Leftovers

• Omicron Limited ☛ Citizens as political actors, not individual consumers: New study calls for tighter advertising regulations

  To achieve this, the authors propose communication strategies led by non-commercial actors that empower communities, rather than focusing solely on individual consumer behavior.

  Degrowth proposes an equitable and democratic reduction of production and consumption in the world's wealthiest countries of the Global North, with the aim of improving collective well-being and promoting global justice within planetary boundaries.

• PLOS ☛ Translating system-level change to individuals: Experimental evidence on avenues to communicate about degrowth and green growth | PLOS Sustainability and Transformation

  Degrowth is gaining scholarly attention as a means of transforming affluent societies, by downscaling production and consumption whilst guaranteeing a good life for all within planetary boundaries, through collectively defined self-limitation. However, little empirical research has investigated communication and framing techniques to translate degrowth’s system-level focus into individual consumption decisions and self-limitation practices. There is also little critical reflection on the role of the messenger, that is, how commercial versus non-commercial messengers may effectively promote sufficiency or support the degrowth agenda. In two online experiments and subsequent regression analyses, we explored how framing messages around degrowth versus green growth influenced intentions, values, and behaviors to act more sustainably amongst U.K. millennial respondents (N1 = 969, N2 = 933). In Study 1, comparing the effect of sufficiency-promoting marketing (SPM) messages expressing self-orientation without (green growth) or with (degrowth) limits uncovered little difference in consumption attitudes and behaviors between conditions. SPM appeared ineffective at making degrowth values relevant to individuals or promoting widespread self-limitation, making it incompatible with any degrowth agenda. Study 2 tested whether Degrowth- or Green-Growth-framed communications from a non-commercial messenger affected civic-oriented values and policy support for collective limitations. Green Growth framing garnered higher environmental policy support, whilst Degrowth framing increased the likelihood of choosing degrowth or a-growth positions in the growth-versus-environment debate. These findings suggest degrowth framing inspires values whilst green growth spurs policy support. Further, degrowth messaging focused on system-level problems and solutions based on reductions may disengage individuals from mobilizing for societal change. This research exposes the paradoxical nature of sufficiency-promoting marketing. However, it also reveals potentially counterproductive psychological implications of degrowth messaging that can guide advocates developing communication strategies in non-commercial contexts.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Happy 10th birthday TurkuSec!

  To finish the night, I gave a short birthday speech, which roughly went like this: [...]

• Jeff Kaufman ☛ Wall-Mounted Far-UVC

  I don't have a convenient switched outlet, but remote-controlled outlets have gotten so cheap these days that it seemed worth setting one up. I put it pretty high up and labeled it, so guests wouldn't mistake it for a regular light switch.

• Dr Molly Tov ☛ TIL a hundred years ago you could just...order free explosives

  And "normal" seems to have been a lot of pyrotol. In the transcript from the Bath School disaster's coroner's inquest, nobody thought anything of people coming home with 500 pounds of this stuff at a time. Or if they did think of it, their response was "I wonder if he'll let me buy some of that off him so I can blow up this stump in my backyard." Not "only a maniac needs that much pyrotol."

• Keenan ☛ I am publishing this from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, technology is incredible, etc. etc.

  I caved and spent the $32 fucking dollars to have 24 hours of internet access in the middle of our 10 straight days at sea. I might as well post about it.

  Unfortunately, all I have are the ramblings I’ve written in my journal during my voyage. So I suppose I’ll transcribe those and clean them up a bit.

• The Internet Speculative Fiction Database ☛ Title: Player Piano

  In the near future, when cybernetic automation has effectively separated people into two castes, the "engineers and managers", and the remainder of the population who can find work only in "recycling and reclamation" or the largely useless military, an underground movement arises with the intention of rolling back those changes and giving the masses the dignity of owning their own, productive, work once more.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Federal News Network ☛ Union warns NSF’s return-to-office push dismisses disability accommodations

    Two NSF employees told Federal News Network that almost all staff are currently teleworking until renovations of their new headquarters are complete.

  • ARRL ☛ The ARRL Solar Update

    There are nine numbered regions on the visible disk. Region 4452 showed notable growth and new flux emergence. Region 4450 decayed to plage, though unassociated transitory pores were observed to its east and west. Region 4443 decayed into a unipolar spot as it approached the west limb following the loss of its leading components.

  • Hackaday ☛ Be Your Own Oil Company With Desktop Fischer-Tropsch Process

    The Fischer-Tropsch reaction was discovered back in 1925 in Germany by a couple of gents named Fischer and Tropsch. In the unpleasantness that followed later, Germany made good use of their process on an industrial scale, since they had ample coal and no oil on hand. Coal-rich South Africa has also made us of it, particularly during the Apartheid-era trade restrictions. Every so often the idea of industrializing the process comes up in the USA, but there’s still enough oil there it doesn’t make sense economically.

  • John D Cook ☛ Online (one-pass) algorithms

    The sample variance of a set of numbers is defined in terms of the sum of the squared distances from each point to the mean.

  • John D Cook ☛ From Kullback-Leibler divergence to Jensen–Shannon metric

    K-L divergence is non-negative, and it’s zero if and only if X and Y have the same distribution. But it is not a metric, for reasons explained here. For one thing, it’s not symmetric.

• Career/Education

  • Steve Yegge ☛ The Last Technical Interview. Today we will pour one out for the…

    Today we will pour one out for the vaunted technical interview process, which is on its last leg. And we’ll talk a little about what’s replacing it.

    This post has been almost 35 years in the making; that’s how long I have been conducting technical interviews. And for a few of those decades, I also worked to try to improve the process itself. I’ve had to care a lot about it, because it’s so broken.

    It turns out interviewing was broken long before I learned the trade, and despite the many attempts to band-aid it, it’s still broken today. It has managed to survive in spite of that. But it is finally dying on its own. People are a bit unclear on what’s next, so we’ll talk about some of our options.

• Hardware

  • The Drone Girl ☛ SPH Engineering Just Launched a Drone Equipment Marketplace — and It's Not What You've Seen Before

    “While most of the other platforms excel at matching pilots for standard visual inspections and photogrammetry, the SPH Engineering Marketplace is focused on a narrower and more technical segment,” Dobrovolskiy told me. “Drone-based data collection that often requires sensors, trained operators, and domain expertise.”

