Leftovers

• Science

  • Digital Camera World ☛ One Moon, 32 cameras, 10,000 photos – as a photographer, I’m awed by the Artemis II photo album. These are the best ones so far

    The crew list for the Artemis II includes a commander, pilot, and two mission specialists – but while “photographer” may not be one of the titles, photography was very much part of the first human mission to the Moon in more than 50 years. Artemis II photographs are the intersection of science and art, serving as both a tool for observations and iconic works of art at the same time.

• Career/Education

  • Justin Duke ☛ Write as you want to be heard | Applied Cartography

    I do not purport to ascribe my idiosyncrasies onto you; your goals and voice are different than mine; my point is just that my style fits the goals of my writing, which is to have some fun. What if you have different (i.e. normal) goals? I recommend two tactical things: [...]

  • Kenneth Reitz ☛ The Hacker Ethic and the Vibe Coder

    These weren't idealistic platitudes. They were load-bearing ethical commitments that shaped how the internet was built, how open source works, how the free software movement thinks about human freedom. Richard Stallman put it plainly: the hacker ethic is about "the feelings of right and wrong" in a community — "that knowledge should be shared with other people who can benefit from it."

    This ethic assumed something important: that the people building software understood what they were building.

• Hardware

  • Digital Camera World ☛ The compact camera is back… Why 2.4 million people are discovering that real buttons are outpacing smartphones in 2026

    In case you’ve missed it, the point-and-shoot camera is back and sales have been steadily on the rise for nearly a year or so now. Nobody is really quite sure what triggered the revival (although social media will undoubtedly be involved somehow), but compacts are cool again and particularly with a demographic that has probably never used one before. For some – notably younger women – the smartphone is now so yesterday and real cameras are being preferred for photography.

    The numbers will never be anything like they were during the golden years of 35mm film compacts and the first few of generations of digital models, but they’re growing in a way that can’t be ignored. According to the Japanese Camera & Imaging Products Association (CIPA), around 9.4 million cameras were shipped worldwide in 2025, and 2.4 million of these were point-and-shoots with a fixed lens. This represents the highest number of compact camera shipments since 2021.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ AI Is Causing Healthcare Costs to Surge

    All of this has compounded into a system where the tools that were supposed to make healthcare more affordable have actually had the opposite effect — a potent reminder that no technology can magically solve the tension between healthcare driven by profit, and the basic human need for affordable care.

  • Futurism ☛ To Get Swole, Teens Are Pumping Themselves Full of Drugs Meant for Fattening Cows for the Slaughterhouse

    In previous years, looks-conscious teens might have splurged on glamour shots at the mall, or fine-tuned their selfies with digital filters. In today’s hyper-competitive landscape of bodily optimization known as “looksmaxing,” some young men are going straight for the hard stuff. One particularly alarming intervention: trenbolone, or “tren,” a veterinary-grade anabolic steroid used to fatten up cows destined for the slaughterhouse.

  • Futurism ☛ DOGE Made Drastic Cuts to a Global Vaccine Assistance Program. Now There's a Deadly Measles Outbreak in Bangladesh

    At the heart of the public health failure lies a shortage of vaccine stockpiles. That shortage traces back, at least in part, to the wave of DOGE-driven spending cuts to the US Agency for International Development (US AID) that forced Bangladesh’s then-interim government to shutter healthcare programs across the board, from tuberculosis screenings to public maternity clinics.

  • Athanasia Mo Mowinckel ☛ Norway’s New ME/CFS Guidelines Got It Backwards

    The Norwegian Directorate of Health published draft guidelines for ME/CFS that recommend graded activity over pacing — the opposite of what NICE 2021 concluded and what the biomedical evidence supports. As a post-COVID patient and caretaker for someone with ME/CFS, I wrote a detailed consultation response. Here’s what the guidelines get wrong, why it matters, and how you can respond before the May 4th deadline.

