Leftovers

• IT Wire ☛ World Backup Day - Why Smarter Data – Not More Data – Defines Resilience

  Resilience strategies must also be proven, not assumed. Regular recovery testing ensures backup environments align with real business priorities, surfacing gaps and strengthening governance over time.

• Ruben Schade ☛ My 2026 birþday

  This post was written with the letter thorn in lieu of th, because it marks a special occasion. Don’t ask me how that works.

  Yesterday was one of þose “milestone” birþdays I þink we all learn to dread, but it’s better þan þe alternative!

• Manuel Moreale ☛ Successful products

  Every time I stumble on articles or posts discussing tech products, I’m perplexed when someone uses the word “successful” to describe a product with a lot of users. There’s a better word for products like that, and that’s “popular”. Maybe I’m the odd one here, but I don’t think the popularity of a product is what we should use to evaluate if it’s also a successful one.

• Justin Duke ☛ Why I'm a film blogger now

  I have written more words about film in 2026 than I have about technology and business. This has not escaped your attention — so much so that real-life and internet friends alike have requested that I create an RSS feed excluding my film reviews. (By the way, I did that.) I don't think I've actually written anywhere about why I've gotten so into movies, or why I write about them, and this seems as good a time as any.

• Science

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ X-ray laser experiment unlocks water's hidden critical state at -81°F

    “What was special was that we were able to X-ray unimaginably fast before the ice froze and could observe how the liquid-liquid transition vanishes and a new critical state emerges,” Anders Nilsson, PhD, a professor of chemical physics at the department of physics at Stockholm University, revealed.

• Career/Education

  • Association of Research Libraries ☛ Strategic Implications of AI Futures for Research Libraries: Workshop Report — Association of Research Libraries

    The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) have released the report from our Strategic Implications Workshop, Futurescape Libraries: Mapping Possibilities for Tomorrow’s Information Hubs. The report is designed to support leaders as they consider how advances in AI may affect the roles, responsibilities, and future direction of research libraries.

  • Association of Research Libraries ☛ Strategic Implications of AI Futures for Research Libraries: Workshop Report [PDF]

    The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategic Implications Workshop (December 2024) used the ARL / CNI 2035 Scenarios: AI-Influenced Futures in the Research Environment as a structured basis for examining how artificial intelligence and machine learning could reshape the research, knowledge, and learning ecosystem. (The authors of this report contributed to the “AI-Influenced Futures…” scenarios and participated in the AI Strategic Implications Workshop.) Participants worked across the scenario set of plausible futures to surface implications for library roles, operating models, governance, and capacity, and to apply an AI risk mitigation lens to near-term decisions. Following the workshop, a toolkit was developed to guide other groups that want to run similar workshops with the scenario set.2

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Working on products people hate

    Looking back, I’m glad that people have strongly disliked some of the software I’ve built, for the same reason that I’m glad I wasn’t born into oil money. If I’d happened to work on popular applications for my whole career, I’d probably believe that that was because of my sheer talent. But in fact, you would not be able to predict the beloved and disliked products I worked on from the quality of their engineering. Some beloved features have very shaky engineering indeed, and many features that failed miserably were built like cathedrals on the inside4. Working on products people hate forces you to accept how little control individual engineers have over whether people like what they build.

  • Rob Bowley ☛ Evidence that GenAI is widening the software engineering skills gap

    According to the FT, demand for software engineers is rising again, and in relative terms is outperforming the wider jobs market. That’s the headline most people will take away.

    But the more important detail is that the growth is concentrated in more experienced roles, while entry-level hiring remains weak.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Nikhil Anand

    This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nikhil Anand, whose blog can be found at nikhil.io.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ You Work For the Bad Boss You Have, Not the Good Boss You Wish You Had

    Likewise, we must persevere through bad bosses. We must learn to navigate pernicious supervisors, backstabbing managers, and incompetent executives as the price of gainful employment. Good bosses are a stroke of luck, rather than a baseline expectation. If we all limited ourselves to workplaces that were free of bad bosses, it would take ten years to find a job.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Senior Librarians as Publisher Change Agents: What's the Business Case? (Part 1)

    In preparation for these interviews, I asked several North American library leaders what they thought about these senior-level roles. It’s a small sample, but in my experience, as both a librarian and a publisher representative, they reflect widely-held librarian sentiment about these types of positions. The librarians I spoke to preferred to remain anonymous so they could speak freely.

  • Truthdig ☛ Can Screen Bans Help Solve the Reading Crisis?

    For some at Jewett, the school day doesn’t feel that different. A few teachers said they hadn’t used screens very much. For others, the routine has changed substantially — and for the better, they believe, with students more engaged and learning less “gamified.”

    When asked about her school’s screen ban, a girl wearing a Lilo & Stitch shirt in an intervention class for struggling readers, just growls. But her intervention instructor, Julie Kearns, said the students are simply adjusting.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Bringing AI education to 1.25 million students across Latin America

    Working with education partners across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, we will help young people develop a foundational understanding of AI technologies, their social and ethical implications, and the role that AI can play in their lives.

  • Craig Cook ☛ The End

    I was also clinging to a foolish hope that, if I could just weather the current storm, this-too-would-pass and the situation might improve. Mozilla was once a great place to work; maybe it could still be saved. Maybe the revolving door of executives would finally bring in someone who would repair the damage done by previous administrations. Maybe new marketing leadership would change tactics and actually value my team’s work, and let us actually do it. Maybe we’d at least get some different middle-managers who would hear our concerns and try to address the root causes of low morale instead of just punishing us for having low morale.

    While I patiently waited for circumstances to improve around me, my circumstances just kept sucking and I kept slowly burning out.

    Then they fired me anyway and, just like that, all my worries were gone. Ahhhhhh.

• Hardware

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Bridge cameras are underappreciated awesomeness

    But a closer look reveals the key difference: there’s no mechanism to remove or swap the lens. What you get on the camera is what it’ll always have, unless you break out an angle grinder (cough), which I’m sure would do wonders for the device and your warranty.

    Having a bulky camera with a fixed lens and small sensor might sound like a bizarre set of compromises, and it certainly would limit its appeal among those used to the flexibility of an SLR. But it also comes with several key upsides that make it really attractive to specific audiences: [...]

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Console prices are insane now

    Oh, and the PS5 Pro was bumped from $750 to $900. It seems like it might actually be reasonable to expect a $1,000 console by the end of 2026. See also my 2026 is going to be a very painful year in tech.

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ Most Collected Typewriters on the Typewriter Database

    Naturally the data isn’t perfect and some of the numbers broadly track the manufacturing numbers of some of the most widely made models across the 20th century, particularly models which, though they changed in style and design over time, kept the same model name for decades. Despite this, the list of the top 50 doesn’t seem too far off of what one might expect.

  • Cassidy Williams ☛ I got yet another digital typewriter: The BYOK

    I talked about building my Micro Journal in the past here, and how much I like having a distraction-free writing device for blogging, drafting things, and just getting ideas out.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Independent UK ☛ Cigarette smoking in US drops to record low

    E-cigarette use is on the rise, particularly among younger adults, with 13 percent reporting regular use and 1.63 million middle and high school students using them in 2024. Health experts warn that e-cigarettes are unsafe, containing addictive nicotine and harmful chemicals, and can lead to the use of traditional tobacco products.

