers ​and ensure adequate oversight to guarantee fairness and contestability," the broadcasters said.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Cloudflare Reports Surge in Geo-Blocked Pirate Site Domains

    Cloudflare's latest transparency report shows that the company geo-blocked nearly 2,800 domains in the second half of 2025, up from around 300 in the same period a year earlier. These blocking actions took place in France, the UK, Belgium, and South Korea. Cloudflare confirms that it has not blocked content through its public DNS resolver. That refusal recently cost the company a €14 million fine in Italy.