Leftovers

• Stephen Hackett ☛ Om Malik, 1966-2026

  I’ve read Om’s writing since before starting this site over 17 years ago. It is hard to believe he won’t be lighting up my RSS reader anymore.

• Om Malik ☛ Om Malik, 1966-2026 – On my Om

  Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends.

• Crazy Stupid Tech ☛ Om Malik, 1966-2026

  I’ll have more to say about this soon. Speechless right now.

• Nick Heer ☛ Om Malik Has Died

  I will miss Malik’s writing, of course. I will also miss his photography, where he had found a distinctive and recognizable style that was very often breathtaking.

• Career/Education

  • Rlang ☛ Winter R workshops at University of Queensland, Brisbane

    These intensive, hands-on workshops are designed for individuals with a foundational understanding of R who are eager to master the essential skills for effective data wrangling, code organisation, advanced visualisation, spatial analysis, and building interactive Shiny apps. Join us to elevate your R proficiency and become a data manipulation and presentation expert!

    Each day is self-contained so you can attend the workshops you want to.

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ Chinese supercomputer using local processors heads TOP500 list

    The TOP500 list of Earth’s mightiest supercomputers has a new leader: the 2.198 Exaflop/s LineShine machine housed at the National Supercomputer Center (NSC) in Shenzhen, which took the top spot without using any kit from Nvidia, Intel, or AMD.

    Which is not to say that LineShine is an entirely Chinese creation. As explained in a pre-press paper, the machine’s LX2 processors are a local effort but use Armv9 designs – so chalk up a win for Blighty, the home of Arm. The machine also runs KylinOS – a Linux distribution that features contributions from around the world.

  • Jim Grey ☛ A pan that won't let me rush dinner

    They said bluntly that it doesn’t matter how much you invest in a non-stick skillet, the coating will fail in a few years. They thought perhaps enameled cast iron might be a reasonable compromise — it does take a little technique, but far less than plain cast iron or stainless steel. And they last for decades.

  • Hackaday ☛ A Look At A Gaggle Of Transputer Boards

    The transputer story is a fascinating one, forming a major part of the UK’s semiconductor industry during the 1980s, creating a strong legacy as the computer industry awkwardly tried to figure out what types of parallelism to target. Whereas the industry largely moved to instruction-level (superscalar) parallelism alongside tightly coupled task-level parallelism along with multiple CPU cores on a single die, one could consider today’s supercomputer clusters to be one example of the transputer legacy.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Retiring my RTX 3070 for an AMD RX 9060 XT (16 GiB)

    I have a new graphics card for my primary desktop, the Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT. This replaces my Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 Twin Edge, a card with a name that’s almost as long.

    The tl;dr is: it’s great, for me!

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Liliputing ☛ Kubuntu Focus Ar (GEN 1) is a Linux Laptop with Intel Panther Lake and Arc B390 graphics

      The Kubuntu Focus Ar GEN 1 is the first Linux laptop from the Kubuntu Focus team to feature an Intel Panther Lake processor that delivers the kind of graphics performance you’d expect from an entry-level discrete GPU.

      While there are several other Kubuntu Focus models that do have even higher-performance discrete graphics, those models are bigger, heavier, and less efficient. They also have higher price tags… although the Kubuntu Focus Ar isn’t exactly cheap. It’s available for pre-order now for $1950 and up, and it’s expected to begin shipping in July.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Common Dreams ☛ Supreme Court Sells Out American People to Foreign Chemical Corporations

    Public health leaders and food experts joined America’s small farmers and regenerative agriculture experts to eviscerate today’s bipartisan Supreme Court decision, which they believe sells out the American people to foreign chemical corporations. The decision takes away the rights of family members and those who have died or are sick from glyphosate exposure to hold Bayer/Monsanto legally accountable. The decision was a major victory for Big Poison, which sought immunity from liability.

  • The New Lede ☛ US Supreme Court rules for Monsanto in case over pesticides and cancer warnings

    The case, Monsanto v Durnell, specifically dealt with the question of whether a federal law that gives the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulatory authority over pesticides preempts state claims that a company failed to warn users of certain product risks when the EPA itself has not required such warnings.