  • Chris Hannah ☛ Cutting Down on my Phone Usage

    After realising my average phone screen time was 6 hours a day, I've decided I want to start using it less. Although, I don't have any specific goals in mind just yet.

    First I will give myself a week to try and naturally use it less. Which I hope will help me detect where I usually reach for my phone, and also help me identify suitable replacements.

  • The Scotsman ☛ How smoking ban showed Scotland is capable of transforming big ideas into bold laws

    The impact on lives has been significant, as Ash Scotland points out. Since 2006, smoking rates have nearly halved, with a half a million fewer Scots lighting up. There are fewer strokes and serious asthma attacks, and the smoking ban is directly linked to a 17 per cent reduction in hospital admissions for heart attacks. A study by the HERU (Health Economics Research Unit) estimated that over a 30-year period, the ban will avert 4,490 deaths from reduced second-hand smoke exposure and an additional 5,330 deaths due to reduced active smoking. More than ten thousand Scots living longer, healthier lives as a direct impact of MSPs’ determination to do the right thing.

  • NPR ☛ 10 tried-and-true methods to stay off your phone, according to our readers

    Dozens of listeners emailed us with their cleverest, tried-and-true methods. One person charges their phone in a different room to prevent picking it up. Another keeps a notebook with his phone and writes down his questions there instead of searching for the answers.

    Here are a few ideas from our readers. These have been edited for length and clarity.

• Proprietary

  "" ☛ https://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2026/03/27/taking-care-pendants/ | Source: Phil Gyford

  • Phil Gyford ☛ Taking Care pendants

    There are many pieces of hardware associated with healthcare and being elderly that feel utilitarian and clunky, and so many services that feel stretched and only-just-working. Yes this is a pay-for service as opposed to the underfunded NHS but, still, it was as good as you hope everything should be.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ Goodbye, Mac Pro

    It’s not a shock that a product that was underpowered and overpriced wouldn’t sell well, leading to cancellation. The mystery is why Apple seemed to repeatedly come up with designs that were not what customers were asking for and why it couldn’t manage to do basic speed bump updates. Presumably the answer is internal politics. I’m not sure what to make of the reporting that John Ternus was apparently one of the champions of the Mac Pro and that he’s likely to be the next CEO, yet the product is being killed.

  • Macworld ☛ RIP Mac Pro: Apple officially kills its tower computer

    Apple introduced the Mac Pro in 2006, the same time Apple completed its transition from Motorola chips to Intel. It had two 64-bit, Intel Xeon 5100 (Woodcrest) processors, four hard drive bays, eight RAM slots, and started at $2,499.

  • Jarrod Blundy ☛ RIP Mac Pro

    For a computer that has caused so much consternation over the years, its story can be told very succinctly. Stephen Hackett captured it all in six sentences: [...]

  • Abhinav Gopalakrishnan ☛ Recovery Apple Keychain

    It turns out that this data was encrypted using my old password, and the reset utility doesn’t decrypt and re-encrypt it with the new one. In hindsight, that makes sense from a security standpoint. Still, I had assumed there might be some kind of master key that would handle this automatically during a password reset.

    After the reset, macOS gave me the option to resync with my old data. Unfortunately, I had already exhausted the allowed attempts to enter my old password. Every time I tried to resync, I was met with the dreaded “delete iCloud data” prompt.

  • Open Web Advocacy ☛ Our Submission to the CMA on Apple’s iOS Interoperability Commitments

    TL;DR: The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has stated that developers need access to key iOS and iPadOS features to build innovative products and services, so UK consumers do not miss out. As outlined in our previous article, Apple’s proposed commitments are far too weak to deliver that outcome. The CMA has the power to impose effective and enforceable interoperability obligations on mobile operating system gatekeepers under the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCCA), but it does not appear to be using those powers.

  • Dark Reading ☛ Is the FCC's Router Ban the Wrong Fix?

    The FCC's move essentially prohibits the import of new models of consumer grade routers made by manufacturers outside the US. Consumers and businesses that are already using foreign made routers can continue using them, and retailer can continue to sell and import router models that the FCC has already previously approved for use.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • New Statesman ☛ What my students taught me about AI

      A lesson, it seems, that a sometime university professor turned right-wing cheerleader appears not to have heeded. By relying on ChatGPT for his new book, the Reform party’s “intellectual guru” Matt Goodwin – or MattGPT as he will henceforth ever be known – has destroyed such credibility as he still had after losing the Gorton and Denton by-election. This was only the most embarrassing example of unacknowledged AI usage to have been unearthed in recent days. The publisher Hachette has pulled author Mia Ballard’s horror novel Shy Girl because it was detected as 78 per cent AI-generated (J. G. Ballard, the great literary prophet of our techno-saturated condition, will be smiling wryly in his grave at the undoing of his young namesake). And the Atlantic has published an article about how “Artificial intelligence seems to be turning up, undisclosed, in the opinion pages of major news publications,” citing an example from the much-read “Modern Love” column in, of all places, the New York Times. Meanwhile, in schools and on campuses around the world faculty are wrestling with the question of what to do about student usage.

      At every level from school to postgraduate, students are getting the LLMs to do their thinking and writing for them. This semester I decided to confront the problem directly. I included a rubric with every written assignment: [...]

    • CBC ☛ Why we should 'fight like hell' against Big AI

      “Fundamentally, we need to separate AI from empire. We want the benefits of AI. We absolutely cannot have it at the cost [of] our democracy,” Hao said in her public talk hosted at the University of Toronto’s Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology, earlier this March.

      "People should fight like hell to make sure that's not taken away,” she told host Nahlah Ayed in an interview.

      Hao’s book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI investigates the global impact of Big AI: from the implications of its rapid deployment, to the erosion of democratic norms — and explores how we need to responsibly rethink, design and distribute more purpose-driven AI systems in the future.

    • Futurism ☛ A Reporter Tried Cooking Actual AI-Generated Recipes and the Results Are Stomach-Churning

      But it can get way worse, an intrepid reporter found.

      Mia Mercado at The Cut delved into the culinary frontier of AI-generated recipes, and in the several-course-meal of this endeavor, subjected herself to eating “literal AI slop” that she cooked herself, to see if the instructions held up in reality.

    • Futurism ☛ Anthropic Just Leaked Upcoming Model With "Unprecedented Cybersecurity Risks" in the Most Ironic Way Possible

      In an enormously ironic twist, a draft blog obtained by Fortune, which was “available in an unsecured and publicly-searchable data store,” claimed that the new model “poses unprecedented cybersecurity risks.” In other words, let’s hope the new model wasn’t responsible for the security of Anthropic’s company blog.

