Leftovers

• Derek Thompson ☛ The Six Megatrends That Define 2026

  In this edition, I’m trying something a bit more ambitious. I’ve organized the morsels of information under several themes—let’s call them: “megatrends”—that define the 2026 news cycle and that I think will continue to shape the world in the months, and years, to come.

  Today’s megatrends span economics, health, artificial intelligence, culture, politics, and media. Free subscribers will get to read the first two megatrends, on economics and health—plus a “historical interlude” that was too interesting to leave out. Only paid subscribers will get to read more about the state of AI, a paradox in politics, and an eerie new trend in the media.

• Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Simon Späti on Technical Blogging - Write that blog!

  Simon Späti’s web is one you’ll enjoy being caught in. You might enter via a blog post – likely on data engineering – then get hooked. You could easily spend hours exploring his neatly organized Second Brain, evergreen notes, and interactive graphs tying it all together.

• The Point C Collective LLC ☛ The First Year

  A year ago this week, I published the very first post of this newsletter. It wasn't a framework. It was an announcement. I was launching Point C, a new coaching practice, and I made a promise: every week, I would share one visual framework supporting one act of leadership, built from the tools I use with my coaching clients, and I would build it all in public.

  I didn't have a content calendar. I didn't have a book outline. I had years of frameworks I'd been teaching and coaching with but had never written about, a blank half sheet of paper, and a question I couldn't stop thinking about: What if I just started sharing these tools, one at a time, and see what happens?

• Science

  • Dr Molly Tov ☛ i'm doing citizen science and it's SO FUN and you can too

    CoCoRaHS is, as the name implies, a community volunteer effort to measure rain, hail, and snow amounts across the member nations. It's also fun as hell.

  • Rlang ☛ Is logistic regression regression?

    I came across a post recently by a machine learning engineer who made the bold claim that logistic regression is the worst name for an algorithm ever, or something along those lines. Many statisticians of the more old-school type seemed to disagree. This led me to think a bit more deeply about the subject. I’ve already written several posts on bad terminology in statistics (see confidence level, line of best fit, r squared) so I might have been expected to agree with the machine learning view, but in this case I agree with the statisticians, and I would like to explain why.

  • Joachim Hendrik Schipper ☛ BSc thesis | Publications, Hypergeometric functions, Mathematics

    My BSc thesis is titled “On the algebraicity of GKZ-hypergeometric functions defined by a (hyper)cuboid” and was written under the supervision of Frits Beukers.

    My supervisor referred to this thesis in Algebraic A-hypergeometric Functions (“It has been verified by J. Schipper (…)") and my lovely girlfriend Esther Bod cited my work in Algebraicity of the Appell-Lauricella and Horn hypergeometric functions; this page exists for the benefit of those tracking down these citations.

    The latter article renders this thesis mostly obsolete: it obtains the same main result in the two-dimensional case with less effort, and it leverages the idea used in the proof of the high-dimensional case to obtain a more interesting result.

• Career/Education

  • Tracy Durnell ☛ Bookshelves as mental constructs

    The bookshelf has many layers of organization: first, where books will fit on the shelves; then, my system of classification, which is unique to my understanding of my own library; then, the collection as a whole, what it includes and excludes, and how that relates to what I am thinking about and what/ who I want to be. It seems there is a higher conceptual level of whole schools of thought represented within a bookcase — even a worldview, when taken as a whole. Or you can burrow inwards, to the structures of thought that compose the books.

  • Mandy Brown ☛ Freedom from unreal loyalties | A Working Library

    I think these teachers go by other names—frugality, integrity, humility, and solidarity, to name a few. Like the best teachers, they ask a lot of us. Perhaps too much on some days; we may not always be able to hear them, especially through the din of the war drums and the noise of the platforms and the very real fear of precarity that screams ever so loudly in our ears. But I think perhaps that if we make an effort to listen, we will find that they still have much to teach us, that we still have much to learn.

