Leftovers

• Salon ☛ In 1976, I went to jail to celebrate the Fourth of July

  When we got home, dad was waiting. Since my parents had split, he wasn’t around much, but this got his attention. He kept me outside, telling mom he wanted to talk to me. “Someone needs to,” she said. Dad was aghast. He couldn’t believe what I had done. He asked me what the hell I was doing driving around on I-65 outside of Shepherdsville at 4:30 a.m.

• Stanford University ☛ Remembering Paul R. Ehrlich: A tribute from the MAHB

  A conservation biologist, teacher, professor, prolific author (over 1100 papers and 40 books) usually with his wife (of 72 years) Anne Ehrlich; environmentalist, pilot, traveler, bird watcher and so much more. His early scientific pursuits were as a child fascinated by butterflies which inspired a career in evolutionary biology.

• The Register UK ☛ David Potter, the man who put Psion in the palm of your hand, logs off at 82

  Potter was the founder of the company of the same name, a pivotal firm in the British technology industry from the 1980s to the 2000s. Psion supplied software for the early computers from Sinclair Research, the ZX80 and the ZX81, including a Flight Simulator that you can play online. In 1982, Psion supplied the bundled software with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and the later, the XChange suite for the Sinclair QL, later available for DOS under the name PC-Four – a deal The Register reported in detail for the QL’s 30th anniversary.

• Dave Gauer ☛ What should a personal website be?

  Which is as good a time as any to write down these thoughts I’ve been germinating for the last decade.

  I’ve had this website for a long time and for the first two thirds of that time (as of this writing), I struggled with the question, "What should my website be?"

  I didn’t know if I should try to have a professional portfolio and résumé or, later, a blog when that got popular, or just make it a JavaScript-heavy art project to show off my 1337 (wikipedia.org) skillz. I did a little of all of those things.

• Dan Q ☛ A postcard from a distant friend

  Anyway: it was a delightful surprise to receive this (Yyou can read the full text in its entry on my postcards page). Technology may make the world feel smaller and us all more-easily connected, but there’s something still something magical about a handwritten note.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Microdistillery For Microchemistry

    The first step is to build the heating component of the still. This is provided with a few custom aluminum parts for the base and a pair of heaters originally meant for 3D printers, with the assembled unit wrapped in insulation. The heater accomodates a 25 mL round-bottom flask. Temperature control of the heating mantle is provided by a controller mounted to a DIN rail which receives power from a 24V power supply, and an additional temperature probe is added to measure the temperature of the distillate. A test run with water shows the small still quickly and efficiently evaporating the water up to a condenser.

  • Philip Zucker ☛ A Theory of Arrays (ToA) Union Find

    One thing I’ve been discussing with Rudi, Michel and Max is union find annotations. Union find enhancements that still feel like union finds.

    I think I have another one that supports a notion of destructive store / substitution which doesn’t obviously fall into previous categorizations. Such an edge annotation feels highly noninvertible, but it is ultimately doable because the edge annotation is nondestructively swapping out data with the root annotation during rerooting.

  • Matt Keeter ☛ Please Steal my Meshing Algorithm Idea

    However, the resulting meshes may have self-intersections, and thin features are only captured if they happen to lie on the sampling grid. There are also scale-invariant adversarial models, which can bite you depending on how your model aligns with the sampling grid.

  • Alisa Sireneva ☛ Suffix BWT vs cyclic shift BWT, and fast computation | purplesyringa's blog

    The Burrows-Wheeler transform takes a string as an input and rearranges its characters, grouping them by context. It is invertible with 𝒪(1) additional input, and together these properties give it a place in data compression and genome alignment.

    What Wikipedia doesn’t tell you is that there are actually two variants of BWT, with subtly different performance characteristics and simplicity. These differences seem to be largely undocumented, so this post is me trying to make sense of it.

• Career/Education

  • Zachary Kai ☛ People and Blogs: Andy Baio

    Hi, my name's Andy Baio. I'm a writer and coder living in Portland, Oregon. You might know me from my blog, Waxy.org, where I've written for 25 years about the internet. If you've never heard of it, I rounded up some of the highlights from my first decade of blogging in 2012, and the second decade in 2022.

