Leftovers

• The New Leaf Journal ☛ Be the Blogger You Want to Be (Or Read)

  I am sharing my blogging “wisdom” (such as it is) that I have derived from running The New Leaf Journal. As I have noted elsewhere, The New Leaf Journal is a non-commercial project. Thus, my wisdom that bloggers and writers should run websites that they would want to visit and to publish articles, blog posts, and media that they would want to read and view is necessarily grounded in the non-commercial context. If one depends on a blog, writing website, or media site to earn a living, mileage may vary with my perspective of wisdom on this subject. But with that caveat being granted, many (if not most) of the articles I read come from commercial websites and paid writers, and I would not be reading those articles if I did not think they were worth my time in one respect or another. In Re; The Indie Web Is Not Defined by Its Enemies, I opined: [...]

• Herman Martinus ☛ Resurfacing posts

  One of the things I like best about blogs is that posts stick around (or at least they should). I enjoy scrolling through historic posts of bloggers and reading about what they were thinking about 1, 5, or even 10 years ago—if I'm lucky.

  I've noticed that my most recent posts get the more attention than the rest of my blog. This makes sense, as I have the most recent 5 posts on my homepage, alongside the fact that newer posts go out to my email subscribers and are more likely to find themselves on link aggregators, Twitter feeds, and RSS readers.

• I Cringely ☛ Where the heck have I been all this time?

  I owe you all an explanation of where I have been. The story starts in 2022 when ChatGPT came out and everyone decided to get rich. I know I did. So, I bullied my dear friend – a legendary lawyer – into building a legal writing tool. Within a week we knew our mission was close to impossible because of failures in GenAI. There were imperfect products we could have sold but didn’t – dooming ourselves instead to a three-year product cycle to defeat the nightmare called LLM hallucinations.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Hunting Submarines Via Gravity Is A Tough Errand

    It’s true that technology has moved on since 1989. We have more advanced gravimeters and gradiometers available now, including quantum units with greater sensitivity than ever. And yet, even with these advances, it would be still be a struggle to detect a submarine at useful range. Sensitivities would have to jump by four or five orders of magnitude to enable detection at ranges of 1000 meters. Even still, if this were achieved with some highly classified system, it would still be relatively limited in capability versus more established techniques in magnetic or acoustic detection.

  • John D Cook ☛ Fitting the parameters of a Besace curve like the Meta logo

    A Besace curve has the implicit form

    (x^2 - by)^2 = a^2(x^2 - y^2)

    and the parametric form

    \begin{align*} x &= a\cos(t) - b \sin(t) \\ y &= -\sin(t) x\end{align*}

    where t ranges over [0, 2π].

  • Avi Loeb ☛ Avi Loeb Comments on the Alien DNA Claims

    AL: Thanks for having me. I don’t think it’s very likely to be a real thing. It’s possible that a CIA analyst or anyone else might have been curious about this question, but there is no scientific basis to lend any credibility to this possibility. Because, first of all, for biological beings to travel interstellar distances, requires a very unusual genetic engineering. As far as we know, these trips — even at the speed of light — would take tens of thousands of years. And they are very hazardous because of bombardment by cosmic rays and low gravity. Humans cannot survive for more than a few years on the surface of the Moon or Mars.

    JW: I guess the question is, is there a genetic marker that you could search for, potentially?

• Career/Education

  • Louie Mantia ☛ 3rd Japanniversary

    Well, it’s time for that annual blog post. I’ve been in Japan for three years now. In short, I love living here, and I’m continuing to embrace living in my own unique way.

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: The NYT Gamifies Summer Reading (Gift Link)

    Summer is three months. Summer gives people time to be outside and relax-- even if just on a few weekends. Summer holds fun memories of childhood summer reading.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Autopsy Of A Failed Vintage Carbon Resistor

    Ultimately the insides were revealed, and they turned out to be rather interesting, with what looked like a glass tube filled with what would be the carbon-laden material between the two lead terminals. From poking around a bit at these insides it would appear that the failure mode was a degraded contact between these terminals and the carbon material. Considering that this resistor is many decades old and has gone through many thermal cycles and potentially various kinetic events some fractures are probably to be expected.

