Leftovers

• The Newsprint ☛ The Sunday Edition — 04.05.26

  Diving into the resurrection story yields some stunning wisdom, and it’s the story that gives something new each year. Our pastor spoke at length today about “tetelestai”, the Greek word for “It is finished”. I don’t normally (ever, honestly) put in AI-generated content here at The Newsprint, but I figured I would include the following Gemini results when I asked Gemini “What does tetelestai mean?” The results: [...]

• Jarrod Blundy ☛ The difference between a company that makes money and a company that makes something worth caring about

  David Sparks blogs that companies whose leaders actually give a damn about the products are the ones worth watching: [...]

• David Sparks ☛ The Paint at 7AM - MacSparky

  You can spot it pretty easily. When a CEO talks about their company, do they talk about the product or the business? Walt talked about the park. Steve talked about the iPhone. Jensen talks about the chip. The ones who love the product can’t help themselves. The ones who don’t talk about market share and strategic initiatives.

  There’s a difference between a company that makes money and a company that makes something worth caring about. I believe it starts with whether the person at the top loves what they’re building. As a thing they poured themselves into, not a line on a balance sheet.

• Chi Señires ☛ I use em-dashes a lot and I don’t want to stop using it.

  Today as well, I saw this post from Jeffrey Zeldman also talking about the em-dash and commenting about the sentiment on whether to abandon usage of it altogether in human writing.

• Uusi kielemme ☛ Suomen kielen päivä - Hyvää Agricolan päivää! 9.4. - Uusi kielemme

  In Agricola’s time, Finnish was just a language spoken by the common people in the countryside. There wasn’t any formal version of Finnish: there were just local dialects. Agricola used these dialects to translate his books, picking up words from what people around him used.

• Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Testing The Wave-Particle Duality With Gamma Rays

    For these experiments, he used a Radiacode 110 X-ray and gamma ray detector, which uses a photodetector to detect radiation’s passage through a scintillation crystal. By summing the energy contained in the light emitted by one ray, it can measure the ray’s energy and, over time, create an energy spectrum. [Huygens Optics] used the americium capsule from an old smoke detector as a radiation source, and cast a lead enclosure to shield the Radiacode from most background radiation, with a small opening for measurements.

  • Alisa Sireneva ☛ Simplest hash functions

    What came to your mind when you read “hash functions” in the title?

    If you’re pragmatic, you probably remembered SHA-256 or MD5. Those are cryptographic hash functions, and they work fast and well for arbitrary inputs, even if they are supplied by malicious actors. Or at least they’re designed to.

    That’s the exact opposite of what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the cheapest, stupidest, most ridiculous hash functions you can get away with.

  • Jeff Huang ☛ Best Paper Awards in Computer Science

    This is a collection of best paper awards from conferences in each computer science subfield, starting from 1996. Originally, the broadest representative conference for each subfield were selected to be included. This data was entered by hand from sources found online (many of them no longer available), so please email bestpaper@jeffhuang.com if you notice any errors or omissions. The page is maintained annually by Jeff Huang.

    Caveats: Note that some conferences do not have such an award; "Distinguished paper award" and "outstanding paper award" are included but not "best student paper", "best short paper" or "best 10-year old paper"; at this point, it is unlikely that new additional conferences will be added due to the ongoing time commitment to prepare updates; only each author's first affiliation is listed due to how the data was originally stored.

• Career/Education

  • Ava ☛ 2 museums, 3 exhibitions - work culture, oceans, sex work

    Not only was the art really interesting and inspiring, but the participation options were varied and engaging. Lots of stats, options to discuss, being able to put stickers on what applies to you, rating different activities on whether they qualify as free time or labour by using red or green felt balls, using string to vote on labour strikes, adding your own thoughts on a little paper you stick on a board with questions... it's so cool when museum visitors become part of the exhibition.

• Hardware

  • CBC ☛ In the age of autocorrect, this typewriter shop owner in Hamilton wants you to write with intention

    "Using a modern word processor, my writing is a bit sloppy because I’m able to make mistakes," Marshall said, but when he writes using a typewriter knowing a mistake could mean restarting, it focuses his mind.

