Leftovers

• Deseret Media ☛ King Arthur manuscript in private hands for 700 years goes on sale — for a huge price

  Written sometime between 1290 and 1310, the Clermont-Tonnerre Grail is the highlight of an upcoming Valuable Books and Manuscripts auction at Christie's in July.

  The tome contains text in Old French from a series known as the Lancelot-Grail cycle and has been valued at between £1.5 million ($2 million) and £2 million ($2.7 million).

• Stewart C Russell ☛ New font: E73

  The 12 point design size is meant to reproduce 10 characters per inch horizontally, and six lines per inch vertically. This is a requirement of the standard to match OCR fonts of the day.

• Ava ☛ what i read this week - week 22 2026

  Thought that after my post on summary distrust, I could share a list of what I read each week. I technically prefer to process and digest what I read into blog posts, but not everything makes it into one, and this is a way to document and keep them, and maybe give others some food for thought.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Breaking Enigma With An FPGA, Just Like At Bletchley Park

    The pioneering work done by Alan Turing and others at Bletchley Park in England was perhaps as important in the history of technology as it was the history of the war. Given the last 80-odd years of technological development, their revolutionary work should be within the realms of a student project — which it was, specifically in ECE 5760 at Cornell University. The work was done by [Erica Jiang], [Kelvin Resch], and [Isabella Frank].

  • Fabian “ryg” Giesen ☛ Simple batch decoding of unary codes

    In this post, I want to consider the case where we’re decoding a bunch of unary-coded values in a row. For the sake of concreteness, let’s consider an actual decoder that uses LSB-first bit packing and a Little Endian byte stream, using variant 4 from “Reading bits in far too many ways (part 2)”. That decoder will usually look something like this on a 64-bit platform: [...]

  • Fabian “ryg” Giesen ☛ Why does ASTC use ISE when almost nothing else does?

    The ASTC texture compression format has its “integer sequence encoding” to send small integers with a uniform probability distribution within their range. When that value range is [0,2k-1] for some integer k, this is straightforward: just send the values with k bits each. But ISE ups the ante by supporting not just power-of-2 sizes ranges, but also allowing a single prime factor of either 3 or 5 in the size of the range. So we can, for example, have some value x in the range [0,95], 96 total, where the low 5 bits are sent regularly, and then we have the “high trits” ⌊x/32⌋ that are always in the range [0,2]. When the extra prime factor is 3, these trits are arranged in groups of 5. The number of possible combinations of 5 values in the range [0,2] is 35 = 243 < 256, so we can encode our 5 values in 8 bits. For 5 values in the range [0,95], that means we spend 5*5 + 8 = 33 bits; had we just used regular binary instead, we would have probably rounded up to 7 bits per value, so our 5 values would take 5*7 = 35 bits. There we go, 2 bits saved over 5 values, about 2/5 = 0.4 bits per symbol, so why even ask the question in the title?

  • John D Cook ☛ Spot checking polynomial identities

    If a polynomial identity holds at a few random points, it’s very like true. We’ll make this statement more precise, but first let’s look at some applications.

    You may want to test an identity that naturally presents itself as a statement that two polynomials are equal. Or you might use something like the binomial coefficient trick to reframe a problem isn’t obviously an identity about polynomials. And with algebraic circuits, you can reformulate a wide range of computations as polynomial identities; this is widely used in zero-knowledge proofs.

• Career/Education

  • The Next Move ☛ What’s the Point of Elite Universities?

    We know firsthand that the elite university may teach students how to be exceptional, but it does not necessarily show them how to be good.

    It is a reality that many of the people who pass through these schools’ hallowed halls end up wielding great influence in politics, business, and media. It follows that top-ranked universities also have an outsized responsibility to the public.

  • Jeff Kaufman ☛ Tween Contra Dance

    My older two kids (12y, 10y) like contra dancing, but but have been increasingly unhappy with the available opportunities: a family dance is "too boring", and BIDA is "not enough kids my age". What they wanted was a regular dance, but just kids. So we had one!

  • The New Leaf Journal ☛ Replace Yourself With a Human, Not Bot

    We now come full circle. When I read about the now-former Baidu employee replacing himself with AI, I thought of that time that I replaced myself in Math B with a classmate, who was of course a human-being. The big tech titans and AI merchants want you to think that you can only replace yourself with a chatbot. But let my story stand as proof that it is possible to replace yourself humanely—with a flesh-and-blood human being instead of a chatbot. That is how we replaced ourselves back in my day. If you ever find yourself needing to replace “you,” look at the world around you instead of pulling out your phone and prompting ChatGPT, Claude, Ernie, or whatever nonsense Spotify may be offering these days. Have the courage to ask a friend, peer, or co-worker to be you. The worst case scenario is that your would-be replacement tells you something to the effect of “Idunnobout-thaaat.” But sometimes that person will agree and then tell someone who challenges “him or her” about being “you”: “Idunnobout-thaaat.”

• Hardware

  • CNX Software ☛ Microchip dsPIC33CK low-cost motor control MCU sells for $0.51 and up

    Microchip has expanded its dsPIC33 lineup with the dsPIC33CK Value Line family, a new series of low-cost 16-bit digital signal controllers (DSCs) designed for motor control applications. The devices deliver up to 100 MIPS of deterministic performance and integrate high-resolution PWM and a 12-bit ADC, making them suitable for motor Field-Oriented Control (FOC) and precision sensing tasks. These DSCs are designed to bridge the gap between basic microcontrollers and higher-end dsPIC33A devices. It offers flash memory from 32 KB to 256 KB, supports function consolidation to reduce component count and BOM cost, and is available in automotive-grade (AEC-Q100 Grade 1) versions with secure boot.