  • Hackaday ☛ Inside Dyson’s Over-Engineered ₤1000 Hand Dryer

    These hand dryers are rated for a cool 900 Watts, with an 0.5 W standby power consumption, though you can also switch it to a 650 W ‘eco mode’ when installing it. The air that gets sucked into the dryer first passes through a HEPA filter before it hits the heating element and then gets blown out of the handles onto one’s hands.

  • Terence Eden ☛ Gadget Review: Chuwi Minibook X N150 + Linux

    Boot → Boot Option #1 → USB Device

    The go to Save & Exit. I tried Linux Mint Debian Edition. It booted just fine and, after fiddling in the display settings, it automatically detected the screen rotation. Internet worked, touchscreen worked, Bluetooth worked. I tried a few distros and settled on NixOS as being the least worst option.

    Everything works except the keyboard switching off when it is folded backwards.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Finding and using a 5:4 display in 2026

    The NEC is a Multisync LEC 1790NXp (gesundheit). According to the official datasheet I was able to source from the Sharp Displays Europe website (huh), it’s a 19-inch TFT with an 800:1 contrast ratio, 20 ms response time, SXGA resolution, and enough weight to crush my aforementioned foot. Not amazing specs, but not bad either. Quite respectable for the time, actually.

  • Rob Knight ☛ Cult Pens Anniversary Mystery Box Review

    At the start of the month Cult Pens, for their anniversary, put up a birthday mystery box for £100. No other information, just choose a nib size and they'll send out a mystery box: [...]

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Life Changed a Lot After the Pandemic of 2019

    Years ago I kept track of excess deaths in the UK. Maybe that has improved, maybe not. I no longer keep track of it; it has been years since I last checked. I moved on. I do other things.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Texas’s Senate Race Will Be a Referendum On Healthcare

    Texas’s healthcare policy stands out, even among red states, for its cruelty.

  • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ CHAOSS Metrics in 2026

    The CHAOSS project has spent the last eight years writing down careful, implementation-agnostic definitions for the things people measure about open source projects: how many issues get opened, how long they take to close, how many distinct people commit, how stale the dependencies are. The point of writing them down is that two dashboards computing “issue response time” should at least be computing the same thing, and the released metric set has become the closest thing the field has to a shared vocabulary.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • [Old] The Verge ☛ How independent websites are dealing with the end of Google traffic

    There’s a theory I’ve had for a long time that I’ve been calling “Google Zero” — my name for that moment when Google Search simply stops sending traffic outside of its search engine to third-party websites.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ The MacBook Ultra’s Naming Dilemma - 512 Pixels

    This could be a very exciting machine. It’s rumored to come with a Dynamic Island, a thinner design1, M6-class processors, and of course, a touch-enabled OLED display.

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

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Pope Leo to AI bros: Just stop it

      Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical letter to the Vatican on Monday. Titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or Magnificent Humanity, the 43,000 word missive specifically takes aim at AI — and the AI bros.

      It’s a book-length writeup on the AI bubble and why it’s terrible. It details all the current human abuses of AI in practice, and states that none of this should be allowed to happen. The Pope told the press: [...]

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Pope Grasps the Limits of AI

      The Lord may have delayed such technologies, but he didn’t preempt them entirely. The Vatican’s recently released 250-page encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas—“magnificant humanity”—has been hailed as the first official Catholic document to wrestle with AI. But rather than deal strictly with its hazards, the letter, signed by Pope Leo XIV, has two overarching purposes: first, to defend humanity against those who have grown jaded about our shared nature and existence, and second, to warn society about the threats posed by the temptation to outsource human capabilities to computers. Championing not just human magnificence but human imperfection is a radical turn. The pope’s insight that much of our beauty arises from limitation rather than limitlessness is a crucial intervention in the age of AI.

      Magnifica Humanitas is not a Luddite document. Rather, it follows in a long tradition of Christian critiques of dazzling technologies that nevertheless smuggle in dangerous risks. The Industrial Revolution, for example, greatly increased productivity but also catalyzed a new form of exploitation for the profit of a handful of capitalists—prompting William Blake to wonder, in his 1804 poem “Jerusalem,” whether the light of God had ever shone among “these dark satanic mills.”