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: ALA 2026: Wrap Up Post 2 of 2 (the Becky's Rant Version)

    I am going to address the opening and closing sessions in a moment, but first, I want to begin with some o fly observations from the Exhibit Floor.

• Hardware

  • Rui Carmo ☛ We Call It "Weather" Here

    It’s pretty obvious, even looking at the monthly data (which I pulled out to get an idea of the overall trend), that one of the fans started failing over the weekend–and it was the Noctua NF-A9x14 that I’ve been using for the CPU cooler.

  • The Arcade Blogger ☛ More Tales From the Arcade Factory Floors

    We’re going to jump around a bit, and these images are in no particular order, but let’s start at the fledgling early years of the arcade industry with a newspaper clipping from late 1972 which shows and details Atari’s Pong production facility in Santa Clara, CA: [...]

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Western Water ☛ Groundwater Nitrates: A slow crisis below our feet

    About 10 percent of global land area now has groundwater nitrate concentrations that exceed the World Health Organization’s safe drinking water limit of 11.3 milligrams of nitrogen per liter, which is the equivalent of 50 milligrams of nitrate per liter. That threshold is not simply a bureaucratic line on a chart. Research from a large Danish study cited in the report found elevated cancer risk at concentrations as low as 3.87 milligrams of nitrogen per liter, a level well below the official safety standard, with an estimated 6,000 cancer cases linked to nitrate exposure.

  • Vox ☛ AC saves lives. It also created a nation that can’t survive without it.

    But the roaring, life-saving success of the AC has also embedded a profound vulnerability: the moment the power goes out, as it’s prone to do in a heat wave — or that electricity bills get too onerous, which tends to happen when the AC is cranked — the nation’s cold-blooded buildings convert into furnaces.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Dark Reading ☛ Apple Reverses Age-Old Patch Policy to Keep Up With AI

    The company has historically saved big, bundled sets of bug fixes for new versions of its operating system (OS). That's set to change. The company released a variety of security updates June 29 for iPhones, iPads, Macbooks, and the Safari browser, untethered to any major version releases. It's hardly the first time it's released security updates out-of-band, but the motivation was different this time. According to Reuters, the company said "it was adapting to the reality that, given the ability of artificial intelligence to speed the development of malicious hacking tools, it ⁠needed to reduce the time between when updates were first made public and when they were put into customers' hands."

  • [Repeat] Security Week ☛ New CitrixBleed Vulnerability Exploited Immediately After Public Disclosure

    Threat actors began exploiting the latest CitrixBleed-like vulnerability in NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateways less than 24 hours after public disclosure, Scottish cybersecurity firm Lupovis reports.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ EveryMac Turns 30

    I am a huge fan of the site’s comparison charts, which make it easy to see how a particular model evolved over time: [...]

  • Six Colors ☛ Stop previews from autoplaying on Apple TV

    It used to be that when I fired up Disney Plus on my Apple TV, I could browse for something to watch in relative peace. But at some point, an update must have come along that caused the app to break its previously inviolable vow of silence. Because now, when I hover over the thumbnail for a particular movie or show, a preview starts to autoplay.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ A new media spinout provides streaming apps for public service broadcasters. I just wish it was open.

    But I do wish it was fully based on open technology. While stations gain the right to modify the source code of their apps after a year, they remain locked into Local Public’s back-end services. For the CMS, which builds network effects the more stations use it, stations can only get support, maintenance, and customization through Local Public. Over time, that lock-in does not incentivize great support, and Local Public will need to work hard to buck the trends. NPR’s CMS, for example, is notorious among the stations that have to use it. I’m certain the will is there to do better, but they will need to proceed with intention. In my opinion it would be better if, at least after establishing a customer base, they open sourced their back-end CMS too.

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

    • Futurism ☛ AI Browsers Can Basically Be Hypnotized Into Turning Against Their User and Carrying Out Devastating Hacks

      Through the hack, the researchers demonstrated that leading AI browsers like OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity AI’s Comet, and Anthropic’s Claude plugin for Google Chrome could be duped into executing any command, allowing a hacker to change a user’s password, install malware, and steal their information.

      They call this hack “BioShocking,” a reference to the video game BioShock, in which the protagonist is hypnotized into doing stuff against their will with a specific phrase.

