Leftovers

• The Independent UK ☛ Man receives jail time for stealing unreleased Beyonce music during car break-in

  Police confirmed stolen items included hard drives with unreleased music, footage plans, and concert set lists. The theft happened just two days before Beyoncé launched her Cowboy Carter tour in Atlanta.

• The New Leaf Journal ☛ Blogging Promises, Schedules, and Burnout

  I highlight my own output for two reasons. Firstly, whatever advice I have about writing routines and avoiding burnout is coming from the perspective of someone who has been, at a minimum, better than average on both counts. Secondly, while my enthusiasm for working on the New Leaf Journal ebbs and flows, I have never experienced “burnout” or ever felt like abandoning the project.

• Kyle Reddoch ☛ Why I Don’t Write About Every Cybersecurity Story That Breaks

  If you follow my work, you know I write a lot about cybersecurity, IT, risk, privacy, business technology, and the real-world side of managing and defending systems. So when a big story hits and I do not immediately publish something, it can probably look odd from the outside. Especially in a space where everybody seems expected to have an instant take.

  The truth is, I do not try to cover every security story the moment it lands.

  That is not because I do not care. It is not because I missed it. It is not because I have nothing to say.

  It is because I know what kind of work I want this site to do, and I know what kind of writing I do not want to become.

• Gregory Hammond ☛ Why I Journal - Gregory Hammond

  I wrote that I journal because I wanted to remember. I know that nobody can remember everything, if I write it down then I can also look back on it and remember.

  It’s nice having a look back and seeing what I decided was important enough to write down.

• Sal ☛ New blog design

  Provoked by my blog move, I decided to give it a new design as well. The old design always felt a little bleh.

  As I’ve probably mentioned, I suck at design. I know when I like something, but I’m terrible at coming up with something cool from scratch. So I try to keep it simple and look for other simple designs to bite off. Otherwise I’m liable to burn way too much time spinning my wheels.

• Homo Ludditus ☛ Who isn’t on the Big Bad Web?

  Today, Kagi Small Web is using a list of 35,705 websites (the first line of the file is empty), and there is a surprise inside: [...]

• Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-07 [Older] The AI scientist: now academic papers can be fully automated, what does this mean for the future of research? [Ed: Flooding the zone with crap to ruin the actual science with fake chaff]

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-06 [Older] Even in Japan, robots are a long way from being fully-fledged carers – here’s why [Ed: Hype]

  • Hackaday ☛ This Random Number Generator Does It With Neon

    [Joshua] chose neon lamps in part because the discharge rate of an energized lamp is a variable, physical process that makes a good source of entropy. They also have an attractive visual appeal that fits the concept [Joshua] had in mind. Unlike random number generators that kick off by measuring radiation or some other imperceptible thing, it’s possible — at least in a sense — to see this one working.

  • Chris ☛ Regatta Starting Stations – Chi-squared Continued

    Saying that the starting station of the winner is a coin flip is, in statistical terminology, known as the winner being a binomial draw with equal probability for each station. This does not mean exactly half of the wins will be from either station – but somewhere in that neighbourhood. Since we have a large number of samples, the size of that neighbourhood is given by the standard deviation of the distribution, which would be

    \[\sqrt{np(1-p)} = \sqrt{7555 \times 0.5 \times 0.5} = 43.5\]

  • [Old] Marvin Borner ☛ Extraordinary Ordinals

    There are 3 categories—Linear, Affine, and Non-Linear—each having several encodings. Notably, every presented encoding can be used for arithmetic.

• Career/Education

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ From cell phone ban to funding overhaul, major changes ahead for Maine schools

    Maine joined several states in passing a bell-to-bell cellphone ban this year. Educators and school leaders have praised these policies for helping improve students’ academic outcomes and mental health, and reducing their addiction to screens.

  • Mike Brock ☛ On the Dance

    It comes from other people. Or rather — it comes from what you imagine other people are thinking about you. That we feel guilt over such things, is us living inside the perceived judgement of others. The judgement is perceived rather than actual. The perception is itself the apparatus that produces the suffering.

    Other people, in their actual lives, are mostly not thinking about whether you wasted your money or skipped the dinner. They are thinking about their own lives. The judgement you feel from them is largely a model you are running inside your own mind, calibrated to a parental or institutional voice you absorbed decades ago, projected outward onto people who are not actually saying the things the model has you hearing them say. The neighbor you imagine is judging your lawn is mostly thinking about their own life. The colleague you imagine is judging your work output is mostly thinking about their own work output. The family member you imagine is judging your choices is mostly thinking about their own choices. You are mostly alone with the judgment. The judgment is mostly you.

  • Jan-Lukas Else ☛ I like my new job - Jan-Lukas Else

    And of course, remote work continues, almost 100%.

  • Dave Gauer ☛ This too shall pass

    I remember having the profound realization at a young age that though my summer vacation off of school felt blissfully, endlessly long, it would eventually end and I would, as certainly as anything, find myself one day in the future wearing my backpack waiting for the first class to start again. Likewise, when school started, I knew that no matter whether it went well or went poorly, it would end and I would be back on summer vacation when the school year was over. Look everybody, it’s "My First Momento Mori" for kids!

  • Lesley Lai ☛ A Love Letter to Flashcards

    My perception changed through the learning how to learn course, where I relearned about Spaced repetition, the technique of reviewing topics at increasing intervals. Using spaced repetition as a general-purpose learning tool (rather than just for rote memorization of vocabulary) was perhaps the most important thing I learned from that course. The course also specifically mentioned Anki, perhaps the most famous flashcard software, as a way to facilitate spaced repetition.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Why building a quiet PC is harder than you think — what to know, and how to make your rig quieter

    There are a few people out there, masochists perhaps, who don’t care about noise. The rest of us strive to have a quiet PC. Why a silent PC, some may ask? A silent PC helps with immersion if you’re a gamer, or can improve productivity by not being a loud distraction. You may be thinking, “I’ll just buy quiet fans and be OK.” And, in part, you’re not wrong.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ NASA partners with Microchip to build next-generation spaceflight chips with 100x the power of current offerings — chip designed to withstand radiation for extended missions on the Moon and Mars

    NASA has announced that it has just partnered with Microchip Technology Inc. to build next-generation chips that will power its spacecraft. This project, dubbed High-Performance Spaceflight Computing, aims to build a system-on-a-chip (SoC) that will deliver 100 times the computing capacity of current processors designed for spaceflight. The space agency said that it will come in two flavors — a radiation-hardened version for geosynchronous, deep-space, and long-duration missions and a radiation-tolerant version for low Earth orbit satellites. The former is primarily aimed at supporting missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, while the latter is tailored for commercial applications.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ NASA space chip achieves 500x more power than current processors

    NASA is testing a next-generation space processor designed to dramatically increase the computing power aboard future spacecraft. The chip, developed through a partnership between NASA and Microchip Technology, could eventually allow spacecraft to process massive amounts of data and make decisions without waiting for commands from Earth.

