Leftovers

• Vintage Everyday ☛ Photos of Judy Garland and Terry the Dog Posing Together in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939)

  Terry’s importance to the production was reflected in her pay. Her trainer earned about $125 per week for her work, more than some of the actors who played the Munchkins received.

• Robert Birming ☛ Don't wait for flow

  Or we can stop believing that flow is a prerequisite for creativity. It’s not. It’s nice to have, but not a necessity.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ Being “Good” at Things

  I think that’s true of so many things we do as humans: programming, design, writing, etc. If you want to be “good” at what you do, do the hard, little things that others gloss over. Do them consistently and well, with discipline and perseverance.

• Joel Chrono ☛ Posts I did not write in one go

  I am one of those who prefers to get something done in the span of a day or else whatever I publish will need way more work on my part, to make sure the tone stays consistent and the flow of what I write makes sense.

  I actually write most of these posts in a single big text file that I then copy paste to a final post.

  So, by looking at this text file, I have an idea of a few drafts that have been around for a very long time. Some are super long, and I decided to just talk about these ideas for once. Some are still definitely works I want to complete, but it may be months until that happens, I may as well share some of these.

• Bertrand Meyer ☛ Newsletter archive available

  I have been publishing my “Software Engineering newsletter” since October 2025. It normally comes out every Monday, although in practice the schedule is a bit more haphazard as I am not a Swiss clock, actually not a clock of any denomination (clocks are not lazy).

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • France24 ☛ World’s largest, deepest, oldest whale graveyard discovered in Indian Ocean

    Extrapolating from the number of bones they found, most of which were from beaked whales, the scientists estimated there could be more than 10 million carcasses across the area called the Diamantina Zone.

    The soft tissue and lipids inside that many carcasses "translates to roughly 6.7 million tonnes of sequestered carbon", Xiaotong Peng said.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Federal science agencies facing a ‘generational loss,’ nonprofit says

    “We’re talking about a generational loss here,” Stier told reporters during a press call last week. “This is not something that can be turned on and off like a light switch. We’re seeing the destruction of something that was invested in over 50 years, and it’s disappearing in the space of, so far, 18 months.”

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ New quantum code reduces errors by 1,000x with 8x fewer qubits

    Error correction is widely considered one of the key hurdles preventing today’s quantum computers from tackling commercially valuable problems at scale. While advances in qubit quality have steadily improved hardware performance, experts believe fault-tolerant systems will require robust error-correction schemes capable of suppressing errors faster than they accumulate.

  • Rlang ☛ Eleven Latin American Voices for Open Science: The New Cohort of Champions rOpenSci 2026

    We are very happy to introduce the new rOpenSci Champions. This group will experience the program and work in Spanish, allowing us to continue to strengthen the open science and research software development community in this language. We are excited about the projects they will develop, which address real challenges from different disciplines and territories in Latin America.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Respect the P v NP Problem

    There are two ways to look at the P v NP problem, as a formal mathematically defined conjecture as a Clay Millennium Prize Problem, and as the more intuitive notion that everything efficiently verifiable is efficiently computable and the implications that has on our ability to compute.

• Career/Education

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Everyone wants to think they're open‑minded. Here's why most people aren't

    By answering these big, existential questions, worldviews can help manage anxiety. Strong convictions help people get through the day. For example, belief in an afterlife can thwart fear of mortality because it denies that death is the end of existence.

    A lack of certainty, on the other hand, can allow existential anxiety to creep in.

    In 2022, my colleagues and I presented research participants with a list of existential topics and asked them to reflect on what they believed. We also asked them to rate how committed they were to their belief and how open they were to change.

  • Yle ☛ Finland must collect data on teachers to restore PISA rankings, Harvard professor says

    The Finnish education system's PISA scores have seen a steady but significant decline since the highs of the 2000s.

• Hardware

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ Mechanical Buttons, Not Touchscreens (a Design Mistake)

    Nicolas Magand beat me to it with his critique on on car dashboard and interior design. Especially in cars, the last two iterations of the new designs aggressively pushed the implementation of touchscreens. Many car brands such as Tesla or Cupra from SEAT seem to go all-in and simply jam an iPad-like into the cockpit and call it a day. The ugly screen that protrudes in a weird way from the dashboard not only looks out of place (that’s a polite way of saying bad) but also poses a treat to the safety of the driver and others as you take your eyes off the road to try and “press” something instead of controlling the AC with the help of haptic feedback.

  • Jeff Kaufman ☛ High Dynamic Range DIY Air Testing

    DIY testing of air cleaning is practical, and thoughtful experimental design can substitute for high-quality sensors including for evaluating air purifier setups that give >100,000x particle reductions.

  • Dan Q ☛ I Hate (Most) Keyboard ‘Fn’ Keys

    I don’t want any of these “special function keys. Occasionally, I suppose, I might need one2, but mostly I’d just like F1 through F12 to remain the multi-purpose, context-dependent keys that they have been since they first appeared in 1965.

    And so, because I don’t want to hold Fn every time I want to press an F-key for its intended purpose, I used the arcane shortcut Fn+Caps to “lock” the keyboard into “standard” mode, where multipurpose F-keys remain multipurpose F-keys unless I hold down the special magic button that transforms them into rarely-used single-purpose special function keys.

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ RSVPed Attending QWERTY! A Typewriter Festival

    Clicky-clack, we are bringing the typewriters back on Saturday, June 27, from 12 pm to 5 pm, in celebration of National Typewriter Day!

  • The Deep Dive ☛ OpenAI Locked Up 40% of Global RAM With No Obligation to Buy Any of It

    Samsung and SK Hynix together control roughly 78% of global DRAM production. A demand signal at that scale — even non-binding — reshaped manufacturer priorities, supply allocations, and pricing across the entire memory chain. Micron’s exit from consumer memory reflected how seriously the industry internalized the commitment.

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • Dedoimedo ☛ My brief encounter with Google Pixel 8 Pro

      Why on earth would you be reviewing a smartphone that is by now two years old, you be asking? And why not, I be answering. Having friends is a good thing. Having friends who want to buy themselves new hardware and are willing to loan you their old stuff so you can test it and write articles about is even better. This is why we're here, to see what gives. After all, Google's Pixel is probably as Android as you can get. Or is it?

