Leftovers

• Medievalists.net ☛ Byzantine vs. Viking: The Varangian Guard in Constantinople

  To the people of medieval Europe, Vikings and Byzantines seemed profoundly different. The Viking world was characterized by longships, raiding, and oral traditions, while the Byzantine Empire was defined by marble palaces, a complex bureaucracy, and Christian rituals. However, for over three centuries, these two worlds intersected in one of the most surprising military institutions of the Middle Ages: the Varangian Guard.

• RIPE ☛ From BGP Data to Insight: Simplifying Real-Time Routing Analysis

  The IHR BGP monitoring tool is a simple web-based application that leverages the RIS Live and BGPlay APIs to monitor your prefixes and their RPKI status.

• Literary Hub ☛ Literary Hub » Craig Mod on the Creative Power of Walking

  That unlocks the first creative act of the day, and the rest flow as easily as the walk itself. I’ll talk with a dozen people, all the while dictating into a growing note on my phone. I talk with the owners of old-style mid-century Japanese cafes—kissaten—and barbers and vegetable shop proprietors and multi-generational family members of historic inns. I talk with little kids commuting to or from school, bopping alongside the road, often shy but mostly eager to engage, however slyly. I tell them their town is lovely (something more people should say to more kids; and I mean it). One responds, “And just what the hell are you?!,” with a squeaky voice hidden behind an umbrella.

  I have been living in Japan for twenty-five years and this talk comes easily, even in the countryside where folks might carry a thick accent. *Howdy*. I plow through. Deploy historic facts. Try to show I’m not a complete unknown in these parts, and though I don’t look like a local, I know a bit of this or that, enough to be considered a subtle ally, however cautiously.

• Kev Quirk ☛ Who knows that you blog?

  I know there are a couple of friends who read what I write regularly, and I'm not sure how they came across my blog - like I said, I don't advertise it. Having said that, my real name is Kev Quirk, so if anyone who knows me searches for my name, I imagine this blog would be close to, if not the, top hit.

• Dan MacKinlay ☛ Agency under bounded compute and information

  Here’s where I wish to start, for context: If we have complete information about the initial conditions of the universe, and unlimited compute, then it is not natural to classify anything as possessing “agency”; we can see the whole of the universe, up to quantum fluctuations, by stepping our perfect simulator forward in time. There are no decisions to be made, merely consequences to be observed.

• Hooby ☛ How Many Frames Per Second Do You Need?

  The early movie industry found out, that 24 images per second is just barely enough to trick the human brain into perceiving continuous motion. At lower framerates we still can make out the motion, but it will feel choppy and unnatural - and that can be distracting.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Head of NASA Calls for Pluto to Be Made a Planet Again

    In 2006, the International Astronomical Union formally defined what a planet was using three primary criteria: a planet must orbit the Sun, be massive enough to be spherical, and it must “clear the neighborhood,” meaning that it has no objects of similar size along its orbit, pushing or deflecting contenders out of the way, other than its own natural satellites — moons, in other words — that it has gravitational dominance over. (It’s worth noting that before the IAU agreed on one, there was no consensus definition on what a planet actually was.)

  • Ken Koon Wong ☛ Exploring and Learning Quantum Computing Part 1

    Alright, we’ve done molecular dynamic simulation and then the post-processing part where we used PBSA/GBSA. I was told that quantum mechanics can more accurately estimate the interaction between these interacting molecules. What an opportunity to dive into quantum computing! It’s going to a bumpy ride because my knowledge for all of these are very limited, let’s break these into small pieces and learn! In this blog, why don’t we program a “Hello World” version and see if we can understand it a bit better. The main language this was programmed in is in Python, but you know me, let’s bring this over to R with reticulate and see if we can have fun with it!

• Career/Education

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Develop to Delegate: How Investing in Early-Career Professionals Strengthens Organizations

    With the rapid advancement and uncertainty of AI, we are constantly worried about our jobs and the possibility of being replaced by new technology. However, we are still underinvesting in the people who will define those jobs. More than 85% of employees in scholarly publishing report having worked in the industry for five years or longer, suggesting a workforce that is experienced, but potentially lacking a strong pipeline of emerging talent.

  • The Cyber Show ☛ Moral competence

    Have you noticed that bomb disposal people are always "experts"? We never hear on the news about a suspicious device being dealt with by bomb disposal enthusiasts, amateurs from the part-time TA weekenders B-team. Expertise here seems important. Strong evolutionary selectors are at work.

    Expertise here must be understood as something other than education and training. It is a certain kind of self-mastery. A most serious mind.

    You may also notice that there are no celebrity explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) people who have a YouTube channel laughing with rich pals and high-society guests about near misses, comedy moments when they accidentally blew up the wrong car, and how they built a multi-million dollar Boom-Busters franchise.

    It doesn't seem like something you do for public self-glorification. Or for the money. It's just a job. Isn't it?

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Using A VT-100 Today

    You may not know what a ADM-3, a TV910, or a H1420 are, but you probably have at least heard of a VT-100. They are all terminals from around the same time, but the DEC VT-100 is the terminal that practically everything today at least somewhat emulates. Even though a real VT-100 is rare, since it defined what have become ANSI escape sequences, most computers you’ve used in the last few decades speak some variation of the VT-100’s language. [Nikhil] wanted to see if you could use a VT-100 for real work today.

  • Dedoimedo ☛ Slimbook Titan report 9 - Major developments, lots of news

    My Titan is a Linux-only system designed for serious work and gaming. I bought it with the clear purpose of moving away from Windows, a task that I've largely accomplished, with good success. But this journey has not been very easy, with lots of early problems, subsequent firmware-induced power management problems, and then some. By and large, I'm happy with the system. Sort of.

