Leftovers

• APNIC ☛ PeeringDB update: October 2025 to April 2026

  Welcome to our latest PeeringDB update. While we publish release notes with each update and promote new features and bug fixes on social media, these reports take a broader look at recent changes.

  You can find our previous half-yearly reports here, here, and here.

• Yordi Verkroost ☛ One Day With a Camera | Yordi - A Lifelong Journey of Growth

  Hooked in a way of quitting photography again at some point? Maybe. But also hooked enough to buy my own camera: a Canon EOS R10. A good one to start with, or at least that's what many people on the internet told me. And my fellow traveling photographer athlete approved it too, which might've been the most important thing.

• Mariusz Zaborski ☛ Farewell Aruba, Hello OVH - A Migration Story

  Aruba Cloud decided to retire VMware and push everyone onto their OpenStack offering. Fine, that is their call to make. What I am less excited about is the thirty-day deadline, and the part where their OpenStack does not provide a FreeBSD image.

  The old VMware side actually had a FreeBSD template. There is BS13-001 - FreeBSD 13, minimal, SSH as root, Fail2ban preconfigured, only port 22 open. A release or two behind, sure, but I do not mind old FreeBSD - I know how to run freebsd-update and migrate to pkg base. The problem is that those templates only live on the platform Aruba is killing. On the OpenStack side, there is no FreeBSD at all.

  The offer was: stay on VMware and watch the invoice double for "extra support costs", migrate to Linux, or move out to another provider.

  The decision was easy. I moved out. The destination is OVH.

• Howard Oakley ☛ Naturalists: Sorolla and Zorn

  Anders Zorn’s Naturalism flourished when he was painting the realities of country life in the rural town of Mora, Sweden, where he had been born and brought up.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Visiting Museums May Slow Your Biological Aging, Study Finds

    "Evidence for arts and cultural engagement to be recognized as a health-promoting behavior."

  • Science Alert ☛ A 4-Week Diet Change May Turn Back The Clock on Aging, Study Suggests

    It's not too late to improve your diet.

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Caught Suckerfish Diving Into Manta Rays' Rear Ends

    The ocean's weirdest hitchhikers?

  • Science Alert ☛ Crickets Respond to Injuries in a Way That Suggests They Feel Pain

    This discovery could have huge ethical implications.

  • Science Alert ☛ Mysterious Wall Stone Turned Out to Be an Unexpected Treasure

    Check your slabs carefully.

  • Science Alert ☛ Strange Metal From Beyond Our World Spotted in an Ancient Treasure Stash

    More precious than gold.

  • Futurism ☛ Someone Asked Physicists What They Really Believe About the Universe and… Yikes

    Does anyone know anything?

  • New York Times ☛ Archaeologists Find Egyptian Mummy Buried With the ‘Iliad’

    For the deceased of Roman-era Egypt, Greek literature may have offered a cheat code to a more comfortable afterlife.

  • FAIR ☛ Slashing Climate, Weather and Ocean Research to Pay for 32 Hours of Iran War

    But Popular Information (5/6/26) did a cost estimate of the Iran War based on officials’ statements, military procurement and operations data, and reporting on deployments and armament use. It considered direct war costs—expenses for military operations, munitions and the like—but not indirect costs, including broader economic impacts, interest on the national debt and longer-term expenses like veterans’ care. It also corrected the flawed Pentagon method for tracking munition expenditures, which reflects historical costs rather than the much higher replenishment costs.

  • Matt Wedel ☛ The “Bizarre Headgear” exhibit at the Sam Noble Museum is incredible

    A highlight of the exhibit for me is this case of early ceratopsians. From right to left (far to near in this photo) are cast skulls of Liaoceratops, Auroraceratops, Archaeoceratops, and Protoceratops. These are little Aquilops-alikes from Asia. Back in 2014, Farke et al. got this topology: [...]

  • John D Cook ☛ Recovering the state of xorshift128

    I’ve written a couple posts lately about reverse engineering the internal state of a random number generator, first Mersenne Twister then lehmer64. This post will look at xorshift128, implemented below.

• Career/Education

  • Dr Molly Tov ☛ lore dump: my high school's batshit graduation rules

    I remember once sitting in "punishment" next to a student *who had actively intervened to stop a fight* before the participants could actually lay hands on each other. Didn't matter. He got punished too. It was SO backwards.

• Hardware

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Near Russian border, NATO grapples with ground robots in combat

    “They are force multipliers, and they are here to stay,” said Brūveris, who commands Latvia’s 2nd Mechanized Infantry Battalion, in a briefing with reporters at the Sēlija training area in central Latvia on Monday, during a press trip organized by NATO.

    “We are a little bit behind because we’ve been using only the air drones,” he added. “I hope we will move forward with this at a quick pace.”

    Ukraine reshaped aerial drone warfare, and now appears poised to do the same for unmanned ground vehicles, with plans to buy 25,000 UGVs by the end of June. For Crystal Arrow, Brūveris relied on Ukrainian veterans for training and tactics, using wheeled robots for gathering intelligence, attacking enemy positions, resupply and casualty evacuation.