    • Futurism ☛ Weird Al Turns Down Huge Sum to Appear in Ad for AI

      As he tells it, he was offered “a nice pile of money” to star in a commercial before kickstarting his current tour. At first, the ad was pitched to him as for “business software that would increase productivity,” which sounded innocuous enough.

      “And then a week before we’re supposed to shoot it, I find out, oh, this is, it’s AI,” he continued. “And I thought, ‘Oh no, I can’t be the poster boy for AI, forget it.”

    • Techdirt ☛ No, Tim Sweeney, Valve Isn’t ‘Irresponsible’ For Having An AI Disclosure Tag On Games

      But the real issue here is just how tone deaf and idiotic it is for Sweeney to chide a rival platform for the severe crime of informing customers about the content of the games they purchase and how they were created, specifically on a hot button issue like the AI in gaming. While I, too, have made it clear that I think pre-judging every game that made any use of AI at all in development is a mistake, the cure for it is certainly not obfuscating that information from the very people that pay for these games.

    • Benny Siegert ☛ Some nuanced thoughts on AI, part 2 · benzblog

      It has been a bit over a year since I wrote Some nuanced thoughts on AI. Much of what I said then still stands.

      On the other hand, the AI models have continued improving. Even more so, the “harness” running it has gone through multiple iterations. Back then, the main mode of interacting with an LLM during coding was through autocomplete. The LLM would guess what you wanted to write and propose some text. That UI paradigm is gone now.

      The major game changer has been making it agentic. Yeah, I can hear you groan, dear reader. But the LLM can now run tools: it can build stuff. It can run tests. It can ingest test failures and use that for improvements. Most importantly, it can search documentation and can run CLI tools, e.g. for your framework.

      The current UI paradigms that I see are: [...]

    • The New Stack ☛ The $1.3 million theft that exposed AI's blind spot

      Infrastructure resilience increasingly depends on whether critical hardware arrives at the construction site at all — and on schedule. Verisk CargoNet reported that U.S. and Canadian cargo theft losses jumped roughly 60% in 2025 to nearly $725 million, even as the total number of incidents held essentially flat — a sign that thieves are becoming more selective about high-value freight. Metal theft rose 77%, driven largely by demand for copper, while organized groups shifted toward enterprise computing hardware. CargoNet expects that focus on high-value technology — RAM modules, storage drives and enterprise computing equipment — to carry into 2026. For broader context, the Department of Homeland Security has estimated that cargo theft overall costs as much as $35 billion a year.

  • Social Control Media

    • Michael Tsai ☛ Old Reddit Now Requires Logging In

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Espionage Against the European Parliament: Member of Committee Investigating Spyware Hacked with Pegasus

      We found that former Member of the European Parliament Stelios Kouloglou was hacked with Pegasus spyware while serving on the PEGA committee, which investigated Pegasus and other spyware abuses in Europe. Through forensic analysis of his device, we found that the attackers could have had access to confidential documents and committee deliberations.

    • The Record ☛ Spyware found on phone of European Parliament member probing it

      At the time of the infections, the so-called PEGA Committee, which included Kouloglou, was conducting sensitive work relating to its planned recommendations for tackling rampant abuse of commercial spyware in Europe.

      The PEGA Committee released its recommendations in May 2023, but the European Commission has largely ignored them, a failing that Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton — along with dozens of politicians and experts — have called inexcusable.

    • Wired ☛ EU Politicians Investigated Pegasus Spyware. Then It Ended Up on One of Their Phones

      In the summer of 2022, Greek politician Stelios Kouloglou was investigating how intrusive spyware had been used to hack business leaders, law enforcement officials, and politicians. As part of the European Parliament’s PEGA Committee, set up to investigate the use of the notorious Pegasus spyware and other variants, Kouloglou travelled to interview spyware victims and probe high-profile cases. That fall, according to a new forensic analysis, Kouloglou’s iPhone was hacked with the very same Pegasus spyware at the center of the investigations.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Flock Cameras Can Surveil Cars Without License Plates

      This kind of thing is older than AI; I wrote about it in my 2014 book Beyond Fear. Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was using cell phone location data to track phones that were habitually near each other.