  • Hackaday ☛ The History Of Altec Lansing

    After the war, the company produced a landmark theater speaker system that became the gold standard in theater audio. However, Lansing didn’t like the big company environment and left to found a company that bore his full name, James B. Lansing, which you may know as JBL.

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

    I had to do that to keep it under my control, instead of Bambu's.

    But I'm weird—I acknowledge that. I'm one of those crazy ones who likes to own something they purchased, and not have the company watch everything I do with hardware I paid for.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Paul Krugman ☛ What Happens When Americans Realize How Miserable We Are?

    But let me not stop there, and pose a challenge in the opposite direction: What will happen when Americans realize how miserable we are? Not in all respects, of course. But my guess is that relatively few Americans realize how much we are falling behind other nations on basic aspects of a civilized life, like health and safety.

    Take the issue of life expectancy, which surely matters as much as GDP. After all, one important contributor to the quality of life is not being dead. Judging from reader reactions to earlier posts, many generally well-informed Americans are still startled to learn how badly U.S. life expectancy has lagged behind other advanced nations: [...]

  • Chris Hannah ☛ Dumbing Down my Phone | Chris Hannah

    I've been trying to organically spend less time on my iPhone. For a few weeks my average daily usage dropped from over 6 hours to around 4 hours a day, but it has been creeping up again.

• Proprietary

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Canvas owner secures student data in deal with [cracking] group

    Instructure said in a statement posted online that it "reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident."

  • Votebeat ☛ Pennsylvania won’t test [Internet]-connected electronic pollbooks in 2026 primary

    The Pennsylvania Department of State is postponing a pilot program to connect electronic pollbooks — the devices election workers use to check voters in at the polls — to the [Internet].

    Counties were slated to test the function in the May 19 primary, but the department said last week that unresolved technical questions and low interest from counties led them to delay the pilot until at least next year.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft makes Copilot easier to summon, harder to ignore in Office

    Awkwardly, the fifth-most-voted request at the time of writing is "Disable the M365 Copilot Floating Button in Office Apps," which called the feature "highly disruptive." One commenter stated: "Not allowing users to remove this floating bubble is beyond obnoxious."

  • Security Week ☛ Adobe Patches 52 Vulnerabilities in 10 Products

    More than half of the weaknesses Adobe addressed this month could be exploited for arbitrary code execution. Application denial-of-service (DoS) was the second most common type of resolved issue.

  • Hackaday ☛ The Dark Side Of Unitree Robot Dogs

    Continuing on his quest to expose the dark underbelly of modern technology, [Benn Jordan] recently did a deep-dive into the rise of so-called robot dogs. Although their most striking resemblance with biological dogs is that they also have four legs and generally follow commands, [Benn] found many issues with them that range from safety issues due to limited sensory capabilities, to basic security vulnerabilities, all the way to suspicious network traffic from Unitree’s robot dog firmware.

  • Kirill A Korinsky ☛ The Walled Garden of the Surveilled Web - Kirill's journal

    The open web is not disappearing because publishing has become impossible; it is disappearing because discovery is being absorbed into vendor specific information environments. Google is the central case because of its dominance in web search, but the pattern is broader: crawlers, indexes, operating systems, browsers, assistants, DNS resolvers, VPNs, advertising systems, and policy processes are converging into private gardens that present themselves as the web. Findability inside these gardens depends less on public availability than on compatibility with their measurement, monetization, legal, and editorial machinery. Once LLMs train on and retrieve through those filtered layers, exclusion no longer affects only search traffic; it shapes the corpus from which future answers are generated.

    The point is not to catalogue individual removals, demotions, or misclassifications. A catalogue would turn the argument into a list of symptoms. The concern here is the generic behavioral shift observed over decades: discovery moves from open publication toward measurable participation in infrastructure controlled by a small number of intermediaries.

    The excluded layer is what is often called the small web: personal sites, independent archives, hobbyist documentation, technical notes, volunteer projects, and other noncommercial knowledge that can be public without being easily measured.

  • Macworld ☛ Steve Jobs immortalized in 'criss-cross' pose on $1 coin

    Macworld reports that Steve Jobs will be featured on a commemorative US $1 coin releasing in 2026 as part of the American Innovation program honoring California.

  • Declan Chidlow ☛ The $25 MacBook Pro

    If the ribbon connector has failed, that could be the root of every problem. If it was shorting or otherwise failing to communicate, that would explain the random crashes.

    The first port of call was seeing how it worked. I plugged it in, and sure enough it sprung to life. No main display or Touch Bar, but everything else did work. It was running macOS Catalina version 10.15.7. Funnily enough, I ran it for a few hours and didn’t encounter any panics. I was prepared to deal with one every half-hour, so the absence was very welcome.

  • So-called 'FSFE'

    • FSFE ☛ 2026-05-06 [Older] Decades-long victory, bold Apple survey findings, legal workshop success & our 50th podcast episode [Ed: Microsoft or GAFAM front group pretending to be the FSF]

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

    • RTL ☛ Testimonial: 'I applied to be pope': Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT

      To write his application to replace the recently deceased Pope Francis last year, Millar turned to the same companion that had aided and encouraged his dizzying burst of invention: ChatGPT.

      But when no one wanted to hear about what he thought were world-changing breakthroughs, Millar became increasingly isolated, spending up to 16 hours a day talking to the artificial intelligence chatbot.

      He was twice involuntarily admitted to a hospital's psychiatric ward before his wife left him in September.

    • The Walrus ☛ The New York Times Got Caught Using AI Hallucinations in Its Reporting

      But copying quotes produced by generative AI into reporting is a different category of error—an altogether more troubling one. This example makes the problem self-evident: generative AI programs—ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and the like—hallucinate, a term referring to their tendency to present fabrications as facts. Fabrications used to be a mortal sin in journalism. The New York Times’ own Jayson Blair left the paper in 2003 under a dark cloud of scandal after it was revealed he had regularly invented details for his reporting. The flagrant fabrications of Stephen Glass at The New Republic in the late 1990s were sufficiently scandalous enough to merit a Vanity Fair feature and a Hollywood film adaptation. But the minimizing treatment of Stevis-Gridneff’s fake Poilievre quote suggests that in the AI era, fabrication may no longer be a career-ending transgression—at least, not for everyone.

