Leftovers

• 404 Media ☛ How the Internet Became Hell (with Whitney Phillips)

  Why does the [Internet] feel like it’s getting worse every single day, and why does it feel like the political landscape is getting worse in response? The answer might seem obvious, especially if you read 404 Media on a regular basis, where we’ve been documenting this decline, but it’s important to occasionally zoom out and ask the big questions.

• Ruben Schade ☛ URL change fixes

  Thanks to all of you who sent in comments regarding my domain migration, and for pointing out that I missed (more than!) a few things. In particular I want to thank Rebecca H, Simon Ruderich, and Andrew Wheeler for taking time out of their day to detail exactly what needed fixing.

  I’ve fixed: [...]

• Science

  • Hackaday ☛ From Lunar Dust To Breathable Air

    This brings us to today, where [Blue Origin] has announced a prototype method of turning Moon dust into the valuable gas we call oxygen. [Blue Origin] hasn’t posted much about the actual process behind this feat, terming the system “Air Pioneer”. What we do know is that it requires melting the regolith and then passing current through to release the O2 molecules from their rocky prison.

  • Elias Mårtenson ☛ Kap performance

    This came out of an observation that many simple APL algorithms were very expensive in terms of complexity. Often, some permutation is computed, and then only a small subset of the results are actually used. This often leads to situations where the most straightforward solution is \( O(n^2) \) when it should be \( O(n) \). One such example is using ↑⍷ to match the beginning of a string.

    Additionally, the use of this form of lazy evaluation allows the runtime to perform other types of optimisations based on what is known about the values and the functions being applied on them. For example, monadic ≡ does not have to evaluate all the values if it knows that the argument only contains scalars.

  • Dhole Moments ☛ Hybrid Constructions: The Post-Quantum Safety Blanket

    Last night, I opened an issue on the Fediverse Key Transparency project to discuss two options for post-quantum signatures in the protocol. Predictably, this led to a few folks insisting on discussing hybrids for post-quantum signatures (albeit off of GitHub).

    So, let’s have a raw, honest talk about hybrid post-quantum KEMs and hybrid signature schemes.

• Career/Education

  • EDRI ☛ EFFecting Change: Can't Stop the Signal

    Join EFF and Amnesty International for a deep dive into the black hole of internet censorship, and learn how journalists, emergency responders, and ordinary people can persist. Live discussion followed by by Q&A.

  • Amras ☛ The Technical Irrational

    Working in Big Tech is profoundly isolating. In many ways, the industry is a crowning achievement of late stage capitalism. Critical work is performed, but undervalued. Individual achievement is celebrated by virtue of preexisting prestige and only ever expressed in quantifiable metrics. Workers are burdened with emotional labor, and encouraged to carry those emotions back home with them. The problem of breakable digital systems has been solved by placing breakable workers at the failure nodes.

• Hardware

  • The Drone Girl ☛ XPONENTIAL 2026 Is Coming to Detroit — What to Know

    XPONENTIAL 2026, the largest annual gathering of the unmanned systems and autonomous technology industry, is headed to Detroit, Michigan from May 11-14 at Huntington Place Convention Center.

• Proprietary

  • KitGuru ☛ Former Bethesda PR lead was not happy with Microsoft merger

    It came as quite the surprise when Pete Hines left Bethesda. The company's long-time PR lead departed once Starfield hit the market, and it sounds like the merger with Microsoft played a major factor.

    In a recent interview with Firezide Chat (via VGC), Hines said that it “it was really hard to walk away” and alluded to his retirement coming sooner than planned: “I think I’ve done everything I can do. This is not when I wanted it to end or how I wanted it to end, but that’s not really up to me.”

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Undeadly ☛ pfsync(4) Packet Header Field Renamed to Avoid AI Bug Report Noise

      Bogus security bug reports generated by large language model (LLM) tool use are a well known irritant and time sink for open source projects.

      As a consequence of one such report, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) committed a change to pfsync(4) to rename an otherwise unused field in the pfsync(4) packet header.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI Chatbots and Trust

      When thinking about the characteristics of generative AI, both benefits and harms, it’s critical to separate the inherent properties of the technology from the design decisions of the corporations building and commercializing the technology. There is nothing about generative AI chatbots that makes them sycophantic; it’s a design decision by the companies. Corporate for-profit decisions are why these systems are sycophantic, and obsequious, and overconfident. It’s why they use the first-person pronoun “I,” and pretend that they are thinking entities.

