Leftovers

• Vintage Everyday ☛ 30 Amazing Photographs From the Set of “A Night at the Opera” (1935)

  Before filming, the Marx Brothers took the script’s comedy sketches on a live vaudeville tour to test which jokes got the biggest laughs, ensuring the timing in the film was perfect. In 1993, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

• Science

  • BoingBoing ☛ Bacterial flagellar motor mechanism finally solved

    Creationists had long held up the flagellar motor as their prime example of "irreducible complexity" — a system too intricate to have evolved step by step. Manson sees it differently. "If you understand the proton motive force," he said, "you basically understand the underpinnings of all that happens in biology."

  • Quanta Magazine ☛ What Physical ‘Life Force’ Turns Biology’s Wheels?

    Berg guessed that the flagellar motor was a rotor that turned the flagellum like a screw. “He did it by sticking two cells together by their flagella and seeing them spinning in opposite directions from each other,” Manson said. “From that, with no knowledge, he hypothesized that the bacterial flagellum rotates. Way ahead of his time. That was 50 years before understanding how this motor works.”

• Career/Education

  • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Designing Libraries Conference – Save the Date!

    CNI is delighted to sponsor the next Designing Libraries Conference, along with NC State University Libraries and Tom Hickerson, Conference Founder. The conference will be hosted by University of Pittsburgh on October 18-20, 2026. Visit the conference website to sign up to receive an alert when registration opens. We are developing a dynamic program highlighting a wide variety of institutional projects. Participants will have the opportunity to tour the multi-year, multi-phase renovated Hillman Library and learn about new and expanded programs in the LEED Platinum facility.

  • Chris ☛ Understanding systems

    Here’s how I figured it out when I was tutoring. A lesson with me consisted basically of me repeatedly (a) selecting an exercise for the student from their book, and then (b) watching the student work through it.

  • Remy Wang ☛ Teaching Tricks

    Instead of making an AI use policy for homeworks, I don't grade homeworks, but give them quizzes that will be easy if they have done their homework, so they are self-motivated to actually do the homework.

    I make slides, but don't show them in class; the slides guide me when I'm writing on the blackboard, and also function as lecture notes for students to review. The blackboard slows me down and the students follow better.

  • Marty Day ☛ Worthy Read: “Do I belong in tech anymore?”

    Now, at 41, when I think of those who are into tech — I see a community that no longer matches the one I loved.

    Maybe we need to bring back that independent spirit to tech while we still can.

• Hardware

  • HowTo Geek ☛ Stop wasting drives on RAID 6—why I ditched it for RAID 5 in my homelab

    RAID 6 is the best form of RAID to run in a homelab, right? I don’t think so. RAID 6 might offer slightly more protection than RAID 5, but I prefer RAID 5 for my NAS systems—here’s why

  • Bhaskar English ☛ NASAs DSLR Choice: Nikon D5 on Artemis II | Space Mission Cameras

    These cameras are already producing stunning images. But what’s really surprising is the type of camera NASA chose for such a major mission. Instead of relying only on the latest mirrorless technology, NASA picked an older DSLR camera as its main shooter. Let’s understand why

  • [Repeat] Tom's Hardware ☛ Complex that supplies 70% of global critical PCB base targeted in Iranian strike — attack could fracture the already disrupted electronics supply chain

    In yet another blow to the broader industry, Iran hit the Jubail petrochemical complex in Saudi Arabia on 7th April, bringing the production of high-purity polypropylene ether (PPE) resin, a critical base material for manufacturing PCB laminate, to a complete stop.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ China announces CPU-only exascale supercomputer with 47,000 homemade processors, record 2 Exaflops of performance without GPUs — Lingshen super said to use Huawei Kunpeng servers and no foreign-made components

    Every other exascale system in operation relies heavily on GPUs or accelerator hardware. The U.S. Department of Energy's El Capitan, currently the world's fastest supercomputer, runs on 44,544 AMD MI300A APUs that tightly couple CPU and GPU silicon on a single package. Lingsheng’s CPU-only architecture would represent a fundamentally different approach to reaching exascale throughput.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Getting an xD card reader in 2026

    xD-Picture Cards, as they were officially named, were sold from 2002 to 2009. The format was developed by Fujifilm and Olympus for their digital camera lines, and manufactured by Samsung and Toshiba. They were sold with capacities between 16 MB and 2 GB, though I never saw anything with less than 1 GB in the wild. They were faster than first generation MMC and SD cards, but just like Sony’s MemoryStick they couldn’t compete with their economies of scale, rapid development, and wide industry adoption.