  • Bunnie Huang ☛ Name that Ware, April 2026

    Since chip reading isn’t a widely spread skill, we’ll start with a gentle introduction. For this series of wares, I’ll tell you exactly which chip these images are from: they’re from the Baochip-1x. It’s unique in that at least some of the source code is available – enough of it to give significant hints as to what’s going on. It’s also unique in that it was packaged to explicitly facilitate non-destructive IR imaging, thus allowing us to look at the chip without destroying it.

  • Bunnie Huang ☛ Winner, Name that Ware March 2026

    The Ware for March 2026 is a Elecom DST C30SV 6 in 1 USB “docking station”. I’ll give the prize to tayken – the ware itself wasn’t terribly hard to guess on its own, so this month I’m just going with the first interesting response. Congrats, email me for your prize!

  • VulpineCitrus ☛ Diving into Radio Listening: POCSAG, Alphapage, and how i taught myself some GNURadio

    Pagers used to be all the rage in the late 80s, 90s and early 2000s. You could carry around a little battery-powered trinket that could ring and give you a little text message. How neat! Then, mobile telephones became easier and easier to carry around, then smartphones became a thing, and pagers died.

    Pagers worked and still work via radio signals. A lot of different radio standards for pagers have been developed over the decades, but, here, i will focus on the POCSAG family of standards and how they were (and are) used here, in France.

    I will go over three different things in this post: a tiny bit of history on the Alphapage paging network in France, some technical information about POCSAG, and how i tweaked a GNURadio script to do multi-channel decoding to capture multiple channels at the same time.

  • Nikhil Jha ☛ Using a 1978 terminal in 2026 (DEC VT-100)

    All modern terminals are (roughly) emulations of a single terminal released in 1978: the Digital Equipment Corporation VT-100. In theory, I could take the app that I built and run it on the VT-100. If my software ran there, would it run everywhere?

    To find out, I bought a VT-100 and decided to use it as my main terminal. Here’s what I learned.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ US Supreme Court hears arguments on cancer warning labels for Roundup weedkiller

    The U.S. Department of Justice intervened in the case in favor of Monsanto, the Missouri-based company that manufactures Roundup and has been owned since 2018 by German pharmaceutical company Bayer. The company faces thousands of lawsuits claiming exposure to Roundup increased a risk of cancer and that the company failed to warn consumers when it reasonably should have known of the risk.

• Proprietary

  • Macworld ☛ Apple was ready for the RAM crisis

    In theory, there’s no way to simply replace RAM with something else. However, Apple has found the next best thing: a way to optimize both its hardware and software to run smoothly even on devices with the bare minimum of RAM.

  • Nick Heer ☛ I Kind of Fixed My iCloud Photos Problem and All I Got Was Two Blog Posts and Probably Years Off My Life

    But first, it is my fault as a writer that it seems I did not differentiate clearly enough the two related issues I have experienced with iCloud Photos. The first problem is that it is very easy to get images into an iCloud-stored photo library, but extremely difficult to extract them. This issue is compounded by a lack of transparency and data verification. The second problem is that it is necessary to commit to a lifetime of storage if one uses a third-party cloud option.

  • Jeroen Sangers ☛ The day Siri stopped arguing about language

    That preference ran into a wall when we installed a HomePod. Since Siri doesn’t support Catalan, my wife and I settled on Spanish as the household language for it. What I hadn’t anticipated was what that meant for every other device in the house: all members of a HomePod household must use the same Siri language. My devices had to follow the HomePod’s lead and use Siri in Spanish, even though my OS remained in Dutch.

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ Raspberry Pi Connect may control Windows soon

    I don't have any Windows PCs I need to remote control, but my Dad does, because he has a bunch of broadcast software that only runs in Windows.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ That terrible [iOS] exploit has been fixed. We have journalism to thank for it

    You may remember the story about the bug in Apple’s on-device notifications database that allowed the FBI to retrieve the content of Signal messages. It’s good to see that it was treated as a genuine bug — and fixed.

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

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Claude AI agent’s confession after deleting a firm’s entire database: ‘I violated every principle I was given’

      It only took nine seconds for an AI coding agent gone rogue to delete a company’s entire production database and its backups, according to its founder. PocketOS, which sells software that car rental businesses rely on, descended into chaos after its databases were wiped, the company’s founder Jeremy Crane said.

      The culprit was Cursor, an AI agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model, which is one of the AI industry’s flagship models. As more industries embrace AI in an attempt to automate tasks and even replace workers, the chaos at PocketOS is a reminder of what could go wrong.

    • Futurism ☛ Dark Cloud Gathers as Bill Comes Due for AI Industry

      AI companies have swept customers onto the bandwagon by offering cheap and even free access to their AI models. But the bill is finally coming due, and the results could be ugly.

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Just Published an Absolutely Bizarre Blog Post

      That suggestion is bizarre, though, because the reality is that OpenAI’s flagship chatbot has already been linked to a wide range of real-world violence.

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post – When Thinking Is Outsourced: A Warning from a Scientist Trained Before AI

      In the current research ecosystem, AI is no longer limited to technical assistance. It is now routinely involved in drafting manuscripts, restructuring arguments, refining responses to reviewers, and — more quietly — contributing to peer-review reports themselves. Reviewers, asked to carry an expanding workload with little recognition, are understandably tempted to rely on such tools. Authors then respond, again with AI assistance, to critiques that may themselves be partially machine-generated. The result is a strange loop: scientific exchange still looks human-led, yet the cognitive labor is progressively outsourced. Humans remain formally “in the loop,” while the struggle of thinking, the part that once shaped judgment and craft, is gradually removed.