    "When you really have to put yourself into the work, you start writing differently," Marshall told CBC Hamilton.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ I’m a film and digital photographer. Retro digital cameras are missing half the equation. The other half? A retro lens

    Yes, a major part of that film look is actual film, with all the grain and colors that come with it. But old lenses were not as sharp as modern optics.

  • Hackaday ☛ With Affordable Storage Options Dwindling, Where To Store Our Data?

    These days our appetite for more data storage is larger than ever, with video files larger, photo resolutions higher, and project files easily zipping past a few hundred MB. At the same time our options for data storage are becoming more and more limited. For the longest time we could count on there always being a newer, roomier, faster, and cheaper form of storage to come along, but those days would seem to be over.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ America's Largest Hospital System Ready to Start Replacing Radiologists With AI, Its CEO Says

    "Only someone with zero understanding of radiology would say something so naive."

• Proprietary

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Target Warns That If Its AI Shopping Agent Makes an Expensive Mistake, You'll Have to Pay for It

      If that weren’t enough proof that Target doesn’t stand by its product, it gets more explicit: “Target does not purport to guarantee that an Agentic Commerce Agent will act exactly as you intend in all circumstances. You should review orders, account activity, and settings regularly.”

    • The Nation ☛ What Is Artificial Intelligence Anyway?

      In her new book, The AI Paradox, Dignum offers an overview of AI with particular attention to its social ramifications. Each chapter is devoted to a different paradox that serves to illuminate a specific dimension of her theme. The “agreement paradox,” for instance, focuses on the surprisingly thorny question of what AI is in the first place (“the more we explore AI, the harder it becomes to agree on its definition”), while the “solution paradox” summarizes the pitfalls inherent in the tech industry’s fondness for the technological fix (“solving problems with technology often creates more problems”).

    • New York Times ☛ The Big Bang: A.I. Has Created a Code Overload

      The company went from producing 25,000 lines of code a month to 250,000 lines. That created a backlog of one million lines of code that needed to be reviewed, said Joni Klippert, a co-founder and the chief executive of StackHawk, a security start-up that was working with the financial services firm.

      “The sheer amount of code being delivered, and the increase in vulnerabilities, is something they can’t keep up with,” she said. And as software development moved faster, that forced sales, marketing, customer support and other departments to pick up the pace, Ms. Klippert added, creating “a lot of stress.”

    • The Register UK ☛ AI slop got better, so now maintainers have more work

      If AI does more of the work but humans still have to check it, you need more reviewers. Now that AI models have gotten better at writing and evaluating code, open-source projects find themselves overwhelmed with the too-good-to-ignore output.

    • Watts Martin ☛ "How are you leveraging AI in your technical writing?"

      First and foremost, what we’re calling “AI” is not the AI of sci-fi movies. Generative pretrained transformers are statistical prediction engines; when they’re coupled with large language models, what they do is generate a statistically likely continuation of their input text. That’s it. Full stop. Now, it turns out that “that’s it” undersells how amazing that output can be. The statistically likely continuation of an input text that's a search query is a plausible answer to that query; the statistically most likely continuation of feeding a Github repository into an LLM with a command to write documentation for the code is plausible documentation.

      But plausible is not the same as correct. The bigger and more complicated the task presented to an LLM is, the likelier it is to go off the rails—maybe just a little, maybe a lot. If you don’t know what the output should look like, you may not catch this. That’s the obvious peril of “vibe coding”; a similar issue arises with “vibe documenting.” The more constrained the task you give it, the better job it’s going to do at it. Claude will probably nail “write a Python script to transform the date formats in this text file” on the first try; “write a clone of Photoshop that runs as a web app,” not so much. Likewise, “write reference descriptions for this API, including input parameters, sample output, and error conditions” will get you a better first draft than “write a complete casual developer’s guide for this database.”

    • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ The Cathedral and the Catacombs

      Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar is almost thirty years old and people are still finding new ways to extend the metaphor. Drew Breunig recently described a third mode, the Winchester Mystery House, for the sprawling codebases that agentic AI produces: rooms that lead nowhere, staircases into ceilings, a single builder with no plan. That piece got me thinking, though it shares a blind spot with every other response to Raymond I’ve read.