• Proprietary

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Rockstar Games confirms it was [breached] by malicious group — 'ShinyHunters' takes credit, gives until April 14 to pay ransom or it will release confidential data

    The group didn't break Snowflake's security; they instead extracted authentication tokens from Anodot to pass as regular users and access Snowflake accounts. Once in, they easily stole the data, which likely doesn't include passwords or sensitive player info, and perhaps not even bits from active game development. Still, there will be confidential corporate data that Rockstar doesn't want to float around otherwise.

  • Mike Rockwell ☛ Apple Discontinues the Mac Pro With No Plans for Future Hardware

    Imagine an alternate reality where the Mac Pro became a system optimized for large amounts of internal storage. You could pop it open and there were six 3.5-inch SATA drive slots and a few M.2 NVMe slots as well.

    Or if it was designed as an upgradable Mac and Apple released mainboards with each new M-series chip that you could swap out to upgrade your system with ease.

  • Heliomass ☛ Apple at 50

    There’s a fine line in this list between items which which would just be considered obsolete, and the more interesting category which we’d call “vintage”. Not all of it still works, but even the items which aren’t functional still make for great display pieces.3

    And before we start, I’d argue Apple has four distinct “eras” as it were: [...]

  • Ars Technica ☛ Dad stuck in support nightmare after teen lied about age on Discord

    Once Frey realized his daughter had been hacked, he assumed that Discord would promptly intervene, recognizing that many minor victims on her friends list could be harmed the longer the attacker kept control. Instead, Discord’s chatbot, Clyde, and a seeming human support member, Nelly, automatically closed her support tickets after telling her it would be best to report the issue from inside the app, which she could not access.

    Frey told Ars he was shocked to see a platform as big as Discord relying on such poor support infrastructure.

    “There’s no pathway for a parent to step in and advocate for a minor whose account has been compromised,” Frey told Ars.

  • Daemonology ☛ 20 Years on AWS and Never Not My Job

    I created my first AWS account at 10:31 PM on April 10th, 2006. I had seen the announcement of Amazon S3 and had been thinking vaguely about the problem of secure backups — even though I didn't start Tarsnap until several months later — and the idea of an online storage service appealed to me. The fact that it was a web service made it even more appealing; I had been building web services since 1998, when I decided that coordinating a world-record-setting computation of Pi over HTTP would be easier than doing it over email.

    While I created my AWS account because I was interested in Amazon S3, that was not in fact immediately available to me: In the early days of AWS, you had to specifically ask for each new service to be enabled for your account. My new AWS account did come with two services enabled by default, though — Amazon Simple Queue Service, which most people know as "the first AWS service", and Amazon E-Commerce Service, an API which allowed Amazon affiliates to access Amazon.com's product catalogue — which was the real first AWS service, but which most people have never heard of and which has been quietly scrubbed from AWS history.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ There's a Mass Rebellion Against AI in the Workplace

      A new survey by the SAP-owned software company WalkMe of 3,750 executives and employees found a major discontent growing in large companies across the globe. According to the findings, 54 percent of workers reported avoiding their company’s in-house AI tools in order to complete tasks themselves. A full third of workers reported never using AI at all.

    • Kyle Kingsbury ☛ The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Annoyances

      The latest crop of machine learning technologies will be used to annoy us and frustrate accountability. Companies are trying to divert customer service tickets to chats with large language models; reaching humans will be increasingly difficult. We will waste time arguing with models. They will lie to us, make promises they cannot possible keep, and getting things fixed will be drudgerous. Machine learning will further obfuscate and diffuse responsibility for decisions. “Agentic commerce” suggests new kinds of advertising, dark patterns, and confusion.

    • Fortra LLC ☛ AI and Cryptocurrency Scams are Costing Americans Billions, FBI Reports

      The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has released its 2025 Annual Report, and two threats dominate the headlines: artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. Together, crypto and AI is reshaping the fraud landscape in ways that should concern organizations and individuals alike.

      According to its report, for the first time in the IC3's 25-year history, complaints of cybercrime crossed the one-million mark in 2025, with Americans defrauded of almost US $21 billion.

