Leftovers

• Michel Alexandre Salim ☛ Michel Alexandre Salim: Work-Life Balance 🏖️ with Sandogasa 👒 Hat-Track

  Happy Friday! Of course it’s not Friday anymore in Asia, and if I finish this post in time, it’s still the work day in the Western Hemisphere.

  When you work in a large distributed project, it’s not dissimilar to working in a large multinational company - there are too many people to know everyone (or at least not at once!) and you might not know where someone is and if you’re pinging them in the middle of the night.

• Wouter Groeneveld ☛ The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book

  This was a special experiment with a high probability of failure as I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. What should a Brain Baking book look like compared to browsing this website? How should it feel to flip through the pages? Will I be able to squeeze everything in there (nope)? Do I want to publish this publicly or just generate a .pdf, send it to the presses just for myself and call it a day? And if so, which service to use, as the past ones I’ve relied on all showed their shortcomings?

• Matt Webb ☛ Self-driving legs to walk me to the office

  But maybe Electrical Muscle Stimulation could drive me up there safely, and I’d just be along for the ride as I (or whatever split body “I” am at this point) ropelessly ascend 3,000ft of sheer rock face, AI controlled hands and feet, high up in the fresh air of Yosemite, body tingling as a thousand tiny electric pulses zap me hour after hour through my fish-scaled cyborg bodysuit.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • John D Cook ☛ Mr. Bessel’s eponymous functions

    Yesterday I wrote a post showing that the trapezoid rule evaluates the integral

    \int_{-\pi}^\pi \cos(\sin(x) + x)\, dx

    very efficiently. But how do we know what the exact integral is for comparison? If you ask Mathematica, it will tell you the integral equals −2π J1(1) where J1 is a Bessel function. This may seem like rabbit out of a hat, but it’s actually a simple calculation given the integral definition of Bessel functions: [...]

  • Giles Turnbull ☛ gilest.org: Your friendly local particle accelerator

    Went on a visit to Dimond Light Source, my friendly local particle accelerator. They do regular open days, I managed to get a place, and spent an enjoyable couple of hours looking around and boggling. It’s huge, and very impressive. I came away thinking that the UK can do big projects, for big money, and do them well. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that.

  • Avi Loeb ☛ Did NASA Miss Viking’s Discovery of Life on Mars?

    The Viking landers from 50 years ago were the first and only missions so far explicitly designed to search for biological activity on Mars. Why did NASA never attempt to reproduce their results over the past 50 years? The only plausible explanation is that the risk-averse astrobiology community restrained itself from finding life in the same way, because of the controversy generated by the Viking results. This is exactly the opposite mindset of a curious and open-minded research community.

• Career/Education

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Barry Hess

    This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Barry Hess, whose blog can be found at bjhess.com.

• Hardware

  • CNX Software ☛ $54 ThinkNode G4 Wi-Fi HaLow gateway extends the range of Ethernet or 2.4 GHz WiFi 4 devices

    Elecrow’s ThinkNode G4 is a Wi-Fi HaLow gateway with Ethernet and 2.4 GHz WiFi that allows you to connect compatible devices or extend the range of existing devices when used with two gateways or in an 802.11s Mesh configuration with multiple gateways.

  • The Drone Girl ☛ This map of 1,413 drone companies tells a fascinating story

    The DII report for 2026 has 1,413 companies, but in fact approximately 300 companies from the 2022 edition have been removed due to mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, or pivots out of the civil drone sector. At the same time, roughly 637 new companies have been added, producing a net increase of 337 entries.

    The drone industry is growing faster than it’s consolidating — but it is consolidating. According to DII, the companies that are disappearing from the map represent the natural selection pressure of a market that is maturing past the point where a compelling pitch deck alone sustains a business.

  • Sal ☛ Holy refresh rate

    The new monitor is capable of a 240Hz refresh rate, which I believe my new Macbook Air can handle at 4K resolution. The Studio Display could do only 60Hz.

    Wow, it makes a big difference. The computer feels much faster.