    • Techdirt ☛ Hey, Game Devs: The ‘Placeholder Assets’ Excuse For Using AI Is Running Really Thin

      Like I said above, this excuse is getting old. Very old. Game developers and publishers will be more than aware at this point that a sizable percentage of the gaming public is very allergic to the use of AI in games, particularly when that use is not acknowledged at the forefront. If placeholder assets generated by AI are to be used at all in the development of a game, it is inexcusable for a developer to not have a process to remove them in place of human-created art before the game is published. That’s sloppy at best, and a lie of an excuse at worst.

      Especially because it’s not like there aren’t other options that have nothing to do with AI.

    • Vox ☛ Why Gmail’s AI-generated email replies feel so creepy

      But I think that this machine-generated personal correspondence, which is only likely to spread further into other forms of communication, has preoccupied me because there’s something deeper going on here. A lot of ink has been spilled in the last few years about AI-generated writing and its social consequences — how it will deskill millions of workers, outsource our thinking, confuse kids growing up in the AI age about the difference between real and synthetic friends, and so on. We already know that AI language is unnervingly good at sounding like it’s the product of a fellow consciousness. But the particular creepiness of elaborate email autocomplete is that it’s training on and simulating your consciousness. And as it does so, it also gives you a little less reason to actually be conscious.

    • The Register UK ☛ Using AI to code does not mean your code is more secure

      Researchers affiliated with Georgia Tech SSLab have been tracking CVEs attributable to flaws in AI-generated code.

      Last August, they found just two CVEs that could be definitively linked to Claude Code – CVE-2025-55526, a 9.1 severity directory traversal vulnerability in n8n-workflows, and GHSA-3j63-5h8p-gf7c, an improper input handling bug in the x402 SDK.

      In March, they identified 35 CVEs – 27 of which were authored by Claude Code, 4 by GitHub Copilot, 2 by Devin, and 1 each by Aether and Cursor.

    • The Register UK ☛ Sycophantic behavior in AI affects us all, say researchers

      "Even a single interaction with sycophantic AI reduced participants' willingness to take responsibility and repair interpersonal conflicts, while increasing their own conviction that they were right," the researchers explained. "Yet despite distorting judgment, sycophantic models were trusted and preferred."

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Agentic AI security demands zero-trust playbook

      A recent Cisco Systems Inc. survey of large-scale enterprises found that 85% of respondents are experimenting with AI agents, yet only 5% have moved those agents into production environments. The gap between experimentation and deployment underscores how agentic AI security has become the defining barrier to enterprise-scale adoption, according to Jeetu Patel (pictured), president and chief product officer of Cisco.

      “These agents [are] kind of like teenagers,” Patel told theCUBE. “They’re superbly and supremely intelligent, but they have no fear of consequences. They do stupid stuff all the time. The difference between delegation and trusted delegation is equivalent to the difference between bankruptcy and market leadership. It is literally that stark.”

    • NVISO Labs ☛ Bridging the Gap: Rethinking AI Security Testing Approaches

      This is the first of five posts on testing AI systems securely. If you’ve shipped or evaluated AI in production, you’ve probably felt it: the test suite passes, coverage looks good, and something still nags. What are we actually validating? That gap is what this series addresses. We look at why the way we’ve always done security testing (the test cases, suites, and approaches built for deterministic software) fails when applied to AI; what to test (surfaces and flow); eleven concrete examples; the practices that make tests stick; and a threat and coverage model you can use.

      The series aligns with the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 for LLM Applications 2025, the OWASP AI Security Verification Standard (AISVS), and MITRE ATLAS (Adversarial Threat Landscape for Artificial-Intelligence Systems) where relevant. This post lays the foundation: why that traditional testing approach is misaligned with how AI systems behave, and what to do about it. Later posts cover the full threat landscape (prompt injection, data poisoning, model extraction, supply chain, and more) and what to test in practice.

    • Joel Chrono ☛ How to turn off Calibre AI features

      A while back Calibre—a book management program which I have been using for years—integrated AI features, in an option that showed up in the context menu, when selecting a book and clicking on View, titled Discuss selected book with AI. Clicking it opens a chat interface that connects to any “provider”—also known as slop generator—of your choice.

      Of course, I see no use for such a useless feature, and if you don’t either, here’s how to hide it completely: [...]

    • Giles Turnbull ☛ AI and the human voice

      I see AI generated text and most of the time, I think it’s rubbish. It’s dull, it’s derivative, it always sounds like a thousand other things I’ve read before. Because the AI has been trained on those thousands of things, all now easy to find on the internet.

      But: do I think AI is quite good at making simple software, or basic web tools? Well, yeah, I have tried it for that, and I thought: “Hmm yeah this isn’t too shabby.”

      And of course I would think that, wouldn’t I? I don’t know better. I’m not a software engineer.

      I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession. I fall into the same trap as everyone else. I recognise, and admit to, my own bias.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ BuzzFeed goes AI — then it goes broke

      Well, no, it isn’t. AI does the opposite of those things. Peretti is clearly unable to tell good writing from slop, and he’s sure you can’t either.

      But most people can. Across all types of creative media, audiences consistently hate being fed slop. No matter how hard you want to sell it to them.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Grandmother jailed 6 months on AI facial recognition

      Lipps sat in jail for nearly six months. Her court-appointed public defender, Jay Greenwood, did what the police hadn't: he asked her family for bank records showing she'd been buying groceries and depositing Social Security checks in Tennessee at the time of the alleged crime. That took about a week. The charges were dismissed, and Fargo released her onto the street — in North Dakota, in winter — with no money, no transportation, and no false teeth, which police hadn't let her bring when they arrested her. Local defense attorneys pooled their own money for a hotel room, and a community volunteer drove her halfway to Chicago to meet her family.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Judge blasts DOJ for using AI to write filings with fake citations

      A federal judge tore into Justice Department lawyers after finding their court filing relied on nonexistent legal precedent, raising serious questions about whether AI-generated text, complete with hallucinated citations, made its way into official arguments.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ OpenClaw Bots Are a Security Disaster

      Despite the widespread enthusiasm, the tech comes with some enormous and hard-to-overlook security concerns. In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper simply titled “Agents of Chaos,” an international team of researchers from Harvard, MIT and beyond red-teamed — meaning they simulated adversarial attacks to test cybersecurity measures — the open-source software in a series of experiments.

    • The Infrastructure Mindset ☛ Prompt Engineering Is Not. Engineering, That Is.

      Before we can argue that prompt engineering isn’t engineering, we need to establish what engineering actually is. Not what we feel it should be – what the professional and accreditation bodies that govern the discipline say it is.

      The definitions converge. ABET, IEEE, and the National Society of Professional Engineers all describe engineering through five recurring themes[1] – not a single canonical taxonomy, but a consistent pattern across independent definitions: [...]

    • C4ISRNET ☛ The military’s fabled ‘human in the loop’ for AI is dangerously misleading

      Recently it was reported that Amazon convened an internal “deep dive” after a string of outages disrupted its retail site, apparently caused by AI assisted coding tools. The meeting followed several highly visible failures and a growing recognition inside the company that safeguards around generative AI in production systems are inadequate.

  • Social Control Media

    • India Times ☛ Digital addiction claims 20,000 children's lives a year, says TMC's Derek O'Brien; urges govt action

      Raising the matter during Zero Hour in the Upper House, O'Brien said studies indicate that children and youth are spending up to eight hours a day on screens and mobile phones -- amounting to more than 100 days every year.