      Today, I will try to show you my take on a high-end smartphone. True, I will be looking at older hardware, but Google intends to support this phone for a long time. Seven major upgrades, at least, which means we're looking at five more years of a fully relevant, fully up-to-date experience. Furthermore, the Pro model comes with fancy cameras, so you might like that angle, too. Lastly, you've already seen me cope with the latest Samsung and Fairphone devices. This will be a fresh third dimension to my Android tribulations. Commence.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Common Dreams ☛ More than 325 Organizations Affirm Support for Medicare for All

    Some D.C. insiders are urging members of Congress and health care advocates to think small and prioritize incremental health care tweaks. This letter is a clear warning that half-measures will not meet the scale of the health care crisis. As health care costs soar, affordability is top of mind for American families, and it's a particularly important kitchen table issue ahead of the 2026 midterms. The American people need, and demand, Medicare for All.

    The letter reads, in part: [...]

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Spectator AU ☛ Who really owns your iPhone? | The Spectator Australia

    Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Rent the man a spot on the river, and make him tick a box on a multi-thousand-word end-user licence agreement meaning that any fish he catches, ultimately, still belongs to you, and you stand to get very, very rich indeed.

    "We live in an age where stuff we think we own is, really, stuff to which we subscribe"

  • Macworld ☛ macOS 27 warning: Your Intel apps are nearly dead

    As each day goes by, we come closer and closer to the absolute end of Intel-based tech on the Mac. macOS Tahoe is the last version to have any support for Intel-based Macs (it’s only a few models, at that). Not only does macOS Golden Gate not support Intel-based Macs at all, but it also has a feature that warns that the clock is ticking for apps built specifically for Intel processors.

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

    • Privacy International ☛ Bad Vibes: AI coding tools and privacy issues

      We tested AI coding assistants by tasking an experienced developer with building a Matrix server, a messaging client, a health app, and a blogging site - finding that each project was riddled with hidden flaws ranging from broken cryptography, insecure data handling, and misleading outputs.

    • The Nation ☛ Gen Z’s Ability to Detect AI Is Far Lower Than You’d Expect

      What makes this ease of access more concerning: A majority of Americans are highly confident they can identify AI-generated images and videos, per the spring 2026 Yale Youth Poll. The experiment provided participants with two pairs of headshots: one pair from Adobe Stock and the other from single-sentence descriptive prompts on DeepMind’s publicly available Nano Banana 2.0.

      Expectedly, the most technologically literate subgroup of the poll (ages 18–34) overwhelmingly shared a confident belief that they were capable of detecting AI-generated content. But under this subsequent direct test, 80 percent of that demographic could identify AI images only 50 percent of the time.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ OpenAI: ‘Likely’ Chinese influence operation tried to use ChatGPT to stir debate on data centers

      In both cases, OpenAI said the operators “likely originated” in China. The anti-data center content was traced to an unnamed Chinese technology company that holds multiple contracts with regional Chinese governments, and both clusters used VPNs to evade restrictions, prompted ChatGPT in simplified Chinese and asked for both English and Chinese-language outputs, all while posing as Americans on social media platforms like X and YouTube.

    • The Verge ☛ Microsoft, like, totally gets why students are booing AI-pilled graduation speakers

      But in substance, the blog post is similar to the line of reasoning that have elicited the boos in the first place: that AI will reshape culture, labor, and relationships in ways we might not even understand yet. Smith also suggests graduates are more attuned to an AI-filled future, having grown up with technology and being more nimble to change.

    • W Evan Sheehan ☛ Everywhere Foist Upon Us

      When I began writing this, I intended to make the case that there is no responsible use of “AI”. I was motivated by three separate encounters in a single morning of people arguing that the path forward is to adopt “AI” and find a way to do so responsibly.123 In the course of writing, however, I discovered that my real disagreement with this position was that it is predicated on the belief that “AI” is here to stay, that it is inevitable.

    • Vincent Bernat ☛ Blogging with LLMs as a non-native speaker

      AI slop is invading the web. A recent story about disallowing LLM-generated submissions on Lobsters triggered a lot of debate. My personal worst offenders are LinkedIn articles with AI-generated images and uninspired articles filled with emojis from people trying to masquerade as experts on a subject they don’t care enough to write themselves. While I am unhappy about this situation, I rely on LLMs for grammar, copyediting, and translation. I don’t see this as a contradiction.

    • Tim Bray ☛ Long Links (AI-free)

      Now, let’s all take a couple of breaths and gingerly approach the A-word, namely “AI” (as understood in 2026). Which is occupying much more of my attention and cognition than I would like, and there are gems embedded in the flood; granted, sparsely but they still add up. I respect that many of you will have just fucking had it with that subject. So I shuffled that material off into Long Links (AI), which you can drop by (or not) as you please.

    • Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Report: Why Developers Use LLMs to Write Blog Posts

      After hitting a few too many AI-scented tech blogs, “Why are people doing this?!?” popped into my head. First, it was really just a cry of frustration. But then it shifted into a more curious “Why ARE people doing this?”

    • Busybee ☛ Code: On LLM-based programming

      First of all, to be clear, I am not in favor of LLM-based programming. My personal opinion is that LLMs are catastrophic to the environment and to the Internet as a whole (especially due to the added burden of every server being overwhelmed by the relentless AI-focused crawlers), and to the intelligence of the humans who wield them.

      However, in the current landscape, I have also found myself (begrudgingly) using them on occasion to a limited degree, and in the mind of some folks, this probably irrevocably taints my code. So I’d like to at least discuss my perspective on them.

    • Ava ☛ our workplace LLM mass delusion

      We have recurring house-wide meetings where groups are asked to show off their LLM projects. They register them, try them out for a couple months, and then come back presenting their results. I have attended all of these meetings so far, and there was not a single one that actually worked out. All projects ended with the conclusion that this isn't workable, that this isn't saving time, or that it over-complicates things. Hundreds of people, different teams, people enthusiastic about AI, all kinds of projects, and there wasn't a single success.

    • Techdirt ☛ CEOs Who Think AI Replaces Their Employees Are Just Bad CEOs

      In the last three months I’ve had people forward me four separate examples of a CEO losing his or her mind over AI. What’s been striking to me is the similarity in each case: It would be an “all hands” email in which the CEO talks up how amazing LLM tools are and saying that everyone in the company MUST start learning to use them immediately or they should look for a job elsewhere. Sometimes they talk about hiring “consultants” to come in and teach the team how to use the tools properly. Sometimes they are setting up “office hours” or internal “AI hackathons.”