  • University of Toronto ☛ It seems unlikely that I'll have basic ARM servers to deal with

    At work, we have a lot of basic servers. These basic servers are 1U rack servers, with unexciting amounts of disk bays, RAM, and CPU performance, because we buy them to do straightforward jobs (for example, much of our mail system hardware is basic servers). Right now, these are all x86 machines, but like a lot of people I'd love it if the x86 architecture had real competition (even if returning to the days of a multi-architecture Unix environment wouldn't necessarily be fun). However, these days I don't think we're likely to see basic 1U ARM servers that we're interested in, and why that is comes down to modern hardware and modern basic server power usage.

  • The Arcade Blogger ☛ Atari Pole Position: Factory Assembly Line Footage

    The development and release of Pole Position is probably worthy of an in depth deep dive for another time, so look out for that in a future post. In the meantime, I’ve come across some more extended footage of the game being constructed on Atari’s assembly lines that I wanted to share. If memory serves me correct, we have seen some of this before, but only a relatively short clip. What I have now is much more extensive and shows a lot more of the build process of these cabinets.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ Ebola Expert Fears Outbreak Is Heading Into “Nightmare Scenario”

    "I think it's safe to say it could be unprecedented."

  • Latvia ☛ Latvia thinks about bigger penalties for attacking doctors

    Three attacks on doctors occurred in May at the Emergency Care Clinic of Rīga East Hospital by patients and relatives. Doctors believe that the law should be expanded so that an attack on a doctor is considered an attack on a public official, which carries a prison sentence, Latvian Television reported on June 4.

  • Tracy Durnell ☛ Mental defrag

    I am trying to turn to computing metaphors for thinking (and machine metaphors for bodies) less often — our analog brains are functionally and materially distinct from digital computers — but this describes my experience better than other descriptions and metaphors I can think of: [...]

  • New York Times ☛ Laboring Under Delhi’s Harsh Heat, Workers Must Choose Health or Wages

    Severe heat waves have been hitting India since April, forcing many of the country’s essential workers to make tough decisions.

• Proprietary / SaaS

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

    • I Cringely ☛ Detection Is Not a Strategy

      Every few weeks, someone announces a tool that detects Hey Hi (AI) hallucinations. A startup, a research lab, a hyperscaler bolting a “trust layer” onto its chatbot. The release uses the word “guardrails.” Everyone nods. Another brick in the road to safe, reliable AI. I want to argue that we are cheering for the wrong thing — that hallucination detection, however clever, cannot be the strategy. It can be a backstop. It can be a monitor. It cannot be the plan. And the reason is older than computing. Start with the trap at the center of the whole idea. To catch a hallucination, your detector has to know the right answer. Sit with what that means.

    • 404 Media ☛ K-pop Fans Are Calling Out Creepy Deepfakes of Idols

      “K-pop fans (like all pop culture fans) have long been active producers of fan materials about their preferred idols. However, these to date have not been 'convincing' as artefacts that might have involved the idol themselves,” Keith told 404 Media. “It's a parallel issue involving both fans and AI tools. Because of these two factors, there is now an increased facility for fans to create large volumes of content, which do not respect the idols' personal integrity, and which can be distributed online in ways that undermine the idols' reputation (e.g. sexualized deepfakes).”

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ [Cracking] Meta's AI Chatbot

      [Imposters] are convincing Meta’s AI support chatbot to let them take over other peoples’ accounts: [...]

    • CleverHans Lab ☛ AI Agents Enable Adaptive Computer Worms

      A computer worm is self-replicating malware that spreads across a network without human intervention. The WannaCry worm (2017) disrupted critical infrastructure across 150 countries by exploiting a single vulnerability. Traditional worms can be stopped by patching the specific vulnerability they exploit. Our adaptive worm cannot be stopped this way: it uses a recursive reasoning loop to detect and exploit diverse vulnerabilities as it propagates.

      We demonstrate these capabilities in a controlled experiment: a prototype AI-driven worm powered by an open-weight LLM running locally, propagated across a heterogeneous network of Linux, Windows, and IoT devices with common corporate network vulnerabilities. The experiment was conducted in an isolated virtual network.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI Worm

      This is the closest to John Brunner’s original 1975 conception of a computer worm that I’ve seen.