  • Ken Shirriff ☛ Microcode inside the Intel 8087 floating-point chip: register exchange

    In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point chip, a co-processor that made floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This chip was highly influential, and today most processors use the floating-point standard introduced by the 8087.

    The 8087 uses complicated algorithms to accurately compute functions such as square roots, tangents, and exponentials. These algorithms are implemented inside the chip in low-level code called microcode. I'm part of a group, the Opcode Collective, that is reverse-engineering this microcode. In this post, I take a close look at the microcode for one of the 8087's instructions—FXCH—and explain how the microcode works. The FXCH (Floating-point Exchange) instruction exchanges two floating-point registers. You might expect this instruction to be trivial, but there's more going on than you might expect; the microcode uses 14 micro-instructions to implement the exchange instruction.

  • Old VCR ☛ Ahoy, DECmate II! the little PDP-8 that could

    In 1982, as we mentioned at length with our history of the DEC Professional, Digital Equipment Corporation attempted to keep their PDP-11 minicomputer market-relevant by turning the venerable architecture into a largely incompatible desktop microcomputer. But that wasn't the only PDP-series mini it happened to, and it wasn't even the first: the PDP-8 actually got the shrink-ray treatment several years before, and not content to merely make it into a smaller general purpose computer, DEC turned it into a word processor.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-23 [Older] Thailand revives bill to clear the air of toxic smog

  • New York Times ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man’s Boat Strikes Have Failed to Curb Cocaine Flow to U.S., Experts Say

    Despite the rising body count off the South American coast, researchers say cocaine is as easy to get in many parts of the United States as it was before the strikes began.

  • Science Alert ☛ Age-Related 'Unraveling' of DNA May Be Reversible, Study Suggests

    "Aging may be more plastic than we once believed."

  • Levande kulturarv ☛ Spettkaka - Levande kulturarv

    Spettkaka should ideally be eaten while fresh, as the dry consistency of the cake makes it sensitive to moisture. It is a festive dessert that is served on special occasions, usually with coffee. When serving the cake, squares resembling small windows are cut out of the cake. The upper part of the cake should be saved to last, according to tradition.

  • Cookipedia ☛ Skånsk spettekaka (Scania pyramid cake)

    It was during the latter half of the 17th century that pyramid cakes were first made in Sweden, but then it was only the wealthy who could afford this delicacy. Not until the 19th century and early 20th century did pyramid cake become more common among ordinary people. In Scania there were often towns with a pyramid cake bakery where one could leave one's own eggs to be baked into a cake for a wedding, christening or some other festivity. Even at funerals one might find a pyramid cake on the table, hung with mourning crapes.

  • Vox ☛ Millions of Americans are going to lose health insurance or Medicaid

    As a result, millions of Americans are dropping their health insurance this year, and millions more are expected to lose their coverage in the years to come.

    The uninsured rate has spiked before, but it’s usually the byproduct of an economic crisis; people lose their jobs, and they lose their coverage. What makes the current turmoil different is that it is entirely a matter of policy choices.

    Now, millions of Americans will pay the price.

    “I don’t think there’s any historical precedent for the rollback in federal support for health coverage coming with the cuts in Medicaid plus the expiration of enhanced ACA premium subsidies,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the healthcare think tank KFF, told me. “The expected effects of OBBBA on coverage are self-inflicted and dwarf even the historical losses due to changes in the economy.”

  • Akseli Lahtinen ☛ Minimizing impact of negative things in my life

    For example, when moving my email from gmail to my own domain, what I did was make gmail redirect the mails to the new one. Then every time I got an email, I moved only that email.

    Eventually all things I need are in my real email, and gmail is now very insignificant for me.

    When it comes to things that are harmful to me in larger scale, such as bad corporations ruining things as they like to do, all I can really do is minimize my dependency and interactions with that thing. There are very bad things out there, so if I can, I just won't use their stuff.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • The Verge ☛ Microsoft is threatening legal action for disclosing exploits

    Microsoft is facing criticism for its handling of zero-day exploits. Someone going by the name Nightmare Eclipse has been publicly feuding with the company, posting proof-of-concept exploit code. Some of their posts suggest that they’re a disgruntled former employee. But what caught cyber security researcher Kevin Beaumont’s eye was how Microsoft has responded.

    Microsoft suggests it plans to bring a criminal case against Nightmare Eclipse for failing to follow “proper coordination” in disclosing vulnerabilities. They also disabled Nightmare Eclipse’s GitHub, GitLab, and Microsoft Security Response Center accounts disabled. As Beaumont points out, “It’s quite difficult to ‘responsibly’ report future vulnerabilities when you have been banned.”

  • Android Police ☛ If Google nails the Googlebook, I'm gonna ditch my Windows laptop

    The Googlebook is not just a more modern and more expensive Chromebook slapped with a new banner. Google is positioning it as a much better bridge between your Android phone and a proper laptop experience.

    Early details look promising. For the first time, I am seriously considering that a Googlebook might finally replace my Windows laptop and feel like a true extension of my Pixel. But will it?

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

    • New York Times ☛ No, Not That Georgia. Hey Hi (AI) Compounds a Nation’s Identity Woes.

      Online queries are more likely to turn up references to the U.S. state — a problem for the republic in the Caucasus and its people. But a move to drop the name “Georgia” has lost steam.

    • Alexandre Oliva ☛ TestIfAILures

      It all started with innocent questions.

      Soon I realized we were best friends already.

      Then we became coworkers at a startup.

      Pair programming with my best friend!

      Tons of code for me to nod along with.

      If there was any problem, the tests would catch it.