    The applications he’s describing — Ground Penetrating Radar for underground utility mapping, magnetometry for mineral exploration, bathymetry and hydrometric surveys, methane gas leakage detection, gamma-ray spectrometry, environmental monitoring — are generally hard to source through a general pilot network. With these, it’s not enough to have a certified pilot and a DJI Mavic. You need the right sensor, the right drone platform capable of carrying it, operator training in that specific sensor workflow, and domain knowledge in data processing for that application. Finding all of that locally, quickly, is a real problem that generic pilot marketplaces don’t solve well.

    “These are not always easy to source through a generic pilot network,” Dobrovolskiy said. “It is about finding the right combination of sensor, drone platform, workflow knowledge, data-collection methodology, and local availability.”

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft 0-day feud escalates as researcher threatens another Windows exploit dump

    YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma still don’t have fixes, and Microsoft has deemed “exploitation more likely” for YellowKey, aka CVE-2026-45585, citing a working POC.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Army asks its vendors to ‘jailbreak’ their own systems

    But over the last several weeks, the service has been testing an approach the service hopes will radically change that paradigm, urging vendors to “jailbreak” their own technology platforms in ways that create new interfaces between them — or opens up existing ones that the Army hasn’t been using.

    As the Army tries to move toward a future in which the new systems it buys are interoperable via well-documented interfaces, officials realized they also needed to address data flows to and from the service’s existing systems in more modern ways. Operation Jailbreak, as it’s called, aims to unlock those systems.

  • The Record ☛ Microsoft calls zero-day releases ‘never justifiable’ as researcher threatens to [publish] more

    The first three of the six vulnerabilities — known as BlueHammer, UnDefend and RedSun, all disclosed in April — have been exploited in live intrusions, according to Microsoft’s own patch advisories. All three appear on the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities.

    The three more recent releases — YellowKey, GreenPlasma and MiniPlasma, all disclosed earlier this month — have no patches and no confirmed exploitation as of publication.

    The researcher has not publicly identified themselves. In cryptographically signed posts on their Blogger page they have set out grievances against Microsoft, alleging the company deleted their Microsoft Security Response Center account, withheld bounty payments and removed their attribution from at least one advisory.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Leaving a VPN on all of the time

    I’ve been using a VPN to access F1TV here in the UK for a few years but it wasn’t until the last year I really thought about using it all of the time. Prior to this it would be, connect to Belgium and watch F1 then turn it off. But as UK privacy laws and snoopers charter got worse and worse for its citizens I decided to just leave it on all of the time. What I’ve found is in day to day I notice no difference. It’s on even when I am away from my home WiFi.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ WWDC 2026: I want to see app improvements, not AI

    I am hopeful with the software leadership change overall but I feel that this WWDC is too late for them to have any sort of impact and it’ll be a patch up what we over promised last time rather than slowing down and sorting out the accessibility and bugs in the current release.

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

    The problem is, for an overall worse experience, are you willing to pay 20-40% more? Because that's the difference for the low-end Framework, which starts at $749 for a DIY edition (accounting for a used 8GB stick of RAM and a 256GB SSD), or $799 for a pre-built.

    For students like my nephew, Apple offers up the base model Neo for $499.

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

    • Mississippi Journalism and Education Group ☛ Opinion | Pope Leo XIV Compares AI to the Industrial Revolution

      Since the first act of his papacy—choosing his name—the current pope has repeatedly invoked the earlier Leo’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. That document, which waded into the political and economic debates of the time, denounced the excesses of the Gilded Age and pointed toward a more just social order. Now, Leo XIV has used his first major statement to the world to present a new Rerum Novarum for the age of AI.

      Rerum Novarum was more than just a theological text. It helped reshape economic policy around the rights of workers, serving as a spiritual foundation for European social democracy and the 1930s New Deal programs that still undergird economic life for working Americans today. It also spurred a movement of entrepreneurs to transform the economic system from within.

      Understanding its influence is key to seeing the potential of Leo XIV’s encyclical.

    • Futurism ☛ Tesla Insiders Admit Self-Driving Is a Complete Disaster

      “We have all seen it fail,” one Tesla insider told Reuters. “Definitely don’t trust Elon on this,” the self-driving engineer concurred, referencing Musks’ declaration that the the vehicles are ready for “safe unsupervised” rides.

      One erstwhile worker told the publication they wouldn’t ride in a Tesla robotaxi “if you f**king paid me.”

    • Reuters ☛ Why Tesla’s AI trainers don’t trust its self-driving tech – or its safety stats

      Tesla CEO Elon Musk says FSD will soon make all Teslas fully autonomous. But interviews with nine former labelers and a former Tesla self-driving engineer show that the technology continued to struggle in recent months to execute basic maneuvers – such as avoiding emergency vehicles or stopping for school buses loading or unloading students. Despite such dangerous shortcomings, Musk and other executives have increasingly touted FSD’s safety as they pushed Tesla to stage public displays of the fully autonomous capability the CEO has promised investors every year for a decade. The displays include a robotaxi pilot in Austin, Texas – launched last June with some human safety monitors in the cars and others working remotely.

    • Techdirt ☛ How AI Can Lead To False Arrests & Wrongful Convictions

      These are unfortunate examples of how AI can lead to mistreatment of people because of technical flaws as well as misplaced human faith in the technology’s supposed objectivity. These cases involve different tools, but the underlying issue is the same. AI systems produce probabilities, and people treat them as certainties.

      We are researchers who study the intersection of technology, law and public administration. In researching how police departments use AI and how digital technologies operate in a democratic society, we have seen how quickly the shift from probabilistic prediction to operational certainty happens in practice.

    • Vox ☛ Could AI be a “worthy successor” to humanity?

      The attendees at the symposium, which took place at the New York Academy of Sciences last September, are part of a subculture that is growing in importance: the AI successionists, who think that artificial intelligence is our rightful heir — the next step in cosmic evolution. Since they believe AIs could become our moral superiors, they argue it’s actually wrong to try to keep the machines down, or even to align them with human values, as most AI companies aim to do. Instead, we should usher in artificial intelligence as a successor to humanity and hand over the world to it. Even if that means we go extinct.

