Leftovers

• Robert Birming ☛ Unpopular posts on Bear blog

  My advice is to just keep posting whatever tickles your mind. If your post ends up on the trending page, give yourself a quiet cheers and move on.

• Fundor 333 ☛ Who Knows That I Blog

  Yes I tell but not unprompted. I told people while talking about the argument of my blog, like if I have a post about what we are talking or if the topic of the blog can be usefull for the discussion.

• Kelson Vibber ☛ 100 Posts?

  Though I am curious: across my whole website, how many posts have I made over the past year? Only nine on K2R (counting the update round-up, but not counting the individual posts I’ve updated), but it turns out I’ve written 96 reviews since May 23 last year (which is a lot more than I realized!) and 14 troubleshooting articles. So I guess I’ve got a decent shot at hitting 100 again!

• The New Leaf Journal ☛ Choosing How to Build and Host a Blog

  We are reaching the end of my six-part “blogging wisdom” project in celebration of The New Leaf Journal’s sixth birthday. For our penultimate entry, I will tackle a subject which has the potential to nip a potential blog in the bud (a fitting way of phrasing the matter for The New Leaf Journal): Deciding what tech to use and how to host said blog. Before continuing, I note from the outset that I will not be telling you or anyone else what you should use for a blog. Instead, I will offer my own thoughts with reference to interesting articles and blog posts from around the web concerning what prospective or current bloggers and internet writers should consider when making the decision, and perhaps more importantly, about how to prevent settling on blog tech or platforms from becoming a form of procrastination.

• The Verge ☛ MPC creator, Roger Linn, stays focused with a single browser tab

  Somehow, those are not his greatest contributions to the music world. That would, undoubtedly, be the MPC. Linn partnered with Akai to create one of the most popular and important samplers ever. The MPC60 and its successors became the tool of choice for countless hip-hop and house producers. J Dilla’s MPC 3000 even sits in the Smithsonian.

  Roger Linn was also an early adopter of MPE, or MIDI polyphonic expression. It’s a key feature of his LinnStrument, an expressive 3D controller released in 2014 — three years before the Association of Musical Electronics Industry (AMEI) officially released the MPE standard. Turns out the man stays so innovative by keeping things simple and focused.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-18 [Older] Ancient tooth proteins suggest ‘Homo erectus’ may have left a genetic legacy in people today

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-15 [Older] Eaten, used as taxis and vomited up: how bees support other animals

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-15 [Older] My unsung hero of science: Carolyn Wood Sherif, pioneer of feminist psychology who foresaw the risks of scientific bias

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-15 [Older] Sweeteners and the quest for the perfect alternative to sugar

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Eurovision Song Contest: what the science of statistics reveals about an infamous voting scandal

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Heatwaves are now everyday disasters – governments need to do more to protect people

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-13 [Older] Nasa bets big on nuclear engines to cut journey times to Mars

  • Bartosz Milewski ☛ Tabulation Tribulations

    We all know what a graph of a function is: it’s a set of pairs (a, b), where b = f a. Similarly, a graph of a relation is a set of pairs where b is related to a.

  • John D Cook ☛ Hilbert transform as an infinite matrix

    When I looked back at that post I thought about how if you thought of the Fourier coefficients as elements of an infinite vector then the Hilbert transform can be represented as multiplying by an infinite block matrix.

  • John D Cook ☛ Building complex functions out of real parts

    A couple months ago I wrote about how to compute the sine and cosine of a complex number using only real functions of real variables using the equations

    \begin{align*} \sin(x + iy) &= \sin x \cosh y + i \cos x \sinh y \\ \cos(x + iy) &= \cos x \cosh y - i \sin x \sinh y \\ \end{align*}

  • John D Cook ☛ Real and imaginary parts

    The previous post announced some notes I wrote up based on an article by Henry Baker implementing functions of a complex variable in terms of functions of a real variable. That is, it finds functions u(x, y) and v(x, y) such that

    f(x + iy) = u(x, y) + i v(x, y)

  • Wired ☛ All the Fancy Measuring Devices Used in Science Rely on Two Stone-Age Techniques

    Physicists build models to explain how the world works. It might be an equation, like the ideal gas law: PV = nRT. This tells us, for example, that if you double the temperature (T) of a gas, all else equal, its gas pressure (P) will double. But to see if the model is legit, or at least useful, we need to get some real-world values and check whether the equation holds. Modeling and measuring, measuring and modeling—that’s science in a nutshell.

    Of course, today we have some pretty fancy instruments for this. But I’m going to let you in on a little secret: With all of our cool tools, measurement still comes down to either comparison or counting. In that sense, it hasn’t changed much since Noah built his ark from a spec sheet in cubits—the length of a human forearm from elbow to fingertip. Let me show you what I mean.