  • Social Control Media

    • France24 ☛ White House posts then deletes Easter video of Trump insulting Macron - Truth or Fake

      The White House briefly published — then deleted — a video from Donald Trump’s private Easter luncheon in which the US president made a series of inflammatory remarks, and repeated false claims about several public figures. These extraordinarily candid comments were likely never supposed to be heard by the public. However, the closed-door footage was downloaded by a journalist before it was removed and later circulated online.

    • Hindustan Times ☛ Reddit down in US; users report 'You broke Reddit' error

      According to DownDetector, reports of the outage began around 2:45 p.m. EDT on Monday. By 3 p.m., the site had received over 15,000 reports. Users say both the Reddit app and website are affected.

    • The BSD Cafe Journal ☛ I’m Just the Barista

      This is the text I wrote for my part of the talk “Liberating the Social Web Using *BSD“, presented together with the great Jeroen (@h3artbl33d) at EuroBSDCon 2025 in Zagreb. It’s not a transcript – it’s the base I worked from, the thoughts I organized before stepping on stage. What I actually said may have been slightly different in places, as it always is when you speak from the heart rather than read from a page. But these are the words, and the spirit is exactly the same.

    • Pete Brown ☛ Food that is made for TikTok instead of for eating

      I hate how so many recipes are now optimized for online video appeal rather than—you know—actually being good. Like, I don’t want cheese that makes for a good “cheese pull”, I want cheese that is going to taste good as part of whatever the thing is that I’m cooking.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Meduza ☛ Russia’s internet regulator says DDoS attacks hit record levels in February and March, surging after reports of Telegram ban

      Under normal conditions, the agency’s systems register an average of 350 attacks per week, about 23 of which target Roskomnadzor itself. During the peak period — February 26 through March 4 — the total number of attacks rose to 949, the Russian state news agency TASS reported, citing Roskomnadzor.

      Telecommunications companies and hosting providers were the most frequent targets, with government resources ranking third, TASS cited Roskomnadzor as saying.

    • Krebs On Security ☛ Germany Doxes “UNKN,” Head of RU Ransomware Gangs REvil, GandCrab

      An elusive hacker who went by the handle “UNKN” and ran the early Russian ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil now has a name and a face. Authorities in Germany say 31-year-old Russian Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin headed both cybercrime gangs and helped carry out at least 130 acts of computer sabotage and extortion against victims across the country between 2019 and 2021.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Spectator AU ☛ Should the ABC be privatised? A modest valuation... |

    The managing director then sat down with union delegates in a Fair Work Commission mediation and produced a revised pay offer, complete with new provisions for ‘progression through pay bandings’. Sixty per cent of staff had voted against the original deal. The unions will now ‘consult members ahead of a staff vote’. The ABC News website duly reported all of this with the same studied neutrality it brings to covering cyclones in far north Queensland – as though it were an act of God rather than an act of payroll.

    And when the picket lines went up?

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • David Pogue ☛ How I Scammed Myself on Venmo

      This was not, by the way, a situation of Venmo not being secure. (Some people think it could do better.) Venmo had tried to steer me right, with the phone-number thing, and I’d trampled past it.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Ars Technica ☛ Perplexity's "Incognito Mode" is a "sham," lawsuit says

      Perplexity’s AI search engine encourages users to go deeper with their prompts by engaging in chat sessions that a lawsuit has alleged are often shared in their entirety with Google and Meta without users’ knowledge or consent.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Submission of the Citizen Lab (Munk School of Global Aff airs & Public Policy, University of Toronto) to the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP)

      Research by the Citizen Lab on the use of spyware by state actors shows that this technology is abused by governments and results in human rights violations and serious risks to national security, democracy, and the rule of law. Spyware abuses are not limited to authoritarian regimes, but are also committed by democratic and quasi-democratic states against journalists, members of the political opposition, human rights defenders (HRDs), lawyers, and civil society.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ John Scott-Railton Shares Tips and Tools to Protect Yourself Digitally

      Senior researcher John Scott-Railton speaks with GIJN about strategies journalists can employ to improve their digital hygiene and protect themselves from targeted attacks. He recommends concrete steps like turning on protective phone and messaging app settings, enrolling in advanced protection programs, and reaching out to security helplines.