    • Futurism ☛ Nvidia CEO Begs Execs to Stop Telling Workers They're Fired Because of AI

      For a while now, executives have raised eyebrows by justifying sweeping layoffs by arguing that AI had made thousands of roles redundant. But as reality settles in and the tech’s real-world capabilities are coming into focus, some in the industry are starting to sing a dramatically different tune.

      Most recently, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang scorned other executives for wrongly justifying layoffs with AI — and telling them to cut it out. The hidden implication: soaring costs are the real culprit, especially when it comes to AI-related spending, mismanagement, and over-hiring.

    • Futurism ☛ Debt Collectors Are Being Replaced With AI Agents

      Knowing that he had already settled the dispute, Ben poked and prodded, trying to test its limits after it refused to connect him to a human. “I figured it was just going to kick me over to a person when I asked about repayment structure or anything more technical,” he told Wired.

      In the end, he got the bot to engage in some quasi-sexual roleplay, where he was “just a little guy” and his debt was a sultry giantess. After a few minutes of this, Ben says he was unceremoniously whisked away to a human, who confirmed the debt had been settled.

    • Chris Ferris ☛ Claude Can Never Be Held Accountable, But You Can.

      An agent is different. An agent generates tokens that become the action. The tool call goes out. The email gets sent. The file gets deleted. The wire transfer initiates. The database gets dropped. There is no second human in the loop turning the model’s output into a decision. The model’s output is the decision, and the system executes it.

      None of this is a new problem. In 1979, an internal IBM training slide stated the principle that should have governed everything we built since: “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." Forty-seven years later, we are not just letting computers make management decisions, we are letting them execute those decisions autonomously, at machine speed, against production systems and people’s lives.

    • Digital Music News ☛ YouTube’s New AI Detector is Here with Automatic AI Flagging

      Now, YouTube is making its AI labels more prominent for creators and viewers alike, as well as releasing tools to help automate the process. Creators are still required to indicate when uploading videos whether they were created with the help of AI tools, but before, there was no incentive for uploaders to be honest about it.

      Beginning this month, YouTube will utilize “internal signals” to flag AI content, which will apply to videos that display “significant photorealistic AI use.”

    • Walled Culture ☛ Why Google’s new AI-saturated search page will be a disaster

      What this is likely to mean in practice is that even fewer people will follow links to sites, something that was already happening last year; instead, they will engage with Google’s chatbot to gather information indirectly. This is terrible news for access to knowledge because it frames the Google AI search engine as the fount of all knowledge – one that will do all the hard work of finding information and combining it into an easily-digested answer that can be interrogated further. It can do that because it has already ingested billions of Web pages and other information sources as part of the Large Language Model (LLM) training process. But search engine users will no longer know what some of those sources are unless they painstakingly click on the links in the new panel.

    • Manton Reece ☛ Magnifica Humanitas

      I’ve read several big sections of Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas — magnificent humanity. The whole thing is essentially a book at 40k words. It’s fascinating and at times even great. Some of the most interesting parts of the text aren’t really about AI, but more about what it means to be human and to care for others.

      There is also a theme of concentrated power and who will control AI: [...]

    • Matheus Lima ☛ Using My Fucking Brain – Terrible Software

      You paste the issue into the machine before reading it. You accept the explanation before forming your own. You create a PR before even understanding what the problem you’re fixing is (!). You request a PR review before reading the diff. You merge because the checks passed and the reviewer approved it and the whole thing smells like progress.

      And then, if you’re lucky, a few minutes later your stomach drops. Because wait. What did I just ship again?

    • Jim Grey ☛ Judgment is the skill that matters most in the AI era

      Conventional wisdom says that judgment comes from years of making your own mistakes. The software developer who debugs their own bad code until the lesson is internalized. The writer who rewrites their own bad drafts until they develop an eye for what isn’t working. Failure as the teacher.

      But judgment does not require creating the flawed work yourself. It requires sustained critical engagement with flawed work regardless of origin.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: AI and a world without migrants (27 May 2026)

      Just lately though, we've come up with a new solution to the problem of hell being other people. Rather than coercing other people into arranging their affairs to suit our needs, we've devoted trillions of dollars to replacing people with pliant chatbots, in the hopes that these chatbots can be made so effective that we can just dispense with other people altogether.