      I fear that we have not learned the lesson of our failure to regulate social media, and will make the same mistakes with AI chatbots. And the results will be much more harmful to society: [...]

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

      New machine learning systems endanger our psychological and physical safety. The idea that ML companies will ensure “AI” is broadly aligned with human interests is naïve: allowing the production of “friendly” models has necessarily enabled the production of “evil” ones. Even “friendly” LLMs are security nightmares. The “lethal trifecta” is in fact a unifecta: LLMs cannot safely be given the power to fuck things up. LLMs change the cost balance for malicious attackers, enabling new scales of sophisticated, targeted security attacks, fraud, and harassment. Models can produce text and imagery that is difficult for humans to bear; I expect an increased burden to fall on moderators. Semi-autonomous weapons are already here, and their capabilities will only expand.

    • Lee Peterson ☛ Don’t waste your time with Google Gemini when it’s as bad as this

      I support Birmingham City FC and there was interesting omission from the team in yesterdays win against Wrexham, so I thought this would be a good time to test Google Gemini – I’m wish I hadn’t bothered.

  • Social Control Media

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-04-07 [Older] Rise of TikTok-driven tourism strains locals in Amsterdam’s Negen Straatjes

    • India Times ☛ Social media platforms need to stop never-ending scrolling, UK's Starmer says

      Social media companies had designed algorithms that ​were intended ​to encourage addictive behaviour, and parents were ⁠asking the government to intervene, Starmer said.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Ransomware scum, other crims exploit 4 old Microsoft bugs

      Crooks are exploiting four Microsoft vulnerabilities - one patched 14 years ago and another tied to ransomware activity - according to America's lead cyber-defense agency, which on Monday gave federal agencies two weeks to patch them.

      The four vulnerabilities added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog on Monday are: [...]

• Security

  • Live Law ☛ 2026-04-09 [Older] Madras High Court Dismisses Plea By Cyber Security Expert Seeking Probe Into Star Health Security Lapses

  • CISA

    • CISA ☛ 2026-04-09 [Older] Contemporary Controls BASC 20T

    • CISA ☛ 2026-04-09 [Older] GPL Odorizers GPL750

    • CISA ☛ 2026-04-08 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-04-07 [Older] Mitsubishi Electric GENESIS64 and ICONICS Suite products

    • CISA ☛ 2026-04-06 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Bhaskar English ☛ Pavel Durov WhatsApp Encryption Fraud; 95% Messages Not Private

      WhatsApp says only the sender and receiver can read messages. But Durov argued this isn’t fully true in real-life use. According to him, many chats are saved in cloud backups on Apple and Google servers. These backups are often not protected by end-to-end encryption, which means they may be easier to access.

    • The Record ☛ Hack at Dutch gym chain Basic-Fit exposes customer data in several EU countries

      Unknown hackers breached the systems of European gym chain Basic-Fit and downloaded personal data belonging to members across several countries, the company said in a statement on Monday.

      The Netherlands-based company claimed the breach involved information including names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth and bank details, as well as membership data such as subscription numbers, subscription types and recent gym visits. Passwords and identity documents were not accessed, according to the company.

    • YLE ☛ Tuesday marks Finnish officialdom's shift to digital mail

      However, people can still choose to receive paper mail through the service settings. After activating Suomi.fi Messages, it is also possible to switch message delivery back to the paper format. The choice to receive paper mail will remain valid for at least one year.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Record ☛ Majority of Australian youth still use social media despite ban, researchers find

    The survey found that TikTok and YouTube retained 53% of previous youth users and Instagram 52%. In most cases, children can still access social media because the platforms “failed to identify and remove their accounts in the first place,” according to the research report.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Axis of Autocracy Loses a Wheel

    After Victor Orbán’s Fidesz party took power in 2010, Hungary became a role model for those who admired corruption, fascism, and loyalty to Vladimir Putin. Orbán’s regime brought widespread crony capitalism, captured Hungarian media outlets, and installed corrupt judges. He actively undermined solidarity within the European Union and worked to block aid to Ukraine. Sound familiar?