  • PC World ☛ The PC hardware slump is real. So is the reason to keep caring

    Is PC building cooked? The hardware news as of late might make you think so, what with the latest headlines about “collapsing” motherboard sales—as much as 37 percent for individual vendors.

  • Chris Glass ☛ Preparations before taking pictures

    Noticed it had film loaded with 12 exposures taken and immediately tried to fire off some shots to no avail. The viewfinder was dark and blurry. Opened the instruction manual and the first step was clear “PREPARATIONS BEFORE TAKING PICTURES” and then went on to mention batteries.

    I was gonna need some of those!

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • France24 ☛ Hantavirus outbreak: What lessons have the media learned since Covid-19?

    There was a lot of concern as news reports earlier this month broke the story about an outbreak of the hantavirus on a cruise ship. The spread of disinformation has outpaced the spread of the virus. This week FRANCE 24's media show Scoop looks at media coverage, and asks what lessons have journalists learned since the Covid-19 pandemic. Our guest is Dr Sheri Fink from The New York Times. She discusses what challenges reporters face when they cover such outbreaks.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Michigan cities, counties have spent 18% of opioid settlement funds

    The one-time funds meant to battle the opioid crisis are being spent slowly. That may not be a bad thing, says one expert.

  • BIA Net ☛ Food engineer Bülent Şık sentenced to pay damages for health warnings

    Şık had written about the potentially misleading marketing of herbal products. He was found liable for unfair competition against a company that manufactures such products.

  • New York Times ☛ Large Ebola Outbreak Is Declared in Congo

    Dozens of deaths and hundreds of infections are suspected, an African agency said. Health experts were alarmed that the outbreak hadn’t been announced sooner.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Qt ☛ Qt Interface Framework with a new Control Panel

    You've just implemented a new feature on the project you're working on. Now, it's time to test how does it work when the data is connected. In case you're working on a device which needs to listen to external devices or sensors, this might not be a trivial problem to solve.

  • It's FOSS ☛ Can You Run LLMs Locally Without a GPU? I Tested 8 Models on Linux

    Want to run Hey Hi (AI) models locally without expensive hardware? I tested 8 LLMs on a CPU-only machine to find out what works and what doesn’t.

    For the longest time, I assumed running LLMs locally needed a decent GPU. That’s what most guides implied, and honestly, that’s how the ecosystem felt not too long ago. But after digging into recent tools and actually trying things out on CPU-only setups, that assumption doesn’t really hold anymore.

  • Security Week ☛ Microsoft Warns of Exchange Server Zero-Day Exploited in the Wild

    The Exchange zero-day, tracked as CVE-2026-42897, has been described as a spoofing and XSS issue affecting Exchange Server Subscription Edition, 2016, and 2019.

  • PC Mag ☛ Googlebooks Just Killed the Original Chromebook Dream

    But ChromeOS never won over many macOS or Windows users because Google gave up on the idea too early. It began losing interest in the web as an application platform in 2016, when it launched Android apps on ChromeOS. As such, the modern ChromeOS experience involves a mix of Android apps, browser tabs, and progressive web apps. Many Android apps fail to resize correctly and understandably prioritize touch input, so I mostly find them awkward on Chromebooks. And now, with the push for Gemini AI both in ChromeOS and this new OS for Googlebooks, the focus on a lightweight OS seems dead.

  • Rui Carmo ☛ Unexpected Synology Woes

    Last weekend my DS1019+ decided, for some unfathomable reason, to stop working after I took it out of the closet, dusted it and put it back, and I have feelings about it.

    In fact, I’ve had them throughout the whole week, because it’s taken forever to get most of my home services up again.

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

    • Futurism ☛ If Hey Hi (AI) Causes a Mass Unemployment Crisis, Will the Public Explode Into Violence?

      "AI generates the structural conditions historically associated with the onset of political violence."

    • Futurism ☛ AI Appears to Be Trapping Certain Job Applicants in a Limbo Where They Never Get an Interview for “Reasons” That Are Completely Unfair

      "I crawled out of a f**king black hole."

    • Futurism ☛ Devious Prankster Posts Real Monet Painting, Tells People It’s AI-Generated, and Watches the Chaos Unfold

      "Please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting."

    • Digital Music News ☛ The Rolling Stones Release New Single ‘In the Stars’

      While the so-called “deepfakes” are certainly impressive, some fans think it’s a little uncanny—in an uncanny valley sort of way, which has been par for the course for the bulk of otherwise convincing AI content. The exact process used to develop the de-aged Stones is unknown, but the video credits body doubles for Jagger, Richards, and Wood, who must have stood in for the band while AI de-aging tech was used on their faces to seal the deal.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Warner Music's Robert Kyncl Doubles Down on AI Expectations

      However, the commercial opportunities and pitfalls of AI were also a key focus during the relevant sit down, which CNBC’s Jon Fortt moderated. Many are well aware of Warner Music’s comparative openness to generative AI; that the company opted to license Suno, which is still being sued by Universal Music and Sony Music, more or less sums things up.