    • Security Week ☛ European Commission Confirms Data Breach Linked to Trivy Supply Chain Attack

      The European Commission (EC) has confirmed that [intruders] stole over 300GB of data from its AWS environment using an API key compromised in the Trivy supply chain attack.

    • The Verge ☛ Wisconsin governor says ‘no’ to age checks for porn

      The bill (AB 105) would’ve required sites with more than one-third of their total content deemed harmful to minors to impose a “reasonable” form of age verification, such as asking users to show their government-issued ID. More than two dozen states have already passed similar age check requirements for access to adult content, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Texas, and Virginia. As a result, Pornhub has blocked its site in these locations.

    • 404 Media ☛ Wisconsinites Can Keep Watching Porn After Governor Vetoes Age Verification Bill

      The adult advocacy group Free Speech Coalition wrote following the veto that Director of Public Policy Mike Stabile flew to Madison “to meet with legislators to discuss the legal and technological issues with the bill, including a ban on VPN traffic, and to advocate for device-based verification solutions.”

    • 404 Media ☛ Multiple Hackers Warned Anti-Porn App Quittr About Security Issue for Months

      I first wrote about Quittr’s security vulnerability in January after hearing about the app’s security problems from a different independent security researcher. At the time, I did not name the app because Quittr did not fix the issue despite reaching out to the developers about it multiple times. That security researcher found that Quittr had a misconfiguration issue in its use of the mobile development platform Google Firebase, which by default makes it easy for anyone to make themselves an “authenticated” user who can access the app’s backend storage where in many instances user data is stored.

    • Terence Eden ☛ Someone at BrowserStack is Leaking Users’ Email Address

      Like all good nerds, I generate a unique email address for every service I sign up to. This has several advantages - it allows me to see if a message is legitimately from a service, if a service is hacked the hackers can't go credential stuffing, and I instantly know who leaked my address.

  • Confidentiality

    • Filippo Valsorda ☛ A Cryptography Engineer’s Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines

      My position on the urgency of rolling out quantum-resistant cryptography has changed compared to just a few months ago. You might have heard this privately from me in the past weeks, but it’s time to signal and justify this change of mind publicly.

      There had been rumors for a while of expected and unexpected progress towards cryptographically-relevant quantum computers, but over the last week we got two public instances of it.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Robert Reich ☛ Trump has really, seriously, frighteningly lost his mind

    What about international law, which makes it a war crime to destroy civilian infrastructure? What about Trump’s repeated assurance that the United States has already “obliterated” the danger Iran poses?

    The biggest absurdity here is that Trump is now focusing his war’s endgame on Iran’s willingness to open the strait. But the strait was open before Trump attacked Iran on February 28. Iran blocked it in retaliation for that attack.

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Is Azerbaijan banning the hijab in public schools?

    Such rumours first began gaining prominence on social media on 7 March after a video was shared by RFE/RL showing the director of the Imishli District School N8, Rena Guliyeva, not allowing students wearing hijab to enter school grounds. In the video, a school administrator is heard justifying the decision on the grounds that a hijab was not part of the school dress code.

  • France24 ☛ US Supreme Court paves way to drop Capitol [insurrection] charges against ex-Trump ally Steve Bannon

    The US Supreme Court on Monday paved the way for the Justice Department to drop a criminal case against Steve Bannon, a one-time chief ally of President Donald Trump, who had been convicted of defying a congressional subpoena issued during the investigation into the January 6 Capitol [insurrection].

  • The Walrus ☛ The US Torpedoed an Unarmed Ship. Who Are the Good Guys Again?

    The war isn’t legal by US domestic standards. Congress has the sole authority to declare war according to the US Constitution. It isn’t legal by international standards either. The UN Security Council must authorize a necessary and proportional response to an imminent threat. This was an unprovoked war of aggression. A dream come true for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a genocidal accused war criminal who has “longed” for this for forty years due to Iran’s support of terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah and their pursuit of nuclear weapons, which, for forty years, has been months or weeks away from being realized.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ 25th Amendment row: What if Trump gets impeached? A look at the past and future as results of new poll revealed

    Amid calls to invoke 25th Amendment top remove Donald Trump from office, a new national survey reveals that a majority of likely voters for the 2026 election across the country are in favor of impeaching the US President. The survey was conducted by by Lake Research Partners and commissioned by Free Speech For People (FSFP).

