Leftovers

• Digital Camera World ☛ I gave up color photography for one year. Four years on, I still haven’t gone back!

  No color film, no color digital work, no “just in case” versions sitting on a hard drive waiting to be edited later. Just monochrome, in every sense of the word, both digitally and on film.

• Kyle Reddoch ☛ Adding Quick Notes to My Website

  The notes section on my site has always been a little more casual than the main blog.

  It is where my weekly notes live, but I also wanted it to become a place for smaller updates. Not everything needs to be a Big Blog Post. Some things are just a paragraph or two. Some things are more like a status update. Some things are a quick thought I want to keep on my own site instead of handing it straight to a social network.

  That distinction matters to me.

• Dr Molly Tov ☛ eat the colonizers

  Quackgrass is quick to part with its stems and leaves. They snap right off at ground level, making you think you've weeded. Nice try. The rhizome will send up a new set by breakfast. Of these meter-long roots, the plant only needs a couple centimeters' worth to start sending out new shoots again.

• Dan Q ☛ Reply to: Who knows that you blog?

  I feel like my answer is different from those of many other participants: I’ve traditionally made no effort to keep my cyberspace and meatspace separate: probably everybody in my “offline” day-to-day life knows that I write here, and my “online” identity centres around the same central point too.

• Adam Silver ☛ Is form design easy?

  But this doesn’t mean form design is easy.

  If it was easy, most forms on the [Internet] would be easy to use.

  But they’re not.

  Even forms that are made up of just a few fields usually have bad UX.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ 'Negative Time' Really Does Exist, New Experiments Suggest

    But it does show that negative dwell time is not an artefact. However paradoxical it may seem, it has a directly measurable effect on the atomic cloud that the photon traverses.

  • Runxi Yu ☛ On (not) using “cryptographic hashes” for hash table keys

    A hash table maps keys to buckets (or, sometimes, more complex schemes such as bucket directories and sizes, as seen in extendible hashing, probe chains in open addressing, etc.).

    In every case there is a function h:keys→{0,1}∗ (or some prefix or reduction thereof) whose output the scheme consults to decide where a key lives.

    What must h be?

    The naïve answer of “something that spreads key evenly” may be catestrophically wrong under certain adversarial conductions. In particular, if for some reason (such as for content-addressing) a deterministic public hash such as SHA-256 already exists for the key, it is very tempting but also very likely incorrect to index hash tables with it directly, with potentially adversarial inputs.

  • Mark Litwintschik ☛ 10K+ Satellites in Space

    The General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects (GCAT) is a dataset collection of space launch sites, vehicles, satellites and other related items. It's compiled and maintained by Jonathan C. McDowell, who uses its data for his space reports. 854 such reports have been published to date.

    In this post, I'll convert a handful of the GCAT datasets to Parquet and do some analysis on them.

• Career/Education

  • Omicron Limited ☛ What's stopping kids from learning useful skills? Short answer: Exams

    Unlike traditional curricula, which often emphasize covering content and memorizing facts, competency-based curricula focus on how students apply what they learn in real-world situations. For example, instead of simply recalling scientific definitions, students might be asked to use a concept to explain how diseases spread.

    Much of the discussion around this shift in education has focused on familiar challenges, including teacher preparedness, availability of learning materials, and how faithfully the curriculum is implemented.

  • 404 Media ☛ 'Nature' Retracts Paper on the Benefits of ChatGPT in Education

    “What educators, parents and policy officials really needed was high quality data and evidence to help guide them. What they have had to deal with instead is some substandard research.”

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Crushing shortages have pushed long-term supply agreements for SSDs and HDDs to record five years — large customers are signing large contracts

    In a world of rapidly developing artificial intelligence, the supply of computer hardware can barely meet demand, and at this point, long-term supply agreements (LTAs) become compulsory. When it comes to storage — both hard disk drives and solid-state drives — LTAs now span from three to five years, depending on the device. While some may argue that now all the supply will get to large customers, such agreements with guaranteed offtake may actually be good for consumers.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Manufactured Stone Is Killing Stonecutters

    So it was hard for stonecutter Gustavo Reyes Gonzalez, thirty-five, to get a clear diagnosis in 2019 when he first developed a cough and shortness of breath. It wasn’t until two years later that he was told he had silicosis — and only had a year to live.

    Reyes Gonzalez had worked for fifteen years in a fabrication shop cutting and shaping the manufactured stone now commonly used for countertops and showers (also known as quartz or engineered stone).