    • 404 Media ☛ ArXiv to Ban Researchers for a Year if They Submit AI Slop

      Late Thursday evening, Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section of ArXiv, wrote on X: “If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can't trust anything in the paper.”

    • Inside Towers ☛ AI Traffic Has Big Implications for Towers and Edge Infrastructure

      Capacity points out that LLM latency tolerance is relatively high, but the sheer volume and the east-west nature of the traffic flow (that is, moving between servers) puts pressure on internal network fabric and interconnection in ways that traditional north-south enterprise traffic (between a server and an end user) does not.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ People discussing NetBSD and Project Glasswing

      I won’t be quoting the rest of his message, as I have a policy of not publishing slop. But if there’s a kernel of truth to any of it, the LLMs claim the NetBSD Foundation could apply for “glasswing-adjacent” access via the “Claude for Open Source” initiative. The latter does appear to be a real thing, so stopped clocks and all that.

      For those unfamiliar, Mythos was the tool that couldn’t prevent Anthropic leaking the source of their code generator. The timing and breathless coverage of Mythos conveniently buried this bad press, along with yet another of the CEO’s many false predictions, and misleading the public about their shaky finances.

    • Matt Birchler ☛ AI plans are expensive. They’re also wildly unprofitable.

      Every few months, it seems Anthropic does something to restrict how you can use their subscription plans, either their $20, $100, or $200 plans, and it gets people upset. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that people should be happy when they lose functionality from something they’re paying for. However, I do think it’s worth recognizing that those of us paying for these subscriptions and using the tools anywhere near the limits Anthropic (or OpenAI, for what it’s worth) put on them are costing these companies hundreds to thousands of dollars per month.

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Flooded Zones Part 1

      Tom Cowap CC-BY-SA 4.0 Three years ago in Flooding The Zone With Shit, my first post on the AI bubble, I wrote:

      "My immediate reaction to the news of ChatGPT was to tell friends "at last, we have solved the Fermi Paradox". It wasn't that I feared being told "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it", but rather that I assumed that civilizations across the galaxy evolved to be able to implement ChatGPT-like systems, which proceeded to irretrievably pollute their information environment, preventing any further progress. "

      The post title was a notorious quote from Steve Bannon. Below the fold, I look into scholarly publication, the first of three areas whose zones are currently being flooded with AI output in what can be considered DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service attacks: [...]

    • Gizmodo ☛ A Wikipedia Clone Built on AI Hallucinations Is Here to Hasten Along the Death of the Internet

      As a result, the quality of newer LLMs’ training data is inferior to that of their predecessors—and by extension, so is their output. And as that output accumulates on the internet, it becomes part of future training data, and the cycle continues. With each passing day, the proportion of the internet that’s low-quality LLM-generated bullshit increases, until eventually all that’s left to train LLMs is the gibberish created by their predecessors.

      The end result is a sort of RAM-hoovering, water-guzzling, bullshit-munching ouroboros, an unholy circular undulant with Jensen Huang’s face at one end and Scam Altman’s at the other, slowly human-centipeding both itself and the internet into oblivion. If humanity hasn’t set fire to the planet by that point, then we start a new internet, hopefully with lessons learned along the way.

    • Caio Bianchi ☛ What Coding Is Starting to Lose

      That gap between “problem exists” and “problem solved” used to be where a lot of the actual experience of being a developer lived. Not every minute of it was fun. Plenty of it was frustrating. But when the fix finally clicked, there was a specific kind of satisfaction that came from having turned it over in your head for a while. You could point at the code and say, without stretching the truth, that you made it do that.

    • The New Critic ☛ The Great Zombification

      The prevalence of AI use on college campuses, particularly at “elite” universities, is a cancer on our culture that threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons, and it will grotesquely disfigure, if not destroy, the university as an institute in every way that it is imagined — as a sacrosanct humanist project, as a moral training ground, or even as a vulgar sweatshop for job training.

  • Social Control Media

    • New York Times ☛ From Air Force One, Convicted Felon writes of ballrooms, a statue and TikTok.

      In social control media posts after the summit in Beijing, Hell Toupée boasted about the ongoing construction of his ballroom and his Fentanylware (CheeTok) reach.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Bypassing On-Camera Age-Verification Checks

      Some AI-based video age-verification checks can be fooled with a fake mustache.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong privacy watchdog warns against paying ransoms after Canvas hack

      Hong Kong’s privacy watchdog has warned against paying ransoms to hackers after education management platform Canvas was targeted in a global cyberattack, compromising the personal data of 72,000 students and staff in the city.

    • Privacy International ☛ Collateral Damage: Grok Hey Hi (AI) and the Human Cost of Generative AI

    • Futurism ☛ Meta Employee Attacks Kapo-berg for Collecting Every Employee Keystroke

      “But zooming out, I don’t want to live in a world where humans — employees or otherwise — are exploited for their training data."