  • New York Times ☛ A Hidden Russian Hand in Hungary’s Election? Actually, It’s Quite Open.

    Giving a boost to Mr. Orban, who relies on cheap Russian energy to keep Hungary’s anemic economy afloat, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia received the Hungarian foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, last month at the Kremlin.

  • Futurism ☛ Polymarket Has Turned Our Climate Apocalypse Into a Casino

    In a blistering essay on catastrophe markets, Aeon notes that the rise of weather-based betting rather faithfully follows the development of industrial capitalism. Since at least the 1880s, communities across the US have delighted in weather betting, most often on rain. Continuing into the early 20th century, weather betting continued to spread, becoming a common pastime among American office workers.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Maine Supreme Court says proposed ranked choice voting expansion is unconstitutional

    “Maine voters made clear at the ballot box when they adopted ranked choice voting that they want a stronger, more representative democracy,” Reny continued. “As legislators, it’s our responsibility to make sure the laws they enact are fully and faithfully implemented.”

    She said even with the likely failure of this bill, she remains “committed to finding a lawful path to uphold the will of Maine people.”

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Trump’s SAVE America Act would end voter registration drives nationwide

    The SAVE America Act would effectively ban voter registration drives, a mainstay of college campuses and neighborhood events.

  • [Repeat] Tom's Hardware ☛ Iranian missile blitz takes down AWS data centers in Bahrain and Dubai — Amazon reportedly declares “hard down” status for multiple zones

    The AWS sites in the Middle East each have three compute zones, with both data centers reporting “hard down” and “impaired but functioning” zones. More importantly, the company said in its internal communications, “We do not have a timeline for when DXB and BAH will return to normal operations.”

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Techdirt ☛ Jacob Siegel’s Error-Filled Book On ‘Censorship’ Got Fact-Checked. He’s Calling It Censorship.

    Fact-checking is not censorship. Asking a publication to correct factual errors is not censorship. Pointing out that someone’s book contains demonstrably false claims is not censorship. None of this should require explanation. And yet here we are, because author Jacob Siegel has decided that Renee DiResta requesting corrections to false statements he made about her — in his book and in reviews of his book — constitutes some kind of sinister suppression campaign. He’s gone as far as writing an article at The Free Press (which I have no intention of linking to and giving more traffic) publicly accusing her of plotting to censor a review of his book published in The Baffler. He spent a morning on Twitter calling her “a figure connected to the US government” (she’s not) who “pressure[d] a publication to remove its review of my book” (she didn’t).

• Environment

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ Activists hope hair donations will ease Gulf oil spill damage

    The grassroots response comes amid mounting anger over what’s perceived as slow official action, disputes about a cover-up, and growing ecological and economic damage along more than 630 kilometers of coastline.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Investors push Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to disclose data center water and power consumption — more than a dozen resolutions ask for transparency ahead of annual investor meetings

    More than a dozen investors are pressuring Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet's Google to provide detailed data on water and energy consumption at their U.S. data centers, Reuters reported today. The pressure comes as all three companies have recently scrapped multibillion-dollar data center projects following community opposition, and as North American data centers consumed nearly 1 trillion liters of water in 2025, according to market research firm Mordor Intelligence.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Guardian UK ☛ How Paris swapped cars for bikes – and transformed its streets

      “It was a process that started slow and really accelerated in the last 10 years,” Roudaut said. “At least in some parts of the city, we have a [cycle] network that is starting to be safe and pretty much complete.”

      Paris has embarked on a grand transformation since Anne Hidalgo became mayor in 2014, planting 155,000 trees, adding several hundred kilometres of bike lanes, pedestrianising 300 school streets and banning cars from the banks of the Seine.

      Parking spots have been turned into green spaces and terraces for cafes and bars. Fewer parents have to fear their child being run over when they walk to school.