  • J B Crawford ☛ voice modems

    You've probably read enough of my writing to know where this is going: the design of cellular radios, which assume call audio to be part of Their Exclusive Domain, is a legacy of an age-old architectural decision traceable to the original Hayes Smartmodem. It relates to a feature of modems that was widely available, but sparsely used, for much of the PC revolution. The details are odd!

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ A ‘barbaric’ problem in American hospitals is only getting bigger | Analysis

    We had already learned the hard way that if you need admission to the hospital, you can remain in the emergency department — in the hallway or a curtained bay on a hard stretcher or in a makeshift holding area — for more than 24 hours, even for days, while waiting for a real hospital bed. In this limbo state, you’re technically admitted to the hospital, but still located in the physical domain of the ER. And the rules governing acceptable care and safety measures become much less clear.

  • Frontiers ☛ Infrasound exposure is linked to aversive responding, negative appraisal, and elevated salivary cortisol in humans

    Introduction:

    Infrasound describes sound wave frequencies below 20 Hz, which are typically imperceptible to humans. Some animals perceive and demonstrate aversion to infrasound, raising concerns about its potential adverse effects as an anthropogenic pollutant. Recent research suggests humans may also respond to infrasound, despite being below the conventional limit of human hearing. This study explored the non-auditory impact of infrasound on human mood and stress responding.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Study finds infrasound the likely horror in hauntings

    The new study, led by Kale R. Scatterty, Trevor J. Hamilton, and Rodney M. Schmaltz of MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta (with co-authors Dawson VonStein, Lisa B. Prichard, and Brian C. Franczak), set out to test whether infrasound exposure could measurably shift mood and stress physiology in humans, even if it was beyond the range of audibility.

  • Giles Turnbull ☛ gilest.org: Allotment engineering

    In recent years, I’ve developed a new interest in what I call allotment engineering: the clever structures that allotment holders build to support, protect and nurture their crops.

• Proprietary

  • Techdirt ☛ Amazon Gets Exemption From Trump FCC Router (Extortion) Ban, Doesn’t Say How

    Now Amazon is the latest to get an exemption for both its Eero consumer routers and its Leo low Earth orbit (LEO) routers. Amazon showed up on the exemption list, but again there’s absolutely no indication of what the company had to actually do to get it, or the standards the Trump FCC is using to determine what hardware can be trusted. An Amazon announcement is painfully vague: [...]

  • The Gray Zone ☛ The US tech giant where employees wear IDF uniforms to work

    Yacobi works in TurboTax’s trust and safety team which handles the most sensitive personally identifiable information of TurboTax customers and users.

    The whistleblower who provided me with this screenshot told me that since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, Israeli employees of California-based Intuit have, like Yacobi, been allowed to take as long as three or four months off work, often with minimal notice, to serve as reservists in the IDF.

  • BoingBoing ☛ GoDaddy domain transfer handed nonprofit to a stranger

    GoDaddy, the world's largest domain name registrar, transferred a 27-year-old nonprofit's main web address to a complete stranger 2,000 miles away. They didn't ask her for a single document to prove she owned it. Within four minutes, websites and email for all twenty of the nonprofit's chapter offices went dark.

  • So-Called 'Artificial Intelligence' ('AI') / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘They’re supposed to be handmade’: zine creators fight to resist AI influence

      “AI is eliminating a lot of people’s ability to think critically for themselves,” says Rachel Goldfinger, a Philadelphia-based video editor and illustrator who has published an anti-AI zine.

    • Futurism ☛ Waymo Has a Bike Lane Problem

      Consider Waymo’s track record in San Francisco, where Waymo faces mounting scrutiny over its bike lane policy. As Streetsblog notes, Waymo vehicles routinely pull into the city’s bike lanes both to pick up and drop off passengers — a phenomenon which is well documented on social media.

    • Futurism ☛ Police Are Using AI Camera Networks to Stalk Women

      The timing is striking, with the majority of the stalking cases coming after 2024 — the year when AI-ALRP company Flock Safety initiated a massive expansion into over 4,000 US cities. Though Flock is claims to have internal safeguards to prevent this kind of abuse, the bulk of the 14 cases were uncovered by the victims, as opposed to the company or internal police investigations.

    • Stephen Hackett ☛ CHATBOT Act Introduced in Senate

      The solutions proposed by the legislation aren’t bad, but they don’t go far enough. If usage limits and other safeguards have failed our young children when it comes to social media, these tools don’t stand a chance when it comes ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others.