      Many everyday people have replaced their romantic partners with chatbots ("AI boyfriends"/"AI girlfriends"), and they've formed active communities to revel in the delights of pursuing love with someone who demands no moral consideration or compromise, glorying in a world of love without lovers: [...]

    • Variety ☛ Steven Spielberg Says Hollywood Shouldn't 'Use AI as the Final Word'

      “Where I don’t love AI is where it takes a position or there’s an empty chair at a writer’s table,” Spielberg said. “I’m not willing to substitute, you know, because I don’t really believe in sentience. I don’t believe there is any substitute for the soul. I don’t think that is an algorithm that’s inventible… A computer that thinks it feels more than we feel is anathema to the way I was raised and how I’ll practice my own trade of producing and directing in the future.”

  • Social Control Media

    • [Repeat] OpenRightsGroup ☛ Growing up in an online world: ORG Consultation Response

      The risks of expanding age-gating are also very real. Emerging evidence further demonstrates that age-gating systems are frequently far less privacy-preserving than presented to the public, remain ineffective at preventing determined young people from accessing online services. The growing reliance on age assurance mechanisms also risks normalising identity verification across the open internet, with significant implications for privacy, anonymity, freedom of expression, and access to lawful information.

    • SQ Magazine ☛ Why Fortnite Is Ending Some Popular Game Modes

      Recently, Epic made an announcement that will shape a lot of the future of the game’s development. And while you probably won’t feel a lot of these changes, it doesn’t mean that they don’t matter, as they’re a microcosm of a much larger issue that these developers are dealing with.

      In this article, we will talk about the removal of 3 of Fortnite’s experiences, what caused their removal, and what this can mean for players in the future.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ NASA Unveils New Details About the Future Moon Base and the Missions Laying the Groundwork to Build It

    In a broader financial perspective, “we’re talking about a $20 billion investment over the next seven years to establish that enduring presence on the moon,” Isaacman tells Gadi Schwartz on NBC’s “Stay Tuned Now.”

  • NASA ☛ NASA Provides Update on Moon Base Rovers, Landers, Missions - NASA

    NASA has awarded Astrolab $219 million and Lunar Outpost $220 million to build and deliver the first phase of LTVs. Awarded under the Phase 1 High Achievability Mission task orders of the Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract, these firm-fixed-price, performance-based milestones will enable NASA to deploy crewed and uncrewed mobility systems to the lunar surface by 2028 through the agency’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative. Early surface mobility is a foundational component of the national space policy priority to create an enduring lunar presence.

  • Reuters ☛ NASA picks Blue Origin, other space firms for moon missions

    NASA awarded contracts to space firms including Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Astrolab to ​send robotic landers, rovers and drones to ‌support the upcoming lunar exploration missions.

  • Forbes ☛ NASA Picks Bezos’ Blue Origin Over SpaceX For Key Moon Base Mission

    Part of the original Artemis Program to land on the moon was Lunar Gateway, an orbiting station that astronauts would build and use to descend to the lunar surface. This, the first international space station around the moon, will now not proceed.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • The Register UK ☛ CrowdStrike, Google shatter Glassworm botnet

    This self-replicating worm initially targeted VS Code extensions on the OpenVSX marketplace before moving on to npm and Python packages, and later poisoned more than 300 GitHub repos using stolen credentials harvested in earlier Glassworm infections.

  • Orchid ☛ I’m tired of talking to AI

    I found GitHub repositories that were spreading malware. I asked AI what to do about it, but it gave me nothing useful. So I opened a discussion on GitHub. Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me. I called it out and the comment was deleted. Then another person replied. It was the same AI answer again.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Privacy International ☛ The ILO Convention on decent work in the platform economy

      PI welcomes the ILO’s decision as a step in the right direction to protect platform workers who have been at the forefront of new forms of data exploitation in the workplace. The platform economy has created an environment of unprecedented surveillance and monitoring for workers that greatly threatens privacy and other fundamental rights.