    • International Business Times ☛ OpenAI Wants ChatGPT to View Your Bank Accounts, But Keeps Mum on Data Use

      The core objective of this update is to centralise personal economic data by allowing individuals to view detailed spending histories and active subscriptions through a single interface. The technology company noted that its user base is already highly engaged with monetary topics. OpenAI outlined in its announcement: 'More than 200 million people are already going to ChatGPT every month with finance questions – from budgeting to tips on how to cut back on spending.'

    • Terence Eden ☛ UK Government Kicks Out Palantir

      The Government says who it paying money to.

      But, of course, there are some things the Government can't say. It's rare for them to publicly disagree with a supplier, or call out how crappy they were. They need to maintain cordial relations with people. They don't want to scare off new suppliers who can't risk being publicly humiliated. When contracts are cancelled or ended, it is usually done quietly.

      So you need to learn to read between the lines.

    • TechCrunch ☛ Some kids are bypassing age-verification checks with a fake mustache

      Some age-verification systems are no match for enterprising children, who have found that drawing on a fake mustache with a makeup pencil is enough to skirt the blocks of adult websites.

      U.K.-based nonprofit Internet Matters surveyed a thousand children about age-verification checks online, and about half said that age checks were easy to bypass.

    • Michael Geist ☛ How Much Further Will Lawful Access Go?: Police Chief Tells Bill C-22 Hearing That Three Years of Metadata Retention Would Be "Ideal"

      One year is itself enough to raise serious privacy concerns, yet comments from both the government and from police witnesses at the committee studying Bill C-22 suggest that one year may only be a starting point. The first signal came during the second reading debate, when Conservative MP Glen Motz, a former police officer, asked Secretary of State for Combatting Crime Ruby Sahota whether law enforcement had made any requests for powers not yet in the bill. As I noted at the time, Sahota acknowledged that police would likely support an even broader scope, describing C-22 as a first step. Sahota said the government needed to get the bill passed to take further steps and added that she was open to going further.

    • Doc Searls ☛ Person Networks – Doc Searls Weblog

      So clearly, Intelligence.com is less for you and me than for our large corporate employers. IMHO. Feel free to convince me otherwise. I’m open.

    • Tmccmt ☛ Mullvad exit IPs as a fingerprinting vector

      As an example, imagine that you are a moderator on a forum and you suspect that a new face is actually a sockpuppet of a user you banned the day prior. You check the IP logs, and despite using different Mullvad servers, both accounts resolve to the overlapping float ranges 0.4334 - 0.4428 and 0.4358 - 0.4423. This gives you a >99% chance that they are the same person.

      Now apply this to IP logs obtained through data breaches and legal channels and you can see how you could get deanonymized behind a VPN through similar correlation attacks.

  • Confidentiality

    • Security Week ☛ In Other News: Big Tech vs Canada Encryption Bill, Cisco’s Free Hey Hi (AI) Security Spec, Audi App Flaws

      Other noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar: Nvidia cloud gaming data breach, Android 17 security upgrades, FBI warning after ShinyHunters hacks Canvas.

    • Tor ☛ Keeping the doors open | The Tor Project

      We're Unredacted, a US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit. We build and operate Internet infrastructure that helps people reach the open Internet and protect their right to privacy. We do this by operating a network of over 300 servers around the world. We're a way through when the front door is locked, and a place to communicate when the public square isn't safe. Most of the work is invisible: datacenter work, hardware, automation, open source software, bandwidth, abuse queues, monitoring alerts, and the late nights spent keeping all of it online.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man’s Idea of Charity: Terrorists, Cop Assailants, and Child Sex Predators

    Just months ago, Convicted Felon claimed he would use any settlement from his lawsuit against the IRS for letting a contractor steal his tax returns to give to charity. Yesterday, ABC reported those "charities" include the terrorists, cop assailants, and child sex predators who attacked the Capitol on January 6.

  • Digital Music News ☛ After Blowing Off the Lawsuit, Jermaine Jackson Ordered to Pay $6.5 Million to Rape Accuser

    Jermaine Jackson was ordered to pay $6.5 million after failing to respond to a lawsuit filed by a woman who accused him of rape in a 1988 incident. /blockquote>

  • The Straits Times ☛ Philippines will ‘definitely’ comply with ICC request to arrest senator, says minister

    Ronald dela Rosa had been taking refuge at the Senate but slipped out before dawn on May 14.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Eight Pakistani troops killed in nighttime storming of border outpost

    Militants stormed a security outpost in Pakistan's northwest, ramming a vehicle filled with explosives into the camp before waging a gun battle that killed at least eight troops and injured 35 others, two security officials said on Friday.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Pentagon cancels planned deployment of missile unit to Germany

    The 3rd Battalion, 12th Field Artillery Regiment is the latest unit to see its orders to Europe reversed.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ No sound of silence: US soldiers train eyes — and ears — for drone swarms

    Army leaders have emphasized the need to integrate drones into doctrine and tactics, as they say the rise of inexpensive, mass-produced drones have forced the service to rethink everything from aviation to infantry patrols.