    • Techdirt ☛ Meta Admits Its ‘AI’ Helped Hackers Compromise 20,000 Instagram Accounts

      Meta has subsequently confirmed the issues and outlined the full scope of the problem. In a data breach notice filed with Maine’s attorney general’s office late on Friday and noticed by Techcrunch, Meta notified at least 20,225 people that their accounts had been compromised, including 30 people in Maine.

  • Social Control Media

    • Spectator AU ☛ The real reason Keir Starmer is cracking down on social media

      I do not dispute that there is an almighty problem with kids accessing porn, and with ‘sextortion’ offences involving kids. I flinch at the idea that noticing that is having a moral panic. In general, I think flashing distraction boxes of nonsense are bad for developing brains, and perhaps not all that fantastic for fully grown ones. But my suspicion is that the device itself is the problem – and, even then, only because it has exposed the rottenness of the wider culture and concentrated it, as the sun is concentrated by a burning glass.

      Why is Labour – and the Tories for that matter – so bothered by social media? The direction of travel here offers one answer; banning kids from these apps means that adults will need ID to access them. That will enable the state to monitor adults using them, and what they say. All of this ‘what about the children’ feels like a convenient fig leaf to achieving that ultimate aim. Online anonymity can be a real pain, but it is also often the only way dissenters can safely speak out. Anyway, the crackdown is unlikely to work: kids will, as they have in Australia, find their way around the restrictions.

    • Stanford University ☛ How are Stanford students using social media?

      Sophomore year I found myself scrolling through social media during lunch, dinner, really anytime I had a free moment away from work. I remember defending myself to a friend. It is good to know what is Fizzin’. It is good to know what is on the ’gram. It was denial, really. I could no longer justify the hours lost to brainrot.

      This fall, I deleted Instagram and axed my YouTube history so its algorithms no longer recommend content. I started to notice the effects. Interactions felt intentional. Work felt productive and exciting.

    • RTL ☛ 'Prevent serious and irreparable harm': EU orders Meta to open WhatsApp to rival AI chatbots for free

      The European Commission, the EU's digital watchdog, said Meta will have to maintain access to competitors until Brussels wraps up its probe.

      "Today, we require Meta to restore access to WhatsApp for competing AI assistants while we investigate whether the restrictions may infringe EU competition rules," EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera said in a statement.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • LRT ☛ No sign of coordinated attack, Lithuanian authorities say after another cyber incident

      The compromised data also included information on the training qualifications of administrators from around 156 healthcare institutions, as well as technical system metadata.

    • Security Week ☛ New Windows Zero-Day Exploit 'RoguePlanet' Released

      The fresh zero-day exploit leads to local privilege escalation (LPE) by exploiting a race condition issue in Microsoft Defender, Nightmare Eclipse says.

      According to the researcher, the exploit initially led to remote code execution (RCE) by tricking a victim into opening a .vhd(x) file on a remote SMB server or into opening the SMB share.

    • Security Week ☛ Infostealers Turn Millions of Devices Into Credential Theft Machines

      Stealers are available on the underground ecosystem, often via malware-as-a-service (MaaS) and for hire at as little as $60 per month. During 2025, the most successful stealers, in order, were Lumma, Acreed, Rhadamanthys, Vidar, and StealC. However, this can change rapidly. During the first two months of 2026, Vidar rose from fourth place to dominate, accounting for more than 73% of all infected hosts and devices. Lumma, number one in 2025, accounts for just 1.1%

    • Bitdefender ☛ Why schools remain one of cybercriminals' favourite targets

      Schools on both sides of the Atlantic have been revealed in recent days to have been hit by hackers, reminding all of us that ransomware gangs see educational instituions as targets all year round.

      Evanston Township High School (ETHS), located approximately 14 miles north of Chicago, says it was hit by a ransomware attack on Sunday, June 7 2026.

    • Krebs On Security ☛ Who Runs the Ransomware Group ‘The Gentlemen?’

      A cybercrime group known as The Gentlemen has emerged as the second most active ransomware gang by victim count, rapidly attracting a talented pool of hackers through an aggressive recruitment strategy that promises affiliates 90 percent of any ransom paid by victims. This post examines clues pointing to a real life identity for the administrator of The Gentlemen ransomware group.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Linux Foundation's Site/Blog ☛ LF AI & Data Foundation Launches DocLang Specification Working Group to Advance an Open Standard for AI-Native Documents [Ed: Openwashing and promotion of slop by Microsoft front group]

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Bhaskar English ☛ Artemis III Mission: NASA Astronauts & Moon Program Updates

    NASA has named the crew for its next major lunar programme mission, Artemis III, but the astronauts will no longer land on the Moon as originally planned.

  • Hackaday ☛ NASA Announces Artemis III Crew And Ambitious Goals

    Although astronauts are by their nature the best of the best, the collected experience and knowledge of the Artemis III crew is truly incredible — and for good reason. This flight will be one of the most challenging and technically complex operations ever conducted in space, perhaps second only to the Apollo Moon landings themselves. In the most ambitious version of the plan, three spacecraft launched by three different booster rockets will conduct a carefully choreographed operation over the course of two weeks.

  • Futurism ☛ The Math on SpaceX's IPO Is Virtually Impossible

    According to Fortune‘s estimates, SpaceX would have to increase sales by a whopping 50 percent every year for a decade, something no company has even come close to achieving. By 2035, the company would be the same size as an entire industry made up of dozens of Fortune 500 members, according to the publication, over 50 percent bigger than the utilities sector or entertainment industry.

  • Futurism ☛ NASA's Next Moon Mission Is a Rube Goldberg Machine of Corporate Failure Points

    For one, the elephant in the room during this week’s announcement was an enormous explosion that recently rocked Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, the launch platform designed to deliver its Blue Moon lander to space. The thunderous May 28 mushroom cloud dealt significant damage to Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, leading to questions of whether it, and Blue Origin’s rocket, will be ready in time for Artemis 3. (NASA is also hoping to send an uncrewed Blue Moon lander to the Moon long before that as well.)

  • The Conversation ☛ Nasa names Artemis III crew, but a rocket explosion has thrown US Moon plans into turmoil

    There are two potential landers that could fly on their separate mission to then rendezvous with the Orion spacecraft; one made by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the other by Jeff Bezos’ firm Blue Origin. They will carry astronauts down to the Moon’s surface on subsequent missions.