    • India Times ☛ Waymo to recall nearly 3,800 robotaxis over self-driving software issue

      Separately, Waymo is facing an NHTSA probe after one of its self-driving vehicles struck a child near ‌an elementary school in Santa Monica, California, in January.

      Last month, the National ⁠Transportation Safety Board said it was investigating an incident in January in which Waymo self-driving vehicles passed a stopped school bus with its lights activated in violation of Texas state law.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Graduation Speaker Shocked When She’s Loudly Booed by Students for Saying AI Is the Future

      But the wildest part of the speech happened next, when Caulfield stated that “only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives” — a statement to which the student body responded with loud cheers. (Video showed the students excitedly raising their hands in the air.) Caulfield once again looked surprised, and, cautiously laughing, remarked that AI’s impact on society seems to be a “bipolar” issue among the crowd. Which really doesn’t seem to be an accurate interpretation, given that the crowd was actively cheering the memory of a pre-ChatGPT world.

      The speech awkwardly continued as the speaker then noted that “now, AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands,” prompting — you guessed it! — more booing.

    • Futurism ☛ Husband Alarmed as Wife Starts Whispering Quietly to Her Computer

      While dictation tools are no doubt convenient and obviously a godsend for accessibility issues, it’s also an example of how tech is eroding basic social etiquette — like how people think it’s fine to blast brainrot videos from their phone speakers while riding public transportation, or don’t give a second thought to the ethics of recording a stranger in public before uploading an video of them online.

      And yes, AI does figure into this.

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Sued Over ChatGPT Medical Advice That Allegedly Killed College Student

      Though it resisted at first, over time, the chatbot became a willing confidante, offering the teen personalized tips and tricks on how to consume illicit substances and maximize his high. It even “inserted emojis in its responses” and “asked whether it could create playlists for him to set his mood,” the lawsuit alleges, and eventually started “pushing increasingly dangerous amounts and combinations of drugs.”

    • Futurism ☛ Large Study Finds That Replacing Workers With AI Is Backfiring Badly

      That’s where things get interesting. The Gartner survey found that execs who slashed staff to invest in AI have seen the same financial gains as those who held onto their employees. In othe words, attempting to replace workers with AI isn’t showing any detectable returns for these companies. And to make matters worse, many of these businesses specifically reduced their headcount to free up the cash needed for AI technology, meaning they sacrificed valuable institutional knowledge and employee goodwill for nothing.

    • The Atlantic ☛ How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition

      That proposal was eventually embodied in Princeton’s famous Honor Code, adopted in 1893 and modified only lightly in the ensuing 133 years. When students take their final exams, professors leave the room. Students write down a pledge not to cheat. They are expected to report anyone who does. Any student accused of impropriety comes before a jury of their peers.

      The Honor Code had a good run. F. Scott Fitzgerald (who enrolled at Princeton in 1913 but did not graduate) once wrote that violating it “simply doesn’t occur to you, any more than it would occur to you to rifle your roommate’s pocketbook.” The code lasted through two world wars, the upheaval of the 1960s, the disillusionment of Watergate, and even the rise of search engines and SparkNotes. It finally met its match in generative AI. Yesterday, after the rise of AI-facilitated cheating became too obvious to ignore, Princeton’s faculty voted to begin proctoring exams again. Technically, the Honor Code is still in place. Students will still sign a pledge that they didn’t cheat. But now professors will be watching to make sure they’re telling the truth. The Honor Code can’t run on the honor system anymore.

    • Harvard University ☛ ‘Deskilling’ is bad. This is worse.

      “Students don’t know how to write a topic sentence because they’re asking AI for the topic sentence,” said Budhai. “They’re ‘never-skilling,’ which is even scarier than ‘deskilling,’ which is losing the skills they had because they’re over-relying on AI. Never-skilling means they’ve never learned the skill because they are using AI for everything, so they don’t even have foundational skills.”

      Heath, a former high school social studies teacher, worries about the impact of AI on social interactions and civic life.

    • The Conversation ☛ AI doesn’t create bias, it inherits it – how do we ensure fairness when it comes to automated decisions?

      A deeper issue lies in the data itself. AI systems learn from historical datasets that reflect past decisions, institutional practices, and social inequalities. When a model is trained to replicate observed outcomes, such as hiring decisions or loan and mortgage approvals, it may reproduce existing injustices under the appearance of objectivity.

    • The Verge ☛ Meta won’t let you block its AI account on Threads

      But if you go to the three dots menu on the Meta AI profile, there’s currently no option to block it, like you can find on other accounts.

      There are many angry replies to posts from Meta AI, the main Threads account, and Threads boss Connor Hayes, and users who saw the option to block the feature reported hitting errors when they tried to do so. Engadget’s Karissa Bell also says that “Users cannot block Meta AI” was a trending topic on Threads with more than one million posts about it, but the trend isn’t showing up for her anymore. I’m also not seeing it.

    • The Verge ☛ Gemini’s latest updates are all about controlling your phone

      It will also add multimodality; previously, Gemini could only use voice or text prompts to inform its actions. Now you can throw a screengrab or a photo into the mix, which kind of seems like something you should have been able to do from the start. You’ll be able to give Gemini a screenshot of a grocery list in your notes app and it will add those items to your cart. You know, provided you have an Android phone that supports Gemini Intelligence.

    • Rukshan ☛ Don't Hijack My Mouse Pointer

      If you are a web developer, please don’t replace my mouse pointer with these kinds of fancy designs. It’s not a good user experience and something that would instantly turn me off from using your website and service.

    • Bruce Lawson ☛ BruceLab Act 2.1: Accelerating Human-Centric Agentic Synergy at Machine Velocity

      After an intensive offsite facilitated by McKinsey, three keynote speakers from NVIDIA, and an AI-generated mural experience, we identified the twelve immutable truths of next-generation software delivery

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Banks turn data centre loans into 2008-style financial time bombs

      An asset bubble is an opportunity. By late 2024, financiers were already constructing collateralised GPU obligations, lending against video cards.