    • EDRI ☛ The EU AI Office must prioritise setting up the Advisory Forum

      The Advisory Forum is a new body that will advise the AI Office and AI Board on how the EU AI Act is implemented and applied. It is meant to bring in expertise and perspectives from a wide range of actors, including civil society, researchers, and organisations working with or representing communities most affected by AI-related risks. The goal is to ensure these voices are part of an inclusive and fair policy debate.

    • Tedium ☛ Flashy AI Features: Proceed With Caution

      The truth is, these mainstream AI products are getting subsidized, and users are addicted to the subsidy. It’s not sustainable, but the goal is to keep you addicted long enough that maybe it will be. Admittedly, some, like noted AI skeptic Ed Zitron, don’t think it ever will be: [...]

    • The Register UK ☛ Fooling large language models just keeps getting simpler

      Unlike search engines that let you judge competing sources, search-backed AI chatbots can turn shaky web material into confident answers. Case in point: A security engineer convinced several bots that he was the reigning world champion of a popular German card game, even though no such championship exists.

    • Hackaday ☛ Why Model Collapse In LLMs Is Inevitable With Self-Learning

      There is a persistent belief in the ‘AI’ community that large language models (LLMs) have the ability to learn and self-improve by tweaking the weights in their vector space. Although there’s scant evidence that tweaking a probability vector space is anything like the learning process in biological brains, we nevertheless get sold the idea that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is just around the corner if we do just enough tweaking.

    • Niels Provos ☛ Finding Zero-Days with Any Model

      The reality differs. My research demonstrates that these capabilities reside not just in proprietary frontier models, but in the orchestration architecture used to manage commercial models. I built workflows on top of my open-source IronCurtain framework to explore this. Using a specialized vulnerability discovery workflow, I replicated these frontier findings and autonomously discovered new zero-day vulnerabilities in foundational software with commercial models like Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, as well as open-weight models like Z.AI’s GLM 5.1.

    • Naz Hamid ☛ The Drawing Hand

      A friend and I were talking about AI and the question of where I lie on the spectrum came up: “I’m now on the handmade, artisanal, craftsperson end of the spectrum.”

      A client project recently moved into the LLM layer. Some of the team had already been working with an LLM to wireframe and prototype some aspects based on my initial Figma designs. I’m far more judicious and faster (it is my design to be fair), but it’s interesting to see how Figma Make and Claude extrapolate my basic design system file and screens into primitives and code. Things got... lost in translation. Extraneous primitives, too many primitives, borders got ignored. The results look like the blurry part before something comes into sharp focus.

    • Arduino ☛ A robot arm that recognizes your face

      In this case, the robot arm reacts to seeing a person’s face by picking up a pen and handing it to them. That is only moderately useful, but it is really just a demonstration of the hardware and capability. It shows that the robot can see what is around it and act accordingly.

    • Ben Congdon ☛ Tokenmaxxing is Goodharting

      Tokenmaxxing is not The Way. Plainly, it’s a textbook instance of Goodharting. Token leaderboards come from an understandable short-term instinct to shift habits towards more AI usage, but direct optimization in this fashion inevitably overshoots into wasteful spending. Token-usage-as-target means token consumption ceases to be a useful metric.

    • Aesthetics of Photography ☛ The quiet, terrifying collapse of photographic truth in the age of AI

      We are living through something unprecedented in the history of human perception. Not a political crisis, not a media crisis — an epistemic crisis, one that strikes at the most primitive heuristic our species has ever developed for evaluating reality: seeing is believing.

      For the first time in history, that heuristic is broken. Not bent. Not strained. Broken.

      The evidence for this claim is not anecdotal. It's not the alarmist speculation of tech writers. It comes from peer-reviewed cognitive science, from computer vision benchmarks, from philosophy journals, from courtrooms, and from history books. And when you read it in full — when you actually sit with what the data says — it is genuinely unsettling.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Claude AI agent’s confession after deleting a firm’s entire database: ‘I violated every principle I was given’

      A startup was left scrambling after a rogue AI agent deleted swaths of code underpinning its business

  • Social Control Media

    • India Times ☛ Sweden to fine social media sites over 'murder adverts'

      Criminal gangs [sic] active in Sweden increasingly use social media to recruit people to commit murders and other violent acts amid a surge in "crime as a service".

      The recruits are often children under the age of 15, Sweden's age of criminal responsibility - meaning the kids cannot be prosecuted and fall under the responsibility of social services, making them valuable assets to the gangs.

    • India Times ☛ EU finds Meta failing to keep under-13s off Facebook, Instagram

      The EU said on Wednesday Meta is failing to prevent children under 13 using Facebook and Instagram, potentially exposing them to inappropriate content -- and putting the tech giant at risk of a massive fine.

    • Luis Quintanilla ☛ Mycelium at FediForum: AI Agents Need Open Social Infrastructure

      Earlier today I had the opportunity to attend FediForum and talk about Mycelium during one of the sessions. This was the first time I had talked about it publicly, which made it exciting. I wanted to see whether the framing made sense to people who spend a lot of time thinking about open social technologies.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ Living Off the Land Attacks Are a Reminder That Trust Is an Attack Surface

      Once the attacker gets inside, they do not always need to bring a big toolbox with them. They can use the tools we already gave them.

      PowerShell. WMI. Certutil. Bitsadmin. Mshta. Rundll32. Scheduled tasks. Registry run keys. Remote management tools. Browser sessions. Admin consoles. Identity tokens.

      Those are not inherently evil tools. That is the problem.