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Austerity creates fascism

    My concern about a massive collapse in the capital markets isn't that workers will suffer directly. Despite all the Wonderful Life rhetoric about your money being in Joe's house and the Kennedy house and Mrs Macklin's house, the reality is that the median US worker has $955 saved for retirement. You could nuke the whole financial system and not take a dime out of most workers' pockets:

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html

    No, the thing that has me terrified about AI is that when it craters and takes the economy with it, that we will respond the same way we have during every financial crisis of the 21st century: with austerity, and austerity breeds fascism.

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-04-10 [Older] America’s $2.5 Trillion National Security Budget for FY 2027

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-04-11 [Older] Amsterdam Court of Appeal raises sentence to 12 years in killing of Ukrainian sex worker

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-11 [Older] Ukraine: Attacks continue as Orthodox Easter ceasefire nears

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-09 [Older] Fact check: Orban points to Ukraine over pipeline bomb

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-09 [Older] Hungary election: Voters want new EU approach, but tough on Ukraine, poll shows

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-09 [Older] Hungary election: Voters want new EU approach, but tough Ukraine stance, poll shows

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-09 [Older] Ukraine and Syria tighten relations

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-08 [Older] Hungarians living in Ukraine caught between front lines

    • CNN ☛ 2026-04-12 [Older] Russian authorities detain suspect over St. Petersburg cafe blast

    • CBC ☛ 2026-04-12 [Older] Ukraine, Russia accuse each other of violating Orthodox Easter ceasefire

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-04-11 [Older] Swedish fighter jet spots Russian sub in Kattegat

    • CBC ☛ 2026-04-11 [Older] Orthodox Easter ceasefire in Russia-Ukraine war falters following drone strikes

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-11 [Older] Russian Memorial human rights NGO labeled 'extremist'

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-11 [Older] Ukrainian civilians abducted, tortured in Russian prisons

    • HRW ☛ 2026-04-10 [Older] Belarus Imports Russia’s 'Propaganda' Playbook

    • HRW ☛ 2026-04-10 [Older] Russia: Memorial Rights Group Declared ‘Extremist’

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-04-10 [Older] Britain Reveals Russia Used the Iran War as Cover to Send Spy Submarines After Undersea Cables in the North Atlantic

    • Off Guardian ☛ 2026-04-09 [Older] WATCH: Kicked Out of Russia for Realizing Multipolar BRICS is WEF Carbon Copy?

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-09 [Older] Russia labels human rights group Memorial 'extremist'

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-09 [Older] Ukraine: Russia's Putin declares Easter ceasefire

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-04-09 [Older] UK deployed military to deter Russian submarines from its waters

    • 2026-04-08 [Older] Russians hijacking routers for cyber spying

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-04-07 [Older] ING's sale of Russian operations falls through; Kremlin won't approve

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-07 [Older] Ukraine: Several killed as Russia strikes bus, other targets

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-04-07 [Older] Vladimir Putin Urged To Mimic Donald Cheeto Mussolini With 48-Hour Nuclear Warning To Ukraine

• Environment

  • Court House News ☛ Youth activists try to revive suit over Trump fossil fuel policies

    “We are here because the president rewrote energy law without statutory or constitutional authority to do so, and the district court mistakenly believed it lacked Article III power to redress the constitutional violations and the injuries to the plaintiffs that are undisputed in the case,” Julia Olson, an attorney with Our Children’s Trust, representing the plaintiffs, said.

    Olson told the panel that the court has the ability to remedy the plaintiffs’ claims and return energy policy back to what it was before the executive orders were issued.

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ The Heroes of Chernobyl, Who Saved Europe From Nuclear Fallout

    The men seen suiting up in the photo were not professional divers, but power plant employees who knew the facility's layout: Alexei Ananenko, a mechanical engineer who knew where the release valves were located; Valeri Bespalov, a senior engineer who assisted in the search; Boris Baranov, the shift supervisor whose job was to provide light for the others.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Doc Searls ☛ Watching the Strait

      The red arrowhead shapes are tankers in motion. The green ones are container ships in motion (or underway, as they say). Small green arrowheads are general cargo or bulk carriers in motion. The red and green dots are the same kinds of ships, but not in motion. Note how those are clustered on either side of the strait. Click on any of them for more info. Zoom out and look around the world to learn more types of ships, where they are headed, and more.

