Leftovers

• El País ☛ Cocaine, bikers and aliens: The film that saved David Bowie at his lowest point

  His last public appearances had been calamitous. He tried to help promote what would become his most successful international album to date, the leaden and decadent Young Americans, but his legendary charm seemed to have evaporated: he weighed less than 40 kilos and could barely form a sentence. Journalists didn’t know what to write about him without doing damage.

  [...] In 2016, coinciding with the film’s 40th anniversary, cinematographer Tony Richmond said: “I can’t think of anyone else who could have played [Thomas Jerome] Newton. Bowie was so strange, so ethereal, so androgynous.”

  Richmond added that Bowie relaxed somewhat when his five-year-old son Zowie, the future film director Duncan Jones, came to visit. Working with the rock star was, for Richmond, a “weird” but satisfying experience.

• Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Which Memes Deserve Digital Preservation? See the Online Videos the British Film Institute Selected for a New Archive

  Other videos were chosen for their role in helping to shape the content creation we are familiar with today. These include early vlogs, video essays, tutorials and marketing campaigns.

• New York Times ☛ B.F.I. Preserves ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ and 430 Videos in Archive of Viral Moments

  The clips range in duration from an 11-second viral meme to a weeklong livestream, and are accessible at the B.F.I.’s viewing space in London as well as online for internet users in Britain.

  Here’s a selection, in no particular order.

• Robert Birming ☛ Where do blogs go when they die?

  I'm far from an expert when it comes to keeping blogs alive. I've killed so many blogs that I've lost count. Then again, maybe that makes me a great expert on the topic.

  Anyway, here's the thing I've noticed.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ UK commits $1.47B to supercomputer and domestic chip development

    The strategy was announced as part of a wider push to strengthen the country’s sovereign computing capability, with investments spanning supercomputing, semiconductor design, skills development, and venture funding for AI hardare startups. The government said the plan is aimed at improving national security, boosting innovation, and supporting economic growth.

  • Avi Loeb ☛ What Are the Chances That We Are Visited by Aliens?

    In contrast to fleeting communication signals that travel at the speed of light, physical interstellar objects are trapped by the Milky-Way gravity and accumulate over time. Technological devices might cluster around the habitable zones of stars for the same reason that bees seek resources around flowers. The chance of finding bees around flowers depends on how many bees exist per flower. Interstellar probes could outlast the age of their senders. The number of packages in our mailbox is not simply related to the number of phone calls we receive, because most senders of these slow packages might have died by now whereas their communication signals are billions of light years away and not detectable on Earth.

    Therefore, the Drake equation does not address the likelihood of detecting extraterrestrial technological probes near Earth.

• Career/Education

  • Robert Reich ☛ It's Easy To Create Lots of Shitty Jobs

    What all this acclaim left out was that wages are falling relative to prices.

    Average hourly earnings for private-sector production and non-supervisory workers — that is, for most employees — rose by only 8 cents (or 0.2 percent) in May. That’s the weakest pace of wage growth since 2021.

    Meanwhile, prices are rising quickly — by around 3.8 percent annually. Hence, real wages — that is, their actual purchasing power — are dropping. The paychecks of most American workers aren’t covering rising costs. They’re getting poorer.

  • Jeff Kaufman ☛ Contra Dance at LessOnline

    Unlike a house party dance we didn't take any breaks: there were enough people that we could dance straight through. I did give people a lot of time to rest and chat before teaching each dance, though, since otherwise I expect we'd have had a lot of attrition.

  • Guy LeCharles Gonzalez ☛ Publishing Career Advice at the US Book Show

    I generally avoid giving career advice to anyone, especially anyone younger, because my career path was unusual and almost impossible to duplicate these days. For one, I came in through the magazine side of the business, which is nearly unrecognizable from the industry I joined in 1993 via a couple of temp assignments. Over the years, the book side of the business had no interest in my reader-centric experience until I was running Digital Book World nearly 20 years later, but very few of them had created roles for someone like me yet.

  • Antipope ☛ Back at the coal face

    I must remember that now I'm over 60, doing more than one SF convention in a month is probably more than my stamina can cope with. (Which is going to make this November really interesting as I'm about to say yes to two literary festivals/SF conventions in Spain, a week apart, in Barcelona and Madrid: more on this when it's confirmed).

• Hardware

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Robot mountaineer reaches 6,200-meter peak in Ecuador

    A humanoid robot has successfully reached the summit of Ecuador’s Chimborazo volcano. This is a new milestone in efforts to push legged robots beyond controlled environments into some of the world’s harshest environments.

  • Jim Grey ☛ Pentax Zoom 90-WR

    Pentax is known today for weather sealing many of its cameras. That doesn’t make them waterproof in the sense of “take it snorkeling.” But they are well protected against rain and beach spray.

    The 1991 Pentax Zoom 90-WR is Pentax’s second weather-sealed camera, the first being the 1980 Pentax LX SLR. These two cameras gave Pentax the expertise it would deploy as a differentiator across its modern digital line.

  • Jan van den Berg ☛ How to fix a laptop that reboots randomly

    This can happen when you place a laptop on your bed or on the carpet (which teenage girls tend to do a lot): the fan will suck all sorts of dust inside. That dust then accumulates on the exhaust side. So the fan may be spinning, but it can no longer dissipate the heat. The temperature rises, and then the thermal protection kicks in: the laptop shuts down. Fortunately, otherwise you could burn up your own laptop or, even worse, cause a fire.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Industry coalition urges Trump administration to take urgent action as AI data centers' extreme memory consumption threatens other industries — AI-driven memory chip shortage could raise prices in automotive, medical, telecommunications sectors

    A coalition of nine US trade associations has urged the Trump administration to take immediate action on what it describes as an emerging memory chip shortage driven by the explosive growth of AI data centers. In a June 3 letter sent to US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent shared with Tom's Hardware, the organizations — representing telecommunications providers, automakers, medical device manufacturers, and major retailers — warned that AI infrastructure deployments are consuming an outsized share of global memory production, creating supply constraints and price increases that could ripple across large segments of the US economy.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Green Party UK ☛ Food system ‘close to collapse,’ Polanski warns as figures show costs to rise 170% by 2050

    The speech comes as figures from the Autonomy Institute show that UK fruit and veg prices could rise 170% by 2050, with the climate crisis set to become the leading driver of fresh produce inflation in the UK.