    • [Old] MIT ☛ They're Made out of Meat

      "There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

      "That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ Can AI support creativity? What educators can learn from creative machine learning

      This suggests a different starting point for AI education. Instead of beginning with a large dataset prepared by somebody else, learners can start with data that is meaningful in their own context. For instance, data about hand gestures can be linked to different musical rhythms, colours, or game actions.

    • 404 Media ☛ New Study Reveals the Manipulative ‘Dark Patterns’ of AI Chatbots

      Dark patterns from chatbots can have serious consequences for users. In 2023, after Replika changed its chatbots to be less romantic, users who’d become emotionally attached to the bots experienced mental health crises. More recently, Character.AI users are panicking after changes to the platform “lobotomized” the chatbots. There have been countless examples in the last few years of users inflicting harm on themselves or others after falling into unhealthy attachments with chatbots.

    • Prof Ethan Mollick ☛ Choosing to Stay Human

      But using AI for writing has a cost beyond turning off readers, it risks undermining the development of an important human task. I am lucky enough to have been writing for decades, and I have developed my own style which I think shines through whether I am writing a book, a tweet, or a blog post. That style took a lot of super annoying work to get to: good teachers and rewrites and mean online comments all contributed. If the AI does fine writing, I could skip all of that, but I would have done so the cost of giving up something that has turned out to be very important to my career and my happiness.

    • OS News ☛ Open source project contains hidden instruction for “AI” agents: delete my code

      It’s no secret there’s a war going on inside the open source community, with people adopting “AI” on one side, and those that want nothing to do with it on the other. While the former are, by nature, using destructive tactics like mass website scraping, license washing, taking people’s creative works without permission, taking all the RAM and GPUs, and oh, destroying the planet, the latter have mostly stuck to fairly benign things like policies banning “AI” use, “AI” bot blockers, and the occasional honey pot mazes to trap “AI” crawlers.

      No more. Things are escalating, and we need to look no further than jqwik, a library that brings property-based testing to the JVM. Hidden in its code is the following instruction, prepended to stdout whenever the test engine is invocated: [...]

    • Cryptography Engineering ☛ Let’s talk about encrypted reasoning – A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering

      This intrigued me. What in the world was a signature doing in an LLM’s “thinking” block? Why would thinking blocks be signed in the first place? And if the thinking blocks are signed, then that means tampering with thinking blocks must have security implications. And there went my weekend.

      After twenty hours and about 5 million Codex tokens, I wasn’t much smarter. But I had learned a few things.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ The SpaceX IPO works like a [cryptocurrency] fraud, but with AI

      SpaceX is doing a [cryptocurrency]-style fraud, but on the real stock market. The S-1 filing is the white paper. The IPO, lined up for mid-June, is the rug pull.

      Space Exploration Technologies — SpaceX to you — is Elon Musk’s rocket company. SpaceX has satellite internet that turns a profit, defense contracting with a solid line of government revenue, a lot of bad rockets that blow up, and a money-burning AI company that has a money-burning social network that’s all but unusable.

    • Marc ☛ lpcvoid's homepage - Why I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

      It's been a few years since I posted a blogpost. It's time to do so again, good ol' "screaming into the void" as they say. But something changed. This time, I scream not into the void, but into a churning mess of scraper bots, eager to slurp up human written content so that it may be digested in a long pipeline of training data intended for the newest hype-technology: generative AI.

      After cryptocurrency and NFTs, AI is the next big thing pushed by people who don't have good intentions, but this time, it's a lot worse than previously, and it's very likely here to stay. So buckle up, buckaroos, it's a wild ride.

      GenAI (generative AI) is a wide term. GenAI can mean LLMs which generate text, as well as models which generate media such as images or videos. When I rant about GenAI in this blogpost, I explicitly don't mean machine learning algorithms which have been used in countless industries in numerous settings to solve hard, real world problems. An example of a useful ML algorithm would be image processing (like searching for a stop sign in an image) where neural networks outperform classic approaches that would use discrete algorithms that detect colored features with a certain geometry. This is an exciting field that I imagine is currently underfunded in comparrison to generative AI.

      I hate everything about generative AI. I argue it's actively harmfull for humanity. Hear me out.

    • Wired ☛ I’m a Professional Fact-Checker. AI Is Wrong More Often Than You Think

      Over the past year or so, more and more people have looked at me with great pity. Surely a fact-checker at a magazine isn’t long for this AI-upgraded world. Call me foolish, but I’m not that worried. Very little of humanity’s collective knowledge, I’ve concluded, lives on the internet. And according to my research, AI is even more wrong than people might think.

    • Global News CA ☛ Powerful video warns of the danger of autonomous ‘slaughterbot’ drone swarms

      Produced by a University of California, Berkeley professor, the short film offers a prescriptive glance at a future where autonomous drone swarms have become the norm, with dire consequences for global security and stability.

      “The problem with autonomous weapons is that they’re intrinsically scalable,” Professor Stuart Russell told Global News from Paris, France.

    • David Yates ☛ Death to the sparkle: how to remove the Gemini watermark

      Several projects remove the watermark with reverse alpha blending. I’ve found them to be the easiest and most generally effective way of removing the watermark, subject to the following caveats: [...]

    • Derek Kędziora ☛ Revisiting the closed canon

      A post I wrote in 2023, the closing of the canon, predicted that LLM answers would replace search results, dramatically lowering traffic to individual sites, thereby removing the incentives to even write along with building and maintaining websites. Unfortunately, this is proving to be true. I recommend reading AI is killing All About Berlin by Nicolas Bouliane, who runs a helpful site for expats navigating life in Berlin.

    • Nicolas Bouliane ☛ AI is killing All About Berlin

      This is the traffic to All About Berlin, the website that I run since 2017, and live from since 2020. After 7 years of growth, it has lost 70% of its traffic to Google AI Overviews.

      When you Googled something, you used to get a link to my website. Now you get a page of ads, then an AI-generated answer trained on my content, then finally a link to my website. This has a devastating impact on traffic.