    • CBC ☛ Blinded by the headlights? Transport Canada wants to know

      Conversations about headlight brightness have prompted Transport Canada to collect data on Canadians’ experiences with headlight glare through a survey on its website.

      The survey is open to drivers, pedestrians and cyclists, and includes questions about travelling at night, driver behaviour and possible changes.

    • CBC ☛ Solar power in Africa is heating up — thanks in part to chili peppers

      About a tenth of Malawi's grid power now comes from two new solar plants built by Toronto-based JCM Power. The 60-megawatt Salima solar plant, co-owned with InfraCo Africa Ltd., became the country's first solar plant in 2021. Golomoti came a year later, and its five-megawatt battery is the first such storage system for a utility-scale project in sub-Saharan Africa.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Hatchings of two California bald eagle chicks delight vast livestream audience

      The first chick hatched around 9.30pm on Saturday, and the second on Easter about 8.30am, Voisard said.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Big Bear bald eagles Jackie and Shadow welcome two eaglets on Easter weekend

      The cam has followed Jackie and Shadow, who have been mating since 2018, and made the birds worldwide celebrities and regular fixtures of morning TV shows.

  • Overpopulation

    • Science Alert ☛ Earth's Population Has Surpassed The Planet's Capacity, Study Suggests

      Based on more than two centuries of population data, a team led by Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University in Australia found humanity is living well beyond the bounds of what our planet can support long-term.

      Ecologists describe the ability of an environment to sustain a species' population as its "carrying capacity". It's an estimate of the number of individuals from any given species that can survive long-term, based on the resources at hand and the rate at which those resources regenerate.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Variety ☛ Why Kanye West's Rehabilitation Says So Much About America

    In the America we grew up in, no one can stop us from listening to the music or experiencing the art we want. Whether it’s R. Kelly’s songs or fascist admirer Ezra Pound’s poetry or the trans-bashing J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books, it’s all an individual’s choice. But Kanye West’s jarring return to the spotlight sets a disturbing precedent.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ New Yorker investigation raises questions over Sam Altman’s trustworthiness

    Memos compiled by OpenAI staffers — including Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei, who later left to found their own AI enterprises — amount to “an accumulation of alleged deceptions and manipulations,” Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz wrote.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Europe’s Steel Industry Should Be Publicly Owned and Controlled

    Europe’s steel firms are increasingly unprofitable, and rising energy prices are making things even worse. Public ownership is vital to ensure conversion to green production while maintaining jobs.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Exclusive: FBI’s New Political Pre-Crime Center

    Now, Trump’s budget request reveals, the FBI runs a dedicated “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center”; with personnel from 10 federal agencies, it is busy “proactively” identifying domestic terrorists motivated by any of the following beliefs: [...]

  • RFERL ☛ 'You Couldn't Dream Up A Better PR Campaign.' An Interview With Co-Director Of Oscar-Winning Mr. Nobody Against Putin

    The film Mr. Nobody Against Putin had won one of the industry’s highest honors just days earlier: an Oscar for best documentary film.

    Now, condemned by the government as a “foreign agent,” and his film banned by a court: all the more reason to celebrate.

  • Meduza ☛ Dozens gather outside Presidential Administration in Moscow to submit petitions against messaging app blocks and mobile [Internet] shutdowns

    “Society needs to understand that there are enough safe ways to express your attitude toward the blocking,” Galyamina told the Telegram news channel SotaVision. Nadezhdin told journalists that the point of the action was to submit a large number of petitions, and that many people who could not attend in person had also submitted petitions electronically.

    People waited in line for up to an hour and a half to submit their petitions, a SotaVision correspondent on the scene reported. Participants estimated that around 200 people came to the reception office in total.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Eulogy for the CIA Factbook: The free standard for world facts, long an educational staple, is gone

      The CIA World Factbook, a free educational resource for generations of students, was abruptly shuttered by the Trump administration on Feb. 4. Its closure sparked mourning among users who saw it as a loss of reliable, unbiased information in an age of unreliable internet sources.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Trump threatens to JAIL a journalist unless he reveals which Trump official leaked the news about the missing pilot!