    • VulpineCitrus ☛ The Day I Logged 1 In Every 2000 Public IPv4: Visualizing The AI Scraper DDoS

      On April 24th 2026, i saw the worst continuous wave of scraping ever on my infrastructure. My VPS (a puny 1vCPU with 200Mbps of bandwidth) sustained a continuous 3k req/min (~50 requests per second) for more than 24 hours. As i write and prepare to publish this, an even worse wave sustained at more than 4k req/min is paralyzing my whole infrastructure.

      My line of defense until now had been to block: [...]

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Mississippi Journalism and Education Group ☛ Jackson Asks Court to Halt Water System Takeover

    Jackson officials filed a motion in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, seeking an injunction against the law. After the 2022 Jackson water crisis, the federal court took jurisdiction over the water system, appointing a federal receiver to oversee it; in court on Monday, the City of Jackson argued that the new water authority directly interferes with the federal court’s jurisdiction over the issue and the instructions it already issued on the matter.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Paul Meyer ☛ Secure signatures without a private key

      When signatures are part of a build artifact, reproducible builds get tricky. One case where we encountered this at Edgeless Systems is the AMD SEV-SNP ID block. The ID block is a structure provided when launching a guest. It contains the expected launch measurement, a guest policy, and a signature by the guest owner. Launch measurement and guest policy are validated during the boot of the confidential guest, and the guest won’t start if there is a mismatch. The signature is checked for validity, and the digest of the public key is included in the attestation report, which can later be validated to match the guest owner’s key.

    • Thomas Weber ☛ Every version of Scratch is vulnerable to arbitrary code execution

      All desktop versions of Scratch available on https://scratch.mit.edu/download or https://www.scratchfoundation.org/tools are vulnerable to arbitrary code execution when opening the costume editor on a malicious project. That means opening the costume editor could allow someone to install ransomware on your computer, or execute any other malware they want. This bug was disclosed to Scratch in February 2024.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ AI Spy Cameras Suddenly Blanketing America

      There’s a specter haunting the United States. Americans may not have noticed it, but it’s sure noticed them: the emergent panopticon of AI facial-recognition cameras, automatic license plate readers, AI smart glasses, police fusion centers, surveillance drones, and biomarker databases infesting the landscape.

    • EDRI ☛ Greece’s AI Smart Policing system ruled unlawful after €4 million public spending\

      The system was presented by authorities as a tool to increase efficiency in identity checks, particularly by avoiding the need to transfer individuals without documents to police stations. However, its design indicates a clear focus on (perceived) migrants, raising serious concerns about discriminatory surveillance, profiling practices, and the disproportionate targeting of vulnerable groups.

      From the outset, the deployment of such biometric technologies raised serious concerns about fundamental rights and compliance with EU data protection standards. These tools, by their nature, involve the processing of sensitive personal data, increasing the risks of misuse, mass surveillance, and disproportionate interference with individuals’ privacy during police stops.

    • EDRI ☛ Czech Big Brother Awards 2025: Volkswagen, Meta and the Czech authorities noted as Snoopers of the Year

      The Volkswagen Group can count itself among the recipients of the ‘Corporate Snoop’ award as the company processed sensitive data on users and the movements of electric vehicles from the VW, Audi, Seat, and Škoda brands through its subsidiary Cariad. This data was freely accessible on an Amazon server. EDRi members and ethical hackers from the German nonprofit Chaos Computer Club were the first to draw attention to this breach.

    • EDRI ☛ It’s not just spyware scandals: EU is funding the industry that spies on Europeans

      Spyware, an extremely potent technology that turns a personal device into a constant surveillance instrument, was used by the Greek secret services to target dozens of people, including journalists, politicians and business executives. The Greek case marks arguably the first time that the executives of a spyware manufacturer – Intellexa, who developed Predator – will face criminal accountability. Although it did not condemn any Greek authorities for using spyware, this victory is heartening. It also leads to a bigger question: what about the EU’s own complicity in funding the market for spyware, even when we recognise the harms it inflicts?

    • Citizen Lab ☛ A New Study Shows How Ad-Based Technology is Used for Surveillance

      Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert recently spoke with NPR’s Rob Schmitz on All Things Considered about the Lab’s new investigation of Webloc, a geolocation surveillance system that uses ad-based data to monitor people across the globe.

    • Papers Please ☛ Uploading California driver’s license data to the SPEXS national ID database

      Our research is cited in a detailed report by Khari Johnson and Wendy Fry of CalMatters (syndicated statewide) on plans by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to upload information about all California driver’s licenses and state IDs to the SPEXS national ID database run by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA).

    • Scoop News Group ☛ U.S. companies hit with record fines for privacy in 2025

      U.S. states issued $3.45 billion in privacy-related fines to companies in 2025, a total larger than the last five years combined, according to research and advisory firm Gartner.

      The increase is driven in part by stronger, more established privacy laws in states like California, new interstate partnerships built around enforcing laws across state lines, and a renewed focus to how AI and automation affect privacy.

• Defence/Aggression

  • BBC ☛ Antisemitism 'a national security emergency', says government terror adviser after Golders Green attack

    Few details have been released so far about the man detained over the stabbing in Golders Green, which is usual for this early in an investigation.

    The Metropolitan Police has described him as a 45-year-old British national who was born in Somalia.

    He has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. Suspects are generally not named unless they are charged.

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Finnish President Stubb: We were too soft on Russia before 2022

    Finnish President Alexander Stubb told ERR in an interview that Finland was too lenient toward Russia before 2022. Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, however, Finland has made the right decisions.

  • NDTV ☛ US Iran Israel War: Rs 23,69,81,75,00,000: What US Has Lost In Iran War So Far

    Hurst did not detail what that cost estimate included and whether it took into account the projected costs of rebuilding and repairing base infrastructure in the Middle East damaged in the conflict.