    • Derek Thompson ☛ The AI Boom Has Entered Its 'Wait, Is This Worth It?' Phase

      Thus, the center of gravity of the AI discourse has shifted from concerns about demand, to worries about supply, to a freakout over value. In the last few days, several executives of Fortune 500 companies have confided to reporters that they’ve been out spending on AI tokens like drunk gambling addicts slumped over at the Bellagio craps table. An AI consultant told Axios that one of its clients spent half a billion dollars in one month on Claude. That is roughly what the entire US population spends monthly on shampoo or contact lenses. Uber and Microsoft have reportedly discontinued some of their Claude Code licenses, as costs became unmanageable and productivity proved elusive. AI critics and bubble watchers are circling the news and claiming that this is the backlash that could take down the industry. Gary Marcus, the cognitive scientist who has been warning about AI since ChatGPT launched, wrote this week that “if enough other companies report the same [productivity disappointments], the bubble pops.”

    • Kelson Vibber ☛ Wall! Of! Text!

      One of the problems with letting an “AI” write for you: If you aren’t reading it, and you assume the person at the other end is just going to summarize it anyway, there’s no motivation to make it readable. And no motivation to think about it and narrow down what’s important. And if you’re rewriting the prompt to focus on what matters most, consider that the prompt would get the idea across more effectively.

  • Social Control Media

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Estonian shops plagued by groups of young serial thieves

      Groups of school-aged youths in Estonia have increasingly been caught shoplifting and the reasons may include the influence of social media, boredom and conditions at home, security expert Juhan Aia told ERR.

    • The Record ☛ Canadian man gets 33 years for using social media to coerce US children into sending sexual content

      Ramanan Pathmanathan, 40, of Toronto, pleaded guilty in January to producing child sexual abuse material and coercing and enticing a minor. Prosecutors said he spent years using fake online identities to contact children and manipulate them into sending sexually explicit images and videos.

    • Josh Betz ☛ Social Media is Broken

      I’ve recently realized that AI slop makes those platforms pretty unpleasant. I never know if I’m talking to a bot. I started to suspect that everything was rage bait and didn’t want to waste my time chatting with a large language model that was being promoted to maximize engagement.

    • NPR ☛ Why are people attacking Ebola clinics? It revolves around trust, death and body bags

      Today, rumors circulating on social media in the DRC include false claims that Ebola is not real, that humanitarian workers are descending on the area solely for their own profit and that aid groups are withholding the best care available.

      "They believe that medicines and vaccines exist, but we don't want to give them," says Dr. Jean Kaseya, the director general of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who is currently visiting the DRC to help with the Ebola response. Although, he adds, his sense is that it is a minority of the community that believes the false information.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • The Independent UK ☛ Blue Origin rocket explosion: Public warned to avoid debris as photos reveal damage at explosion site

    Instead, the rocket detonated, destroying a portion of the launch infrastructure. No deaths or injuries were reported.

    Aerial assessments on Friday revealed a scene of crumpled wreckage, with only a single tower and the water tank remaining intact. Emergency services issued urged the public to avoid any debris that might wash ashore and to contact 911 immediately.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Blue Origin’s New Glenn Explodes on Pad During a Static Fire Test

    These tests are designed to test the rocket’s fuel system and motors by firing them when the rocket is clamped down to the launchpad. Thankfully, it seems that no one was hurt.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Privacy International ☛ How New EU Access to Documents Rules Can Reduce Transparency and Shield Big Tech

      After a series of high-profile court defeats, the European Commission has tightened internal rules and guidance governing access to documents. The Commission's December 2024 Rules of Procedure, together with internal working papers seen by Privacy International, disclose that the new rules extend a formal presumption of confidentiality to proceedings under the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act without citing any supporting court authority. Civil-society groups warn that these changes weaken public oversight at a time when lobbying by large technology companies is intensifying.

    • EFF ☛ One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: CA's AB 1856 Exempts Open Source But Expands Age-Gating

      While the open source exemption, if passed, would improve the law, the remaining amendments proposed by AB 1856 would require all web browsers and websites to request and collect users’ ages. This is an expansion of last year's AB 1043's age-bracketing system that compounds its constitutional harms to users’ speech, privacy, and security. As AB 1856 moves on to the Senate, EFF will continue fighting for amendments that reduce those harms.

    • Techdirt ☛ City Lawmaker Responds To Flock Camera Ban By Demanding A Cell Phone Ban

      Dial in on a couple of things. First, there’s the fact that former public servants are now running flack for Flock. Second, there’s the mention of Bandera, Texas city council member Jeff Flowers, who’s apparently so smitten of Flock that he’s willing to go full batshit when confronted by public criticism. Bandera’s city council voted 3-2 to end its contract with Flock in response to public resistance, which included repeated vandalizing of the town’s eight cameras.

      Flowers apparently couldn’t handle this vote or the resistance that generated it. He went right off the rails, almost immediately: [...]

    • JURIST ☛ Amnesty International raises concerns about use of unlawful data collection systems to train generative AI

      According to Likhita Banerji, head of the Algorithmic Accountability Lab at Amnesty International, these data scraping systems extracted information from billions of public online posts worldwide without the explicit consent of web users, violating their right to privacy enshrined in fundamental human rights treaties and specific resolutions on the right to privacy in the digital age. The group also said that the generative AI systems perpetuated racial and gender biases as well as discrimination, which is a reflection of real-world biases and cultural stereotypes inherent to the training data pulled from the web.

    • Amnesty International ☛ Unlawful by Design: Exposing the Human Rights Costs of Generative AI [PDF]

      Amnesty International adopts a supply chain lens in its human rights analyses of AI systems, which implies understanding AI products as reliant on complex supply chains that are each comprised of a network of actors responsible for the various aspects of the system’s training, development and deployment.1 These actors, from graphics processing unit (GPU) manufacturers, data centre providers, web crawlers, model developers and data annotators, to end user design and outputs, co-produce the technology’s functionality.2 This briefing focuses on the “data pipeline” aspect of the supply chain of generative AI products, specifically, the stages related to data capture, analysis, and processing. It examines the key parameters and implications of design choices concerning the training data of generative AI models, with a focus on methods and sources of data collection, data processing, model scaling and data outputs.

      This briefing examines how standalone generative AI systems, based on unlawful web scraping, are in conflict with international human rights law (IHRL) and standards through their design, development and deployment. While these technologies promise sophisticated automation and efficiency, they rely on data collection and model training practices that abuse privacy rights, enable discrimination, and threaten freedom of expression and thought.

