Leftovers

• [Repeat] Ruben Schade ☛ Handwriting

  If there’s a big grey muscle in my head involved in reading this stuff, maybe I need to get into the habit of reading more human words. I wonder how one would go about that in the modern age?

• Pete Brown ☛ Living in someone else’s art

  I can appreciate what Frank Lloyd Wright was trying to do with his architecture, and the buildings and spaces he created are spectacular. Walking through the house, though, I found myself repeatedly thinking how miserable drafty and cold it must have been throughout most of the year with its 147 single-pane windows. Our tour guide eventually noted that even with the boiler cranked and all the fireplaces going, the interior temperature never got above 56F in the winters.

• Nicolas Magand ☛ April 2026 blend of links

  I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Actually Handed Over. – Deleting my LinkedIn account a few years ago is still one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life, and today when I’m asked why I am not on LinkedIn, I tend to answer with “Why are you on LinkedIn?”, and the words “pile of garbage website” may come out too, if I’m being polite.

• The New Leaf Journal ☛ Attending to Surroundings and Thoughts on Walks

  I came across a long-form essay in Aeon by Carlo Iacono, a university librarian, titled Books and screens. Mr. Iacono argued against the idea that phones and other modern technological innovations are driving us toward a post-literate society. I would broadly break his argument into two parts while otherwise encouraging you to read it and reach your own conclusions. Firstly, he compared the fear that technology is leading to a post-literate society to critiques of other “changes in how knowledge moves through society,” covering everything from 19th century periodicals to 20th century comic books. Secondly, he argued against the belief that “literacy [is] primarily about decoding text,” and favoring instead looking at literacy as a multi-domain phenomenon encompassing books and long-form texts, podcasts, videos, and more. The issue, he suggests, is not different ways of absorbing knowledge, but choosing “[b]etween habits that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.”

• Kevin Boone ☛ Self-hosting and steamrollers in the small net

  If you just want to maintain your own website, there are many ways to do that at low cost. If you want to host your own Gemini capsule, or gopherhole, or Misfin mail server, you’ll need a platform to do it on. Because the small web/net is relatively quiet, and not a war-zone like the regular web, you might wonder whether it’s sensible to host these services yourself, rather than paying a commercial host. But wait: there are no commercial hosts for any of the small-net servers. So self-hosting is the only alternative to relying on the generosity of those folks who make their own facilities available to like-minded enthusiasts.

  If you do want to self-host, your choices essentially amount to: [...]

• Dave Gauer ☛ Finishing Things

  This was originally supposed to be a pretty short note. But it turned out I had a bunch of related thoughts all tangled up. And once I started to tease them apart, it became something much longer. This could have been half a dozen separate Cards. (As a matter of fact, some new cards did arise.)

• Dave DeGraw ☛ How I Compute (2026)

  I have a custom-built NAS/media server. It lives down in my networking closet. It has an Intel i3-10105, 8 GB RAM, and 4x 8 TB HDDs in a RAID 5 configuration, for a total usable size of 24.00 TB. After playing with a few NAS operating systems, I finally settled on OpenMediaVault. It strikes the right balance of convenient web UI on top of a basic Debian host that I can still SSH into and do whatever I need to do. The kids in the Bullpen are all hyped on Proxmox and I’m kind of envious but for now I’ll keep it as is. It primarily hosts Plex, but also hosts WireGuard for a road-warrior setup (run all traffic through WireGuard when connected to a remote network). WireGuard has served me quite well and I feel a lot better about using foreign networks to do “real” work. I’ve even upgraded the firmware on my home router remotely which was quite thrilling! I also run a few other Docker containers such as Caddy (reverse proxy so I can just go to https://server.home instead of IPs and ports, which is mostly to get Safari to remember unique credentials better), dynamic DNS worker for WireGuard, Immich to backup iCloud photos, and Syncthing to automatically pull in my latest DVD rips when I add something to my primary machine. I find OMV’s Docker offering to be good enough. I used to use Portainer to manage it with a web UI, but OMV added their own and it works well enough for me. It’s been fun to play around with random Docker containers for various things like a Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force server.

• Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-04-13 [Older] What is the chance of a message in a bottle being found?