• Career/Education

  • Ava ☛ computers, privacy and data protection conference 2026

    The conference has lots of different rooms mostly in the same building where multiple panels, workshops and other things are happening at the same time in specific slots, so you gotta choose what you participate in (was difficult at times!). Next to that, you have some fun rooms, some quiet working spaces and spaces to just hang out and talk.

    Based on the programme, the focus this year was definitely on age verification/youth 'protection', human AI relationships, consumer rights and marginalized groups.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Piri – Manu

    This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Piri, whose blog can be found at pketh.org.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Another graduation speaker hypes AI to boos, tells students their education is already obsolete

    Both sides of the AI hype coin ("AI is the revolution!" and "suck it up") place the same value on human creativity: a cog in the content machine. Is there a commencement speech consultancy these people all use that hasn't updated the boilerplate? NPR offers a tip: "don't talk about AI."

• Hardware

  • Kev Quirk ☛ Using Fountain Pens for Note Writing

    As a test, I dug out an old notebook that we got a freebie from work (it's a really nice one - I figured nice paper would help) and started using my Lamy for note taking in work too.

    Using a slightly adapted version of my note taking system, it's been glorious! Flipping back through physical pages and easily finding my notes for a particular day has been very refreshing. Everything is in my notebook now, and I rarely use OneNote as a result.

    I decided to go all in, I sold my Nomad back in January and haven't looked back since.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • CBC ☛ 2026-05-16 [Older] At least 80 deaths reported as Congo grapples with new Ebola outbreak

  • Jeff Kaufman ☛ Heretical Pasta

    The primary goal is to keep the tastes and textures distinguishable, merging only as you chew. The pasta resists your teeth; the sauce flows. The sauce is rich and flavorful; the pasta is a hearty foil. Secondarily, by combining only on each person's plate you can handle a range of preferences in sauce-to-pasta ratio, and different dietary restrictions (ex: a separate vegan sauce).

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Enhanced Games Are a Scam on Steroids

    The Enhanced Games allow athletes to dope in order to beat records in sprinting and swimming. It’s a perfect metaphor for the self-improvement industry: hurting your body and soul in order to chase a hollow idea of success.

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ The History of Canaries in Coal Mines

    Unlike humans, a bird’s respiratory system uses an intricate system of air sacs. When a canary inhales, it takes in air; when it exhales, it pushes air from its sacs into its lungs. This means it receives a double dose of oxygen, and a double dose of any airborne poisons, with every breath cycle. Because of their tiny size and fast metabolism, a canary absorbs carbon monoxide roughly 20 times faster than a human.

    In a gas-laden tunnel, a canary would show visible signs of distress—agitating, stopping its song, and ultimately falling off its perch unconscious—up to 20 minutes before a human would feel a single symptom. This gave miners a critical window of time to evacuate.

  • Bhaskar English ☛ Writing & Brain Health Link | Early Dementia Signs Revealed

    The most revealing part of the study came when participants were asked to write a sentence that was dictated to them. Unlike copying a sentence, dictation requires the brain to perform several difficult tasks at the same time: [...]

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Luigi Mozzillo ☛ What iOS gives me · mzll

    iOS gives me something today that Android can’t: time. Need something? I can find it right there in the App Store – for better or worse. I don’t have to browse around, search Reddit, or ask an AI. It’s right there.

  • Pirijan Ketheswaran ☛ Why Sell Lifetime Plans, in a Default Subscription World?

    There’s never been just one way to buy software. In ye olden times, if you liked some shareware, you’d mail off a cheque, or call up a hot-line, to get the full version. Later on, you could walk into a store and walk out with a shiny box, manuals, and disks.

  • PC World ☛ Microsoft Exchange hacked, Defender broken, BitLocker bypassed

    PCWorld reports that Microsoft faces multiple critical security breaches, including an actively exploited Exchange Server spoofing vulnerability and a BitLocker bypass exploit called YellowKey.

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

    • Richard Green ☛ Choosing Joy Over AI Discourse

      One area where I’m not going to disengage with the LLM discourse is in my real life conversations. It seems like everytime I tell somebody that I work(ed?) in tech, they want to talk LLMs with me. I’m fucking sick of it, but it’s where I feel like my words will have the most impact, so I’ll keep trying. If anybody has any tips on how to have more effective conversations about this stuff, please let me know.

      Other than that, I’m going to take the energy that I was wasting hating, and put it towards my workshops and art.

    • Homo Ludditus ☛ The umpteenth AI compromise

      With chatbots, or rather with the underlying LLMs, the situation is even worse. The more their makers declare each new version as better than the previous one (benchmarks, benchmarks, benchmarks!), the more people complain that the respective models are dumber and dumber.