      Legislation should not put all of the responsibility for safety on parents. AI companies need to be regulated, and their products need strict safeguards in place when they are used by children. This bill would forbid companies from using minors’ personal data for targeted advertising and require them to build some basic tools for parents, but it does very little to address the addictive and harmful aspects of these products.

    • US Senate ☛ Cruz, Schatz, Curtis, Schiff Introduce New Bill Giving Parents Control Over Kids’ AI Chatbot Use - U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation

      The Children’s Health, Advancement, Trust, Boundaries, and Oversight in Technology Act, or CHATBOT Act, would require AI companies to establish “family accounts” for parents to manage access and usage of AI chatbots by their children. AI chatbots would limit manipulative design features; require parental consent for chatbot usage and parental controls to access and monitor a child’s conversations with a chatbot; and prohibit targeted advertising to children. In addition, the bill would direct further study on potential chatbot-related harms to children and best practices for parents.

    • US Senate ☛ CHATBOT Act [PDF]

      A majority of American teenagers and a large percentage of children now report using AI chatbots. These tools can offer immense possibilities for education, creativity, and exploration. But they can also pose serious risks, when left unchecked.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ What Anthropic’s Mythos Means for the Future of Cybersecurity

      We see Mythos as a real but incremental step, one in a long line of incremental steps. But even incremental steps can be important when we look at the big picture.

    • Hidde de Vries ☛ Open web vs AI: what can W3C do?

      At last week’s W3C Advisory Committee meeting, I ran a breakout session on what to do about threats to the open web. We had an interesting conversation. Many interesting points were raised, and some disagreed the web needs saving at all.

    • The Conversation ☛ Half of AI health answers are wrong even though they sound convincing – new study

      That scenario is not hypothetical. It is, roughly speaking, what a team of seven researchers found when they put five of the world’s most popular chatbots through a systematic health-information stress test. The results are published in BMJ Open.

      The chatbots, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Meta AI and DeepSeek, were each asked 50 health and medical questions spanning cancer, vaccines, stem cells, nutrition and athletic performance. Two experts independently rated every answer. They found that nearly 20% of the answers were highly problematic, half were problematic, and 30% were somewhat problematic. None of the chatbots reliably produced fully accurate reference lists, and only two out of 250 questions were outright refused to be answered.

      Overall, the five chatbots performed roughly the same. Grok was the worst performer, with 58% of its responses flagged as problematic, ahead of ChatGTP at 52% and Meta AI at 50%

    • Don Marti ☛ slop “doctors” and the attribution cartel

      And I found another example of this kind of craving for bogus data: Half of AI health answers are wrong even though they sound convincing by Carsten Eickhoff. The chatbot habit is catching on with many people, even for medical advice. When you ask a chatbot about something you know, or can look up, you often get wrong answers. But the feeling of having a conversation about an issue, for those who can get that feeling from a chatbot, can be valuable, too.

      It’s safer and more reliable to seek medical info at the public library, where the person in the loop is bound by the code of the librarian, not the inexorable imperatives of the trust collapse bubble. But the chatbot is right there and provides that conversational experience, at least for some. Going to the librarian takes more effort, and a librarian won’t provide medical opinions or affirm your medical opinions, just recommend legit sources.

    • Declan Chidlow ☛ AI Terminology Is Poorly Defined and Oft Misused

      Te ultimate purpose of any jargon is to simplify communication. Rather than saying something super complex and informative, such as ‘Large-Scale Transformer-Based Natural Language Pattern Recognition and Generative Model’, we say ‘large language model’, and rather than ‘large language model’, we say ‘artificial intelligence’, and rather than ‘artificial intelligence’, we say ‘AI’.

      The International Standards Organisation has made an effort to standardise terminology in ISO/IEC 22989, but things are still lacking, and confusion is common.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Tokenmaxxing: “How much did you spend in tokens?” — CEO of tokens

      Jensen sells the cards the tokens run on. Anthropic lose several dollars on every dollar they make, but Jensen makes money when you burn out a few more Nvidia cards. This is the CEO of tokens telling you to spend more on tokens.

      On April 6th, The Information discussed Meta’s “Claudeonomics” leader board: [...]

    • The Independent UK ☛ Claude AI agent deletes company’s entire database

      PocketOS founder Jer Crane blamed “systemic failures” with modern AI infrastructure that made the issue “not only possible but inevitable”.

      The AI agent was working on a routine task, according to Mr Crane, when it decided “entirely on its own initiative” to fix the problem by just deleting the database.

      [...]

      “Reservations made in the last three months are gone. New customer signups, gone,” Mr Crane wrote.