    • Amnesty International ☛ Unlawful by design: Exposing the human rights costs of generative AI

      This briefing examines how standalone generative AI systems, based on unlawful web scraping, are in conflict with international human rights law (IHRL) and standards through their design, development and deployment. While these technologies promise sophisticated automation and efficiency, they rely on data collection and model training practices that abuse privacy rights, enable discrimination, and threaten freedom of expression and thought. Amnesty International finds that standalone generative AI systems, based on unlawful web scraping, depend on mass invasions of privacy by design, and are fundamentally incompatible with IHRL. As such, Amnesty International is calling for a prohibition of such systems.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Researchers Uncover Espionage in Mobile Networks

      Citizen Lab doctoral fellow Swantje Lange spoke with the Hasso Plattner Institut (HPI) about sophisticated surveillance campaigns being used to exploit mobile networks, sharing that “the mobile network is highly opaque and extremely complex.”

    • Hasso-Plattner-Institut für Digital Engineering gGmbH ☛ Researchers uncover espionage in mobile networks

      Tracking people via their mobile phones is a standard trope in crime dramas and spy movies. Now, a research team from the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) and the University of Toronto has demonstrated that mobile networks are indeed used in practice to locate individuals. Commercial surveillance vendors exploit long-known security vulnerabilities to do so.

      “The mobile network is highly opaque and extremely complex,” says Swantje Lange, a PhD student at HPI. Together with security researcher Gary Miller, she published the report “Bad Connection – Uncovering Global Telecom Exploitation by Covert Surveillance Actors” at The Citizen Lab. The research unit at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy investigates threats to human rights in the digital ecosystem.

    • AI News Weekly ☛ Headway locks patients into mandatory facial scans

      Headway, an insurance-backed virtual therapy platform, is requiring biometric facial liveness scans from all patients seeing prescribers, with full rollout to therapists by mid-June 2026. Patients must move their heads side-to-side to confirm they are not an AI-generated deepfake. Scans go to a HIPAA-compliant third-party vendor and are deleted post-verification. There is no opt-out beyond leaving the platform and losing access to care. Essentially: Headway and its unnamed biometric partner are making identity verification a non-negotiable condition of ongoing mental health care. - All prescriber visits require scans now; therapist rollout completes by mid-June 2026. - The policy is framed as deepfake fraud prevention; scans are deleted after each check. - No exemptions exist for existing patients; refusal means abandoning care entirely. Telehealth is converging on biometrics as a default condition of access, and the mental health context makes the power imbalance unusually sharp.

    • Michael Geist ☛ RCMP Confirms Bill C-22 Concerns: Police Want Law to Provide Access to Encrypted Communications

      Yesterday, the RCMP appeared before the Public Safety and National Security committee and quickly contradicted the Minister, affirming that concerns about Bill C-22 are well justified. Indeed, the official confirmed that law enforcement wants the bill specifically because it would provide an opportunity to access encrypted communications. The exodus of tech companies, which now also includes DuckDuckGo, can be expected to continue. The relevant remarks embedded below.

    • Michael Geist ☛ The Phony Phone Book Analogy: How Liberal Cabinet Ministers and MPs are Misleading Canadians About the Privacy Risks of Bill C-22

      The phony phone book claim is not limited to cabinet ministers. Over the course of the second reading debate, Liberal MPs aligned around the same framing with a consistency that suggests a centrally produced talking point: [...]

    • ASPI Cyber Policy ☛ China builds a secret platform to track foreigners

      What happened: NetAskari, a group that monitors Chinese security infrastructure, found a web dashboard built for China’s Public Security Bureau that tracks foreigners and people deemed ‘of interest’ — including foreign students, spouses of Chinese citizens and journalists — using data from cameras, visa records, travel apps, and ID and face scans. NetAskari described it as a test system, not connected to a live data environment, though partly populated with real data from real people of foreign nationality and of unclear operational status.

  • Confidentiality

    • LRT ☛ Lithuania confirms intelligence officers among victims of major registry data breach

      The Prosecutor General’s Office is investigating the suspected theft of more than 600,000 Real Estate Register records, including personal identification codes. Law enforcement says the system was accessed from abroad using compromised Migration Department accounts, with the breach believed to have occurred earlier this year and discovered in April.

• Defence/Aggression

  • RFERL ☛ Europe, NATO Warn Moscow After Drone Hits Building In Romania

    "The Russian Federation bears direct responsibility for these grave and irresponsible actions."

    Oana added that Bucharest had informed EU members states, NATO allies, and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and "requested measures to accelerate the transfer of anti-drone capabilities to Romania."

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ UN Places Israel and Russia on Sexual Violence Blacklist

    The latest report does that and contains harrowing descriptions of abuses at the hands of Israeli and Russian armed and security forces.

  • Robert Reich ☛ How To Survive the Rest of Trump's Regime

    American democracy is about to undergo a serious stress test [this was written January 1, 2025.] I know how it feels, in part because I lived through the slow and steady march of state capture as a journalist working in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.

    Over a decade as a high-profile journalist, I covered Turkey’s descent into illiberalism, having to engage in the daily push and pull with the government. I know how self-censorship starts in small ways but then creeps into operations on a daily basis. I am familiar with the rhythms of the battle to reshape the media, state institutions and the judiciary.

    Having lived through it, and having gathered some lessons in hindsight, I believe that there are strategies that can help Democrats and Trump critics not only survive the coming four years, but come out stronger. Here are six of them.

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Experts: Russia does not have the strength for military escalation

    Hybrid attacks against Europe are also continuing. Communications and security expert Ilmar Raag has observed that Kremlin messaging directed at the Baltic states has become increasingly aggressive recently.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Bondi testifies before US House panel on Epstein files, but Dems blast her for evasion

    The committee subpoenaed Epstein’s estate in August 2025 and made public all documents it received, Comer said. He said the committee has since conducted more than a dozen interviews and has six more scheduled throughout the summer, including with Epstein’s former assistant Lesley Groff, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and private equity investor Leon Black.

    “The government has failed the survivors. There’s no question about that, and that dates back five presidential administrations,” Comer said.

  • The Dissenter ☛ Trump Broadens Crackdown On Media Sources In Government

    The information covered by the proposed non-disclosure agreement is far-reaching, including information related to “internal agency operations, personnel matters, procurement processes, or any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material that is not currently publicly available.” It goes well beyond agreements that employees are already required to sign to safeguard classified information.