    In its ruling, the court said that the EPA regulates Roundup, one of Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides, and the agency has “repeatedly concluded that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer, [and] … has not required a cancer warning on Roundup’s label.” Regulations require manufacturers to use EPA-approved pesticide labels, the SCOTUS opinion argues, and, under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), states cannot impose labeling requirements different from the EPA.

  • The New Lede ☛ Lawsuit demands USDA release records on glyphosate executive order

    The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is violating the law by failing to turn over records related to an executive order issued by President Donald Trump protecting production of the controversial pesticide glyphosate, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.

    The lawsuit, filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, seeks to force the USDA to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request the center submitted on Feb. 26 requesting records related to how and why the order was developed.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Peter Hofmann ☛ The Saga of Windows 98 on my Pentium 133

    I tried to install Windows 98 on my retro box lately -- the computer that I've used for the last three Advent of Code events. While the plan is to use Windows 2000 on this box for AoC this year, I also gave 98 a try out of curiosity.

  • International Business Times ☛ AI Memory Boom Backfires on Apple: Stock Drops Nearly 5% After Mac and iPad Price Hikes

    Apple's near-5 per cent stock slide wiped almost $200 billion off its market value after the company hiked prices on key Mac and iPad models, as soaring memory costs from the artificial intelligence boom squeezed its hardware margins and forced those higher costs onto consumers.

    The move underscores a new risk from the AI cycle: chipmakers supplying high-end memory are enjoying record demand, while device makers that depend on those components are being hit with sharply higher bills.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Apple's Macs and iPads and Microsoft's Xbox consoles are getting more expensive - blame AI

    The iPhone maker briefly took the Apple Online Store offline in the morning, in a move that normally signifies the launch of a new product. But the only new thing that appeared when it returned was significantly higher prices on some existing devices, with iPad models now costing between 15% and 25% more, and Mac prices rising by between 15% and 20%.

  • Macworld ☛ Brace yourself, Apple's price hikes are much worse than we thought

    None of the storage and RAM options have changed for the models affected—prices are just higher. It’s notable, however, that neither the iPhone nor the Apple Watch is impacted by the price increases. The Studio Displays also have the same price as before.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Apple raises prices, and it's gonna hurt

    I also can’t help but see that “we need to begin ⁠raising prices on a number of products, including today's increases for iPad and Mac,” statement as implying more increases are coming. The iPhone price increase seems inevitable, and my money is on it starting with the new models in September. We’ll see what they manage there, but if prices go up $200 or so on those models, I’d expect this past year’s boom cycle in iPhone sales will come to an end.

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

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Quaint

      It's almost quaint and retro when I start getting hammered by a botnet that is incompetently probing for WordPress exploits instead of incompetently trying to suck down everything in order to feed the plagiarism machine.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ Apple Hardware Price Hikes

      I was recently looking to add another SSD and a few hard drives to my setup. Normally, prices go down over time, but currently it SSDs are about double the price I paid last year, and large hard drives are almost triple.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

      Many readers are probably aware of the scene in the video above: Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, recently gave a commencement speech in which he heralded the coming of AI — and was loudly booed by the students. This was not an outlier. There have been a number of similar incidents lately, evidence that many people now really hate AI.

      Are we talking about a vocal but unrepresentative minority? No. A recent Pew survey found that American adults believe by a wide margin that AI will be negative for society and, by a smaller margin, that it will be bad for them personally: [...]

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ All you need to poison an LLM is 13 words.

      So not only do we need to worry about AI-generated slop polluting our social spaces, we also have to worry about people who want to influence the output of the AI-generated slop polluting them, too. There’s a whole industry of companies trying to improve their clients’ coverage in AI results, just as there were for search engine results. And all of them will be spamming the crap out of our public communities and collaborative websites.

    • Project Censored ☛ Frame-Checking Generative AI’s Role in Transmitting News

      AI summaries are designed to sound polished and authoritative, which obscures the inherent inconstancy behind them. After all, these responses are not produced through independent verification of facts and accounts, which becomes even more concerning when a user is searching for information about current news events.

      AI overviews mediate between users and the information they’re actually searching for. Just as a picture window or a camera viewfinder highlights some elements of a scene, while leaving others outside the frame, AI overviews direct our attention in certain ways—but with the added twist that, in this case, the framing is largely invisible to the user. One challenge that careful users of AI summaries must address is how to recognize the limits of what they’re reading.