    • John Gruber ☛ Daring Fireball: The European Commission Ruled Months Ago That Google's Integration of Gemini in Android Violates the DMA

      The difference between Google and Apple on this front is that Google just blazed ahead and shipped Gemini integrated into Android in the EU, and is now facing compliance problems after shipping. (Ask forgiveness.) Apple isn’t shipping Siri AI in the EU in iOS 27, knowing that it’s going to be deemed non-compliant. (Ask permission.)

    • Ars Technica ☛ EU tells Google to open up AI on Android; Google says that's "unwarranted intervention"

      This action stems from the continent’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a sweeping law that designates seven dominant technology companies as “gatekeepers” that are subject to greater regulation to ensure fair competition. Google has consistently spoken against the regulations imposed under the DMA, but it and the other gatekeepers have been subject to the law for several years now, and there’s little chance the commission backs away from it.

      The issue before the commission currently is the built-in advantage for Gemini on Android. When you turn on any Google-powered Android phone, Gemini is already there and gets special treatment at the system level. The European Commission is taking aim at the lack of features available to third-party AI services. The commission believes that there are too many experiences on Android that only work with Google’s Gemini AI, and as a gatekeeper, Google must change that.

    • Michael Geist ☛ The Data on Australia's Social Media Ban: The Better the Privacy Protection, The Less Effective the Ban

      As regular readers know, the Canadian plan to establish a social media ban for under 16s in Bill C-34 is based largely on the Australian model that took effect last December. With more data on the ban’s effectiveness continuing to roll in, multiple studies now confirm that it simply hasn’t worked as the majority of under-age users still have access to social media accounts. Yet rather than treating that as a reason to reconsider the model, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Parliament in late June that his government is working “as a priority” to strengthen the law. The failure highlights a troubling correlation: the better the privacy protection, the less effective the ban. In other words, since users will find ways to circumvent the ban, “strengthening” the law likely means less privacy and more surveillance.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Shaky Ground Gets Shakier: What the U.S. Supreme Court's Location Data Decision Means for Bill C-22

      When the government rushed Bill C-22 through the House of Commons last month, it defended the lawful access mandatory metadata retention requirement as consistent with similar rules established by Canada’s Five Eyes allies. Yet the U.S. has never imposed a comparable obligation to retain every subscriber’s transmission data, and this week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision that further solidifies the view that Bill C-22 is disproportionate and inconsistent with widely held understandings of privacy.

    • [Old] Signal ☛ Surveillance Is Not Safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [PDF]

      Forcing all UK residents to prove their age and/or have all their content scanned, simply to exercise their fundamental right to communicate, is a perilous proposition. We know that mass surveillance and censorship capabilities, however sincere-sounding the promises of those who initiate them are, never remain narrowly scoped. Once created, they will be expanded, forming a dangerous tool that will be wielded both in the UK and abroad to censor and surveil whatever they might consider “threatsˮ or “harmful content.ˮ

• Defence/Aggression

  • New Republic ☛ The Founders’ Warnings About Excess Wealth Have Come Appallingly True

    In fact, the Founders were deeply worried that concentrations of wealth would corrode self-governance and hollow out the republic from within. In their study of history, they saw how wealth inequality fueled political division, class conflict, and social unrest, eroding governance and ultimately contributing to failed states like the Roman Empire.

  • Robert Reich ☛ A warning about American fascism

    This is a clip from the original, which runs 23 minutes. It was called “Don’t Be a Sucker.”

• Environment

  • India Times ☛ AI infrastructure emissions: AI race weakens climate pledges at Google, Amazon

    Google and Amazon this week reported sharp increases in greenhouse gas emissions, driven by the frantic construction of artificial intelligence infrastructure that is pushing the tech giants further from their carbon neutrality pledges.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Russia faces growing fuel shortage

    Russian diesel prices are up more than 40% since spring, and June fuel output fell about 25% to a two-decade low. A Bloomberg survey of eight farmers found only two had enough fuel to complete harvesting. In a sign of the growing frustration, searches for “how to siphon fuel” jumped to more than 9,300 by June 21 from 697 a month earlier, according to Yandex data cited by the consumer-tech website iPhones.ru.