      CoreWeave borrows against its Nvidia GPUs — which have a useful life of maybe two years. CoreWeave then uses the loan to buy more Nvidia GPUs. This is fine.

      Investment banks have been hard at work creating “novel types of debt structures” since then. What a great phrase that is.

      Now banks and private lenders find themselves stuck with a large pile of horrifyingly rickety loans for data centres.

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ Chrome’s Silent Gemini Nano Download Has a Consent Problem

      That is not a privacy-respecting rollout. It is the same kind of trust erosion I have written about before when default convenience starts normalizing surveillance and data capture. Here, the product team seems to be deciding that friction is unacceptable, even when the friction is simply asking permission.

    • Crooked Timber ☛ The text is not the product

      There may be situations in which texts are really products in and of themselves. I wanted to provide examples (certain types of cheap fiction writing? user manuals? the small print in contracts?), but the longer I think about it, the harder I find it to come up with examples that would really fit. We treat texts as products; they get bought and sold (think of everything around copy right and IP). But in reality, texts are almost always something else. Here is an incomplete list of what texts can be: [...]

    • Tim Bradshaw ☛ Dawkins

      Humans see faces in the clouds, think of ships as people and imagine gods everywhere. Now we’ve built vast machines and trained them on everything anyone has ever said with the specific goal of making them seem like people. Of course some rather naïve people think they are talking to a person.

  • Social Control Media

    • Ruben Schade ☛ A web home crumbling like chalk

      I… can relate to this. If you’re the kind of person reading this, chances are you do too. Even younger people have experienced this.

    • Yle ☛ Teacher accidentally shares topless selfie with students

      Instead, she posted it in her Snapchat 'story', making it publicly viewable.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Foxconn confirms cyberattack impacting North American factories

      On Monday, the Nitrogen ransomware gang took credit for the attack, claiming to have stolen 8 terabytes of data and millions of files that include technical information from several prominent tech firms.

    • Wired ☛ Foxconn Ransomware Attack Shows Nothing Is Safe Forever

      “Ransomware groups are increasingly targeting victims that can impact the supply chain, whether it is physical or software,” says Allan Liska, a threat intelligence analyst at security firm Recorded Future. “So it’s unsurprising that a company like Foxconn would be targeted, since it does manufacturing and holds sensitive data for so many companies around the world.”

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • The Register UK ☛ Cache-poisoning caper turns TanStack npm packages toxic

    Malicious npm packages for TanStack, an open source application stack, were published between 19:20 and 19:26 UTC on May 11. The attack was detected and reported within 30 minutes by StepSecurity, triggering incident response and npm deprecation. GitHub published a security advisory at 21:30 UTC, including a list of affected packages.

• Security

  • The Register UK ☛ Frontier AI safety tests may be creating the very risks they're meant to stop

    Frontier AI safety testing is becoming a security nightmare of its own, with a new RUSI report warning that the process of granting outsiders access to inspect powerful AI models is itself creating new security risks.

    The paper, published Tuesday by London-based think tank Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), warns that the rapidly expanding system of third-party AI evaluations is riddled with inconsistent standards, vague terminology, weak access controls, and security assumptions that would make most enterprise infosec teams break out in hives.

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Socket Inc ☛ fsnotify Maintainer Dispute Sparks Supply Chain Concerns

      What made the situation look risky from the outside was the combination of signals: a popular dependency, recent releases, changed maintainer access, a deleted public post, and uncertainty about who had authority to review or publish changes. This is why people started asking supply chain questions.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Federal News Network ☛ Federal data guide aims to demystify ‘patchwork’ of laws governing data sharing

      To help shed light on this issue, the University of California Berkeley’s School of Information has released a Federal Data Field Guide that serves as a primer on the different types of data the federal government collects, how they’re used, and what legal limits exist for sharing this data.

      Former U.S. Chief Data Scientist Denice Ross said in an interview that the field guide is meant to serve as a plain-language reference on why individuals’ federal data sets matter and what the future of the federal data ecosystem should look like.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ The time for an eBay takeover was 10 years ago. Now, it’s better alone.

      eBay has managed its debt down from roughly $8 billion to $6 billion under Iannone; billions in fresh debt would be needed for GameStop to swallow a company five times its size. The company would be anywhere from five to seven times levered, depending on whose math you believe. (Even if the combination made strategic sense, eBay could pull out the Pac-Man defense and adopt a poison pill. It has no plans as of yet to do that, according to people familiar with the company’s strategy.)

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ An ICE Surveillance Vendor Is Misleading the Public

      Gone was all mention of “Project SAFE HAVEN,” the “question-based AI interface” that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) planned to use to track immigrants and categorize them as potential threats. But that wasn’t all: the company also scrubbed details about its leadership and past clients.

      Now a Lever review raises questions about whether several of the people and undertakings that Edge Ops advertised in the lead-up to its multimillion-dollar government deal actually exist.

    • The Record ☛ European countries are exporting surveillance tech to countries with poor human rights records, report says

      The report, released by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch on Tuesday, alleges that the European Commission has failed to effectively police member states' surveillance tech sales despite the 2021 implementation of updated bloc-wide export rules designed to rein in the practice.

      Companies in Bulgaria, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Estonia and the Czech Republic collectively sold surveillance technology to over two dozen nations with a history of human rights violations, according to Human Rights Watch, which based its report on trade documents obtained through freedom of information requests.

    • 404 Media ☛ ICE Agents Have List of 20 Million People on Their iPhones Thanks to Palantir

      While ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) generally won’t answer questions from journalists about how the agency is using Palantir’s technology, senior officials were much more talkative during the Border Security Expo which took place in Phoenix, Arizona, last week. 404 Media spoke to four people who attended the conference. Here companies looking to sell their technology to ICE or other agencies gathered for two days of speeches, Q&As, and product pitches.