    However, the timetable for Artemis III and the first mission to return astronauts to the lunar surface (Artemis IV) has been thrown into doubt by the recent explosion of a New Glenn rocket. This rocket is intended to launch Blue Origin’s lander, called Blue Moon.

• Security

  • LWN ☛ Open-source security is not a solo activity [Ed: Marketing person on Microsoft's payroll, without any technical experience, became "chief" of security... in the thing Microsoft is attacking!]

    Ginn is the executive director of the OpenJS Foundation...

  • LWN ☛ A loadable crypto module for FIPS certification

    Many organizations require US Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) certification of the crypto code they are running. The certification process is lengthy, but the bigger problem is that the way the crypto subsystem is built into the kernel makes the result unable to be reused across kernel updates. I have proposed a patch series that decouples the crypto subsystem into a standalone loadable module, allowing a certified crypto module to be reused with multiple kernels and, thus, requiring fewer lengthy recertification delays.

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Advancing Federated Identity in the Library Ecosystem

      Working across both the federation and library communities provides a useful vantage point. Both share a common goal: enabling researchers to access scholarly resources reliably, securely, and with appropriate respect for privacy.

      Federated identity infrastructure was designed to support exactly that. So why isn’t it used more frequently for library access? To explore this, I examined authentication patterns across publisher and aggregator environments.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • RFERL ☛ Russia Wants To Build a State-Run VPN. What Could Go Wrong?

      That's made Russian regulators, not to mention the country's powerful spy agencies, unhappy. Officials have sought to restrict or even criminalize the use of VPNs.

      Roskomnadzor, the agency that has spearheaded most of the Kremlin's efforts to clamp down on the Russian segment of the Internet, has reportedly come up with its own novel idea to tackle the problem: a government-run VPN.

    • Hindustan Times ☛ Facebook privacy settlement: 2nd payment coming in June; check eligibility, amount, key dates

      The first round of payments started going out in September 2025 to eligible users. In the first payout, average users received about $29 to $30 depending on usage and claim details. Out of around 250 million eligible users, only about 19 million people actually received payments in the first round, states Yahoo Finance. Around $169 million from the settlement was used for legal and administrative costs.

    • NYOB ☛ Secret scoring: Join the CRIF class action now!

      What is CRIF? Hardly anyone has heard of “CRIF GmbH” before. Yet this credit reference agency holds the personal data of millions of people in Austria. Extensive research by noyb confirms that its database contains details such as names, dates of birth and home addresses. CRIF uses this information to assign people a score between 250 and 700 upon request. However, CRIF has no financial information at all for a good 90% of the people in its database. For these individuals, the score is based solely on age, gender and addresses. It therefore has little to do with a person’s actual creditworthiness – that is, their ability and willingness to pay.

      In practice, however, the score often determines whether consumers are granted a contract. CRIF’s largest clients include mobile phone operators such as Magenta and Drei, banks such as Erste Bank and Santander, energy suppliers such as Verbund, online retailers such as Zalando, and the payment service provider Klarna.

      Ultimately, CRIF has established a kind of secret, private "registry" and credit scoring system that has the potential to have a massive impact on millions of people – mostly without any reliable data on the individual’s actual financial situation.

    • EFF ☛ The 702 Ultimatum: Warrant Requirement or Bust

      This is a serious proposition. The intelligence community can keep a useful national security surveillance tool if and only if they make FBI agents get a warrant signed by a judge before they sift through and read out private communications. A warrant requirement is not the only demand EFF has been making for changing Section 702, but it is the most important reform and it should happen before there is any more reauthorization of the policy.

      For too long, the FBI has been able to piggyback on a major national security tool as an unconstitutional backdoor way of reading Americans’ communications. 702 collects communications going to, from, or between people in other countries—including when they are contacted by people in the United States. Mass surveillance is just that—mass. It’s lacking any of the individualized suspicion that our legal system is based on.

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ Why OpenAI wants to turn ChatGPT into a super app

      Eight months later, OpenAI is preparing to launch a new super app, according to the Financial Times, confirming reports that first surfaced in March. A sign of the upheaval sweeping the generative AI market, the new platform would combine ChatGPT’s conversational interface with code-generation tools and AI agents. Those have become strategic priorities for the company as it seeks to drive revenue growth at a time when user growth is slowing and conversion rates to paid subscriptions remain limited.

    • Bertrand Meyer ☛ Q&A after ACM Webinar on Software Verification in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

      There was not enough time for all the questions that came up at the end.

    • Armin Ronacher ☛ Gaslighting Openness | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

      A lot of that battle today is manipulation of the narrative. Opinion makers on social media and in business circles increasingly frame access as irresponsibility. That is why the EU’s DMA matters, even if many people (including myself) reflexively hate EU regulation. Apple’s fight over delayed AI features in Europe is not about Brussels being annoying: it is about whether users can access their own devices and data. The phone is yours, the data is yours, yet Apple decides who may reach it and takes the agency away from you and then tries to make that sound like it is in your interest (supposedly it’s for your safety and security).

    • Cryptography Engineering ☛ The future of Siri, or: why private inference isn’t private enough

      Apple has since “expanded” PCC to encompass Google’s hardware as well. I will confess that I find the details of the new “expanded” PCC just a bit vague. It sounds a lot like Apple is primarily going to rely on Google’s existing confidential compute (running in Google datacenters) to process this data, but they’re bolting on a new layer of technical security to control which models are actually running. In any case: security experts can argue about whether this is good enough to keep Cozy Bear away from your data. What I will grant is that it’s probably good enough to keep Google and Apple from accessing your stuff, which is what most people are worried about in the first place.

      So why am I so nervous?

    • Futurism ☛ Sam Altman's Eyeball Scanning Company Now Laying Off Workers

      It’s main product is the Orb, a biometric ID device that scans irises in order to provide “proof of humanity” to clients. Basically, the idea goes, Orb is the only way to combat the growing risk of AI deepfakes and scams — a development which Altman, as chief executive of OpenAI, is coincidentally spearheading.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Push to install Flock Safety devices targeted L.A. agency, emails show

      Emails obtained by The Times show officials pushing the Bureau of Street Lighting to speed up installations of the Flock devices.

      Flock has been criticized for supplying data used to enable President Trump’s immigration crackdown. The company says it complies with a California law that limits what information can be shared with federal authorities.

    • BoingBoing ☛ The FCC wants to make burner phones illegal

      The ACLU's Jay Stanley told 404 Media that civil libertarians spent decades looking at authoritarian countries that require phone registration and "never thought that would happen here." The EFF's Cooper Quintin said scammers "will have no trouble creating fake documentation," while "they want to take away our ability to make an anonymous phone call."

      The proposal hits domestic violence survivors, journalists, and low-income people hardest.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Submission to the Standing Senate Committee on National Security, Defence and Veterans Affairs of Bill C-8

      In her testimony, Robertson testified that targeted recommendations were needed to address constitutional and cybersecurity deficits in the legislation.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Submission to the Standing Committee on National Security, Defence and Veterans Affairs of Bill C-8, An Act respecting cyber security, amending the Telecommunications Act and making consequential amendments to other Acts [PDF]

      1. A series of important amendments to Canadaʼs proposed cybersecurity legislation were made in the House of Commons SECU study earlier this year. However, as important as the recent amendments have been, this committee is now left with the irony that the most significant constitutional vulnerability in the legislation has continued to be left wide open: the imbalance between the billʼs privacy-impacted powers, and the contrasting absence of independent judicial oversight. As a result, this brief sets out targeted recommendations that would help establish a much stronger constitutional foundation for legislation that has the potential to guide the protection of Canadaʼs networks for decades to come.

      2. In January 2026, the House of Commons SECU committee voted to amend Bill C-8 to incorporate independent judicial authorization of orders issued by the Governor in Council or the Minister under the proposed sections 15.1 or 15.2 of the Telecommunications Act, and in respect of compelled secrecy orders. The amendments were nevertheless ruled out of scope after the studyʼs conclusion.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Nation ☛ Daniel Ellsberg vs. “Ordinary Insanity”

    When Ellsberg gave the 7,000 pages of the top-secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, he was risking the rest of his life in prison for exposing the official deceptions behind the Vietnam War. That brave act, causing him to be vilified and beloved, began his five decades of tireless antiwar efforts. Through it all, his main preoccupation continued to be reducing the risk of nuclear war.

  • New York Times ☛ Britain Is Weighing a Social Media Ban for Children. How Did It Get Here?

    Now, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government is weighing whether to introduce a ban on social media platforms for children under 16, as public opinion in Britain has coalesced around the idea that more needs to be done to keep children safe online.

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Azerbaijan bans TikTok and other social media apps in school

    The announcement came during a parliamentary discussion on the draft law on information, informatisation, and information protection on Monday.

    APA, a pro-government media outlet, wrote that during debate, Gurbanov stressed that as a ministry, they were trying ‘to introduce some restrictions in schools’.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Army mortar crews trade laptops for phone app

    Unlike the previous systems, the Mortar App runs on Android devices, allowing soldiers to download it onto smartphones and tablets instead of relying on laptops.

    The Army’s existing tools — the Mortar Fire Control Software and the Lightweight Handheld Mortar Ballistics Computer — entered service in 2003 and 2004, respectively.

  • The Register UK ☛ Troops’ phones leaked location data to foreign adversaries

    As for how exactly data brokers got access to the data that allowed adversaries to locate troops and their movements, they got it from the same sources as anyone else buying data from a commercial broker: Smartphone advertising profiles.

  • [Old] Business Insider ☛ US Army: How Cellphones Can Get You Killed on the Modern Battlefield

    Taylor compared the dangers posed by cellphones to that of cigarette smoking during World War II, when the spark of a match or the glow of a cigarette could help snipers pick out enemy targets.

    "The cellphone is the new cigarette in the foxhole," Taylor said.

  • The Washington Times ☛ The danger of digital footprints: How ‘ubiquitous technical surveillance’ threatens U.S. military

    Those elite units, such as the famed Delta Force and Navy SEALs, conduct the most complex and dangerous missions on the planet. And their commanders are well aware of the risks of modern digital surveillance.

    “We now fight in a space of pervasive surveillance, a ubiquitous information environment driven by technical surveillance. Exquisite information is no longer the guarded property of governments or of the state. It is increasingly crowdsourced, exploitable and available to anyone with the will to look,” Adm. Bradley said in a May 19 keynote address to the Special Operations Forces Week convention here.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Navy veteran arrested for alleged plot to support ISIS

    “Over [the] years, the individuals communicated about several plans to support ISIS, including through the provision of personnel, services, and money,” the complaint says. “Through chats, voice calls, and multiple messaging platforms, these conspirators pledged allegiance or ‘Bayat’ to ISIS and its leader.”

    The FBI identified all three men after they allegedly made social media posts in support of ISIS, the complaint says.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • [Old] Hindustan Times ☛ Trump's oral sex allegations to Bill Gates STD: 5 key takeaways from new Epstein files

    The latest trove, published after the DOJ missed a legally mandated deadline, includes records naming several powerful figures, while repeatedly cautioning that many claims are unverified or disputed, according to ABC News and the BBC.

    Here are five key takeaways from what the newly released Epstein files contain.

  • Common Dreams ☛ New Website Tracks AI Dark Money Campaign Spending

    Leading the Future is poised to spend tens of millions of dollars on elections to kill regulatory safeguards for AI. They are doing this by spending money to support anti-AI safeguard candidates and attacking pro-AI safeguard candidates. AI Money Watch uses public FEC filings to show how much Leading the Future is spending on elections across the nation and lets Americans spread the word on X and Instagram. The website also flags which candidates have been endorsed by Leading the Future.

  • International Business Times ☛ 'Predilection for Nipples': The Epstein File Claim About Trump That the White House Buried

    Ransome wrote that the injuries looked severe. 'They looked incredibly painful as they were red and swollen and I remember wincing when I looked at them,' she stated in the disclosed documents.

  • RIPE ☛ What We Learned from a Multi-Service Vulnerability Disclosure

    The reported issues fell into three broad categories: Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), and overly permissive Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) records. Taken individually, each had a different impact and required a different remediation. What made them significant was the way they could be combined.

  • Futurism ☛ Investigators Questioning Bill Gates Over Ties to Jeffrey Epstein

    But the close ties between the two, particularly when it comes to Gates’ philanthropic efforts, are hard to ignore. Epstein offered to raise money in cooperation with the Gates Foundation, recently revealed email exchanges dating back to 2011 show. He also met with several top foundation executives, but never ended up collaborating. (That all happened long after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for sex crimes involving a minor, charges that Gates and his team could have found on Google.)

  • The Nation ☛ How Jared Kushner Sparked a Political Crisis in Albania

    Dozens of protesters gathered at a scenic lagoon outside the Albanian coastal city of Vlore on May 23 to oppose the development of a luxury resort by an international consortium led by Jared Kushner. The demonstration received scant attention from Albania’s media establishment, which is controlled by many of the same oligarchic forces that support the Kushner project.

• Environment

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Farmers in a national park are turning down lights at night to help wildlife. It could be good for crops too

    The initiative is about ensuring that lighting is used in the right place, at the right time and at the appropriate intensity. This might involve installing downward-facing fixtures, reducing glare through shielding, or switching to warmer-colored lighting that is less disruptive to wildlife.

    The best places to start trying to reduce bright nighttime lights are those rich in wildlife, and farms in the park are often in the darkest areas.

  • TechRadar ☛ Texas farmer donated land for children decades ago but City officials quietly sold the land for massive data center construction

    Public records later showed the property passing through multiple nonprofit and municipal entities before eventually reaching the City of Taylor in 2003.

    Five years later, city authorities transferred ownership to the Taylor Economic Development Corporation for approximately $15,000, substantially changing the property’s administrative direction afterward.

    The controversy intensified in 2025 after the Taylor Economic Development Corporation sold the same property to developer Blueprint for $10 million.

  • Gizmodo ☛ A Farmer Donated Land for a Public Park and the City Sold It to a Data Center Developer for $10 Million

    As reported by 404 Media, the City of Taylor, Texas, paid a paltry $10 in 1999 to accept a donation of almost 88 acres from the Bland family farm. According to documents reviewed by 404, the conditional language in the original deed granted the land to the “Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation, a Texas non-profit corporation, to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas.”

  • Inside Towers ☛ Monterey Park, CA Voters Back Permanent Data Center Ban

    The proposed facility by HMC StratCap, an Australian-owned investment firm, was expected to generate $5–7 million annually in tax revenue and serve as an anchor tenant for a largely vacant business park, according to the Times. Despite support from some union workers, the City Council unanimously opposed the project and placed the measure on the ballot. HMC StratCap later withdrew its proposal.

  • Overpopulation ☛ Partha Dasgupta’s new book is a must read

    Dasgupta is one of very few economists who pay sufficient attention to nature (the biosphere) and human numbers as key factors in a sustainable economy. Praised by both Paul Ehrlich and David Attenborough, how does he describe a sustainable economy and sustainable development?

  • The State of Michigan ☛ MI Healthy Climate Plan

    The MI Healthy Climate Plan lays out a pathway for Michigan to reach 100% carbon neutrality by 2050 to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis, create good-paying jobs, and build a healthier and more prosperous, equitable, and sustainable Michigan for all Michiganders. It has seven objectives: [...]

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Donald Trump Is Accidentally Speeding the Green Transition

    It follows that this clean energy transition will entail job losses for coal miners and all other workers now employed in the oil, coal, and natural gas industries, in the United States and everywhere else. But what Trump and his minions ignore is that the investments to build the new clean energy infrastructure will create far more jobs than the jobs that will be lost through phasing out fossil fuels. Moreover, any Green New Deal program worthy of the name will include generous transition provisions for the fossil fuel industry dependent workers whose jobs will be phased out.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Farmer donates land for a park, city sells it for data center development — $10 gift became $10M for city government, with $30M tax expected over next decade

    To introduce this case, let’s go back to 1999, when the $10 deed was inked. For some background, 404 Media talked to long-time local Pamela Griffin, who used to play on the farmland, and watched her children grow up and enjoy the same freedom. Griffin recalled that old farmer Mr. Bland used to talk to her father from time to time. According to her, Bland once said to her dad, “I see the kids don’t really have nowhere to play.” He continued, “I’m thinking about giving this land for parkland because these kids need somewhere to play.” The original July 1999 deed has since been unearthed, and the farmer did indeed follow through with his words. Now, let’s make the following chain of events simple using a bullet point timeline: [...]

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Register UK ☛ Datacenter growth may run into a power wall by 2030

      The research giant expects global datacenter electricity consumption to reach 565 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2026, as power demand rises from 104 GW in 2025 to 132 GW this year.

      This is higher than the 500 TWh per year Gartner estimated two years ago that AI-optimized servers would consume by 2027.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ US firm makes history, flies electric plane using solid-state batteries

      The aircraft, previously equipped with lithium-ion batteries rated at 260 Wh/kg, was reconfigured to run on solid-state batteries delivering 410 Wh/kg.

      According to the organization, these new cells are smaller than typical lithium-ion packs used in modern electric vehicles yet provide 60 to 80 percent greater energy density.

    • Hackaday ☛ Safely Using Old EV Batteries In Your Home Solar Setup

      The referenced Battery Emulator project is an open source effort to create a suitable interface between these EV batteries, with the mentioned Nissan Leaf being just one example in the project Wiki, with the connection scheme shown in the top image. It’s also noted that the Leaf battery BMS is not designed to operate continuously, so they need to be restarted every day or so lest they become too inaccurate.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Driving in America Is Headlight Hell

      Other people’s lights are a pet peeve nearly as old as the automobile: Everyone’s beams are too bright, too aggressive, and purposefully pointed into your eyes. But the problem really is worse than ever, and that’s because of the LED headlights that have taken over car design during the past decade or so. Not only can they crank out more lumens than the halogen lamps of old; their light is also sharper and bluer, which makes it feel like an assault on the eyeballs. Car companies have an incentive to install bright headlights that make drivers think Oh man, you can see everything, Jonathan Elfalan, the director of vehicle testing at Edmunds, told me. The wincing driver in the opposite lane isn’t their problem.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ The key to grid-wide resilience: end-to-end layers of automation

      To achieve true resilience, it’s necessary to take a holistic approach, treating the entire distribution grid as a unified system, from the substation to the grid edge. Operating from this perspective, utilities can devise comprehensive resilience schemes comprising layers of area-specific solutions that work together to achieve grid-wide goals.

      On the product level, resilience starts with automation technology. Solutions that can rapidly isolate faults and quickly restore power to surrounding areas will immediately transform aging distribution infrastructure into modern, agile distribution systems.

  • Overpopulation

    • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘I fear people will go to war over water’: as wells run dry, farmers struggle to survive in Bangladesh

      But now, the aquifers that fuelled that transformation are collapsing under the combined pressure of the climate emergency, erratic rainfall and decades of intensive extraction. Recent studies show that more than 82% of the region is already under serious water stress.

      “We have to place pipes deeper underground than before,” says Ataur Rahman, a 48-year-old farmer whose family has cultivated the same land for generations. “Even after going deeper, we still don’t get water like we used to.”

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Pope Leo says Christians cannot promote war

    "We cannot believe in Jesus and promote war. We cannot believe in Jesus and kill the innocent," the pope said in front of thousands of worshippers including Spanish King Felipe VI and his wife Queen Letizia.

    Leo has labelled "outdated" the concept of a "just war" put forward by Washington in the context of the war against Iran initiated by the US and Israel.

  • Let's Encrypt ☛ Let’s Encrypt Subscriber Agreement [PDF]

    • You are not a person or entity that is: (a) located in, organized under the laws of, or ordinarily resident in any country or territory that is the target of comprehensive U.S. sanctions; (b) a prohibited or restricted party under U.S. or other applicable sanctions and export control laws and regulations; or (c) owned or controlled by or acting on behalf of anyone described in (a) or (b). You agree to use Let’s Encrypt Certificates and any services provided by or on behalf of ISRG in compliance with applicable U.S. export control and sanctions laws and regulations.

  • Wired ☛ The UK Is Betting on a Billion-Dollar AI Supercomputer to Kick Its Addiction to US Tech

    Under the measures, announced Monday, the UK will spend more than $1 billion on a national AI supercomputer. It will be stocked with $530 million worth of hardware, including $200 million that will go toward specialist inference chips for processing AI tasks. Priority will be given to up-and-coming British firms in the procurement process; the government pointed to Olix and Fractile, two UK startups developing new styles of inference chip, as potential beneficiaries. British researchers and startups are expected to be able to use the supercomputer starting in 2030.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ It's not enough to have better ideals.

    Although pro-social values are important, it’s never enough to build something that is ideologically better. We need to build tools that are practically better for people today, based on people’s actual needs. “Twitter but decentralized” is not a particularly useful idea. You need to figure out who you’re going to help first, get to know them, understand what is painful for them, and solve that pain.

    Extractive networks have literally brought down democracies and enabled genocides, so we know we need software that encodes better ideals — but to most individuals, those ideals alone are vitamins at best. If your project has better ideals but the experience of using your software compared to the incumbents is the same or worse, you’ll only attract the most dedicated idealists. To attract more, you need to both provide better ideals and solve a real need better than the alternatives.

  • RFERL ☛ EU Considering Sanctions On Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Chess Federation Chief, Others

    That has helped fuel a schism between the Russian church and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which formally broke away from oversight by the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian church.

    Kirill also reportedly worked for Soviet intelligence agencies, according to declassified Swiss documents.

    The EU document said Kirill “consistently justified and supported Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine,” calling it “sacred.”

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ Climate Mis/Disinformation Is Meant to Stall Action: CAAD

      And the more false information spreads, the more easily decision-makers may be able to justify not taking action, explained Philip Newell, communications co-chair for Climate Action Against Disinformation, at a June 4 webinar hosted by the Toronto Public Library.

      The goal for those spreading the fake news: Keep climate change feeling like a debate, rather than a consensus.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Guardian UK ☛ UFC champion says he has been banned from White House fight over criticisms of Trump

    When a fan had earlier asked for specifics on why he had been excluded, Strickland replied: “I made fun of Israel and Epstein.”

    In a subsequent post on X, he went further: “The only male American champ banned at the White House because I said Trump is owned by [Benjamin Netanyahu]. That’s not public opinion, it’s fact.”

  • ANF News ☛ Brother of Kurdish protester killed in “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” uprising sentenced to six years in prison

    He was arrested for a second time on 20 May 2024, after publishing a post on his personal Instagram page about the death of Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s former president and a member of the “death committee” in the 1980s.

  • RFERL ☛ Taliban Forces Fire On Afghan Women Protesting New Restrictions

    In a directive issued last week, the Taliban prohibited women from appearing in public without what they described as a “proper hijab,” or Islamic head scarf.

    Women who failed to comply with the Islamic dress code, including those showing their faces or wearing makeup -- would face punitive measures, according to the directive.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ To build the future, we need theories of change

    The world won’t stay the same. Journalism isn’t staying the same. In addition to the rapid change in the platforms we depend on, trust is declining; engagement is declining; for many newsrooms, revenue is declining. A bet on the present is not a winning one. So we need to reach further.

  • BIA Net ☛ Two Kurdish journalists acquitted over reporting on Öcalan, one sentenced

    The İstanbul 25th Heavy Penal Court court sentenced Alayumat to one year and three months in prison for "making propaganda for a terrorist organization," but suspended the execution of the sentence. The journalists did not attend the hearing, where their defense lawyers were present.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Why Republicans Aren’t Condemning Trump’s Meet the Press Walkout

    Welker permitted these wild lies to go unchallenged for nearly two minutes before she noted that he had no evidence for these claims, and that many of the criminals pardoned by Trump had pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers during the Capitol riot. The brief interjection of reality into Trump’s fantastical diatribe appears to have angered him. He began shouting that FBI agents on January 6 had ushered people into the Capitol. Welker gently noted that he had no evidence for that claim either.

    [...]

    Welker, by then recognizing that Trump was evading her attempts to clear up his stance on the fund, noted that he lacked any basis for his accusations about the L.A. election.

    “Do you have evidence?” she asked.

    “All I have to do is look,” he replied.

    “But sir, that’s not evidence,” Welker responded.

    At this point, Trump flew off the handle, spewing a series of insults against Welker and the news media and then walking off the set.

  • JURIST ☛ Press freedom groups concerned over human rights in Egypt

    As part of the elevation of the EU-Egypt relationship to a Strategic and Comprehensive Partnership in March 2024, the EU pledged €5 billion in financial assistance. According to the CPJ, one of the main conditions attached to the funding was for Egypt to make progress on key human rights issues. This period of EU-Egypt relations has been described quite positively, but the rights groups emphasize that “Unless the EU and Member States press Egypt to improve its human rights situation, that ‘golden age’ risks becoming one of deepening repression and instability.”

    The CPJ letter stresses the ongoing “systematic and widespread” use of enforced disappeared and torture, as well arbitrary detentions in “abysmal conditions,” including 18 journalists being imprisoned in 2025. These tactics have also affected human rights defenders, scholars, minorities, and peaceful opposition leaders.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Democrats push SSA on reported DOGE [sic] plan to ‘kill off’ living individuals in database

    Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal want answers from the Social Security Administration chief following a whistleblower complaint that revealed a DOGE [sic] plan to target undocumented immigrants by moving 2.7 million living people to the agency’s Death Master File.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ The Man Who Created a Written Language for the Cherokee Did It So Efficiently and Elegantly, His Peers Thought It Was Magic

    At first, they laughed. Then they scoffed. Finally, they accused him of witchcraft. The Cherokee silversmith named Sequoyah had spent years scratching strange marks on paper. In 1821, his fellow tribespeople, disturbed by his obsession, put him on trial for practicing black magic. Sequoyah insisted his invention would allow Cherokee speakers to write out Iroquoian language for the first time. To test his claim, tribal elders ordered Sequoyah’s young daughter, Ayoka, to another room. Father and daughter separately made marks on paper and told their minders in each room what the marks said. Then the papers were exchanged. When each was able to read the other’s messages aloud, suspicion turned to wonder.

    The astonished elders immediately asked him to teach them his revolutionary transcription method. Within six months, one in four Cherokee, or Tsalagi, could read and write. Within a quarter-century, Cherokee people had achieved a higher rate of literacy than the country’s non-Native population.

  • Wired ☛ Wrongful Arrest Exposes Failures in One of the Oldest Police Face-Recognition Tools in the US

    The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the suit, says Dillon was arrested at his home in front of his wife, held overnight in a cold cell, and transported in a caged, unlit van. He pledged the title to his truck to make bond. The arrest came during peak stone crab season, causing him to fall behind on rent and nearly lose his home. His mug shot stayed online for nearly a year, removed from the county website only after a TV reporter intervened.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ How DOJ Threw a Crock of Shit because Kat Abughazaleh Complained about Being Run Over

    But the grand jury transcripts also back something that had been the subject of litigation throughout this case: how DOJ came to charge just the 6 people they did, who were in no way the most threatening people involved in blocking a car entering Broadview on September 26 of last year, but who were, instead, political figures who had condemned Broadview specifically and Trump’s immigration policies more generally.

    Here’s how Kat Abughazaleh described the selectivity with which DOJ charged the case in a motion for a Bill of Particulars: [...]

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Trump administration swiftly moves ahead on plans to restrict voting by mail in the states

    The order could carry major consequences for the midterm elections. Any new restrictions on mail ballots would risk disrupting how tens of millions of voters cast their ballots. About 30% of voters cast mail ballots in 2024, according to data gathered by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

    But despite several legal challenges, the order remains in effect.

    A federal judge in Washington, D.C., in late May ruled against a request by Democratic groups to pause the order, finding that it was too soon to weigh in because federal officials hadn’t taken enough action yet. A second judge in Massachusetts held a hearing last week, but didn’t immediately issue a decision.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Congress Must Act Now to Protect Social Security—Make the Wealthy Pay Their Fair Share

    “The right solution is simple, has broad support from the majority of Americans, and would fix Social Security's finances for the next 75 years. Today the wealthiest Americans benefit from a loophole that lets them stop paying Social Security tax after the first $184,500 they earn while the rest of us pay on every dollar we make.

    “This loophole is indefensible. Millionaires and billionaires should pay into Social Security at the same rate as everyone else. Closing this loophole would mean a strong, solvent Social Security for the next 75 years.”

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • PC World ☛ Windows Secure Boot deadline won't brick your PC, but don't ignore it

    Nevertheless, there are certain restrictions that will apply after June to all systems that haven’t updated Secure Boot. For example, your system will no longer be able to download new DBX blacklists (these contain the signatures of faulty or dangerous bootloaders that could harm your system and are therefore blocked by Windows).

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ Warner Music Buys AI Attribution and Monetization Platform Sureel

      WMG formally disclosed the Sureel purchase this morning – albeit without shedding light on the hard numbers behind the transaction. Founded in 2022 by former Snowcrash CTO Tamay Aykut, Palo Alto-based Sureel bills itself as today’s “attribution layer for generative AI models.”

    • Walled Culture ☛ Spain’s Net blocks have a flimsy legal basis, and lack both oversight and accountability

      But even if it does, there is already another disproportionately heavy-handed attempt to enforce copyright up and running in the shape of Italy’s Piracy Shield. It works by blocking access to unauthorised material using court orders against Internet Service Providers (ISPs). That would clearly be problematic, even if it were implemented properly, and well run. It is neither, as academic research from the end of last year underlined. Since the massive extension of its powers a year ago, things have gone relatively quiet on the Piracy Shield front in terms of new developments, and there are no signs that the Italian government has taken the many criticisms to heart.

    • The Verge ☛ Google won’t just admit it’s feeding YouTube creators to its music AI

      This is standard hedging for a legal filing: “you can’t prove we did it, and even if we did, we’re allowed to.” When asked directly if Google was using YouTube videos to train its Lyria 3 AI music model, the company declined to comment. But based on past public statements, it seems safe to assume the answer is yes.

    • Press Gazette ☛ Biggest news websites in the world for 2026 (any language)

      Indian Express posted the third-biggest decline in traffic year on year, down 40% to 88.9 million.

      Eight of the 13 US sites in the top 50 saw traffic decline both month on month and year on year. Google traffic has declined at a faster rate in the US compared to European publishers as AI Mode and AI Overviews were rolled out earlier there, causing the effects to appear sooner.

    • Press Gazette ☛ US publishers tell Common Crawl to stop scraping and delete archive

      The database has been widely used to train major AI models, proving controversial because it gave them access to swathes of publisher articles including, allegedly, paywalled content.

      Its CCBot is now one of the most blocked AI scrapers by many news websites who do not see the value exchange in allowing their content to be crawled.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Filmmakers and ISP WOW! Settle Piracy Liability Lawsuit Before Trial

      The long-running piracy liability lawsuit between filmmakers and internet provider WOW! has ended with a quiet settlement. In late March, a Colorado federal court refused to resolve the ISP's safe harbor defense on summary judgment. Instead of going to trial, both sides walked away. The settlement follows the Supreme Court's Cox decision, which had reshaped secondary liability earlier this year.