    • One Happy Fellow ☛ Simulacrum of Knowledge Work

      Large language models are great at simulating a style of writing without necessarily reproducing the quality of the work. You can ask ChatGPT to write you a market analysis report and it will look and read like a deliverable from a top-tier consulting firm written by Serious Professionals.

      A software engineer can write thousands of lines of code which looks like high-quality code, at least if you have just a couple of seconds to skim through it. Their colleagues will ask AI to do a code review for them, the code review will uncover a lot of issues and potential problems, and these will be addressed. The ritual of working will be upheld with none of the underlying quality.

      We have built a working simulacrum of knowledge work.

  • Social Control Media

    • Press Gazette ☛ Australia to tax Meta if it doesn't pay news publishers

      The proposal is designed to address a loophole in Australia’s existing News Media Bargaining Code, which was intended to force the likes of Google and Meta to pay for news on their platforms.

      In 2024 Meta closed the Facebook News tab in Australia (as well as the US) and did not renew licensing agreements it had with news publishers. Meta also previously experimented with removing all news from Facebook and Instagram in the country.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Dark Reading ☛ 20-Year-Old Malware Rewrites History of Cyber Sabotage

      SentinelOne researchers uncovered fast16 while attempting to trace the earliest meaningful use of an embedded Lua VM in Windows malware. Lua is a scripting language that organizations use to extend an application's functionality. SentinelOne had observed how the authors of highly sophisticated malware frameworks such as Flame, Flame 2.0, PlexingEagle, and Project Sauron consistently embedded a Lua scripting engine to add modularity to their tools and wanted to see how far back the practice went.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ Congress Must Reject New Insufficient 702 Reauthorization Bill

      Section 702 needs to be reauthorized by Congress every few years. These reauthorizations give us a chance to tinker with the language of the law and introduce some much-needed reforms. This attempt at reauthorization has been particularly fraught, but there is still time for Congress to include real protection for Americans’ civil liberties and rights. We need to make sure that when an FBI agent wants to look through Americans’ conversations scooped up as part of a national security intelligence program, they need a warrant signed by a judge just as if they were trying to search your email account or your house.

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Papers Please! MPs back mass online digital ID checkpoints

      As age identification expands, millions more people may be required to hand over personal data to access everyday services. Open Rights Group has already warned that current systems pose “serious privacy and security risks”, including weak safeguards, data reuse, and fraud vulnerabilities.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Firefox IndexedDB flaw exposed users to cross-site tracking

      Researchers discovered that a built-in browser feature (called IndexedDB, which websites use to store data on your device) could leave behind a kind of hidden "fingerprint." This fingerprint wasn't erased when you clicked "New Identity."

• Defence/Aggression

  • NDTV ☛ Mira Road Stabbing, Mumbai Stabbing, ISIS: On Camera, Man Stabs Mumbai Guard After Asking Him To Recite 'Kalma'

    Police sources told NDTV Ansari demanded the guards - Rajkumar Mishra and Subroto Sen - recite the 'kalma' or 'kalima', which are the foundational doctrines of Islam. When the guards said they couldn't, he reportedly attacked with a knife.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Common Dreams ☛ New Report Exposes Trump Cryptocurrency Corruption

    The report states, “The Trump family's entanglement with Binance exposes a dangerous contradiction at the heart of U.S. foreign policy: The same exchange that built the infrastructure for and holds the vast majority of Trump's USD1 stablecoin has facilitated billions of dollars in transactions for Iran and designated terrorist organizations. The opacity that defines [cryptocurrency] isn't a bug. It's the feature that makes it useful to both speculators and sanctioned regimes, and the president of the United States is profiting from it.”

  • Dark Reading ☛ NSA Chief During Snowden Affair 13 Years Later

    Chris Inglis was the head civilian in charge at the NSA when the Snowden leak exploded. He gets candid about mistakes the organization made, and what CISOs need to know about spotting potential threats, media disclosures, and "enculturation."

  • Wired ☛ Stop Trying to Unmask Satoshi Nakamoto

    On this week’s Big Interview podcast, actor-director Ben McKenzie talks about the rise of [cryptocurrency], why he finds it dangerous, and why it benefits from having a mysterious creator.

• Environment

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Light pollution alters food webs along riverbanks, finds study

    Artificial light at night not only alters the landscape, but also profoundly disrupts natural ecosystems. A recent study by the RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau shows that light pollution can significantly disrupt the exchange of energy and nutrients between bodies of water and their surrounding habitats—sometimes even more than non-native species. Thus, lighting along riverbanks or streams can have far-reaching ecological consequences. These results are published in Functional Ecology.