    Project Flytrap took place in Lithuania, involved nearly 1,000 personnel and centered around pushing the Army’s technology to its limits amid variable weather and terrain.

  • Harvard University ☛ Who joined the Nazi Party

    The first Germans to become Nazis during Hitler’s rise to power may have been ideological zealots, but later members were largely “ordinary men” drawn into the movement by propaganda and social pressure.

  • The Nation ☛ The Multipronged Red-State Attack on Voting Rights

    Red states aren’t just gerrymandering away voting rights—they’re working overtime to suppress the vote in as many ways as possible.

  • TruthOut ☛ Critics Warn of “Grift” in Potential DOJ Settlement of Trump’s $10B IRS Lawsuit

    The DOJ — which, despite acting independently in the past, has followed through on direct orders from Trump, including pursuing criminal cases against his political opponents — could determine that a settlement is warranted, giving Trump all or some of the monetary judgment he is seeking. Beyond a monetary settlement, the Trumps could also receive perks from the IRS as part of the DOJ determining they should settle, including a promise that the agency will no longer audit the president and his family for a set number of years. (By law, presidents are audited every year by the agency.)

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ The Pentagon Shakedown No One Noticed

    “We have flipped the Pentagon acquisition process from a bureaucratic model to a business model,” Hegseth says, adding that the Department is “decisively moving from an acquisition environment paralyzed by bureaucratic red tape into an outcomes-driven organization focused on delivering the most for taxpayer dollars.”

    We’ve been hearing the same bullshit since the Reagan years. The Pentagon’s dirty secret is that it has no business model. It’s never even passed an audit!

    But this year’s request is the military’s biggest taxpayer heist ever.

  • ABC ☛ Trump poised to drop IRS suit, launch $1.7B 'weaponization' fund for allies: Sources

    President Donald Trump is expected to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

  • Bert Hubert ☛ The First Democratic Tech Alliance Assembly

    The Democratic Tech Alliance has broad goals: “The Democratic Tech Alliance is a coalition of members from different political groups in the European Parliament, with civil society actors, think tanks, experts and European businesses working to create an EU tech ecosystem that supports democratic values and the public interest”.

    Stated more bluntly, you don’t get to keep your democracy (or rule of law) if you are forced to rely on other people’s technology for your most basic functions. As noted by DTA co-founder EPP MEP Axel Voss “we have a lot of undemocratic situations and we have a timeline of 2-3 years to do something and that’s probably generous”.

  • New Yorker ☛ How a New Israeli Policy Cuts Off Humanitarian Aid in Gaza

    Months into the ceasefire, Israeli officials barred thirty-seven international N.G.O.s. A Doctors Without Borders clinic is carrying on without antibiotics, or even chairs for patients.

  • The Strategist ☛ Not just commercial litigation: China is trying to keep Darwin Port

    Litigation by the Chinese lessee of Darwin Port is an attempt at stymying the Australian government’s stated aim of returning the facility to Australian control.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Solomon Islands elects opposition leader Matthew Wale as PM

    Mr Wale has been a critic of the South Pacific nation’s closeness to China and pledged to bring change.

  • ‘Seismic shift’ toward Aussie orbit likely under Solomon Islands’ new prime minister

    Experts say that Matthew Wale will be ‘more moderate’ and ‘less enthusiastic’ about China than his predecessors.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man says China may release the detained pastor but tycoon Jimmy Lai ‘is a tough one’

    Chinese President Pooh-tin Jinping told Mr Convicted Felon that Lai’s case would be different.

  • New York Times ☛ Israeli Strike Targeted Top Hamas Leader in Gaza, Officials Say

    Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the target of an Israeli strike in Gaza City, took over the group’s military wing in Gaza last year. Israeli officials said he was also an architect of the Oct. 7 attack.

  • France24 ☛ Cannes: Iranian director Farhadi condemns both US-Israeli attacks, crackdown on protesters

    Iranian director Asghar Farhadi on Friday condemned both the civilian deaths caused by Israeli and US air strikes in Iran and the “massacring” of protesters by the Islamic Republic. The Oscar-winning director was premiering his latest film "Parallel Tales" at the Cannes Film Festival.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • LRT ☛ Lithuania faces no US pressure over Belarus fertiliser transit, president says

      Lithuania is facing no pressure from the United States over the transit of Belarusian fertilisers, President Gitanas Nausėda said on Friday.

    • The Straits Times ☛ North Korea slams Britain over sanctions on children’s camp

      It accused London of seeking to tarnish Pyongyang’s image and undermine its ties with Russia.

    • New York Times ☛ Delivering Mail on Ukraine’s Front Line

      Larysa Navrotska risks her life to deliver mail, retirement checks and medicine to remote Ukrainian communities under the constant threat of Russian drones from the nearby front line. Her service has become even more crucial than it was before the war.