  • Vox ☛ We don’t know how the Ebola outbreak started. That’s a problem.

    Two recent outbreaks have demonstrated the necessity — and the challenges — of such investigations, almost two centuries after Snow’s pioneering work. The first was the hantavirus outbreak that dominated headlines last month. Then, on May 17, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a public health emergency of international concern, the highest level of global health alert, in response to an outbreak of the deadly hemorrhagic disease Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which, as of June 2, had killed 62 people, with 363 confirmed cases. It’s the 17th Ebola outbreak in the DRC and one of the largest on record. It has spread to neighboring Uganda, where, as of June 4, there are 16 confirmed cases, one confirmed death, and one probable case and likely death.

  • The Conversation ☛ If AI is addictive, where does the responsibility lie – with big tech or its users?

    Generative AI is not formally recognised as addictive right now – the medical evidence is still being gathered. But there is a significant amount of data showing heavy use of chatbots and other systems that produce text, images and video leads to neural patterns and behaviour that are associated with addiction.

    In light of Meta’s and YouTube’s recent legal defeat in a landmark social media addiction trial, I believe it’s time to ask whether a similar logic applies to generative AI – and how it could be addressed. The starting point would be to identify who carries responsibility for overuse of generative AI.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Noah Liebman ☛ Noah Liebman | Mending is better than spending

    The same thing happened with software. I’m hardly the first one to notice this, but those of us who learned to use computers before the [Internet] became 3 conglomerates in a trench coat seem to be the ones who are comfortable with fundamental concepts of modern computing. We know how to use computers, but the megaplatforms abstracted away anything tweak-able or fixable.

    Take the file system: if something goes awry while you’re working on a document, you could try opening that file in another app or editing the preferences file/plist of the app you’re working in. On the other hand, when Google Docs breaks there’s nothing you can do; you’re out of luck, completely beholden to some corporation elsewhere. What even was the point of personal computers when we’re all back on mainframes?

  • Jack Baty ☛ TheBrain on Linux

    I can understand why people in my circles might not even consider using TheBrain. It's closed-source, it's not plain text (except it kind of is), it's weird, it's expensive, and the website makes it feel like the app isn't really for "us". None of that matters once you start using it.

  • Ava ☛ changed email address!

    I respect what Proton is trying to accomplish with their product suite, yet I feel like they are spread too thin, releasing unpolished product after unpolished product, and not putting enough effort into adequately supporting what they already have.

  • Stéphane Huc ☛ Gmail Detect Error 550-5.7.1 (gsmtp)

    “Communication” with Gmail services seems anything but a model of good communication!

    In the serie “Gmail, your ruthless world…”: [...]

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

    • The Walrus ☛ The Real Scandal Isn’t That AI Wrote a Prize-Winning Story. It’s the Response

      Evidence suggests that that mission is in jeopardy. For an article in The Atlantic, Vauhini Vara ran fifteen years of regional winners through the AI detector Pangram. Four were flagged as likely to have been written, in large part, by AI: three from this year and one from 2025. On its own, this doesn’t prove anything, but it makes it harder to dismiss the controversy as a false positive or as a misreading of non-Western writing styles.

      I’m not here to argue whether the entries relied on AI. Others (such as Wired) have done that at length. Instead, I want to draw attention to the responses from Granta and the Commonwealth Foundation, both of which seem to have mistaken uncertainty for helplessness. Whether any AI detector can deliver true certainty is not what matters. What matters is institutional fence sitting and head burying—some might call it cowardice—that looks a lot like complicity.

      At its core, this is a debate about values. A short story implies a human artistic act with intentional imaginative labour—the exact practice whose future is now at risk if the literary world doesn’t take a stand.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Era of Cheap AI Is Over

      By 2023, the research firm SemiAnalysis estimated that ChatGPT was already costing roughly $700,000 a day to run. The models have only gotten more complex and resource-intensive since. As of early 2026, with eight hundred to nine hundred million weekly active users users and only thirty-five million paying subscribers, the cost of sustaining global access to ChatGPT at this scale is around $17 billion a year, or close to $47 million a day.

      In the words of Harvard business professor Andy Wu, most people don’t realize how “ridiculously expensive” AI is. Most are aware of the high fixed costs, but not the variable inference costs incurred every time the model generates an image. OpenAI expects to spend more than $150 billion on inference costs alone through 2030. While the vast majority of users continue to access the platform for free, the question is how the gap between resources and revenue will eventually close, and who will bear the costs.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Executives are cutting jobs for an AI future that hasn't fully arrived yet, even as productivity gains remain difficult to prove — data neither confirms nor refutes an AI unemployment apocalypse

      A recent Mercer survey of nearly 12,000 C-suite executives, HR leaders, investors, and employees found that 99% of CEOs expect AI and automation to drive at least some headcount reduction in the next two years. At the same time, the report found that only 32% of executives believe their organizations are effective at combining human labor with AI systems.

    • Security Week ☛ Everybody Is Vibe Coding But Nobody Told the Security Team

      Recent research from Veracode shows 45% of AI-generated code contains OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities. AI models have improved dramatically at generating code that compiles and runs – but the security of that code is not always sound. The reason is straightforward: AI optimizes for functionality, not security.

    • Tom Critchlow ☛ Of Termites & Tokens

      But I think this is boring and mundane. The more interesting question is what happens when AI changes the throughput of the workflow itself? Don’t make one landing page. Make 1,000. Don’t summarize one customer interview. Summarize every customer interaction continuously. Don’t run one competitor analysis. Monitor the market in real time.

      This is where “workflow automation” feels too small and unimaginative. The opportunity is not to build faster, smaller machines - but to become a colony: a mixed population of humans, agents, bots, scripts, dashboards, workflows, alerts, memories and permissions, all sensing and acting through local signals.

      In the colony company - where are the pheromone trails?

    • Roy Tang ☛ On Generative AI and LLMs

      I wanted to have a post that I could point to when people ask why I don't use or like GenAI/LLMs. I had to restart this one a few times because it kept growing too long and full of links and I don't need that because many many people have already written many words about all the problems with GenAI.