  • Guy LeCharles Gonzalez ☛ Five Things: May 14, 2026

    Like most of Gen X, I didn’t get any training before I got my first roles that involved managing other people. If you’re good at doing something, the assumption is you’ll also be good at managing other people doing that thing — which in my experience, is often not true at all. I had to learn the nuances of management on the fly, from good and bad examples, making mistakes along the way, and it’s an ongoing learning process.

  • Derek Sivers ☛ Prepare your “no” and keep it handy

    I felt the pain of this, over and over again. Then I finally figured out a solution that’s worked wonderfully for years.

    I took an hour to write a really nice “no” in advance. Considerate, but decisive. Not too long, but not too short. Generalized and versatile for all situations.

    I saved it on my computer and phone, to copy and paste. Now as soon as I get an unwelcome request? Tap-tap-tap. COPY-PASTE-SEND in three seconds, and it’s out of mind.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Ask Hackaday: Do We Need A 21st Century Calculator?

    I often see newer calculators from HP, like the Prime G2, or “new” HP-like calculators like the ones from SwissMicros, and think I should pick one up. Well, technically, HP licensed their calculators to Moravia, so even a “real” HP calculator isn’t from HP anymore. But, in the end, I always realize that my need for a physical calculator is so diminished that I can’t justify buying anything new, and I can barely even spring for a $10 one at the thrift store unless it is a real collectible.

    Mind you, I’m not talking about RPN versus algebraic. I could say the same thing for TI, Casio, or Sharp calculators. I just don’t know why I need one anymore, even though I still, for some strange reason, want them.

  • Ludlow Institute ☛ Never Plug In Raw Again

    USB charging has become completely normalized. And sometimes we don’t realize that what we’re plugging into is another computer.

    USB connections are often doing two jobs at once: delivering power and opening a channel for data. And if you don’t control what you’re plugging into, that data connection might be used to steal information or load malware onto your device.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Engadget ☛ UK antitrust regulator is officially investigating Microsoft Office

    The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will officially begin a strategic market status investigation into Microsoft this month. The organization will examine whether the bundling of Windows, Word, Excel, Teams, Copilot and related Office products is uncompetitive.

    "Our aim ​is to understand how these markets are developing, Microsoft's position within them and to consider ‌what, if ⁠any, targeted action may be needed to ensure UK organizations can benefit from choice, innovation and competitive prices," CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell said in a statement published by Reuters.

  • SANS ☛ Simple bypass of the link preview function in Outlook Junk folder

    Besides serving as a place where Microsoft Outlook places suspected spam, the Outlook Junk folder has one additional function that can be quite helpful when it comes to identifying malicious messages. Any e-mail placed in this folder is stripped of all formatting, and destinations of all links included in the message become visible to the user, as you can see in the following images which show the same e-mail when it is placed in the inbox, and when it is placed in the Junk folder.

  • Rui Carmo ☛ Googlebook

    On the face of it, this looks like yet another Google rebranding exercise, and considering what happened with the Pixel and Google’s penchant for unveiling “category defining” devices they never actually sell worldwide, My first reaction was “meh”.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ I see 1Password is stepping on the rake again

    (No I'm not linking to it.) Ok first, how in the everloving fuck did you allow a password manager to reach multiple millions of lines??

  • The Independent US ☛ Inside Donald Trump’s billionaire entourage for Beijing as MElon and Tim Crook join President on China trip

    “It is an Honor to have Jensen, Elon, Tim Apple, Larry Fink, Stephen Schwarzmann [sic], Kelly Ortberg (Boeing), Brian Sikes (Cargill), Jane Fraser (Citi), Larry Culp (GE Aerospace), David Solomon (Goldman Sachs), Sanjay Mehrotra (Micron), Cristiano Amon (Qualcomm), and many others journeying to the Great Country of China where I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction, to “open up” China so that these brilliant people can work their magic, and help bring the People’s Republic to an even higher level!” Trump wrote.