    • India Times ☛ In wake of US social media verdicts, look at what limits other countries have imposed for kids

      On Wednesday, a Los Angeles jury found both Meta and YouTube liable for harms to children using their services. A day earlier in New Mexico, a jury determined that Meta knowingly harmed children's mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

    • Bhaskar English ☛ US Court: Social Media Addiction for Youth

      Here's why this victory is historic

    • Harvard University ☛ Social media firms lost 2 bellwether cases, but future remains unclear

      In this edited conversation, I. Glenn Cohen, the deputy dean and James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and faculty director at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics, discusses the verdicts and what they mean for social media’s future.

    • Pete Brown ☛ The Facebook verdict is not about Section 230

      No, sorry—this comparison is just wrong.

      I don’t mean to pick on Broderick, because I have been seeing a bunch of these “But this will kill Section 230!” reactions from Very Online People this week, but this is a perfect example.

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ Historic ruling against Meta and YouTube

      A landmark decision. On Wednesday, Meta and YouTube were found guilty of negligence for knowingly designing their products to be addictive, to the detriment of the mental health of younger users. The parent company of Facebook and Instagram was ordered to pay $4.2 million in damages to the plaintiff, a young woman now aged 20. Google’s subsidiary must pay $1.8 million. Both companies are expected to appeal.

      Beyond these relatively modest sums, the ruling could prove significant for the precedent it sets. It may open the door to similar convictions in the thousands of cases currently pending across the US, while encouraging new lawsuits against social media platforms. It also weakens the position of these tech giants ahead of a legal battle this summer with several US states determined to force sweeping changes to how their apps operate.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Why Knight Foundation Invested in Bluesky

      What’s most exciting to me is that Knight cares about the open social web at all. I think it’s vying for the most important technical development for newsrooms: the most promising way for them to build first-party connections with their audiences, subscribers, and communities. Most of the newsrooms themselves don’t seem to care all that much, to be frank, but it’s good to see that one of the most important support organizations is paying attention. Hopefully that can be a signal for others to tune in.

    • New Statesman ☛ Parents must also take responsibility for online safety

      I am no apologist for Meta or Google (nor Snap and TikTok, which settled with Kaley before the case went to court). These companies undoubtedly could and should do more to keep children safe online, whether through far more robust age verification systems or by disabling certain features. The Los Angeles court ruled the companies “negligent”. Features like “infinite” scrolling and autoplay were designed to “hook” young children, the jury agreed, and did not adequately warn them of the dangers. Only a day earlier, a court in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375m. It found serious fault with the tech giant over the safety of its platforms, saying that it exposed children to sexually explicit material. This is both abhorrent and deeply worrying to me as a parent.

      But much of the discussion about social media harm seems to centre on the software – the apps and the content within them – rather than the hardware necessary to view them: the smartphones, the tablets, the (now rather old-school) iPod Touches. Parents have some responsibility here, too. The picture is more complicated, more nuanced, than some campaigners portray.

    • Spectator AU ☛ Behind the Manosphere: the vacuum we won’t fill

      The recent Louis Theroux documentary titled Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere has further exposed these sides of the internet. While what is often referred to as the manosphere is made up of many subcultures such as incels (involuntary celibates), pickup artists, and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), Theroux focused on four rather unlikeable characters who sell not just a lifestyle of material success, but also misogynistic ideologies.

      As the world consumes the Netflix documentary, the response has been one of horror. Google it, and you’ll find the words ‘scared’, ‘chilling’, and ‘disturbing’.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 'Looksmaxxing' — the manosphere beauty cult

      Spawned from the misogynistic, MAGA-aligned manosphere, looksmaxxers are often racist, hence "whitemaxxing" to change your skin color.

      Clavicular was seen with Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes and manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, who has been charged with sexual crimes, among other things, at a Miami nightclub in January, singing along to the Ye (formerly Kanye West) song "Heil Hitler."

      The extremist scene is documented by journalist Louis Theroux in his new Netflix documentary, "Inside the Manosphere," which dives into the world of toxic "ultra-masculine" influencers.

    • teleSUR ☛ Meta, Google Convicted for Addictive Platforms

      The legal process brought to light crucial internal documents from 2013 to 2022, revealing Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg and several employees explicitly acknowledging that increasing daily usage time was a primary corporate goal. These revelations exposed a deliberate strategy to keep adolescent users engaged, directly impacting their well-being.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Social-Media-Addiction Lawyer on Landmark Trial Win, What's Next

      Rolling Stone spoke with one of the plaintiff’s trial attorneys, Emily Jeffcott from the Morgan & Morgan law firm, about the huge win. It’s the first such personal-injury case to reach trial, amid thousands of cases that have been consolidated in California. The 20-year-old plaintiff, identified in court documents as K.G.M., alleged that excessive use of Instagram and YouTube as a child intensified her mental-health issues. The jury deliberated for nine days before reaching their decision, awarding K.G.M. $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $3 million in punitive damages to the plaintiff. (Meta and Google have said they will appeal.)

      Jeffcott is one of the lead lawyers on an upcoming lawsuit against social media companies, and she reveals the next case will focus on addiction as well, and the potential harm caused by lack of sleep for minors who use their phones all hours of the night. She also talks about how this bellwether trial finding fault with social media companies could impact legislation, and change the way kids use these platforms in the future.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Jury says Meta knowingly harmed children for profit, awarding landmark verdict

      The jury agreed with allegations that Meta made false or misleading statements and also agreed that Meta engaged in “unconscionable” trade practices that unfairly took advantage of the vulnerabilities of and inexperience of children.

    • JURIST ☛ Meta and YouTube found liable for designing harmful and addictive products

      A Los Angeles jury found Wednesday that Meta and Youtube are liable for negligence in having knowingly designed addictive and harmful products. The platforms were found to have deliberately targeted children, which led to significant harm against the plaintiff. The judge awarded $3 million in damages for the plaintiff, and additional punitive damages to be decided at a later date. Snapchat and TikTok were also named in the lawsuit but settled out of court in December.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ YouTube, Meta lose landmark social media addiction case

      The companies must pay a combined $6 million in damages after being accused of harming kids and teens with platforms as addictive as cigarettes and failing to warn them about those dangers.

      The verdict, The New York Times noted, gives credence to a legal theory that social media sites can cause personal injury, and it may factor into other active cases.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Fortra LLC ☛ World Leaks Data Extortion: What You Need to Know

      Well, you can think of it like that if you want - but traditional ransomware attacks involve two things: stealing and encrypting your data, followed by demands for payments to be made to prevent the publication of the stolen information.

      World Leaks, however, focuses exclusively on the theft and threat to expose sensitive data - without the use of encryption. It appears that the group has decided that pure extortion is more profitable (and less risky) than deploying traditional file-encrypting ransomware.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • El País ☛ This is how the illegal market for buying and selling personal data on Telegram works

      It isn’t just a hunch. A study examined how the illicit data market operates via Telegram in Latin America, and the findings are disturbing. In at least 27 active groups on this platform in Brazil, Peru, and Argentina, a 24-hour marketplace for buying and selling sensitive personal data was identified. What’s most alarming is that many of the buyers use this data as a weapon against women and children. In short, it’s a digital black market that contributes to gender-based violence.