• Career/Education

  • Jim Mitchell ☛ Sometimes Wrong is Right

    So try to relax and let go of the fear of failure. Looking foolish will only last a little while. Being afraid to choose because you don’t want to fail ends up lasting a lifetime – and by then, you have failed.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Analog Circuitry Lets You Blow This LED Out

    LED candles are neat, but they’re very suboptimal for wish-making: you can’t blow them out. Unless you take the circuit from [Andrea Console]’s latest project that lets you do just that, using only analog electronics— no microcontroller in sight.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The New Lede ☛ EPA ignored plea to tighten restrictions on a controversial weed killer, lawsuit claims

    The lawsuit, filed April 20 by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), asks the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to require the EPA to respond to a 2018 petition that calls on the EPA to ban the use of glyphosate for drying out crops before harvest and to lower the level of glyphosate residue allowed to linger on oats from 30 parts per million (ppm) to just 0.1 ppm. The EPA has never responded to the petition, which was filed by EWG and a group of food companies and grocers.

    The lawsuit focuses on the EPA’s current “maximum residue limit” (MRL) for glyphosate in oats, which are widely eaten by children in cereals, cookies and other products, and alleges the limits do not adequately protect children’s health.

  • Dr Molly Tov ☛ what's growing in my garden this year

    I have started seeds and early planting, so I also started a list. I have four times the available full-sun garden space this year, and I fully intend to use it.

• Proprietary

  • Microsoft may announce massive layoffs in the coming weeks

    The spectre of layoffs continues to haunt the gaming industry and the tech world at large. Microsoft may well be the next to take action by letting go of a significant portion of its workforce.

    In a post on Blind, a user mentions the layoff of 15% of the American giant’s staff on May 5 or June 6, 2026. The person did not specify whether the date 6/5 should be read as May 6 or June 5.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Proprietary stacks are failing enterprises when they need flexibility the most

    The industry’s recent trajectory has made the stakes clear. Many technology providers are moving toward proprietary stacks at precisely the moment customers need the opposite — flexibility that does not come at the cost of durability. SUSE S.A. has staked its position on that gap, with open source’s low barrier to entry and capacity to adapt serving not just as a philosophical preference, but as the foundation of operational resilience, according to Peter Smails (pictured), general manager of cloud-native at SUSE.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Mac OS X Shipped 25 Years Ago

    That original Aqua interface came with a cost, as John Siracusa wrote in his review of the operating system: [...]

  • Macworld ☛ John Ternus is not inheriting your father's Apple

    Ha-ha! No, that’s not it. It’s that in the middle of writing this column that was going to be about the MacBook Neo, Apple announced that Tim Cook would be turning over the reins to John Ternus as of September 1st of this year, and now the Macalope has to somehow make what he’s already written make sense in the context of this executive change. This is extremely rude timing on the part of Apple. Very inconsiderate. The Macalope sleeps a full third of the day. Is it so hard to issue big announcements while he’s asleep?

    Anyway, let’s see if we can take the ingredients on hand and make a meal.

  • Vidit Bhargava ☛ Where I want Apple to go in the next 15 years

    Today’s world however is much different from 1997 or 2011. It’s not an era where people are new to technology or computers. Everyone young grew around it. The novelty of the tech is gone. In fact, the last few years of the software industry in general have been so trust eroding that people no longer see tech and tech companies with rose tinted glasses.

  • Rich Trouton ☛ Apple enforcing stricter network security requirements for future versions of Apple’s platform operating systems

    In a future version of Apple’s various OS platforms, which include iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS, Apple is going to be enforcing stricter controls on Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections. (These connections may also be referred to as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections, as SSL is the now-deprecated technology that TLS was built on.)

    This change could come as soon as the next major operating system release, which would mean the following operating systems: [...]

  • Nick Heer ☛ Breaking Up Is Hard for E.U.

    The red alert push for digital sovereignty is really only about a year-and-a-half old, at most, and it is remarkable what E.U. countries have been able to achieve in that time. Yet it is a fraught and challenging operation, regardless. These big U.S.-based companies are deeply embedded into everything we do and a clean break was never going to be possible, in large part because it is not designed to be easy. That is not to say it is deliberately designed to be difficult — despite the consumer-level evidence offered by Amazon’s Prime cancellation procedure — only that there are few incentives to help users leave.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ The Quadrant Was Now Complete

    He didn’t just say how great products were the focus. Apple actually delivered a string of them, both hardware and software. And you could tell that he understood why they were good.

  • Six Colors ☛ MailMaven review: An email nerd’s best friend?

    The bigger question is the issue I mentioned at the outset. How long will MailMaven abide? It’s a small, scrappy company that persisted past Apple pulling the rug out from under plug-ins. It’s not a startup, and they invested years to get to this point.