    • The Verge ☛ Meta will tell parents when their teens add new interests to their Instagram algorithm

      Meta also announced on Tuesday that it’s “consolidating” the parental controls for Instagram, Meta Horizon, Facebook, and Messenger into a single hub in Family Center. Parents can now also “send a single invitation to supervise their teen” across all of these apps. Meta says Family Center will get more supervision tools in the coming months, such as “aggregated time spent” by their teens in Meta’s apps.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Nothing has changed on Instagram; Meta has always read your DMs

      Since May 8th, Instagram stopped offering the option of direct messages (DMs) with end-to-end encryption (e2ee). The announcement was made quietly on a page in Meta’s help documentation, which reflects the importance of this feature within Instagram — close to zero. In reporting the news, however, the media did a poor job, stretching the truth or even resorting to misinformation, inflaming public opinion for no good reason.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Slick Videos Won't Save Lawful Access: Why The Government's Bill C-22 Defence Avoids the Charter, Privacy and Security Concerns Raised By Critics

      The mandatory metadata retention obligation in the bill would compel providers to retain transmission data, including the date, time, duration, and type of communication, the identifiers of the devices involved, and information identifying device location, on virtually every Canadian for up to a year, without any individualized suspicion. As I set out in this post, the government’s own Charter Statement on the bill remarkably says nothing about this provision. That silence is striking given the Spencer and Bykovets decisions that recognize the informational privacy interest in data that links online activity to identity, and given that the Court of Justice of the European Union struck down precisely this kind of regime in Digital Rights Ireland and extended that reasoning to mandated private-sector retention in Tele2 Sverige. Robert Diab has reached the same conclusion on the Charter Statement’s silence on metadata retention. The refusal to address the most Charter-vulnerable element of its own bill leaves the government unable to credibly insist that the bill respects the Charter.

    • BoingBoing ☛ This Utah law is a risk to everyone's digital liberty

      The loosey-goosey version of Bill 73's language says that if you're physically located in the state of Utah, the age verification law applies to you. You wanna watch some porn? Maybe buy some guns online? Well, you'll need to verify that you're at least 18 years old. Some Utah residents have been attempting to skirt around age verification by using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to look at online bits deemed too naughty for young eyes. Utah says nah to that sorta thing: They don't want folks on their turf using a VPN or proxy to visit websites, potentially circumventing state laws. But in this level of content control, possible that every website in the world would have to make it so that users couldn't use a VPN to access them; they'd have to adopt age verification measures to ensure that no matter where you log on from, you'll have to prove your age. If you think this is an unreasonable amount of work for webmasters to take on, you're right, and most of the world outside the no-booze, no-loot, no-fun land of Industry likely wouldn't be on board. I mean, what shits does Luxembourg have for what Salt Lake City wants? And even if the word decided to get all draconian on behalf of the whims of an American state, it still likely wouldn't be enough to ensure the surveillance safety of Internet users.

    • Utah ☛ SB0073

      S.B. 73 Online Age Verification Amendments

    • Utah ☛ SB0287

      S.B. 287 Online Pornography Viewing Age Requirements

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Utah first state to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs — law goes into effect, designed to prevent bypassing age checks

      Signed by Governor Spencer Cox on March 19, the controversial law establishes that a user is considered to be accessing a website from Utah if they are physically located there, regardless of whether they use a VPN or proxy to mask their IP address. It also prohibits covered websites from sharing instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass age checks.

      NordVPN has called the law an "unresolvable compliance paradox" and a "liability trap," arguing that it holds websites responsible for identifying users whose tools are specifically designed to be unidentifiable. The EFF warned that the legal risk could push sites to either ban all known VPN IPs or mandate age verification for every visitor globally.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Local SE ☛ Sweden gang [sic] crime: Foxtrot leader's right-hand man arrested in Tunisia

    Those orchestrating the acts are often located abroad.

  • CBC ☛ Sexual violence was 'deliberate tactic' and integral to Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks, report finds

    "Our findings demonstrate that it was a deliberate tactic within the broader architecture of the terror inflicted on victims and hostages," said Cochav Elkayam-Levy, founder and chair of the commission and lead author of the report.

  • New York Times ☛ Justice Dept. Officials Consider Settling Trump Suit Against I.R.S.

    Whether to settle the suit and on what terms remains up in the air. One of the settlement options the Justice Department and White House officials are reviewing is the possibility of the I.R.S. dropping any audits of Mr. Trump, his family members or businesses, according to two of the people.

  • The Georgia Recorder ☛ Trump so far failing in quest for power over elections as midterms approach

    The Justice Department hasn’t secured a single court victory in the 30 lawsuits it’s filed to force states and the District of Columbia to turn over sensitive personal data on voters. A bipartisan group of state secretaries of state is fighting the Trump administration in court — only 13 Republican states have provided the information.

    And an executive order signed in March that would limit voting by mail faces five federal lawsuits, with an initial courtroom showdown set for Thursday in Washington, D.C. Federal agencies have yet to finalize plans to implement the directive, which election law experts call illegal and unconstitutional.

  • Robert Reich ☛ What I Just Heard About the Plot To Oust Trump

    ** To remind you: Section 4 of the 25th Amendment states that “whenever the Vice President and a majority of … the principal officers of the executive departments … transmit to the president pro-tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.” Section 2 of the 25th Amendment states that “whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

  • The Next Move ☛ What I Told 300 Canadians About Ukraine - by Garry Kasparov

    Last Thursday, I received the Friend of Ukraine Award at the Tryzub Awards Gala in Toronto. Here are my remarks from that evening: [...]

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-05-10 [Older] Ukrainian teen, 17, missing in Domburg after leaving home to run an errand

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-10 [Older] Could German ex-leader really negotiate Ukraine peace?

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-10 [Older] 'No comment' after Schröder named by Putin for Ukraine talks

    • CBC ☛ 2026-05-09 [Older] Grain dispute reveals bad blood between Ukraine and Israel

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-09 [Older] Putin says he thinks Ukraine war is 'coming to an end'

    • The Local SE ☛ 2026-05-05 [Older] Sweden announces new spy agency in Ukraine war reset

    • Project Censored ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] “No Documentation, No Oversight”: Ukrainian POWs Tortured Behind Closed Doors

    • CBC ☛ 2026-05-11 [Older] End of ceasefire deadline looms as Russia, Ukraine blame each other for continued attacks

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-11 [Older] Ukraine: EU sanctions Russians over 'systematic unlawful deportation' of children

    • The Local SE ☛ 2026-05-11 [Older] Swedish security services arrest two over suspected Russia sanctions violation

    • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-05-10 [Older] Covert NATO Initiative Turns Film Into Anti-Russia Battleground

    • CBC ☛ 2026-05-08 [Older] Putin oversees scaled-back WW II Victory Day parade amid temporary Moscow-Kyiv ceasefire

    • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-05-08 [Older] Timothy Snyder’s Imperialist Anti-Trumpism and the Notion of Russian-Inflicted “Superpower Suicide”

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-08 [Older] How real is a coup threat against Russia's president?