    • EFF ☛ Traffic Violation! License Plate Reader Mission Creep Is Already Here

      If you’re thinking that this sounds outside of the scope of what ALPRs are supposed to do, you’re right. In November 2025, Flock Safety, the maker of the ALPR in question, wrote a post about how they definitely are in compliance with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In this post, which highlighted what ALPRs are and what they are not, the company writes: “What it is not: Flock ALPR does not perform facial recognition, does not store biometrics, cannot be queried to find people, and is not used to enforce traffic violations.” (emphasis added)

    • Doc Searls ☛ If privacy matters to you, this is a required assignment

      I’m kinda proud of the stars we’ve been bringing to our salon series here at Indiana University since 2021. And there are none I’m more excited to welcome than Helen Nissenbaum, who will be here on Tuesday to speak both in person and on Zoom. The title of her talk is “Why Obfuscation is (still) Needed (more than ever).”

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Online porn sites putting kids' safety at risk, EU says

      Social media platform Snapchat and four adult websites put kids in danger by not enforcing age-limits to access content, according to the European Commission. An EU age-verification app is set to launch in 2027.

    • CBC ☛ EU charges porn sites with breaching tech safety rules, could face fines

      Adult content platforms Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX and XVideos have been charged with breaching European Union rules by letting children access pornographic content on their ‌sites, EU regulators said on Thursday, which could lead to hefty fines.

      The charges follow a 10-month-long investigation under the bloc's Digital Services Act, which ​requires large online platforms to do more ​to tackle illegal and harmful content.

    • Court House News ☛ Epstein sexual assault survivors file class action to stop spread of personal information | Courthouse News Service

      “Even after the government acknowledged the disclosure violated the rights of the survivors and withdrew the information, online entities like Google continuously republish it, refusing victim’s pleas to take it down,” the plaintiffs said in the complaint. “Survivors now face renewed trauma. Strangers call them, email them, threaten their physical safety, and accuse them of conspiring with Epstein when they are, in reality, Epstein’s victims.”

  • Confidentiality

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Iran-linked hackers breach personal email account of FBI Director Kash Patel

      “Instead of targeting heavily defended FBI systems, attackers are taking the easy route by exploiting personal email systems that usually have weaker protection,” said Eric Stride, chief security officer of cybersecurity services company Huntress Inc. “Even when the data isn’t classified, the accumulation of stolen unclassified information, even from a personal account, can yield or imply sensitive details. These are the kinds of attacks that AI can accelerate.”

    • Ken Klippenstein ☛ FBI Director Kash Patel's Emails Hacked by Iran

      There’s a joke among cybersecurity geeks that they changed their password to “incorrect” so whenever they forget it, the computer reminds them: “Your password is incorrect.” Evidently FBI Director Kash Patel did something similar because the Iranians managed to hack his personal email.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-17 [Older] Vatican declares partial mistrial in cardinal's fraud case

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-17 [Older] Northern Ireland's Gerry Adams tells court he wasn't in IRA

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-17 [Older] Nigeria: At least 23 killed in Maiduguri 'suicide' attacks

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Austria plans to ban social media for under-14s

    Alexander Pröll, a digitalization official in Chancellor Christian Stocker's office, said "technically modern methods" will be used to verify users' ages while respecting privacy. The details of the technical implementation are not yet finalized.

    Babler emphasized that there will not be a list of banned platforms. Instead, the age restriction will generally apply to platforms that rely on addictive algorithms, generate profits and can harm children.

    The Austrian government also plans to introduce a new school subject to strengthen media literacy among young people.

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ At least 22 'No Kings' protests scheduled across Alabama Saturday

    The protests are targeted toward President Donald Trump and his concentration of power in the executive branch.

    According to the No Kings website, this round of demonstrations are in response to the recent immigration crackdown; voter disenfranchisement; the current war in Iran; increased cost of living prices and the defunding of education, health care and environmental protections in the country.

  • Nebraska Examiner ☛ Artists blast Trump attacks on First Amendment ahead of another No Kings protest

    More than a dozen activist performers and creators rallied for Artists United for Our Freedoms, an event organized by the advocacy group Committee for the First Amendment.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ L.A. braces for 'No Kings' demonstrations, installs barriers to the 101 Freeway

    Overnight installation of metal swing gates on downtown L.A. freeway ramps marks latest precaution ahead of Saturday’s “No Kings” demonstrations planned across Southern California.

    Forty-one rallies are scheduled to take place countywide, with turnout potentially rivaling previous protests that drew up to 30,000 participants to downtown L.A.

  • Arkansas Advocate ☛ Third round of 'No Kings' protests expected Saturday throughout Arkansas | Arkansas Advocate

    The People’s Protests and Marches of AR is hosting the Little Rock rally, which will start at noon with a march across the Broadway Bridge into North Little Rock and continue until 3 p.m. with a “Community Connect Fair” and several speakers.

    Indivisible LRCA, the League of Women Voters of Arkansas and 50501 Arkansas are also hosting the Little Rock event, according to social media.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Ukrainian drones hit all three Baltic States − did Russia redirect them?

    Three Baltic states recorded drone incursions within roughly 48 hours this week, as Ukrainian strike drones targeting Russian Baltic port infrastructure were apparently diverted into NATO territory by Russian electronic warfare.

  • The Nation ☛ Trump’s TV-Warped Brain Is Putting the World in Danger

    In other words, even when confronted with evidence that his personal war briefings are bowdlerized agitprop, Trump’s solution is not to change his briefings but to change the reporting—to the point of seconding his lickspittle FCC commissioner Brandan Carr’s threat to withdraw broadcasting licenses from networks that don’t produce news that meets the White House’s jingoistic standards. In this strongman version of audience reception theory, Trump, as the most powerful TV viewer alive, naturally should dictate the content and coverage priorities for the entire mediasphere.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Donald Trump Is Unpopular. That Only Matters in a Democracy.

    US democracy has been degrading for years. Donald Trump has the motive, the disposition, and the political and legal infrastructure to simply circumvent it, especially with such low approval ratings and midterm elections around the corner.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ China's rifle-toting robot dogs operate like swarm combat platform

    China’s multiple robot dogs recently operated as one using shared “brain”, according to a report. Operating like drone swarms, these robots conducted complex tasks during simulated urban clearing operation.

  • Reach Publishing ☛ Indonesia Begins Under 16 Social Media Ban

    Indonesia has said that the implementation of the restrictions would be carried out gradually, until all platforms comply with the measure.In a press briefing on Friday night, Indonesia’s Communication and Digital Affairs Minister Meutya Hafid said X, formerly known as Twitter, has committed to start identifying and deactivating accounts owned by minors from Mar 28.X has announced that it would enforce a minimum user age of 16 in Indonesia. They have published this on their help centre,” said Meutya, as reported by news outlet Jakarta Globe.