    • Connor Tumbleson ☛ Main Character Syndrome

      Some cars are not about letting that individual in to combat the behavior which turns a turn based zipper merge into an aggressive stop and go traffic jam. It just becomes exhausting to consistently watch traffic degrade because of the actions of a few, because when you play simulations of common traffic patterns - it works. What every simulation doesn't account for is the main character energy that some folks exhibit.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Digital Camera World ☛ 13 camera traps, 6.5 years, and 1 rare clouded leopard: Photography once again helps wildlife conservation as researchers set a record for the longest a single animal has been studied | Digital Camera World

      And now, thanks to a network of camera traps and, of course, the researchers analyzing the footage, a rare Sunda clouded leopard has been tracked for a record-breaking 6.5 years across the forest of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo.

• Finance

  • Spectator AU ☛ France takes its 129 tonnes of gold out of New York

    France has sold its 129 tonnes of gold being held in the New York Federal Reserve and purchased an equivalent amount now held in Paris’ La Souterraine underground vault. This represents 5 per cent of its total global gold holdings which is around 2,437 tonnes.

    This happened in the last half of 2025.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • HRW ☛ 2026-04-10 [Older] Thailand: Security Agency Implicated in Attack on Muslim Lawmaker

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Nation ☛ How Iran Won the Meme Wars

      Social-media posts likening the current conflict to movies starring Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson clearly aren’t working; nor are Truth Social posts showing Trump to be Jesus. The propaganda coming out of the White House is clearly a case of preaching to an ever-shrinking choir. It’s red meat that might feed the MAGA faithful, but only repels the non-MAGA majority.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ The FAA’s “Temporary” Flight Restriction For Drones Is A Blatant Attempt To Criminalize Filming ICE

    In practical terms, this TFR means that anyone flying their drone within a half mile of an ICE or CBP agent’s car (a DHS “mobile asset”) is liable to face criminal charges and have their drone shot down. The practical unfairness of this TFR is underscored by the fact that immigration agents often use unmarked rental cars, use cars without license plates, or switch the license plates of their cars to carry out their operations. Nor do they provide prior warning of those operations.

  • Techdirt ☛ Section 230 Is Dying By A Thousand Workarounds, And Massachusetts Just Added Another One

    Now, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has gone even further. In a unanimous ruling in Commonwealth v. Meta Platforms, Inc., the state’s highest court has denied Meta’s motion to dismiss the state attorney general’s lawsuit, holding that Section 230 does not bar claims that Meta designed Instagram to be addictive to children, lied to the public about the platform’s safety, failed to properly age-gate underage users, and created a public nuisance. The court’s reasoning provides a clean, easily replicable template for any plaintiff anywhere to plead around Section 230, and it does so by mangling the statute’s text and ignoring key words while drawing a distinction between “content” and “content presentation” that collapses under even the slightest scrutiny.

  • Techdirt ☛ Whoops: Russia’s Attempt To Block VPNs Causes Major Banking Failure

    And when shitty, surveillance-happy governments try to block or degrade the use of VPNs, bad things can happen. As Russia found out recently when a ham-fisted effort to block VPN users from accessing Telegram resulted in a massive outage for online banking across the entire country.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Gulf media crackdown sanitizes images of the war

    The blackout coincided with increasing pressure from UAE authorities — initially seen as targeting social media users — to control the news coming out of the country.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Hindustan Times ☛ ‘Apologise for lies’: Trump slams NYT over Iran war coverage, insists Iran ‘obliterated’

    The editorial argued that Trump bypassed congressional approval and allied support in launching the February 28 attack, failed to anticipate Iran’s likely response, and damaged US alliances and global standing.

    It also pointed to Iran’s move to restrict traffic through the Strait of Hormuz as a predictable consequence, while condemning Trump’s war rhetoric as harmful to America’s moral authority.

  • BBC ☛ US judge dismisses Trump defamation suit against Wall Street Journal

    Trump sued the newspaper and its owners, including Rupert Murdoch, in a Florida federal court over a birthday book for Jeffrey Epstein.

  • Deseret Media ☛ Judge throws out Trump's defamation case against Wall Street Journal

    A judge dismissed President Donald Trump's defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal. The judge said Trump failed to meet the 'actual malice' standard required for public figures.