  • Athanasia Mo Mowinckel ☛ Two Years of Visible: New Angles on the Long Covid Data

    It’s been two years since I started tracking my Long Covid with the Visible app, and a year since I last sat down with the data here on the blog. This post is a follow-up — same data, but now with twice as much of it, a clearer improvement arc, and some new plots and analyses I hadn’t tried before. Calendar heatmaps, ridgeline plots, change-point detection, and a phase-by-phase look at how my morning stability score moves across the menstrual cycle all make an appearance, alongside a quick check on whether last year’s symptom clusters still hold up.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Palantir CEO: 10 percent of world 'professionally hates us'

    Karp said being unpopular is part of daily life for Palantir employees as they work with clients including governments that have been accused of war crimes such as targeting aid workers, lethal strikes on suspected drug boats, or the undeclared war on Iran that has killed at least 13 American service members and wounded more than 300 and caused unknown quantities of casualties in Iran.

  • The Record ☛ Educational company Infrastructure reports cyber incident

    A cyber incident disrupted operations this weekend at Infrastructure, the educational company behind popular [sic] learning tool Canvas.

  • 404 Media ☛ OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft Back Bill to Fund ‘AI Literacy’ in Schools

    A new bill introduced by Senators Adam Schiff and Mike Rounds would award grants to the National Science Foundation—which has endured massive funding cuts under the Trump Administration for science research—to put “AI literacy” in schools.

  • Old VCR ☛ Testing MacOS on the Apple Network Server 2.0 ROMs

    It's time for another save point in the continuing saga of the various ROMs for the Apple Network Server, Apple's first through-and-through Unix server (previously, previously). The Apple Network Server was only ever officially able to boot AIX, IBM's proprietary Power ISA-specific Unix, though it was originally intended to run Novell NetWare and was demonstrated booting Mac OS with early pre-production ROMs. However, much to industry surprise, late in its life cycle then-CTO Ellen Hancock announced that the ANS would be able to boot Mac OS and even Windows NT as well using ROM upgrades. Neither ROM was officially released before Steve Jobs convinced Gil Amelio to cancel the line, and for many years they were believed to be vapourware.

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

    • The Register UK ☛ AI-BOMs replace SBOMs as way to track AI agents and bots

      While a traditional SBOM includes all of the software packages and dependencies in the organization, an AI-BOM aims to cover the gaps introduced by AI assets by providing visibility across all of the models, datasets, SDK libraries, MCP servers, ML frameworks, agents, agentic skills, prompts, and other AI tools - plus how these AI components interact with each other and connect to workflows.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ The quiet erosion of agency in the age of AI

      The danger isn’t necessarily sudden or dramatic. It’s quieter, more gradual, invisible and easy to justify along the way: It’s the slow loss of agency inside the company.

      A company loses agency with AI when humans stop setting direction, making judgments and owning outcomes, and instead become passive supervisors of systems that operate with increasing autonomy. No one announces this shift; it happens, one decision at a time.

    • Hackaday ☛ The Math You Need To Start Understanding LLMs

      The text is encoded in the LLM’s vector space as token IDs, each token being a text fragment that has some probability of following another ID, such as when cats may be found on desks, as in the above photo by [Giles]. With inference multiple of such IDs are retrieved in a vector from which in successive steps a sentence can be pieced together. These so-called logits are detailed in the first article in the series, with the second article focusing on vocabulary space and embedding, as well as the matrix operations used for inference.

    • Lee Peterson ☛ Swatch now lets you put AI slop on your wrist

      I guess the Swatch brand can throw their environmental policy in the bin too. This is disappointing to say the least and I won’t be purchasing anything from the Swatch group again.

    • Karl Bode ☛ Your Software Is Not Sentient

      Software simulacrum is not true consciousness, the stripper at the strip club doesn't actually love you, and nearly all of the biggest problems with "AI" have very ordinary human origins.

    • Joost de Valk ☛ What agent-ready looks like for a static blog

      One thing worth doing before working through the list: customize the scan. isitagentready lets you enable or disable individual checks, and the default set covers a broad range of standards, more than most sites need. For this blog, the defaults caught the real gaps but missed one check that was actually relevant: the A2A Agent Card. That only surfaced after I enabled it manually.

    • Gregory Hammond ☛ Wanting to stop, block or confuse AI? Do it slightly differently than everyone else

      With AI grabbing just about every single public thing, people have (rightfully) gotten tired of it and put into place something that will (at least hopefully) stop AI companies from being able to grab their works.