    But the market is cruel. Will it MailMaven around in six months, a year, five years—dare I hope for 10 or 20? Having developed a better pathway for migration for my archives, it might be that I have to think of MailMaven as a foster dog, rather than me providing a forever home.

  • Patrick D Stephen ☛ AI has another security problem

    How expensive do you think it is to find exploits in closed source systems? It must be substantially less expensive: The depth of security in any system is a product of the number of eyes and hands that system has passed over. Each user of an open source system is one more possible misconfiguration that leads to a revelation of a problem to solve in an open library, and each year the code spends open is another year of eyes skimming or scanning the project identifying improvements and flaws.

    Closed source software doesn’t have any of these benefits. No one who is using it is going to be able to freely draw a line from a failure they notice to a problem in the code, and layers of support teams between the users and the engineers who could look at the code will further hamper open discovery of problems.

  • Mullvad VPN ☛ Force all app traffic into the tunnel

    A year ago, we wrote about how bugs in Apple's networking stack are preventing the iOS app from being as secure as possible. The bugs are still there, but we have secured our app anyway.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Age AU ☛ Florida State University shooting: Attorney-general investigates ChatGPT’s role in advising alleged gunman Phoenix Ikner

      “Now, of course, ChatGPT is not a person, but that does not absolve our office and my prosecution team from our duty to investigate whether there is criminal culpability here.”

    • Bhaskar English ☛ Anthropic's Claude Mythos: New AI Threatens Internet Safety

      According to Anthropic, Mythos discovered vulnerabilities that were 27 years old in OpenBSD and 16 years old in FFmpeg. Experts fear that hackers could misuse such tools to target hospitals, networks and critical infrastructure. In this situation, experts emphasize that cyber security should be made default, not an option. Companies will have to include security measures in their software from the beginning, so that risks can be controlled in this new era of AI.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Anthropic nuked a company's access to Claude, stopping 60 employees dead in their tracks — support via Google Form is the only recourse for vague usage policy violation

      The shutdown happened last Friday, with the only communication from Anthropic being the presumably automated email, with zero details about exactly which rules were broken and how. Turning off the Claude tap for Belo meant that 60 employees were dead in the water, as reportedly their daily workflows rely on the AI assistant's integrations, skills, and conversation histories.

    • The Verge ☛ AI backlash is coming for elections

      More than 60 percent of both Republicans and Democrats polled by Ipsos earlier this year agree that the government should regulate AI for economic stability and public safety, and that the technology’s development should slow down. Still, “when you just ask folks, ‘what’s on your mind?’ AI and data centers aren’t rising to the top of the list — at least not yet,” says lead pollster for Ipsos Public Affairs Alec Tyson.

    • Simon Späti ☛ AI Reveals Why BI Still Matters

      Ask a BI engineer what they actually spend their time on: it’s not building dashboards. More often: fixing the join that broke in the overnight pipeline, untangling the metric definition that means three different things to three different teams, or getting last week’s numbers into an Excel by Monday morning. The dashboard was always the easy part.

      This article looks at how BI evolved, how dashboards are actually used today, and what survives when AI enters the picture — starting with the foundation that was never really about dashboards in the first place, and ending with the problem nobody in the AI hype cycle wants to talk about: who maintains it all.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Meta Tells U.S. Staff It Is Going to Start Surveilling Their Every Digital Move for A.I. Training

      If this were happening at any other company, it would be an alarming violation of workers’ expectations. But since it is Meta, I am sure employees, even those who are captive, will be reassured by the pinky promise limited scope in using this information.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Is Data De-Identification Dead?: Why the AI Privacy Risk Isn't What It Learns, But What It Figures Out

      In 1997, an MIT graduate student named Latanya Sweeney stunned the privacy world by matching publicly available voter rolls with hospital records stripped of names and addresses to identify the supposedly anonymous medical history of the then-governor of Massachusetts. Three years later, she expanded on that finding by demonstrating that 87 per cent of the U.S. population could be uniquely identified using just three data points: ZIP code, date of birth and gender.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Russia demands a sovereign AI

      Russia particularly wants to stop the malign influence of foreign chatbots. In July 2025, Russia and Belarus proposed an official Russian-language chatbot — trained on local data and embodying “traditional values.”

  • Social Control Media

    • EFF ☛ Copyright and DMCA Best Practices for Fediverse Operators

      This post gives an overview of the steps to take. It’s meant for operators of Mastodon and other ActivityPub servers, Bluesky hosts, RSS mirrors, and other decentralized social media protocols, and developers of apps for those protocols — but it will apply to other hosts as well. This isn’t legal advice, and can’t substitute for a consultation with a lawyer about your specific circumstances. It focuses on U.S. law — the law may impose different requirements elsewhere. Still, we hope it helps you get started with confidence.