      (Note: I dislike how the term "artifical intelligence" has been completely co-opted as a marketing term by these big companies. The field of artifical intelligence existed decades before the concept of large language models and generative AI. I always take the time to use the term "GenAI" were possible to be more precise.)

    • Martin Alderson ☛ xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

      An unexpected development over the past few weeks is xAI's new partnerships with Anthropic and Google, providing them with a huge amount of capacity. It's worth remembering that xAI is now part of SpaceX, after the two merged back in February - so the revenue from these deals flows straight into the entity about to go public. While much has been made of the potential financial engineering given SpaceX's upcoming IPO, I think there's a bit more to this than just pure accounting tricks.

    • Karl Bode ☛ Selling You The End Of The World

      AI sci-fi doomsday scenarios exist to misrepresent what modern software is capable of, and spook lawmakers into embracing terrible laws, written by rich and terrible men, that will free them from oversight, ethics, and accountability.

    • Henry Desroches ☛ It doesn’t matter if it works

      There are about a thousand and one debates about the ecology of AI, the ethics of AI, the governance of AI. As the technology advances, the debate with the slipperiest footing is on the actual efficacy of AI: does this work for this application? Or for this one? Ultimately, whether LLMs “work” as a technology or not doesn’t matter. The function of a system is its output, and no matter what utility individuals find in the tech, the widespread adoption and deployment should be considered and regarded firstly as a threat to the labor force.

    • Alberto Romero ☛ What Apple Knows About AI That Silicon Valley Won't Admit

      AI is like religion. Either you believe it changes everything, or you don’t believe at all. There is no moderate position; nobody believes in AGI “more or less,” just like nobody is “casually religious.” If God exists, the only coherent response is to reorganize your entire life around that fact, as priests do. If you pray sometimes, then you are just an atheist who’s also fearful. When tech companies spend hundreds of billions on capital expenditures to add sparkly AI features to Office, Gmail, and Instagram, I only see fearful atheists—guys who don’t believe in AI but pretend just in case.

    • University of Toronto ☛ Should we care any more about Googlebot crawling our sites?

      To echo what Paul Cantrell said on the Fediverse, we tolerated and even embraced Googlebot crawling our websites as part of a social bargain. Allowing Googlebot was a big part of how people found our sites and our work, which is to say through searches. That social bargain has been fading as Google put more and more things inline, but at least they were still providing links and directly showing our words (I know, usually).

      But now Google has said out loud that Googlebot is just the front end crawling ingester to an LLM system, much like all of the other LLM crawlers that are hammering our sites. Google is no longer in the search business, where they provide links to people; they're in the 'answers' business (which is to say, the probabilistic text generation business). Much as with HTTP requests from cloud provider IPs, this raises the question of whether we should care about allowing Googlebot to access our websites or whether it's now a source of undesired crawl load, or at least of no meaningful benefit to our sites.

    • Brett Kosinski ☛ Cannibalism | The “B” Ark

      It’s hard not to enjoy the bitter irony, here. The tech industry once revelled in disruption. Whether it was Uber wiping out the taxi industry, Amazon destroying traditional bookstores, or Spotify wiping out artist revenues, time and time again we’ve seen the Silicon Valley enrich themselves by disrupting an established market and then transforming into rent seekers.

      AI now threatens to do the same to countless professions. Everyone from writers to graphic designers to financial analysts can feel the wolf at the door.

      But this time things are a little different.

      This time it’s coming for tech first.

    • [Old] arXiv ☛ AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance

      People often optimize for long-term goals in collaboration: A mentor or companion doesn’t just answer questions, but also scaffolds learning, tracks progress, and prioritizes the other person’s growth over immediate results. In contrast, current AI systems are fundamentally short-sighted collaborators – optimized for providing instant and complete responses, without ever saying no (unless for safety reasons). What are the consequences of this dynamic? Here, through a series of randomized controlled trials on human-AI interactions (N=1,222), we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance. Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up. Notably, these effects emerge after only brief interactions with AI (∼10 minutes). These findings are particularly concerning because persistence is foundational to skill acquisition and is one of the strongest predictors of long-term learning. We posit that persistence is reduced because AI conditions people to expect immediate answers, thereby denying them the experience of working through challenges on their own. These results suggest the need for AI model development to prioritize scaffolding long-term competence alongside immediate task completion.

    • Josh Collinsworth ☛ LLMs and performative productivity

      That all sounds fantastic, of course. It felt fantastic.

      But when I got done with all that, I had to wonder: could I really call any of that productive?

      • At work, I didn’t understand the codebases I was working in, and though I was contributing to them, I gained no real context about them. I was opening PRs, but I couldn’t really defend what was in them, or say whether or not they worked with the system. I was constantly afraid I’d messed something up without realizing it [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • Bhaskar English ☛ Digital Fatigue: New Gen Opting Feature Phones | Avoiding Social Media

      Many Bollywood and Hollywood celebrities take digital detox from time to time. Some celebrities have even quit their social media accounts. Governments of several countries have made rules to limit screen time for students. Such initiatives are also happening in India. Karnataka has proposed limiting entertainment-related screen time to one hour per day for students. Meanwhile, the Sunday Unplug to Reconnect campaign has been launched in Chandigarh.

    • JURIST ☛ UK urges device controls to restrict children's access to nude images

      This would also extend beyond many existing child online safety measures, which generally focus on restricting access to websites, social media platforms, and online services. Countries including Australia have introduced age-based restrictions for social media and strengthened age-assurance requirements for adult content but have not proposed nationwide requirements that would prevent minors from accessing nude images across their devices.

      The proposal is part of the UK’s effort to address online harms affecting children. Earlier this year, the government announced plans to ban AI “nudification” tools that generate fake nude images of real people, and said it would work with technology companies on measures to make it harder for children to create, send, receive, or view nude images.

    • The Record ☛ UK gives big tech 3 months to create device controls to block nude images of kids

      The United Kingdom is giving Apple, Google and other big tech companies three months to create safeguards on smartphones and tablets that find and block nude images of children in an effort to disrupt the trafficking of the imagery.