      From what I have seen, many research on how to stop them, implement one that is easy and quick for them, then forget about it. Which will result in the AI bots that are blocked and new ones finding other ways to see that content.

    • Connor Tumbleson ☛ GitHub, AI & An Influx of Content

      I wrote an entire blog post about the spam and it has no sign of ending. Imagine a user opening up an issue, which is supposed to be a bug report, but instead is some generic post summarizing to "it doesn't work". There is probably already a comment on the issue from some unrelated account guiding the user to resolution with some purely LLM generated text.

      The LLM message may be full of advertising links or edited in later, but you are starting to debate disabling notifications so your inbox isn't full of useless spam. You turn off notifications to reduce a cognitive load on your mind, but now trade discovering content much later and watching your repositories slowly increase in spam.

    • ComiCSS ☛ comiCSS #249: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

    • Armin Ronacher ☛ Content for Content’s Sake

      But some of the changes to that language might now be coming from … machines? Or maybe not. I don’t know. I, like many others, noticed that some words keep showing up more than before, and the obvious assumption is that LLMs are at fault. What I did was take 90 days’ worth of my local coding sessions and look for medium-frequency words where their use is inflated compared to what wordfreq would assume their frequency should be. Then I looked for the more common of these words and did a Google Trends search (filtered to the US). Note that some words like “capability” are more likely going to show up in coding sessions just because of the nature of the problem, so the actual increase is much more pronounced than you would expect.

      You can click through it; this is what the change over time looks like. Note that these are all words from agent output in my coding sessions that are inflated compared to historical norms: Loading word trend chart…

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Microsoft VS Code says Copilot AI wrote all your code

      Microsoft Visual Studio Code is a text editor for computer programming. In versions 1.117 and 1.118, if you use any autocomplete, including tab complete, it marks your code commit with “Co-authored by Copilot”! Even if you don’t use Copilot. Even if you’ve got “chat.disableAIFeatures” switched on: [...]

    • The New Stack ☛ AI won't speed up software delivery — nothing has

      We’ve been here before. We should all lament how the Agile movement withered to a dried husk that only offered “speed”. Speed was never the goal. The primary reason to increase your throughput is to get feedback earlier. When you find out your amazing new feature doesn’t excite your users, you can stop working on it right away.

      You throw away far less when you can stop a bad idea early, and you get to move on to a better idea straight away. Nobody should be trying to build software with the most features and the fastest rate of change. When you have too many features and things are constantly changing to accommodate the ever-expanding list of stuff your software does, people start to hate what you built.

    • Google ☛ How LLMs Distort Our Written Language

      LLMs are used by over a billion people globally, and the most frequent use case is to assist with writing. LLMs can provide a huge efficiency boost, but are they actually writing what we want?

      Many users recognize the "feel" of LLM prose, but few people realize the extent to which LLMs distort the meaning of writing. We find this across three datasets: a human user study, a dataset of human argumentative essays, and reviews from a top machine learning conference.

  • Social Control Media

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Why endless scrolling gets harder to stop: Three drivers of problematic internet [sic] use revealed

      Why many people play for hours or scroll endlessly through feeds is explained by the I-PACE model, developed by Brand at the University of Duisburg-Essen. The model is well established in addiction research, but until now had not been fully validated empirically. That has now been achieved: the findings, published in Comprehensive Psychiatry, answer a key question posed by the DFG research group FOR 2974, for which Brand is spokesperson.

      For the study, 819 participants (average age around 27, approximately 45% women) were examined extensively in a laboratory setting, using clinical interviews, questionnaires and computer-based tests (lasting around five hours). Participants responded to specific stimuli and were required to deliberately inhibit others. Such tasks measure impulse control objectively and show how strongly internet-related [sic] cues affect behavior.

    • The Register UK ☛ Kids can bypass some age checks with a drawn-on mustache

      Like keeping booze away from teenagers or nudie mags out of the hands of young lads, slapping a big “restricted, 18+” label on parts of the [Internet] hasn't stopped kids testing the limits. Those limits, according to UK online safety group Internet Matters, are easy to sidestep.

    • The Verge ☛ Elon Musk will settle the feds’ Twitter lawsuit with pocket change

      The SEC claimed Musk saved over $150 million by breaking the disclosure rules, now it’s settling for $1.5 million.