    • Project Censored ☛ Beyond Fact-Checking: A Teaching Guide to the Power of News Frames [PDF]

      At its simplest, the term “frame” suggests picture and window frames. Just as a picture frame or a window frame can focus our vision on a specific object of attention, such as the view outside or a person’s face, news frames focus our attention on some event in the world around us.

      "A news frame is the central idea or primary storyline that organizes the information included in a news story and gives meaning to it. News frames influence how people interpret that information and make judgments about issues the story addresses.

      The influence of news frames is accomplished through language choice, tone, and selection of sources. These choices often reflect the journalist’s and the news outlet’s perspectives, values, and priorities; sometimes these choices also reflect deep-rooted but taken-for-granted assumptions about the distribution of wealth and power.

    • Security Week ☛ When Information Becomes the Attack Surface - Understanding AI Agent Traps

      Content injections exploit the difference between what a human sees and what an agent parses, as well as the system’s difficulty in keeping trusted instructions separate from untrusted external data.

      A webpage might appear harmless, but its underlying code, metadata, hidden text, or image can contain malicious instructions for an AI system. An AI model accepts attacker-controlled data from an external source, such as a website or file. If this system fails to distinguish between data and instructions, the model may start processing instructions within that content. The objective behind such injection of malicious content is to alter the AI’s response, disclose sensitive information or enable an unauthorized action. In NIST evaluations of agent hijacking, malicious instructions succeeded across five tested injection tasks, on average, 57% of the time.

      A support ticket with underlying malicious instructions can manipulate an AI agent into retrieving customer data from the CRM and sending it to an attacker-controlled address. If the agent has excessive permission, this exfiltration becomes all the easier.

    • Wired ☛ British Police Built a Sprawling Crime-Prediction Machine. Some Results Couldn’t Be Trusted

      Launched in 2016 by the Bristol City Council and the regional Avon and Somerset Police, the database has stored all manner of sensitive information—police intelligence reports, housing status, mental health records, teenage pregnancies, enrollment in parenting courses, free school meals. On top of this sensitive data, officials built machine-learning models to assign scores to thousands of adults and children. They hoped to build what they called a “picture of threat, harm, and risk” in the region. At an event in early 2022 to help officials tackle child exploitation crimes, one police data scientist described part of the approach this way: “I essentially dump all that data in a big bucket and stir it with a data-science spatula, and we come out with a lovely risk score for everybody.”

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Interesting Paper Exploring Prompt Injection

      This is a fascinating explotation of how LLMs fall for prompt injection attacks. It turns out that they learn to recognize the style of text in different role/instruction blocks, and not just the tags.

      Their conclusion: [...]

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Embedding Forbidden Text in Spyware to Discourage AI Analysis

      At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis.

    • Rui Carmo ☛ I think that will be quite enough AI, thank you very much

      Even as (finally) Z.ai puts out something that is close enough to Claude and Codex and the bemonied digerati gushed all over Twitter (yes, I still refuse to call it “X”) that finally they can run something comparable to cloud models locally (for the cheap price of a kidney or two), I have to ask myseilf why the fuck we are doing this (and yes, that is an expletive–if you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I am usually much more restrained than this and that it was by no means gratuitous).

  • Social Control Media

    • Michał Sapka ☛ Internet works best in small dosages

      I stopped using services with algorithmic feeds. I either stopped using them all together (Reddit, Musk's version of Twitter), or removed the feed (like on Google Youtube). Those services are designed around the feed; they are as addictive as they can be. They expect nothing of you. You are only a mindless consumer of whatever they throw in your eyes. The less algorithm they can use at you, the less inclined you are to waste time on them. This is a self-propelling machine: the harder it is to use them, the less you use them. And the less you use them, the less you want to use them. It can be seen as using their weapons against them! All their thinking is about how to make using their services as effortless as possible. By optimising for effortlessness, they lost the ability to imagine their products being used any other way. Have you tried finding anything on Google Youtube recently? I did! I also don't want to use it much anymore.

      Seeing how this works on my brain, I continued this path. First, I replaced my laptop for a desktop. To use The Big Screen now I need to sit in front of the computer, on the chair I spend 8 hours prior working. I still do it (my goal is not to abandon the internet), but I do not want to spend hours more there. I do what I want to do, and I go somewhere else.