      The companies “must activate built-in features or implement technical solutions on smartphones and tablets to detect and block nude images for children,” according to a press release from the Home Office. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the measure in a speech at London Tech Week Monday.

      The rules will apply to both existing and new smartphones and tablets, the press release said. If the tech firms fail to comply with the order, the government will introduce legislation to “force” them to act, the press release said.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Meta Says A.I.-assisted Account Hijackings Began in April

      It got worse again. That is a large number of accounts but, more notable to me, a long duration for this vulnerability to be live, from less than a month after the A.I. support bot launched until last week.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • The New Stack ☛ Microsoft's pitch to enterprises: Ditch Azure Repos for GitHub, despite its rocky reliability record

    GitHub hasn’t had an easy year. The platform has been hit by repeated outages affecting core services — including the Actions-based CI/CD pipelines that engineering teams depend on daily — and has had to issue public apologies as a result.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Meduza ☛ Russia’s surveillance expansion isn’t really about telecoms anymore — it’s about building a parallel ‘SORM’ inside every major company in the country

      In late May, the newspaper Kommersant published an article reporting on the “expansion of the list of data that telecom operators are required to collect and transmit to law enforcement agencies” through SORM.

      Journalists and the experts they consulted reached that conclusion after reviewing a recently published Digital Development Ministry order.

    • Futurism ☛ Meta Furious Over Bombshell Smart Glasses Revelation

      It’s true that NameTag remains unreleased. But if Meta were to launch it, the implications are likely to be enormous.

      “The feature is not yet exposed to consumers but seems nearly ready to go,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Threat Lab technologist Cooper Quintin, who reviewed the latent NameTag code, told Wired. “Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine.”

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Meta accuses NSO Group of defying spyware injunction, files contempt of court complaint

      The company won a civil case last year against NSO Group barring it from targeting WhatsApp users and securing $168 million in damages, although NSO Group has been appealing the ruling.

      But Meta says NSO Group, makers of the Pegasus spyware, isn’t honoring the permanent injunction.

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Meta declares war on Israeli spyware firm

      The company said its WhatsApp messaging service disrupted new spear-phishing attempts linked to NSO, an entity blacklisted by the US government for engaging in activities that are contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests.

      These attempts were similar to previous “1-click phishing campaigns”, aimed to trick users into clicking malicious links and direct them to external websites, Meta said in a blogpost.

    • The Record ☛ WhatsApp says NSO targeted users with spearfishing attacks in violation of court order

      WhatsApp is filing a federal court contempt order against NSO for violating the permanent injunction that bars it from mounting such attacks, the blog post said. NSO has been implicated in spyware abuses worldwide that have snooped on human rights activists, journalists and others.

      The alleged violations come after WhatsApp prevailed in a lawsuit against NSO stemming from its targeting of about 1,400 of the messaging app’s users with zero-click attacks in 2019.

    • The Record ☛ Russia upgrades rules for its digital spy system to better track citizens online

      Russia has spent decades building one of the world's most sophisticated digital surveillance systems. Now, the Kremlin is taking steps to make it faster, more automated and better integrated across the country's internet infrastructure.

      Known as SORM, the platform gives Russia's security and intelligence agencies access to telephone calls, internet traffic and other electronic communications passing through domestic networks.

    • Wired ☛ Meta Deletes Face-Recognition System From Its Smart Glasses App After WIRED Report

      The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Meta Removes Code It Added to Support Facial Recognition Feature That ‘Does Not Exist’

      Once again, the pugilistic but ultimately cowardly Meta communications team had no comment of substance for what is, despite their public protest, a worrisome feature that is clearly moving through development.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Canadian American Business Council on Bill C-22: It “Threatens Our Bilateral Partnership on Data Security”

      The Public Safety committee continues its clause-by-clause review of Bill C-22 this week, even as all the stakeholder briefs on lawful access have still not yet been distributed or published. Late last week, submissions from Apple and the Canadian American Business Council (CABC) were posted online. The Apple brief is well worth a read as it reiterates many of the points raised during its appearance before the committee and provides specific recommendations for reform. The CABC brief is noteworthy since the organization represents many of the largest companies on both sides of the border. And the view of business is unequivocal: the CABC states “We believe Bill C-22 raises fundamental privacy concerns, weakens encryption at a time when Canadians need it more than ever, and threatens our bilateral partnership on data security.”

      It proceeds to warn of the specific challenges on both sides of the border: [...]

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ Security Risks of Apple's AI Changing Your Passwords

      People ignore compromised-password warnings. They put them off because changing a password is annoying, the website hides the setting, the account asks for another verification step, or the user has 40 other warnings waiting behind it. A warning that never becomes action is not much of a control.

      But there is an important line between detecting a risky password and changing the credential that controls somebody’s account.

• Defence/Aggression

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ Mobilizing Ukraine for a long war

    This challenge is not unique to Ukraine. In a November 2023 interview, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, then commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, argued that Russia had failed to fully capitalize on its manpower advantage because Vladimir Putin feared that a general mobilization could trigger a domestic political crisis, and because Russia lacked the capacity to properly train and equip large numbers of additional troops. Zaluzhnyi also acknowledged a miscalculation of Russia’s threshold for casualties in a war of attrition. “That was my mistake,” he said. “Russia has lost at least 150,000 men. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war.”

    Ukraine faces a different version of the same problem. Russia can continue absorbing losses on a scale that would be politically destabilizing in many other countries. Ukraine, by contrast, must find ways to sustain mobilization while preserving public trust, combat effectiveness, and social cohesion.

  • The Atlantic ☛ A 100-Year-Old D-Day Survivor Reflects

    More than 80 years later, few men like Picard remain: those who participated in the boldest military operation of the 20th century and can lay claim to membership in the “greatest generation.” Less than 0.5 percent of the more than 16 million Americans who served in World War II are still alive. Before long, the great invasion of France that began on June 6, 1944—and the Second World War itself—will be recounted only in documentaries and books alongside other historic conflicts such as the First World War and the American Civil War. The immediacy of personal experience will vanish. But Picard, now 100 years old, can still recall the feel of the straw he stuffed into his mattress, the blast of a mine soon after he landed on Utah Beach, negotiations in French for the use of a château, and a friend’s death in a cold forest in Germany.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Trump administration swiftly moves ahead on plans to restrict voting by mail in the states

    Democrats and voting rights advocates oppose the directive as unconstitutional election meddling by Trump and have sued to stop him. The president, who has long attacked mail ballots but votes by mail himself, says the additional rules will fight noncitizen voting, a rare phenomenon.

