Leftovers

• ARRL ☛ Amateur Radio to Participate in DoD Armed Forces Day Crossband Test on May 9, 2026

  Amateur radio operators will participate in the Department of Defense’s Armed Forces Day (AFD) Crossband Test on May 9, 2026. The annual event will not impact any public or private communications.

• Jim Grey ☛ Your blog is a radio station

  Your blog is a radio station.

  Every time you publish a post, you are programming your station. You are choosing what goes into rotation. Some post types are your familiars, the topics and themes readers already associate with you. Some are deeper cuts, things that matter to you but may not matter to everyone. Some are experiments, signals sent into the dark to see if anyone recognizes them.

• Science

  • Brandon Rozek ☛ Expectations are Linear

    What does your intuition say the answer is? Justin continues by stating that computing this expectation is as easy as summing their individual expectations. $$ E[X + Y] = E[X] + E[Y] $$ In other words, expectations are linear. I recommend reading his entire blog post. It’s great and also talks about how this property is used in databases today. After a high-level explanation, he says: [...]

• Career/Education

  • Noel Rappin ☛ When Books Could Code #1: Design Patterns

    I’ve spent my whole career fascinated by writing about programming. How do programmers explain what we are doing to each other? How have books written about programming changed the way we work and think? So now I’m writing about programming books.

    If you think this is somewhat elegiac for the Era of the Programming Book, as the co-author of a 700 page programming book in an era where there will be roughly zero new 700 page programming books, yeah, kinda.

    So this series, “When Books Could Code” (alluding, obviously, to the “If Books Could Kill” podcast, making my title the faint echo of somebody else’s joke, which somehow seems appropriate).

• Hardware

  • Daniel Estévez ☛ Decoding the NB-IoT downlink

    While writing this post, I have been referring frequently to the paper A Tutorial on NB-IoT Physical Layer Design, by Matthieu Kanj, Vincent Savaux, and Mathieu Le Gue. This is an illustrated and concise introduction to the NB-IoT physical layer which is much easier to follow on a first read than the 3GPP TS documents. The TS documents still need to be consulted for many of the details.

    The signal structure depends on whether the cell is FDD, TDD or NTN FDD. Here I will be treating only the FDD case, which is the most common for NB-IoT, because that is what is used in my recording. Additionally, there are some differences depending on whether the NB-IoT carrier is placed in-band (that is, inside the resource element raster of an LTE carrier), or in the guardband or standalone. These differences boil down to the fact that for in-band operation the NB-IoT signal needs to avoid resource elements which are used by the LTE CRS (cell-specific reference signals) and the control region, which occupies the first 1 to 3 symbols of each subframe depending on the configuration. My recording is of a guardband cell, so I will only treat this case.

  • Works in Progress Magazine ☛ The world’s most complex machine

    Advanced semiconductors are, arguably, the most important technology in the world. Over the last five years, they have even emerged as a geopolitical flashpoint between the US and China. But for all this rivalry, any country or company that hopes to manufacture semiconductors is dependent on a single firm: ASML. Dubbed ‘a relatively obscure Dutch company’ by the BBC in 2020, ASML makes the only machines in the world capable of stenciling the transistors onto chips with the precision necessary to fit billions on a 30-centimeter wafer.

    These machines are roughly the size of double-decker buses. To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. They are the world’s most complex objects. Each contains over one hundred thousand components, all of which have to be perfectly calibrated for the machine to produce light consistently at the right wavelength.

  • Denis ☛ The West Forgot How to Build. Now It's Forgetting Code

    In March 2023, the EU promised Ukraine one million artillery shells within twelve months. European production capacity sat at 230,000 shells per year. Ukraine was consuming 5,000 to 7,000 rounds per day. Anyone with a calculator could see this wouldn’t work.

    By the deadline, Europe delivered about half. Macron called the original promise reckless. An investigation by eleven media outlets across nine countries found actual production capacity was roughly one-third of official EU claims. The million-shell mark wasn’t hit until December 2024, nine months late.

    It wasn’t one bottleneck. It was all of them. France had halted domestic propellant production in 2007. Seventeen years of nothing. Europe’s single major TNT producer was in Poland. Germany had two days of ammunition stored. A Nammo plant in Denmark was shut down in 2020 and had to be restarted from scratch. The entire continent’s defense industry had been optimized for making small batches of expensive custom products. Nobody planned for volume. Nobody planned for crisis.