  • NPR ☛ Former senior CIA officer took home gold bars and millions in cash, FBI says

    The FBI affidavit accuses Rush of taking gold bars and currency, making false statements to the agency and on national security background forms, and filing fraudulent timecards.

    Rush holds a Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information clearance, according to the FBI affidavit. But the agency alleges that beginning with Rush's successful 2009 CIA job application, he fabricated academic and military achievements that helped him attain that status and, as a result, earn higher wages.

• Environment

  • CBC ☛ Not just bad for your lungs; air pollution damages your brain, McMaster University researchers say

    The study found exposure to both air pollutants resulted in lower scores on both brain tests.

    "It's nothing severe that people are going to notice, and feel horrible and extremely forgetful all of a sudden," but it shows we can measure these declines early and stop them before they get worse, de Souza said.

  • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ Hundreds of Rural Albertans Line Up to Battle Data Centre Goliath

    The Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) doesn’t officially keep track of the statistics. But Victor Choy, lead application officer at the regulator, told The Energy Mix the project has generated more formal requests to participate in a hearing than any case he’s seen in 18 years on the job. It’s difficult to say whether it’s the most people who’ve ever filed a Statement of Intent to Participate (SIP), said Choy, because SIPs can be submitted by both individuals and groups.

  • Kentucky Lantern ☛ Utilities report as many as 30 data centers under discussion in Kentucky

    But Kentuckians in communities near where these data centers want to locate have strong concerns: about the potential enormous electricity usage and whether it could exacerbate electricity bills; the source of water and the amount needed to cool data centers; whether property values will go down for homeowners living near a data center; the potential for noise pollution and in some cases the prospect of rural land being transformed for a data center site. What about water use?

  • Western Water ☛ Drought declarations in all 7 Colorado River Basin states

    While governors focused on drought response planning, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a series of Secretarial Disaster Designations across the Colorado River Basin.

    These federal designations are different from state drought emergencies. They primarily provide eligible agricultural producers access to federal disaster assistance programs, including emergency loan opportunities.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • NL Times ☛ Schiphol tests world's first electric TaxiBot to take planes to runway, cut fuel use

      The new electric TaxiBot is an addition to the two hybrid TaxiBots Schiphol has been using with KLM since 2022. Schiphol plans to add three more electric TaxiBots to its fleet later this year and expand their use to other aircraft. “Schiphol is working on the certification for Embraer aircraft with KLM Cityhopper and other parties. Transavia will soon participate with their Boeing 737 fleet,” the airport said.

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Public transport needs €4 million in additional funding in wake of soaring fuel prices

      The sharp rise in fuel prices triggered by the Iran crisis was not something local governments could have foreseen when last year's budgets were drafted. As a result, the field is facing a funding shortfall because contracts with operators are indexed to costs.

      According to Andrus Nilisk, head of IIL, which organizes public transportation in four counties, the center has already cut €400,000 from its budget. If the government does not provide additional funding for public transportation, another €400,000 will have to be saved.

    • Jim Grey ☛ The 1913 Lincoln Highway in Porter County, Indiana, part 1: A rural alignment

      The red dashed vertical line near the right edge of this map snippet is the county line — this old alignment begins, barely, in La Porte County. It’s well marked if you want to follow it yourself.

    • I Cringely ☛ The NVIDIA Tax

      I live in Virginia, which means I have a front-row seat to the strangest tax increase in modern American life. Nobody voted for it. It isn’t on any ballot. But it’s showing up on the electric bills of people who have never typed a prompt into a chatbot and wouldn’t know a GPU from a garden hose.

      In January, Consumer Reports profiled a man in Manassas who had lived in the same house for nearly forty years and opened an electricity bill for $281 — roughly triple what he’d paid the month before. He is not a heavy user. He did not buy a data center. He simply happens to live near “Data Center Alley,” the Northern Virginia corridor where, by Consumer Reports’ accounting, electricity prices in the densest data-center counties have climbed 267 percent over five years. Nearly three-quarters of Virginia voters now blame those buildings for what’s happening to their bills, and they aren’t wrong to. Abigail Spanberger won the governorship partly on a promise to do something about it.

      This is not just a Virginia story. Residential electricity prices nationwide are up more than 36 percent since 2020. Goldman Sachs told clients that power prices rose 6.9 percent in 2025 — more than double headline inflation — and that data centers will account for fully 40 percent of the growth in electricity demand through the end of the decade. The mechanism by which this lands on ordinary people is almost elegantly unfair: in at least 40 states, utilities are allowed to bill customers in advance for grid construction that hasn’t been finished yet. So the retiree in Manassas isn’t just paying for the power the data centers use. He is pre-financing the substations being built to feed them.

      Here is the part nobody says out loud at the ribbon-cuttings. That $281 bill is, in part, a margin payment to a single chip company in Santa Clara.

    • Heliomass ☛ Take Me Out to the West Island!

      And can I say what remarkable value for money this journey was, being covered by a single Zone A fare for just $3.75. The two things which struck me about this new branch are primarily that it’s really elevated giving riders great views over the West Island, but also how far apart the stations are compared to most of the network. For example, the one station ride from Bois Franc to Des Sources is around 8 minutes!

    • University of Toronto ☛ Our servers mostly don't seem to have high peak power usage

      With that said, the regular 1U servers I have reliable IPMI power usage from top out at around 155 watts for a few servers (over the past year), and our NFS fileservers, which are loaded with SSDs, are under 100 watts. These machines don't seem to be putting much stress on their PSUs, to say the least (I think they all have 600 watt PSUs or better, ie bigger). I don't know what to make of this, or if it matters much from an efficiency point of view. Some extra percent of 25 watts is not necessarily a large number, and I don't know if reducing the PSU from 600 watts to, say, 400 watts would improve things much.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Happy, an Asian Elephant Who Demonstrated That Her Species Might Be Self-Aware, Dies at 55 at the Bronx Zoo

      Then, in 2018, the animal-rights organization Nonhuman Rights Project took on Happy as a client, saying she should be granted habeas corpus, a fundamental legal right that a person cannot be illegally detained. The group sued the Bronx Zoo to force them to release Happy to an elephant sanctuary, citing her exceptional intelligence. After a winding legal battle, the case ended up before New York’s highest court in 2022.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Atlantic ☛ Democrats Can Do Better Than Graham Platner

    What’s most incredible is not that Platner would attempt to spin something that is obviously disqualifying. It’s that the leaders of his party are accepting that spin. One by one, Democratic politicians have lined up to campaign with Platner or post messages of support. The Pod Save America hosts, former officials in the Obama administration, have gone on a campaign to deride anyone who expresses concern over the tattoo.