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ Automating Blog Posts to Mastodon From My Website

      I added an opt-in workflow that can publish new blog posts to Mastodon, save the returned Mastodon URL back into the post front matter, and rebuild the site with the discussion thread already connected.

    • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Ribbon - a linkding client

      I built a native iOS client for linkding and launched it, as I usually do, with a sarcastic-ish Mastodon post. I'd been using my instance as a PWA (inasmuch as PWAs are supported on iOS) and found it to be ok but not terribly satisfying. I appreciated the existing clients, but didn't love them. I'd tried them all, but ended up generally using a Safari extension and the web app in Safari.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Ransomware group claims breach of pro-Orbán Hungarian media firm

      The World Leaks group said they released nearly 8.5 terabytes of allegedly sensitive files on their dark web site last week. Local media outlets that reviewed the material said it included payroll records, contracts, financial statements and internal communications.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ EFF Submission to UK Consultation on Digital ID

      Since then, EFF has joined UK-based civil society organizations in urging the government to reconsider this proposal. In one joint letter from December, ahead of Parliament’s debate around a petition signed by 2.9 million people calling for an end to the government’s plans to roll out a national digital ID, EFF and 12 other civil society organizations wrote to politicians in the country urging MPs to reject the Labour government’s proposal.

      Nevertheless, politicians have continued to explore ways to build out a digital ID system in the country, often fluctuating between different ideas and conceptualisations for such a scheme. In their search for clarity, the government launched a consultation, ‘Making public services work for you with your digital identity,’ seeking views on a proposed national digital ID system in the UK.

    • Techdirt ☛ Section 702 Vote Pushed Back Another Six Weeks Following GOP’s ‘But With Cryptocurrency Ban’ Failure

      The administration isn’t exactly winning here. The GOP has been opposed to a clean reauthorization since its first brush with warrantless surveillance back during the Biden administration. GOP members weren’t upset that the FBI routinely abused the NSA’s Section 702 collections to access US persons’ communications… unless those communications happened to be theirs.

    • The Register UK ☛ Public voter records can expose personal data when linked

      Your voter data could be used against you. A foreign intelligence service that wished to identify the family members of deployed military personnel could do so by cross-referencing public voter record data and social media posts.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ UK's Online Age Checks Are Failing—Kids Are Beating Them With AI, Fake Beards - The Cyber Express

      Children aren’t just countering age checks, they’re actively bypassing them—and often with surprising ease.

      According to a new report from Internet Matters foundation, nearly half of children (46%) believe age verification systems are easy to get around, while only 17% think they are difficult. That perception isn’t theoretical. It’s grounded in real behavior, shared knowledge, and increasingly creative workarounds.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Death Star Administration

    So what has the Trump administration learned from its humiliation in the current war? Silly question. This administration doesn’t learn.

    After all, the war in Ukraine had entered its fifth year by the time the U.S. began bombing Iran. Drones have turned the entire front line of that war into an ever-widening “kill zone”. So nobody should have been surprised by the lethality — Hegseth’s favorite word — of inexpensive drones in the Persian Gulf. Yet Hegseth and co. were evidently caught completely off guard. Many reports indicate that U.S. military sites have suffered far more damage than the Pentagon has acknowledged.

  • New Republic ☛ How the Tech World Turned Evil

    Once upon a time, they were counterculture idealists bringing power to the people. Today they’re greedy monopolists who’d sooner destroy our democracy than be reined in by government in any way—and they have to be stopped.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Demand destruction vs fuel-superseding infrastructure (04 May 2026)

    In her latest, "Truth, Consequences, Climate, and Demand Destruction," Solnit is nothing short of inspirational – not because she downplays the horror and misery of Trump and his war of choice in Iran, but because she tells us what we stand to salvage from the wreckage: [...]

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • CNN ☛ China Eastern MU5735: Flight data bolsters claim China Eastern plane was deliberately crashed in 2022

    “The plane did what it was told to do by someone in the cockpit,” the Journal quoted a person who is familiar with American officials’ preliminary assessment as saying.

  • Lina ☛ I accidentally made law enforcement shut down their stresser honeypot

    However, there was a massive giveaway if you even slightly started looking. The Dutch police absolutely love using bit.nl as their server host. And when you check the MX DNS records, Cyberzap used bit.nl for their mail servers.

    I decided to sign up to see how deep this went. I just wanted to let them know that I'm just researching, and not an active cyberterrorist™. So I registered with the email

• Environment

  • Western Water ☛ Truckee Reservoirs refilled early in rare shift

    In simple terms, the earlier refill allows operators to capture more of the spring snowmelt as it flows downstream.