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Google just announced the Googlebook

    Yes, Googlebook. Not Chromebook. This is a whole new thing. Google is merging Android and ChromeOS into a new laptop platform with Gemini AI baked in from the ground up. The new laptop was announced this week.

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

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ How Dangerous Is Anthropic's Mythos AI?

      While Anthropic’s model is really good at finding software vulnerabilities, so are other models. The UK’s AI Security Institute found that OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, already generally available, is comparable in capability. The company Aisle reproduced Anthropic’s published results with smaller, cheaper models.

      At the same time, Anthropic’s refusal to publicly release its new model makes a virtue out of necessity. Mythos is very expensive to run, and the company doesn’t appear to have the resources for a general release. What better way to juice the company’s valuation than to hint at capabilities but not prove them, and then have others parrot their claims?

    • Martin Chang ☛ I had enough with slops

      I don't know why. But my YouTube, Twitter (I still refuse to call the thing X) and Facebook account has been simultaneously infested with AI slop. Absolutelly low effort, low quality, hype or fear mongering (I think the AI risk is real, both economy and human existence. But that needs real adult conversation). STOP! Why should I spend my effort reading your garbage when you yourselves spent 0 effort creating it?

    • Martin Alderson ☛ Managed agents are the new Lambda

      Anthropic has really been pushing their managed agents product hard lately. This makes a lot of sense - cloud hosted agents are genuinely incredible in what they can do - but I'd urge real caution on locking yourself into a vendor - at least at this point.

      Fundamentally, agents are not particularly difficult to swap out. While there are important differences and nuances in how they work and operate, switching from Claude Code to Codex (or OpenCode, or Pi, or one of the many other agent harnesses) is a fairly simple process. Fundamentally the pattern is the same - run a harness with a prompt, context and tools and capture output and logs. All agent harnesses have the same primitives.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Kickstarting “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI” (14 May 2026)

      My next book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, will be out in about a month – and (once again) Amazon's monopoly audiobook platform refuses to carry it, and so (once again) I'm pre-selling the audio, ebook and print edition in a Kickstarter campaign that proves that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them: [...]

    • The New Stack ☛ GitLab is betting a 19th-century economic theory will shape its AI era

      But now, GitLab is restructuring itself for a whole new paradigm: that AI agents will increase the amount of software being built — and developers will spend their time supervising, reviewing, and coordinating machine-generated code rather than writing every line themselves.

    • Futurism ☛ Software Engineers Say They're Losing the Ability to Code Now That AI Does It for Them

      But it turns out that embrace of AI by programmers may come at a steep price. Many are speaking out, saying they now simply review AI-generated code instead of writing it themselves — a rote task, it turns out, that’s an important part of keeping their technical skills sharp.

      Similar complaints are proliferating across social media, and 404 Media talked to more developers who confirmed the problem.

    • Press Gazette ☛ Prolific finance journalists facing questions over identities

      Together, they have written over 1,000 articles for more than 30 different news outlets.

      None of the many publications who have published their work has yet been able to verify them either despite being asked to do so by Press Gazette.

  • Social Control Media

    • Sweden ☛ Criminal networks are recruiting children | The Swedish Police Authority

      Criminal networks are exploiting children in Sweden. Here we explain what warning signs to look out for as a parent and how the Police work to stop the exploitation.

    • Futurism ☛ Mark Zuckerberg Is Realizing That When You Treat Your Workers Like Human Garbage, They Might Not Like You Anymore

      The two key ingredients to Mark Zuckerberg’s all-in AI push? Money, and a heaping serving of misanthropy.

      As part of his AI-first regime, Meta has fired thousands of employees while forcing the ones that remain to use the tech as much as possible, speeding them towards burnout. The expectation now is that they run a whole posse of AI agents that work in the background so a single employee can tackle multiple projects at the same time. If an employee doesn’t use AI enough, they’ll get dinged on their performance review. And while Meta’s future looks more uncertain than ever, Zuckerberg has turned his attention towards building a photorealistic AI clone of himself to make his micromanaging presence omnipresent throughout the company.