    • The Register UK ☛ UK government wants 'trusted' news sources promoted above the social media noise

      The British government wants "trusted" news sources to be made more prominent on social media in plans that seem set to cause controversy with free speech advocates.

      In a Green Paper published Tuesday, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) laid out its aim to improve access to reliable news sources on online platforms.

• Linux Foundation

  • Linux Foundation's Site/Blog ☛ Linux Foundation Announces Intent to Launch Agent Name Service to Establish Trusted Identity Infrastructure for AI Agents [Ed: Slop promotions]

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Olaf Alders ☛ On GitHub Issues as Untrusted Input

    I was recently talking with a friend who was explaining his workflow to me. He has a private repo where he opens a new GitHub issue. The issue is the source of truth that LLM agents use to kick off an unattended workflow. I do essentially the same thing and this is how many other tools also operate. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this workflow on a private repo that only trusted collaborators can access. When you transfer this workflow over to a public repository where all kinds of chaos can happen, there are more interesting vectors to consider. That’s a nice way of saying you get a much bigger blast radius. First off, let’s toss out the assumption that all inputs on a GitHub issue are trusted. In fact, if we don’t do this, we can open up a vector for prompt injection and possibly even shell injection.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Yash Garg ☛ Lufthansa Asked for My Credit Card

      I knew that you don’t need OTPs for payments in the US like we do in India, but giving out your card details over the phone was something I never expected.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Michael Geist ☛ Soft Ban or Hard Verification Requirement?: Why Bill C-34's Social Media Ban Exemption Gets the Incentives Wrong and Comes Too Late to Matter

      The debate over Bill C-34’s social media ban for those under sixteen has largely focused on the impact on users, including mandated age verification for millions, the privacy risks of verification technologies, and experience elsewhere suggesting the policy is ineffective. Defenders of the ban have characterized the Canadian approach as a “soft ban” that will allow social media companies to obtain exemptions provided they meet yet-to-be-determined safety standards. This approach is said to create incentives for companies to address safety concerns and qualify for the exemption. But a closer look at the bill reveals that the approach does not work, as even “safe” services will be required to implement age verification for tens of millions of users. By the time the Digital Safety Commission has figured anything out, the services will have verified most of the country and likely lost users in the process. This is true not only for services that require significant design changes, but even those services that today would be widely acknowledged to be safe for children.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ The Warrior-Witches of Ukraine's Resistance

    An underground intelligence network uses subterfuge and honey traps to direct drone strikes deep inside Russian-occupied territory.

  • Yle ☛ Universities, city officials voice concern at Migri's plans to close offices in Eastern Finland

    The region's universities noted that accessible immigration services are vital for the region's growing number of international students and staff.

  • Votebeat ☛ Judge blocks key pillars of Trump executive order restricting mail voting in 2026 election - Votebeat

    A federal judge on Thursday blocked key pillars of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overhaul the 2026 elections, declaring unconstitutional his attempts to create centralized lists of adult citizens and giving the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented authority over who can vote by mail.

    The 37-page ruling by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani concluded that the president did not have the constitutional authority to regulate state elections as he tried to do in a March executive order.

• Environment

  • Richard J Tofel ☛ Oil Prices and Lessons for the Press from a Failure of Expertise

    Let’s start in the world of oil, where a number of solid stories have appeared on what the analysts mistook. There’s this one from Barron’s from early this month, and this one (gift link) from the Wall Street Journal a week later. The Barron’s piece, almost humorously, can be summed up by saying supply turned out to be higher and demand lower than analysts had expected. Of course, predicting supply and demand is analysts’ most basic job.

  • The Nation ☛ This Summer’s Heat Is Only the Beginning

    The intensity, scope, and projected duration of this extreme heat has drawn comparisons to the catastrophic heat wave that scorched Europe in 2003. That heat wave is a landmark event in the history of human-caused climate change for two reasons. First, it was the first extreme weather event that scientists authoritatively attributed to climate change; a team of British scientists published a study concluding that global warming was responsible for 45 percent of the excessive heat that punished Europe that summer. Second, the 2003 heat wave was global warming’s first mass casualty event: It killed a staggering 71,000 people in six weeks, considerably more than the number of US war deaths throughout all the years of the Vietnam War. (Initial reports estimated that 15,000 people died, a figure sometimes still repeated today, but subsequent epidemiological analysis concluded that the actual death toll was nearly five times higher.)