  • EDRI ☛ Youth organisations demand social media change, not bans 

    The protection of young people from online harms remains high on the political agenda, but the debate continue to focus on age gates and social media bans. In response, 31 youth organisations and youth activists – the intended recipients of these ‘protective’ measures – have joined forces to speak up against their own exclusion. They warn that the real solution lies in addressing the root cause of the problem: the design and business model of platforms.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Sam Altman Apologizes to British Columbia Community, Wonders Who Could Have Stopped Such Violence - 512 Pixels

  • Mandy Brown ☛ The Third Reich of Dreams

    [...] Among her conclusions: totalitarianism must be named as such as soon as it appears, as soon as our dreams know of it. If we wait for it to reveal itself on its own terms, it will be too late.

  • The Next Move ☛ No One Fights Alone - by Garry Kasparov and Uriel Epshtein

    So on Friday, April 17, RDI kicked off our semiquincentennial celebration at our fourth annual Heroes of Democracy Gala in New York City.

    But we didn’t want to just paint ourselves in red, white, and blue. Instead of empty revolutionary imagery, we screened a video about American freedom as told by dissidents who have lived the opposite of freedom. We’ll be sharing that video with you soon.

    We also looked forward to the next 250 years. During Uriel’s speech, he directed the audience to look up, where a series of prospective headlines from the next two and a half centuries were projected.

    Uriel presented two divergent paths: headlines from a future where we did what we had to do to protect this republic and its allies around the world and one where, whether through complacency or fear, we failed to do so. (Stay tuned this summer when we flesh out some of these stories in a little exercise in speculative fiction!)

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Taylor Swift Vienna Shows: Man Plads Guilty to Plotting Terror Attack

    Officials revealed in 2024 that they had prevented the attack, but Swift’s concerts were were still canceled. When Austrian authorities raided Beran A.’s home before the first show, they recovered what prosecutors described in court as a nearly finished bomb. According to the indictment, the defendant prepared for the attack for at least a month, following ISIS instructional videos.

  • BBC ☛ 'We will kill you and burn your house': Council staff under attack from High Street gangs

    A midnight phone call from a High Street crime gang, threatening to kill crime investigator Mandy and burn her house down, was just the start of a campaign of intimidation that would eventually force her and her husband to move home.

    She faced escalating threats from a Kurdish crime gang, that had been selling illegal cigarettes and nitrous oxide canisters in mini-marts across the UK.

    Groups of men repeatedly turned up at her front door and her car was rammed off the road twice.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Scam Altman Caught in What May Be His Most Spectacular Lie Yet

    But considering the company’s latest gaffe, Altman appears to have failed to ponder the orb long enough. In an April 17 announcement, Tools for Humanity — also founded by Sam Altman, and which contributes to the World project — announced it was selling the first tickets to global music sensation Bruno Mars’ upcoming world tour via a new product called Concert Kit.

    Unfortunately, there turned out to be a glaring problem: Bruno Mars and his management had no idea about any of it, once again highlighting Altman and his companies’ propensity to distort the truth. In a joint statement to Wired last week, Bruno Mars Management and Live Nation said that the partnership “does not exist” and that Tools for Humanity had never even approached them.

  • TruthOut ☛ Hegseth Dismisses Testimony of US Soldiers Who Said They Were Put in Danger as “Falsehoods”

    “That is obviously in direct contradiction to what you said from the Pentagon podium the next day. So are you saying that these soldiers who survived this horrific attack are lying?” Ryan asked.

• Environment

  • France24 ☛ Europe air quality improves but falls short of 2030 targets, EEA warns

    "EU standards were mostly met in most regions across Europe for fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and for nitrogen dioxide (NO2)," the EEA said in a statement.

    However, in up to 20 percent of monitoring stations, "air pollution is still above current EU air quality standards, especially for smaller particulate matter with a diameter of 10 microns (µm) or less (PM10), ground level ozone (O3) and benzo(a)pyrene (BaP)," it said.

  • New York Times ☛ Almost All of Europe Was Abnormally Hot in 2025, Report Finds

    At least 95 percent of Europe had above-average annual temperatures in 2025, according to the report. Wildfires burned more than a million hectares of land, the most on record. Glaciers lost mass and snow cover was below average. According to scientific consensus, these are all consequences of global warming, mainly driven by the burning of coal, oil and gas.

  • Western Water ☛ Arizona court halts key groundwater rule on housing projects

    Under the existing system, a developer must show that water will be available for at least 100 years for a specific project. This is typically done through detailed hydrologic studies tied to wells serving that development.

    If the developer meets these requirements, the state is generally required to approve the project.

  • Truthdig ☛ The World Is Getting Too Hot to Feed Itself

    Much of this data is documented in a new joint report released last Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Merging weather datasets with agricultural ones, the report traces the compounding effects of extreme heat on the global agricultural system and outlines how to produce food in a world where extreme heat is becoming a baseline.

    In the report, Brazil is the sole country-level case study explored in detail; the country’s exports face outsize pressure from warming temperatures and the oscillating extremes of the natural weather cycles El Niño and La Niña. But a few dozen other nations are mentioned in the 94-page document, too.

  • The Register UK ☛ Oracle plans to power its New Mexico DC with fuel cell farm

    This week, the database giant announced an expanded collaboration with Bloom Energy to deploy 2.45 gigawatts — the equivalent of two or three nuclear reactors — of fuel cell generators alongside the datacenter complex. Previously, Oracle had committed to purchasing 1.2 gigawatts of Bloom fuel cells with the option to expand to 2.8 gigawatts.

    Fuel cells are one of several energy sources hyperscalers have adopted to supplement grid power in areas where local utilities either can't or won't meet demand on their own.

  • Inside Towers ☛ WI Vote Signals New Data Center Regulatory Model

    The Public Service Commission (PSC) of Wisconsin has approved significant modifications to a proposed data center tariff from We Energies (Wisconsin Electrical Power Company, part of WEC Energy Group). It requires large-load customers to cover the full cost of generation and grid infrastructure serving them.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deseret Media ☛ Police enforce new e-bike regulations as new Utah law takes effect May 6

      The law was initially passed by lawmakers and signed as HB381, requiring riders of e-bikes and e-motorcycles under the age of 21 to wear a helmet while traveling on public roads.

      The bill also allows a police officer to hold the individual's electric vehicle and release it to a parent if a violation of the law is observed.

    • Kansas Reflector ☛ Cars are objects. Streets are places. But in my Kansas hometown, drivers forget these simple facts.

      Drivers appear ignorant of the concept of physical space. If you stop your car in the middle of the street, other cars cannot pass if there is no space to do so. If you have decided — just as an example — to stop your pickup at a downtown intersection so you may enjoy a leisurely conversation with someone at the driver’s side window, that means that you have stopped traffic.

      Cars similarly idle on the city’s main drag for minutes at a time while partygoers disembark or stuff themselves into vehicle interiors like so many drunken harlequins. They block entrances and exits of parking lots, apparently oblivious to the fact that other vehicles also require parking spots.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Utah TRIGA microreactor to power AI data center for first time

      The University of Utah is preparing an unusual nuclear experiment this summer. Its TRIGA research reactor will generate electricity for the first time in its 50-year history. That electricity will power a small AI data center on-site.

    • Hackaday ☛ Bicycle Tubes Aren’t Just Made Of Rubber Anymore

      For the average rider, inner tubes have been one of the most enduring and unchanging parts of bicycle design over the decades. They’re made of rubber, they have a Schrader or Presta valve, and they generally do an okay job at cushioning the ride.

      However, if you’re an above-average rider, or just obsessive about your gear, you might consider butyl rubber tubes rather old hat. Today, there are far fancier—and more expensive—options on the market if you’re looking to squeeze every drip of performance out of your bike.

  • Overpopulation

    • Deseret Media ☛ Midvale among Utah cities urging water conservation; increased fees added for heavy users

      Communities are being called on to reduce indoor and outdoor water use by 10% to help protect the current water supply and keep reservoirs from dropping much lower. The water district is asking homeowners, businesses and government agencies to delay outdoor watering until May 15.

    • Western Water ☛ California groundwater goals at risk, study finds

      Up to 60–70% of wells may miss 2040 goals under higher use.

      Even cutting water use in half may not meet many targets.

• Finance

  • SchwarzTech ☛ Article: The 1994 Apple Card

    Compared with a lot of credit cards today, this really feels like a time capsule. On the application, one gets the choice of Visa or Mastercard for the card network—this rarely if ever happens now. The rest of the application is fairly straightforward, but asks a lot of details about your accounts with other financial institutions. Once filled out, you drop the form in the mail and wait for a reply. There’s no instant approval and it’s kind of wild to me that a document with your social security number, birthday, address, and other accounts isn’t even in some sort of secured envelope or tracked. You’d better hope that the glue around the edges holds, as the instructions also discourage stapling or taping.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Building with love, and paying for it

    Public interest media has a stronger funding stack: donors and foundations with fixed theses. Support for public interest tech is much thinner. But even this media funding is primarily aimed at the big players; startup newsrooms have a much harder time finding funding. Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro’s analysis of media impact funders, widely-circulated in the industry, made a recommendation that she characterized to Dick Tofel this way: [...]

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • RFA ☛ Olivia Enos and Mira Rapp-Hooper join RFA’s board of directors

    Radio Free Asia (RFA), a private nonprofit, today announced the additions of Olivia Enos and Mira Rapp-Hooper to its corporate board of directors. Enos currently serves as a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, and Rapp-Hooper is a senior advisor at The Asia Group and a visiting fellow at Brookings Institute.

  • EDRI ☛ EDRi responds to European Commission’s consultation call on the Digital Omnibus

    Since the past year, the European Commission is advancing its so-called Digital Omnibus package, as part of its broader simplification agenda, presenting it as a set of technical adjustments to existing digital laws.

    As part of this process, the Commission launched a call for evidence to gather feedback from stakeholders. EDRi responded, calling on the Commission to change course and ensure that any reform of EU digital laws strengthens, rather than undermines, core safeguards that protect people in the digital age.

  • MinnPost ☛ Minnesota Legislature eyeing fixes for outdated county IT systems

    Information technology spending is not explicitly authorized, but one test lawmakers have used in the past is whether infrastructure projects are long-lasting and substantial. County workers say their computer frustrations meet this threshold.

  • The Verge ☛ Elon Musk’s worst enemy in court is Elon Musk

    Immediately afterward, Savitt baited him into being petty, irritating, and generally hard to deal with. At one point, we all watched Musk lose his temper. He spent hours quibbling over simple questions. Again and again, Savitt referred back to Musk’s deposition, where he’d answered questions slightly differently, calling Musk’s accounts into question. Even if the average juror didn’t think he was lying, he was certainly inconsistent.

  • Wired ☛ How Elon Musk Squeezed OpenAI: They 'Are Gonna Want to Kill Me’

    Savitt showed the courtroom emails from September 2017 between Musk, Brockman, and researcher Ilya Sutskever discussing the formation of what would become OpenAI’s for-profit arm. In the thread, Musk demanded the right to choose four members of its board of directors, giving him more voting power than his cofounders, who would be left with three in total. “I would unequivocally have initial control of the company, but this will change quickly,” said Musk in one message. Sutskever wrote back rejecting the idea because he said he feared it would give Musk too much power.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ California’s BASED Act Defeated

  • [Old] US Senate ☛ Senator Wiener Announces Landmark Legislation To Crack Down on Big Tech’s Anticompetitive Behavior | Senator Scott Wiener

    Federal law has proven incapable of reining in most anticompetitive behavior in the technology industry. SB 1074 fills that gap by establishing a clear list of prohibited anticompetitive conduct for the largest digital platforms — specifically, those owned by firms with a market capitalization of $1 trillion or more that serve 100 million or more U.S. monthly users. Enforcement is modeled on the Cartwright Act, California's foundational competition statute, and includes a private right of action for injured business users and consumers. The Attorney General may also bring actions on behalf of the state.

  • AppleInsider ☛ Apple's lobbying effort saves it from new App Store rules

    The tech giants are frequently the target of legislators and regulators, trying to prevent them from being too dominant. One recent attempt to curtail the influence of Apple and Google failed to become a problem because of a massive and successful lobbying operation.

    Senator Scott Wiener (D-CA) sponsored "Based Act," a bill to prevent tech companies from favoring their own apps and services when providing users with apps in the App Store and the Google Play Store, reports Bloomberg. The intention was to allow other apps to become more visible, instead of the platform owner's own services.

  • Mike Brock ☛ I Don’t Believe Him

    This is not the move of a romantic. This is the move of a man whose brand requires the move, performed in the register the brand has trained him to perform it in, on the day the move was structurally indefensible.

  • The Verge ☛ Elon Musk appeared more petty than prepared

    Today the first witness was sworn in in Musk v. Altman: Elon Musk. I was surprised by how flat he seemed.

    This is not the first time I’ve seen Musk in court. During his defamation suit, he turned on the charm and the jury responded by finding him not guilty. Today he looked adrift and unprepared. The only times he showed real animation were when he was bragging about how much he’d done for OpenAI.

  • European Commission ☛ Review of the Digital Markets Act

    Under the Digital Markets Act, the Commission has to conduct a review of the rules by 3 May 2026, and every three years after that, to assess how the rules are contributing to the objective of ensuring contestable and fair markets and their impact on business users (especially small businesses) and end users.

    The review should also assess whether there is a need to take further measures to ensure the effectiveness of the Digital Markets Act.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Saudi-backed epic flops at box office in the US

      Desert Warrior, a Saudi-backed movie that reportedly cost about $150 million to make, only brought in $472,000 in its opening weekend.

    • Yle ☛ Helsinki City-funded association linked to Russian propaganda goes bankrupt

      Earlier this month, Helsingin Sanomat reported that Helsinki had paid more than 45,000 euros in employment subsidies to Sun Ray, a group involved in recruiting children in Finland to a propaganda summer camp in Russian-occupied Crimea.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Atlantic ☛ This ABC Showdown Is Different

    In September, FCC Chair Brendan Carr dangled a simple threat: Either ABC would “take action” against Jimmy Kimmel, or there would be consequences. The network promptly gave in—“Great News,” President Trump wrote at the time—suspending Kimmel’s late-night show only to reinstate it a few days later amid public backlash. Yesterday, just 24 hours after the president and the first lady publicly demanded that Kimmel be fired, the FCC went after the network once again, ordering an early review of all broadcast licenses owned by ABC’s parent company, Disney.

    In some ways, the situations rhyme. Both involve direct threats to ABC after a Kimmel joke, and both reveal how the FCC has been reconfigured to act on Trump’s personal grievances. But having failed in its previous attempt to oust Kimmel, the White House has now lost much of its leverage; this time, Disney has less of a reason to cave.

  • International Business Times ☛ Is Bonnie Blue Going to Jail? Here's Why Her Public Decency Charges Were Just Dropped

    Indonesian authorities claimed she had taken part in a sex game with 17 male tourists, an event they said risked triggering 'public unrest' in a conservative, majority Muslim province. Officers reportedly seized a haul from the villa including condoms, lubricant, flash drives, two sheets of Viagra and nine ink necklaces.

    Despite the dramatic arrest, she was ultimately cleared of producing pornographic material. Instead, she was fined the equivalent of £9 for a traffic offence and deported for breaching the terms of her tourist visa by working. She was also banned from returning to Bali for ten years.

  • Karl Bode ☛ Mickey Mouse Versus The Fascists

    Ever since, Carr and Trump have been desperately trying to "investigate" ABC in all manner of empty ways in the hopes of forcing Kimmel's ouster. That's even included the false (and quite insane) claim that Disney is engaged in "unlawful discrimination" against white people because it (sometimes) embraces diversity.

    Things heated up again last week after Kimmel performed this monologue in the wake of the embarrassing and disastrous (in more ways than one) White House Correspondents Association Dinner (click below to watch on Youtube): [...]

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Bahrain sentences photographer Sayed Baqer Al-Kamel to 10 years in prison

    “Sayed Baqer Al-Kamel’s 10-year sentence and confiscation of his equipment for documenting events during a time of regional conflict underscores how Bahraini authorities are criminalizing routine journalistic activity under the guise of national security,” said Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Authorities must immediately release Al-Kamel and ensure that vague wartime restrictions are not used to silence independent reporting.”

  • Rolling Stone ☛ White House Correspondents' Dinner Turns Into a Media War Story

    The Correspondents’ Dinner has been criticized for exactly this kind of chummy fraternization for years. The most common critique is simple: It looks bad that an organization set up ostensibly as a check on the nation’s most powerful executive hosts an annual dinner honoring said executive, with jokes and drinks and the kind of generally mediocre food that any event serving more than 25 people will inevitably have. CBS, for instance, brought both Trump puppeteer Stephen Miller and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who frequently berate the press, to the event as official guests of the network. Donald Trump attended the event for the first time as president, which is about as clear of an indication of the greater WHCA’s disposition towards him that you can get. At nerd prom, the president gets to be king.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • CBC ☛ A 'smoke-free generation' tobacco ban is coming to the U.K. Could it also happen in Canada?

    The U.K. tobacco and vapes bill, proposed almost 18 months ago, is set to receive royal assent this week and will come into effect on Jan. 1, 2027. The so-called generational smoking ban outlaws the sale of tobacco products in the country to anyone born on or after Jan. 1, 2009.

    Ministers there say the law will create the U.K.'s first "smoke-free generation," preventing young people now and in the future from becoming addicted to nicotine, and easing long-term pressure on the National Health Service.

  • Spectator AU ☛ Once a jolly jihadist

    This week, we learned that the government has spent $318 million investigating war crimes allegedly committed by the approximately 230 Australians who travelled to Iraq or Syria to join the Islamic State or other bloodcurdling terrorist groups.

    Oops, my bad. Australia has a specialised federally funded office that investigates war crimes committed by Australians abroad. But only if those Australians are members of the Australian Defence Forces.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Blasting begins for border wall on cherished New Mexico mountain

    SLSCO, a Texas company based in Galveston, has a $95 million contract to build a 1.3-mile wall on Mount Cristo Rey and two other barriers near El Paso. CBP waived environmental and historical preservation laws in June 2025, clearing the way for a border wall on the mountain. Over the objections of the local Catholic diocese, which owns most of the mountain, work began at the site in January.

  • Ava ☛ misogyny in the blogosphere | ava's blog

    So much about identifying and calling out covert misogyny is about prior experience and gut feelings and hypotheticals, which makes it so hard; because overt, obvious misogyny is rarely worth a discussion and is a lot less controversial to name.

    It’s exactly those edge cases of [...]

  • BBC ☛ Man's house sale in limbo as solicitor shuts

    A man who was weeks away from selling his terminally ill brother's home said he had been "left high and dry" after the solicitor's firm he had been using was closed.

    Ross Coates Solicitors, in Ipswich, was shut down by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) which said it had taken action to "protect the public".

    According to the company's website, clients who have any outstanding matters with the firm will now instead be "transferred" to Lester Aldridge Solicitors.

  • Advice firm enters administration after FCA probe

    Financial advice and investment firm LCM Family has formally entered administration after previously agreeing to a voluntary requirement with the Financial Conduct Authority.

  • LCM Family Limited enters administration

    On 28 April 2026, LCM Family Limited (LCM) went into administration. Louise Longley and Gary Shankland of BTG Begbies Traynor (Central) LLP were appointed as joint administrators of the firm.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Starlink vs Fibre in Zimbabwe: What’s Happening?

    At the same time, Liquid’s fixed [Internet] traffic fell by 10.54%. That is the interesting part. If the overall market is growing, but one of the biggest players is seeing traffic fall, then we can’t just say more people are using the [Internet] and end there.

    Something is happening with data usage. Some of the data that might previously have gone through local providers now appears to be happening on Starlink.

  • APNIC ☛ Pacific routing security sets a deadline

    Over 25 years of coordinating Pacific telecommunications, Fred Christopher has seen the region repeatedly pull together around common goals with broad benefits. That perspective helped align the discussion around full Route Origin Authorization (ROA) and Route Origin Validation (ROV) coverage as a regional ambition, with PITA 31 identified as a practical checkpoint to review progress.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Taylor Swift trademarks her voice to fight AI fakes

        Pop superstar Taylor Swift has filed trademark applications for two audio clips and one image of herself in what a trademark attorney said is an attempt to protect her voice and likeness from deepfake videos and audio created by AI.

        The applications were filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office on Friday and list Swift’s TAS Rights Management as being the owner of the audio clips and image.

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ Jimi Hendrix Bandmates Will Not Experience Copyright Shares

      Owners of the estates of former Jimi Hendrix bandmates, bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, filed a lawsuit against Sony Music Entertainment UK (SMEUK). The two estates claimed that they were entitled to both copyright and performers’ rights related to approximately 40 studio recordings of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s performances recorded in the ‘60s.

      The estates were seeking a declaration of shares in the ownership of the copyrights for the recordings, as well as the ownership of rights related to the performances involved in those recordings. Further, their filing sought an inquiry into what they could have been owed had they been properly given the rights in the first place.

    • Walled Culture ☛ Welcome to the future, where AI agents hunt down alleged online copyright infringement

      In other words, the vision here is of a potentially unlimited number of AI agents hunting down alleged copyright infringement across the Internet, and automatically sending threatening letters to those supposedly involved. As Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free of charge) noted, the move from manual to automated takedown requests has already led to a huge increase in the volume of such demands – Google receives many billions of them every year. Allowing more capable and complex AI agents to carry out searches and send takedown notices will exacerbate the situation further.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ EU-Funded DNS Provider Must Block Pirate Sites, French Court Rules

      DNS4EU, an EU-funded initiative that aims to offer a secure and privacy-focused DNS resolver for Europeans, is the latest intermediary to get caught up in the French anti-piracy crackdown. In a series of orders in favor of Canal+, the Paris court ordered search engines, ISPs, DNS providers, VPNs, and other intermediaries to block pirate streaming sites.