  • Thomas Buck ☛ E-Scooter Battery Build

    For some years now I own a Xiaomi Mi 2 scooter. Of course I flashed it with SHFW using the ST-Link method, which then allows using the normal SHFW Android app to do all updating and configuring.

    This worked perfectly fine for about 2500km. Then the internal battery was noticeably degraded and I could no longer reach home from work in winter.

    So I got one of the last Rita adapters before the product was discontinued, which allows connecting an external battery with differing voltage for range extension.

  • Sang-Ki Lee ☛ The Rise and Fall of the Arctic Meridional Overturning Circulation (ArcMOC)

    This blog post and the “Deep Dive” podcast, created by NotebookLM, are based on “Transient Increase in Arctic Deep-Water Formation and Ocean Circulation under Sea Ice Retreat” by Bretones et al. (2022).

    Using a long-term climate simulation, this research explores how Arctic sea ice loss influences ocean circulation and deep-water formation between the years 1850 and 2300. The study introduces a new metric, the Arctic meridional overturning circulation (ArMOC), to track changes as deep-sea mixing shifts from the North Atlantic into the central Arctic. As winter sea ice retreats, new areas of deep convection emerge in the Nansen Basin, temporarily strengthening the ArMOC even as the broader AMOC weakens. However, this northern migration eventually stalls when the sea ice edge reaches the Canadian Basin, where high freshwater content creates stable stratification that prevents deep mixing. Ultimately, the authors conclude that the temporary boost in Arctic overturning cannot compensate for the progressive decline of circulation in the Atlantic. This highlights that the location of sea ice is a decisive factor in the future of global ocean health.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Trump will cause some of you to die from the heat

    Some 163 million people in the U.S. live in areas that experienced dangerous heat on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service — sending “heat risk” forecasts in major cities (including New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Atlanta) into the most extreme risk category through Saturday.

    Part of the reason is the planet is warming dangerously, but Trump calls climate change a “hoax” and is encouraging more use of fossil fuels.

  • European Southern Observatory ☛ Large or bright satellite constellations: Effects on observations, including background sky brightness [PDF]

    Conclusions. The constellations currently proposed for launch, which exceed 1 700 000 objects and include satellites brighter than V550 km = 7, would substantially degrade astronomical observations. Maintaining satellite brightness below V550 km = 7 is important for all instruments but critical for safeguarding saturating instruments, such as the Rubin LSST camera, and for limiting sky-background pollution. Even under this constraint, the total satellite population should remain below ∼ 100 000 satellites to ensure that field-of-view losses do not exceed typical technical downtime.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Hackaday ☛ Settling The Debate On Soldered Versus Crimped High-Current Connectors

      For some reason there’s heated debate around the topic of whether high current carrying wiring ought to use crimped or soldered connections, even though the industry standard is to crimp everything. As a practical demonstration of why this is the case, [Will Prowse] set up a test involving a rig capable of dispensing a few hundred amps through both a crimped and a soldered copper cable.

      Prior to making things go spicy, [Will] made sure to check the resistance of the two cables, noting that the soldered version had significantly lower resistance than the crimped connectors. This could be one metric that proponents of soldered connectors can point to as a benefit.

    • Nick Heer ☛ An Updated Look at the Environmental Impact of A.I. Data Centres

      Google’s power consumption is now greater than the amount of electricity generated by New Zealand.

    • Mat Duggan ☛ Midnight Train to Stockholm

      Stockholm, it turns out, is much further from Copenhagen than anyone lets on. My options were to fly or take the train. Flying is technically a one-hour affair, but to make a 9 AM meeting I'd have to wake up at 4 AM, shuffle through security in a fugue state, and land in Sweden looking like a hostage video. I wasn't sure when I'd nap. This seemed insane.

      Then I had what I believed, at the time, to be a genius idea: the overnight train from Malmö to Stockholm. I'd sleep en route, wake refreshed, stride into my meeting like a man who understood something about life that others did not. Plus, I love trains. Sweden has a high-speed line that does the run in four hours, but the night train takes its time, which sounded charming. It was not charming.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Yle ☛ Pallas's cat gives birth to 3 kittens at Helsinki zoo

      Pallas’s cats, also known as manuls, are small wildcats native to the grasslands of Central Asia. They are named after the German explorer Peter Simon Pallas, who first scientifically described the species in 1776.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Digital Music News ☛ NY Congresswoman Demands Repayment for Swelce Wedding

    At least the Swift-Kelce affair will not be quite as extravagant—in terms of security, anyway. The security detail surrounding what is being called “America’s royal wedding” is estimated to cost the New York Police Department $160,000, with approximately 130 officers stationed for the event.