    • The New Stack ☛ Karpathy says developers have 'AI Psychosis.' Everyone else is next.

      His explanation for the gap is technical: reinforcement learning works best with verifiable reward functions which makes coding and math dramatically more trainable than writing or search. And because those technical domains generate the most B2B revenue, that’s where the biggest teams are focused. He’s right about that.

      But there’s a simpler reason he doesn’t name. I’m not a developer. I’m a journalist and editor, and I know how to push AI forward in editorial and content work in ways that a software engineer might not. But I’m not feeling the same “AI Psychosis” that Karpathy describes, because the tools haven’t been optimized for my domain the way they’ve been optimized for code. Not yet.

    • The Record ☛ UK government threatens tech bosses with jail time if they do not adequately fight nudification tools | The Record from Recorded Future News

      The U.K. government on Friday announced it has formally submitted a proposed change to a crime bill that would allow tech executives who fail to remove nonconsensual intimate images published on their platforms to be imprisoned.

      A U.K. communications regulator, Ofcom, has said it will be cracking down on the spread of the images in the aftermath of the Grok scandal, which led to millions of “nudified” images of women and children to be circulated worldwide.

      The scandal led to a worldwide backlash and condemnation from multiple national governments, which pledged to stop the practice.

  • Social Control Media

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ I Built an Eleventy Plugin for Sharing Posts to Mastodon

      A new Eleventy plugin that adds a Mastodon share button with an instance picker, saved instance support, and shortcode helpers.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • [Repeat] SANS ☛ Obfuscated JavaScript or Nothing

      The script is a Windows-flavor JavaScript and uses ActiveXObject, Microsoft.XMLDOM, ADODB.Stream. It copies itself and implements persistence (through a scheduled task): [...]

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • The Register UK ☛ Two different attackers poisoned popular open source tools

      Both targeted popular open source projects that are used by a ton of organizations and integrated into countless software products, apps, and developer environments.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • TruthOut ☛ Trump Admin Seeks Sweeping Access to Federal Workers’ Health Records

      A brief notice from the Office of Personnel Management could dramatically change which personally identifiable medical information the agency obtains, giving it the power to see prescriptions employees had filled or what treatment they sought from doctors. The regulation would require 65 insurance companies that cover more than 8 million Americans — including federal workers, retired members of Congress, mail carriers, and their immediate family members — to provide monthly reports to OPM with identifiable health data on their members.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Hims Breach Exposes the Most Sensitive Kinds of PHI

      "This isn't just a data breach — it’s a breakdown in the customer relationship," says Baker Johnson, chief business officer at UJET. "When someone reaches out for support, especially in healthcare, that’s a moment of trust. They reached out for help and instead had their trust compromised. That changes how they engage — and once that hesitation sets in, loyalty is already at risk."

    • The Verge ☛ My baby deer plushie told me that Mitski’s dad was a CIA operative

      I went to fact-check the AI fawn. There were, in fact, multiple Reddit and social media posts about the conspiracy theory. (Something Mitski herself refuses to discuss.) A shudder ran down my spine. I’ve conversed with many an AI companion. I’ve even worn one around my neck. I consider myself somewhat inured to the uncanny, sycophantic imitation of friendship they provide.

      Never has one gone onto the internet, researched something I liked, and, unprompted, texted to tell me about it.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ Perplexity Privacy Lawsuit

    • El País ☛ European money pours into Palantir: Over 100 asset managers and banks boost their investments in the controversial tech company

      Over the past year, major European banks and asset managers have dramatically increased their investments in Palantir, the controversial U.S. technology company. This is despite the firm’s links to serious human rights violations. The company provides services to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) and to the Israeli army in the Palestinian territories. In 2020, Amnesty International denounced the company for failing to comply with international standards, while the consulting firm MSCI gave it a score of two out of 10 for “civil liberties” and “human rights” in a recent benchmark report for institutional investors worldwide. Palantir’s founder and chairman, Peter Thiel, openly advocates anti-democratic and anti-EU positions.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Fire Next Time

    A policy problem is solvable with better policy. A legitimacy crisis is not. A legitimacy crisis is not a question of what the people in charge are doing. It is a question of whether the people in charge have any right to be in charge at all — whether the system that produced them, rewards them, and protects them from consequence is a system that serves the people it claims to represent, or a system that serves itself while claiming to represent the people.