      For now, I revised my Android apps and my browser bookmarks to a new set of chatbots, and I’ll try to explain (if that still matters) my decision.

    • Chris Ferris ☛ The Zeroth Law of Agentic AI

      This is the part everyone forgets, and it’s the part that matters most: Asimov did not present the Zeroth Law as a triumphant generalization. He presented it as a transgression that broke the robot who derived it. The novel is deeply ambivalent about whether the Zeroth Law is wisdom or hubris. Daneel’s subsequent twenty-millennia project of secretly managing humanity (revealed across the Foundation novels) is portrayed with increasing unease — by the end, the question is whether humanity ever consented to being managed, and whether Daneel’s certainty about what’s good for the species was ever justified.

      The Zeroth Law, in other words, is the law that turns a robot into a philosopher-king. Asimov knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote it. It’s a warning, not a recommendation.

    • Diomidis Spinellis ☛ blog dds: 2026-05-23 — Why reviewing AI-generated code is devilishly hard

      When working with AI assistance and you have to review an AI-generated change that passed continuous integration, the control gate is missing: there’s no objective mechanism to determine whether you truly understand the code or not. This means that you may accept an AI-generated change in the mistaken belief that you understand it, when in fact you don’t.

      The required type of thinking, metacognition, involves not only understanding the code but also assessing your understanding. In brief, it involves two abilities.

    • Bhaskar English ☛ Rajasthan Eye Scans Fake Interviews; AI Aadhaar Fraud

      A new cyber fraud method has come to light in which fraudsters are allegedly using AI-generated videos and fake biometric verification to change mobile numbers linked to Aadhaar cards. Cyber experts say this could allow criminals to gain access to OTPs, bank accounts, UPI apps and other digital services connected to Aadhaar.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Marc Andreessen Sputters Incomprehensibly at Question About How AI Will Actually Benefit Humankind

      The fact that one of AI’s loudest and richest devotees can barely articulate why he thinks the technology is important should be a telling sign, especially as productive returns on the tech remain far out of reach.

      Commenters posting under clips of the interview were unimpressed. “Before AI, if I didn’t know something I would just google it,” one TikTok user wrote. “AI gets to the answer faster but it’s only correct half the time. How is that revolutionary?”

    • TechCrunch ☛ Research repository ArXiv will ban authors for a year if they let AI do all the work

      That incontrovertible evidence could include things like “hallucinated references” and comments to or from the LLM, Dietterich said. If such evidence is found, a paper’s authors will face “a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted by a reputable peer-reviewed venue.”

      Note that this isn’t an outright prohibition on using LLMs, but rather an insistence that, as Dietterich put it, authors take “full responsibility” for the content, “irrespective of how the contents are generated.” So if researchers copy-paste “inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content” directly from an LLM, then they’re still responsible for it.

    • Futurism ☛ Democrats' 2024 Election Autopsy Shows Signs of Sloppy AI Generation

      Indeed, it’s pretty rough-hewn. It’s short on citations and chock full of errors, many of which fit the profile of hallucinations from a large language model like ChatGPT. While a few incongruities are to be expected with any rough draft, some of them are beyond the pale, drawing into question why they would have been included in the document to begin with.

    • Futurism ☛ Academics in Meltdown Now That They’re Responsible for AI Hallucinations in Their Research Papers

      Last week, the open-source research repository arXiv announced that it was banning scholarly authors from the platform for up to a year if “hallucinated references” are found in their work. The rationale behind this should be obvious enough for any self-respecting academic: as arXiv computer science chair Thomas Dietterich wrote in his announcement, “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.”

    • The Atlantic ☛ Why College Students Are Booing AI

      It is always easy for a wealthy and successful person to present their own success as deliberate and replicable rather than accidental, and Borchetta certainly delivered that message. But on the whole, over the 15 minutes he spoke, Borchetta did the job he was assigned. He encouraged graduates to believe in themselves, to chase their dreams. The line that “AI is rewriting production” came at the end of this message, as the latest in a line of changes that had included streaming and social media as prior examples. When the time for the boos came, Borchetta’s unrehearsed response, “Deal with it,” seemed like a concurrence with the student view rather than a rebuke of it.

    • The Atlantic ☛ AI-Writing Scandals Are Getting Very Confusing

      It’s been a rough week for human authorship all around. On Monday, a viral post showed a Nobel-winning novelist seemingly admitting to using AI to sharpen her story ideas, before later claiming she had been misunderstood. On Tuesday, allegations mounted that the Trinidadian author Jamir Nazir had used AI to write “The Serpent in the Grove,” which won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. By Wednesday, two of the other five prize winners had come under similar scrutiny. (The Commonwealth Foundation, which administers the prize, initially said in a statement that it had confirmed that none of the winning writers had used AI. Yesterday, the foundation issued another statement saying it “takes seriously the allegations” and was reviewing the evidence.)