    • The Atlantic ☛ An Urgent Question for Anyone Who Uses Social Media

      The evidence that Latifi collects in Like, Follow, Subscribe could easily support the conclusion that family influencing is unethical, full stop. Parents who chase algorithms on social-media platforms are sacrificing their children’s privacy, well-being, and safety. Their home becomes a boundaryless jobsite where there is no third-party protection, and where a child’s primary caregivers are also their bosses. Seven states have now passed legislation to regulate family influencing, but these laws mostly just ensure that parents set aside a percentage of earnings to compensate their children. Latifi’s sources indicate that most of these kids are already being paid—usually in the form of bribes. At any rate, the laws put the onus on the parents to comply and correctly calculate their children’s earnings, with little to no outside enforcement.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • BBC ☛ Cyber-crime increasingly coming with threats of physical violence

      Beasley works for a US security firm called Semperis, and at the time he was involved in ransom negotiations on behalf of a US government organisation that had been hit by a cyber-attack.

      The package delivered to his home in the US was a warning from the ransomware group he had been having to talk to.

    • Bitdefender ☛ When ransomware gets physical: cybercriminals turn to threats of violence

      A study last year by identity security firm Semperis found that 40% of ransomware attacks saw criminals threatening physical violence against employees who refused to pay.

      In the United States that figure rose to 46%.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft BitLocker-protected drives can now be opened with just some files on a USB stick — YellowKey zero-day exploit demonstrates an apparent backdoor

      YellowKey can be triggered simply by merely copying some files to a USB stick and rebooting to the Windows Recovery Environment. We tested this ourselves, and sure enough, not only does it work, it bears all the hallmarks of a backdoor, down to the exploit's files disappearing from the USB stick after it's used once.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Verge ☛ Linux devs are fighting the new age-gated [Internet]

      His persistence paid off. On May 1st, SB26-051 passed with an exemption he’d pushed for — excluding open-source operating systems like Linux from its rules. “We have created a template that I hope other legislatures adopt,” Richell told The Verge.

      Richell’s brush with age verification laws ended well. In the larger world of open source, though, they remain a hot topic. As several US states are debating and enacting rules similar to Colorado’s, some open-source developers are still trying to figure out how to respond — or whether they need to. Others are openly thumbing their noses at the new rules. And some, like Richell, are trying to help lawmakers understand their plight.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Signal Warns It Would Pull Out of Canada if Made to Comply With Bill C–22

      Are lawmakers capable of learning from their peers elsewhere? Do we have to do this kind of thing every year, country-by-country?

    • Michael Geist ☛ Bill C-22’s Groundhog Day: Why the Government’s Dismissal of Signal, Apple and the U.S. Congress Concerns Runs Back the Disastrous Online News Act Playbook

      Secure messaging service Signal yesterday became the latest company to warn that Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, could force it to leave the Canadian market rather than comply with provisions it says would compromise its end-to-end encryption and create new cybersecurity risks. Signal vice-president Udbhav Tiwari told the Globe and Mail that the company “would rather pull out of the country than be compelled to compromise on the privacy promises we have made to our users.” The comments are part of a steady stream of similar warnings from Apple, Meta, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, and the chairs of the U.S. House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees. Despite growing concern, the government’s response has been to launch a misleading social media campaign and repeatedly insist that the experts and companies are mistaken.

    • Lusaka ZM ☛ Zambia’s digital ID ecosystem takes centre stage at id4Africa 2026 conference

      Zambia’s digital transformation towards a secure, inclusive, and government wide digital identity system has become a standout story at the ID4Africa 2026 conference with Smart Zambia National Coordinator, Percy Chinyama, detailing the country’s progress before an international audience of policymakers, technologists, and development partners.