    “No president has the authority to unilaterally rewrite election rules or dictate how states administer their elections,” Marcia Johnson, chief of activation and justice at the League of Women Voters, said in a statement last week. The League of Women Voters filed one of at least five lawsuits challenging the order.

  • US Navy Times ☛ Sailor charged with attempting to finance ISIS attack on US troops

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Friday arrested U.S. Navy Seaman Bareen Dzayee, 25, along with Bisaam Ghafoor, 21, and Elias Shamsaldeen, 21, for allegedly providing over $2,000 to an individual they believed to be an ISIS member.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Finland deploys new system to detect threats to undersea cables — distributed acoustic sensors measure vibrations from the seabed and informs the authorities and operators of suspicious activities

    Elisa, a Finnish telecommunications company, has installed detection equipment on its undersea cables to monitor the critical infrastructure. According to the company’s announcement, the system is based on Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), which turns the undersea cable into a long sensor that registers vibrations coming from the sea floor. The system has since been successfully tested, and it’s now being developed to automatically inform the Finnish Border Guard and the Finnish Navy, as well as the owner of the cable, of any irregularities.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Four suspects identified in Finland undersea cable damage investigation — criminal case referred to prosecutors for consideration of charges

    Finland's National Bureau of Investigation has concluded its criminal investigation into the damage to two undersea telecommunications cables in the Gulf of Finland on December 31st last year, identifying four suspects and referring the case to prosecutors for a decision on charges, according to a police statement. Investigators say the cargo ship Fitburg dragged its anchor across the seabed for several kilometers and severed cables owned by Finnish operators Elisa and Arelion Finland while sailing from St. Petersburg to the Israeli port of Haifa.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Exclusive: U.S. Secretly Deployed Paratroopers to Israel

    When the Pentagon announced that the 82nd Airborne was deploying to the Middle East in March, it concealed a key detail: some of the paratroopers were headed to Israel, as revealed in an Army deployment order I obtained.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Dissenter ☛ From Gaza To Lebanon: The Role That US Media Plays In War Crimes

    Andersen discusses the coverage of Gaza within the context of recent developments with the war in Iran and Lebanon. She recalls how the establishment press developed a narrative around the October 7th attack by Hamas that over the next two years helped facilitate the whitewashing of atrocities by Israel.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Storms Off After “Meet the Press” Host Asks for Proof of “Rigged” Races

    “Where’s the evidence to that?” Welker asked.

  • France24 ☛ Trump storms out of NBC interview after denying his own “No War” promises - Truth or Fake

    Donald Trump stormed off from his interview for NBC’s “Meet the Press," after he was fact-checked on his false claims about election fraud by reporter Kristen Welker. She also asked him about the Iran war, his controversial "anti-weaponization" fund and the cost of living, though Trump made a serious of false and exaggerated responses. He also denied having made campaign "promises" about starting any wars before walking out entirely.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ DOJ Remains Panicked about So-Called "Duplicative" Jeffrey Epstein Files

    In an Appropriations hearing that took place after Bondi’s interview but before its release, Madeleine Dean read the content of her hand transcription of an October 2009 email from Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer to the sex predator regarding what Trump Organization attorney Alan Garten had proffered Trump would say in lieu of a deposition (this is the same document Dan Goldman raised with Bondi in a hearing and then taunted Blanche about in February). In the publicly released version, the passage was entirely redacted as privileged.

• Environment

  • The Independent UK ☛ Data centers are booming. Here’s how they’re endangering communities across the US

    In the U.S., Virginia has more data centers than any other state – over 600, two-thirds of which are in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. In 2023, the state’s data centers consumed about 26% of Virginia’s total electricity supply – a higher share than in any other state.

    We study science communication, climate science and public health, so we wanted to understand how data centers in Virginia affect the people who live near them and the broader public.

    We found that the data centers that already exist affect nearby residents and the nation as a whole in five main areas: air quality, water quality, noise levels, land use and energy costs.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK data centres have among world's worst energy carbon footprints: UN study

    “Indonesia, India, and Hong Kong (SAR) are among the most carbon-intensive grids with carbon footprints 62%, 51%, and 43% higher than the global average, respectively. Poland and Mainland China rank lower with carbon intensities at 30% and 21% higher than the global average,” the UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health said in a report on Wednesday.

    In comparison, the carbon footprint of electricity in the US, Germany, and Italy is 18 per cent, 24 per cent, and 32 per cent below the global average, respectively.

  • The Revelator ☛ When the Butterflies Come Home Again

    How is a person supposed to think about that? How do you hold both truths at the same time — the horror and the hope? How can you accept the truth that destroys hope and at the same time hold the hope that may be the only route toward recovery?

  • Futurism ☛ Remember How Sucking Carbon Out of the Air Was Going to Save the Planet? We Have Terrible News

    Unfortunately, it seems like the strategy is already hitting a wall. A new report published this week found that ongoing carbon dioxide removal (CDR) efforts are barely putting a dent in the fight against global warming — and that for them to start making an impact, they would need to be scaled up at a rate that rivals the adoption of solar panels.

    In other words, we’re not doing it big enough, and we’re not doing it fast enough. And the longer we wait to get the ball rolling, the more carbon removal we’ll need to do to mitigate climate impacts.

  • Futurism ☛ Zoo Officials Horrified by AI Data Center Menacing Their Endangered Animals

    And it’s not just residents in rural America trying to keep out facilities, which have been linked to rising electricity prices, water issues, and copious amounts of noise. The Nashville Zoo in Tennessee has turned into the latest battleground, with officials arguing that a proposed 69,000-square-foot data center next door could be devastating to animals living in captivity a mere 50 yards away.