    • Business Insider ☛ Apple's Steve Wozniak Cheered for AI Joke During Graduation Speech

      While Wozniak delivered his speech without interruption, the same can't be said of some other AI-forward commencement speakers. In the weeks that followed, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and real estate executive Gloria Caulfield were both booed for their comments about AI at two separate graduate ceremonies.

      AI is looming over new graduates as they enter the job market. The tech is changing the landscape, from the skills candidates need to how companies assess them. Its ability to automate many tasks has led some companies to conduct AI-related layoffs.

    • The Register UK ☛ Baidu says the quiet part out loud – you can’t build AI infrastructure, so clouds can cash in

      Chinese web giant Baidu has told investors its rare ability to build and operate AI infrastructure at scale represents a new high-margin business that its customers can’t avoid.

  • Social Control Media

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ How to talk to your kids about extremism online

      Two teenage suspects who attacked the Islamic Center in San Diego on Monday, killing three people before turning the guns on themselves, were engaging with far-right extremist content on social media, authorities have said.

    • New York Times ☛ Australia’s ‘Prettiest Street’ Is Grappling With TikTok and Instagram Fame

      During vacation periods, the traffic can be so bad that locals say they try to run errands in the morning before hunkering down at home during the busiest part of the day. Sometimes the two-lane road becomes clogged with cars parked on both sides of the street.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Dark Reading ☛ China's Webworm Uses Discord, Microsoft Graphs to [Breach] EU Govts

      The research predominantly covers Webworm's activities between early 2024 and early 2025, as well as how its tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) have evolved since 2022. The threat actor originally relied on well-known malware families like McRat and Trochilus, though it has more recently pivoted toward existing and custom proxy tools. In these cases, which were mainly observed in 2024, Webworm relied on "legitimate or semi-legitimate tools, such as SOCKS proxies (SoftEther VPN) and other networking solutions."

• Security

  • CISA

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-15 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens gWAP

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens Ruggedcom Rox

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens Solid Edge

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens Teamcenter

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens Simcenter Femap

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens Industrial Devices

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens SIMATIC

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens Siemens ROS#

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens Opcenter RDnL

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens SIMATIC

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens Ruggedcom Rox

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens Ruggedcom Rox

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens SIPROTEC 5

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens SENTRON 7KT PAC1261 Data Manager

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens SIMATIC S7 PLC Web Server

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Siemens Ruggedcom Rox

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Universal Robots Polyscope 5

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] Fuji Electric Tellus

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] Subnet Solutions PowerSYSTEM Center

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] ABB AC500 V3 Multiple Vulnerabilities

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] ABB Automation Builder Gateway for Windows

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] ABB AC500 V3 Stack Buffer Overflow in Cryptographic Message Syntax

    • CISA ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] ABB WebPro SNMP Card PowerValue Multiple Vulnerabilities

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Bert Hubert ☛ Some notes on how we ended up with Palantir & how to replace it

      There is justified anger about governments relying on Palantir software. There are also calls to write replacement software, perhaps imbued with European values, and with less fascism.

      And I’d love for that to happen pronto, but first we need to understand a few things. It is not just the software.

    • Declan Chidlow ☛ There Isn't A Microchip Under Your Skin Tracking You

      In media, you often see quick and easy injections. Take James Bond or The Hunger Games. Both are popular works which depict the protagonist being swiftly implanted with a chip deep into the forearm. Both are also pure works of fiction, with many outlandish concepts. Implants, as they and other media depict, are no more anchored in reality than the smart blood and nanobot viruses also seen in Bond or the fantastical prosthetics and mutant animals also seen in Panem.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Texas Attorney General Sues Meta, Claiming It Is Lying About WhatsApp’s End-to-End Encryption

      Paxton is alleging (PDF) Meta is fully lying about the end-to-end encryption promise of WhatsApp in this wild lawsuit.

    • C4ISRNET ☛ SOCOM begins fielding new battlefield biometrics system

      The small Montana-based tech company Reveal Technology announced that its biometric tool Identifi has been formally adopted as a program of record by U.S. Special Operations Command, or USSOCOM. And, according to last week’s announcement, it’s a major milestone, not just for the company but for the technology as well.

    • The Register UK ☛ UK MPs slam digital ID rollout as a 'fiasco' after botched launch

      A report from Parliament's Home Affairs Committee this week concluded the government's handling of mandatory digital ID plans was "rushed, poorly thought out and failed to make a convincing case." It warned that ministers had already undermined public confidence with what MPs described as a rushed and inadequate announcement.