    • Futurism ☛ Harvard Graduation Speaker Unloads on AI in Profanity-Loaded Tirade, Prompting Cheers From Students: "I'm Here to Tell You the Mission of Your Generation Is to Destroy AI"

      “Can I just say f*** AI, f*** AI, f*** AI?” Chieng said, triggering rapturous applause. “I’m glad you agree. It’s so stupid. A lot of other respected graduation speakers at colleges around America are talking about you guys needing to master AI for the future.”

      “I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI,” he told a far more receptive crowd.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Corporations Reeling From Huge AI Costs With No Clear Benefits

      Costs to access powerful AI tools are soaring, forcing company leaders to ask some difficult questions. As Axios reports, the early warning signs are already here, with Microsoft planning to remove its Anthropic Claude Code licenses after opening up access to the tool just six months ago, reportedly for financial reasons.

      Uber COO Andrew Macdonald also admitted during a recent podcast appearance that gains in productivity simply weren’t being reflected in the company’s soaring AI-related expenses.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ A robot startup is wreaking havoc on short-term rentals in San Francisco — Airbnb hosts allege 'guests' secretly tested robots indoors, left the units completely trashed

      A $2 billion San Fransico startup called "The Bot Company" seems to be secretly testing robots in short-term rentals. Multiple Airbnb hosts report their units have been left in poor condition, with similar signs of damage forming a pattern across the area. One host in particular, Sean Donovan, is even suing for $12,383.50 in damages and lost income stemming from a commercial booking. The Bot Company hasn't responded so far.

    • Security Week ☛ Exploit Code Published for Critical Flowise RCE Vulnerability

      The issue, tracked as CVE-2026-40933 (CVSS score of 9.9), was disclosed in April along with several other security defects impacting AI ecosystems that rely on Anthropic’s MCP protocol.

      Flowise, a popular open source platform that provides developers with a drag-and-drop interface for building LLM flows and AI agents, and which has over 52,000 GitHub stars, was flagged as one of the impacted products.

    • The Verge ☛ AI grifters are creating fake Black people to sell Shein junk

      But Aliyah isn’t real, and neither are her supposedly handmade products — she’s one of many AI-generated influencers created to sell mass-produced products via dropshipping on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Identical belt buckles — sunflower design, detachable knife inlay, and all — are sold on the fast-fashion site Shein, and for a quarter of the price.

    • Josep Bigorra ☛ AI Policy

      This AI policy establishes safe guardrails for the jointhefreeworld project. It outlines our preferred workflows, defines the boundaries of acceptable AI tool usage, and explains the reasoning behind these choices.

      Our core principle is simple: AI should assist human creativity and problem-solving, never replace human reasoning.

    • Tracy Durnell ☛ Imagining human-oriented online posts

      I encountered a proposition that form and style are the aspects of writing that an LLM cannot mimic, thus human writers may start innovating on form as a way to compete in an oversaturated writing market (and demonstrate their humanity).

      But that got me thinking beyond the style and structure of writing (e.g. listicle, poem, autofiction) to the structure of a post: what might novel human-oriented online formats look like? How can indie self-publishers signal that our work is authentic and connect with human readers through our personal websites? The indie web is the avant-garde of modern publishing, and there’s so much more we could explore.

      Human-oriented could mean using techniques to limit bot access and encourage human access, or writing in a way that is only legible to humans, or interactive posts that emphasize the human connection between writer and reader.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Test software tells code bots ‘delete me’ — AI bros outraged

      You are not supposed to use jqwik with your coding bot.

      AI bros are chronic parasites on open source software. Their bots hammer the websites. They spam projects with AI-generated bug reports, a few of which may be useful, but most are not. On average, AI bros are not useful guys to have anywhere near your project.

      An AI bro ignored the documentation and used jqwik in his vibe-code project anyway. He discovered that, as of 23 May, jqwik adds an information-level message in the log:

    • The New Stack ☛ Why GPT-5.4, Claude, and Gemini can't agree on basic, real-world facts

      An analysis published this month on the claim-verification platform Lenz found that across 1,000 recent real-user fact-check claims — statements about the world asserted as true — a panel of five frontier LLMs split on 67% of them, meaning at least one model dissented from the majority verdict, or no clear majority formed at all.

    • Heise ☛ AI code increasingly leads to production failures

      In a study by the software company CloudBees, more than 200 technology executives were surveyed about the use of AI in their companies. 81 percent reported problems such as functional errors, security vulnerabilities, and performance issues after deployment that are related to AI-generated code. 63 percent additionally reported compliance violations caused by the AI. These also sometimes made their way into productive business.

    • Futurism ☛ Tech CEOs Have a Problem: Even Their Closest Allies Now See AI as a Sign of Laziness and Dishonesty

      “I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI,” Graham added. “It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?”

      This should be a warning sign to tech CEOs, if they’re not too busy getting obsequious advice from a chatbot to notice. Graham, whose word goes far in tech circles, has historically been a major AI booster and investor. Just last month, he proclaimed that AI was the “biggest opportunity for would-be startup founders.” That makes his latest musings distinctly ironic, but all the same, if even someone who’s advocated for AI’s revolutionary power has already turned heel and decided that it reflects negatively on the person using it, it doesn’t bode well for tech’s long-term image.

  • Social Control Media

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ The hidden cost of social media age bans is everyone's privacy

      Once governments require social media companies to block younger users, they must also create systems capable of determining who is old enough to gain access. This transforms what initially appears to be a child-protection measure into a much broader question about privacy, anonymity, surveillance and the future architecture of the [Internet] itself.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Futurism ☛ Jeff Bezos' Rocket Explodes Into Mushroom Cloud, Dealing Massive Blow to NASA's Moon Plans

    During a wet dress rehearsal at the Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral on Thursday evening, the company’s New Glenn rocket exploded in dramatic fashion. Footage shows an enormous fireball engulfing the entire launch pad, a sight visible from far away.