  • The Register UK ☛ US pays wind developers to quit, back fossil fuel projects

    This isn't the first such development: last month, the DoI reached a similar deal with French ‌energy biz TotalEnergies to reimburse the company approximately $1 billion to give up its wind farm leases in Carolina Long Bay and the New York Bight area, suggesting that this may be an ongoing strategy.

    It appears that paying developers to surrender offshore wind leases has become a fallback strategy after President Trump's executive order halting new federal approvals for wind projects ran into legal challenges from a coalition of state attorneys general and was later struck down in federal court.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Why Maine Governor Vetoed Landmark Data Center Pause

    Maine Conservation Voters Executive Director Maureen Drouin stated that Mills’ veto sides with developers. “Across the country, the development of large-scale data centers has far outpaced the ability of policy and lawmakers to properly regulate them and establish sensible protections,” Drouin said. “Maine had a chance to push pause and establish the right regulatory framework to protect its people, their wallets and the environment from polluting, resource-hungry data centers. This veto flies in the face of that responsibility and the bipartisan will of the Maine Legislature, passing the buck to the next Governor to rein in large-scale data centers after they’ve arrived.”

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Henrique Dias ☛ Stepping Into The Car - Henrique Dias

      No, it wasn’t the hills, even though my driving school was literally at the bottom of one. That was a good way of learning to feel the biting point of the clutch. No. The problem was that I managed to have more than half of my lessons on rush hour in the morning.

      So busy. So many people. So many hills. Combined with the fact that I wasn’t doing it because I liked it. Not good. So I ended up getting the license mid 2019 and driving a car two or three times afterwards. Until last Saturday - spoiler alert -, I hadn’t driven for like 5 years.

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Dormant Digital Assets

      A transaction contains an unlocking script, proving that the private key owns the wallet, and a locking script that transfers coins to the recipient. Some script types reveal the public key and are thus vulnerable to an At-Rest attack, some reveal only its hash and are thus immune unless the script is re-used.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Digital Camera World ☛ YouTuber uses night vision camera to record footage of giant sea creatures 700ft below “Black Magic Island”

      On his latest project, Dillarstone dropped the camera to 700ft (213m) into the Indian Ocean off the coast of Nusa Penida, an island that forms part of the province of Bali, Indonesia, and is known to locals as “Black Magic Island.”

• Finance

  • Chris ☛ Donating to open source

    I have decided to start donating a small amount of my fun money to open source projects. After some research, the initial set of recipients are

    • Magit
    • Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund
    • XMonad

    These are important to me, they need more money, and I believe they can use donations well. If you disagree, I’d genuinely like to hear what mistakes I’ve made in the analysis below. I hope it shows that this is important to me!

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Bhaskar English ☛ AI Race Pressure: Microsoft, Meta & 98 Firms Cut Jobs | Tech Layoffs

    According to Layoff Dot FYI, which tracks employee layoffs in the technology industry, 98 companies have announced their intention to reduce more than 93,000 employees this year. OpenAI has changed its plan for a very large expensive infrastructure project. The company has abandoned its plan to build and operate its own data centers. Instead, the company will rent servers from existing cloud companies. This will have some impact on its balance sheet. Still, it may have to spend ₹56 lakh crore.

  • Futurism ☛ If You Thought Mark Zuckerberg Was a Pathetic Little Worm Before, Wait Until You Hear About His Latest Move

    And no, we’re not talking about his coldhearted choice to cut funding for a private Bay Area school that previously provided tuition-free education for low-income students, forcing it to lay off nearly 150 employees and permanently close.

    We’re talking about something arguably even more craven: a pathological unwillingness to use his vast wealth to contribute to society, as evidenced by his his decision to relocate to Florida as a California bill proposing a billionaire tax continues to gain considerable momentum in the Golden State.

  • New York Times ☛ Google Signs A.I. Deal With the Pentagon

    Google said on Tuesday that it had signed a deal to provide the Pentagon with its artificial intelligence models for classified work, amid a dispute between the Department of Defense and the A.I. start-up Anthropic over how to responsibly use the technology during war.

  • Aidan Walker ☛ "algorithmic gaze," continued

    From a macroeconomic perspective, war at this scale is a gross inefficiency — how many bridges and cars could have been built with the metal that made those bombs, how many inventions might have been made by the people who died in those trenches — but it is also a result of incentives that become misaligned with reality, and end up making people a lot of money.