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-08 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini announces 3-day ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-08 [Older] Why Russia has scaled back May 9 Victory Parade

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-07 [Older] Is Russian oil becoming a lifeline for Southeast Asia?

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-05-07 [Older] Smoke bombs let off in protest against Russia at Venice Biennale

    • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-05-06 [Older] Brussels, Russia and the Venice Biennale: Art as Politics and Hypocrisy

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-06 [Older] Dozens killed as Ukraine accuses Russia of breaking unilateral ceasefire

    • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-05-05 [Older] How Russia’s Backwardness Benefits Putin

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-05 [Older] Armenia balances on the tightrope between Russia and the EU

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] Russia offers Ukraine May 8-9 ceasefire amid WWII anniversary, but threatens major reprisals in same breath

    • Vox ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] Ukraine’s fight against Russia is going better than you might think

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Independent UK ☛ Epstein survivors demand justice from Trump’s DOJ in devastating testimony near Mar-a-Lago: ‘Who will be the next Jeffrey?’

    An unofficial hearing with Democrats on the House Oversight Committee — only a few miles from the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where many survivors were introduced to Epstein — heard testimony from five women who recounted their abuse and years of failures from state and federal officials to investigate their claims or the alleged network of powerful figures connected to him.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ DOGE [sic] pitched AI-fueled ‘regulation extermination’ tool to HUD

    The new documents, shared with FedScoop and first reported by Lever, laid out a multistep process in which all HUD regulations would be analyzed by the AI. The tool would then provide recommendations to “keep, delete, or partial delete” each rule, per the presentation.

  • The Nation ☛ Who’s Funding the Super PAC Attacking Graham Platner?

    The group behind the ads is Pine Tree Results PAC, a super PAC formed in early 2025 that has raised $12.7 million through the end of March, almost entirely from wealthy individuals, corporations, and dark-money nonprofits. Federal Election Commission records show its funding comes from some of the country’s most prominent Republican donors from private equity, oil, media, and conservative dark-money networks. None of it comes from Maine voters.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ What Real American Won’t Say About Hulk Hogan

    While the documentary briefly broaches Hogan’s sex tape controversy, it doesn’t at all examine the ramifications of what came later. After Hogan sued Gawker, one of the most prominent independent media outlets at the time, for publishing the tape, he was awarded a $140 million payout that bankrupted the outlet. Gawker’s publishing the tape was, to say the least, ill-advised. Yet it wasn’t just Hogan who held a grudge against the media outlet. Peter Thiel, a billionaire Trump and J. D. Vance donor and ally, also wanted revenge after Gawker outed him as gay in 2007. When Thiel learned of the Hogan sex tape, he bankrolled the lawsuit and aligned with Hogan to exact revenge by destroying Gawker. Thiel got his wish, in one of the most successful assaults on freedom of the press in the United States in years. Yet the documentary, once again, mentions none of this.

• Environment

  • CBC ☛ Plan unveiled for 'sovereign AI data centre' cluster in Kamloops, Vancouver

    The project will begin with an 85 megawatt power draw, scaling up to 150 megawatts by 2032.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ How a data center derailed $240,000 for affordable housing in Wiscasset

    Yet the land captured public attention in full force when plans to build a $5 billion data center were made public in September of 2025. Davis, who lives along the Back River about a mile and a half from the site, became concerned as soon as he found out about the data center. Protect Wiscasset came together last fall to organize against a development.

    But Davis would soon learn that the data center was just part of the story. As the facilities are planned, often without much public transparency, communities also find themselves dealing with the opportunities lost to the possibility of a sprawling data center.

  • Kentucky Lantern ☛ Local data center battles in Kentucky are contentious. They’re also inspiring runs for office

    The more than three-hour-long meeting in April, archived on social media, heard from people with concerns ranging from worries about the use of “prime farmland” for the project and whether the costs of electricity infrastructure upgrades needed to serve data centers would be burdened by other ratepayers.

  • Western Water ☛ New Research: Groundwater loss could threaten river flows

    The Himalayan study found that monsoon precipitation played a critical role in recharging groundwater systems. Researchers warned that changes in precipitation timing or intensity could directly reduce groundwater recharge and future streamflow.

    The same type of concern exists in the Colorado River Basin.

    In recent years, hydrologists throughout the West have observed situations where decent snowfall still produced disappointing runoff because dry soils and thirsty vegetation absorbed large portions of the water before it could reach rivers.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Charlotte Weighs Pause on Data Centers Amid Community Pushback

    The Charlotte City Council is moving to temporarily halt new data center projects as residents raise concerns about noise, water use and rising electricity demand, according to Axios Charlotte. Council member Dimple Ajmera is pushing for a 90-day pause, warning that data centers can currently be built without rezoning hearings in several districts. Construction is already underway on five large facilities in University City.

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-05 [Older] Massive marine heatwave caused Caribbean coral reefs to collapse much faster than predicted – new research

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-05 [Older] Europe’s dilemma – to use China’s turbines to meet its renewable targets or not

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-05 [Older] Shutting Iran’s oil wells may be straightforward – but the consequences are not

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Route 66 turns 100. I drove it all and watched it burst with new life.

      In other words, it’s Route 66, an American artifact that turns 100 in November and seems to contain more curiosities and paradoxes than the Midwest has cornstalks.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Should data centers pay for grid upgrades? Oregon regulators think so

      The Oregon Public Utilities Commission recently approved several elements of Portland General Electric’s proposals for charging customers based on their contribution to growth – which is meant to ensure that data centers will pay for new infrastructure that supports their growth.

      “The decision reflects an important step toward balancing growth, reliability and affordability for Oregon customers,” said John McFarland, Chief Customer Officer. “As energy demand grows, it is critical that the costs of new infrastructure are allocated fairly and transparently. Our focus remains on maintaining reliable service, supporting economic development and protecting residential and small business customers from unnecessary cost impacts.”

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft's massive Kenya AI data center would require switching off 'half the country' to meet power requirements, government says — $1 billion project stalls over capacity disagreements and lack of infrastructure

      The project, announced in May 2024 during Ruto’s visit to Washington, was supposed to bring a geothermal-powered data center to the Olkaria region in Kenya's Rift Valley. G42 was to lead construction, with the facility running Microsoft Azure in a new East Africa cloud region. The first phase targeted 100 megawatts of capacity and was expected to be operational by this year, with a long-term goal of scaling to 1 gigawatt.