    That will include 70 detectives, who cost a minimum of $95,200, as well as another 50 junior officers costing $63,000. On top of that, more senior-ranking officers are expected to be on hand, which pushes the cost above $160,000.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ OpenAI could reportedly give 5% stake to US government

    OpenAI received a $852 billion valuation following its most recent funding round in March. A 5% stake would be worth $42.6 billion. The value of the shares could increase following OpenAI’s initial public offering, which the company reportedly hopes will boost its valuation to $1 trillion.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ SoftBank unveils plans to enter the US neocloud business with SB Neo

    SoftBank Corp. says it has been running a beta operation of its GPU cloud service in Japan since April. It’s powered by a software stack called Infrinia AI Cloud OS, which is a software stack for AI data centers. The company says it wants to apply the expertise it has gained from running this business on a much bigger scale in the U.S.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ AI data center builder Crusoe reportedly raising $3B at $30B valuation

    Crusoe builds data centers for major tech firms such as Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and OpenAI Group PBC. According to Bloomberg, Meta Platforms Inc. is also a customer. The social media giant has reportedly signed contracts to use two Crusoe data centers undergoing construction in Texas and Missouri.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Room at Aspen

    n Tuesday afternoon in Colorado, one of the most powerful venture capitalists in America stood on a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival and told the room that the first American pope is working for the Chinese Communists.

    The room laughed.

    That is the story. Everything else is footnote.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Counterfeiters at the Seam

    The operation is counterfeiting. Peter Thiel’s religious theories are to Christianity as the conservative legal movement’s theories about executive power are to the Founding tradition. Both are forgeries. Both borrow the authority of a tradition to authorize what the tradition, in its actual texts, forbids. Both work only on marks who have inherited the vocabulary of the tradition without the reading of it. And both are being deposited into the relay right now, at unusual tempo, because the counterfeiters can feel the window closing.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ This is How You Give a Speech on American Independence

    There is the noble vision of the founding ideal, says Leo, and then there is the messy reality of a work in progress. Let us not mistake the vision for the reality. In so doing, we miss the fact that *every* generation has to take up the challenge of applying it to its current day.

  • Derek Thompson ☛ What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Government Report Says About Who We Are

    One hundred years ago, on September 26, 1929, President Herbert Hoover gathered a group of social scientists at the White House. He asked them to begin research on the most detailed report ever produced on the state of the nation. Four years later, running more than 1,500 pages long, Recent Social Trends was published, offering an unusually granular look at life in the mid-1920s.

    The document is almost entirely forgotten. But today, for America’s 250th birthday, I’m blowing the cobwebs off this sucker and taking readers inside its yellowed pages for a look back at what life was like in the U.S. exactly 100 years ago, when the U.S. was celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • TruthOut ☛ Taxpayer-Funded 250th Anniversary Group Pushes AI Slop to Whitewash US History

      But, not content with America250, Donald Trump launched (to much confusion) his own competing initiative last year: Freedom 250. While both organizations are receiving taxpayer funding, the Trump administration has directed funding toward his preferred organization, NOTUS has reported. Freedom 250 is perhaps most known for Rededicate 250, a prayer event on the National Mall, as well as a concert series that swiftly fell apart when numerous musicians dropped out almost as soon as the lineup was announced. But the initiative has also included its own “Story of America” history lessons, developed by the conservative Christian Hillsdale College. Among them is a video about the “faith of our founders” that offers a Christian nationalist perspective on the separation of church and state.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Troy Hunt ☛ Troy Hunt: Swimming Pools, Pee, and Trying to Delete Your Data From the Internet

    But it's the data removal piece that's the real problem. If you pay one of the services in question to scrub you from the [Internet], I have no doubt they'll have some degree of success with the legally operating services. Those services will comply with legal requests and are adequately equipped to receive and process them. But the LeakedSources of the world? Not so much. And that's where the rub begins:

    Requests to remove personal information are only effective for services that are willing to honour them.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • TruthOut ☛ ICE Detained 10,000 People in 5 Days After White House Ordered Surge in Arrests

    According to The New York Times, top ICE officials have pushed to double daily arrest numbers in recent days after the White House called for an increase to 2,000 ICE arrests per day.