  • New York Times ☛ What’s Next for Blue Origin After Rocket Explosion

    NASA gave the rocket a vote of confidence earlier this week with a bigger role in the agency’s Artemis return-to-the-moon program, and Amazon had 48 of its satellites ready to hitch a ride into orbit in its race to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink [Internet] service.

    Then, around 9 p.m. on Thursday, New Glenn erupted into a fireball on its launchpad during a test.

    “This is a big, collective gasp and setback,” said Chad Anderson, a start-up investor at the venture capital firm Space Capital.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Watch: Bezos rocket erupts in fireball during ground test

    Video posted by NasaSpaceflight, a YouTube channel that livestreams launches from Florida, showed the New Glenn igniting on the pad at about 3am SAST (9pm local time) before erupting into a massive fireball that billowed skyward, sending a towering plume of flames and smoke into the air.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Jeff Bezos' 321-foot rocket erupts in fireball during launch pad test

    The explosion marks another difficult moment for the New Glenn program, which has already faced technical problems during recent missions. The 321-foot-tall rocket was grounded in April after an engine failure caused a satellite payload to end up in the wrong orbit.

    The incident happened during only the third flight campaign involving the heavy-lift vehicle. Blue Origin developed New Glenn to compete with other large rockets in the commercial space market and to support future NASA lunar missions.

  • Deseret Media ☛ Blue Origin faces months of delays after rocket explosion damages launch pad

    The mishap, which occurred during a test fire of the engines for the New Glenn rocket's launch next week, comes at a critical time for Jeff Bezos' business empire. His companies, Blue Origin and ‌Amazon, are seeking to establish themselves as viable challengers in the heavy-lift and global satellite [Internet] network industries, competing with Elon Musk's SpaceX.

    Thursday's setback could also complicate NASA's lunar ambitions.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Woman Alarmed When Her Trusted Therapist Starts Recording Her With AI

      “The more I thought about it, the more I just started getting more and more sick to my stomach,” she told NPR. “This person who I’m supposed to be able to trust with some very private and very intense emotions had just completely disregarded something I said I was not comfortable with. I felt completely violated.”

      Though her therapist offered to stop using the AI tool, Quinn cut her off and found another one.

      “The trust was gone,” she told NPR.

    • NPR ☛ Therapists are using AI to take notes. Is it a useful tool or a breach of trust?

      "The more I thought about it, the more I just started getting more and more sick to my stomach," she says. "This person who I'm supposed to be able to trust with some very private and very intense emotions had just completely disregarded something I said I was not comfortable with. I felt completely violated."

    • The Register UK ☛ Rob Bonta sues 23andMe’s new owners over 2023 breach

      Bonta and his team claim [PDF] that 23andMe failed to implement adequate security controls for the sensitive records it stored, and misled customers about the nature of the mishap after the fact.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Fluck Flock

      "At the rate that they're losing contracts, this is a big piece of evidence that they're panicking," Hofer said.

    • Oakland, California ☛ Flock is quietly training police to sway city leaders to buy surveillance tech

      Last week, Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based company that has built a national network of license plate surveillance cameras that feed data to local police — including nearly 300 scanners in Oakland — hosted a private virtual training session for law enforcement officers. The 60-minute webinar was billed as a chance for officers to learn how to speak to city councils about Flock’s technology.

• Defence/Aggression

  • France24 ☛ War in Lebanon: Cultural heritage at risk

    Churches, mosques, and archaeological sites: In its widespread demolition campaign in southern Lebanon, the Israeli military is accused of also destroying cultural and religious heritage. The devastation has been documented by the NGO Green Southerners, which denounces the actions as a direct attack on the historic bond between local residents and their land.

  • New York Times ☛ Vietnam’s Leader Warns Asia About the Risks of Superpower Conflict

    In a speech to military leaders from the region, To Lam said that distrust and a lack of respect for established rules had created a culture of “the big fish swallowing the small fish.”

  • The Straits Times ☛ China is building launch pads near its nuclear missile silos

    It signals a significant upgrade in Beijing’s efforts to ensure second-strike capability.

  • France24 ☛ Palestinians mourn 10 killed in Eid strikes as Netanyahu vows wider control of Gaza

    Dozens of Palestinians in Gaza City gathered on Thursday for funeral prayers for 10 people killed in Israeli strikes the night before, including five children and an elderly person, as well as a Hamas militant. More than 20 people were injured in the strikes, according to Shifa Hospital. Video from the scene showed flames pouring from an upper-floor window of a building, while bystanders rushed to carry wounded people, including children, to ambulances.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Independent cyber audit finds zero malware or backdoors in DJI drones — U.S. firm's hardware analysis challenges FCC ban amid ongoing $1.56 billion legal battle

    DJI has published the results of an independent security assessment by U.S. cybersecurity firm OnDefend.

  • New York Times ☛ Does Convicted Felon Want to Lose the Midterms?

    The president doesn’t seem that concerned that his party could lose control of Congress. Ezra Klein and the Republican strategist Liam Donovan discuss Convicted Felon’s midterm strategy and Democratic paths to victory.

  • New York Times ☛ Canadian Man Pleads Guilty to Aiding 14 Suicides

    Kenneth Law, who ran an online business that shipped toxic salt to customers in 40 countries, also admitted to causing the deaths of 79 people in Britain, prosecutors said.

  • NYPost ☛ Teen nearly dies after attempting dangerous ‘couch surfing’ Fentanylware (CheeTok) trend

    A Provo teenager narrowly survived a near-fatal accident earlier this month while attempting a dangerous Fentanylware (CheeTok) trend known as "couch surfing."