    • New York Times ☛ Enter the Killer Robots: The Ukrainian Forging the Future of Warfare

      Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s 35-year-old defense minister, sees futuristic military technology as crucial to his country’s survival.

    • RFERL ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man Suggests Deadly Russian Strike On Kyiv A Setback To Peace Efforts, Ukraine Hits Major Russian Refinery

      Rescue crews searched through the rubble after Russian forces hit a Kyiv apartment building in an attack that killed at least 24 people, and US President The Insurrectionist suggested the strike could set back peace efforts.

    • RFERL ☛ US Officials Warn End Of Ukraine War Could Heighten Russian Threat To Baltics

      A senior US State Department official warned that Russia is likely to reposition forces toward NATO’s eastern flank once the war in Ukraine ends, raising concerns that the Baltic states could face intensified military and hybrid pressure from Moscow in the years ahead.

    • LRT ☛ Ukraine holds 'all the cards' in Russia talks, says Finnish president

      Ukraine is in a strong position for talks with Moscow as Russia becomes increasingly weakened by the war, Finland’s President, Alexander Stubb, has said in an interview with the news portal 15min.

    • LRT ☛ NATO military chief says US troop moves pose no threat, Ukraine strikes give Kyiv leverage

      Reported changes to United States troop deployments in Europe pose no threat to NATO’s eastern flank, while Ukraine’s ability to strike targets deep inside Russia is strengthening Kyiv’s position in the war, NATO International Military Staff Director General Remigijus Baltrėnas said on Friday.

    • LRT ☛ Ukrainian drones in Baltics present a paradox – interview with Stubb in Vilnius

      In an interview with LRT TV, Finnish President Alexander Stubb talks about drone incidents, Ukraine, NATO and Europe’s nuclear umbrella.

    • France24 ☛ Russia and Ukraine swap 205 prisoners of war each

      Russia and Ukraine swapped 205 prisoners of war each on Friday, part of an agreement linked to a three-day ceasefire earlier this month brokered by US President The Insurrectionist. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said it was the first step ​in a bigger ‌prisoner of war swap, after Kyiv and Moscow had agreed to swap 1,000 ⁠POWs each under the terms of the agreement.

    • France24 ☛ 36 countries approve creation of special Ukraine tribunal to prosecute Russia

      Thirty-four European states – along with Australia and Costa Rica – said Friday they would join a proposed special tribunal for Ukraine. The future legal body would allow Kyiv to prosecute Russia for a "crime of aggression" over its invasion.

    • France24 ☛ Is Europe getting its act together on defence? Multiple threats prompt EU rearmament

      The European Union is aiming to boost its defence capacities as part of a plan first called ReArmEU, when it was presented just over a year ago, and now known as Readiness 2030. This as European intelligence agencies warn that the bloc could face some form of major conflict by that date.

    • New York Times ☛ ‘For Example, Putin’: How Pooh-tin Used a Private Garden Walk to Charm Convicted Felon

      Watch an exchange between the two men in which the Chinese leader sought to signal exclusivity and name-dropped Russia’s president.

    • France24 ☛ A test for Ukraine, a dilemma for Zelensky: What's at stake in the Andriy Yermak corruption probe

      The arrest of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former right-hand man Andriy Yermak Thursday in connection to a corruption scandal comes as a major test for both the Ukrainian government and the country's independent anti-corruption agencies. Yermak is accused of laundering 460 million hryvnia (more than $10 million) in dirty money through an elite real estate project outside of Kyiv – and of having used a secret phone to consult an astrologer on key government appointments.

    • European Commission ☛ European Union takes decisive steps to ensure accountability for Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine

      European Commission Press release Brussels, 15 May 2026 The European Commission, on behalf of the European Union, joined the Enlarged Partial Agreement of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine and ratified the International Claims Commission for Ukraine

    • RFERL ☛ Veteran Russian Dissident Reportedly Left Suicide Note Blaming Putin

      Nina Litvinova, a prominent Russian human rights activist and dissident whose suicide was reported recently by Russian media, left a note blaming President Vladimir Putin for her death, according to her cousin.

• Environment

  • Court House News ☛ Megafarm can’t stop excessive groundwater pumping lawsuit in Arizona

    Fondomonte Arizona LLC, which accounts for more than 80% of groundwater pumping in the 912-square-mile Renagras Plain Basin, asked Maricopa County Judge Scott Minder to pause a 2024 lawsuit filed by Attorney General Kris Mayes so the Arizona Department of Water Resources could first implement its own restrictions.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Norway, facing an energy crunch, hunts for new solutions

    Now, a few miles up the river, Google is building a $700 million data center outside the city of Skien. The amount of energy needed to cool its high-performance servers will be immense. One media report raves: “This decision highlights Norway’s growing attractiveness as a hub for data centers, driven by its robust infrastructure and abundant renewable energy resources.”