      Speaking during a high level panel discussion on Digital IDs, Mr Chinyama explained that while Zambia has experimented with various identity interventions over the years, none achieved lasting success until the government adopted a coordinated ecosystem approach backed by the World Bank.

    • EFF ☛ Help EFF Solve an Issue That's Bigger than Creepy Ads

      Privacy is a human right because it gives you a fundamental measure of security and freedom. That is why we at EFF focus on your ability to have private conversations and interact with the world using technologies that you choose. But when tools that many of us must rely on serve corporate surveillance, they also feed government surveillance. We owe it to ourselves to fight the mass spying used to control and intimidate people. Let’s do this.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Surveillance Economy Is Here. This Is How We Fight Back.

      It’s part of a broader trend in this period of rapid technological and economic change. We are being told what our future will look like by a select few tech companies that bought their way into the corridors of power in Washington. The question now is whether we can resist this trajectory.

      Do Americans actually want a more painstaking and inaccessible economy in which every consumer needs an AI proxy to negotiate against corporate algorithms? Where workers must simulate productivity to evade constant digital surveillance? Where every interaction is stripped down to a transaction, and where we are sorted, scored, and steered at every turn, treated as profiles rather than as people?

      The answer, unsurprisingly, is no. Ida Tarbell’s generation offers an alternative roadmap.

  • Confidentiality

    • Matt Birchler ☛ Is the war on RCS actually an argument that texting Android users *should* suck?

      This is where I ask you, dear reader, has texting people gotten more complicated for you since RCS rolled out? Maybe if you care deeply about whether messages are RCS or SMS, and maybe you're surprised when it's SMS when you were expecting RCS, but I'm not sure what confusion he's referring to. I'm Apple tech support for most of my family and friends, so when something is weird in Apple world (Apple Photos, a hit of liquid glass, etc.), I hear about it. I've not heard a single complaint about RCS since its roll out.

• Defence/Aggression

  • 404 Media ☛ DOGE [sic] Cuts Unleashed a Deadly Wave of Violence Across Africa, Study Finds

    The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is associated with measurable increases in Africa, especially in areas most dependent on the agency’s support.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ A Failing, Flailing President Supplicates Xi

    Yet this is the opposite of the truth. As a result of Trump’s petulant, self-destructive policies, much of the world now holds him and America as a whole in contempt. As the New York Times reported just before Trump’s visit to Beijing, the Chinese now talk routinely about “American decline,” and describe Trump as “an accelerator of American decay.”

  • Mike Brock ☛ On What a Moral Concept Is

    When I tell someone in a comment thread that I’m a coherentist, that I’m working from outside the rationalist tradition, that I have spent the last few years in contemplative practice trying to dismantle the Cartesian and Kantian metaphysics still running underneath my thinking, I am not making a small clarification. I am naming what the disagreement is actually about. The generative discussions I have been having recently about whether the term genocide applies to what is happening in Gaza are not, at root, disagreements about international law or the documentary record or even about the application of the 1948 Convention to a specific contested case. They are disagreements about how concepts work. About what kind of thing a moral concept is. About what we are doing when we apply one to a case. And until the disagreement at that level is named, the surface argument cannot resolve, because the moves available to each side are constrained by metaphysical commitments the participants don’t share and rarely articulate.

  • The Next Move ☛ The Free World Without America?

    Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a veteran politician, is known to be direct. He had barely greeted his audience before he said, “Let me be direct: The world we once knew, and the democratic foundations we once took for granted, are collapsing.”

    Rasmussen was speaking at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit on Tuesday.

  • US Navy Times ☛ US Navy could run out of money by July, top officer warns

    The Iran war has cost the U.S. approximately $29 billion so far, according to the Pentagon’s acting comptroller, Jules Hurst III, who spoke Tuesday at a Capitol Hill hearing.