  • Press Gazette ☛ Climate scientists say news coverage ignores cause of UK heatwave

    “News stories about heatwaves often do not mention the influence of climate change or the burning of fossil fuels on increased temperatures – for example, three in five stories during the May heatwave did not – while two-fifths of those about net zero make no mention of climate change. In this context, it is unsurprising that the public often do not understand these issues or the connection between them.”

  • Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit ☛ Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit | British media ‘divorcing’ net…

    Failing to reach net zero emissions will mean climate impacts continue to become more extreme. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated in its 2023 AR6 Synthesis report, agreed by all the world’s governments: “Limiting human-caused global warming to a specific level requires limiting cumulative CO2 emissions, reaching at least net zero CO2 emissions, along with strong reductions in other greenhouse gas emissions.”[1]

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ What Europe’s heat wave means for the power grid

    Climate change is squeezing the grid from all sides, affecting both supply and demand. Heat can affect power availability, from generation to transmission infrastructure, as I covered in my latest story. But climate change is also helping push electricity use higher—and countries in Europe and around the world will need to adapt.

  • Ruben Verweij ☛ Is this for real?!

    I’ve learned from a very informative Mastodon thread by Kees van der Leun that we’re breaking all kinds of records here today. I’ll say it one more time for the people in the back: this. is. not. normal. Yes, we’ve had heatwaves in the past. Yes, some people are enjoying themselves in the sun today. But it’s also an unassailable fact that because of climate change, the frequency and intensity of heatwaves will increase.1 We ain’t seen nothing yet.

    From that same thread by Kees van der Leun: [...]

  • NPR ☛ A second data center could be coming to North Richland Hills. Many residents don't want it | KERA News

    A majority of residents at the meeting said they oppose the new project. Many brought up issues with large-scale data centers in other parts of the state, including communities south of Tarrant County.

    Following a presentation, Backes answered questions from several residents about the project.

    “Say hypothetically every person in this room like we took a vote right now and everyone said ‘no, I don't want this data center,’” asked Taylor Stevenson. “Would you still continue with that?”

    “I think I'd have a lot of questions about that process and about the due process involved in that,” replied Backes.

    “That sounds like you still would,” Stevenson said.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Joel Chrono ☛ More bike adventures

      Something I realized about my bike is that the valves are different, and they have different stems. (I had to look that up, that’s the name of the hole through which you inflate them). I wasn’t sure if the place would have an adaptor, but things worked out in the end and it wasn’t even expensive, they let me pay whatever I wanted. I probably went beyond their expectations by at least a dollar or two, everything happened in just a couple minutes, and riding away felt so awesome with my wheels gripping much better and feeling swifter than before.

    • International Business Times ☛ BTC Price Crashes to Lowest Level Since Late 2024. Why Is It Dumping?

      The scale of the liquidations shows how leverage amplified Bitcoin's decline. When BTC broke key price levels, traders betting on further gains were forced to sell, adding additional pressure to the market.

    • Yle ☛ Soon you can book direct train trips between Finland and Sweden

      Tickets go on sale next Tuesday for the first Finnish cross-border train trips in more than five years – and the first to Sweden in 38 years.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ To build resilient organizations, you need to empower your team to make decisions.

    The only way to build an organization that can live without you is to devolve decision-making — and the only way to do that is to create the conditions to make devolved decision-making a safe norm. Corey’s been building on that idea in his recent posts, and I enthusiastically co-sign. I’ve taken “surround yourself with people who are better than you” to heart: the Director of Product Engineering, and Director of IT and Security, who both report to me, fit that description exactly and we’re all better off for it.

  • Votebeat ☛ How to vote in Michigan’s 2026 primary election

    This ballot is a long one, so don’t be concerned if it takes you a little while to fill it out. However, remember to vote in only one of the two partisan sections (the Democratic column or the Republican column). If you vote in both, none of your votes in any partisan races will count. (This mistake, known as crossover voting, inadvertently disenfranchises thousands of voters each primary, so make sure you’re paying attention!)

  • Robert Reich ☛ Eighty F*cking Years Old?