    • Wired ☛ Meta Is Sued Over Scam Ads on Facebook and Instagram

      While many online scams involve direct outreach to victims by scammers (who are often themselves human trafficking victims trapped in scam compounds), CFA’s lawsuit focuses on fraudulent advertising that CFA alleges Meta profited from and allowed to "proliferate on its platforms,” despite publicly promising that it takes cracking down on fraud and scams seriously.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Dark Reading ☛ Exploits Turn Windows Defender into Attacker Tool

      Three proof-of-concept exploits are being used in active attacks against Microsoft's built-in security platform; two are unpatched.

    • Yle ☛ Finnish police suspect espionage in major state data breach

      As Valtori publicly reported the breach on 6 February, it said that personal data had been compromised, including people's names, work email addresses and phone numbers. Additionally technical information about the mobile devices had also been compromised, as well as country-level location information.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Futurism ☛ Jeff Bezos' Botched Space Launch Was So Bad It Could Threaten NASA's Entire Moon Program

    It wasn’t just an embarrassing setback following over a decade of the launch vehicle’s development, either. It also could imperil NASA’s ambitious plans to return astronauts to the Moon, experts warn.

• Security

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ A security update for Raspberry Pi OS

    Today we are releasing version 6.2 of Raspberry Pi OS, the second update to the Trixie version we released last year. This update is mostly a round-up of all the small changes and bug fixes we have made over the past few months, but there is one significant change that we’d like to flag up: passwordless sudo is now disabled by default.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ Palantir Has a Human Rights Policy. Its ICE Work Tells a Different Story

      For years, EFF has pushed technology companies to make real human rights commitments—and to live up to them. In response to growing evidence that Palantir’s tools help power abusive immigration enforcement by ICE, we sent the company a detailed letter asking how the promises in its own human rights framework extends to that work.

      This post explains what we asked, how Palantir responded, and why we believe those responses fall short. EFF is not alone in raising alarms about Palantir; immigrants' rights groups, human rights organizations, journalists, and former employees have raised similar concerns based on reports of the company's role in abusive immigration enforcement. We focus here on Palantir’s own human rights promises.

    • The Register UK ☛ UK weighs break clause in Palantir NHS deal

      Speaking before a heated debate in Westminster Hall, Zubir Ahmed MP, junior minister for the Department of Health and Social Care, said the £330 million contract between one of the world's largest healthcare providers and the controversial US spy-tech firm could end short of its planned seven years owing to a break clause next spring.

    • Dark Reading ☛ WhatsApp Leaks User Metadata to Attackers

      Tal Be'ery knew that I was online the night before I called him. He knew what kind of device I was using. I didn't share this information with him. All he had was my phone number.

    • The Local Stack ☛ I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Actually Handed Over.

      For a three-minute identity check, this is what Persona collected: [...]

      Persona didn’t just use what I gave them. They went and cross-referenced me against what they call their “global network of trusted third-party data sources”: [...]

    • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Exclusive: ICE Glasses

      The Department of Homeland Security is developing specialized smart glasses that will allow federal agents on American streets to automatically identify “illegal aliens” from a distance, budget documents reveal.

      These new ICE Glasses, building on available glasses that allow video recording and heads-up data display, will be able to pulse vast federal holdings of biometric data — from facial recognition to walking gait — to identify people in real-time.

    • Don Marti ☛ We still have time to save the halo effect

      I’m still on about the attribution cartel, and got in AdExchanger again: What Happens When The Attribution Cartel Meets Advertising’s Halo Effect? Last time they let me cover The Hidden Dangers Of Privacy-Preserving Attribution (plot twist: it’s a privacy menace) and this time it’s all about the halo effect.

      What’s the halo effect? It turns out that in a world where social science results are hard to replicate, and marketing results even harder, one consistent effect is that ads work better in trusted contexts.

    • Ava ☛ interesting data protection/tech stuff lately

      When you talk to people about data protection and privacy, what they are usually thinking of are social media, ads, and agreeing to share information with 1557 partners in a cookie banner. It's all about the evil big guys. Child surveillance is less in the spotlight, and what's often forgotten is how supposedly "normal" school tech can put child and parent in danger.

    • The Globe And Mail CA ☛ Peter Thiel's Billion‑Dollar Bet on Palantir: What His Roughly 4% Stake Really Means for Investors

      That large stake also showcases that one of the most noted thinkers in modern technology still believes Palantir's best days are ahead. To appreciate why this matters, let's examine who Thiel is and what his decision implies about the company's durability in its two core markets.