  • The Nation ☛ To Build the Anti-War Movement of the Future, We Must Learn From the Past

    Before discussing the strengths and failures of the last major anti-war movement, we need to step back and look at US history. What that history shows is that the inability to build and sustain an anti-war movement or mass presence is directly linked to the absence of what one might call an anti-imperial/pro-democratic foreign policy on the part of progressive movements. As a result, those who adhere to the notion of a need for peace and justice find ourselves in a Groundhog Day scenario on a regular basis, trying our best to ignite or reignite a mass movement against US aggression each time that aggression raises its ugly head.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Scoop News Group ☛ OMB plans to make IT contract data collection public, per federal CIO

    Despite citing data standards consistent with the OPEN Government Data Act — a law that requires agencies to publish non-sensitive information in machine-readable and open formats by default — the memo did not state whether the information would be publicly disseminated.

• Environment

  • Inside Towers ☛ Data Center Opponents Claim Victory in VA

    Virginia has become the center of the U.S. data center industry, with more than 660 facilities already operating and hundreds more planned. One of the biggest proposed developments, the 2,100-acre Digital Gateway project in Prince William County, has now stalled after strong public opposition, reports Bloomberg. The project, backed by Compass Datacenters and Brookfield Asset Management, was approved in 2023 despite a divided county vote and would have created around 23 million square feet of data center space, making it one of the largest hubs in the world.

  • Truthdig ☛ Kevin O'Leary-Backed AI Data Center Transforms Rural Utah Into a National Flash Point

    This hyperscale data center is set to consume 9 gigawatts of power — more than double the total energy consumption of the entire state of Utah — relying solely on natural gas-fired energy generation. Reports indicate this would increase the state’s emissions by 50%. An estimated 16.6 billion gallons of water per year would also be required to operate the facility’s turbines. The quantity of water isn’t the only concern, but also the source. Stratos would have to tap water sources whose diversion environmental groups warn will impact the Great Salt Lake, the largest saline lake in the Western Hemisphere and a critical ecological hub for millions of birds and other species. Warmer winter temperatures have reduced the desert state’s snowpack, the primary water source for residents and the Great Salt Lake. As Utah’s water crisis deepens, the shrinking lake is approaching record-low water levels.

    But the data center is now facing its first major wave of organized resistance.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Verge ☛ Honda’s hybrid future starts with new Accord and RDX prototypes

      Honda revealed prototypes of two new hybrid models, an Accord sedan and the Acura RDX SUV, during its annual business briefing this week, built on a platform that it says will begin launching next year. The RDX was announced earlier this year as Honda’s first SUV to feature the next-gen version of its two-motor hybrid system.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Independent UK ☛ World’s oldest oak tree spared from California developers after years-long battle

      The Center for Biological Diversity, along with other conservation groups, escalated the fight by suing the city in October 2024. The lawsuit claimed that the city approved the project without assessing the potential harm to the 13,000-year-old tree.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Who Is "Out of Touch?"

    Now, the spectacle of a Silicon Valley billionaire accusing the nation’s most prestigious magazine editor of being out of touch is like watching a quadruple amputee and a triple amputee argue over who is more likely to win the Olympic pole vault. But the fact that such an accusation could even creep into Andreesen’s misshapen brain is an illustration of why such arguments are so alluring. The rubric of being “in touch” allows those who are undeniably elite to indulge in the fantasy that they can claim solidarity with the Regular People just by cobbling together a list of characteristics and activities that they have in common. It is a cheat code for soothing the egos of those who would never want to actually be a regular person, but who yearn for the populist shield of being sufficiently in touch with the experiences of regular people to lend their opinions credibility and insulate themselves from accusations of elitism.

  • Dan Sinker ☛ A pep talk in the face of despair (or: trying redux)

    It's not even optimistic to say we have to try, it's just necessary. To give up, to stop trying, is to accept that things can't change. As Audrey Lord put it: "despair is a tool of our enemies." Despair is a gift to those that want you to believe that what we've got is all we'll get and there's no way to make things better.