      According to the committee, there was "no rigorous policy development and no public consultation ahead of the announcement," which left ministers struggling to answer basic questions about privacy, implementation, safeguards, and how the system would actually operate in practice.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Akamai Gains Secure Enterprise Browser Tech With LayerX Deal

      LayerX, a Tel Aviv-based startup founded in 2021, offers a lightweight browser extension that turns Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and other major Web browsers into a policy‑enforced, secure workspace, rather than requiring users to switch to a separate enterprise browser. While Akamai will continue to provide the LayerX browser as a standalone product, the company also plans to integrate the browser into its Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) portfolio, which includes Guardicore Segmentation, Secure Internet Access Enterprise, Enterprise Application Access, and a multifactor authentication (MFA) access offering. Integration with ZTNA is important because Akamai's platform controls application access but not what happens in the browser once authenticated, says Mani Sundaram, executive VP and general manager of Akamai's Security Technology Group.

    • 404 Media ☛ The FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers

      Only a couple vendors could likely fulfill what the FBI is after, namely Flock and Motorola.

    • Hackaday ☛ PCB Map Display Keeps An Eye On Family

      The PCB was designed as a map of the California East Bay area. The roads are laid out as the top-side copper layer, while the land and roads are used for the top solder mask layer, with the flipped land and roads area making up the solder mask on the bottom side. The map data itself was cribbed from Snazzy Maps. Behind the PCB, [Jonathan] mounted a 64 x 32 RGB LED array, which can be seen glowing through from behind the material. The LEDs are controlled by an ESP32, which grabs location data from [Jonathan’s] family member’s mobile devices over MQTT, and uses it to light their positions on the map. [...]

    • Spectator AU ☛ America’s vehicle kill-switch mandate threatens privacy

      So, what is a kill-switch? In the United States, it is a federally mandated system designed to detect driver impairment that has the capacity to limit or even prevent the operation of motor vehicles. This system is found in section 24220 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Public Law 117-58) adopted by Congress on November 15, 2021.

      This congressional provision may become one of the most consequential automotive regulations in modern American history. Section 24220 mandates that all new vehicles sold after 2026 include AI‑driven impaired‑driving prevention technology capable of ‘preventing or limiting motor vehicle operation’.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-10 [Older] Berlin: Fighting the city's young far-right scene

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-10 [Older] Germany: 'Ulm 5' on trial after attack on Israeli arms firm

  • Robert Reich ☛ Corruptonomics

    The purpose of this memo is to help you shape your midterm message around the crisis of affordability and Trump Republican corruption. I urge you to present these two issues as aspects of the same underlying problem: The economy is lousy for most Americans because Trump Republicans are enabling super-rich oligarchs to siphon off most of its gains while exerting increasing control over it. Their — and Trump’s — self-dealing is undermining trust and confidence in the U.S. economic system.

  • The Nation ☛ We Should All Be Mad As Hell About Trump’s $1.8 Billion Slush Fund

    To be 100 percent clear here: Unlike the men, women, and children who have simply been disappeared into makeshift concentration camps by Trump’s regime, those “victims” actually received jury trials, were found guilty by their peers, and were sentenced not for being Trump fans but for battering Capitol police officers, for hunting congressional members with the intent of killing them, for vandalizing the citadel of American democracy, and for trying to subvert the will of the people by preventing the peaceful transfer of power. Now, members of this ragtag band of traitors, fools, hucksters, and brass-knuckle men stand to gain wealth, possibly millions, through the transfer of your and my hard-earned tax dollars into their bank accounts. Six dollars from every man, woman, and child in this country; that’s about what this slush fund for fascists will end up costing if the courts don’t stop it—a number of Capitol police officers have already sued—or if Congress doesn’t muster the decency to intervene.

  • Project Censored ☛ 88 Corporations Paid No Federal Income Tax in 2025 Thanks to Trump

    Companies including Tesla, Palantir, and Citigroup paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2025 thanks to tax cuts from Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB). April 2026 reporting by Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby for Popular Information and Stephen Prager for Common Dreams highlighted a report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that found eighty-eight profitable corporations benefited from these tax cuts. According to Popular Information, the companies collectively reported $105 billion in profits in 2025. While the statutory tax rate for corporations remains unchanged at 21 percent, the effective tax rate has fallen from about “38% in the 1960s to 22% before Trump’s first term, and to about 12.8% after Trump’s first tax cut was passed in 2018,” due to the ability to write off capital investments and research and development costs.

  • The Record ☛ Meta settles school district lawsuit claiming addictive design harmed students' mental health

    The amount that Meta will pay under the terms of the settlement is not public.

    Snap, TikTok and YouTube settled with the school district late last week. A jury trial had been expected to launch in June.