    The U.S. wasn’t much better. One plant in Scranton, one facility in Iowa for explosive fill, no domestic TNT production since 1986. Billions of investment later, production still hadn’t hit half the target.

  • [Old] Markus Wandel ☛ My Homemade PBX

    I did gain access to a lot of junked electronic components that would allow me to build complex projects. Also I had learned about microcontrollers which allow the construction of smart electronic projects. And lastly, I had begun to frequent suburban garage sales, where telephones of every description were plentiful and cheap. The stage was set to finally build my own dial telephone system. I spent several months of evenings and weekends on this, in the 1992-93 timeframe. I didn't draw a schematic for it, but I will give here what information I have in my notes or can remember.

    This is intended for educational and/or entertainment purposes. In no way is it sufficient information to duplicate the circuit. Perhaps it will satisfy the next person who asks about it after reading the brag reference I inserted into this old Usenet posting.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-14 [Older] The world ditched wasteful toilets, the US stayed behind

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-14 [Older] Sudan: Iran war prompts 'massive' food, fuel price rises; drones kill hundreds of civilians in 2026

  • Project Censored ☛ 2026-04-15 [Older] Fewer Vaccine Mandates Result in Fewer Doctor Visits for Kids

  • Michał Sapka ☛ Simulating linear TV for The Kid

    And let me interject for a moment and note that I attempt to show him older shows. The pacing is slower, the stories deeper, the humour smarter. Yes, sure - not everything new is bad, but it's much easier to pick and choose from infinite library of old than to hope they didn't Netlix this new, random show. He will have time to get the brainrot, but armed with context of older titles. Our current library is surprisingly long: [...]

  • Yle ☛ Doctor urges "nature prescriptions" for patients

    In a clinical study, Kolster and other researchers had 79 adult primary care patients in Sipoo take part in either a nature group or a conventional exercise group over eight weeks.

    Many of the participants had diabetes or symptoms of depression.

    The results showed that both groups experienced improvements in physical health, but the nature group stood out on one key measure, which was sleep. As many as 61 percent reported sleeping better.

• Proprietary

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-04-13 [Older] Apple Has a Fake Ledger App Problem After Musician Loses a Decade of Bitcoin Savings

  • Microsoft wants 8,750 workers gone — and its 'Rule of 70' reveals exactly who's on the chopping block

    Silicon Valley has a job-security problem. The tech sector has ramped-up voluntary layoffs since Google's Platforms & Devices buyout in January 2025. For the first time, Microsoft appears poised to board the train of tech companies offering buyout packages to employees.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Waymo Baffles Police When it Plows Through Taped Off Crime Scene

      The latest incident from the company happened late Wednesday night in Harlesden, a burg in Northwest London. Police had closed a road in order to investigate a grisly double-stabbing, blocking off the street with crime scene tape and flashing squad cars.

    • Futurism ☛ Your Former Employer Is Selling Your Slacks and Emails to Train AI

      Founders of defunct startups are more than happy to do business with RL gym builders, and middlemen have emerged to facilitate these transactions. SimpleClosure, a company that styles itself the “TurboTax of shutting down,” recently launched a new tool called Asset Hub that allows moribund companies to sell off their Slack archives, emails, and libraries of code, and supposedly anonymizing that data before it finds a buyer. Its CEO Dori Yona told Forbes that it’s processed nearly 100 deals for defunct companies in the past year, recovering over $1 million dollars for their founders.

    • The Register UK ☛ Tokenmaxxing isn't an AI strategy

      You could start with the token, the basic unit for selling the input and output of AI models at the moment. The price of tokens has been much on the mind of developers using AI subscription plans because plan providers like Anthropic and GitHub have been pushing customers away from token-subsidized subscriptions toward pay-as-you-go consumption.

    • The New Stack ☛ The disappearing AI middle class

      In 24 hours last week, OpenAI and DeepSeek made opposite bets on what frontier AI is worth. One says it is a closed product that just got more expensive. The other says it is open infrastructure that just got dramatically cheaper. The price gap between the two ends of the market is now wider than it has been in years, and the comfortable middle that most coding agents have been routing through is thinning out.

  • Social Control Media

    • Seth Godin ☛ Bad money…

      Social media platforms fall into a trap like this when they seek to grow. For example, at the beginning, Substack had a very high signal to noise ratio–plenty of good ideas and so readers were happy to expect that an email from them or recommendation from the platform was worthwhile. It didn’t get put in the spam or promo folder, because it wasn’t spam.