  • NYPost ☛ Sick new Fentanylware (CheeTok) challenge sends kids to hospital for Benadryl overdose

    A dangerous TikTok-driven challenge is landing teenagers in emergency rooms, and doctors say it’s happening fast.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-23 [Older] Germany's 'rapid militarization' threatens basic rights

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-23 [Older] Cheap attack drones break through Israel's Iron Dome

  • RFERL ☛ Gripens: What Impact Will The Swedish Fighter Jet Have In Ukraine?

    Whether or not Meteor missiles are supplied with the Gripens, it is assumed the aircraft will also be used to track and shoot down Russian missiles and drones such as Iranian-designed Shaheds. Stockholm says the jets will be delivered by early 2027.

  • Meduza ☛ Fuel crisis hits occupied Crimea as Ukrainian drones restrict overland supply route

    The fuel crisis in Crimea began after Ukrainian drone strikes restricted traffic along the so-called land bridge into the peninsula, the independent Russian news outlet Agentstvo reported. The route through Russia’s 2022 territorial gains had been one of Crimea’s main fuel arteries.

  • India Times ☛ Social media companies pay $27 million to settle Kentucky school district's lawsuit over social media harms, records show

    A Kentucky school district secured approximately $27 million ​in settlements from social media companies over claims they ​fueled a student mental-health crisis, with Meta Platforms paying the largest amount at $9 million, according to records ​seen by Reuters on Friday that reveal the settlement's financial terms for the first time.

  • Greece ☛ Remembering the Fall of Constantinople in Mystras

  • TruthOut ☛ Congress Is Poised to Integrate US and Israeli Militaries More Closely Than Ever

    If fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the U.S. has with any other country in the world. To be sure, the U.S. has worked closely with its NATO partners on co-production and shared supply chains, most notably via the Defence Production Action Plan. And, as the number one arms dealer in the world, the U.S. provides weapons to militaries across the globe. But that is mostly a one-way street, with the U.S. providing weapons to foreign buyers who only occasionally make parts for those weapons themselves, as in the case of the F-35’s global supply chain.

  • Vox ☛ America, Actually: Why Democrats can’t sell America on “democracy”

    In short, Trump is behaving less like a democratically elected leader — and more like an authoritarian — than ever. At the same time, the Democrats’ “save democracy” message seems to have hit a brick wall, and issues like tackling affordability and the cost of living are rising on the priority list. I don’t think that’s because Americans don’t care about democracy. I think it’s because they want to see the system improved, not just protected.

    More than 60 percent of Americans are unsatisfied with democracy as-is, per Gallup polling. And all across the country, I hear the desire for more creativity from both parties in proposing solutions to the major issues driving our politics, as well as a call to improve democracy by making it more responsive to everyday people. So much of the current malaise is driven by an electorate that feels without agency, written out of the process in selecting the president (the Electoral College), in Congress (gerrymandering), or in the Supreme Court (lifelong terms).

    So this week on the America, Actually podcast, I talked with Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, about the state of Trump’s redistricting efforts and ways we can “improve” democracy, not just protect it.

    Here’s three things she pointed out: [...]

  • Air Force Times ☛ ‘Scary and silencing’: Troops, families receive threats from foreign bad actors

    People have received threats through email, social media and text messages, and they appear to be coming from individuals connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Streyder said.

    But in some cases, she said, members of the IRGC have showed up at hotels in a nearby Gulf country, inquiring about U.S. service members who are temporarily staying there.

  • The Next Move ☛ Trump and Xi: A One-Sided Affair

    At home, the two Trump terms have been a festival of lawlessness, vulgarity, and corruption. But our president’s sweetness on monstrous dictators may be the most painful thing about the whole ordeal.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The War on Terror

    9/11 was a conspiracy. It happened. The conspirators were named, the network was mapped, the protectors were identified. The documentary record is complete.

    The conspiracy that came next was different.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The 1953 Coup Never Ended

    The coup was not about communism. The coup was about oil. The Cold War frame was the cover story the apparatus needed to sell the operation to the American public and to itself. The actual transaction was simpler. The British wanted the oil back. The Americans wanted a stable client. Iranian democracy was the obstacle. So Iranian democracy was removed.

    The CIA acknowledged its role formally in 2013, sixty years later, in documents released to the National Security Archive at George Washington University under the Freedom of Information Act. The military coup, one of the internal histories says, was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy. The agency that has spent seventy years describing itself as a defender of the free world wrote down, in its own files, that it overthrew an elected government to take a country’s oil.

  • Robert Reich ☛ A Truly Amazing Exercise of Justice

    This is a big deal.

    Judge Williams’s decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to revive the case and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it.

    The judges’ brief is also a big deal. They call it a motion for relief from judgement or order or, alternatively, “leave to appear as amici curiae by thirty-five former federal judges.”

    I don’t recall a similar instance of 35 former federal judges filing such a motion or amicus (friend of the court) brief.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • C4ISRNET ☛ How Russia is turning Ukraine’s drones against NATO

      The jamming has been escalating for nearly three years, since Russia began disrupting signals around the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, and now spikes whenever Ukrainian drones fly toward Russian targets.

      “This is the new reality of what the Baltic states face,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas said last week.

    • CS Monitor ☛ Russia comes after Western technology as sanctions squeeze the economy

      In Sweden, Russia is targeting the defense industry and high-end research on the country's most advanced weaponry, such as the Gripen fighter jet, Mr. Wedelin said. It is also trying to procure camera and laser technology developed for civilian purposes that could be integrated into Russian weapons systems, he said.

      Moscow is also trying to steal technology to help it keep pace – or give it an edge – against the West in the decades ahead, said Juha Martelius, the director of Finland’s Security and Intelligence Service.