    Platforms have recently lost in court when facing similar lawsuits. In March, Meta and YouTube were found liable by a jury for a young California girl’s social media addiction, which allegedly caused her mental health problems. The jury ordered Meta to pay the girl $6 million.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Why your tracking system fails the moment it matters most

    Most tracking systems are designed to operate in stable environments, where connectivity is assumed and visibility is continuous. That assumption no longer holds.

    In South Africa, the communication layer that underpins asset tracking is increasingly being targeted as part of the attack itself. What was designed as an enabler of visibility has become a point of vulnerability.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Putin Can No Longer Hide His Catastrophe

    But Putin can no longer lull Muscovites into thinking that his war does not involve them. Earlier this month, the annual parade commemorating the defeat of Germany in World War II was startlingly short and devoid of most of the usual military hardware, because the Russian dictator was terrified of Ukrainian drone attacks. A week later, Ukraine launched hundreds of drones and cruise missiles on the Russian capital. The action, an audacious counterstrike to a mass Russian attack on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities two days earlier, showed that multiple rings of air defense around Moscow have been thoroughly compromised. The narrative that Putin has constructed—about a mere “special military operation” that need not trouble Russia’s elites or middle class—is now unraveling completely. Any pretense that Moscow itself can stay out of the war has vanished.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Techdirt ☛ Journalists Identify Murder Victims Of Trump’s Boat Strike Program

    What’s happening now is even more disturbing. We’re killing people simply because they happen to be in boats spotted exiting certain shores and headed towards international waters.

    The War on Drugs has always been evil. It has always relied on the ends justifying the malicious means, especially when the means usually meant the killing or incarceration of non-white people.

  • Air Force Times ☛ Congressional report tallies 42 US aircraft lost or damaged in Operation Epic Fury

    The May 13 report, “U.S. Aircraft Combat Losses in Operation Epic Fury: Considerations for Congress,” draws on news accounts and statements by the Defense Department and U.S. Central Command to compile the list.

• Environment

  • Jason Becker ☛ Yeah, we know why people don’t want data centers

    My take, which isn't necessarily different or counter to Matt's five points, is people don't want data centers in their backyard because:

    • It doesn't create jobs
    • It increases energy costs
    • It increases energy use
    • They feel weird about the products

  • Arkansas Advocate ☛ Arkansas Explained: Understanding the data center boom and debate

    More than 1,500 centers are planned across the country.

    Some take issue with the vast amounts of power and water large data centers use, and the potential impact on utility bills. Others chafe against the public’s lack of input into projects and the economic incentives that attract them, brought about by nondisclosure agreements signed by local officials. Some have other environmental fears, such as the potential for ongoing noise or increased flood risk from filled wetlands.

  • Western Water ☛ Colorado Basin heat raises drought concerns

    For the seven Colorado River Basin states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — the report showed a familiar and growing problem: very little precipitation and expanding drought.

    Large portions of Arizona, Nevada, Utah, California, and New Mexico received less than one-tenth of an inch of rainfall during the reporting period. In many places, there was effectively no measurable rain at all.

  • TruthOut ☛ Critics Warn Utah Megadata Center Could Devastate Great Salt Lake

    The controversy in Utah is a stark illustration of a wider trend. Across the United States, data centers are drawing bipartisan backlash as communities clash with tech giants and developers over strained water supplies and spiking energy costs.

  • New Scientist ☛ The ‘doomsday’ glacier’s giant ice shelf is about to break away

    Dubbed the “doomsday glacier”, Thwaites is about the size of Britain, but it is shrinking rapidly and is already responsible for 4 per cent of all global sea-level rise. Worse still, its collapse is expected to set off a domino effect in the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, ultimately resulting in a calamitous sea-level rise of 3.3 metres and changing the coastline of the entire planet.

    Many Antarctic glaciers form ice shelves that float out onto the ocean and buttress against the flow of ice from the continent. Thwaites glacier has one on its eastern front, known as Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf (TEIS), that is about the size of Greater London – 1500 square kilometres – and 350 metres thick. But satellite images show alarming signs that this will imminently detach. In fact, by some measures, this break-up is already under way.

  • Futurism ☛ Doomsday Glacier Shows Signs of Imminent Disintegration

    Satellite imagery shows that the ice shelf is actively breaking away, with major fissures visible around the point where the sheet connects to the broader glacier. As University of Innsbruck in Austria geophysicist Christian Wild told the New Scientist, “suddenly, large areas are just falling to pieces. It looks like a windscreen that’s shattering.”

    About the size of Britain, scientists are concerned the Thwaites’ collapse will set off a sort of domino effect across the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which holds enough ice to raise the global sea level by anywhere from 13 to 16 feet.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Joel Chrono ☛ Riding a bike

      Going from there to riding in the middle of downtown traffic afte almost ten years was definitely a change of pace.