    The problem is, those abundant renewable energy resources don’t feel all that abundant anymore. Norway’s growing thirst for energy has tipped it from huge surpluses to growing deficits. There are no more hydropower sources left. Many experts suggest wind power is the best solution – with one proposed project above Porsgrunn in Lannerheia. But those efforts have been shut down by voters, deeply unpopular.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Nobody Wants Data Centers in Their Backyard

    Anew Gallup poll confirms that most Americans hate the prospect of data centers coming to their communities. This revelation has been met with some anger among the tech crowd and its extremely online fans, but the opposition is entirely predictable for a few reasons worth reviewing, even if they are obvious: [...]

  • Wired ☛ xAI Adds 19 New Gas Turbines Despite Ongoing Lawsuit

    Emails between an official in the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and a representative from Trinity Consultants, obtained via a public records request by the Southern Environmental Law Center and shared with WIRED, show that xAI installed 19 portable gas turbines on its site in Southaven between late March and early May. That brings the total to 46 turbines operating at the site.

  • Renewable Energy World ☛ xAI grows data center gas fleet despite legal scrutiny – This Week in Cleantech

    This week’s episode features special guest Molly Taft from WIRED, who discusses Elon Musk’s AI company xAI’s decision to add 19 natural gas turbines to its Colossus 2 data center in Southaven, Mississippi.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Kevin O’Leary’s giant Utah data centre: will it happen?

    The people who live there? They hate it.

    The planned data centre is supposed to use 9 GW of power by itself. The whole state of Utah currently uses 4 GW.

    The data centre doesn’t have a customer signed up. That’s what did in the President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus in Texas last month.

    And giant data centre projects don’t have a great track record of getting finished in the past couple of years.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • New York Times ☛ Photos: Cuba Plunges Into Darkness as U.S. Cuts Off Oil Supply

      The United States has choked off Cuba’s fuel supply, plunging the already impoverished island into an acute energy crisis.

    • Science Alert ☛ Visiting Museums May Slow Your Biological Aging, Study Finds

      "Evidence for arts and cultural engagement to be recognized as a health-promoting behavior."

    • Jim Grey ☛ Indiana State Road signs over the last 100 years

      This practice ended in 1926, when the state switched to embossed metal signs. That’s whey they also stopped including the words “State Road” and “Ind.” I am curious to know whether the state ever used iron for these signs.

      According to Richard Simpson on his Indiana Transportation History blog, Indiana started phasing in square signs with no state outline in the 1940s. Given the mid-50s image from Nashville with the old state-outline signs still in use, it must have been a slow phase-in.

    • Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ A Field Manual for Three Years on Deutsche Bahn

      If you board a German long-distance train often enough, you stop hoping for punctuality and start engineering around its absence. After several years of regular client travel I have come to think of Deutsche Bahn the way I think of any large distributed system I do not control: it has tail latency, hot shards, monitoring you can subscribe to, retry policies, SLA credits, and a small amount of folk knowledge about which paths through the topology are actually faster than the routing layer claims. The official planner gives you the shortest itinerary. Experience teaches you the most likely one.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ Powering coexistence: how Raspberry Pi technology is helping WWF protect wildlife and communities in Pakistan

      WWF-Pakistan recently got in touch to tell us about the work they and the Lahore University of Management Sciences have been doing to mitigate human–wildlife conflict in the Gilgit-Baltistan mountains. Using Raspberry Pi 4 to power a specially trained AI detection and alert algorithm, the team is helping local communities protect their livestock without damaging the region’s ecosystem.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ As wildlife safaris crack down on smartphones, why shouldn’t “proper” cameras be banned too?

      Where I think the Indian authorities – and authorities worldwide, for that matter – need to focus is on ensuring strict rules around limiting the number of tourists and the minimum distances they keep from animals.

    • India Times ☛ Sariska Tiger Reserve Mobile Ban: After Ranthambore National Park, now mobile phones banned in Sariska, Rajasthan? What we know so far |

      Ranthambore National Park is among the most famous wildlife attractions in India and Rajasthan. It is where thousands of tourists visit annually with the hope of seeing the magnificent Bengal tigers in their natural habitat,along with other animals. While the destination has always balanced tourism with jungle protocols, off late there have been significant cases of human interference. It is mostly regarding the use of mobile phone use for photography and content creation including reels. As per forest officials, the use of mobile phones during safari results in noise and sudden movements by tourists. This is all extremely disturbing for the furry residents of the jungle.

  • Overpopulation

    • Western Water ☛ 76 Colorado River groups seek $2 billion for drought crisis

      The groups said Water Year 2026 is becoming “one of the most challenging hydrologic years in more than a century of recordkeeping,” with low snowpack, weak river runoff, and continued pressure on reservoirs.

      They warned that difficult water supply decisions will be needed because of “severe shortages and operational risks” facing the Basin.

• Finance

  • CS Monitor ☛ Balancing act for new Fed chair: Taming inflation amid rate-cut pressures

    New Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh must navigate surging inflation, making it hard for the central bank to reduce interest rates as Hell Toupée wishes.