    Things can always get better, but it doesn't happen via inertia. It happens because a lot of people tried. Pretty much every big change—every inch made toward progress—has been done because people dreamed it was possible and tried to make it happen. They didn't always succeed. They always tried.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Prediction Markets Redux

    I worked with David Pennock and Yiling Chen to create an interactive map that colored every state based on how likely it was to go Democratic or Republican for both the presidential, gubernatorial and Senate races.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Vatican issues final warning to breakaway traditionalist group attached to the old Latin Mass

    The group, formed in 1970 to oppose Vatican II modernizations, has quietly become a parallel church operating globally with 733 priests, 264 seminarians and 50 nationalities despite decades of schism.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Marines must take new course on the ‘practical application’ of AI

    The new course teaches Marines about the use of AI in today’s operating environment and how AI can improve the decision-making process and overall mission effectiveness, Infante told Task & Purpose.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Arrives in China With Entourage of Tech CEOs

    Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang were just 3 of 17 tech executives who joined Trump at the summit. Trump was also joined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Google reportedly in talks with SpaceX to launch its orbital data centers — partnership could mark a historic turning point and boost upcoming IPO

    This news has the potential to boost the impending SpaceX IPO to infinity and beyond. That offering is expected to be the largest of all time, and was already expected to reach stratospheric levels of $1.5 to $1.7 trillion. As of this writing, neither company has offered any comment on the presumably ongoing negotiations.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Sergio Visinoni ☛ What should one think of the 2026 DORA brochure?

      On April 30th Google Cloud’s DORA team released its latest “report”.

      I spent a decent amount of time reading through it and checking some of the referenced sources.

      In today’s article, I’m offering my usual unfiltered and opinionated take on it.

      As we go through the analysis, I hope the reason why I refer to it as a brochure, rather than a report, will become clear.

      If it doesn’t, please reach out with your observations and comments.

      Let’s start with a quick summary of the brochure.

    • RFERL ☛ Lego, Hip-Hop, And Deepfakes: How Iran Uses AI To Shape Western Opinion

      RFE/RL: You have tracked Iranian influence operations closely. How sophisticated has Iran become online? Are we watching the world's first real AI war unfolding around Iran right now?

      Max Lesser: Iran has become increasingly sophisticated in its online influence operations. There's definitely been a big shift. The AI Lego videos are probably one of the most successful propaganda efforts that I've ever seen come out of Iran targeting foreign audiences.

    • France24 ☛ Trump shares fake quotes, falsely accuses Obama of treason in late-night rant - Truth or Fake

      In his frenzy, Trump reposted comments that Obama should be "arrested" and "prosecuted" for allegedly wiretapping Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign. This is despite zero evidence that anyone – let alone Obama himself – wiretapped Trump Tower at the time, and a 2017 court filing from the Justice Department also affirming it had found no basis to support the claims.

      Trump also shared a quote attacking Obama that never existed, claiming Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana demanded Obama "return $120 million that he allegedly earned through ownership related to Obamacare". Kennedy himself told digital outlet NOTUS he'd heard of the claims online, but that he "didn't say that. I don't know the basis of it".

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Moscow orders media blackout on drone-strike and terrorist-attack aftermath photos

    The ban exempts information published by Russia’s Defense Ministry, the city’s mayor on his official website and channels, and the Moscow city government. It will remain in effect until a “separate decision” is made, with no set end date.

  • RFERL ☛ Women Bear The Brunt Of Iran's Internet Blackout As 'Parallel Labor Market' Collapses

    An editor at a Tehran publishing house, an online yoga instructor, and a rural mother who sells homemade food via Instagram are just three of many Iranian women whose livelihoods have been ruined by their country's ongoing Internet blackout.

    Three Internet shutdowns in Iran in recent months -- including the current blackout, the longest on record -- have dealt a devastating blow to the economy. And in many cases, it is women who are feeling the impact most.