    Under normal rules, reservoirs must wait until snowpack drops to certain levels before storing water. That delay can mean missed opportunities, even in years with plenty of runoff.

  • Renewable Energy World ☛ Michigan House panel takes testimony on dam safety reforms as heavy rain strains structures across state

    “The 2020 dam failures that I discussed earlier were declared foreseeable and preventable, and the regulator’s calls for extensive maintenance work were ignored by the dam owner,” Schuette said. “So this was a true clarion call, and it’s clear that we need a better framework for the communities and local job providers.” State Rep. Bill G. Schuette (R-Mildland) testifies on legislation intended to improve dam safety regulations in the state. April 29, 2026 | Photo by Kyle Davidson/Michigan Advance

  • Hackaday ☛ Why Leaded Fuel Is Still A Thing

    Leaded fuel is considered one of the greatest environmental failures in modern human history. Adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline reduced knock in internal combustion engines, which was widely considered a good thing. It was only later that the deleterious health effects came into view, by which point there was a massive fleet of lead-dependent automobiles and an industry reluctant to change. Still, the tide turned, and over the last 50 years, unleaded fuel has become the norm for automotive use across the world.

    And yet, there remains a hold out—a world where engines still burn leaded fuels and spray their noxious fumes across the countryside. In the aviation sector, leaded fuel remains a normal part of everyday operations to this day amidst concerted efforts to eliminate it for good.

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ Truth, Consequences, Climate, and Demand Destruction

    There might be good news about the very bad news. If the most important crisis of our lifetimes is the climate crisis, the most important new inflection point for that catastrophe is the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz for the last several weeks. Its most direct impact is dire: the loss of oil and gas as the fuel on which much of the world runs and as the raw material for fertilizers, plastic, and other stuff made from fossil fuel. But when a resource is no longer available or affordable for too long, people can and do change patterns of usage and turn to other resources. This is how the attack by one petro-state (ours) on another (Iran's) may be turning out to be very bad for petroleum, because the only thing history loves more than a surprise party is irony. As the Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman put it, "One way or another, the world will have to burn significantly less oil in the near future than it would have if this war had been avoided. In the jargon of energy analysts, there will have to be large “demand destruction.'"

  • Washington State ☛ Shared Strategy for Puget Sound

    A major priority in the basin is protecting and restoring estuary, nearshore and floodplain habitat. The watershed is poised to make significant progress on this priority in the next 5 to10 years. Farmers have already restored access to some tidal channels. For two years, the Stillaguamish Flood Control District, in conjunction with the Stillaguamish Tribe, has been diligently experimenting with new, lighter tide gates and refining how the gates can work for both fish and farmers. The District has constructed over eighty of these improved gates to date.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Tedium ☛ Wheel Reinvention: Not Just A Common Metaphor

      Today in Tedium: Wheels (along with mousetraps) are the iconic inventions. And why not? The wheel is among the simplest of machines, and yet, just in terms of its applications for locomotion, the speed and volume of transportation it enabled was literally revolutionary. Despite this, the wheel has two major downsides: One, it requires an entire infrastructure of roads to unlock its full capability; and two, the wheel only goes in the direction it’s pointing. For the past nearly 200 years, a mostly obscure lineage of inventions attempted to address these problems, largely unsuccessfully. These are the new wheels. — John @ Tedium

    • Hackaday ☛ Sunlight Powered, Sunlight Readable: Solar Case For Nook Simple Touch

      It looks like he’s got a pair of panels built into the 3D printed case. He recommends using any TP4056-based charger, and tying into the battery test points, not the 5 V supply. It won’t hurt anything if you do, apparently, but the device will think it’s plugged in an refuse to turn off the WiFi. That’s no big deal when you’ve got a continental power grid on the other end of the cable, but charging from a small panel on the back of the case doesn’t always give you enough juice to waste on unneeded radio activity. Especially indoors — these panels are apparently big enough to trickle-charge the device under artificial light, which is a nice, if doubtless slow feature.

    • David Oks ☛ Why airlines are always going bankrupt

      This is very strange. There’s not really a conventional economic explanation for an industry whose long-term equilibrium is losing money: an industry that, on a purely economic level, should not exist. Warren Buffett once called the airline industry a “bottomless pit” for investor capital. “Indeed,” he wrote, “if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.”

      So why is the airline business so remarkably bad?