      Not to worry though. I live in a pretty small city, which is alos quite used to motorcycles and bikes as part of traffic.

    • Western Water ☛ Machines that pull water from air near reality

      That amount would not replace a city reservoir or major river system. However, experts say the technology could become useful in places where traditional water supplies are strained, unreliable, or expensive to transport.

    • Vintage Everyday ☛ The Story of Steve McQueen With His 1958 Porsche Speedster, the First Brand-New Car He Ever Purchased

      McQueen used this Porsche to transition from motorcycle racing to sports car competition. In May 1959, he entered his first official Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) race in Santa Barbara and won his class against 47 other novice drivers. He continued racing the Speedster throughout 1959 at iconic tracks including Del Mar, Willow Springs, and Laguna Seca.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • TruthOut ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] Amazon Deforestation Falls to Lowest Levels Since 2018

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Don Marti ☛ How the attribution cartel misleads advertisers: Q&A with Rick Bruner

    The attribution cartel at W3C has lots of questionable decisions to worry about, but just for a minute let’s ignore implementation issues like centralizing on US-based platform companies or the environmental impact of all that additional processing of data for obfuscation purposes. Even if the Big Tech companies managed to go international and sustainable with this thing, they still have two big fundamental problems.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Data center battles started in the states. Now it’s Congress under siege.

    At the grassroots, intense opposition continues breaking out. In early May, community members screamed and booed when commissioners in Box Elder County, Utah, unanimously approved two resolutions in support of a 40,000-acre data center campus proposed for an unincorporated site in the county.

    Asked if he sees any momentum in Congress to do anything significant about the potential spread of data centers, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said in an interview, “Only with voters.”

  • The Nation ☛ Why Gen Z Is Turning to Christian Influencers

    The question of whether a Gen Z–led return to Christianity is taking place in the United States has been hotly contested. This “revival” has been flaunted as a cultural victory for the religious right and debunked as a propaganda myth by the secular left. There is a discrepancy between the statistics and a diffuse, vibes-based sentiment that young people are, indeed, demonstrating an increased interest in the Christian faith. I began to wonder if statistics measuring religious participation, like church attendance, could be used as a litmus test for the Gen Z revival. It seemed to me that the popularity of faith-based content creators revealed something that traditional metrics were missing. If Crawford could get thousands of twentysomethings across the US out of their houses and off of their phones to hear the gospel in person, surely something was going on.

  • India Times ☛ Who killed US President Donald Trump's AI order? Musk says it wasn't him

    The collapse is the latest sign that Washington remains unable to agree on even modest guardrails for the technology -- leaving the United States well behind Europe and Asia and far short of what many safety advocates say is needed.

  • India Times ☛ Zoom’s Anthropic investment has netted the company $1 billion

    The total value of Zoom’s stake in the rapidly ascendant AI company is worth about $1.27 billion, according to a regulatory filing Friday. That value is primed to increase further as Anthropic nears the completion of another funding round as soon as next week.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Marty Day ☛ 23 Hours Later, Stephen Colbert returns to TV

    In full, here is the May 22nd edition of Only In Monroe. Not only is it a great showcase of how naturally funny Colbert is, but, it seems to be the first video crossposted to a new YouTube page of his, and…there are some surprises.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Celebrates Colbert’s Ouster at Hands of CBS Owners Aligned With His Admin

    “We see this over and over again, where the Trump administration is weaponizing its power over mergers to try to get what it wants in the media space,” says David Sirota, editor-in-chief of The Lever and host of the Master Plan podcast.

  • Medievalists.net ☛ Medieval Swear Words: What People Really Said in the Middle Ages

    People in the Middle Ages swore very differently from us. Words that modern audiences consider deeply offensive were sometimes treated casually, while insults involving God, saints, or sacred objects could provoke outrage and punishment.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ X warns founder against reuploading White House shooting video: 'Revenue reduced by 90%'

    Nawfal reuploaded the video with a different caption just a few minutes later. “Footage from ABC News has captured the moment shots were fired outside the White House,” he wrote.

    The post led to a warning from X’s Nikita Bier, who informed the founder and CEO of IBC Group that he could face further reductions in his earnings.

    “Please do not reupload the author’s video: use Quote or Video Reshare,” said Bier. “Your revenue was reduced by 90% last cycle and we’re running out of room to reduce it more.”

  • Hindustan Times ☛ The Boys’ Elon Musk parody leaves world’s richest man fuming: ‘Pathetic’

    The Boys has long been known for politically charged satire aimed at celebrities, corporations and public figures. Over recent seasons, viewers and critics have increasingly linked Homelander’s storyline to real-world political movements and media figures.