  • CJR ☛ VOA’s Legal Fight for Independence - Columbia Journalism Review

    Late last month, four employees joined with Pen America and Reporters Without Borders to sue the administration over allegations that President Trump and his political appointees at the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees VOA, had censored their coverage, transforming the newsroom into a “partisan mouthpiece of the administration” and breaching a congressionally created editorial firewall. Codified under the 1994 International Broadcasting Act, the firewall is meant to prevent “interference by any US government official in the objective, independent reporting of news.”

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ For Roman Workers, Life Was Nasty, Brutish, and Short

    Our images of the Roman Empire are dominated by the monuments and lifestyles of wealthy urban elites. An important new history shifts our attention to the 90% of Rome’s population whose brutally exploited labor made it all possible.

  • Securepairs ☛ Open Letter To Colorado Senators: We’re Cyber Experts: This Bill Is Bad For Security.

    On behalf of Secure Repairs (securepairs.org), a coalition of more than 400 cybersecurity and IT professionals we, the undersigned, urge you to vote in opposition to SB26-090, a bill to “Exempt Critical Infrastructure from Right to Repair.”

    As written, SB26-090 will effectively strip tens of thousands of Colorado businesses of their ability to repair and maintain their own IT equipment – things like servers, routers, switches and firewalls. And it will deny them the benefit of a healthy and open marketplace for repair service providers. That will weaken Colorado’s existing right-to-repair protections leading to higher operating costs for Colorado businesses and other harmful consequences for cybersecurity, and market competition.

  • Wired ☛ Meta Is Warned That Facial Recognition Glasses Will Arm Sexual Predators

    The coalition, which includes the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Fight for the Future, Access Now, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, is demanding Meta kill the feature before launch, after internal documents surfaced showing the company hoped to use the current “dynamic political environment” as cover for the rollout, betting that civil society groups would have their resources “focused on other concerns.”

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Pre-Teen Terrorists: FBI’s New Target

    Federal counterterrorism law requires a nexus to violence or material support for it; “being a radicalized child” is not a crime. So rather than acknowledging that it is effectively targeting a juvenile population, the FBI routes its investigations through platforms where they congregate. Gaming platforms — Roblox, Minecraft, Discord — have become the main target of government scrutiny. The FBI says it isn’t investigating children; it’s investigating violent criminal networks that happen to recruit on children’s platforms.

  • Dr Molly Tov ☛ the billionaires don't understand how reasonable our terms are

    The Epstein class does not understand how reasonable our terms are.

    The vast majority of people agitating for change aren't asking for a fundamental shift in the US's social, economic, policy, or monetary systems. They're not calling to abolish private property or guillotine the billionaires. They are, largely, not calling for an end to the hegemony of the US petrodollar. In fact, most agitators' demands boil down to two incredibly tame, milquetoast, reasonable things: [...]

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Operation Dildo Blitz

    Anti-ICE Protest in Minneapolis Ends With 50+ Arrests: [...]

  • Common Dreams ☛ 'Operation Dildo Blitz' Anti-ICE Protest in Minneapolis Ends With 50+ Arrests

    Demonstrators hurled insults and sex toys at federal agents outside a Minneapolis government building on Saturday to protest the Trump administration's deadly Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown on undocumented immigrants and their supporters, with state and local police arresting more than 50 people.

    Dubbed "Operation Dildo Blitz," the protest outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building saw demonstrators place sex toys in a chain link fence while others handed out rubber phalluses to protesters who threw them at passing federal and local law enforcement vehicles.

  • HRW ☛ 2026-04-07 [Older] Sudan: Arbitrary Detention by Army, Security Forces

  • Keep out of employment issues, solicitors tell SRA

    The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has been told to leave employment issues such as bullying, harassment, discrimination and sexual misconduct to law firms and the courts.

    Birmingham Law Society urged the regulator “to do less and do it better”, including stronger triaging of reports to ensure that “spurious or vexatious complaints are dismissed at an early stage”.

    Cary Whitmarsh, chair of its professional regulation committee, said: “The committee is firmly of the view that that the SRA should do less and do it better by focusing resources on the areas of greatest risk to consumers and to the rule of law, rather than expanding into areas outside its core remit.”