    • NPR ☛ The surprising origin of 4 features that superglue kids — and adults — to screens

      These features create a kind of superglue on the apps, says cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll at New York University, who has pioneered research in this field. "They keep us spending more time on these apps and spending more money. They drain us of our energy and ourselves." Understanding these features offers parents a rubric for evaluating how harmful an app or device may be for kids, Schüll says.

      During the trial in California, the attorney bringing the case accused Meta and Google of designing their apps to behave like "digital casinos." That's an apt comparison, according to Schüll's research, because major design elements of social media have surprising roots in the gambling industry.

• Security

  • Critical Vulnerability Exposes Linux Systems To Root-Level Takeover

    A newly disclosed security flaw affecting Linux systems has raised fresh concerns about the integrity of core package management infrastructure, after researchers revealed that a vulnerability lurking for over a decade could allow attackers to escalate privileges and gain root-level control.

  • Security Affairs ☛ 12-year-old Pack2TheRoot bug lets Linux users gain root privileges

    ‘Pack2TheRoot’ flaw lets local Linux users gain root via PackageKit. CVE-2026-41651 (8.8) has existed for nearly 12 years.

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Kelby Ludwig ☛ You don't want long-lived keys

      This setup is, admittedly, toilsome. Don't distribute that toil to everyone. You can concentrate that effort into a group that is incentivized to be rigorous and solve it once, for everyone. Reducing toil and consolidating rigor is a major advantage of robust security infrastructure.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Tinder Scanning Users' Eyeballs to Prove They Aren't Creeps

      Tinder is partnering with Scam Altman’s World project to let its users prove they’re real humans, in just about the creepiest way possible: scanning their eyeballs with a Cyclops-looking orb.

      The initiative, carried out by Altman’s startup Tools for Humanity, was announced last Friday, and represents a major foray for the biometric verification startup, which has struggled to catch on amid numerous controversies.

    • NPR ☛ The Supreme Court case that could redefine your digital privacy

      Geofencing allows the government to draw a virtual fence around a geographic area where a crime was committed. After that, the government seeks a warrant — not to search a home or office, but to require a tech company to search its data to identify any of its millions of users who were within the geofence line at the time of the crime.

  • Confidentiality

    • [Old] CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: 09 Nov 2022 Delegating trust is really, really, really hard (infosec edition)

      These companies are so opaque and obscure that it might be impossible to ever find out what's really going on, and that's the point. For the web to have privacy, the Certificate Authorities that hold the (literal) keys to that privacy must be totally transparent. We can't assume that they are perfectly spherical cows of uniform density.

    • [Old] Princeton University ☛ Turktrust Certificate Authority Errors Demonstrate The Risk of "Subordinate" Certificates

      Today, the public learned of another failure by a Certificate Authority–one of of companies that certifies SSL-encryption for our internet communications. (See the end of this post for a catalogue of our past writing on problems with this “CA” system.) This time, the company Turktrust was revealed to have issued two subordinate certificates (also known as “intermediate” certificates) to entities that should not have had them. Subordinate certificates are very powerful. They give the holder the ability to issue SSL certificates for any domain name as though they have control of the parent CA’s “root” certificate. In this case, Google discovered that one of Turktrust’s previously undisclosed subordinate certificates had issued SSL certificates for the domain gmail.com, and that these certificates had been used to intercept Gmail users’ traffic… somewhere. This is where the details get foggy, but Turktrust has begun to describe their version of events.

      There is a less paranoid and a more paranoid way of interpreting what happened.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Predicted: Cole Thomas Allen, gay or transgender boyfriend rumours

    What appears to be an attempt to assassinate the US President Donald Trump has dominated the news today. There are numerous people on social control media suggesting the suspect, Cole Thomas Allen, may be gay or transgender, like the Zizian problems. Some people make comments about a handwritten note left for his transgender partner.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-13 [Older] Australia appoints first female army chief

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-18 [Older] Displaced by Iran war: out of Lebanon, into Syrian crisis

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-13 [Older] France: Ex-Lafarge CEO jailed for funding Syrian jihadists

  • University of Michigan ☛ 2026-04-13 [Older] Students Organize for Syria hosts Threads of Heritage: Syrian Textiles as Living History

  • Robert Reich ☛ Sunday thought: Last Night's Correspondents Dinner

    There is a close relationship between Trump and violence — not just the attempts on his life but also the violence he’s unleashed on the world, the violence his ICE and Border Patrol agents have caused inside America, the violence he has incited among his followers. (A few of last night’s attendees were in Congress on January 6, 2021 when Trump’s thugs attacked the U.S. Capitol.)