    As NBC News reports, Southeast Asian clouded leopards, which the zoo is breeding, could be particularly vulnerable. Zookeepers are concerned that the cacophony could stop the creatures from reproducing entirely.

  • MinnPost ☛ Warmer temps, more ticks: How to stay safe from Lyme disease

    Since 1995, the incidence of Lyme disease in the U.S. has almost doubled.

    Warmer weather and changes in rainfall patterns now allow ticks to survive in new regions of the country – and for longer periods. But even in regions where ticks lived before, Lyme disease has become more common due to increases in deer populations. As woodland areas are increasingly being developed, it may be bringing the habitat of deer and mice closer to people, increasing the risk of transmission.

  • Kentucky Lantern ☛ Some Kentucky counties and cities are hitting pause on data centers

    Residents’ passionate opposition to data centers in his county led the local government to enact in late May a moratorium preventing data center construction for the next 12 months. That opposition includes ongoing speculation by residents and a county commissioner over local land deals connected to a company that works on “energy and data center infrastructure” investments.

  • JURIST ☛ UN warns rapidly changing ocean putting future of humanity at risk

    According to the UN, “The coming decade is decisive: without rapid, coordinated global action, ocean health will continue to decline, threatening climate stability, biodiversity resilience, food security, livelihoods and the wellbeing of billions.”

    This warning is emphasized in the UN World Oceans Assessment, a 1600-page analysis created by scientists and experts from around the globe that details the human-inflicted challenges shouldered by the ocean. The UN stated that the findings of this scientific guide contain the knowledge humankind needs to protect the planet.

  • LabX Media Group ☛ Career Chat: A ‘Mathemafishan’ Uses Population Modeling to Prevent Overfishing

    A friend who was working as a scientist for the Queensland state government told Fox there was a math-related job opening and encouraged her to apply. “That was looking at fisheries, and I had no idea what a fishery even was,” Fox said. She hated it at first and felt intense imposter syndrome.

    After a couple of weeks of wanting to quit, Fox went to her boss to ‘confess.’ “I [said], ‘This is impossible. This is not my world. I don't belong here,’” she recalled. Her boss’s supportive response was a shock. “She [said], ‘Of course, you don't know any of this stuff. You literally just got here, and we know what your CV is, and we didn't hire you for your fish knowledge. We hired you for all these other reasons. Just keep going with it.’ And I think that was really important, because [it was] step one to conquering imposter syndrome.”

  • Western Water ☛ San Carlos Reservoir: Drought kills every fish

    This is not the first time the lake has suffered a total fish kill; the reservoir has crashed to near-empty levels roughly 20 times in its nearly century-long history.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ How can wave energy tech support the AI race?

      As part of these efforts, Eco Wave Power U.S. is advancing discussions relating to research and development collaborations with academic institutions, including Florida-based universities, as well as additional technology and infrastructure stakeholders. These initiatives are expected to focus on the integration of AI layers into wave energy infrastructure, including digital twin technologies, predictive maintenance systems, operational optimization, and future applications relating to renewable energy solutions for data center infrastructure.

      The company believes that “proximity-based renewable energy generation” near ports, coastal cities, and infrastructure hubs may become increasingly important as electricity demand from AI computing continues to grow.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Critical Zcash Vulnerability Found and Fixed

      It’s fixed; that’s the good news. The bad news is that there’s no way of knowing if anyone exploited the vulnerability to steal money. And this fragility is the fundamental problem that makes blockchain such a bad idea.

    • Robert Bryce ☛ The Iron Law Of Power Density, Revisited

      My August 13 article, “The Power Of Power Density,” is the second most popular article I have published here on Substack. The article struck a chord. Why? I suspect that lots of people want to have a better grasp of the physics that rule our energy and power systems.

    • Arduino ☛ Star Stream is bringing F1-level telemetry to every race team – and every fleet – with Arduino UNO Q

      In Baja, where connectivity doesn’t exist until Starlink makes it possible, the stakes are different but just as real. Mid-race, Star Stream’s system flagged a tire losing pressure and a fuel situation developing – the chase crew radioed the driver and co-driver in time to pull over and fix it before the tire went flat. At a recent NORA Rally, a voltage drop was caught early enough that the team switched to a backup alternator before any damage occurred. “We or the chase crew, mechanics, crew chief, can tell what’s going on with the car before the people that are in the car usually know what’s happening,” Hammel explains.

  • Overpopulation

    • Vox ☛ Smartphones broke dating. ChatGPT might finish the job.

      Humanity may be scrolling its way out of existence.

      Across the globe, fertility rates are plummeting. In 2023, the average number of births per woman worldwide fell beneath 2.1 — the minimum level necessary for averting population decline (also known as the “replacement rate”). And this collapse is not concentrated in just a handful of places; more than two-thirds of all nations now have below-replacement fertility.

    • New York Times ☛ Two New Studies Ask: Did the iPhone Cause Birthrates to Decline?

      Proving phones caused the decline is a tricky endeavor. There were a number of major events in those years, including the Great Recession, and isolating smartphone use is difficult.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Hindustan Times ☛ OpenAI filed confidentially for IPO as rivals race to market

    OpenAI reportedly missed certain internal revenue and user growth targets. Several key executives have departed or stepped back from their roles. And the company has been working to streamline its sprawling product lineup.

  • Futurism ☛ If You Think AI Companies Are Unethical Now, Wait Until They Go Public

    Of course, whether tech leaders will hold themselves accountable once their firms go public remains to be seen. But given the way the AI industry has already doubled down on generating as much money as possible, safety and the environment be damned, long before the imminent IPOs, it’s far from a guarantee.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Amazon inks multibillion-dollar optical manufacturing deal with Corning

    Corning is a major supplier of fiber-optic cables for data centers. It makes riser cables, which are used to link together the different floors of a data center, and plenum cables optimized for server rooms. The company’s cables ship with specialized jackets that don’t release toxic materials when they come into contact with a flame or water. That helps reduce safety risks in the event of data center malfunctions such as short circuits.

    The company also makes outdoor cables, which cloud providers can use to link together their data centers. The cables come in armored and dielectric versions. The armored variety is designed to reduce scratches, while dielectric cables can be placed near high-voltage power lines without the risk of electric inference.