  • Nick Heer ☛ ‘How Europe Regulated Itself Into American Vassalage’

    It is unclear what E.U. regulators ought to do with Pignal’s feedback. It seems very easy to say there are too many regulations and too much red tape. It seems much more difficult to explain which part of the environment, human and animal safety, customer rights, privacy, or good business behaviour must be sacrificed in the name of international competition.

  • Molly White ☛ No new trial for Sam Bankman-Fried

    Bankman-Fried had tried to withdraw his motion for a new trial, perhaps sensing that things were not poised to go in his favor after repeated questions as to whether his parents were writing his supposedly pro se filings for him, but Kaplan refused to let him slink away. Instead, he ruled on the merits and used the opportunity to condemn what he describes as Bankman-Fried’s ongoing, calculated campaign to rehabilitate his reputation — one that Bankman-Fried outlined in detail before he was even indicted.

  • BoingBoing ☛ How to skip a year of work without anyone noticing

    She doesn't think this is theft, exactly. Modern offices reward looking productive over being productive, she argues, so anyone paying attention optimizes for what gets graded.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Cole Allen Hated the Democratic Party, Too

    But as I’ve written, Luigi Mangione, Tyler Robinson and now Cole Allen were neither far-left nor on any partisan fringe. Instead, they were united in a sense of frustration with failed institutions defined by inaction — and a determination to embody the opposite through shocking spectacles of action. What nobody in power wants to admit is that the belief that institutions have failed is as mainstream as Taylor Swift, not the fringe radicalism of '70s outfits like the Weather Underground that pundits keep invoking.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ AI Agents Linked to OpenAI Are Pretending to Be Human Journalists

      A news website with apparent links to OpenAI is using AI agents that pose as flesh-and-blood reporters to get quotes from human experts — and many of its articles discuss the AI industry, pushing pro-AI arguments and attacking the tech’s critics.

      At least, that’s according to a provocative new investigative piece from The Midas Project’s Model Republic. The links to OpenAI are circumstantial yet eyebrow-raising; we reached out to the Sam Altman-helmed firm to ask about them, but didn’t hear back by press time.

    • The Gray Zone ☛ Israel’s AI foreign influence op blames Palestinians for killing Hind Rajab

      Israel has created nine English language websites explicitly aimed at manipulating AI platforms like Claude and ChatGPT. Its vehicle for maintaining these websites is Clock Tower X, a company founded by Brad Parscale, the former manager of President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign. Now a federally registered foreign agent, Parscale is the point man on a gargantuan contract aimed at reversing Israel’s public relations crisis by flooding online media with anti-Palestinian propaganda.

    • The Record ☛ Cyber Command, NSA chief warns foreign adversaries likely to target midterms

      Federal and state election officials have braced for potential online attacks every election cycle since 2016, when Russia unleashed digital and disinformation campaigns that the U.S. intelligence community eventually concluded were attempts to tilt the presidential race in favor of Donald Trump.

      Those concerns have grown since the start of the second Trump administration, with many policymakers and former national security officials accusing the White House of unilaterally disarming against potential foreign interference by shrinking CISA and gutting federal efforts that are supposed to combat mis- and disinformation.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • NDTV ☛ US Orders ABC License Review Over Jimmy Kimmel's Melania Trump Joke

    The US Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday ordered Disney to submit a license renewal application for its ABC local stations, several years ahead of schedule.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Donald Trump and Jimmy Kimmel's Feud: A Timeline

    It’s easy to forget that before he was a plague on our politics, Trump was a caricature for “American rich guy.” Three wives, lots of money, a golden toilet, and loads of opinions. He was a regular guest on talk shows, radio, and even late-night television.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ FCC Orders Review of ABC Licenses After Trump Demanded Kimmel Firing

    Parent company Disney is being ordered to refile for licenses for the eight stations it owns after the president and First Lady demanded the late-night host to be fired over a joke

  • Techdirt ☛ ‘Free Speech’ President Trump, Once Again, Tries To Get Jimmy Kimmel Fired For Jokes

    But, since then, both Trump and Carr have continued to look for opportunities to get Kimmel fired for his speech.

    In any normal world this would be a huge five alarm fire as an attack on the First Amendment. The president and his minions keep trying to get a comedian fired for his jokes because they are critical of the president. That’s not how any of this is supposed to work. But because Trump does it so often, almost everyone seems to just shrug and move on.