    Trump’s violence has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries. That is no justification for last night’s attack, of course, but it is part of what he has wrought in America. He has changed the script in Washington.

  • Ipswich News ☛ Has Suffolk been put in Russia's crosshairs?

    A road running through RAF Mildenhall has appeared on a list of European sites that Russia's defence ministry has described as potential military targets — just months after one of Ukraine's leading drone manufacturers opened a factory there. We examine what that means, and what it does not.

  • Project Censored ☛ 2026-04-13 [Older] US Militarism in Latin America and Corporate Colonialism in Honduras

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • JURIST ☛ Ontario passes law shielding provincial ministers' records from information requests

    Bill 97, also known as the Plan to Protect Ontario Act (Budget Measures), contains several statutes and amendments to implement its fiscal budget. Also contained in the bill is an amendment to the provincial Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which protects Ontario citizens’ right of access to government records with limited exceptions. The amendment passed on Thursday adds subsection 65(18) to the act, excluding government records held by a minister or their office from the scope of the act. As the amendment removes records held by cabinet ministers and their offices from the legislation altogether, privacy protocols and safeguards in the legislation no longer apply to these records.

• Environment

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 40 years after Chernobyl: Pripyat today

    When Reactor 4 exploded on April 26, 1986, the city had only existed for 16 years. Pripyat was made up of 160 buildings, with 13,500 apartments, 15 kindergartens, and five schools.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Chernobyl's wildlife: The real story isn't the presence of radiation, it's the absence of humans

    Forty years after the Chernobyl explosion, the controversy over how the accident affected people and ecosystems goes on. I've been studying the environmental impacts of the disaster since I began my Ph.D. research in 1990 on radioactive fallout in the English Lake District. Scientists have learned a lot since then, with thousands of studies published.

    But the mainstream and social media remain rife with misinformation and exaggeration about the accident's effects. Scientists often blame the media for this, but maybe we should put some of the blame on ourselves.

  • Western Water ☛ Western drought deepens across Colorado River Basin

    As of April 25, 2026, conditions across the basin reflect a familiar pattern: limited precipitation, expanding drought coverage, and growing concerns about long-term water supply.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-14 [Older] Lufthansa pilots to strike again for 2 more days, leading to a full working week of disruption

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-04-15 [Older] Solar panels won’t slash energy bills on their own – an expert explains how to maximise savings

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The University of British Columbia ☛ Raccoons solve puzzles for the fun of it, new study finds

      Researchers used a custom multi-access puzzle box with mechanisms such as latches, sliding doors or knobs. The box had nine entry points, grouped as easy, medium and hard. In Each 20-minute trial the puzzle box contained a single marshmallow, yet raccoons often continued opening new mechanisms after eating it, a clear sign of information-seeking.

      “We weren’t expecting them to open all three solutions in a single trial,” said Griebling. “They kept problem solving even when there was no marshmallow at the end.”

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-14 [Older] New whale sighting on German-Danish border

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-14 [Older] Colombia approves cull of Pablo Escobar-legacy wild hippos

    • The Revelator ☛ 2026-04-14 [Older] Insects Are Disappearing — Here’s How to Help

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-04-15 [Older] How to tell if your dog is in pain (and what to do if they are)

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-14 [Older] China: Evergrande property developer founder pleads guilty

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-04-16 [Older] How to Make Housing More Affordable

  • Vox ☛ 2026-04-17 [Older] What to do about burnout at work

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-14 [Older] South Korea sentences 90‑year‑old woman for money laundering

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-14 [Older] Spanish PM Sanchez' wife charged with corruption

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-14 [Older] Spanish premier calls for a stronger bond between China and EU on Beijing trip

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-14 [Older] Spain: Sanchez government finalizes amnesty plan for undocumented migrants

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-04-17 [Older] ‘Financial Pawn of the Saudi Monarchy’: House Judiciary Opens Probe Into Jared Kushner

  • TruthOut ☛ 2026-04-17 [Older] House Judiciary Investigating Jared Kushner’s Investments From Saudi Arabia

  • Futurism ☛ Tesla Quietly Buys Mysterious $2 Billion Entity

    Outside Tesla senior leadership, that’s all anybody seems to know — it isn’t clear what the mystery company is even named, let alone what it does or why Tesla is paying $2 billion to snatch it up.