  • New York Times ☛ OpenAI Files Confidentially for IPO as AI Companies Rush to Wall St.

    The company is a long way from being profitable, even after raising more than $180 billion since it was started in 2015. It pulled in more than $13 billion in revenue last year, but expects to spend $115 billion over the next four years. Revenue is rising from the sale of ads inside the consumer version of ChatGPT and the sale of various A.I. technologies to businesses and independent software developers.

  • The Record ☛ Armenia’s pro-Europe party wins election despite Russia-linked disinformation

    Pashinyan's Civil Contract party won nearly 50% of Sunday's vote, defeating the pro-Russian Strong Armenia party led by Russian-Armenian billionaire Samvel Karapetyan, which received around 23% of the vote.

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ The Golden Age of Literature Is Now: Some New Books (and Some Schadenfreude)

    It's not that the right in this era doesn't have books; they just don't have great books. The golden age is ours and it really is golden, a burst of new thinking and dreaming in the arts and sciences and social theory. They do have books. There's some macho genre fiction that is maybe not right-wing but is not exactly progressive either, some mainstream fiction in which women continue to be the untrustworthy little vixens we got to know so well in earlier eras, and right-wing nonfiction memoirs, and and some bestselling right-wing politics in the Bill O'Reilly Killing Everyone vein. It will be very interesting to see how JD Vance's forthcoming book about his newfound Catholicism is received in the wake of his single most memorable accomplishment: being told off by two popes in one season (and then, in defense of his administration's crimes against humanity, lecturing one of them on theology).

  • Site36 ☛ Bern's parliament calls for a ban on "Antifa" and "Black Bloc" - experts say it's barely enforceable

    The chances of the SVP-backed ban succeeding are considered low. In Switzerland, only al-Qaeda, Islamic State, and, more recently, Hamas are explicitly banned. The legal basis is Article 74 of the Intelligence Service Act, under which banning an organisation requires that it be concretely directed against internal or external security and that a corresponding United Nations resolution exists.

  • AdExchanger ☛ The W3C Is Making A Mistake About Measuring Advertising Effectiveness

    At a moment when advertisers face enormous pressure to justify spending and many publishers outside the largest platforms are struggling economically, industry standards bodies should be encouraging more rigorous causal measurement, not reinforcing decades of confusion between observational attribution and advertising effectiveness.

    The proposal is framed primarily as a privacy-preserving replacement for older forms of cross-site tracking and attribution in a post-cookie environment. But embedded within the specification is a much larger and more consequential assumption: that attribution systems are valid mechanisms for determining advertising effectiveness.

  • Don Marti ☛ Why no simulated attribution reports?

    One of the problems with the attribution cartel at W3C is, as Rick Bruner explains in The W3C Is Making A Mistake About Measuring Advertising Effectiveness, a “structural bias toward channels positioned closest to observable conversion activity, including search, retail media, retargeting and click-oriented social advertising.”

  • European Commission ☛ The EU Open Source Strategy

    The EU Open Source Strategy aims to strengthen Europe’s open digital ecosystems by supporting the development, scaling, deployment and long-term sustainability of open source technologies across both the public and private sectors.

    The strategy is embedded in the broader Communication on European Technological Sovereignty, part of the EU Digital Sovereignty Package, alongside initiatives such as the proposal for a Cloud and AI Development Act, the proposal for a Chips Act 2.0, and the Strategic Roadmap for Digitalisation and AI in Energy. Together, these initiatives aim to create a coherent framework for Europe’s digital infrastructure, strengthening resilience, competitiveness and strategic autonomy.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Meduza ☛ Kremlin tells Russian media to portray Pashinyan’s election win with under 50% as a ‘loss’

      Russia’s Presidential administration “recommended” that state and pro-Kremlin media emphasize in their coverage that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party received less than 50% of the vote. Meduza learned this from an employee at one of the major Kremlin-friendly outlets.

      Staff were told to frame the result as Pashinyan’s “loss” — and were specifically instructed to use that word. The Putin Administration’s domestic policy team also “recommended” highlighting violations committed during the election to “sow doubts about the legitimacy” of Pashinyan.

      According to Armenia’s Central Election Commission, Civil Contract received 49.81% of the vote. Pashinyan’s party won 61 of the 105 seats in parliament.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Tennessee Lookout ☛ Knox County votes to challenge Tennessee's book ban law after “Roots” removal

    Knox County Schools Superintendent Jon Rysewyk reversed the ban May 26, returning the 1976 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to shelves at seven KCS high schools effective immediately. But the law that forced the committee’s hand is still on the books. And Thursday night, the Knox County Board of Education voted 5-4 to tell the Tennessee General Assembly to fix it.

  • Techdirt ☛ NCOSE CEO Calls Porn A National Security Threat; Urges Federal Obscenity Prosecutions

    In totally sane and not-crazy anti-pornography activism news, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) considers online pornography a national security threat. This may be the stupidest thing NCOSE has ever claimed in its decades’ long fascistic fight against sexuality.

    The group’s president and chief executive officer, Marcel van der Watt, wrote for the Washington Times about cases of sexual exploitation that could potentially harm individuals who are a part of the military-industrial complex. However, he offers no clear example of such cases and simply relies on the organization’s standard talking points that all sexual expression is bad.

  • Michael Geist ☛ You Can’t Put the Toothpaste Back in the Tube: Why the Government’s Reported “Temporary” Plan for a Kids’ Social Media Ban Would Mean Mandated ID for Everyone

    The Globe and Mail reports today that the government will introduce online harms legislation this week that includes a ban on social media for kids under the age of 16. The ban will be framed as a “temporary” measure with the prospect that the can re-establish service after a new digital regulator certifies that they meet its safety standards. I’ve written extensively about why a ban on social media and AI chatbots is a bad policy idea, but it is essential to emphasize that this measure is unlikely to be “temporary.” An age-based ban will require everyone in the country to prove their age before posting a photo on Facebook or uploading a video on TikTok. This raises enormous privacy concerns and turns the government’s AI for All strategy into ID for All.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Techdirt ☛ Bari Weiss Asked 60 Minutes To Lie. Scott Pelley Had Already Done Plenty On His Own.