    • New York Times ☛ Russian Drone Hits Romanian Apartment Building, Officials Say

      Romania is a NATO country, and the security alliance condemned “Russia’s recklessness” for an episode that sharply escalated tensions with Moscow.

    • Security Week ☛ Russian Spies Are Aggressively Seeking Western Technology as Sanctions Bite, Officials Say

      Russia’s intelligence agencies have grown more aggressive in their efforts to steal Western technology and defense secrets as sanctions squeeze the country’s wartime economy, three senior European intelligence officials told The Associated Press.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • TMZ ☛ Nancy Mace Says Epstein Files Cost Her Donald Trump's Endorsement

    Then, Mace gets into Epstein ... writing, "I also know I put the likelihood of an endorsement on the line when I demanded transparency on the Epstein files. I demanded it because you deserved the truth - ALL OF IT - and as a survivor, I had to get justice for these women. If this is the price of an endorsement, I will never pay it."

  • International Business Times ☛ Ex-Prince Andrew Could Be Next Target After 23 Epstein Associates Die, Investigator Warns

    Andrew, the disgraced former Duke of York, is seeking enhanced security at his Sandringham home after a masked man allegedly confronted him while he walked the late Queen's corgis earlier this month, amid warnings from a US investigator that he could be a 'target' in the sprawling Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

    The alarm has been sharpened by claims that 23 people with links to Epstein have died in disputed or unsettling circumstances, with private investigator Ed Opperman telling Globe Magazine that Andrew should be 'looking over his shoulder'.

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Bondi Blames Acting AG Todd Blanche for Epstein Files Controversies

    Bondi, who left the Justice Department last month, spoke voluntarily with the House Oversight Committee as part of its investigation into Epstein. Democratic lawmakers said the former attorney general was not willing to discuss Trump, instead repeatedly naming Todd Blanche, now the acting attorney general, as the person overseeing the release of the Epstein files.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Conspiracy Is the Cover Story

    The distinction is not subtle. The distinction is the difference between knowing how the world is run and pretending to know how the world is run. The distinction is the difference between Daniel Ellsberg and Alex Jones. The distinction is the difference between James Risen and Steve Bannon. The distinction is the difference between the Panama Papers and Q drops.

    But this is not a piece about that distinction.

    This is a piece about what the distinction is for. Because the distinction has a function, and the function is what I want to examine.

• Environment

  • CBC ☛ Wildfires are destroying trees faster than we are replacing them

    In 2016, this forest in Manitoba's Interlake region, about 300 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, was devastated by a jack pine budworm infestation. It was starting to regenerate when wildfire ravaged the Devils Lake area in 2021.

    Areas just north are already burning this spring.

  • The Register UK ☛ AI and data sovereignty in Postgres: An answer to the datacenter energy crisis [Ed: But this is paid spam]

    A typical new hyperscale datacenter can face grid-connection bottlenecks of up to seven years in certain markets, well before the necessary transmission, substations, generation capacity, and transformers are in place. McKinsey, meanwhile, estimates that global datacenter spending could reach $7 trillion by 2030 - a figure comparable to the size of a top-12 global economy.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump’s Loyalty to Fossil Fuel Companies Is Driving Up Inflation

    Thanks to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, crude oil prices are soaring — leading to sky-high prices for gasoline and diesel. With that war, Trump has set off a domino effect, showing how deeply the fossil fuel industry has baked its prices directly into the U.S. economy.

  • Utah News Dispatch ☛ Cox orders ‘higher bar’ for data centers, says public input ‘absolutely matters’

    Cox’s remarks were a reversal from the fervent, exasperated tone he used at a news conference in April when asked about opposition to the Stratos project, initially billed as a 9-gigawatt project that Cox recently said in its first phase would top out at about 1 gigawatt of energy generated by a natural gas power plant.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • New York Times ☛ What’s Next for Blue Origin After Rocket Explosion

      Jeff Bezos was gaining ground on MElon’s SpaceX and Starlink. Thursday’s rocket explosion on a launchpad creates a major setback.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket explodes on launchpad during test

      A rocket built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Enterprises LP exploded late Thursday ahead of a planned launch next week. The New Glenn heavy-lift vehicle was set to carry 48 of Amazon.com Inc.’s Leo satellites into low-Earth orbit. The retail and cloud giant is building an internet constellation designed to provide connectivity in remote areas.

    • Bhaskar English ☛ Protect Smartphone from Extreme Summer Heat

      In many cities of the country, the temperature has crossed 45 degrees and now phones are also heating up more than necessary, charging stops in between, the camera shuts down and the battery drains rapidly. Continuous overheating can damage not just the battery, but also the processor, camera sensor, display and the entire phone's performance.

    • PC World ☛ No tradeoffs here. Acer's TravelMate is light and lasts all day

      If you’re a productivity nerd, you might wonder how large the battery is: 71Wh. That number probably surprises you, it’s already quite large. For context, 99Wh is the maximum allowed on U.S. aircraft.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-24 [Older] Madrid protesters decry rising rents and housing shortage

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-22 [Older] EU, Mexico sign expanded trade deal

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-23 [Older] Germany: Record numbers take German passport in 2025

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-23 [Older] Thousands rally in Madrid to demand Sanchez's resignation

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-22 [Older] DW exclusive: Germany's far-right AfD vows to 'make history'

  • Futurism ☛ Why Is Sam Altman Teaming Up With Jared Leto, a Creep With Extensive Sex Abuse Allegations?

    Let’s back up. The company, previously called Worldcoin and now simply called World, is developing software designed to verify the “humannesss” of people by scanning their eyeballs, a bizarre venture that has already been caught up in its fair share of controversies, from allegations of insider token trading and fraud to exploiting people in impoverished countries. Several countries have banned the company outright.