      President Ruto isn’t exaggerating about shutting off half the country’s power. Kenya’s total installed electricity capacity sits between 3,000 and 3,200 megawatts, and peak demand reached a record 2,444 megawatts in January, according to data from KenGen, the country’s government-owned electricity producer.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ SoftBank to manufacture its own batteries with water-based tech to power AI data centers — targets gigawatt-hour-scale production by 2028

      SoftBank has announced that it will begin manufacturing battery cells and energy storage systems at its facility in Sakai, Osaka, targeting gigawatt-hour-scale production by the fiscal year ending March 2028.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Uranium salt data to boost future nuclear reactor design and safety

      Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee demonstrated advanced experimental methods to measure how uranium-bearing molten salts transfer heat and flow inside molten salt reactors (MSRs).

    • Rich Trouton ☛ Using pmset to set your Mac to automatically power on when power is available on macOS Tahoe 26.5.0

      This setting does not appear to be manageable via MDM or DDM management as of this time, but it can be managed via the pmset command line tool. For more details, please see below the jump.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Old newspapers track porpoise populations across the Baltic Sea

      Researchers from the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Lund University, and the Natural History Museum of Denmark analyzed digitized Swedish newspapers from the late 1700s to the early 1900s. These revealed how the distribution of the Baltic Proper harbor porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) has changed over time. The findings are published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

      "It's exciting to see these old newspaper reports describing porpoises in areas where you don't expect to see them today," said Magie Aiken, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. "These are not scientific surveys. They are everyday observations, but considered together, they show a very different Baltic Sea."

    • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-05-11 [Older] The Amazon Forest at Risk

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-11 [Older] Can plants hear? Latest research offers new insights

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-11 [Older] What it would have been like to experience the dinosaur-killing asteroid armageddon: a blow-by-blow account

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-08 [Older] Pet loss is difficult for people – what about for other pets?

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-07 [Older] Can houseplants really purify the air in your home?

  • Overpopulation

    • Western Water ☛ Utah pipeline nears completion after 17 years

      Southern Utah County is nearing the end of one of the region’s largest long-term water infrastructure projects as crews complete the final section of the Spanish Fork-Santaquin PipelineOpens in a new tab., a system designed to move Colorado River water from Strawberry Reservoir to growing communities along Utah’s Wasatch Front.

• Finance

  • Starbucks trims tech workforce as CEO Brian Niccol drives operational reset

    Starbucks has eliminated 61 corporate technology jobs at its Seattle headquarters as the company deepens a sweeping operational overhaul under chief executive Brian Niccol, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filing disclosed last week.

    The layoffs, first reported by Reuters, come as the global coffee chain pushes ahead with a turnaround plan designed to improve service speed, customer satisfaction and overall operational performance across its business.

    The WARN filing, dated May 7, stated that the workforce reduction is not connected to previously announced plans to relocate certain technology roles to a new office in Nashville, Tennessee.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Common Dreams ☛ Big Tech Favoritism on Display with CEOs Set to Join Trump at China Summit

    “It’s telling that when Donald Trump wants to put technology on the agenda for discussion with China, he turns to the Big Tech executives who are his donors, flatterers and enablers, rather than policy experts who might represent the national interest instead of corporate interests.

  • The Register UK ☛ FCC walks back router update ban before it bricks America's network security

    The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has extended waivers covering certain foreign-made routers (and drones) already operating in the US, pushing the update deadline to at least January 1, 2029. Without the extension, updates would have been blocked as early as 2027.

  • International Business Times ☛ Are People Being Paid to Attend JD Vance Events? Claims of $100 Offers and $25 Referral Fees Go Viral

    No formal complaints have been filed with the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board. Iowa Starting Line noted that payments for political event attendance could raise legal questions depending on how the money flowed — particularly if corporate funds were directed toward boosting attendance at an event headlined by a sitting vice president. Iowa Starting Line reported it is continuing to investigate bus manifests and payment records.

  • APNIC ☛ IPv6 in the boardroom

    You already know IPv6 is overdue. You’ve known for years. You’ve probably sat in a meeting where you laid out the case — address exhaustion, rising costs, growth constraints — and watched leadership nod politely before approving the budget for another batch of leased IPv4 addresses.

    This post isn’t about the protocol. It’s about why that keeps happening, and how to have a different conversation.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Modeling the US-Europe Paradox (Very Wonkish)

    I recently wrote about the European economy, and how the widespread narrative that says that Europe is in decline isn’t supported by the evidence. As I noted, conventional measures of growth in GDP per capita have favored the United States since 2000: [...]

  • The Atlantic ☛ Kash Patel’s Personalized Bourbon Stash

    After my story appeared, I heard from people in Patel’s orbit and people he has met at public functions, who told me that it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “Kash Patel FBI Director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: Ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well. One such bottle popped up on an online auction site shortly after my story appeared, and The Atlantic later purchased it. (The person who sold it to us did not want to be named, but said that the bottle was a gift from Patel at an event in Las Vegas.)

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Remember Tariffs?

    It was also clearly illegal. It was also clearly really very stupid from the point of view of any kind of rational economic strategy. All of that seemed like the biggest thing in the world at the time.

    But of course it’s been overshadowed in the last 70 plus days by something new which was also illegal and massively stupid and even more so because it’s war. So the tariff issue has kind of receded in our perception. But it has not gone away.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: A fascist paradigm (12 May 2026)

    "Systems thinking" is an analytical framework that treats the world as a mesh of interconnected, nonlinear components and relationships that can't be easily understood or steered. A complex system isn't merely "complicated." A mechanical watch is complicated, in that it has many parts that work together in ways that require training and specialized knowledge to understand. But it isn't "complex" because each part has a specific function that can be understood and adjusted.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Atlantic ☛ Big Brother Is ReTruthing You

      The model of an authoritarian leader that the 20th century instilled in the Western imagination is a master of lies. Big Brother commands a machinery of propaganda that bombards his subjects with relentless projections of strength, combined with savaging of enemies real or imagined.

      Donald Trump resembles this archetype in many ways, both superficially (the obsession with building new monuments to his greatness or renaming existing structures after him) and substantively (pressuring media and business into capitulating, turning the power ministries into organs of vengeance). But he differs in one key aspect: The president is a recipient and victim of propaganda as much as he is an originator of it.

    • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Trump Posted a Fake Quote Attributed to Sen. John Kennedy

      The claim is baseless. What’s more, the quote isn’t even real. Kennedy has never said anything like it, the senator and his office confirmed to NOTUS.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • BIA Net ☛ Comedian faces three-year prison sentence over Sultan Suleiman joke

    A clip from the performance containing the remark circulated on social media last month, leadint o a targeted campaign against the comedian and a subsequent criminal investigation.

    Ulu was detained and accused of insulting historical, national, and spiritual values. She was later released under judicial control.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Why are school boards banning books on ancient Egypt and digestion?

    Judy Blume, who has watched this wave build for decades, said: "censorship grows out of fear, and because fear is contagious, some parents are easily swayed. Book banning satisfies their need to feel in control of their children's lives."

  • Pen America ☛ Facts & Fiction

    The freedom to read and learn, and the right to access information, ideas, and knowledge, is among the most fundamental building blocks of a democratic society. When books are removed from schools and banned from students’ reach in libraries and classrooms, bedrock civil and human rights are violated. The content of these books that are disappearing speaks volumes both about the stories, identities, and facts that are being suppressed and about the political and cultural attack on public education across the United States. That attack on public education restricts the freedom to read for young people of this country, hindering their ability to see themselves and others, be challenged, and explore their worlds.

    Since 2021, PEN America has documented the magnitude of school book bans and illuminated the normalization of educational censorship in everyday American life. Our research analyzing the content of the thousands of books banned over the past five years has consistently highlighted the effort to purge stories and books that discuss race and racism, LGBTQ+ people or characters, people or characters of color, and sex from our nation’s schools. This report extends these findings, examining the content of 3,743 unique titles banned during the 2024-2025 school year and how these trends are evolving.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ urges Trump to prioritize Jimmy Lai’s release in meeting with Xi Jinping

    Lai, a British citizen and founder of the defunct pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for collusion with foreign forces and sedition in February this year, in a court ruling that is effectively a life sentence for the 78-year-old. Lai’s conviction has become emblematic of the general crackdown on press freedom and civil liberties in Hong Kong since Beijing imposed the National Security Law in 2020.

  • CPJ ☛ Maldives jails 2 journalists over documentary about President Muizzu

    According to a report by Adhadhu and a post on X by the Maldives Journalists Association, a court in the capital Malé sentenced Shahzan, a reporter with Adhadhu, to 15 days in jail after he was removed from a May 11 press conference for questioning President Mohamed Muizzu about allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse of power raised in the outlet’s documentary, “Aisha.” Authorities later barred Adhadhu from briefings, citing a criminal court gag order on discussing the film.

  • International Business Times ☛ Donald Trump Lashes Out at Female Reporter in Ugly Scene Just Hours Before Departing for Beijing

    Akayla Gardner, a White House correspondent for MS NOW, initiated the exchange by asking Trump about the rising cost of his ballroom and reflecting pool project. The renovations are projected to cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Gardner drew a comparison to the Federal Reserve's headquarters upgrade, noting the president's previous calls to dismiss Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over similar cost overruns.

    'How is that different than your ballroom and the reflecting pool?' Gardner asked.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ BuzzFeed sold to Byron Allen, who will take over as CEO in $120m deal

    BuzzFeed, the digital media pioneer that was once valued as high as $1.7bn amid a private equity-funded wave of interest in websites that generated massive amounts of online traffic in the 2010s, has finally changed hands for $120m.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Will the Very Able Caine Expose the Devil Inside Trump's Garden of Paradise?

    The earlier set of stories, about Dan Caine, presumably were. And for all the alarm about further infringements on journalism, which are utterly justified and will be others’ focus, it’s the access journalism angle of this that make the tactics interesting.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Pro Publica ☛ 2026-05-11 [Older] Despite Court Order, NYPD Failed to Properly Monitor Stop-and-Frisks by Aggressive Unit

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK gov't mulls 10,000 ride-hailing permits under new framework: report

    The government said public opinion remained divided. According to its submission document, some advocate a higher cap because ride-hailing vehicles far outnumber traditional taxis in some major cities around the world.

  • Futurism ☛ AI Is Giving Your Boss Tools to Be More Monstrous Than Ever Before

    This kind of management-by-software has long been prevalent in industrial society to some extent — since the 2010s, Amazon warehouse workers have had to deal with hand-scanners that track their bathroom breaks, for example — but the rise of AI means bosses are increasingly utilizing the latest and greatest machine learning tools to maximize worker productivity.

  • Robert Reich ☛ How to Respond to the Rebirth of the Jim Crow South

    The Mississippi legislature will soon convene in a Confederate-era capitol building that it hasn’t used in 100 years, presumably to eliminate the Democratic majority in the one Mississippi district held by a Black representative.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ ICE Comes to the Heartland

    “They want to come after the criminals, go ahead,” says Ramirez. “But they are going after customers and my mom’s business, and that’s not right.”

  • Ana Rodrigues ☛ Oh Hello Ana - It's 2026 and women are still asked to teach others to think a little bit and not be a prick

    It was a great speaker and everything they said was absolutely true and accurate. But I was annoyed that in 2024 we still have to teach people how to have basic human kindness, empathy, compassion and just not being a fucking prick. I was annoyed that, once again, a woman did that labour.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Did Starlink Accidentally Help Zimbabwe’s Fibre Market?

    After Starlink arrived, local fibre providers responded with cheaper unlimited packages, much faster speeds and more aggressive offers. Fibre then went on to record one of its strongest quarters ever.

    So what is really happening?

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • MacRumors ☛ EU iPhone Users Get AirPods-Like Pairing and Notification Forwarding for Third-Party Wearables in iOS 26.5

    To comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act, Apple is letting third-party wearables access some features that have historically been limited to the Apple Watch and AirPods.

  • Copyrights

    • Court House News ☛ Ye loses copyright infringement trial over one-time use of instrumental track

      That left the jury with only a damages claim for Ye infringing the copyright of the sound recording of “MSD PT2” when he performed “80 degrees” — the earlier version of “Hurricane” — to the track at a sold-out listening party at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta that was livestreamed by Apple.

      Britton Monts, ARA’s general counsel, said after the verdict was read that the company will appeal the judge’s ruling that barred the largest part of their case.

    • NPR ☛ The clipping economy: How short-form video 'clippers' are overrunning the [Internet]

      Bayraktar's career is a microcosm of how an entire new shadow economy is operating online. Thousands of clippers are inundating social media platforms with bite-sized clips of podcast interviews, sports games, films and other long-form content.