  • Reuters ☛ Indonesia's social media curbs for under 16s take set to start, few know how they work

    Indonesia's social media curbs, which the government says are intended to reduce the risk of cyberbullying and addiction, follow a ban in Australia last year over concerns ​about social media's potential harms to young people's mental health. In the United States, where social media companies face thousands of lawsuits over their platform ⁠designs, a court on Thursday found Meta (META.O), opens new tab and Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab YouTube created addictive products that caused harm to young people. Indonesia has also designated platforms including X, Meta's Facebook and Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, owned ​by China's ByteDance, as high-risk.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Worst and the Dumbest

    There was a famous book in the Vietnam years about how all that went wrong, about how all of the sort of brains trust around LBJ led us into that disaster, and it was called “The Best and the Brightest.” In this case, it’s obvious: Everybody knows that we’ve got the worst and the dumbest. So we knew that the thinking about strategy was going to be nil, that it was going to be all very ill-conceived.

  • El País ☛ What to know about the ‘No Kings’ protests on March 28

    The No Kings movement is gearing up for a new national day of protests on March 28, with more than 3,000 events scheduled across the United States and the expectation of bringing together millions of people in what could become one of the largest days of political mobilization in the country’s history.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Office Hours: Will You Protest Tomorrow?

    Tomorrow, across America, we have another opportunity to make our opposition to the Trump regime visible, loud, and clear. It will be the third No Kings Day protest. For information on the march nearest to you, click here.

  • The Georgia Recorder ☛ As No Kings protests grow, a bigger question looms: What comes next?

    Thousands of protests are scheduled across the United States on Saturday as part of the “No Kings” movement opposing President Donald Trump’s administration.

    Organizers expect millions of people to turn out for this third round of No Kings demonstrations, with more than 3,000 local-level events mapped on the movement’s official website.

  • RFERL ☛ Ukrainian Strikes Cause 'Most Serious Threat' To Russian Oil Exports Since War Began

    Leningrad regional Governor Aleksandr Drozdenko has kept up a steady commentary on the attacks on his Telegram channel, documenting fires over the first two days and "damage in the industrial area" of the Kirishi district in the latest incident.

  • Robert Reich ☛ What Americans Can Learn From Other Nonviolent Civil Activism Movements

    John Shattuck: The authoritarian, often referred to as a “king,” is the ideal role from the point of view of the king, but certainly not from the point of view of the people. Authoritarian characteristics include centralized unlimited power, the opposite of democracy; no accountability and no rule of law; no independent courts; no checks and balances on how the king operates; rule by fear and coercion, and when necessary, in order to carry out the king’s orders, rule by by force. There are no individual rights or civil liberties except those the king decides to allow those who are loyal to him to have, at least until he decides to take them away.

    That’s a nutshell informal description of an authoritarian regime. A special threat today is that an authoritarian can emerge from a democratic election, and, indeed, a democratic election can be used to turn a weak democracy into an authoritarian regime. But when this happens, it opens the door to challenge the authoritarian in a subsequent election if civic activism can defend the electoral process by which the authoritarian was elected.

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ Beyond the presidency: why parliamentary democracies remain more adaptable

    As democratic institutions face mounting strain across the globe, it is worth asking whether some constitutional designs weather political turbulence better than others. In a previous piece for this publication, I examined how Central and Western Europe’s parliamentary systems, despite facing illiberal pressures, contain structural features that offer greater resilience than the presidential republics of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Recent developments in the United States, Latin America, and even within the European neighbourhood itself, suggest this argument deserves broader consideration.

    The question is not whether parliamentary systems guarantee good governance; they clearly do not. Rather, it is whether they make bad governance easier to undo. In an era of rising populism, institutional erosion, and executive overreach, that distinction may prove decisive.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Bank of America settles Epstein case for $72.5 million

    A lawsuit claimed the bank ignored red flags tied to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking operations. The bank denied wrongdoing but agreed to settle.

• Environment

  • The Nation ☛ Are Plastics Poisoning Us?

    Swan helps the couples limit their exposure to plastics by having them buy non-synthetic clothes—textiles, she says, are the largest source of microplastics in the environment—ditching cleaning and personal care products sold in plastic containers, and the like. Such detoxing improves sperm counts and other pregnancy-related variables, and some of the couples do become parents, though Swan is careful to acknowledge that this was “not a quote unquote scientific study,” since it lacked a control group and robust sample size.

  • Western Water ☛ Data center boom raises water, power questions

    Data centers, which support everything from cloud storage to artificial intelligence systems, require large amounts of electricity to operate and significant volumes of water to keep equipment cool. According to estimates cited in the legislation, a single 100-megawatt data center can use about as much water as 2,600 households. Some newer facilities are planned at more than ten times that size, increasing both energy and water demand in the areas where they are built.

    The number of facilities is also rising quickly. There are roughly 4,000 active data centers across the country, with about 3,000 more either planned or already under constructionOpens in a new tab.. This expansion is being driven in part by the growing use of artificial intelligence, which requires large-scale computing power.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-16 [Older] Court rejects move to indict Valencia leader over flood response

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-16 [Older] Germany news: Strike to block all flights at Berlin airport

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-16 [Older] Cuba hit by island-wide blackout amid Cheeto Mussolini oil blockade

    • CBC ☛ The energy crisis has only just begun

      Energy shipments stopped in their tracks on Feb. 28 when the war began and Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz. But plenty of ships made it out to sea in those final days before the conflict began. The last of them should arrive in Japanese and Korean ports sometime over the next 8-10 days.

      After that, there's nothing coming.

    • India Times ☛ Crusoe to build 900-megawatt AI data center for Microsoft in Texas

      Billions of dollars are being spent on data centers to meet the massive computing ‌requirements for ⁠GenAI. Microsoft ⁠alone reported $37.5 billion in capital expenditure for the quarter ended December 31, ​with about two-thirds going toward computing chips for services like Copilot and ChatGPT.

      Located next to Crusoe's existing AI facilities in Abilene, Texas, the new campus will bring the site's total projected capacity ​to 2.1 gigawatts. On average, one ⁠gigawatt is enough ‌to power 750,000 homes.

    • The Register UK ☛ Senators want datacenters to come clean on power consumption

      The letter references the Ratepayer Protection Pledge that President Trump urged the biggest AI and cloud companies to sign earlier this month. The agreement intends to shield American consumers in the event that bills rise due to AI's growing energy appetite. However, as The Register noted at the time, there is no enforcement mechanism.

      Senators Warren and Hawley say both Congress and the public currently lack the data needed to hold these companies to this voluntary pledge. Standardized reporting is essential to delivering the oversight necessary to combat rising utility costs.

    • Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging: This hole in our wall

      So, I called a gas engineer (accidentally called the guy who services our boiler and I just didn't realise. I spend as little time thinking about these things as possible), who came round and said that we needed the gas company to come and have a look. He called them for me because I clearly cannot be trusted, and they dropped everything to sprint over and have a look. It was quite impressive actually. In 45 minutes we had a very straight-laced fellow with his apprentice, declaring this and that emergency, talking about evacuation (which is currently physically impossible - more on that another day), and all sorts of severe things. In a further 60 minutes, we had another team here to dig up some slabs, cut off our gas, and make plans to relocate our gas meter outside where it ruddy well should be.