    The number of people detained in ICE immigration jails has also jumped by nearly 4,000 in recent days, with more than 63,000 people in ICE detention nationwide.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Woman and Several Others Arrested After Semi-Nude Appearance in Yazd

    The Public Relations Office of the Public and Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office in Yazd claimed that following the circulation of a video showing a semi-nude woman in Yazd’s Ghadir Park, where she allegedly engaged in “norm-breaking” behavior, the prosecutor’s office launched a special investigation into the case.

  • Wired ☛ Google DeepMind Unionization Talks Are Off to a Rocky Start

    An initial meeting on Wednesday was attended by union officers, DeepMind employees involved in the unionization push, the third-party arbitrator, and DeepMind HR representatives. Those advocating for unionization were left frustrated by the absence of DeepMind leadership figures.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Roy Tang ☛ The End is Nigh for Physical Gaming

    Most of my gaming spend on consoles is on physical games, probably around 99%. The biggest advantage of physical games is of course that you can share and borrow games among friends, which helps with the high costs. I have no problems with digital purchases per se. After all, digital has been the norm on PC forever, and my digital Steam library is huge. But I think the reason digital works so much better on PC rather than on console is that the PC is an open platform, and that has several consequences: [...]

  • Neodyme AG ☛ Diving into the depths of Widevine L3 — Neodyme

    Widevine is a DRM scheme by Google that is used to securely deliver content to the end user; either by secure hardware or obfuscated software. In this post, I will explain how to use the Qiling emulation framework and apply different techniques to break the software-only DRM. In particular, we will cover how to load Android libraries into Qiling, apply Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) on a real-world target, and how emulation can assist in deobfuscating code.

    Let’s start with a quick overview of Widevine.

    Widevine requires three servers: a Provisioning Server, a License Server, and a Content Server.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Salon ☛ How private equity destroyed an American pastime

    Bowlero’s intent to own every 32-lane bowling alley in America is about profit, obviously, but it’s also about the pursuit of a different class of participant. Bowling as we know it has always been a solidly blue-collar pursuit. As a pastime that took off in postwar America with the debut of the literally game-changing automatic pinsetter (alleys previously depended on a revolving stable of pinboys), bowling alleys shed their reputations as seedy, rowdy men’s clubs where patrons drank, smoked, gambled and brawled. The automatic pinsetter ushered in a new era: clean, well-lit places in which to spend leisure time. As a sport, bowling was accessible, low-cost, and with adult, junior and senior leagues, age-inclusive. This made alleys community destinations and social hubs. League bowling took off, offering a reliable income stream for bowling alleys and centers; and as more women joined leagues, some places even offered free daycare. By the mid-1960s, there were approximately 12,000 bowling alleys in the United States that were largely sustained by league play; they were often family businesses that were passed down over generations.

  • Patents

    • Software Patents

      • Paul Krugman ☛ The End of North America

        In what would be major news except for all the other disasters happening, Donald Trump has declined to renew the USMCA — the successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement — which he himself negotiated. This puts businesses on notice that tariff-free shipments within North America, which NAFTA supposedly made permanent, may go away.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ French Police Dismantle Operation Behind the Already Defunct YggTorrent

      France's Gendarmerie nationale announced that it dismantled the organization behind YggTorrent, France's largest torrent site. Twelve people have been arrested on charges including money laundering. The site itself, however, was already destroyed months ago by a hacker who leaked its data and drained its crypto wallets. Meanwhile, the arrests are sending shockwaves through the wider French piracy scene.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Sports Rightsholders Want an EU Blacklist for 'Piracy' Hosting Providers

      Sports broadcaster beIN and the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance propose to expand the European blocking efforts with a blacklist of rogue hosting companies. These companies can then be banned by their ASN, covering a series of IP-address blocks. By implementing the blocking measures across various network companies, including transit providers and internet exchanges, they aim to protect rights across the 'European Internet'.