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ Shadow AI Is the New Shadow IT, But Blocking Won't Work - CybersecKyle

      That is the part I think security teams forget when this conversation gets too policy-heavy. A user finds a faster way to summarize meeting notes. A developer tries a coding assistant that helps with boilerplate. A sales team uses an AI writing tool to clean up follow-up emails. A manager pastes a messy spreadsheet into a chatbot because they need the answer before the next meeting.

      From their side, this does not feel like rebellion. It feels like productivity.

      From the security side, it can look like sensitive data moving into tools nobody reviewed, OAuth grants nobody approved, browser extensions nobody inventoried, and business processes quietly depending on AI systems nobody can monitor.

      That is shadow AI.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Today in the scraperpocalypse...

      If I don't block these scrapers but merely serve them nonsense, my web site falls over.

      I have no idea what to do about this, and it sucks.

    • I Cringely ☛ Detection Is Not a Strategy

      Start with the trap at the center of the whole idea.

      To catch a hallucination, your detector has to know the right answer. Sit with what that means. The original model produced a confident falsehood because it did not have the grounded knowledge to do otherwise. Now you propose a second system to sit behind it and flag the lies. But to flag a lie, that second system has to know the truth — and if it knew the truth, you would not have needed the first model to guess in the first place. You would just serve the truth and skip the theater.

      A detector good enough to reliably catch fabrication would have to possess exactly the capability whose absence caused the fabrication. Detection doesn’t solve the problem. It assumes the problem is already solved. That is the whole argument in a paragraph; everything else is just watching it play out.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Refining humanity (05 Jun 2026)

      One of the best ways to evaluate your own understanding of a subject is to attempt to explain it to someone else. Through explaining things, we discover how much of the "totally obvious" world is actually full of ambiguity, mystery and contradiction.

      There's a great bit in Rowan Atkinson's historical sitcom Blackadder that illustrates this principle. In "Ink and Incapability" Blackadder and friends have accidentally burned the only copy of Samuel Johnson's original dictionary of the English language. To cover up their mistake, they decide that they will recreate the dictionary themselves. However, they founder on the first word they try to define, "A": [...]

    • Take it easy. A guide to avoid burnown during the Vulnpocalypse

      Do not let the Hey Hi (AI) to remove the fun part from software development.

      We shouldn't allow gen Hey Hi (AI) to write software just because it "can".

      First, we must ask if it "should" do it, and even then, we should ask if we want to delegate the fun part, the thinking, the writing, the learning.

  • Social Control Media

    • Matt Birchler ☛ Best-o-Masto comes to the web

      For those who don't know, the concept of Best-o-Masto is that Mastodon does not have any algorithmic feeds to surface the most notable posts in your timeline. That's fine and is likely one of the sources of the more calm vibe on the platform, but it also does mean that if you want to find all the notable posts when you sign on once or twice a day, you have potentially hundreds of posts to sift through and if you don't, you're liable to miss notable things that you would have wanted to see.

    • Bitdefender ☛ Got a LinkedIn message from a recruiter? It might be Chinese intelligence, warn FBI and MI5

      A joint bulletin published earlier this week by the FBI, MI5, Australia's ASIO, Canada's CSIS, and New Zealand's NZSIS has warned that China's military intelligence services are actively using professional networking sites and online job platforms to recruit Western workers into handing over sensitive information.

      According to the bulletin, entitled "Safeguarding Our Secrets", Chinese intelligence officers - or third parties acting on their behalf - are posing as employees of private consultancies, think tanks, and HR firms.

    • Nate Silver ☛ Social media is turning into a freak show

      Before you make too much of that data, or ask why we even bother to post to Twitter at all (in fact, we’ve started a Silver Bulletin X account just for shits and giggles) note that there are a number of caveats. Social media traffic is hard to measure. There’s direct traffic in the form of “dark social” where the source of origin is lost. There’s also indirect traffic in the form of the overall amount of buzz you might attribute to an article. Furthermore, that Substack data ironically isn’t counting traffic from Substack-specific social media channels. Substack increasingly considers itself a social media company (among other things), and we have quite a lot of readers who follow one or more Silver Bulletin-related accounts on Substack Notes but who opt out of email delivery of our newsletters. What’s more, the traffic you do get from Twitter and other social media channels tends to convert to subscriptions at relatively high rates. So we do very much appreciate it when you share Silver Bulletin articles. I should probably get more in the habit of including share buttons in articles like this one: [...]