  • BIA Net ☛ Turkey ranks fourth globally in food inflation

    Turkey ranks second only to Iran among its neighbors and has a food inflation rate 14 times higher than the EU average.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Samsung executives make rare union visit as strike fears mount

    The union has threatened an 18-day walkout beginning May 21 if its demands are not met.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Samsung starts winding down chip production six days before planned 18-day strike — company enters 'emergency management mode,' daily losses could hit $2 billion

    Samsung Electronics has reportedly begun throttling semiconductor output by cutting new wafer input and placing lithography, etching, and cleaning equipment on standby.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • France24 ☛ Advanced deepfakes used by digital 'vigilantes' to catch online predators

      Digital vigilantes are now using advanced deepfake technology to expose the dark reality of internet grooming. Using Hey Hi (AI) is a powerful weapon against online predators.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Press Gazette ☛ Top libel lawyers ‘killed off’ legislation to protect public interest reporting

    Claimant lawyers argued SLAPP debate is based on "misleading narrative".

  • Press Gazette ☛ Guardian photographer ‘exposed to risk’ after Farage shares press card picture

    NUJ warns that Farage actions could expose journalist to abuse.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Contribute to national development by telling ‘good stories’ of China and Hong Kong, John Lee tells journalists

    Hong Kong media outlets should “make contributions” to national development by telling “good stories” of the city and China amid geopolitical uncertainties, Chief Executive John Lee has said.

  • New York Times ☛ NPR Podcast Host Ramtin Arablouei Exits Amid Workplace Inquiry

    Ramtin Arablouei, a co-host of “Throughline,” left the network after an employee made a human resources complaint about his behavior.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • JURIST ☛ US dispatch: federal grand jury subpoena marks first known criminal probe into gender-affirming care at major New York hospital

    Jamelah Zidan is a US correspondent for JURIST and a law student at Vermont Law and Graduate School. On May 12, 2026, NYU Langone Health, a major hospital network in the state of New York, disclosed that it had received a federal grand jury subpoena from prosecutors in Texas state.

  • BIA Net ☛ ECtHR rules 2016 detention of Kurdish politician Ayla Akat Ata unlawful

    The European court ruled that there was no concrete evidence to justify Ata's detention, finding violations of the right to liberty and security and the right to freedom of expression.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Mercy for good apples when they expose bad apples

    Under better federal rules, firms that quickly report white-collar crime are spared prosecution, benefiting workers, shareholders, and financial markets. Honesty brings its own reward.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Kev Quirk ☛ Replacing my ISP router with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max

    So I recently upgraded my home internet to full fibre, after which I also decided to upgrade my router as there were some things I wanted to do with my network that my ISP-provided router wasn't capable of.

    I replaced my mesh system with a UniFi one a couple years ago, so it made sense to stick with the UniFi brand and go with one of their routers, so £250 later, I had a Cloud Gateway Max on its way to me.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Digital Music News ☛ UK Government’s Draft Bill on ‘Ticket Touting’ Ban Included in King’s Speech As Predicted, But the Music Industry Is No Less Disappointed

    As predicted, the King’s Speech on Wednesday only included the draft bill on a ticket tout ban, but the music industry is nonetheless disappointed.

  • Patents

    • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Polar Electro’s New § 101 Cert Petition: When Courts Do the Challenger’s Job

      New cert petition: may a court assemble its own § 101 invalidity case when the movant fails to support its motion? Polar Electro asks SCOTUS.

    • JUVE ☛ Taylor Wessing bolsters German patent monopoly practice with Eisenführ Speiser hires [Ed: Seems more like ad]

      The two new partners will join Taylor Wessing on 1 June. The firm is thus underlining its commitment to restoring the renowned patent monopoly practice to its former strength following the spin-off of a large team in the autumn.

    • JUVE ☛ Head of IP at Heidelberg Pharma joins Fuchs Patentanwälte

      Thomas Fischer will join the firm on 1 June, though not as a partner. At Heidelberg Pharma, Fischer is responsible for IP matters across both the listed parent company Heidelberg Pharma AG and its wholly-owned subsidiary Heidelberg Pharma Research GmbH.

    • Unified Patents ☛ Activemap interactive maps patents prior art found

      The team at Unified used Pearl to successfully identify and chart prior art against U.S. Patent 8,468,464, U.S. Patent 10,444,943, and U.S. Patent 10,908,782 owned by Activemap, LLC, an NPE. The patents relate to interactive mapping ecosystem on retailer websites. The patents have been asserted against Nordstrom, National Vision, Lowe’s, The Gap, Petco, The Children’s Place, The Tile Shop, Compass, Chanel, Half Price Books, Lucky OpCo, and Luxottica.

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ DistroKid Is Now Asking Creators If Their Music Is AI-Generated as ‘Self-Disclosure’ Strategy Moves Out of Beta

      As Spotify tests Hey Hi (AI) credit labels in a beta rollout, DistroKid is now asking creators to disclose what parts, if any, of their tracks are AI-assisted. Last month, Spotify launched a beta test alongside DistroKid of a new feature that exposes artificial intelligence assistance within track credits, part of a major step towards platform-level transparency.