  • Law Society Gazette ☛ Birmingham solicitors tell SRA to stop policing bullying and sexual misconduct

    The Solicitors Regulation Authority has been urged to shed its perception as a draconian force and leave aside issues that can be dealt with by firms - or the courts.

    Birmingham Law Society wrote to SRA chief executive Sarah Rapson last week to set out how the regulator can start to rebuild trust and confidence from within the profession.

    The society’s professional regulation committee called for a culture shift from the organisation in the way it handles solicitors and in the type of conduct on which it chooses to focus.

    Cary Whitmarsh, the committee chair, said that while the SRA should be the guardian of high standards in the profession, too often it has been seen to be a ‘draconian organisation lacking understanding or empathy for hard working legal professionals’.

  • Law firm fails in appeal against £68k fine for AML failures

    A law firm run by an ex-Law Society president has failed in an appeal against a £68,000 fine imposed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) for anti-money laundering (AML) failures.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • RIPE ☛ The Internet’s Trust Architecture

    The Internet’s core, rooted in open standards and unique identifiers, has always depended on trust. That trust is part of what makes coordination possible across distributed actors, shared systems, and diverse institutions. Looking at the Internet in these terms may help explain why similar technical developments advance unevenly across different communities, and why the conditions around coordination matter as much as technical ambition.

  • Wired ☛ The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril

    This month, USA Today published an excellent report that revealed how US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement delayed disclosing key information about the impacts of its detainment policies. The authors used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to compile and analyze detention statistics from ICE and track how the agency had changed under the Trump administration. The story is one of countless examples of how the Wayback Machine, which crawls and preserves web pages, has helped preserve information for the public good. It was also, Wayback Machine director Mark Graham says, “a little ironic.”

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • EFF ☛ The Dangers of California’s Legislation to Censor 3D Printing

    California’s bill, A.B. 2047, will not only mandate censorware — software which exists to bluntly block your speech as a user — on all 3D printers; it will also criminalize the use of open-source alternatives. Repeating the mistakes of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies won’t make anyone safer. What it will do is hurt innovation in the state and risk a slew of new consumer harms, ranging from surveillance to platform lock-in. California must stand with creators and reject this legislation before it’s too late.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Amazon is turning 2 million old Kindles into bricks this May

    The models on the chopping block span the device's entire early history: the original Kindle from 2007, the DX, the Keyboard, the Touch, the 4th and 5th-generation Kindles, the first Paperwhite, and the first two generations of Fire tablets and Fire HD. Some of these devices have been supported for 14 to 18 years. After May 20, owners of affected e-readers can still finish whatever's saved locally, but the Kindle store goes dark: no new purchases, no borrowed titles, no fresh downloads.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Amazon upsets ebook lovers by ending support for old Kindle devices

    Devices released during or before 2012 will no longer receive updates from 20 May, affecting owners of older Kindles, including the earliest models such as the Touch and some Fire tablets. It is thought that 2m e-readers could be affected.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • CBC ☛ 2026-04-10 [Older] BJ Birdy is back with the Blue Jays. That's news to its creator

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Paris Court Issued Simultaneous Site Blocking Orders Against ISPs, DNS Resolvers and VPNs

    In a series of simultaneous rulings, the Paris Judicial Court ordered ISPs, VPN providers, and DNS resolvers to block access to 35 sports piracy sites. The orders were requested by Spanish football league LaLiga, which lacked standing as a foreign entity under French law. LaLiga licensee beIN Sports France had to intervene in the cases and secure the blocks in its own name.

  • The Verge ☛ Justin Bieber’s YouTube Coachella set had nothing to do with who owns his music

    “That’s not how this works,” says James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. “That’s not how any of it works.”

    When Bieber sold his back catalog, Recognition took over publishing copyrights and master recordings, according to The Hollywood Reporter. But Grimmelmann explains that the “relevant copyright here is the public performance right in the songs.” Those rights are administered by performance rights organizations (PRO), and venues like Coachella will enter into agreements to license an entire repertory from the organizations so that “performers can then perform any song from the catalog.” While Recognition Music Group may now hold the right to get royalties from those licenses, Bieber “never needed to own those rights to be able to perform them in any situation covered by PRO licenses.”