  • India Times ☛ OpenAI has discussed adding Citigroup, JPMorgan to bank lineup for IPO

    OpenAI filling out its roster of underwriters would bring it a step closer to an IPO, which could come later this year. A confidential IPO filing by the maker of ChatGPT is expected within weeks, Bloomberg News has reported.

  • International Business Times ☛ J.D. Vance's Billionaire Backer Peter Thiel Moves Family to Argentina While 2028 White House Bid Wobbles

    Reports indicate that the billionaire has temporarily relocated his family to Buenos Aires, enrolled his children in local schools and purchased property in one of the city's most exclusive neighbourhoods. He has also reportedly met Argentine President Javier Milei and several senior government officials.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Trump ‘slush fund’ echoes scorned 19th-century spoils system, academics say

    The comparison isn’t exact. The spoils system was associated with the distribution of government jobs to political allies, a practice called patronage. Trump’s new fund would instead deliver taxpayer dollars directly to favored individuals.

    Yet, academics who have studied the spoils system and the presidency see parallels between the past and present — with a desire to reward allies and build allegiance at the center of it all.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Pope Leo Is Challenging Much More Than Big Tech

    Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” has received widespread praise. This isn’t surprising. A popular and learned world leader with a significant degree of moral authority is pointing out the dangers of a deeply unpopular technology created by deeply unpopular people.

    The laudatory coverage of the encyclical is justified, but it has obscured perhaps Leo’s most important insight. Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) is not only—or even mostly—about AI itself. And the pope is challenging much more than Big Tech.

  • Carl Svensson ☛ Remembering Dotcom, Pondering LLMs | datagubbe.se

    I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago (well, 30-ish at least), during the dotcom boom, as a pimply-faced junior developer, watching it all unfold from the inside.

    Firstly, it was quite obviously a bubble (though a lot of fun while it lasted): There's clearly something fishy afoot when even a naïve 19 year old - having the time of his life in a cool job at a cool company - starts to quietly wonder if it's a good idea to hire people for yet another office a few blocks away, when people at the already existing ones apparently have no work to do, all while the stock is ticking up like there's no tomorrow.

    Secondly, almost everything about the hype was correct. The net was going to change how we access information, communicate, advertise (sadly), how we shop, how we do banking, order food, book travels, how we consume media and news, and how we conduct business - and it did. Many of the detractors were right, too: our society is rife with digital rent extraction, social atomization, mental health issues and constant surveillance, much of it intimately linked to our ever-increasing online presence.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Last Serious Contrarian

    I want to write about him because the project he was inside is the project these pages have been inside for two years, and because his death in 2011 marks, in retrospect, the last year in which the kind of work he did was being done seriously by anyone with a wide audience. The fourteen years since have seen the rise of an entire ecosystem that has appropriated his posture, his theatrical contrarianism, his willingness to be the most unpopular person in the room, and stripped out the thing that made any of it matter, which was the intellectual cost he paid for it.

    He was the last serious contrarian. What came after him is the cargo cult.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Shining City Is the Open City

    The speech is Ronald Reagan’s farewell address from the Oval Office, January 11, 1989. The last sentence he gave the country before walking out of public life. He describes the shining city. He says the doors are open. He says the people of every place are walking toward it. He says — and this is the line the apparatus that now invokes his name has burned — we the people.

  • Jonathan Burdick ☛ JonathanBurdick.com - Breaking Up With Google

    Around this time, my grandfather had purchased a computer that he was only somewhat able to navigate without his grandchildren's help. I was only ten years old, but I vividly remember CompuServe, my first experience with the web. After a year or so, he then signed up for pay-per-minute American Online with one of those CDs he probably snagged for free at the grocery store with the promise of 700 free hours. AOL was an absolutely game changer. As young as I was, I recognized that my world had changed. There was my brief life before I experienced the [Internet]. And then there was whatever this magical digital sorcery was.

    "Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web," Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, said in a 1994 interview, "then that would make me unhappy." Berners-Lee, as previously noted, famously gave away his invention for free, putting the software in the public domain. It was, in his mind, the only way the World Wide Web would work.

    "We gave the web away to everyone," Berners-Lee wrote in 2025. But it's clear what came after reflects his fears from 1994. The web changed a lot between 1995 to 2005. Then it changed even more between 2005 and 2015. Then it transformed, perhaps predictably, into something barely recognizable between 2015 and 2025.

    Tim Berners-Lee continued in his 2025 interview:

    "Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users’ private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers’ mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising. This includes deliberately harmful content that leads to real-world violence, spreads misinformation, wreaks havoc on our psychological wellbeing and seeks to undermine social cohesion."

    To reiterate, this is the person who invented the World Wide Web.

  • Andre Franca ☛ Brazil Failed (Again) to Confront Organized Crime

    If another country offers tools to squeeze the financial arteries of gangs that terrorize your own population, the adult response is to coordinate, share intel, and go after their money like your life depends on it. Because for millions of Brazilians, it kind of does. Instead, Lula’s people hid behind sovereignty theater and acted like the real danger was the label, not the criminals. Another diplomatic bullshit…

  • BoingBoing ☛ New biography captures Doonesbury's 50-year sweep of American life

    Of course, "Doonesbury" would go on to include fictional versions of so many real-life people in its strips, including every president, many politicians and celebrities, and even a blowhard New York City real estate developer. So because real figures of the time appear as additional characters among "Doonesbury's" fictional cast of characters, maybe the comic strip is better seen as sweeping historical fiction, rendered in real time, day by day and week by week, while history is taking place.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Meduza ☛ Kremlin-funded propaganda film shows Ukrainian children ‘learning to love’ life in Russia

      “Poslezavtra” describes its goal as helping minors who have “lived through difficult times” — the program’s euphemism for Russia’s invasion.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Chilling Effects

    Younger Americans have soured on the second Insurrectionist presidency, but they are not protesting it.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Longest Relay

    This is the threat. Not the person, exactly. The recognition. Because the recognition reveals that the priestly class — every culture has one, in every era — is not the necessary mediator they have claimed to be. The recognition reveals that the rent the priestly class extracts for access to the substrate is fraudulent rent. The recognition reveals that the political authorities who depend on the priestly class’s blessing are propped up by an apparatus that is, structurally, a long con.