  • Overpopulation

    • The Washington Spectator ☛ Republicans Made Children More Expensive: Here’s How to Fix the Problem

      The Department of Agriculture estimates that in 1960 it cost middle-income families $259,711 (in 2025 dollars) to raise a child. In 2015, it cost $414,000 (again, in 2025 dollars), an increase of over 50 percent—substantially more than median household income increased over this time period.

    • [Old] Puget Sound Institute ☛ Photo essay: Rebirth of an estuary | Puget Sound Institute

      When Europeans first occupied the land around the Stillaguamish River Delta, they diked the river to stop the tides from overflowing into nearby marshland. The resulting levee allowed the surrounding area to dry out and be used for farming. The Stillaguamish Tribe will push back two miles of the levee currently surrounding Hat Slough along the Stillaguamish River to restore tidal marsh habitat for juvenile Chinook.

    • The Nature Conservancy ☛ Port Susan Bay Preserve's Estuary Restoration

      Despite their array of benefits, functioning estuary habitat has declined across Puget Sound, with critical species and local communities feeling the impact. The Stillaguamish River Delta historically supported nearly 20,000 Chinook salmon annually. In 2019, just 500 fish returned. For the Stillaguamish, Swinomish and Tulalip Tribes, whose ancestors have stewarded these lands and waters since time immemorial, addressing declining salmon populations is a key priority. Ensuring juvenile salmon have places to mature is necessary to recover fish stocks for commercial, subsistence, ceremonial and recreational fishing, as well as for the endangered Southern Resident killer whales.

    • Washington State ☛ Puget Sound Salmon Habitat Restoration Efforts - State of Salmon

      Population Growth and Infrastructure: While Washington State has laws meant to direct development and protect habitat, these have not proven sufficient and often are disconnected from salmon recovery planning. Puget Sound’s population growth is increasing the demand for housing, roads, water systems, and associated infrastructure. This infrastructure often destroys or disconnects salmon habitat. Development continues to destroy habitat at a pace greater than habitat is restored. Restoration also takes time as small plants grow into forests. When healthy habitat is destroyed, it can be decades or even centuries before an area can be restored fully. The Partnership and partners work to both protect what is remaining and fund restoration to increase the amount of habitat available for salmon.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Join CNI’s Steering Committee

    Who else serves? The committee includes three at-large members alongside three representatives appointed by each of CNI’s sponsor organizations, ARL and EDUCAUSE. The executives from CNI, ARL, and EDUCAUSE also serve as ex officio members.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Cisco buys Astrix Security to strengthen AI agent discovery and governance

    Cisco Systems Inc. today revealed it will buy the Israeli cybersecurity firm Astrix Security Ltd. in an effort to bolster the defenses of artificial intelligence agents.

  • The Verge ☛ Altman vs. Elon for the future of OpenAI

    The trial began with jury selection on April 27th. Elon Musk took the stand on April 28th as the first witness called, portraying his interest in founding OpenAI as an effort to help save humanity, then returned to the stand on April 29th and again for a third day of testimony on April 30th, before his financial manager and Neuralink CEO, Jared Birchall, took the stand.

  • Wired ☛ Greg Brockman Defends $30B OpenAI Stake: ‘Blood, Sweat, and Tears’

    The message—which OpenAI’s lawyers made public on Sunday, and which Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers subsequently refused to let the jury hear about—underscores what may be Musk’s larger goal in this trial. He appears to be trying to not only win over the jurors to potentially remove Brockman and CEO Sam Altman from power, but also stir up dirt on the two men and damage OpenAI’s public image.

  • The Verge ☛ OpenAI’s president does ‘all the things,’ except answer a question

    The strongest witness for Elon Musk’s case against OpenAI so far has been Greg Brockman’s journal. Brockman himself is running as a close second.

    Brockman was called to the stand in a rather unusual way — he was cross-examined first, followed by a direct examination — and he had some serious high school debate club energy. There was a lot of “I wouldn’t characterize it that way,” “I wouldn’t say it that way,” and “That sounds like something I wrote. Can I see it in context?” When Musk’s attorney, Steven Molo, read some of the evidence aloud, Brockman would pedantically correct him if he skipped a word, even if that word was “a” or “the.” When asked if Microsoft’s $10 billion investment was the biggest financial event at OpenAI, Brockman replied it was the only $10 billion investment. Come on.