    • The Motley Fool ☛ From PayPal to Palantir: What Peter Thiel's Track Record Means for Patient Shareholders Today

      Yet both companies were co-founded by Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley's most prominent investors. Let's look back at Thiel's involvement in these two companies, how much he profited from those stakes, and what his track record might mean for long-term investors.

• Defence/Aggression

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-04-19 [Older] US Brain Drain: FBI Expert, Lawmakers Warn Of 'Suspicious' Deaths Among Top National Security Scientists

  • RFERL ☛ Rachel Ehrenfeld: Why Targeting Iran's 'Shadow Economy' Hits The IRGC Where It Hurts

    In an interview with RFE/RL, Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the American Center for Democracy and the Economic Warfare Institute and author of multiple books on terrorism financing, said the IRGC's economic reach is not incidental but rather a crucial foundation of its power.

    She argued that targeting infrastructure and commercial activity directly affects the regime's military capabilities.

  • ADF ☛ Islamic State Attacks Eastern DRC Mines

    The Muchacha mine in the eastern Ituri Province employs thousands of workers, both Chinese and Congolese, and was protected by the 311th Battalion of the Congolese Army (FARDC) under a contract with the owner, China-based Mimia Mining.

  • ADF ☛ Boko Haram, ISWAP Target Military Bases

    The attacks were the latest in a string of more than a dozen terrorist attacks on military outposts in Borno and Yobe states since the beginning of 2025. The attacks have killed dozens of Soldiers and multiple high-ranking officers. Terrorists have also launched deadly assaults on civilians across the region.

  • Truthdig ☛ Why We Don’t Need Billionaires

    The Economist piece is just looking at the ridiculously rich people of the last century and a half and implying that the innovations they are associated with would not have taken place otherwise. That is a logical leap bordering on absurdity.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Big Tech Quietly Demanded Immunity for Working With TikTok

    After Congress banned Big Tech from working with TikTok, major tech firms like Apple and Google privately requested the Trump administration assure them they wouldn't be prosecuted under the law. The president happily granted them full amnesty.

  • WEMU FM ☛ Some Democrats call for nominating Michigan Secretary of State, Attorney General candidates via primaries

    Some Democrats are calling for Michigan to switch from party conventions to primary elections to choose candidates for statewide offices, such as Attorney General and Secretary of State. That’s after a raucous party endorsement convention this past weekend.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Man Who Cannot Stop Talking About Killing

    Then I went back and read it again, slowly, against the larger record of what Karp has said in public over the last two years, and I realized the document was not stupid. It was diagnostic. And the thing it was diagnostic of is not an idea, or a policy program, or even a political orientation in the ordinary sense. It is a psychological display. A man in one of the most consequential positions in the American defense-intelligence ecosystem has been, for the better part of two years, showing us something about himself.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Comrade Trump (20 Apr 2026)

    All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly weird. On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery, as Trump and his chud army of Christian nationalists and degenerate gamblers pursue a program of gleeful genocide. But at the very same time, I'm living in a world in which Trump is (inadvertently) dismantling many of the worst aspects of the old order in favor of something decidedly better.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • The Record ☛ 2026-04-18 [Older] Ukrainian emergency services and hospitals hit by espionage campaign using new AgingFly malware

    • CBC ☛ 2026-04-18 [Older] Gunman who killed at least 6, took hostages in Ukraine supermarket shot dead by police

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-18 [Older] Ukraine: Gunman kills several people in Kyiv

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-18 [Older] Ukraine: Gunman shot dead after killing spree in Kyiv

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-04-17 [Older] EU Commissioner urges defense union with Ukraine

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-04-16 [Older] President Zelensky receives top Four Freedoms Award for Ukraine’s war-time resistance

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-14 [Older] Germany's aid to Ukraine faces challenges

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-14 [Older] Germany, Ukraine discuss drone deal as Merz hosts Zelenskyy

    • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-04-13 [Older] Don’t Forget Ukraine

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-04-19 [Older] Dockworkers Against Russia’s and Israel’s Wars

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-18 [Older] US extends waiver allowing purchase of Russian oil

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-04-17 [Older] Robots just captured a Russian position in Ukraine – but don’t worry about real-life Terminators just yet

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-17 [Older] US military in Libya: Pursuing unity, or pressuring Russia?