• Finance

  • The Register UK ☛ Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

    Time and again, I see people begging for companies with deep pockets to fund open source projects. I mean, after all, they've made billions from this code. You'd think they could support the code's creators and maintainers. It would be only fair, right?

    Screw fair. Screw asking for dimes. You can't live off one-off charity donations. Trust me, I've been on the boards of several small nonprofits. Dpending on what people put in a tip jar is no way to fund anything of value.

    So you'll excuse me if I'm not blown away by the fact that Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others – total market cap in the ballpark of $7.7 trillion – have donated $12.5 million in grants to the Linux Foundation, OpenSSF, and Alpha‑Omega. If you make $100,000 a year, that's about 16 cents. Color me unimpressed.

  • The industry is in a 'really horrible place,' say Brenda and John Romero

    "I feel like the industry's in a really horrible place," Romero Games studio CEO Brenda Romero said.

    The conversation took place ahead of Game Republic's Dark and Doomy event last week. Speaking to GamesIndustry.Biz alongside Romero Games game director and id Software co-founder John Romero, Brenda reminisced about the US video game crash of 1983, which was a large-scale recession that took place until 1985.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Futurism ☛ With the Metaverse Canceled and Zuckerberg Training AI to Run the Company, Meta Is Slashing Its Headcount

    Intermittent layoffs are the norm at Meta, but it’s now carrying them out as its shift towards building AI — and using it to attempt to speed up its own workforce — becomes more overt than ever.

  • Wired ☛ Anthropic Supply-Chain-Risk Designation Halted by Judge

    A judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s designation, clearing the way for Anthropic to keep doing business without the label starting next week.

  • Mike Brock ☛ A Note to My Readers: What Happened After

    What I am saying: there is a paid operation, and today it targeted me.

    What I suspect, based on the patterns I observed and the context in which this kind of operation typically functions: this is not purely domestic. My analytical judgment — and I offer it as judgment, not yet as documented fact — is that what I encountered today has the signatures of influence operations with Chinese and Russian origins, recruiting economically vulnerable Americans as their ground-level operators. These governments have documented histories of exactly this playbook: find people who already hate the system, pay them modest sums, point them at targets.

  • The Register UK ☛ US cloud giants not invited to Euro digital dosh project

    Europe is taking a small step toward breaking its reliance on US Big Tech by hiring only cloud operators headquartered in the EU to work on the backbone of the digital euro project.

    French businesses OVHcloud and Scaleway are providing a sovereign European cloud infrastructure to support the digital currency, a European Central Bank scheme to enable electronic payments in shops, online, and person-to-person.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • [Repeat] Citizen Lab ☛ Netanyahu Posts ‘Proof of Life’ Video: AI Sows Doubts About What’s Real

      Recently, rumours of the Israeli Prime Minister’s death proliferated on social media. “Benjamin Netanyahu having to prove that he’s alive and that his image is not AI-generated shows that the risk cuts both ways,” Fittarelli says.

    • Futurism ☛ Those Viral Posts About the Brave Kidnapped Dogs Escaping and Finding Their Homes Together Are Fake, You Gullible Buffoons

      X’s AI blundering chatbot Grok eagerly fed into the misinformation when asked if the viral story was true, insisting to users that the dogs were “stolen for the dog meat trade” and walked ten miles “home together over two days.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Michigan Advance ☛ No Kings organizers raise concerns about fencing outside Schoolcraft College in Livonia

    The protest is planned outside Schoolcraft College, a public community college in Livonia, on Haggerty Road. It is one of two No Kings protests in Livonia Saturday. The other is at the Livonia Civic Center Library from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.. As for the Schoolcraft protest, which is from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Carol Poenisch, a No Kings Coalition Host in the area, said that event organizers have coordinated with the college’s public safety team to use the parking lot and bathrooms, and that the public safety team will be a presence at the event.

    However, photos obtained by the Michigan Advance now show a large fenced-off area on the east side of Haggerty Road — the same side of the road where protesters will be able to park. Poenisch noted that this will make the event more dangerous, writing in an email, “With this restriction, people are now forced to cross Haggerty where there is no crosswalk and cars are going 50 mph.”

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Man beaten by Adam Kadyrov for burning Quran ‘disappears’ during prison transfer

    There has been no information about Zhuravel’s whereabouts since 24 December 2025, his lawyer Andrei Sabinin said in an appeal to a member of the Russian Presidential Council for Human Rights, Eva Mekacheva.

    In the appeal, published by Merkacheva on her Telegram channel, it is stated that Zhuravel was transferred from Moscow in the final days of December. On 24 December, his relatives received a letter sent from Ulyanovsk, after which all contact with him ceased.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Vigil group feared nat. sec law could be used for 'political suppression': activist

    The discussions, held before the June 4 vigil that year, addressed “concerns that the national security law would be used as a tool for political suppression,” Chow told prosecutor Ivan Cheung.

    “It could be used to suppress dissident voices, which is clearly what we were,” she said.

  • Techdirt ☛ Blocking The Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase The Web’s Historical Record

    Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper.

    That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—the world’s largest digital library—has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s. The Archive’s mission is to preserve the web and make it accessible to the public. To that end, the organization operates the Wayback Machine, which now contains more than one trillion archived web pages and is used daily by journalists, researchers, and courts.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Techdirt ☛ CBS News Under Bari Weiss Sees Worst Ratings In Quarter Century

    As we noted at the time, that was all bullshit code for turning CBS into yet another outlet that panders to global autocrats, normalizes far right wing extremism, coddles corporate power, and generally shits all over progressive societal reforms.

    Weiss wasn’t a journalist, had no serious journalism experience, isn’t good at journalism, and wasn’t hired to do journalism. She was hired specifically to do ratings-grabbing, viral, right wing friendly agitprop which the Ellisons mistakenly seemed to think there was a massive market for. But unfortunately for Weiss, she’s not good at that either.

    And it’s just observationally true that nobody actually wants what CBS’ new ownership is selling.

  • Carole Cadwalladr ☛ The broligarchy's war on journalism

    This week, the BBC announced the appointment of a new director general. An ex-Google middle manager called Matt Brittin who will lead the publicly-owned corporation at a time when its entire existence is under threat. The next years are crucial: Nigel Farage, whose far-right Reform party is surging in the polls, hasn’t disguised his Trumpian desire to smash it to pieces.

    I’ve written about Brittin in the Nerve this week because I believe it’s a disastrous appointment for the BBC and therefore us all. It’s a choice rooted in our ongoing naivity about Silicon Valley technology firms including Google that’s still seen as a dynamic start-up not a rapacious AI company that’s actively trying to destroy journalism.