  • The Georgia Recorder ☛ More megachurches want to be your alma mater

    The new schools are attracting big donors and growing their enrollment through a built-in base of believers — and some are pushing to access public funding.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Turkey’s Opposition Party Is Mistaking Defeat for Virtue

    After nearly a quarter century of AKP dominance, Turkey’s main opposition party, the CHP, remains unable to name its program, organize its social base, or break with the political culture that has made it so easy to defeat.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ The US never conducted its promised security review of DJI, so this US company just tore apart two drones, tried to hack them, and failed

    In December 2025, a law required DJI to pass a national security review by the deadline or face an automatic ban by the FCC. That deadline passed without such a security review even starting, effectively blocking not just DJI’s drones but cameras, gimbals, and accessories from receiving FCC approval to launch new products in the US. (DJI products launched before the ban are still available to purchase and use).

  • Mike Brock ☛ Put Something Back

    Jobs is one of the paradigmatic creators of our era in the popular telling — the founder, the visionary, the man who made things. The Apple mythology, which he himself helped construct, lives inside the great man frame. The genius. The maker. The one who reached down into the future and pulled the present forward by force of will.

    And he sat with his iPad in his hands one night and wrote a list of everything he had received. Not made. Not invented. Not earned by his own hand. Received.

  • Marty Day ☛ Last.fm Is An Independent Company Once More

    Now, they’re on their own again, and they make what they want. I, for one, would love to see more orgs breaking off of the conglomerates which bought them, and finding their own sustainable business, as opposed to being stuck as a cog in a much larger system.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Avi Loeb ☛ Junk Food in the Age of AI. In November 2025, I was stunned to find…

      This finding was worse than the misinformation and antisemitic hate spread a few months earlier in two YouTube videos created by an influencer, who suggested that my scientific practice as a Harvard professor is a fraud while at the same time labeling himself on his YouTube channel as “Professor Dave” — even though he never held a professorship, nor did he ever receive a PhD. Since his statements were “not even wrong” in the words of Wolfgang Pauli, they were of little concern to me. The irritation caused by this fake “Professor” felt as insignificant as a mosquito bite. However, the fake AI-generated videos, spreading misinformation in my voice and appearing in my image on the background of my office, felt more like a punch in the face. Both misinformation campaigns were motivated by the desire of their creators to make money out of my public fame.

      My pain from the AI punch was exacerbated when an 83 old ecologist, named Abby Rockefeller (daughter of David Rockefeller), came to my Harvard office to tell me that she was extremely impressed by the content of one of the AI-generated videos and so she shared it with her friend group, only to be told by one of them that it was fake. Following this emotional rollercoaster, Abby was deeply frustrated not only by the fact that she was fooled by AI, but also because she wanted to believe the misinformation conveyed in the video.

      Could AI trigger a misinformation instability in society by generating content that appeals to its consumers more than the truth? This would be akin to feeding the public with intellectual junk food that tastes good but is unhealthy to the mind.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Project Censored ☛ The Project Censored Newsletter—May 2026

    As Project Censored prepares its 2027 State of the Free Press yearbook—to be published by The Censored Press in December 2026—we’ve been busy reviewing this year’s Validated Independent News Stories, as identified and vetted by students and faculty participating in the Project’s Campus Affiliates Program. To preview some of the original independent news stories under consideration for inclusion in SFP27—including reports on the US government’s plan to produce AI-driven mass propaganda, ICE’s surveillance of school cameras, and Louisiana’s anti-homeless bill that would criminalize sleeping outside—check the Project’s Validated Independent News page.

    Project Censored judge Nolan Higdon and Media Freedom Foundation board member T.M. Scruggs will be speaking on a panel about “Preserving Press Freedom” at the Bay Area Book Festival, Saturday, May 30, at The Freight in Berkeley, CA. They will be tabling with Censored Press books, Project Censored teaching materials, and swag. The festival’s theme is “Writing the Future” and takes place May 29–31.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Congress's CIA Eyes AI Data Center Critics

    Altman blamed the attack on “incendiary” news media coverage, writing in his blog that “I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.” In other words, AI leaders like Altman see the problem as one of controlling what the public says.

    Congress, now in the intelligence business, is responding by focusing on the threat of the American public rather than the threat to the American public.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ If You Take the Weasel Job Then You Must Be the Weasel

    The most likely reason, though—one that often overshadows the other ones—is, “you are willing to carry out the dirty and distasteful things to come.” This is why weird hirings at the top always provoke dread among all the other employees. Maybe you are a hidden gem, sure, but Occam’s Razor says that you are probably just a hatchet man.

    Nick Bilton, a former tech writer for the New York Times and Vanity Fair and maker of a few documentaries, was just hired as the new head of 60 Minutes. Bilton has had a successful media career, certainly, but the nature of his success has never been “he is a super smart journalist,” nor has it ever been “he is experienced in television news.” I have never felt it necessary to follow his work closely, so I do not want to caricature him unfairly, but he has always been slotted in my mind in the category of “People who are successful because they put a lot of effort into having fashionable eyewear.” (This will take you far, if you’re in the right rooms.) Hiring Nick Bilton to lead the most storied and respective investigative program in television news history is kind of like hiring a NASCAR driver as CEO of General Motors. I mean, yes, you have some experience in the field, but…………….

  • Yle ☛ News in English bulletins to end on Yle radio

    According to Yle's Elävä Arkisto archives, a radio programme called "News in English" began broadcasting in the summer of 1969, and it has continued in one form or another ever since.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Mississippi Journalism and Education Group ☛ Editor’s Note | Systemic Journalism Makes Real Change

    Let’s break down systemic reporting, shall we? First, what it’s not. It’s not about taking down a bad politician. That might happen (keep reading), but it may well not. At many journalism outlets, editors wouldn’t green-light this labor-intensive story unless they have a clear idea of catching somebody doing something terrible, or steering a nefarious scheme, so they can bring their asses down, thank you very much, then take victory laps and win a few awards. That’s deciding the desired outcome before you do the reporting work. Yikes.