    The answer, in the minds of a growing majority of Americans, is the latter. And no policy proposal, however well-designed, answers that question. Because the question is not about policy. It is about legitimacy. And legitimacy, once lost, is not recovered by competence. It is recovered — if it is recovered at all — by accountability, by justice, and by the visible arrival of genuinely different people in positions of power.

    The people do not want better managers of the existing system. They want new people. And they want to see the current lot face consequences for the mess they have made.

  • RFERL ☛ London Says It Tracked Three Russian Submarines Near Critical Undersea Infrastructure

    Healey said the operation involved the Royal Navy working with Norwegian and other allied forces, as part of broader efforts to counter what he called “malign activity” by Russia in strategically sensitive waters.

    “We’ve exposed those covert operations. We’ve made clear to [Russian President Vladimir Putin] and his submarines that we’ve watched them every step of the way,” Healey said, adding that British forces deployed maritime patrol aircraft and sonar systems to maintain constant surveillance.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Table

    The table in Islamabad is where the gap is being negotiated. Iran has read the situation correctly: the captain is performing for his audience, the protégé is building his future, the son-in-law is serving interests that are not the nation’s. The machinery of American foreign policy is in the hands of people whose primary investment is not in the outcome but in what the outcome does for them.

    Iran is not asking for what the face of this negotiation offers. Iran is asking for what the hands reveal is available.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Bhaskar English ☛ NYT AI Style ID; Adam Back Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin Mystery

    Who created Bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency, remains a mystery even after 15 years. Recently, an investigation report by the New York Times claimed that British cryptographer Adam Back is 'Satoshi Nakamoto'. However, Adam Back has rejected these claims.

• Environment

  • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ Researchers Map Massive Global Price Tag of Emissions

    The study and interactive “damage map” published by Stanford University researchers says just $3.1 billion of the domestic losses in Canada were caused by the country’s own climate pollution. The map offers users a strictly quantitative, strictly economic snapshot of the scale of climate damages caused by each country’s emissions.

  • Robert Bryce ☛ AI Rejected: Tracking The Great Data Center Revolt

    Since January 1, there have been more rejections or restrictions of data centers in the US than in all of 2025. Furthermore, the number of US data center rejections in 2026 is already nearly equal to the total number of wind projects rejected worldwide in 2025! And more rejections are coming. A recent poll found that 65% of Americans surveyed oppose data centers in their communities. (Details on that in a minute.)

  • Energy/Transportation

    • RFA ☛ US to set up Philippines fuel depot in support of its South China Sea operations

      Both agreements give the legal cover for America to rotate troops and preposition equipment in the Philippines, where Washington once maintained its biggest overseas naval base.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ Red Hat RHELocates its Chinese engineering team to India

    Red Hat has decided India is a key site. China isn’t. So Red Hat will stop engineering activities in the Middle Kingdom and move most of the jobs to India. Red Hat’s parent company IBM says it has more staff in India than the USA and 264,000 staff overall.

    The memo states that quitting China won’t mean a net reduction in head count.

    It also states that the change won’t be made public, so while The Register has asked Red Hat for comment we’re not holding out much hope that the IBM business unit will reply.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Don’t Be Evil

    Opencola didn't make it. Our VCs got greedy when Microsoft offered to buy us and tried to grab all the equity away from the founders. I quit and went to EFF, and my partners got very good jobs [sic] at Microsoft, and the company was bought for its tax-credits by Opentext, and that was that.

  • Armin Ronacher ☛ The Center Has a Bias

    The center, I would argue, naturally needs to lean towards engagement. The reason is simple: a genuinely measured opinion on a new technology requires real engagement with it.