• Security

  • SANS ☛ The Evil MSI Background is Back, (Fri, Jun 5th)

  • LWN ☛ Security updates for Friday

    Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel), Debian (dovecot, exim4, frr, and haveged), Fedora (cockpit, freeipa, jpegxl, libre, nextcloud, perl-Cpanel-JSON-XS, perl-Crypt-Argon2, perl-Dist-Build, perl-ExtUtils-Builder, perl-ExtUtils-Builder-Compiler, perl-HTTP-Tiny, perl-libwww-perl, python-starlette, rubygem-yard, rust-sequoia-cert-store, rust-sequoia-chameleon-gnupg, rust-sequoia-octopus-librnp, rust-sequoia-sop, rust-sequoia-sq, rust-sequoia-wot, samba, and transmission), Red Hat (image-builder), Slackware (dnsmasq and libinput), SUSE (evince, glibc, google-guest-agent, hplip, ignition, LibVNCServer, libzypp, libsolv, python-Pillow, salt, thunderbird, and vim), and Ubuntu (apache2, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp,

    linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15,

    linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-intel-iotg,

    linux-kvm, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-5.15,

    linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4,

    linux-azure-fips, linux-bluefield, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4,

    linux-gcp-fips, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4,

    linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips,

    linux-gcp-4.15, linux-gcp-fips, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-aws-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, nano, postfix, robocode, tomcat6, tomcat7, and yard).

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • [Repeat] Michael Geist ☛ New Privacy Rights in the Morning, Mandatory Metadata Retention in the Afternoon: How Bill C-22 Undercuts the AI Strategy Before It Launches

      The government unveils its long-awaited national AI strategy this morning. AI Minister Evan Solomon has made it clear that the strategy will emphasize trust, noting that Canadians will only embrace the technology if they are confident their privacy is protected and safeguards are in place against potential harms. The privacy assurances are likely to take the form of a new private-sector privacy bill that includes European-style rules, stronger penalties, and recognizing privacy as a fundamental right. The government has proposed as much before, adding fundamental-rights language to the Consumer Privacy Protection Act in Bill C-27 before that bill died on the order paper. But the government is, at the same time, pressuring the public safety committee to pass Bill C-22, whose mandatory metadata retention regime is the single largest privacy risk in Canada in years and one that comparable countries have already struck down as a violation of the fundamental right to privacy. The disconnect is dizzying: the government cannot claim privacy as a fundamental right in the morning and enact mandatory metadata retention that overrides it in the afternoon.

  • Confidentiality

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Outlook may have allowed unencrypted connections for decades, report claims — Fedora and Dovecot upgrade reveal protocol downgrade issue present since at least 2007

      Ssh, don't tell the customer anything.

• Defence/Aggression

  • France24 ☛ 'Is this safety ?': Life in a Beirut displacement camp

    🇱🇧 "Is this safety?" Jenan Habash has been living in a displacement camp on the Beirut waterfront for three months — one of 175 tents with no running water or sanitation. A single mother from Baalbek, she fled with her two daughters, aged 5 and 10.

  • France24 ☛ NASA places ISS astronauts on evacuation alert as air leak worsens

  • Paul Krugman ☛ America, the Inessential Nation

    It was a shocking betrayal of a democracy fighting for its freedom — and, in so doing, fighting for the freedom of Europe as a whole. Even some Republicans are ashamed. Yesterday 18 Republican members of the House broke ranks with their leadership and voted for a bill that would restore aid to Ukraine and impose sanctions on Russia. But the bill has no chance of becoming law, because Trump is siding ever closely more with Putin in a war that is now well into its fifth year.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Sanctioned Russian Bank VTB Sneaked an App Into the App Store

    I suppose the App Store review process could always be worse, but it is no longer surprising that its team, too focused elsewhere, does not catch egregious rule-breakers.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Like Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, I am no stranger to plumbing problems

    It's Only a $13 Billion Aircraft Carrier, Why Would We Expect the Toilets to Work?

  • Barry Hess ☛ Do We Need Billionaires?