    Musk’s reaction drew even more attention because the billionaire has previously criticized Hollywood and mainstream media over political portrayals and online narratives.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Cockroach Party Out of Social Media

    Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) founder Abhijeet Dipke on Saturday alleged a crackdown on the satirical digital outfit, stating that it had lost access to all its social media platforms following a series of takedowns and hacking incidents.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] Italian transposition of press publishers’ right may be compatible with EU law, though with caveats, says Grand Chamber

  • BIA Net ☛ Media Activism Handbook: Good Practices in Civic Engagement

    The purpose of this handbook is to map good practices of media activism to inspire activities for defending public interest in media and communications, including the promotion of media and information literacy.

  • South East European Network for Professionalization of Media ☛ Media Activism Handbook [PDF]

    Media and communications today represent a critical area of modern political struggles. Issues such as editorial policy influence, ownership concentration, information security and surveillance, the quality of information, and the role of media platforms in public discourse have become central points of discussion. Democratic media are not merely channels of communication but prerequisites for democracy. In repressive regimes, independent journalism operates under pressure or disappears entirely. The media crisis is global, with media often captured by corporate and political interests.

    Global trends of polarisation, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, technological changes, and the dominance of major tech platforms further endanger independent and quality journalism. Media activism thus becomes essential to uphold the values of public interest in media and communications.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Chris Ferris ☛ The Many Faces of the Security Poverty Line

    Once you accept that the binary breaks down, a five-tier model falls out naturally. I’ll name each tier and describe what it actually looks like operationally.

  • Project Censored ☛ US Prisons Experiment with Scandinavian Restorative Justice Models

    Scandinavian countries provide sources of inspiration for more humane approaches to incarceration in the United States, Jamiles Lartey reported in April 2025 for The Marshall Project, but conservative commentators and victims’ rights groups alike have expressed concerns. From Connecticut and Pennsylvania to California, select US prisons are adopting programs modeled in countries such as Norway and Denmark to see whether they “can not only change how prisons look, but also how they work,” Lartey wrote.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • PC Mag ☛ Amazon Is Shutting Down Support for Older Kindles Soon. Here's How You Can Save Yours

    Got an older Kindle? Don't throw it away or rush to upgrade—I'll show you how to keep it alive and safeguard your books after the May 20 cutoff date.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-05-13 [Older] US DOJ flags competition law concerns in Corteva v. Inari plant invention dispute [Ed: Plants are not invented, and no monopolies should be granted on any]

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-05-17 [Older] ROSE-tinted reasoning? The General Court on colour words [Ed: Colour monopolies]

  • Nick Heer ☛ ‘How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart’

    These red flags are not obvious in hindsight; they should have been obvious from the time this app was submitted. Meanwhile, apps from longtime and trustworthy developers like Manton Reece and Radu Dutzan are stuck in App Review for dumb and basically invalid reasons.

  • Patents

    • BoingBoing ☛ Armed with German copyright, Fender threatens makers of Strat-style guitars

      Fender does not hold a U.S. copyright or trademark on the shape of its 1950s Stratocaster guitar, having failed in a years-long legal effort to control use of a now-generic design. By the time it started slathering them with polyurethane in the 1970s, the patents were expiring. But the company recently won a default ruling in an unopposed copyright claim in Germany, where instrument design qualifies as a "work of applied art." It has begun threatening other companies that make similar guitars, including one in the U.S.

  • Trademarks

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-05-11 [Older] The CJEU on heritage washing in trade mark law

    • Guitar (NME Networks) ☛ Fender wins legal battle over Stratocaster shape in Germany – is it the end for S-type guitars in the EU?

      The case was against the Chinese-based Yiwu Philharmonic Musical Instruments Co., and took place in the Düsseldorf Regional Court in Germany. According to Fender, the decision made by the court agrees with Fender’s claim that the company had imported guitars that “reproduced” Fender’s Stratocaster body design, and that the design in question is not just a functional trademark but is instead a “a copyrighted work of applied art”, according to German and European law.

    • Guitar (NME Networks) ☛ Gibson’s loses ES body shape in the US, but legal victory over Dean stands

      The long-running legal battle between Gibson and Dean Guitars’ parent company Armadillo has come to a close, after several revivals and attempts at adjusting the final outcome by both parties. With a new filing last month, the presiding judge reasserted Dean’s loss, but, in a major blow to the brand, denied Gibson’s appeal for a new trial to appeal the ES trademark being made generic.

    • Right of Publicity

      • IP Kat ☛ 2026-05-17 [Older] EUIPO receives first sound mark application to protect against digital replicas and deepfakes [Ed: EUIPO is very exceptionally corrupt, no better than people who mimic other people digitally]