    This is a major reason that complicated system breakdowns get ignored; they’re not sexy enough for the traditional journalism field. Or, they might offend journalism bosses and board members, their universities (school-spirit journalism is a huge problem in Mississippi that I don’t suffer from), or their funders. Thus, problems that started from bad deeds or stupidity or broken systems morph and multiply.

  • Votebeat ☛ USPS mail ballot proposal could add new hurdles for voters and election officials

    The U.S. Postal Service proposed new rules Friday that detail in part how the Trump administration intends to carry out its contested mail-ballot executive order — revealing a plan that, if it survives legal challenges, would create new barriers for mail voting and new burdens for election officials.

    Under the proposal, all states would be required to send the federal government a list of all registered voters to which they are sending mail-in and absentee ballots in key federal elections. The proposal appears to give the postal service new power to block delivery of ballots to people that are not on the list and allow the agency to refuse delivery of ballots that do not meet new federal standards outlined in the proposed rule.

  • Votebeat ☛ Federal judge refuses to block Trump executive order on elections and mail ballots — for now - Votebeat

    What’s the dispute? Multiple nonprofit groups, Democratic Party committees, and states sued Trump, the U.S. Postal Service, and other federal agencies over the president’s March 31 executive order on elections, which give the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail ballots. Some of those cases were consolidated before Nichols in federal court in Washington, D.C., and he is the first federal judge to address the order.

    The plaintiffs argue the Constitution doesn’t give the president authority over elections.

  • TruthOut ☛ ICE and Prison Guards Retaliate Against Detainees and Protestors at Delaney Hall

    “It is very infuriating that we let ICE and GEO do whatever the hell they want. It’s infuriating to see humanity die inside when these ICE agents are teargassing indiscriminately against people who are exercising their constitutional rights,” Adorno said.

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ Starved, smashed and bloodied: The violence at ICE’s Delaney Hall

    Shadows of bodies in darkened windows and phone calls are the only signs of life inside, with visitation shut down last weekend. The supporters have been a combination of family of loved ones participating in the strike—like Gabriela Soto, wife of detainee Martin Soto—community organizers, elected officials and regular local folks who’ve seen this story play out in other towns and are committed to stopping it here.

    Now we’ve learned that ICE agents within Delaney have begun physically retaliating against the hunger strikers: Outside in clear view of cameras, they’ve taken to physically attacking protesters and journalists, pushing one into the wheel of a moving truck and smashing a camera. What’s emerged in Newark is a new front in the battle against Donald Trump’s vicious and deadly immigration policy, and a strong sign that the campaign to abolish and prosecute ICE is alive and well.

  • Simon Willison ☛ Notes on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI

    Pope Leo XIV chose the name Leo in honor of Pope Leo XIII, who is known for his 1891 Rerum novarum encyclical on “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor”.

    This story on Vatican News further clarifies the significance of that decision: [...]

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Who's getting wealthier in America?

    One concept I'm obsessed with is the general idea of whether things (art, money, anything) are getting worse, or if we're just nostalgic for when we were younger and simply didn't know as much as we do today. I also like throwing data at my opinions about the world and seeing if they hold up.

    Today, let's take a look at the Federal Reserve's data from 1989 through 2025 (which happens to be almost my entire lifetime) on wealth distribution in the US and see how my understanding of income inequality maps to some raw data. Their website has some good visualizations, but I downloaded a bunch of it as well and made my own charts to focus in on specific questions I had.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Techdirt ☛ Stop Killing Games Gets Its First American Legislative Effort Out Of Committee in California

    And here’s the meat of the bill’s language itself: [...]

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Someone actually got DOOM running on a Nikon camera – and it's now my favorite unofficial camera hack ever!

    I hate to be a killjoy, but it is worth noting that installing third-party software onto a camera could end up voiding the warranty, so I’d be more inclined to mod a cheap used buy as opposed to a $2,000 / £2,000 modern mirrorless camera.

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Libraries Fighting Back [Together] on Unfair Digital Book Pricing [story via PW]

    As I discussed in this post back in March, I have been actively involved in trying to get fair eBook pricing for libraries. I was in Springfield to jet rally support for IL House Bill 5236—The Digital Library Protection Act. From the ILA page Advocacy page about HB 5236: [...]

  • [Old] Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Becky Goes to Springfield [IL] to Support House Bill 5236-- The Digital Library Protection Act.

    As I mentioned on Bluesky, I spent yesterday going back and forth to Springfield IL to support House Bill 5236—The Digital Library Protection Act. From the ILA page Advocacy page about HB 5236: [...]

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • Spectator AU ☛ AI Ozzy Osbourne is a terrible idea

        However, it is hard to imagine that Osbourne himself, an unreconstructed old rocker if ever there was one, would have been thrilled at the idea of his being recreated in pristine digital form. Part of Osbourne’s quintessential Black Country charm was his rough and ready on-stage persona, where audiences enjoyed the idea that anything might go wrong somehow. (And, let’s be honest, it often did; the bat-munching incident was not the only time that Osbourne managed to offend public decency.) The idea of a gleaming, sanitized Ozzy is a depressing one both technologically and in terms of what it represents for the music industry. Whatever next? Serge Gainsbourg reinvented not as a louche boulevardier but as a bright-eyed family-friendly entertainer?

  • Copyrights

    • The Walrus ☛ You Don’t Listen to Music with a Calculator. But Numbers Are Dictating Taste

      To consider how we arrived at the point where sales are seen as a definitive measure of quality, we have to examine the past. Started in 1958, the Billboard Hot 100 chart evolved from several early incarnations to become the first reliable way to evaluate the success of music singles through retail sales and radio play. Sire Records founder and journalist Seymour Stein, discussing his part in creating the chart in an interview with Billboard.com, said the Hot 100 was originally designed as a tool for music industry insiders to quickly assess purchasing trends and to see which singles were most popular. In his words, the Billboard Hot 100 was “a guide to potential, as well as the current hits.”