    You do not get an informed view by trying something for 15 minutes, getting annoyed once, and returning to your previous tools. You also do not get it by admiring demos, listening to podcasts or discussing on social media. You have to use it enough to get past both the first disappointment and the honeymoon phase. Seemingly with AI tools, true understanding is not a matter of hours but weeks of investment.

    That means the people in the center are selected from a particular group: people who were willing to give the thing a fair chance without yet assuming it deserved a permanent place in their lives.

  • NPR ☛ Well-timed bets on Polymarket tied to the Iran war draw calls for investigations from lawmakers

    On Wednesday, The Associated Press reported that at least 50 brand new accounts on Polymarket placed substantial bets on a U.S.-Iran ceasefire in the hours, even minutes, before President Donald Trump announced the ceasefire late Tuesday on social media. These were the sole bets made on Polymarket through these accounts.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Futurism ☛ Foolish Pollsters Are Now Just Asking AI What Voters Would Say in Response to Questions and Publishing It at Face Value

      In other words, Axios had failed to disclose that it was citing alleged “polling data” that wasn’t drawn from human respondents at all. Instead, it was dreamed up by a large language model —yet the latest sign of every imaginable industry trying to leverage AI, even when doing so makes absolutely no sense.

      As Digital Theory Lab director Leif Weatherby and University of California, Berkeley, computer sciences professor Benjamin Recht explain in a guest essay for the New York Times, the practice that tricked Axios is called “silicon sampling,” and it’s a recipe for disaster.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • RFERL ☛ US Condemns Russia Over Targeting Journalists, Urges Respect for Free Speech

    The comments come after Russian security forces raided the Moscow office of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta on April 9, detaining journalist Oleg Roldugin and seizing equipment and documents during a search that lasted more than 13 hours.

  • Insight Hungary ☛ Hungary brings espionage charges against investigative journalist

    Hungary’s government has filed espionage charges against investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi, in a case tied to reporting on alleged contacts between Budapest and Moscow. Speaking at a press briefing on Thursday, Orban's chief of staff, Gergely Gulyás, said justice minister Bence Tuzson had decided to proceed, arguing that publicly known details were "sufficient" and accusing Panyi of acting “in cooperation with a foreign state”. The allegations follow a Washington Post report claiming Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, regularly shared confidential information from EU meetings with his Russian counterpart.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘The party was chilled until police sent in the riot squad’: when a Dorset free rave turned violent

    The partygoers, meanwhile, say they were shocked by the level of force used against them.

    Footage has since emerged showing partygoers being dragged along the ground, bloodied and beaten by police. A week on from the annual rave the disputed accounts are continuing.

  • Futurism ☛ People Who Lose Their Job to AI Are in for a World of Pain, Goldman Sachs Report Finds

    Even if the displaced worker finds a job, those short term impacts have a way of echoing for years, a term the authors call “scarring.” In previous real-world scenarios, technological displacement led to delayed homeownership, lower lifetime income, and even a lower chance of marriage.

  • Futurism ☛ Psychologists Found Something Horrible About the Kind of Men Seeking Trad Wives

    Indexing these responses, the psychologists narrowed down which factors correlated to support for the tradwife schtick. One key factor, researchers were startled to find, was “hostile sexism,” defined as overtly negative beliefs about women.

  • Votebeat ☛ Texas counties subpoenaed by DHS for registration applications

    At least three counties have been contacted this week for detailed records about some individual voters. A Homeland Security representative told one election official “all 254 counties will be contacted.”