    This is a terrifying and unprecedented attack on our First Amendment rights and the freedom of the press. But the other implications of it are even more terrifying to consider.

    Did they only stage a rescue because the missing airman was revealed to the public? After all, they’re lying about casualty counts, they’re lying about US materiel losses, they’re lying about how much damage our bases have taken. They’ve banned satellite companies from publishing images of the Middle East.

  • Techdirt ☛ Supreme Court Shrugs Off Opportunity To Save The First Amendment From The Fifth Circuit’s Antipathy

    This one — involving the retaliatory arrest of an independent journalists by cops who didn’t like her reporting — is yet another miscarriage of justice by a Supreme Court whose majority simply won’t take cases that might force it to hold the government accountable for its actions.

  • JURIST ☛ Journalists harassed at public hearing to debate Zimbabwe constitutional amendments

    On March 30, journalists and citizens gathered at the City Sports Center in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, to open four days of debate about the proposed constitutional amendments. On the second day of debates supporters of the governing Zapu PF party “stormed the venue,” chanting party slogans, preventing the opposition from speaking, and preventing journalists from leaving unless they delete their footage. An anonymous woman journalist reported having alcohol thrown on her and being trampled on by a stampede of people.

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Trump Threatens to Jail Reporter Over Iran Rescue Mission ‘Leak’ - NOTUS — News of the United States

    President Donald Trump said Monday that his administration is on the hunt for an administration official who last week shared information with media outlets about a U.S. military airman who was stranded in Iran after his fighter jet went down over enemy airspace.

  • The Nation ☛ The AI Sector’s Crass Bid for Media Domination

    “Freedom of the press,” A.J. Liebling famously wrote, “is guaranteed only to those who own one.” This pithy observation from one of Liebling’s 1960 “Wayward Press” columns in The New Yorker sums up a great deal about how journalism is transacted under the pressures of American capitalism. But the gist of it has to hit different if you have several hundred million dollars sitting around and a reputation that could use a bit of burnishing.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Artist ‘Bale’ arrested over rape allegation

    According to police sources, the arrest follows allegations of rape made by a woman currently living in the United States. She publicly shared the accusation on social media on Friday, claiming that the incident took place a year ago during Lamsal’s visit to the US.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Unions, or David Duke?

    It is impossible not to marvel at the utter moral depravity of two highly credentialed and educated professionals desperately debasing themselves in order to compete for the David Duke vote. Truly, both of these people exhibit the ethics of toadying prison guards trying to impress their bullying boss with their capacity for abusing those under their care. A total absence of any standards that might prevent them from doing any grotesque act that might gain them an advantage in their horrifying careers. A case study in how not to live. A sad example for children of the depths that adults can sink to when they do not take to heart the lessons that we are all taught in kindergarten.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Navajo Nation: the fight for cultural survival – photo essay

    The legacy of colonialism has profoundly affected the Navajo culture. The forced assimilation of children into boarding schools led to significant cultural suppression.

    Virginia Brown, a 69-year-old elder, recalls her traumatic experience: “I was forced into a boarding school when I was six years old. They cut off all our long hair and washed our mouths out with soap if they caught us speaking Navajo.”

    This resulted in a generational gap in traditional knowledge and language that the Navajo are desperately trying to reclaim.

  • New Yorker ☛ Will Biblical Womanhood Box You In or Set You Free?

    Her proposal is something of a middle path: women should recognize that there are seasons of life with different demands, and see their roles as wives and mothers not as a retreat from work but as a chance to build a foundation. She tells young women to stop scrolling, to date seriously, to treat sex as sacred, and to resist elevating career over everything else. She argues that mothers should stay home with children under three, suggesting that these kids need to be around their moms full time to form secure attachments. She envisions husbands and wives as “battle-mates,” and encourages women to commit to hosting regular meals to build community.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Descendants of Choctaw code talkers gather in Fort Worth for historical marker unveiling - lonestarlive.com

    Members of the Choctaw code talkers were men who volunteered to fight for the U.S. in World War I at a time when Native Americans were not recognized as citizens. Indigenous communities wouldn’t receive citizenship until 1924.