    A significant portion of the population in the USA still thinks of Reaganomics as certified fact rather than a largely discredited theory. By this mindset the engine of our economy requires people to strive for a ton of money. A rising tide lifts all boats and all that.

    First, I got to wondering, were US billionaires even a thing at the end of Reagan’s term? As a tween at the time, I couldn’t really remember. Turns out, yes: [...]

  • Yle ☛ Häkkänen: Chinese corporate network tried to buy properties critical to national security

    Häkkänen noted that Russia has previously attempted to acquire security-critical properties from Finland — and now, in a first, operators from China tried doing the same thing.

  • [Old] Security Affairs ☛ Military personnel improperly used Fitness Strava Tracker exposed their bases

    The list of the bases easy to locate thank to the map associated to the fitness tracker Strava includes Taji north of Baghdad, Qayyarah south of Mosul, Speicher near Tikrit and Al-Asad in Anbar Province and a number of minor sites highlighted in northern and western Iraq.

    Searching for bases in Afghanistan, it is easy to locate the Bagram Air Field in the north of Kabul along with other smaller sites south of the country.

  • France24 ☛ France opens torture, 'war crime' probe over Israel's treatment of Gaza flotilla activists

  • France24 ☛ Holocaust remembrance: Newly discovered photos illustrate previously-unknown roundup of French Jews

    François Picard is pleased to welcome Dr. Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Historian, Professor of Modern History at the University of Manchester, Chief Editor of 'La Revue d'Histoire de la Shoah' and one of the curators of the Shoah Memorial in Paris photography exhibit highlighting the discovery of 98 previously unknown photographs documenting the May 14, 1941 roundup of foreign Jews in Paris. It represents one of the most significant visual revelations in Holocaust historiography in recent years, the images capturing what Dr. Dreyfus calls "a real discovery for history, for our memory," offering an almost minute-by-minute account of a largely forgotten precursor to the infamous Vel' d'Hiv roundup of July 1942.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • France24 ☛ Ukraine: Dear Putin, Lebanon: A Crude Call, Colombia's 'Tiger'

      In a week where a renewed ceasefire was proclaimed between Israel and Lebanon, a deal that hinges on the complete cessation of attacks from the Iranian backed militants Hezbollah and withdrawal from the south of the country.

    • France24 ☛ Ukraine under heavy drone attack as Zelensky seeks direct meeting with Putin

      Russia fired hundreds of drones at Ukraine between late Thursday and early Friday, killing seven people and destroying a factory that produces milk products for children, authorities said. Moscow and Kyiv have intensified drone strikes on each other in recent months as US-led diplomatic efforts to end the war, now in its fifth year, remain stalled over the conflict in the Middle East. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proposed a meeting with Vladimir Putin in an open letter to the Russian leader late Thursday, saying it was only the leaders who could resolve "key issues".

    • RFERL ☛ Putin Rejects Zelenskyy's Proposal In Open Letter To Meet As Senseless

      Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected a proposal by his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to meet for talks to end the war as senseless, calling for the country's military to "do the job."

    • New York Times ☛ A Question Swirling Around Putin’s Big Conference: Could the War End?

      At the St. Petersburg economic forum, business and political elites said Russia faced a choice of halting the conflict or sacrificing more. Vladimir Putin seemed to signal more war.

    • New York Times ☛ Russia Rails Against the West but Welcomes Candace Owens and Andrew Tate

      While some powerful Russians shun the West, others want to restore ties and embrace friendly Westerners. President Vladimir V. Putin’s annual economic conference illustrates the conflicting impulses.

    • New York Times ☛ Backed by Convicted Felon, Opposed by Putin, and Fighting for His Political Life

      Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia is seeking re-election as his country weighs questions of war and peace, of autocracy and democracy, and of subjugation and independence.

    • Latvia ☛ Ukraine’s lesson for Latvia: digital resilience and national security

      While recent attention in security discussions has focused on drones crossing Latvian airspace, we must not forget that another critical area of defence is our cyberspace and critical digital infrastructure.

    • France24 ☛ Ukrainian drone explodes in Romanian sea port

      A sea #drone self-destroyed in the Romanian port of Constanta. #Ukraine's navy said it had been knocked off course by Russian jamming.