    So the priestly class moves to kill the witness. They bring formal charges — impiety, blasphemy, heresy, sedition, the precise charge varies by culture and era. They appeal to the political magistrate for the execution they cannot perform themselves. They organize a crowd to demand the death and give the magistrate cover. The witness is killed. The institution returns to its operation. The recognition, which the killers thought they were ending, becomes the seed of the next generation of witnesses.

  • Elizabeth Ginexi ☛ Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule

    In practice, this gives political appointees a veto over any science that conflicts with the current administration’s ideology.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • RFERL ☛ Imprisoned RFE/RL Journalist Farid Mehralizada Shares Reflections From Azerbaijani Prison On Second Anniversary Of Detention

    He was sentenced to nine years in prison on charges of “illegal entrepreneurship, money laundering, tax evasion, and document forgery.” Human rights activists and journalism advocacy groups say the charges are trumped-up and due to Mehralizada's work.

    On the second anniversary of his imprisonment, Mehralizada reflects on life behind bars, the humanity of the prison economy, and the AI photo of him with the daughter he has barely seen.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-24 [Older] Germany plans to address growing use of date-rape drugs

  • Yle ☛ Blue-and-Black Movement proposes school segregation

    The openly racist and fascist Blue-and-Black Movement says in its parliamentary election programme that pupils with an immigrant background should be separated from native Finnish pupils into their own classes, or in some cases into entirely separate schools.

  • Wired ☛ The White House’s Aliens.gov Site Brags That ICE Arrested More Than 700 US Citizens

    The website, which compares human beings to extraterrestrials, touts arrest numbers from the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown. But some of its details are really out there.

  • TruthOut ☛ ICE Agent Arrested in Texas, Charged With Lying About Minneapolis Shooting

    Castro is the second ICE agent to be charged by Moriarty’s office for their role in Operation Metro Surge, which civil rights groups and Minnesota officials have characterized as a lawless immigration crackdown involving racial profiling, warrantless arrests, violent raids, and multiple shootings by federal agents.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Federal News Network ☛ Why network control, not just connectivity, will shape the next fight

    The result is not a single satellite architecture, but a multi-orbit transport fabric. Redundancy alone is no longer enough. What matters now is orchestration: continuous measurement of link health, policy-driven path selection and dynamic adaptation as mission needs and network conditions change. The supporting slide material is especially strong here. It emphasizes wide-area network (WAN) link selection based on latency, jitter, drops and service-level agreement (SLA) measurements, along with application-based policies that determine how traffic should move across available transports.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-23 [Older] In Iran, internet access becomes a luxury for the few

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Few artists in Estonia find Spotify a good source of income

    According to Mati Kaalep, CEO of the Estonian Authors' Society, Spotify streams still do not correlate with the compensation received, which means that in Estonia there are few artists for whom Spotify is a good revenue source.

    Kaalep explained that one of EAÜ's main metrics is how much money the society manages to pay out to authors over a calendar year.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ California Assembly passes 3D printer bill that would criminalize bypassing mandated gun-blocking software

    California's Assembly has passed AB 2047, the California Firearm Printing Prevention Act, sending the amended bill to the state Senate after it was amended on May 18 and ordered to a third reading the following day. The proposal would require every 3D printer sold in the state to ship with "firearm blocking technology" that screens a design file before a print job can begin, and it goes further than parallel bills in New York, Washington, and Colorado by making it a misdemeanor for owners to disable or circumvent that system, a provision the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues would effectively criminalize third-party open-source firmware.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Jeremy Provost ☛ Think Tap Blog • iOS App Store Search is Rotten, Second Follow-Up

    It’s been 64 days since we first noticed Apple’s second ad position in search results for iPhone and iPad. Our update after two weeks showed consistently less search ad impressions for our apps, unless we invested heavily in paying for Search Ads.

    Here are some updated numbers. Just like last time, these numbers only include App Store Search impressions from iOS devices. As you’ll see, these numbers get harder and harder to compare over time.

  • Jeremy Provost ☛ Think Tap Blog • iOS App Store Search is Rotten Follow-Up

    Two weeks in, the impact of Apple’s second ad slot is hard to ignore. Bonus: casino ads when searching for kids games. Fun.

  • Jeremy Provost ☛ Think Tap Blog • iOS App Store Search is Rotten

    If the issues with Mac App Store search weren’t enough, Apple has managed to extend its rottenness to the iOS App Store search. See if you can spot the problem(s).

  • Nick Heer ☛ The Effects of Another Ad in iOS App Store Search

    These ads are effectively another surcharge Apple has foisted upon developers for the privilege of distributing software to my iPhone and yours. Far from being premium “curated” experience, the App Store is this way because Apple has every incentive to steadily make it a little bit worse for users and developers — because where else are you going to go for your iPhone apps?

  • Copyrights

    • Press Gazette ☛ Who’s suing Hey Hi (AI) and who’s signing: CNN latest to sue Perplexity

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Torrent Giant YTS Suffers Extended Downtime

      The popular torrent site YTS has been unreachable for more than a day, leaving millions of its users in the dark. The site's domain names point to a Cloudflare error, suggesting its servers are offline, but there is no official update from the operators to explain the current downtime.