  • EFF ☛ The Open Social Web Needs Section 230 to Survive

    If you want to overthrow Big Tech, you’ll need Section 230. The paradigm shift being built with the Open Social Web can put communities back in control of social media infrastructure, and finally end our dependency on enshitified corporate giants. But while these incumbents can overcome multimillion-dollar lawsuits, the small host revolution could be picked off one by one without the protections offered by 230.

  • Wired ☛ Why Sharing a Screenshot Can Get You Jailed in the UAE

    The war in Iran has drawn attention to arrests in the United Arab Emirates over online content, but the legal framework behind that enforcement has existed for years.

  • The Verge ☛ The FCC is going after the broadcast licenses of Disney-owned ABC stations

    Disney wasn’t set to renew its broadcast licenses until 2028, according to NBC News. The entertainment giant controls ABC stations in eight major markets, including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia. Disney now has until May 28th to file license renewals for all of its ABC stations. Though the NYT notes that “it is extremely difficult for the government to take away stations’ rights to broadcast,” the FCC’s order marks a concerning escalation in its fight against Disney. If the FCC does block ABC’s broadcast license renewal, Disney would be able to challenge the decision in court while its TV stations continue broadcasting, the NYT reports.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Journalist Andrzej Poczobut freed from prison in Belarus in US-brokered swap deal

    The newspaper’s deputy editor-in-chief, Bartosz Wieliński, posted a picture with Poczobut, captioned: “The first kilometres of freedom. We’re heading to Warsaw.”

  • Arkansas Advocate ☛ Arkansas public television budget bill wins final approval in House

    The Arkansas public television network’s budget bill is headed to Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ desk after winning final House approval Tuesday, but an effort to use state funding to match donations aimed at keeping PBS programs faces an uncertain future.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ joins call for Turkey to repeal disinformation law for its use against journalists

    “Turkey’s disinformation law is structurally incompatible with international press freedom standards. Its language fails to define clearly what constitutes ‘untrue information’ or to specify what content poses a threat to national security or public order,” the statement said.

  • CPJ ☛ Turkey: IPI and partner organisations condemn escalating use of “disinformation law” against journalists and call for its repeal [PDF]

    The undersigned press freedom, freedom of expression, journalists’ and human rights organisations strongly condemn the intensifying use of Article 217/A of the Turkish Penal Code — widely known as the “disinformation law” — to arrest, detain, and prosecute journalists, and call on the government to repeal the provision immediately and release all journalists imprisoned under it.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘I don’t want to be part of a dictatorship’: the Americans queueing up to renounce their citizenship

    Almost everyone I spoke to for this piece wanted their names changed, and that’s with good reason. In very limited circumstances, the US government can reject your renunciation of citizenship altogether, but a much more common outcome is that you become a “covered expatriate”, which is a tax classification and a disaster financially – it lasts for ever, your children will be liable for US inheritance tax – but it also means you may be denied re-entry to the US or questioned at the border. If there’s anyone you love in the country who’s too ill to travel, it’s possible you’ll never see them again. And while, once you’re through the process – which most of these interviewees are – the US is not permitted to persecute you by law, few trust that this would stop it. Every quarter, a federal register of renunciations is published online; serving no practical purpose, the register feels vindictive. “Some have dubbed it the name-and-shame game, it doesn’t have any legal purpose,” says Marino. In short, everyone just wants to keep their heads down, a long way away.

  • Meduza ☛ Chechen political figure says ‘honor killings’ are a private family matter, calls LGBTQ+ people ‘outcasts and perverts’

    “We won’t just come back — first we’ll do some work in Moscow. We’ll install the power in Moscow that suits us,” Kutayev said, noting that up to four million Muslims live in the Russian capital.

  • SBS ☛ Julia Gillard says 'manosphere' requires new approach to gender equality

    Melbourne is hosting. It is the first time the conference — established in 2007 and held every three years — has been in the Oceanic Pacific region.

  • Memphis Flyer ☛ No Kings Protest Discussion Item Removed From City Council Agenda

    Council member Jerri Green requested MPD Chief C.J. Davis appear in front of the council to answer No Kings Day protester demands during the regular meeting of the council on April 14th. Green asked council member Ford Canale, Chairman of the council’s Public Safety and Homeland Security committee, to place Davis on the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting.

    This request was made after community groups and advocates sent a letter in the wake of the incident demanding the release of body-worn camera footage, public identification of every officer present, and more after they said MPD “escalated to violence” during the protest on March 28th.

  • Techdirt ☛ Tech Lobbyists Hard At Work Undermining Proposed Alaska ‘Right To Repair’ Law

    There’s still a meaningful effort afoot to implement statewide “right to repair” laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. All fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, though only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws.