    While in the battlefields in France, some of these men were overheard speaking their Choctaw language and were trained to use their words as “code.” They were placed on front lines and command posts so that messages could be transmitted to headquarters.

  • Votebeat ☛ A five-year record retention rule in Trump’s election order raises practical concerns - Votebeat

    But the line is a bigger deal than it sounds like, should the executive order go into force (it’s currently facing four federal lawsuits asserting the president exceeded his authority with it).

  • Papers Please ☛ Is a meeting “public” if you have to show REAL-ID or pay a fee?

    At our request, the Minnesota Commissioner of Administration has directed the state’s Data Practices Office (DPO) to issue an advisory opinion as to whether the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Airports Commission (MAC) violates the state’s Open Meeting Law by holding its meetings in an area at the MSP airport accessible only by passing through a TSA checkpoint, which requires either REAL-ID compliant ID, a passport, or paying a $45 fee.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Toronto’s Transit Crisis Is a Class Crisis

    The rich are ride-hailing their way out of public transit, draining fare revenue from the system. It’s another instance of the accelerating economic segregation of the public sphere.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ She wrote the history of photography. Then they cruelly erased her from it

    There's a particular species of injustice in photography's past, where the person behind the camera (often a woman) did the work while someone else took the credit. But even by those depressing standards, what happened to Lucia Moholy ranks as extraordinary.

    Here was a photographer so skilled and so important that her images defined how the world came to see the Bauhaus, one of the most influential art schools in history. Yet for decades, those images circulated without her name attached to them.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ South Africa's 5G boom is bypassing rural areas: Icasa

    South Africa’s 5G population coverage surged from 46.6% to 58% in a single year, the biggest network coverage jump recorded in communications regulator Icasa’s latest State of the ICT Sector report — but rural areas remain drastically underserved, with some provinces offering next-generation connectivity to as few as 7% of their rural populations.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Six Colors ☛ Stolen Device Protection may protect you from accessing your own device

    You might have noticed that, after installing iOS 26.4, your iPhone is behaving differently. Some actions (like changing your password) require a one-hour wait, followed by biometric authentication. You never had to do this before. Why now? Because with iOS 26.4, Apple has decided to enable its Stolen Device Protection feature on all iPhones. This feature may not make you safer—or feel safer—but it should prevent or severely deter misuse and hijacking of your iPhone and Apple Account.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Tennessee Lookout ☛ Trump FTC warns TN against repealing Ballad hospital monopoly without stronger competition law

  Lawmakers would let the restrictions on the monopoly end in 2028, but still allow it to block competitors for two more years

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ Music Industry Pressing Capitol Hill to Refresh Site-Blocking Laws

    That matches the proposal set out in Lofgren’s original FADPA bill, which specifically named DNS providers with more than $100 million in annual revenue. While Tillis’ Block BEARD Act does not mention DNS providers, it makes use of the official DMCA service provider definition, which casts a wide enough net to include them.

    It’s notable that DNS providers are included, as it brings companies like Cloudflare and even Google into the fray. It’s also a relatively novel concept on an international level, as most site-blocking legislation does not explicitly include DNS providers.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Yale University May Have Put a Nail in Drake vs. Kendrick

    The second amicus brief was submitted on behalf of a group of social scientists and legal scholars from institutions including Howard University, the University of Richmond, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and Tulane University, among others. They were represented by Jack I. Lerner of the UCI Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic at the University of California, Irvine School of Law.

    This brief argues that rap lyrics, and particularly those in diss tracks, should not be treated as factual statements. The filing includes an account of the history and cultural context of rap music, and describes diss tracks as an “emblematic and long-standing feature of the history” of the genre.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Music Publishers Ask Court to Dismiss X's 'Weaponized DMCA' Antitrust Suit

    Major music publishers and the NMPA are asking a Texas federal court to throw out X's antitrust lawsuit, calling it a baseless attempt at retaliation. The music companies argue that X’s conspiracy theory rests on a single word in an email, while adding that their massive DMCA takedown campaign was not a sham but fully protected by the First Amendment.

  • Daniël de Kok ☛ AI policy

    Unfortunately, since it is nearly impossible to distinguish between proprietary and open weight model crawlers, I use a CDN to block all crawlers.