      While we welcome the ILO’s efforts to try to address the risks to faced by workers in the platform economy, our overall assessment of the texts continues to be that the new drafts of both the Convention and the Recommendation do not sufficiently address the risks posed by the use of automated systems and their impact on workers’ rights.

      In particular, PI is encouraging the ILO and its Members to implement measures that will effectively protect the privacy, autonomy and dignity of workers by: [...]

    • EFF ☛ More License Plate Reader Mission Creep: School Residency Verification, Background Checks, and Noise Complaints

      As a refresher: Law enforcement agencies lease or purchase camera systems from Flock Safety and then mount them by the side of the road and at intersections to document every vehicle that passes, including the plate, make, model, color and distinguishing characteristics, along with the date, time and location of where it was seen.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ ICE to spend $25M on iris recognition technology

      The Massachusetts-based, venture capital-backed vendor will supply ICE agents with an additional batch of 1,570 iris-scanning devices. The handheld devices are wireless and connect to BI2 Technologies’ Inmate Identification and Recognition System, which provides access to 5 million-plus booking records, including arrest and incarceration data from 47 states.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Apple on Bill C-22: “This Bill Allows the Government of Canada to Force Companies to Break Encryption by Inserting Backdoors into their Products”

      I could go on, but the fundamental takeaway from the day can be summarized in this single 22-second clip from Apple, which makes clear that the bill poses real risks, and the government thus far seems uninterested in addressing them. The Bill C-22 hearing may have been a mess, but the message was clear.

  • Confidentiality

    • Federal News Network ☛ DoD’s system to protect classified information held by contractors is under strain

      GAO says the agency responsible for overseeing classified work at defense contractors is falling short of its mission, with gaps in inspections, staffing and risk prioritization.

    • Undeadly ☛ LibreSSL 4.3.2 released

      The LibreSSL project has announced the release of version 4.3.2 of the software.

      The release notes are as follows: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • Techdirt ☛ The California Primary And The Frustrating Absence Of Ranked Choice Voting

    But the problems of the jungle primary would be much less acute if the election used ranked choice voting because it would allow voters to take a chance on a more long-shot candidate because even if that candidate doesn’t ultimately get enough support, the vote still won’t be wasted—it will instead be put towards the voter’s next preference. And by enabling voters to give support to everyone they think deserves it, in order of how much they think so, it allows a consensus to be formed that is much more accurate than this weird one-and-done game voters currently are forced to play, where they can only afford to lend support to a single candidate, which may make them have to choose between the one they want and the one they believe can win, especially when pitted against someone from an opposition party, lest none of the party they prefer potentially end up on the November ballot.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ US munitions depleted by Iran war will take years to restore, analysis finds

    The think tank, a bipartisan policy research organization, estimates that more than 1,000 Tomahawk missiles were launched, far exceeding the average annual procurement of 86 over the past decade – and that replenishment could take until 2030 or 2031. It also determined that up to 290 THAAD interceptors were used, with those reserves returning to prior levels only by mid-to-late 2029.

  • CSIS ☛ Rebuilding U.S. Missile Inventory: A Multiyear Project

    The 39-day bombing and air defense campaign against Iran depleted inventories of key U.S. munitions stockpiles, as a previous CSIS analysis detailed. The United States has enough munitions for any plausible scenario in the Iran war, but the depleted inventories have created a window of vulnerability for a potential Western Pacific conflict. The time needed to rebuild those inventories has thus become a major concern.

  • Karl Bode ☛ Jeff Bezos Is Afraid Of What Comes Next

    Sure thing, buddy.

    Bezos tries to sell Andrew Ross Sorkin on the idea that he's been pushing hard to eliminate income tax for common people (he has not), pays his fair tax of tax obligations (he does not) and isn't the type of man to make his employees skip bathroom breaks and pee in bottles so they can meet brutal quotas (he is).

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • American Oversight ☛ What We Still Need to Know About Bondi’s Handling of the Epstein Files

    On May 29, former Attorney General Pam Bondi is scheduled to appear before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Members of Congress should have the opportunity to ask her questions about her handling of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) review of the investigative files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

    Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) staff were reportedly instructed to flag mentions of Trump in the trove of documents. Lawmakers from both parties want to know more, because we now know that Trump’s name was in the files more than 1,000 times.