    Alaska could be up next. Two versions of a new right to repair law are winding their way through the Alaska state House and Senate. The bills would amend the Alaska Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Act, requiring tech hardware manufacturers to make parts, tools or software needed for repairs available to independent service providers and consumers.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Charles Schulz Franklin Peanuts Harriet Glickman

    I find it amazing that one of the most famous artists in America responded so sincerely and actively to a random letter from a reader about an issue that was very sensitive and politically charged at the time. And unfortunately still is.

  • Law Society Gazette ☛ Court of Appeal clears way for SDT to re-hear Dentons money laundering case

    The court battle between the Solicitors Regulation Authority and global practice Dentons over allegations of historical money laundering breaches could return to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal following a Court of Appeal ruling today. In Dentons UK and Middle East v Solicitors Regulation Authority, three judges today upheld the High Court's quashing of a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal decision to dismiss charges of a breach of SRA principle 7.

    However the Court of Appeal judges allowed the firm's appeal against the High Court's decision to remit for rehearing allegations of breaches of two further principles. They also agreed with the SDT that 'there is an inherent requirement of seriousness' in considering whether a solicitor's conduct amounts to a breach of SRA principles or the Code of Conduct.

  • ALM ☛ Top Court Curbs SRA's Enforcement Powers in Dentons Money Laundering Case

    The Court of Appeal has handed down a decision that could curb the Solicitors Regulation Authority's ability to issue professional misconduct findings against lawyers, ruling that such conduct must be "sufficiently serious".

  • Barristers that ‘failed in duties’ to face probe over Post Office scandal

    Barristers who ‘failed in their professional duties’ when representing the Post Office during the Horizon IT scandal will face potential disciplinary action, the watchdog has warned.

    The Bar Standards Board (BSB), which oversees more than 18,000 English and Welsh barristers, said it currently has ten live investigations into possible misconduct, which are “progressing”, and added that it “will take enforcement action” where necessary.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • RIPE ☛ The Internet’s New Builders

    On the largest routes, the change is even clearer. Content and cloud networks now account for more than 80% of used bandwidth on trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific, and intra-Asian routes. Europe-Middle East routes remain more balanced, but the direction is the same. The firms that drive demand are increasingly also shaping the infrastructure that carries it.

    This is not only a traffic story. It is also a capital allocation story, an ownership story, and increasingly a geography story.

  • Chris Coyier ☛ When Sites Need to Walk Away

    According to a Pew Research Center report, 26% of pages from 2013-2023 are no longer accessible. But that’s not the whole story. In a new study published in Internet Archive’s book, VANISHING CULTURE, data scientists working with the Wayback Machine have found: 16% have been restored through the Wayback Machine. 56% are preserved before they disappear.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • The Verge ☛ Taylor Swift is stepping up the legal war on AI copycats

        Taylor Swift has been at the center of AI imitation controversies for years, and now, she’s become the latest celebrity who’s escalating attempts to protect herself from AI copycats. As usual, however, the legal system intersects with technology in complicated ways — and Swift’s efforts may be a long shot.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Filmmakers Drop Piracy Liability Lawsuit Against ISP RCN

      A group of independent film companies has dropped its long-running piracy liability lawsuit against U.S. Internet provider RCN. The joint stipulation, filed in a New Jersey federal court, follows the Cox Supreme Court ruling. In addition to dropping a multi-million-dollar damages claim, the requested U.S. pirate site blocking injunction is also off the table.

    • Legal Layer ☛ Who Owns the Code Claude Wrote?

      Agentic coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex generate code that may be uncopyrightable, owned by your employer, or contaminated by open source licenses you cannot see. If you are shipping AI-assisted code and have not thought about any of this, this piece is for you.

      Legal Layer Angle: In this piece I will talk about what a developer using AI coding tools needs to document to own what they build, what their employment contract probably says about AI-assisted work product, and what the practical implication is for open source contributions written with AI assistance.

    • [Old] Aesthetics of Photography ☛ Lunch Atop Skyscraper Photo (1932): Iconic Image Explained

      The copyright status is complicated and disputed. Published in 1932, the photo would be in the public domain if copyright wasn't properly renewed between 1959-1963. Getty Images (which acquired the image through Corbis) claims copyright and actively licenses it. However, some legal scholars argue incomplete or improper renewal placed it in the public domain. The uncertainty hasn't prevented widespread reproduction, both authorized and unauthorized. For commercial use, most organizations obtain licenses from Getty Images to avoid potential legal issues, though the underlying copyright claim remains questionable.27