    • RFERL ☛ US House Passes Sweeping Ukraine Support Bill After Months Of Gridlock

      In a rare display of bipartisan cooperation and a rebuke to the administration's approach toward Ukraine, the US House of Representatives approved a sweeping Ukraine aid and Russia sanctions package, with 18 Republicans joining Democrats to pass the legislation.

    • CS Monitor ☛ As Russia and Ukraine press drone war, NATO finds itself caught in crossfire

      Ukraine’s defensive efforts against Russia are increasingly bringing its supportive European neighbors under fire. What are NATO nations to do?

    • CS Monitor ☛ A battlefield volunteer in Ukraine war has a story. She wants Europe to hear it.

      Anastasia Fomitchova left her life in Paris to join the fight for her native Ukraine. She was inspired to write a book about the bravery and unflinching humanity of those she served alongside as a medic. Her message to Europeans: It’s their war, too.

    • Latvia ☛ Latvian security service publishes new Russian 'lawfare' report

      The Constitution Protection Bureau (SAB), one of Latvia's three security services, has published a new report titled "RUSSIA INTENSIFIES LAWFARE AGAINST THE WEST TO JUSTIFY MORE AGGRESSIVE ACTIVITIES".

    • France24 ☛ ISS astronauts briefly put on evacuation alert during repair to fix air leak

      NASA ordered astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to shelter in their spacecraft and prepare for a possible evacuation on Friday after an air leak in the Russian module of the orbiting laboratory worsened, raising fresh concerns over a long-running technical problem.

    • CS Monitor ☛ In Armenia’s elections, a choice: Stay in Russia’s orbit or engage with the West

      As Armenia goes to the polls Sunday, voters face a choice between a prime minister seeking peace with rival Azerbaijan, and pro-Russia elites.

    • New York Times ☛ Russia Floods Armenia With Disinformation Ahead of Election

      Fearing a loss of influence, groups linked to the Kremlin and intelligence agencies have sought to discredit the country’s prime minister.

    • New York Times ☛ Russian Satellites Have Been Jamming GPS Signals Across Europe, Scientists Say

      Scientists and U.S. military briefers have linked short, widespread interference incidents to Russia, revealing vulnerabilities in a technology essential to everyday society.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Meta putting up tents across the US to house Hey Hi (AI) servers, like ‘a scene out of the movie Mad Max’ — structures take three months to build and use jet engines for power

      Meta is reportedly building more tents that house expensive data centers across the U.S., as it reportedly cuts construction time from two to three years to just a few months. It's also bringing its own power instead of relying on electricity from the grid.

    • Hackaday ☛ Using Brand New NiMH Cells After Sitting 12 Years Unused

      After finding a pack of NiMH rechargeable cells that had never been used since buying them in 2014, [DiodeGoneWild] decided to test whether they could be tossed or not. After previously testing different brand cells that had gone high internal resistance after only about five years, he wasn’t expecting much. Amazingly, the batteries not only recovered, but seems to be not that much worse off for wear.

    • Jim Grey ☛ The 1913 Lincoln Highway in Porter County, Indiana, part 2: Valparaiso

      The roundabout was built in 2007. Before then, staying on the 1913 Lincoln Highway was a lot more straightforward here — you just continued straight. I made this photo from the west edge of the roundabout. The 1913 Lincon Highway is on the left, and the 1928 alignment is on the right.

    • Jim Grey ☛ The National Road and US 40 bridges over Big Walnut Creek in Putnam County, Indiana

      This bridge was destroyed on April 5, 1929, when a heavy truck struck it.

• Finance

  • The Straits Times ☛ Korean won breaches 1,560 per US dollar for first time since 2009

    The won faced mounting pressure partly from foreign investors’ continued selling of Korean equities.

• Rust/Politics

  • Hackaday ☛ An Ethernet WiFi Router On A Pi Pico 2W

    The project is written in Rust, and is in part a port of an earlier project. It makes use of Ethernet magnetics, but the rest of the works is all done in software. He says it’s full-speed on transmit and reduced speed on receive, but we’re guessing if you’re using 10baseT in 2026 then speed isn’t your number one concern anyway. It provides a WiFi router as well as a wired connection, making it possibly the cheapest Ethernet to wireless solution possible.