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Capitalist Profits Depend on Stealing Our Future

    Methods of extracting income from the future have been around for a long time. The device that Uber used, the joint-stock company, has existed in its current form for more than 150 years. Modern investor-owned firms first proliferated in the West in the nineteenth century to construct railways and other extended, terraforming, carbon-intensive, often imperial structures whose scale and durability, usually built at great ecological and human cost, promised their shareholders access to unearned wealth from the future. The history of joint-stock companies goes back even further, to the armed trading corporations that European merchants began creating some three centuries earlier to conquer world trade, enabling them to colonize lands and subjugate or eliminate peoples across the earth.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ How To Put Money Directly Into Union Power

    The enormous rise in economic inequality that has produced our modern American oligarchy and gone a long way towards capturing our political system was directly enabled by the decline in power of unions. Battered as they are, however, unions still exist. Fifteen million people are still union members. After getting involved in unions myself, I witnessed firsthand their transformative ability to give power to formerly powerless people in a workplace. As a labor reporter, I have seen countless examples of how a union can create economic and political power for workers who were ignored and exploited before they had a union. Over the past decade, I came to understand that—contrary to conventional wisdom—unions are the most accessible, potent, and realistic road to power that most regular people can access. I also came to understand that because unions naturally fight against inequality, they have the ability to turn around the exact crisis that has gotten our country to where we are. In other words, despite their decline, unions remain the single most important tool to fix the single most important problem in America.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Veterans Are Losing Homes Because of Trump Killing Loan Program

    Close to 100,000 veterans are currently behind on their mortgage payments. Taxpayers will foot the bill

  • Michigan Advance ☛ How Trump’s SAVE America Act could make it harder for married women to vote • Michigan Advance

    As many as 69 million American women have birth certificates that don’t match their current name, according to an analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress.

    “The fact that the majority of women upon marriage do change their name already means that this is going to be completely unequal in how the law is applied,” said Letitia Harmon, senior director of policy and research at Florida Rising, a racial and economic justice nonprofit.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Joost de Valk ☛ Defending the open web is not enough

    Anil Dash recently published Endgame for the Open Web, and it’s a piece worth reading. His argument: Big Tech is systematically dismantling the open web through AI scraping, API lockdowns, and the erosion of open source norms. His prescription: defend the institutions. Support the Internet Archive, donate to the EFF, volunteer for Wikipedia.

    He’s right about the threats. And his title, “endgame,” is the right word. We’re not in the opening moves. We’re deep into a collapse that’s already well underway, and the game board looks very different from what most people defending the open web still picture.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Hackaday ☛ Authenticate SSH With Your TPM

    You probably don’t think about it much, but your PC probably has a TPM or Trusted Platform Module. Windows 11 requires one, and most often, it stores keys to validate your boot process. Most people use it for that, and nothing else. However, it is, in reality, a perfectly good hardware token. It can store secret data in a way that is very difficult to hack. Even you can’t export your own secrets from the TPM. [Remy] shows us how to store your SSH keys right on your TPM device.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Kyle Reddoch ☛ Microsoft’s WireGuard and VeraCrypt Lockout Is Bigger Than a Support Failure

  From the reporting that followed, this was not just a weird hiccup affecting one niche utility. Multiple outlets reported that the suspended accounts blocked maintainers from publishing Windows builds, signing drivers, or otherwise getting updates to users. That list grew beyond WireGuard and VeraCrypt to include projects like Windscribe and MemTest86. In other words, this was not a tiny paperwork annoyance with no downstream impact. It directly touched software distribution and patch delivery on Windows.

  That is the part I think security people, MSPs, and IT admins should focus on. If a trusted security or privacy tool suddenly loses the ability to ship updates, the risk is not only reputational. The risk is operational. WireGuard creator Jason Donenfeld said the account lockout meant he could not sign drivers or ship updates, and he raised the obvious concern: if there had been a critical vulnerability that needed an immediate fix, users would have been stuck waiting. He was careful to note that this was hypothetical, not an active WireGuard emergency, and that distinction matters. Still, the point stands. A broken update path is a security problem even when the software itself is sound, as TechCrunch reported.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ HBO Obtains DMCA Subpoena to Unmask 'Euphoria' Spoiler Account on X

    HBO has obtained a DMCA subpoena, ordering X Corp. to identify the person behind a Euphoria fan account that allegedly posted spoilers from unaired episodes of Season 3. The action comes just days before the show's long-awaited premiere this weekend, but it remains unclear what the company plans to do with the requested information.