    Scott Pelley just gave an interview to the NY Times that reveals two damning things at once: Bari Weiss tried to get him to falsely describe a shooting victim as driving toward the officer who killed her — and Pelley had already bent over backwards to make protesters look as bad as possible before she even asked. That second part is the part most people are glossing over.

    To understand why none of this is surprising, you need to understand what Weiss has actually been doing at CBS. Indeed, we’ve covered a bit of the Bari Weissification of CBS News over the past few months. Remember, Weiss had no real reporting experience (she was a columnist, not a reporter) and zero broadcast experience. She was picked because, as my colleague Karl keeps reminding people, she’s mastered the ability to comfort the powerful by telling them exactly what they want to hear.

  • CPJ ☛ Journalist, press freedom advocate Cristian Herrera Nariño killed in northern Colombia

    Herrera was editor of the online news outlets Cúcuta al Rojo Vivo and Cúcuta Real and often reported on government corruption and criminal groups involved in extortion, kidnappings, drug trafficking and human smuggling in the border area. Herrera was also a board member of the Bogotá-based Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP) and worked as a part-time security consultant for the Cúcuta mayor.

  • CPJ ☛ Under Ghana’s President Mahama, near-total impunity for attacks on 17 journalists

    When Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama took office in January 2025, pledging to restore “an era of true media freedom,” journalists had reason to hope that attacks on the press would be taken more seriously than before.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Court House News ☛ Brice Cantrell, Plaintiff, v Nathan Day & Paige Michaud, Defendants : 2:24-cv-00246-SDN [PDF]

    ORDER ON DEFENDANTS’ MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT

    Plaintiff Brice Cantrell, proceeding pro se, sued Brunswick Police Officers Nathan Day and Paige Michaud (“Defendants”), asserting various violations of his constitutional rights.1 ECF No. 1. Defendants now move for summary judgment, contending there are no disputes of material fact and they are entitled to judgment in their favor. ECF No. 60. For the reasons that follow, Defendants’ motion is GRANTED IN PART and DENIED IN PART. Mr. Cantrell’s claim of First Amendment retaliatory arrest arising from the incident on the highway may proceed. All other claims against Defendants are dismissed.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Reforming Capitalism Is Not Enough

    Victorian Trades Hall is the oldest continuously operating trades hall in the world. And even before it was constructed, in 1856, the stonemasons and building workers of Melbourne downed their tools and marched for the eight-hour day — eight hours of labor, eight hours of recreation, and eight hours of rest. For a while, this city was the closest thing the nineteenth century had to a model of what an organized working class could wring out of capital.

    I mention it not to flatter you but because that slogan — eight, eight, and eight — is still relevant today. It wasn’t a basic reformist demand; it was a revolutionary claim about what a human life is for. And I want to argue that the whole socialist project is, in the end, a fight over that question.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ, partners urge EU to push Egypt on rights and press freedom reforms

    The Committee to Protect Journalists joined 14 other press freedom and human rights organizations on Monday, expressing concern over Egypt’s failure to show meaningful progress on human rights, democracy, or the rule of law, despite the European Union presenting such progress as a key condition of the €5 billion (US$5.75 billion) macro-financial assistance (MFA) package provided to the North African country.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Gamers make me embarrassed to be a gamer

    In short, if you were an insecure dork like this guy, 70% of the big games released can be played as a male character, and 22% of the time he's forced to play as a woman. There is a saying, "When someone is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression," and i think it appeals to this sort of person as well. Before Laufey was announced, he was already "suffering" through 1/5 games featuring a female-only protagonist, and he took that as "female protagonists being pretty much everywhere".

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ South Africa's leap to modern Wi-Fi has barely begun

    Just 0.2% of Wi-Fi connections in South Africa ran over the 6GHz band in the first quarter of 2026, according to Ookla. Across Africa as a whole the figure rounded to 0.0%, the lowest of any region measured. North America, by contrast, put 13.8% of its Wi-Fi traffic on 6GHz – a sixfold increase in two years.

  • RIPE ☛ Sustaining the Commons in an Age of Digital Sovereignty

    Digital sovereignty raises legitimate questions about dependency, resilience and control. It can strengthen the Internet when it builds capacity and meaningful choice. It becomes risky when it is pursued as control over the common layer that keeps the global Internet interoperable.

  • Hackaday ☛ News Sites Are Blocking Internet Archive Over AI Scraping Fears

    Incidentally there’s an ongoing petition over at SaveTheArchive.com which people can sign.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Variety ☛ Ex-DoJ Antitrust Attorneys Slam Live Nation-Ticketmaster Settlement

    Two former top antitrust attorneys at the U.S. Department of Justice who were central to its case against Live Nation and Ticketmaster had strong words for the department following its abrupt settlement with the company just one week after the trial — which saw the DOJ and over 30 states accusing the company of monopolistic business practices — began in March.

  • Kevin Renskers ☛ Loopwerk: Apple blames the DMA again

    Apple will do almost anything to protect their walled garden, and opening it up for competitors is the one thing they refuse to do, even when that’s exactly what Europe’s Digital Markets Act requires. The DMA is a law aimed at “gatekeepers”, the handful of companies so large that they effectively control how the rest of us access digital services. The whole point is to stop those gatekeepers from using their position to lock users in and shut competitors out. If Apple builds a feature, the law says it can’t be built in a way that only ever works inside Apple’s own ecosystem. That’s not an attack on Apple. That’s the entire reason the law exists.

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ AFM Sues Universal Music, Warner Music Over Suno & Udio Deals

      The major labels are anticipating big things, in terms of revenue and otherwise, from their Suno and Udio agreements. But according to a new AFM lawsuit, they’ve also “failed to share in the settlement proceeds and future revenue with those same artists whose music was copied” by the AI audio platforms.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Z-Library Lets People Run White-Label, Login-Only Pirate Mirrors

      In what's partly an effort to push back against domain seizures and blocking efforts, Z-Library has upgraded its mirror infrastructure. Users of the shadow library can now create custom-branded, login-only mirrors of the site, creating a network of stealthy, white-label pirate sites. Running a mirror site comes with costs and legal risk, but Z-Library offers to share a 20% cut of its donations as compensation.