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-04-16 [Older] Dutch company Destinus on Russian list of "possible targets"

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-16 [Older] India faces energy squeeze as US ends Iran, Russia oil waivers

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-16 [Older] Several killed in Russian strikes across Ukraine, many more injured

    • CBC ☛ 2026-04-15 [Older] Russian strikes kill 16 across Ukraine in worst attack this year

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-15 [Older] Germany, the UK warn the Iran war distracts from Ukraine and oil price rises help Russia

    • The Local SE ☛ 2026-04-15 [Older] Pro-Russian group attempted to attack Swedish heating plant

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • International Business Times ☛ Sarah Ferguson Allegedly Using 'Burner Phones' To Evade US Lawmakers While Hiding In Austrian Alps

    Sarah Ferguson is allegedly using secret 'burner phones' while keeping a low profile in the Austrian Alps, where the former Duchess of York has reportedly been staying for months as US lawmakers push for her testimony in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, according to a royal commentator.

  • BBC ☛ The insider trading suspicions looming over Trump's presidency

    It found a consistent pattern of spikes just hours, or sometimes minutes, before a social media post or media interview was made public.

    Some analysts say it bears the hallmarks of illegal insider trading, whereby bets are made by people based on information that is not available to the general public.

• Environment

  • The Highland Times ☛ Inverness Castle to Showcase Sustainable Future on Earth Day - The Highland Times

    The project has focused on reducing environmental impact while preserving the historic character of the castle and strengthening its connection to the Highlands.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Earth Day: 2 years after HK's single-use plastic ban, no sign of Phase 2

    However, with Earth Day on Wednesday marking the second anniversary of the ban, there is no word on when the next phase will be rolled out. It was originally meant to be implemented last year.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Warming waters in the Gulf of Maine may affect the future of lobsters

    With a rapidly changing climate, many researchers worry that Maine’s lobsters will eventually move north to colder waters. Brown isn’t so sure, though, seeing all of the forces affecting the ecosystem as highly complex. His studies in marine biology and policy, along with his continued work as a lobsterman, have helped him understand that the lobster industry depends upon various factors, some beyond man’s control.

  • TruthOut ☛ A Data Center Is Getting a $77 Million Tax Break. It Promises to Create 1 Job.

    On a February morning in 2024, a little-known agency in Rockland County held a public hearing on a proposed subsidy for the expansion of a JPMorganChase data center in Orangeburg, near the New Jersey border. In return for nearly $77 million in tax breaks, the project promised to create exactly one permanent job.

    No one showed up. After 20 minutes of silence, an agency official called the meeting to a close. Two weeks later, the subsidy deal was approved.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Photographer and conservationist Jon McCormack: "Earth Day is a time to reflect, notice and pause"

    Earth Day takes place on April 22 this year, and is a show of support for environmental conservation and protection – a reminder of the responsibility that humankind has to safeguard the planet for future generations. (For more information about the day, and how to get involved, visit www.earthday.org).

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Wired ☛ Ben McKenzie Says [Cryptocurrency] Has a Secret Ingredient: Male Loneliness

      On April 16, about 100 people gathered at event partner Ace Hotel Brooklyn to sip drinks from Aplos, Faccia Brutto, The Sorting Table, and Manojo and ponder the future of cryptocurrency.

    • Peter Rukavina ☛ Peter Rukavina's Blog

      Our longest daily distance on our upcoming cycle through Belgium is just over 60 km, so we’re going to gradually work to increase our training distance as the trip draws nearer.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Vatican vs. Mar-a-Lago

    “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.” As thousands of believers filled St Peter’s Square in the Vatican for the rites of Palm Sunday this year, Pope Leo XIV chose to include in his homily these words that God speaks at the beginning of the Book of Isaiah. In the context of his brief homily, it was the last of several Bible verses Leo chose to illustrate the idea of “Jesus, King of Peace.” But in the context of the Trump administration’s ongoing war on Iran, it was immediately understood as a direct rebuke to a prayer service led by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon a few days earlier, in which he had besought the Almighty for “overwhelming violence.”

  • The Register UK ☛ Europe picks 4 sovereign cloud providers, but one has Google

    But this was criticized last year by CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe), a trade association of 38 of the region's cloud firms. It claimed that the Framework's criteria are drafted so vaguely as to favor incumbents – meaning the big American operators that already dominate Europe's cloud market.