• Environment

  • Lusaka ZM ☛ Zambia poised to play key role in global energy transition

    Dr Kabeta says Zambia has an opportunity to increase mineral production and leverage its mineral wealth for economic transformation, industrialisation, job creation and sustainable development as it is endowed with vast minerals.

    He pointed out that global transition towards clean energy, digital transformation and advanced manufacturing has significantly increased demand for critical minerals such as copper, cobalt, manganese, graphite, lithium, nickel and rare earth elements.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Erin Brockovich starts tracking AI data centers, calls on affected communities to submit issues — website shows more than 2,700 reports from across the US raising various concerns

    "The RACE to build AI infrastructures is unfolding town by town across America. In some places, data centers are welcomed. In others, they are delayed, contested or abandoned altogether,” Brockovich wrote on her website. “This MAP captures the real-world footprint of that race — revealing patterns of growth, conflict and uncertainty.” At the moment, the website lists 33 operational (built & running) AI data centers, 44 under-construction projects, and 27 proposed sites. It also shows 2,716 community-reported locations nationwide as of May 24, 2026.

    There are several primary concerns against data centers, the biggest of which is energy consumption, which has been causing utility prices to skyrocket across large swaths of the United States. Water usage is also another issue that communities have been raising, with these massive-scale projects using a lot of water and catching the attention of lawmakers. There are also reports of noise pollution, with some members of the public complaining about the infrasound phenomenon often brought about by large-scale industrial operations. Brockovich also lists location risks, scalability, and e-waste as potential long-term problems that the industry must deal with in the future.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ When the AI boom subsides, the data centers will remain. What we do now matters

    Data centers now account for 6% of US energy use, and their water use is similarly staggering. 13% of the underlying workloads are useless: zombie processes that have been left running by inattentive owners whose priorities now lie elsewhere. Beyond the environmental impacts, which are no joke, data center consumption is pushing up people’s bills and disrupting communities. And beyond that, they push up real estate costs, with real knock-on effects for communities. It’s no surprise, then, that legislation is being written to limit their growth.

    It’s not that we shouldn’t have data centers. But their footprint is enormous, and the effects are sometimes disastrous. We need to consider the effect on people’s quality of life more than the impact to GDP, not least because economic indicators like these don’t actually show if people’s lives are improving.

  • Nature

    • Working With Almost Anyone

      Many animals can coexist with many other animals; can humans coexist with other humans?

• Finance

  • Don Marti ☛ Modern sports fans and the attribution cartel

    Today, though. the NFL and NBA are all about the gambling ads. Which is a decision that’s going to come back on them in a decade or so. Because gambling displaces savings. Many of today’s young sports fans, instead of getting on track to save up for a house, are getting into financial trouble that they won’t get out of in time to get a down payment together. The leagues are burning a future well-off audience, ready to be monetized with house-related advertising, in exchange for a quick cash hit from the gambling apps today.

  • CBC ☛ Canadian insolvency volumes highest since 2009

    Equifax Canada released a new report that shows insolvency volumes are up 18.8% from this time last year, their highest level since 2009, escalating the financial strain homeowners are already facing.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Vox ☛ Can Democrats reclaim the Christian vote? Texas is about to run that test.

    Talarico earned significant media attention in his primary for the progressive tilt of his Christian faith — one of forgiveness, love, and righteous anger against the wealthy and powerful. Yet he’s also been ridiculed by the religious right as a false prophet: a Christian in name only who launders left-wing social views through faith, supports abortion, and once argued that God is nonbinary.

    Meanwhile, Paxton’s nomination sets up an interesting foil: He’s a formerly impeached and indicted politician in the middle of a divorce his wife sought “on biblical grounds.” And he has championed a right-wing brand of Christian politics, embracing the “Christian nationalist” movement’s efforts to break down the walls between church and state, while fending off bipartisan attacks on his personal morals.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Last.fm Announces It Has Gone Independent

    After nearly twenty years under CBS ownership, Last.fm is once again independent: [...]