  • [Repeat] Michael Geist ☛ AI for All, Details to Follow: Government Releases a Big-Spending AI Strategy That Is Still Short on the Specifics That Matter

    The government today released its much-anticipated national AI strategy, an ambitious plan featuring a myriad of new programs and initiatives to support AI adoption. The strategy emphasizes trust, framing its approach as “AI for All.” Spending dominates the announcement, with money sprinkled across the economy as the government bets on the economic returns that flow from widespread AI adoption. Yet spending money is the easy part. What stands out is the deferral of many of the hard policy choices. The government has no plans for AI-specific regulation, instead relying on updated privacy rules and a reintroduction of online safety legislation. AI Minister Evan Solomon started the process by noting that the prior government had “over-indexed” on regulatory plans, and that perspective remains largely unchanged. There are real risks in bad legislation (see yesterday’s reset of the Online Streaming Act), but the Canadian government will never outspend the market on AI. For the Canadian government, supporting AI development must primarily involve creating the legal and regulatory frameworks that facilitate investment, trust, and adoption, and deferring the hard choices to later does not help.

  • The Straits Times ☛ South Korean riot police clear protesters after ballot shortage blockade

    Electoral staff were forced to stay overnight inside polling stations until the morning of June 5.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ 7 taken away by Hong Kong police on Tiananmen crackdown anniversary

    Hong Kong police took away seven people in Causeway Bay, where past public commemorations for China’s 1989 Tiananmen crackdown were once held, on Thursday, the 37th anniversary of the event.

  • NPR ☛ I wrote about George Santos. Then he made a violent threat and lied about it

    He then proceeded to name-call and attack the reputation of NPR, the kind of invective that's common when reporting on people who try to discredit reporters and news organizations for stories they don't like.

    What Santos said next took me aback, even by his outlandish and brazen standards.

    "This story is going to get you a gun in your face," Santos said.

    I asked him what he meant by that.

    "You know what I mean."

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Robert Reich ☛ It's not just my good fight. It's all of ours.

    “By the time I was a young man,” Reich tells me from his study in Berkeley, California, “I understood that bullying really is a metaphor for all sorts of abuses of power. Men bullying women, or white supremacists bullying black people and brown people, or employers bullying employees.”

    His own experiences, he says, solidified his “lifelong conviction that our moral responsibility is to protect the weak from the strong”. He remembers his father, a progressive Jewish Republican, yelling “son of a bitch” at political figures he saw as bullies—such as Senator Joseph McCarthy—when they appeared on his television set.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ Supreme Court Backs FCC in Fight With Carriers Over Fines

    The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in an 8 to 1 vote yesterday that wireless carriers, including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, cannot use the constitutional right to a jury trial to avoid nearly $200 million in fines imposed by the FCC, notes Seeking Alpha.

    The dispute stemmed from the penalties the FCC levied in 2024 against major carriers including AT&T (NYSE: T), Verizon (NYSE: VZ), T-Mobile (NASDAQ:TMUS), and Sprint for selling access to sensitive real-time location information to third parties without adequate safeguards or customer consent, Inside Towers reported. Regulators concluded the companies had failed to take reasonable steps to protect the data, exposing tens of millions of users to potential tracking and abuse.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Robert Reich ☛ Who's Most Responsible for the Monopolization of America?

    I focused this morning on Chevron and the Big Oil monopoly — and the importance of antitrust enforcement. I’d like to give you a bit more background on what happened to antitrust in America.

    Whether it’s Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Tech, Kroger and Albertsons dominating the grocery market, or Big AI (Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX), corporate concentration is on the rise.

    And its social costs are growing.

  • Copyrights

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ The rise of copyright monopoly trolling

      Copyright trolling and speculative invoicing are back in fashion, thanks to tools that can match images and automate the creation of claims of infringement. This has been going on for a while, so it is not too surprising that ORG has received a demand from PicRights, concerning the reproduction of a Facebook (Farcebook) ad.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Disputed historic Kodacolor photo of John F. Kennedy's final motorcade belongs to museum, court rules

      Now, the latest of these disputes, between The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza (SFMDP) – the official JFK museum in Dallas, Texas – and a private photo collector has been settled in US copyright court, with the ruling in favor of SFMDP.