  • Nick Heer ☛ That Was Tim, This Is Ternus

    The Tim Cook story at Apple is an almost poetic arc. Upon arrival, he fundamentally overhauled the way its products would be made, primarily by moving manufacturing to Japan, Taiwan, and China. This groundwork is what allowed him to transform the company when he arrived as CEO, growing it into a global behemoth and working within China to create the best and most precise electronics manufacturing chain anywhere. And that became a problem for him. The Chinese government was able to use that as leverage, and the tie-up became politically untenable in the United States, too. Cook’s precise supply chain management directly led to his appeasement of strongmen.

  • New York Times ☛ A Wish List for John Ternus, the Man Replacing Tim Cook as Apple’s CEO

    Many of the best-selling products unveiled during Mr. Cook’s tenure — namely iPhones, Macs and iPads — were iterations of past Apple hardware. At the same time, most of Apple’s new products, such as the HomePod smart speaker and Vision Pro headset, were reactions to similar gadgets from rivals and either too flawed or too late to make a dent in the tech universe.

    I found Mr. Cook to be eloquent, charismatic and in command of the details of his company when I interviewed him, but it has been a long time since Apple has had a new, mainstream product hit.

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ Apple bets on John Ternus to reignite innovation

    John Ternus joined Apple in 2001 and currently heads hardware engineering, overseeing the design of the iPhone, Mac and other flagship products. According to Bloomberg, his responsibilities were expanded in late 2025 to include oversight of both hardware and software design — a strategic role once held by Jony Ive and later by Jeff Williams, who was once touted as the future CEO before his retirement last summer. John Ternus has since emerged as the front-runner to succeed Tim Cook.

  • Six Colors ☛ That was Tim, this is Ternus: Some first thoughts on Apple’s CEO transition

    Tim Cook knows he can’t stay at Apple forever. The longer he lengthened his tenure as CEO, the shorter he risked making the transitional period. I’d actually be surprised if Cook isn’t in the executive chairmanship for a lot longer than people expect. I don’t think he’s ready to put Apple in the rearview—but I do think he’s trying to get the timing on this exactly right.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed” (21 Apr 2026)

    The book's starting point is that "Muskism" isn't merely the things Musk says, believes and does. It's the ideology that coalesces around him, from the people in his wake and the people he follows. Just as Henry Ford neither defined "Fordism" nor precisely practiced it, "Muskism" is centered on Elon Musk, but it's not Elon Musk's creation.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Tucker Carlson Apologizes for Supporting Trump Amid Iran War

    Carlson may claim his role in misleading the public about Trump was not “intentional,” but he’s contradicted by the combined force of years of public and private musings (made public after the fact) that lay out with stark clarity the disdain he felt for the president, even as he encouraged voters to forgive and forget the myriad of sins he committed against the nation.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Apology Not Accepted, Mr. Carlson

    Yes, you were misleading people, Mr. Carlson. And contra your characterization, it was very much intentional. We have the receipts of the intentionality that you deny. I will now go through those receipts because I think the record deserves a full accounting of your lies. Because, it turns out, you are lying even now.

    The word misleading is doing the entire work, and the word is a lie. Tucker Carlson did not mislead his audience. He lied to them. He lied to them knowing the things he was saying were false, said so explicitly in writing at the time he was saying them publicly, and continued saying them anyway because the alternative — telling the truth — threatened his business and his employer’s stock price. The record of this is not contested. It was produced, under oath, through discovery, in a defamation case his employer settled for $787.5 million rather than allow to reach trial. Every significant claim in what follows is drawn from text messages and emails that Tucker Carlson himself wrote, that Fox News was compelled to turn over, and that are now part of the public record of the United States.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Tucker Carlson skewered by The View for having ‘liar’s remorse’ after apology about Trump support

    The View’s panelists did not take kindly to Carlson’s apology. After a clip of his mea culpa played during Tuesday morning’s broadcast, Joy Behar uttered a simple, “Oh, please,” before Sunny Hostin jumped in.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Tucker Carlson formally apologizes for helping elect Trump, says that he will be “tormented by it for a long time” and he’s “sorry for misleading people.”

    It must be noted that while Tucker’s mea culpa on the issue of Trump should be welcomed, we cannot start trusting him more broadly. His reactionary, hateful worldview is what led us to this presidency. He continues to regularly push disingenuous talking points, racist beliefs, and outright lies. He is not and will never be our ally — but his turn against Trump offers invaluable insight into the Republican Party’s base.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • ADF ☛ Kremlin Used AI, Fake Author to Pass Off Propaganda

      OpenAI said it received a tip from Meta, which owns and operates Facebook, that a Russian network was targeting African audiences with content generated by its large language model application, ChatGPT. The app is trained on vast amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like language, code, and content

    • The Canary ☛ Iran Lego channel banned as US losing propaganda war

      Iran has proven to be incredibly resilient in their ability to defend themselves against the US and Israel’s war. Their resistance hasn’t been limited to the battlefield either. Surprising many, Iran has deployed wartime propaganda that’s even proving popular with their supposed enemies.