  • Last.fm ☛ Last.fm is now independent - Announcements - Last.fm Support Community

    Is Last.fm shutting down?

    No. The service continues as normal. Is Last.fm being acquired by another company?

    No. Last.fm is now operating independently. Is the team changing?

    The team building and operating Last.fm remains in place.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Kentucky Lantern ☛ Misinformation threatens measles elimination status, overall health. Can KY alter course?

      Experts blame an ecosystem of technology like artificial intelligence, social media algorithms that put people in information silos and a polarizing political environment.

      Reversing course on medical misinformation will not happen quickly or easily, Kentucky experts say. It will take systemic investments of time for the medical community to build trust lost with the public during and as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Mohammad Tarighat Esfanjani, Attorney Sentenced to Prison

    Mohammad Tarighat Esfanjani is an attorney and a member of the East Azerbaijan Province Bar Association. Last year, he was reportedly attacked and beaten by individuals wearing military uniforms. His wife was also threatened during the incident.

  • Wired ☛ Internet Starts to Return in Iran After 3-Month Blackout

    Iran’s more than 90 million citizens have been without [Internet] for the overwhelming majority of 2026, between the current blackout that began on February 28, when Israel and the United States attacked the country, and a previous [Internet] shutdown enforced after widespread protests in January. The reconnection appears to have been ordered by officials in Iran’s government—but could only be temporary.

  • W Evan Sheehan ☛ Congress Is Trying to Ban Books

    Time again to call your representatives. In case you haven’t heard, back in February the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act (H.R.7661) was introduced in the House of Representatives. It is a book ban. It prevents federal money given to schools to be used for programs, activites, or books that include "sexually oriented material"; which includes, by the way, "lewd or lascivious dancing". I guess Mary Miller thought John Lithgow was playing the good guy in Footloose.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Ball State U Settles With Employee Fired for Charlie Kirk Post

    In the post, Swierc wrote, “Let me be clear: if you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.” She referred to his death as “a tragedy,” expressed empathy for his wife and kids, and noted that while the shooting was “a reflection of the violence, fear, and hatred he sowed,” it “does not excuse his death.” Ball State University President Geoffrey Mearns notified Swierc of her immediate termination and cited the Facebook post as his reasoning.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Northwestern University ☛ NPR CEO Katherine Maher Discusses Recent Restructuring and Adapting to Federal Defunding

    Maher joins Tim Franklin on the State of Local News Podcast to discuss the rapidly shifting landscape of public media amid federal funding cuts, audience fragmentation, and technological disruption. Maher outlines NPR’s restructuring efforts, the importance of strengthening the local-public media network, and the organization’s investments in digital transformation, video storytelling, and regional newsroom collaborations. The conversation also explores how public radio can evolve from a traditional broadcast model into a digitally integrated, community-centered network—while continuing to serve as one of the most trusted sources of local and national news in the United States.

    This Q&A transcript captures their conversation on the future of public media, local journalism, AI and how NPR is adapting to technological and financial transformation. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ McClatchy runs AI slop with journalists’ names on it

    This is someone who thinks what their company does now is human slop, and they’re literally unable to tell if something’s actually any good.

    It’s not clear who built the Content Scaling Agent or who sold it to McClatchy.

    Journalists are now withholding their names from the bylines for the slop, under union and contract rules.

  • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ Trump floats NDAs for federal workers to stop press leaks

    Plans for a government-wide NDA come as the administration eyes new ways to clamp down on so-called leakers in the federal workforce who in the last year have disclosed confidential information about President Donald Trump’s immigration policy and military plans to members of the media.

    In a draft document published to the Federal Register Tuesday morning, the Office of Personnel Management issued notice of the proposed global NDA, explaining that the policy would “promote consistency” across the federal government and “better protect confidential information.”

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • EDRI ☛ Digital Rights Monthly Socials

    Connect with the global digital rights community at the monthly Digital Rights Social, hosted by Team CommUNITY. The July edition will focus on Organizational Sustainability and Resilience.

    These monthly gatherings are a space to learn about new projects, share work and research, and discuss updates from the digital rights field. To attend, a TCU Mattermost account is required.