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ The Case for Climate Champion Tom Steyer in the California Governor's Race

    Right now every voter who cares about climate and human rights should first focus on the mess this jungle primary hands us: the top two candidates go on to the general election, and if the Democratic vote in this blue-violet state is spread too widely the two Republicans could be those top two in the November election. But Steyer is currently one of the top two Democratic candidates. In 2016, I said voting is a chess move, not a valentine. I believe that Steyer is the right chess move for California voters. If he wins, we might be able to checkmate the fossil fuel industry at last and improve the life of so many Californians treated like pawns.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Ritual

    Trump returned to the White House briefing room within the hour. He said, of the long list of figures who have been targeted in attempts on their lives, that they’re the big names, and I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot. He used the moment to advocate for the construction of his new ballroom, which he said in a Truth Social post would never have happened in had it been built already. He has not, at the time of this writing, expressed any concern for the populations his administration has spent the past year designating as enemies of the state. He has not expressed any reflection on the relationship between the rhetoric he has been producing for ten years — vermin, enemy within, the dehumanization of his political opponents as a campaign strategy — and the fact that an American citizen, with apparently sufficient grievance against his administration, walked up to a security checkpoint with three weapons and a manifesto.

  • Michael Green ☛ So tired

    It was a heck of a week. The old faithful Transports index blew up. An index in existence since 1896 did something truly unprecedented — it completely diverged from the broader market. If you bought the actual Transport index (price-weighted) versus the IYT ETF, you made an extra 20%: [...]

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Assassin Wasn’t on FBI’s Radar, Sources Say

    Cole Allen was never flagged by the FBI’s sprawling domestic counterterrorism apparatus, sources including a senior FBI official tell me. The 31-year-old alleged gunman who attempted to penetrate the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday was, by all appearances, a normal guy — until he wasn’t.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-14 [Older] Germany debates rape law to tackle AI and online abuse

    • Matt Birchler ☛ 600% is the new 2 + 2 = 5

      Or as someone else famously put it: [...]

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • EFF ☛ 2026-04-13 [Older] War as a Pretext: Gulf States Are Tightening the Screws on Speech—Again

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-04-17 [Older] American Prisons Restrict Free Speech

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-04-19 [Older] From BBC to ICE Detention: The Arrest of Yousof Azizi and the Collapse of “Free Speech”

  • HRW ☛ 2026-04-17 [Older] India: Proposed Rules to Expand Online Censorship

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Political prisoners are dying in Russian prisons and detention centres

    Three anti-war activists have died in custody over the past month, bringing the total to five since the start of 2026. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the number of people imprisoned on political or anti-war charges who have died behind bars has reached dozens.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Nuclear physicist Dmitry Bogmut gets 7 years in prison for “fakes” about the Russian army

    Journalists report that pro-government media outlets have exerted pressure on his supporters. In July, the state news agency TASS published the surnames and initials of St Petersburg residents who attended court hearings in his case, citing a source who described them as “pro-Ukrainian activists”.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-04-17 [Older] How to be a Dissident… or Not

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-15 [Older] Women's workwear: When proper fit becomes a safety issue

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-04-18 [Older] YouTuber Faces Jail Time After Attempting Contact With North Sentinel Tribe and Offering a Diet Coke

  • CS Monitor ☛ What’s ethical for undercover operatives? Anti-hate group entered gray zones.

    Since at least the 1960s, paid informants have been used not just by local and federal law enforcement but also by nonprofits across the political spectrum. These groups, including the SPLC, a well-known civil rights advocacy group, use such informants to build civil cases against extremist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Google Uses Cox Ruling to Kill Last Copyright Claim in Textbook Piracy Lawsuit

      Google is trying to put an end to the copyright liability claim in its textbook piracy battle with several academic publishers. In a motion for partial judgment filed in a New York federal court, Google argues that the recent Supreme Court ruling in Cox v. Sony has effectively killed the copyright liability arguments. That is, unless the publishers can prove Google specifically "induced" infringement or built a service "tailored" exclusively for piracy.