  • The Dissenter ☛ Trump Goes After Reporters Covering War Against Iran

    According to the Journal, the subpoenas stemmed from a February 23 article that reported that “Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others at the Pentagon warned the president about the risks of an extended military campaign against Iran. Other news outlets, including Axios and the Washington Post, published similar stories that day. Trump launched the war five days later, on Feb. 28.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Richard J Tofel ☛ The Baltimore Banner CEO on Progress There and Plans for Their Pittsburgh Newspaper Purchase

    One of the most interesting stories in the news business these days is what’s going on at the Baltimore Banner. The site has the largest news staff of any local nonprofit, is unusual in employing a paywall (even as others, such as in Salt Lake City, move the other way) and just acquired the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which had been slated for shutdown after years of mismanagement and a long labor dispute.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Rich Guy Quote Journalism

    Karl Bode has called this “CEO Said a Thing! journalism”, and it is all over the place. I think Shamshiri’s broader definition is useful, too, especially in lower-stakes situations.

  • Project Censored ☛ Journalists Targeted for Covering ICE Operations

    A ProQuest search of major US news databases conducted in March 2026 returned nearly 200,000 results for “ICE” and “press freedom,” yet coverage was dominated by broadcast segments on protest activity and immigration enforcement, primarily from Fox News. Corporate outlets, including CNN and the New York Times, documented individual high-profile incidents but did not connect the physical attacks, FOIA stonewalling, regulatory investigations, proposed legislation, and journalist deportations into a unified account of what press freedom organizations have documented as a coordinated government effort to suppress independent reporting on deportation operations.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • [Old] The Verge ☛ The battle to stop broadband discrimination has only just begun

    For the better part of a generation, low-income and minority US communities have struggled to gain access to affordable broadband. It’s not an accident: numerous studies indicate that major [Internet] service providers, or ISPs — despite billions in taxpayer subsidies — have consistently avoided low-income, minority, and tribal neighborhoods when it comes to affordable fiber upgrades.

  • Karl Bode ☛ U.S. Broadband Is Racist

    As part of the piece I spoke to Joshua Edmonds, an amazing local Cleveland activist and CEO of DigitalC, who told me that while he had misgivings about whether the FCC's new anti-discrimination program would actually be enforced, the formal acknowledgement of reality was important all the same:

    “It’s one thing for an activist group to say that, or even a local equity champion, but for the FCC to acknowledge that digital discrimination has persisted, that’s moving in the right direction. But what does it mean to be penalized? Is it a public facing walk of shame? What actually is it? I think this FCC has big ambitions, and I laud them. I think the question that I have is: with big ambitions, do you guys have teeth? And I don’t know if they do or not.”

    Yeah, well, about that.

  • Nebraska Examiner ☛ Free prison, jail calls linked to lower costs, better outcomes in new report

    A new report from Worth Rises, a nonprofit that advocates in opposition to the prison industry, found that an estimated 330,000 incarcerated people nationwide now have access to free prison or jail communication services, including phone calls, video calls and electronic messaging in some jurisdictions.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Vic Demuzere ☛ Bots are dominating the web

    The last few years, web traffic from bots has increased rapidly. Some sources claim that automated activity now accounts for over half of all web traffic. This is even more pronounced on small websites like mine, as I don't receive many human visitors.

    The table below shows traffic on this website for the last few days: [...]

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Netflix's astonishing R2.2-trillion content investment

    The Los Gatos, California-based company is one of the world’s largest video streaming platforms, with more than 325 million paid members as of the end of 2025, having pioneered at-home video entertainment and producing original intellectual [sic] properties [sic] that have dominated popular culture.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ Jury Sticks Kanye with Six-Figure Fine Over ‘Donda’ Infringement

      On Tuesday, a federal Los Angeles jury found Kanye West (who now goes by Ye), as well as his business entities, liable for copyright infringement for using an uncleared sample of the instrumental track “MSD PT2” as the foundation for his song “Hurricane.”