  • Engadget ☛ Someone allegedly used a hairdryer to rig Polymarket weather bets

    The gambling site relies on readings from temperature sensors, and the one at Charles de Gaulle airport is on a public road. This makes it easy to access. The operating theory is that someone snuck in and used a battery-powered hairdryer to bring the recorded temperature up well beyond the actual heat outside.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Hacking Polymarket

    There’s also insider trading: a lot of it.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Graham Platner is Not a Nazi

    He has a tattoo on his chest. He got it in 2007, in Split, Croatia, while on leave during his third Marine deployment, with a group of inebriated fellow Marines who walked into a tattoo parlor and chose a skull-and-crossbones design off the wall because skulls and crossbones are standard military iconography. The design resembles the Totenkopf — the death’s head — which has a long history in military symbolism, including Prussian hussars predating the Nazi period by more than a century, and which was also, infamously, the symbol of the SS-Totenkopfverbände that ran the concentration camps. The two histories coexist. The tattoo, depending on what you bring to looking at it, is either a soldier’s iconography or a Nazi’s. Mr. Platner’s account is that he chose it as the former and did not understand it as the latter. He has now had it covered.

  • Keenan ☛ I leave the US in less than three weeks

    So when she got the letter from Austria, congratulating her on her citizenship, we said it's time. And when she received her EU passport, we said it's really real. And when her job said they'd be willing to transfer her to Warsaw, we said we're actually doing this. And when we sold our house, we said holy shit we just sold our house. And when we were doing a test pack of all of the things we want to bring with us, we said fuck we're going to need more boxes. Even though I was pretty sure I ordered enough boxes, I didn't order enough boxes. We're ready to part ways with most of our earthly possessions, but we still need more boxes. Fine. Whatever. We'll figure it out.

  • Bitdefender ☛ Teenager alleged to be Scattered Spider hacker arrested in Finland, faces US extradition

    This is the picture that US prosecutors have painted of a teenager arrested earlier this month at Helsinki Airport while trying to board a flight to Tokyo.

  • Dan MacKinlay ☛ Intergenerational game theory

    Most game theory assumes the players exist at the same time and can interact: observe each other’s moves, retaliate against defections, form coalitions, bargain over outcomes. Intergenerational games break all of this, in favour of the actually-existing.

    Future generations cannot retaliate against past ones; they do not exist when the moves are made. They cannot enter coalitions; they have no preferences yet to voice. They cannot reject offers; the bargain arrives as a fait accompli for them to inherit. So the standard equilibrium prediction of self-interested rational play promises nothing good for the unborn — and indeed delivers expropriation: environmental depletion, sovereign debt, exhausted commons, accumulated tail risk. These are not coordination failures between present-day parties; they are first-mover advantages against people who cannot yet object (Kotlikoff and Rosenthal 1993).

    This is the inter-personal counterpart of intertemporal decisions, where I treat the intra-personal version (different selves of the same person, across time). Same structural shape — present moves bind future agents who could not participate — but here the future agents are entirely different people. Maybe these cash out into the same problem under multi-level agency.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ War And Internet Blackout Push Iran's Economy Even Further Toward The Brink

    Meanwhile, analysts say the destruction of the economy has been exacerbated by the state-imposed Internet blackout, now in its 66th day.

    The shutdown costs Iran's digital economy between $30 and $80 million every single day, gutting e-commerce, logistics, and the technology sector, not to mention smaller entrepreneurs whose businesses have ground to a halt.

  • Wired ☛ DHS Demanded Google Surrender Data on Canadian’s Activity, Location Over Anti-ICE Posts

    Using a 1930s trade law, Homeland Security targeted the man—who hasn’t entered the US in more than a decade—following posts on X condemning the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Northwestern University ☛ Chuck Todd on rebuilding trust through local news

    They discuss the erosion of trust in national media and how it ties into the decline of local news. Todd shares insights from his recent conversations with local news entrepreneurs, exploring emerging business models, the role of community ownership, and why local journalism must return to being service-oriented and deeply embedded in communities. The conversation also touches on policy solutions, the importance of covering everyday community life—from high school sports to local governance—and how local reporting can strengthen democracy, particularly in the run-up to elections.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Sebastian Gorka Didn’t Respond to ProPublica Comment Requests but Lashed Out on X

    Increasingly, journalists are pushing back against attacks on our credibility by “showing the work,” guiding readers through the reporting process to dispel myths and foster transparency. In that spirit, I wanted to take this opportunity to show how basic beat reporting — fact-checking the assertions of a powerful figure — led to a broader story about the state of the U.S. counterterrorism mission at a critical moment.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Attacks Media, Calls Reporting on Iran War “Seditious”

    Trump has a long history of attacking the press over reporting that paints him in an unflattering light. He has described the press as “enemies” of the American people and expressed a desire for reporters to be shot during his campaign rallies. His administration has also taken actions critics have said were intended to censor dissenting voices in the media, and Trump himself has said that reporters should be arrested for articles published on specific elements of the war on Iran.