  • BoingBoing ☛ CBS News ratings reportedly its lowest on record

    After the son of Trumpy billionaire Larry Ellison bought Paramount, its CBS News division was taken over by Bari Weiss, a columnist with little newsroom experience. If she's done her duty as a political commissar, program quality is evaporating and so is the audience. Oliver Darcy reports on ratings "collapsing to historic lows and accelerating the network's decline." [Status via Lawyers, Guns and Money]

  • Project Censored ☛ Silencing Student Reporters Threatens Public's Right to Know

    I faced a decision last October that would dramatically change my professional and personal life. I could enforce a directive from Indiana University administrators to censor the Indiana Daily Student, or stand by my students’ right to editorial independence. What the administrators wanted was clear. The content of the printed version of the IDS—the newspaper seen on stands across campus—was to contain only special editions or promotional content. As I saw it, this would effectively silence student journalists, preventing them from reporting on news that mattered.

    I refused this order and, as a result, was fired from my role as Director of Student Media, a position I had held since July 2018. The very next day, the University announced the suspension of all print editions of the student newspaper. While the University eventually rolled back the decision and allowed the paper to begin printing again, I remained fired.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Solicitor cleared of misconduct over “without prejudice” litigation threat

    The case arose from a defamation dispute. The Respondent’s client had previously brought libel proceedings against a journalist who had published articles linking the client to a corporate scandal. Those proceedings were settled by consent order.

  • Futurism ☛ Protestors Outside Anthropic Warn of AI That Keeps Improving Itself

    “The reason we are pausing AI is because we believe that building AI that can automate AI research, and that can self improve, could be a danger to the human race, especially human extinction,” Michaël Trazzi, an organizer with Stop the AI Race, told local reporters. “It’s not only me and other researchers saying this, it’s the lab CEOs themselves that [say] the risk is real.”

  • Vox ☛ The sneaky way Trump’s lawyers — and Trump’s judges — are supercharging ICE

    The overwhelming majority of judges have ruled that immigrants arrested within the interior of the United States are not subject to mandatory detention. This is also how every presidential administration prior to the second Trump administration — including Trump’s first administration — read federal immigration law after the relevant provisions were enacted in 1996. Again, federal law only calls for mandatory detention when an immigrant is “seeking admission” to the US. (I explained Trump’s contrary interpretation of the law, and why it is incorrect, here.)

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Report on the Arrest of Christian Convert Mohammad Nikbakht

    The treatment of Christian converts in Iran takes place despite Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which affirm that every person has the right to freedom of religion, including the freedom to change their religion and to manifest it individually or collectively, in public or in private.

  • The Register UK ☛ Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester find

    The second reason is that employee fears are stunting adoption. While few jobs were lost to AI in 2025 and future job losses are not expected to constitute a job apocalypse, worker anxiety regarding this is pervasive, Forrester says.

    There could be a good reason for this: public statements by CEOs saying that axing jobs is exactly what they want to do.

  • Andy Bell ☛ Applying accessibility fixes with stealth for the greater good

    At some point I got very invested in accessibility, because it was the missing link for me in my profession. Suddenly, the things I built not only looked good, but they also worked as expected when using a keyboard and a screen reader. Slowly, practicing web development with accessibility in mind became the new normal for me. Unfortunately though, accessibility is still far from normal in the tech industry.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ FCC Votes to Speed Retirement of Copper Lines

    Through a Report and Order (R&O), the FCC takes actions to bring the regulatory environment in line with today’s communications marketplace, while retaining or adopting safeguards to protect public safety and ensure continuity of 911 services. This includes: [...]

  • Anil Dash ☛ Endgame for the Open Web

    Now, the centibillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what's still open, and likely won't rest until they've either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time.

    Right now, too many of the players in the open ecosystem are still carrying on with business as usual, even though those tactics have been failing to stop big tech for years. I don't say this lightly: it looks to me like 2026 is the year that decides whether the open web as we know it will survive at all, and we have to fight like the threat is existential. Because it is.

  • Branur Leach ☛ The Second Wave of the API-first Economy — brandur.org

    In the near future, all platforms would be API-first, providing full programmatic access and opening a new wave of interoperability across the web that’d let any service talk to any other service and massively accelerate the scope and reach of the internet. APIs would help expand everything from freedom to communication to commerce. An overwhelming force for good in the world.

    API winter

    Of course, it didn’t last. The programmable web went through a phase of expansion, reached its maximum extent, and began to contract.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• IP Kat ☛ 2026-03-21 [Older] The divergent approaches to harvested material in the UK Nadorcott decision and the UPOV Expert Study

• Techdirt ☛ Turns Out That Advertisers Not Wanting To Fund Neo-Nazi-Adjacent Content Isn’t An Antitrust Violation

  When X Corp filed this case back in August of 2024, we walked through in great detail why the legal theory was fundamentally broken. Not broken in a “they pleaded it badly” kind of way, but broken in a “this theory does not describe an antitrust violation no matter how many drugs you’re taking or how convinced you are that the world owes you advertising dollars” kind of way. Judge Jane Boyle of the Northern District of Texas has now agreed, and the key section of her ruling is worth reading in full, because it says what we said at the outset: X has not suffered antitrust injury.

  The court laid out the standard, quoting the Fifth Circuit, channeling the Supreme Court, on what counts as an antitrust injury: [...]

• Macworld ☛ The reason Apple won't let this developer update their app is insane

  With the release of macOS Tahoe last September, Apple introduced a major change: It removed Launchpad and replaced it with the Apps app. Many of us mourned the loss (and many of you laughed at us, based on the feedback I got from this article) and turned to third-party, Launchpad-like solutions to fill the void. However, there’s a sign from Apple that those third-party apps could be at risk, too.

• Semafor Inc ☛ US antitrust officials deny improper lobbying in Live Nation case

  Top US antitrust officials rejected allegations of improper lobbying in merger reviews while acknowledging that they aren’t independent of the White House.

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-03-21 [Older] IP Australia opens consultation for reforms – have your say! [Ed: Good chance to tell them to quit granting software patents]

• Copyrights

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-03-21 [Older] You wouldn’t steal a car or clone Claude - or is model distillation just healthy competition? [Ed: Claude is plagiarism machine]

  • Digital Music News ☛ Anna's Archive Faces $322M Damages Push in Labels' Lawsuit

    In addition to emphasizing the defendant’s “flagrant and indisputable” violation of the injunction, the labels described their sought damages as “extremely conservative.” And the label litigants further spelled out that “if needed,” they could identify a multitude of their works in the 86 million tracks that Anna’s Archive allegedly scraped from Spotify. Interestingly, then, Spotify is looking to obtain the remaining $300 million for the defendant’s alleged circumvention of its anti-piracy “technological measures” in violation of the DMCA – calculated here at $2,500 for each of the “120,000 downloaded released music files.”

  • The New Stack ☛ GitHub will train AI models on your Copilot data — and share it with Microsoft

    The update begins April 24 and applies to all Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users, but you can opt out. As GitHub explained in an email sent on Wednesday to its Copilot users, to opt out: “Go to GitHub Account Settings; select Copilot; choose whether to allow your data to be used for AI model training.”

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Spotify and Labels Seek $322 Million Default Judgment Against Anna’s Archive

    Spotify and several major record labels, including UMG, Sony, and Warner, seek a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna's Archive. They argue that the shadow library failed to appear in court and ignored the preliminary injunction by releasing millions of tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent.