Leftovers

• Tracy Durnell ☛ To buy or not to buy: making our selves through our homes (Part 8)

  Home improvement and decoration within my means still requires constant self-control because it means standing strong against the current of consumerism and my own taste gap between what I have and what I could have. And embedded in that having gap, the fear of another gap, a gap of being: what I am, and what I could be.

• Stewart C Russell ☛ New font: nic7pin

  A rendering of a 7-pin dot matrix font, as used by the Epson MX-70 reduced-cost printer from the mid-1980s.

• Robin D Otis ☛ Robin's NearlyFreeSpeech No More

  The account within my profile was created on 2006-08-12. My actual profile has probably been around a few weeks longer. In any case it's two decades old and therefore one of my oldest accounts on the web. My yahoo account will be older, but I can't think of any others.

• Dan Q ☛ Remembering the 90s Web

  This morning I had a lovely meeting with Andreas Marakis, who’s researching the sociological impact of the Web of the 1990s on people who experienced it first-hand.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Young people’s computer programs get data from space

    Yesterday, Astro Pi teams and their mentors received their official certificates and data — the final stage of this year’s challenge. On each certificate, participants can see the exact time and the location of the ISS when their program was run.

  • Hackaday ☛ Mechanical Stability For Your Coils

    If you work with radio, the chances are that before too long you’ll be winding an inductor. At radio frequencies these won’t be big chunky transformer style chokes, but often air-cored affairs supported by their own rigidity. As grizzled old radio amateurs will tell you though, relying on such a coil for stability is a fool’s errand. It will shift inductance from the slightest movement, thermal expansion, or even sound. Luckily [SolderSmoke] is here to remind us of the trusty fix, in the form of Q-dope, or a polystyrene solution that dries to form a rigid low-dielectric coating.

  • Hackaday ☛ Evidence For Water Vapor Plumes On Europa Vanishes In Re-Analysis

    As succinctly summarized in the article on this by [Javier Barbuzano] of Sky and Telescope, the original 2013 finding of said water plumes by the same team was based on faint UV emissions from Europa’s southern hemisphere as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. However, in more recent captures these emissions were not detected again, leading them to reexamine their original analysis of the 2013 data.

  • Hackaday ☛ Building A Desktop Catalytic Cracker

    Although crude oil contains a vast diversity of hydrocarbons, a comparatively small number of these make up the bulk of demand for oil. Cracking solves this mismatch: most of the demand is for light, short-carbon-chain molecules, so a cracker breaks down long-chain hydrocarbons into lighter, more commercially-valuable chemicals. This is usually done in massive industrial plants, but as [Markus Bindhammer] showed, it’s possible even in a tabletop apparatus.

  • Daniel Estévez ☛ PLL coefficients for rate-only feedback

    A couple years ago I wrote a post about the paper Controlled-Root Formulation for Digital Phase-Locked Loops, by Stephens and Thomas. In this paper, the authors study digital PLLs by studying the transfer function in discrete time, rather than doing any continuous-time approximations or equivalences. They give values for the loop coefficients that are needed to achieve a certain noise bandwidth for some standard loop root placements (the supercritical damped response and the standard underdamped response). In general, the loop coefficients are obtained numerically. In my post, I show that in the case of a loop of order 2 with supercritical response the loop coefficients can be calculated explicitly in terms of the loop bandwidth by using the solution of a cubic equation. However, in that post, I treated only the phase/phase-rate feedback case. In this post I cover the rate-only feedback case.

  • Avi Loeb ☛ Whether You Believe in God or Not, You Should Welcome Aliens!

    The public understands this sentiment because it makes sense. Academia is slower to adapt to it. Most astronomers are willing to search for microbial life, but at the same time they are sidelining the allocation of major resources to the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life.

  • Rlang ☛ Ronny Hernandez Mora, Joel Nitta, and Nick Tierney Join rOpenSci Software Peer Review Editorial Team

    What makes rOpenSci’s software peer review work is people who care deeply about the quality and usability of scientific software, and who give their time and expertise to help others build it better. Today, we’re pleased to announce three new members of our editorial team.

• Career/Education

  • Jordan Matelsky ☛ Dumb little embarrassing diary but also it's chinese

    So sometime in college I had the idea to combine my two embarrassing habits: language learning and journaling. I started writing in Mandarin Chinese in my journal as a way to induce immersion without embarrassing myself with my limited vocabulary: Write a sentence, look up a word, write some more…

  • Derek Thompson ☛ Why Do the Best Leaders Fail at the Most Important Job?

    “The major job of leaders is to develop other leaders,” the management expert Noel Tichy once wrote. But corporate and political history is full of towering figures who gave way to fools and incompetents.

    Call it the Aurelius Trap. Strong leaders often fail to do the most important thing in leadership, which is to plan for a successor who can extend their time-bound term into a longer legacy. They have a tendency to make themselves indispensable and irreplaceable—and then prove themselves right by handing the reins to a leader who fails to replace them.

• Hardware

  • [Repeat] Tom's Hardware ☛ Louis Rossmann is suing Samsung after firm offers $330 refund for defective SSD while selling the drives on Amazon for $949 — spat over 4TB 990 Pro SSD is headed to court

    Samsung has 60 days to give Rossmann a working replacement before he takes the company to court in Austin Texas.

  • Rui Carmo ☛ The MilkV Jupiter 2/SpacemiT K3 - Tao of Mac

    Spoiler: We’re tantalizingly close to having usable non-GPU inference on SBCs, and surprisingly enough, RISC-V is more interesting than ARM right now.

    I’ve tested a lot of ARM boards over the past few years, but only a couple of RISC-V machines–and the MilkV Jupiter 2 is quite a substantial system: Sixteen cores (with a twist), a refreshingly roomy 32GB of RAM, a 10GbE SFP, Wi-Fi 6, a GPU with actual DRM nodes, all in a Pico ITX form factor.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Google ☛ ShinyHunters Targets [sic] Education Sector with Oracle PeopleSoft Exploit

    Upon becoming aware of active scanning and exploitation, we initiated notifications to over 100 global organizations whose IP addresses correlated with potentially vulnerable endpoints. Most of these organizations were based in the United States, and 68 percent operated within the higher education sector. Subsequently, public reports by @nahamike01 on X highlighted open attacker directories on the staging servers, allowing GTIG to perform a detailed triage of the threat actor's operations.

  • Riccardo Mori ☛ Intelligence not included

    Especially in Cook’s era, and especially since Apple stopped presenting events live before an audience, with live demos of products and product functionalities, we’ve had to watch videos with either pre-recorded demos or with simulated ‘slice of life’ situations where you could see a certain feature or set of features in action. Such videos have always felt particularly artificial to me, always leaving me with the impression that people at Apple — both due to their social status and the Apple Park ‘ivory tower’ creative environment — don’t really have a clue as to how regular people go on about their lives.

    During the WWDC keynote, this kind of detachment was (to me) painfully obvious both in the initial segment about children safety, and especially throughout the excruciatingly long segment about Apple Intelligence and Siri AI.

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

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Google DeepMind is worried about what happens when millions of agents start to interact

      According to Rohin Shah, who directs the company’s AGI safety and alignment research, the mass-market arrival of agents that can carry out tasks without human oversight and follow instructions given to them by other agents creates a whole new class of risk.

    • Wired ☛ Grok Is Still Hosting Sexualized Deepfakes of Famous Women

      Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot is apparently still being used to produce and host nonconsensual explicit images and videos of women, months after Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI said it would introduce restrictions to stop the creation of potentially harmful sexualized deepfakes. The revelations come as SpaceX, xAI’s parent company, prepares to go public on Friday in one of the largest IPOs of all time.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ How AI chatbots manipulate you and undermine your privacy ⁄ Manual do Usuário

      Keeping a transactional relationship with AI chatbots is, for me, a way of keeping the line between us clearly drawn, to ward off an unlikely — but not impossible — “AI psychosis,” the kind of spiral where someone genuinely believes the AI is alive.

      A newly published report by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), authored by researchers Ruchika Joshi, Adinawa Adjagbodjou and Michal Luria, gave me further reasons to stand by that approach.

    • Jonathan Kamens ☛ Hilariously bad scam email obviously written by AI – Something better to do

      I received this email today (see the end of this posting for a full description of the email for the visually impaired): [...]

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ Anthropic shakes up its pricing strategy

      The losses associated with certain subscription plans have therefore widened significantly. While no company has released specific figures, screenshots posted on Reddit by GitHub Copilot customers provide an idea of the approximate cost. They suggest that some users would have incurred monthly bills running into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars under the new usage-based model. Similar estimates have been made for heavy Claude Code users who still benefit from Anthropic’s subscription plans.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ The honest truth about leaders who want to replace their workers with AI

      I’ve seen some pretty dumb stuff out in the wild: leaders who have expected their engineers to dramatically increase their output to inhuman levels, company-wide token leaderboards, product managers who believe they can replace real user research with synthetic personas, and, of course, high-level leaders who think they can replace their human workers with AI agents. (None of this, I should say, has been at my job, where our work is primarily done by humans and AI, when it is used at all, is an assistive tool.)

    • LWN ☛ AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere

      The agent's GitHub account has since been disabled. It now shows up in conversations on GitHub as "ghost", which is the platform's default placeholder for user accounts that have been deleted. Thus, it is difficult, if not impossible, to piece together a full trail of all the agent's actions on GitHub.

      Williamson said, rather diplomatically, that the agent's actions were not ""having a positive impact on Fedora or the upstream projects"", and suggested that Giovannini adjust the agent to be ""substantially less autonomous"". He specifically asked that the agent not assign bugs to Giovannini, change their state, or ""post confident assertions or specific action recommendations"" without human review.

    • [Old] Johannes Link ☛ To Gen or Not To Gen: The Ethical Use of Generative AI - My Not So Private Tech Life

      This blog entry started out as a translation of an article that my colleague Jakob and I wrote for a German magazine. After that we added more stuff and enriched it by additional references and sources. We aim at giving an overview about many - but not all - aspects that we learned about GenAI and that we consider relevant for an informed ethical opinion. As for the depth of information, we are just scratching the surface; hopefully, the loads of references can lead you to diving in deeper wherever you want. Since we are both software developers our views are biased and distorted. Keep also in mind that any writing about a “hot” topic like this is nothing but a snapshot of what we think to know today. By the time you read it the authors’ knowledge and opinions have already changed.

  • Social Control Media

    • Michael Geist ☛ Yet Another Trade Battle Brewing: Why a Kids' Social Media Ban Could Put Canada on a Collision Course With the U.S.

      It is difficult to reconcile the U.S. position with Canada’s plans. The Canadian plan will include a social media ban and will likely require the use of age-verification technologies and the submission of government IDs. Moreover, the government is anxious to move quickly, which runs counter to recommendations to take the necessary time to develop technological approaches that avoid unintended consequences. And in case there was any doubt, the U.S. will oppose regulations that place “disproportionate” compliance burdens on U.S. companies.

    • Yle ☛ Defence Forces' lawyer faces charges for sharing classified photo on WhatsApp

      According to the FDF, sharing the image was a more serious breach of information security than simply taking the photo — given the image's subject and where it was taken.

      The nature and location of the photo has not been disclosed in documents available to the public.

      The suspect offered the FDF an explanation, admitting to have shared the image with two people on WhatsApp. But the lawyer pushed back on the FDF's assertion that WhatsApp is a social media platform, suggesting that it is an encrypted messaging system.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ British high school sends students home following cyberattack

      Great Marlow School, which has 1,428 pupils according to the Department for Education (DfE), said it was set to remain closed while it works with specialist IT and cybersecurity professionals to resolve the issue.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Google open-sources speedy DiffusionGemma text diffusion model

      The company says the algorithm can generate text four times faster than traditional LLMs. Furthermore, DiffusionGemma does so using less RAM. The model’s memory efficiency enables it to run on high-end consumer graphics cards that usually struggle to support LLMs.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Wired ☛ Mapping Every Flock License Plate Reader Near US World Cup Stadiums

      ALPRs are set up along roadsides by municipalities, businesses, schools, and private groups such as homeowners associations to continuously log the license plate of each car that passes by them. A market survey report prepared for the US Department of Homeland Security says that some providers can collect other information like the make, model, and year of the vehicle and descriptions of bumper stickers affixed to it. Groups that operate networks of these cameras can then query those logs to find matches for specific plates, creating a dossier of where a vehicle has gone and when. Flock Safety, in particular, allows operators to share their data with other groups on their network, meaning that depending on the operator, drivers can accidentally get caught up in a national dragnet.

    • The Verge ☛ A warrantless wiretap law is about to expire — but surveillance networks aren’t actually ‘going dark’

      Congress has failed to pass a three-week extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), with the House voting 218-198 against reauthorizing the controversial warrantless wiretapping authority through July 2nd. After a short-term extension earlier this year, the spying program now appears set to lapse for at least a week. This is the nightmare scenario FISA’s proponents have been warning about — but it doesn’t actually mean the US has lost its surveillance capabilities.

    • Security Week ☛ WhatsApp Catches Spyware Firm NSO Defying No-Hacking Court Order

      Meta-owned communications app WhatsApp says it recently detected and disrupted a spear-phishing attempt linked to spyware company NSO Group. The attack is allegedly in defiance of a court order that bars the spyware maker from targeting WhatsApp.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Enhanced License Plate Tracking

      Yes, it’s bad that more companies are collecting this level of surveillance data. But all of this pales in comparison to the type and quantity of data our smartphones already collect about us.

    • Nick Heer ☛ No Privacy Impact Assessment Was Conducted of Grok Imagine Until After Launch, Finds Canadian Privacy Commissioner

      According to the full report, while a privacy impact assessment was completed of the previous version of Grok’s image generation model, one was not done for Grok Imagine until March, well after its July 2025 launch. Even then, the assessment “did not accurately reflect […] risks to security, safety and privacy”.

    • OPCCA ☛ PIPEDA Findings #2026-004: Commissioner-initiated complaints concerning X Corp.’s and X.AI LLC’s compliance with PIPEDA - Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

      1. The OPC found that the two organizations had not obtained valid consent to collect, use, and disclose individuals’ personal information for the purpose of generating sexualized deepfakes, and that a reasonable person would consider this practice to be inappropriate in the given circumstances. Furthermore, while the respondents represented that they had performed a number of actions to address the concerns that Grok was being used to generate sexualized deepfakes (including improving their technical and organizational safeguards), the OPC found that their response to the widespread generation of such content was insufficient.

      2. Therefore, with a view to bringing X Corp. and xAI into compliance with PIPEDA, the OPC shared its preliminary findings and made a number of recommendations to the respondents.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ No Siri AI in EU

      It seems like Apple isn’t taking this very seriously. They’re more interested in trying to score PR points by blaming the delay on the EC rather than on building something compliant. So I guess the EC was prescient not to grant an exemption based on the promise that they’d follow through with the TSA.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Everything All At Once: Bill C-34 Combines Platform Duties, a Kids' Social Media Ban, AI Chatbot Regulation, and a Powerful Digital Safety Commission Into a Risky "Trust Us" Bet

      Bill C-34 suggests the government absorbed only part of the lesson. The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions are gone, but in their place the government has thrown in everything else: the original Online Harms Act platform duties, an under-16 social media ban backed by mandated age verification, Bill S-209’s pornography age verification requirements, a new AI chatbot regulatory regime, and sweeping powers for a Digital Safety Commission that will write the rules, enforce them, and decide which platforms escape the ban restriction. It is an everything-all-at-once approach in which nearly every key component, including which services face the restriction, how age gets verified, which AI systems are covered, and what standards govern exemptions, is left to regulations that do not yet exist.

    • Michael Geist ☛ The Law to Be Named Later: Bill C-34 Punts 50 Key Decisions to Cabinet and a Digital Safety Commission That Does Not Yet Exist

      The government’s plan to address online safety was introduced yesterday with Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, featuring an under-16 social media ban, pornography age verification, AI chatbot rules, and platform regulation that I argued amount to an everything-all-at-once approach built on a “trust us” bet. My initial guide to the bill highlighted many key issues, but this follow-up examines just how much has been left for later. In many respects, Bill C-34 is best understood as version 1.0 of the Safe Social Media Act with a framework that establishes institutions, sets penalty ceilings, and fixes the age of 16 in the statute. But the bill leaves nearly everything that will determine how the law actually works, including which services are covered, when the ban applies and to whom, what counts as adequate age verification, and what design features platforms must build, to what amounts to a version 2.0 that will be developed later through multiple regulatory processes.

    • Jan-Lukas Else ☛ netcup VPS and NetBird BYOP

      As I told you, I recently switched to mainly using NetBird instead of Tailscale. NetBird released their “Bring your own proxy” functionality on the cloud-hosted version today. That gave me the perfect reason to finally try a VPS at netcup. I ordered the smallest one with just one core and one gigabyte of memory, but all it has to do is the reverse proxy work.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Meta is not sorry it built the spyware, just sorry you noticed

      Meta reportedly tucked facial-recognition code into the app for its camera glasses, then got very upset when journalists treated that like something the public might want to know.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Robert Reich ☛ It's Worse Than Ever

  • Jason Kottke ☛ This is clever & depressing: the Apocalypse Early Warning Sy...

    This is clever & depressing: the Apocalypse Early Warning System tracks private jet activity. “In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies…”

  • Robert Reich ☛ Warning: Trump's Rolling Coup Is Already Underway

    Between us we have served for seven decades, mostly in elected federal office, through Watergate, the post-Vietnam anti-war demonstrations, years of civil rights marches, Iran-Contra, debates over voting rights, the post-9/11 surveillance debates, two impeachments. We are writing today because we are watching something different from any of these, and because most Americans, including most of our friends in both parties, do not see the big picture.

    Many may recognize and be concerned about individual actions or decisions taken by the administration but few have taken a step back and connect the dots. The “rolling coup” is much more than one development, one decision or a single day.

  • The Next Move ☛ The Trump World Cup

    The 2018 World Cup gave the Kremlin an opportunity to project normalcy to the world while it waged a campaign of military aggression against neighboring Ukraine. The dead and disappeared in the Donbas and Crimea were buried under sleek modern stadiums. It evoked the 1980 Moscow Olympics, held in the shadow of the USSR’s brutal war in Afghanistan. At least back then, there was a well-organized boycott of the games.

    For Vladimir Putin, the World Cup was the apex of his international position, truly having his medovik and eating it too.

    America today is not Russia, but the train is moving rapidly in the wrong direction.

  • Yle ☛ Most teens fear loneliness if Finland bans social media

    About a quarter of the 11-13 year olds said they thought it would be good to set an across-the-board age limit, while a third of their older counterparts agreed with the sentiment.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • International Business Times ☛ 'Liked Flicking and Sucking': Trump's Alleged 'Nipple Fetish' Revealed by Tortured Epstein Survivor

    'One evening when we were showering together, she showed me her nipples. They looked incredibly painful as they were red and swollen, and I remember wincing when I looked at them,' she added.

  • International Business Times ☛ Sarah Ferguson Reportedly 'Panicked' as Epstein-Related Claims Reignite Controversy

    Sarah Ferguson is used to charming her way through life's ups and downs, but not this time. Following reports of her alleged ties to Jeffrey Epstein, former employees of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's ex-wife have been sharing negative accounts about her. The stories have reportedly left her feeling panicked.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Orbit is Fracturing

    The Vice President says, this is a significant issue. He is described by people who were present as visibly anxious. He is, according to the reporting, advocating internally for the full release of all Epstein-related files held by the Justice Department, and for a congressional inquiry. The Chief of Staff has told colleagues, in some venue or other that Haberman and Swan have access to, that the Vice President has shown tendencies toward conspiracy theories. Another senior official has told the reporters that the Vice President has been aggressively pursuing the Epstein issue since the memo’s release.

    That is the scene. That is what we are looking at.

  • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ What Happened to tea.xyz

    On June 4th, tea.xyz launched what it had been promising since 2022: a cryptocurrency that pays open source maintainers. Within the first hour of official trading, the token fell 75% from its opening price. A week later it trades about 90% below its first-day high, the company’s GitHub org has been near-silent for six months, and the founder’s public commits are going to a different project entirely.

    Their own blog post from June 8th, titled The Work Continues, concedes “the right response is not to pretend the launch went the way we wanted. It did not.” I’ve been pulling the public data: GitHub commit history, on-chain trading records, and the long paper trail tea left across the package registries.

• Environment

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Brad Paisley joins fight as zoo's dispute with AI data center escalates, petition tops 330,000 signatures — Nashville weighs sweeping hyperscale ban

    The pressure now shifts to the Metro Planning Commission, which is set to hold a public hearing Thursday, June 11th, on legislation that would ban data centers larger than 500,000 square feet across Davidson County and keep smaller ones at least half a mile from homes, schools, and zoos. The 69,220-square-foot facility at 648 Grassmere Park would draw an estimated 50 MW from the local grid, and the zoo argues its noise and light could disturb vulnerable species, including clouded leopards it is working to conserve.

  • Global Justice Project ☛ Summary: The Global Justice Report

    The Global Justice Report attempts to set out a new vision for global progress in the 21st century: grounding human development and equality in planetary habitability. It explores the conditions under which the world could move toward this horizon and traces an economically and ecologically consistent transition path from 2026 to 2100.

    Its main conclusion is simple: it is possible to reconcile planetary habitability and high well-being for all, but only if the transformation rests on three pillars simultaneously. Fast decarbonization of energy systems is necessary. But we also need a major shift toward sufficiency – understood as a sharp reduction in labour hours and material footprint and large changes in consumption patterns, food habits, land use, and forest cover. In addition, neither decarbonization nor sufficiency can be financed and politically sustained without a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power, both between countries and within them. The compression of global inequality is not only compatible with deep decarbonization; it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ No Abandonment, No Bunkers: Preparing for Disaster Together

    As climate disasters intensify and authoritarian threats escalate, most of us are underprepared for moments when systems fail or are weaponized against us. In this episode of Movement Memos, I talk with Chris Begley and Amy Edelman, authors of The Emergency Playbook: A Bunker-Free Guide to Disaster Preparation, about how preparedness can move us away from fear, isolation and bunker fantasies, and toward community, care and collective survival. We discuss how practical planning, community relationships and collective care can help us face climate disasters, political unrest and everyday crises with more courage and less panic.

  • Salon ☛ Officials powerless to stop 8 new data centers that could transform small Texas county

    However, some commissioners and residents remain skeptical, saying the benefits are uneven, and data centers create few permanent jobs after their labor-intensive construction is finished. For example, one Hood County data center proposal shows a peak construction workforce of 2,000 dropping to a permanent workforce of 220, according to the project’s concept plan.

    Hood County Commissioner Dave Eagle said there are “too many unanswered questions” about data centers, and they’re being asked to greenlight plans with incomplete information about their impact on the community.

  • BoingBoing ☛ "Laxative" brownies turn Nantucket School Committee meeting into Schrodinger's shitshow

    Laxative baking has a legal track record: in 2018, a Michigan woman was fired after baking Ex-Lax into brownies for a coworker's farewell party, with police noting that food tampering carried up to 10 years in prison—charges avoided only because nobody ate those, either. PFAS, the chemicals at the center of Perry's protest, persist in the environment and are linked to adverse health effects.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ The first vertically integrated solar facility in the U.S. is now in operation

      Once fully operational, Qcells’ facility in Cartersville, Georgia, will add 3.3 gigawatts (GW) of vertically integrated ingot, wafer, cell, and 3.5 GW of module capacity, with Qcells’ total U.S. output poised to hit 8.6 GW by the end of Q3 2026. Cartersville will be the first U.S. factory to produce the “major parts” of a solar photovoltaic module under one roof, Qcells said.

    • Tom Hodson ☛ Tom Hodson - Buying my Mum an Electric Car

      My mum needed a new car. He current one is a Daihatsu Cuore from about 1998, it’s a sweet little japanese car that looks bizarrely small and simple on UK roads. It served her well but it’s really starting to show its age. That coupled with increasingly large vehicles on the road and the arrival of her grandson she doesn’t feel safe enough in it anymore. Her one looks like this.

      So the plan was to get something slightly more modern, cheap and hopefully electric.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • International Business Times ☛ Trump Admin World Cup 2026 Warning: YouTube and TikTok Videos Could Land Tourists in Trouble

    The Trump administration has issued a warning to foreign tourists ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, cautioning that uploading monetised videos to YouTube and TikTok could lead to immigration penalties. Content creators entering the United States on standard visitor visas risk deportation if they use their stay to generate online income.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Lobbying Heats Up Over Broadband Permitting

    The groups say H.R. 2289 “does not address the actual bottleneck and instead micromanages the level of government that is actively working to get broadband built.” They’re using similar arguments to the FCC, noting that in the “rare” cases “where a local government truly obstructs deployment in the case of telecommunications infrastructure, the FCC already possesses sufficient authority to intervene under Sections 253 and 332 of the Communications Act of 1996.”

  • Robert Reich ☛ Musk's Galactic Ripoff

    Tomorrow's IPO of SpaceX could turn out to be the universe's largest Ponzi scheme, and you and I are paying part of the price whether we like it or not.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Elon Musk’s Age of Impunity

    Musk’s definition of “civilization” is white people. He loves to cast himself as a saviour of humanity, but juggling multiple CEO positions apparently leaves him with enough time in the world to tweet with abandon. Musk has zero relationship with the people he is inciting to cause harm, yet his behaviour and his companies’ track records have no bearing on his finances or his influence. He will become the world’s first trillionaire tomorrow morning. He is just a guy, though, with a cushy white-collar job and an internet connection. It is upsetting to be reminded that much of our world is run by shameless psychopaths.

  • Mike Brock ☛ More Perfect

    We have free will. We can choose. And the potential for tragedy is a necessary consequence of that freedom. It is a burden we must carry to be free, that we may fall.

    This is the oldest claim in the Western tradition and one of the hardest to keep in view. The hardness is not intellectual. The argument is not complicated. The hardness is that the claim asks something of us that we would rather not give, which is the steady acknowledgment that the conditions of every good we love are also the conditions of every loss we fear, and that we cannot have the first without the second. The wish that we could is the deepest and most common wish a human being can have. It is also the wish that, when granted, destroys us.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • International Business Times ☛ Secret Service Called In After '8647' Marking Found on National Mall in Washington, DC

    On Thursday, a large and unexplained turf marking reading '8647' appeared on the grounds of the National Mall in Washington, DC. The alteration prompted an investigation by federal authorities, with the Secret Service indicating it will assist if a suspect is identified.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Richard J Tofel ☛ Passive vs. Active News Consumption and Updating the Pictures in Our Heads

    One of the most significant problems in the news business these days seems to me to be that the pictures in our heads of how people get their news are quickly becoming outdated. I have written about this before, but this week want to try again, from a different angle, because it’s really important.

    When we think about sources of news, we tend to imagine people making choices: Do they subscribe to particular newspapers, magazines, newsletters or podcasts? Do they listen to particular radio shows or stations, or watch television news or YouTube? Do they get news from social media, or, more recently, perhaps from AI agents? These are our competitors for their attention, we often think, and it’s quite a noisy jumble.

  • Karl Bode ☛ Trust Fund Media Brunchlords Can Only Fail Upward

    Generally, what rich Republicans like to do is buy existing media companies (The Baltimore Sun, Newsweek, Twitter), hollow them out, then use their propped up corpse (and any accumulated brand credibility) to spread class, race, and gender propaganda that divides and disorients the electorate.

    I don't think they really care if the patient dies on the operating table during the procedure, but I don't think "killing" CBS is genuinely the goal. They really do want to repurpose CBS into a lowest-common denominator infotainment and pseudo-journalism agitslop machine that influences people and makes money.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Brutal Oppression and Beautiful Humanity Exist In Every Grocery Store

    I have always found grocery stores fascinating—both as endpoints of a staggering global web of logistics, agriculture, and commerce, and as labor stories. So I was enthralled by Ann Larson’s new book “Cleanup on Aisle Five,” a first person account of working in a grocery store during the course of the pandemic, which was just published this week.

    Larson, a writer, academic, and cofounder of the successful activist group Debt Collective, writes in the tradition of workplace classics like Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed.” And Larson is no poverty tourist. She found a job at a grocery store in Utah in the fall of 2020 out of economic necessity, and worked there long enough to experience firsthand the struggles endemic to the industry. I spoke to her about class, service industry labor, and the harsh realities behind the smiles of your grocery store cashiers.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ The Internet works best when the community shows up — the APNIC 62 policy cycle is open now

    The call for policy proposals is officially open from 8 June to 7 August 2026 for APNIC 62 in Mumbai, India. It is a timely reminder that Internet governance is not something that happens elsewhere or is driven by others. It takes shape through contributions from across our region as community members share their experience, raise operational challenges, and help shape better outcomes for the broader Internet community.

  • Don Marti ☛ Think before you click

    Is the “Attribution” proposal at W3C really part of a fundamentally wrong direction for the web, or is there a pony under here somewhere, and the proposal is just incomplete?

    Instead of rushing to make a decision, W3C members should heed some wise advice: Don’t click. Count! Let’s count to 9 together.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Court Holds New York IPTV Box Seller Liable, Millions of Damages at Stake

      An electronics store in Queens that sold pirate IPTV boxes for years, despite receiving six cease-and-desist letters from DISH, has been found liable by a New York federal court. The reseller blamed his supplier in court, but that defense did not convince the judge. As a result, the small brick-and-mortar store was ordered to destroy all remaining pirate boxes, while facing millions in potential damages.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Tech Industry Warns of Piracy Blocking Risks as FIFA World Cup Kicks Off

      As the FIFA World Cup kicks off, tech-industry group CCIA Europe warns that piracy-blocking systems built to protect live sports are damaging the open internet. The group, which represents tech giants such as Amazon, Cloudflare, and Google, echoes a recent academic study, which found that Europe's anti-piracy efforts raise overblocking and enforcement concerns.

    • Deep Content GbR ☛ Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

      A German court has ruled that Google is directly liable for what its AI search overviews say. Previous case law shielding search engine operators from liability doesn't apply to AI overviews.

      The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26). The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the "AI overview" is its own content, not just a list of search results.