  • CPJ ☛ New CPJ podcast reveals torture, coerced testimony in case of jailed Senegalese journalist René Capain Bassène

    The six-part series, “René Capain Bassène, wrongly convicted,” is produced in Wolof and French and is available globally. It draws on first-hand accounts, including interviews with former co-defendants, as well as testimony from Bassène himself.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Polymarket gamblers threaten Israeli journalist over missile strike story

    “After you make us lose $900,000 we will invest no less than that to finish you,” said one message to the journalist, Emanuel Fabian.

    Another said: “You have 90 minutes left to update the lie. If you do this, you will solve the most serious problem you have caused yourself in life … If you decide not to correct it, and leave the lie intact, you will discover enemies who will be willing to pay anything to make your life miserable.”

    The messages to Fabian were shared with the Guardian.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Russia has slipped even further down the press freedom rankings

    Reporters Without Borders also points to a worrying trend in the United States, which has dropped seven places to 64th position. This decline is attributed to the fact that Donald Trump “made regular attacks on the press and journalists part of his systematic practice,” the organisation states.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ “Their Greatest Effort Ever”: The British General Strike at 100

    It’s difficult to imagine, in our age of labor quiescence, the impact of the great British general strike, which began 100 years ago today and reached every city and town in Britain.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ 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 enshittified 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.

  • Inside Towers ☛ BEAD Awardees Learn History

    Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) requires federal agencies to take into account the effects of their undertakings on properties listed, or eligible for listing, in the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). BEAD awards often include a requirement for the grant recipient to participate in the Section 106 review process, according to the NTIA.

  • Derek Sivers ☛ Netizen

    There was no advertising, and no talk of money. I met someone who said he wanted to make money online, and I tried to explain to him that that’s not what the [Internet] is about. It’s a free helpful place where everyone contributes and benefits from others’ contributions.

    I wasn’t naïve. I’m not trying to sound pure-of-heart. It really was the culture and vibe at that time.

    Slowly the culture around me changed, so now it seems I need to explain my strange behavior — why I don’t monetize everything like everyone else. I’m just a product of my place and time. 1993 shaped how I think of the [Internet], and I’m keepin’ on in that original spirit.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Robert Reich ☛ Tonight's Bezos Ball

    A record 55 percent of Americans now report their financial situation is worsening, citing severe stress from high inflation, housing costs, and rising gas prices, according to Gallup/USA Today polling. One in 3 households is unable to cover a month of living expenses. Prices are soaring, wages are going nowhere, millions are losing access to health insurance. Yet corporate profits are in the stratosphere.

    This year’s Met Gala is a testament to the vapid arrogance of the Bezoses and other neo-robber barons of this second Gilded Age.

    As I mentioned recently, Bezos has made his fortune off the backs of millions of working people. According to a newly unsealed filing in an antitrust lawsuit, Bezos’s Amazon has pressured major brands like Levi’s and Hanes to demand that competing retailers raise prices on their products.

  • Trademarks

    • The Register UK ☛ macOS port of Notepad++ called out for trademark violation

      Notepad++ remains a Windows-only app, at least under that name. The beloved developer-focused, open-source text editor recently was ported to macOS by a third party. However, developer Don Ho wants to be perfectly clear that, no matter how convincing the new project might look, it's not official.

  • Copyrights

    • Court House News ☛ Ye faces copyright trial over use of instrumental track at listening party

      But while Ye has admitted he used the track referred to as MSD PT2 and produced by Khalil Abdul-Rahman, professionally known as DJ Khalil, he never compensated the creators for the use of their music, Irene Lee, an attorney for the plaintiffs told the federal jury in LA.

      “They flat out refused to compensate the artists,” Lee said in her opening statement. “They ghosted the artists for years.”

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft fixes VS Code after Copilot credited human code

      The initial change – a pull request – altered VS Code's Git extension to add "Co-authored-by: Copilot" to commits that involved some level of AI assistance. This was done in VS Code 1.110 in early March. The settings change was intended to "[add] the trailer for all AI-generated code, including inline completions."