      This is no mean feat.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Journalists of the year: Kansas Reflector sweeps category in state press association awards

    For starters, Kansas Reflector staff dominated the journalist of the year category, finishing first, second and third. Senior reporter Tim Carpenter took that first place (just five months after being named to the Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame). Editor-in-chief Sherman Smith was in second, and reporter Anna Kaminski was in third.

  • Techdirt ☛ Kash Patel’s Defamation Suit Against The Atlantic Is Designed To Generate Headlines, Not Win In Court

    On Friday, The Atlantic published a truly devastating profile of Patel, reporting that “more than two dozen” current and former officials described a director who shows up to Ned’s in DC and the Poodle Room in Las Vegas to drink until he is visibly drunk, and who has been difficult to wake on occasions when his security detail needed him. There’s also this fun anecdote in the opening, talking about a time, earlier this month, when Patel had trouble logging into his computer: [...]

  • Press Gazette ☛ Judges body hits journalist with £14k costs bill for pursuing FOI request

    His long-running campaign against the JAC led to stories on topics including calls for a senior official for JAC, accused of misleading a court, to be questioned again and claims of bullying within the judiciary.

    Choudhury was shortlisted for the Public Service Journalism award at the British Journalism Awards in 2025 for his work.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Techdirt ☛ Judge Acquits Penis Costume-Wearing Grandma While Saying Some Dumb Stuff About Probable Cause

    You can watch the arrest in all of its ingloriousness below. It’s alternately comical and horrifying. Horrifying, because it involves officers assaulting a 62-year-old grandmother. Comical, because multiple attempts are made to fit the person and costume into a police cruiser before deciding it might be easier if the person and costume were separated… which then leads to an officer discovering it’s kind of difficult to shove a non-resisting inflatable penis costume into the truck of a police car.

  • Papers Please ☛ D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals keeps U.S. citizen on “no-fly” list

    The dissent from one of the two opinions tries hard to tease out a hypothetical procedural pathway to judicial review of a no-fly order in some circumstances. But the practical effect of this pair of decisions is that Mr. bin Khalid will have to fly to Mexico or Canada, then enter the U.S. by land, every time he he wants to return to the country of his citizenship. He will have to repeat that process in reverse to leave the U.S. and rejoin his family in Pakistan.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Webloc tracks 500 million phones for U.S. cops

    The ads on your phone aren't just selling you sneakers. They're a feed for anyone with a budget.

    Tucson cops wanted to nail a suspected cigarette-store thief who had been hitting the same chain. So they pulled up the location pings of every phone near each robbery, noticed one device that kept showing up, and followed it home. That phone belonged to someone who was dating an employee at the store that was robbed first. Catching the guy would normally require a warrant, a wiretap, maybe a subpoena. It required a subscription.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Digital Music News ☛ Live Nation Ticketmaster Ordered to Pay $9.9M Fine by D.C. AG

    On Monday, Washington D.C. Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb announced that Live Nation/Ticketmaster will be required to pay $9.9 million to settle allegations that its ticketing practices were misleading to customers and charged deceptive fees.

  • Patents

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Using the USMCA review to strengthen regional integration

      The trade agreement underpinning North American competitiveness and economic security is up for review in July 2026. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), approaching its sixth anniversary, is being revisited by the three parties through a joint review process that will determine whether the agreement is renewed for another sixteen years, is reviewed annually, or heads for termination in 2036.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Paramount Faces DMCA Whack-a-Mole as Leaked Avatar: Aang Movie Thrives on Pirate Sites

      Paramount’s attempt to contain the leaked 'Avatar: Aang, The Last Airbender' has transformed into a digital game of whack-a-mole. Despite sending numerous takedown notices, the film is now firmly embedded in the piracy landscape, highlighting the limitations of traditional anti-piracy measures once a high-profile leak comes out.

    • 404 Media ☛ This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright

      For a small price, Malus.sh will use AI to ingest any piece of software you give and spit out a new version of it that “liberates” it from any existing copyright licenses. The result is a new piece of software that serves the same function, but doesn’t have to honor, for example, the kind of copyright licenses that ensure open source software remains free to use and modify, a process which could upend the already fragile open source ecosystem.