  • Techdirt ☛ Lying, Cheating Administration Has Its Ass Handed To It By Judge Overseeing BS Charges Against ICE Protesters

    All of this is on the public record. And perhaps nothing is more damning than the combined efforts of two federal judges who are handling the administration’s bullshit prosecution of a half-dozen protesters.

    Everything about this is a work of art — one inadvertently commissioned by Trump’s DOJ and its remaining collection of lying lawyers. Here’s a useful summary, via CBS News: [...]

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Workers Are Demanding a Share of Samsung’s AI Windfall

    A planned strike at Samsung this month would have been the biggest industrial action in a South Korean workplace since the heyday of labor militancy in the 1980s, involving more than 47,000 workers.

    It would almost certainly have been the biggest work stoppage in the history of the global semiconductor industry, where high pay and generous benefits often foster a sense of privilege and prestige among the majority of workers, despite their experience of chemically drenched working conditions, cutthroat competition, and long, risky working hours.

  • The Register UK ☛ AI hiring algorithms reject Black, Asian job seekers at higher rates

    The dataset details hiring recommendations provided to 156 employers with a total annual revenue of $225 billion. It spans 11 industries, including finance, manufacturing, and warehousing.

    When people applied for jobs at these companies, they were directed to pymetrics' machine learning platform to play assessment games. The platform's algorithm measures gameplay performance and recommends on average 58.2 percent of applicants per position. Employers decide who to interview, typically rejecting candidates who were not recommended by the hiring platform.

  • Site36 ☛ 13th undercover police officer exposed in Spain – within in four years

    Why so many undercover cops have been identified in Spain remains unclear. Some exposures can be attributed to operational sloppiness. For instance, two undercover officers had used mobile phone numbers that differed by only a single digit. Activists shared this finding publicly, thereby facilitating further investigations.

  • Sinclair Inc ☛ Charges dismissed for woman without right hand cited for holding phone while driving

    During the stop, the deputy is heard stating he saw the device in her “right hand.” The woman says she does not have a right hand and plans to challenge the citation in court. She has also requested body camera footage from PBSO. CBS12 has submitted a public records request for that footage as well.

  • Yle ☛ Berry firms formed cartel, says competition authority

    The FCCA is seeking the largest penalty — €5.9 million — from Polarica. Marja Bothnia Berries faces a proposed fine of just under €1.8 million, Kaskein Marja and Arctic International close to one million euros each.

    Several companies involved have faced separate legal scrutiny in recent years.

    Polarica and its management have been accused of a total of 78 counts of aggravated human trafficking involving seasonal berry pickers. The Lapland District Court will likely issue its decision in the case in June.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • PC World ☛ Your PC’s trust in Windows has an expiration date

    Microsoft has clarified what will happen to Windows 11 PCs if Secure Boot certificates are not updated before they expire in June 2026.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Open Web Advocacy ☛ Open Letter: Why the CMA Must Enforce the DMCCA

    TL;DR: Today, Open Web Advocacy joins 17 businesses, industry bodies, public figures and civil society organisations including Mozilla, Vivaldi, DuckDuckGo, Coalition for App Fairness, Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), Proton and the UK consumer organisation Which? and others in an open letter to the UK Government and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

    Effective enforcement is vital to ensuring that browsers, browser engines and web apps can compete on fair terms.

    Together we call for more ambitious and urgent enforcement of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCCA).

  • Copyrights

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ Spotify opens the door wide to AI

      AI-generated song remixes, previously off-limits, are making their way onto Spotify in a big way. Last week, the Swedish music streaming platform announced a partnership with Universal Music, allowing users to create tracks based on the major label’s catalog. Spotify presented the move during an investor event as the first “legal” offering that will compensate artists and songwriters, immediately setting it apart from services offered by U.S. startups Udio and Suno.

      The feature will be offered as a paid add-on to existing subscriptions, although all users will be able to listen to AI-generated tracks. Neither pricing nor a launch date has been disclosed. Artists represented by Universal — including Taylor Swift, Drake, Adele, Elton John and U2 — will have to give their consent before their songs can be remixed. While the compensation model has not been detailed, it will likely follow the current royalty structure. Spotify said it is not developing its own AI models, but relying instead on external providers.