    And hardly alone. All 1946 boomers still here are turning 80. More babies were born in 1946 than in any other year of American history up to then — 3.4 million of us little darlings, 20 percent more than the year before. Which is why it was called a boom.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Paste Media Group ☛ Millions of Dollars Have Now Been Awarded to People Fired over Charlie Kirk Comments

    In the days following the shocking assassination of right-wing provocateur/debate charlatan/Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September of 2025, MAGA America spied a rare opportunity to lash out at perceived cultural foes and profiteer all at once. Before they’d gotten around to turning the death into a cheap fundraising plug, and presumably before Vice President JD Vance managed to use the death as a rationale for impregnating his wife for the fourth time, the first days immediately following the assassination were marked by a different endeavor: a coordinated campaign to use any online commentary about the shooting as a social cudgel against any “liberal” identifying Americans who dared to share an opinion, no matter how tepid.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Worst Kirk

    Millions of Dollars Have Now Been Awarded to People Fired over Charlie Kirk Comments: [...]

  • The New Lede ☛ How “ag-gag” laws harm animals, workers, consumers and the environment

    When it comes to food, many people probably would prefer to have more information about where it came from and how it was produced. But for too long, the animal agricultural industry has been shrouded in secrecy. And if “Big Ag” and certain state legislatures have it their way, “ag-gag” laws will continue to help the industry benefit from a lack of transparency while trampling people’s constitutional rights.

  • American Library Association ☛ American Library Association launches national advocacy campaign to fight FCC attack on library funding

    While the FCC chose not to respond to requests to remove language from the proposal regarding limiting or ending E-Rate, SHLB and partners appreciate the FCC following its recommendation of extending the comment period for stakeholders to comment on the proceeding. The coalition intends to use every day of that window to fill the record with the voices of the schools, libraries, and communities that depend on E-Rate most.

  • 404 Media ☛ Bodycam Shows Moment Cops Arrested a Man for Speaking Too Long at Data Center Meeting

    In February, police in Claremore, Oklahoma arrested farmer Darren Blanchard for speaking a little too long during a community meeting about data centers. The city charged Blanchard with criminal trespass, a crime with a $200 penalty, but he’s vowed to fight the charge. He recently shared video of the bodycam footage for the first time with 404 Media and answered our questions about the moment cops arrested him for going over his time at a February 17 community meeting of the Claremore City Council.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Georgia opens criminal probe into independent broadcaster Formula TV

    Katamadze said the investigation was “legal nonsense”, adding that Formula TV’s position is that Georgian law limits the charge of false denunciation of the commission of a crime to cases where someone knowingly files a false complaint with authorities.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Yash Garg ☛ The Illusion of Ownership

    This is kind of a retrospection on all the hardware I own and the annoyances I’ve faced over the years.

    None of these products are bad. In fact, I like most of them. What frustrates me is that the companies behind them keep trying to control how I use hardware I’ve already paid for.

  • [Old] Internet Archive ☛ Why Brendan Eich had to go

    It looks rather like the failure of the Mozilla executives to defend CEO Eich from the Gay Mafia campaign being waged against him may have been at least in part due to the desire to remove a major obstacle to DRM being added to Firefox. Consider these three blog posts from three Mozilla figures, including Eich: [...]

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Robert Lützner ☛ The band of Theseus

      …at this point, I’m asking: “When does the band die?” “When does it become The officially licensed Foreigner cover-band?” Because let’s be real…none of the people on stage yesterday had any hand in writing the songs they played for 90 minutes.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ ACE, UEFA, and Mexico Chase PirloTV's 950-Million-Visit Piracy Network

      One of Latin America's most-visited illegal sports streaming networks has been disrupted by ACE, UEFA, and Mexican authorities. The enforcement action targeted 44 domain names that were operating under popular sports streaming brands including PirloTV. While the enforcement effort appears to have disabled these domains, new ones swiftly popped up, perhaps even operated by the same people.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Major Brand Ads on Pirate Sites Surged 80% in a Year, EUIPO Finds

      A new report published by the EU Intellectual [sic] Property [sic] Office shows that the share of major brand advertising on pirate sites increased 80%. The problem is the worst on court-adjudicated pirate sites, where top brands account for more than half of all ads. The data further shows that anti-piracy blocklists don't always work as intended.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI and Liability

      Earlier this month, a German court ruled that Google is liable for its AI search summaries. Rejecting defenses like “users can check for themselves,” and that they generally know “that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted,” the court held that the AI’s summaries are reflections of the company and “above all an expression of Google’s business activities.”