Leftovers

• Elliot C Smith ☛ Let your users start over

  I wish that more products had an option to reset to factory settings. Whether I haven’t used a product in a long time or have found a new way to set things up, there are plenty of reasons to return to square one. In a world where more and more content is driven by algorithmic recommendations or AI, being able to wipe the slate clean and start over is even more relevant.

  The trigger for this post was a customer I’d been working with who asked for a reset. They were testing our product, and something clicked for them. They wanted to set up and structure things in a different and very particular way. We don’t have a button for this in the app, so we reset stuff behind the scenes. Providing things functionality sparked my thinking and, in this case, helped close a sale.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ I like the person I am when I travel

  When I pack my bags and close the home door behind me and head to a new adventure, I become a different person. When I’m on the road, I’m more relaxed and less worried about stuff. I’m more socially open and end up talking with new people and making new friends. I’m more resourceful and my default mode is to solve problems at hand instead of getting anxious about them.

• Jim Mitchell ☛ I like the person I am when I travel

  I took some time off work during the Thanksgiving holiday after grinding on a work project for a really long time. I’ve found myself at a point over the last six months where I just don’t feel effective and needed to figure out why.

• Clayton Errington ☛ When Texting destroyed communication

  After reading a blog post from Joel about how texting destroyed social investment, it got me thinking about how we all communicate differently these days. Joel’s blog post was in reply to Wouter Groeneveld and both are quite a good read.

  I began thinking how we communicate these days with our friends, co-workers, acquaintances, and even strangers. Now we are able to sit behind a keyboard of sorts and type away our thoughts and wait for that to be received on the other end. As some good points in the previous articles, you had to wait on the pony express, or mail carrier to deliver a letter. Then wait for a response by mail again.

• Annie Mueller ☛ Elements of creativity - annie's blog

  Fear stifles your mind. Anxiety stunts your ability to make connections. Connections are the core of creativity. You can’t connect what you can’t see. When you’re afraid, your vision is limited. All you see is what you are afraid of. Your energy becomes desperate, manic, as you scan obsessively for escapes and solutions. This is what fear does to you.

• 404 Media ☛ WTF Is Stake, the Online Casino Using Viral Posts to Advertise Its Gambling Site

  In an apparent attempt to get around X’s rules prohibiting gambling ads, online gambling site Stake appears to be using influencers, massively popular engagement farming accounts, and stolen content to promote its site.

  On some posts, it’s just the Stake logo over a video or images, and others include versions of “This Is An #Ad" or "Gamble Responsibly #Ad." Influencers are required to disclose advertising, per federal law.

• Joel Chrono ☛ When Texting Destroyed Social Investment

  I have to admit, I switch back and forth on my thoughts about long distance communication and its impact on social interactions. And for me, it is something that depends on context, like people that I interact with in real life and via texting, online only friends, or people I barely talk to at all unless it’s in person.

• Futurism ☛ Three Men Die When Google Maps Tells Them to Drive Off Unfinished Bridge

  According to local officials, mobile records indicated the group was using Google Maps right up until the accident occurred.

• Omicron Limited ☛ Sports betting and financial market data show how people misinterpret new information in predictable ways

  "If you look at the history of NBA games, the probability that a team with the ball, up by two with 10 seconds left, wins is north of 90%," says Eben Lazarus, an assistant professor of finance at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. "But what shows up in the betting markets is that people treat baskets as too similar over the course of the game. They overreact to information that's not very important—early baskets—and underreact to strong signals at the end."

• Standards/Consortia

  • PC World ☛ Buying a USB-C cable? Watch out for these 6 gotchas

    Here are some key gotchas you need to be aware of before buying a USB-C cable these days. Learn how to spot the bad ones and what you can do to end up with one that’s fast, durable, and priced well.

  • Manton Reece ☛ Bluesky relays, Mastodon discovery providers

    Comparing ActivityPub and AT Proto is a useful exercise. It’s tempting but ultimately too simple to say that one is decentralized and one is centralized. Bluesky’s app and relay are centralized but personal hosting in Bluesky is decentralized. Mastodon’s instances are decentralized but identity within an instance is tied to that instance. This makes for an odd comparison because it’s actually easier to migrate account data in Bluesky than it is in Mastodon.

    Folks have criticized Bluesky from the beginning for not adopting ActivityPub. I think it’s clear now that the Bluesky team created AT Proto because they wanted to decouple certain aspects of the protocol, allowing for a high-performance infrastructure that could replace Twitter, while maintaining the benefits of the open web around hosting and domain names. Their strategy has paid off. Bluesky is growing very quickly and is now twice as large as Mastodon.

  • Niel Brown ☛ Using a 20 year old foldable Bluetooth keyboard with a modern day Android phone

    Well, if you can read this blogpost, it works!

    I wrote this post on a really quite a superb Bluetooth keyboard, from a long, long time ago (in computing terms), and uploaded it to my web server over ssh from my phone, all without using the phone’s on-screen keyboard.

• Science

  • The Hindu ☛ National Supercomputing Mission: 33 Supercomputers Deployed with 32 Petaflops Capacity in India till November

    A total of 33 supercomputers with a combined computing capacity of 32 petaflops have been deployed in the country till November 21, 2024 under National Supercomputing Mission, Parliament was informed on Wednesday (November 27, 2024).

• Career/Education

  • The Independent UK ☛ Just 18% of teachers think phone ban would improve pupil behaviour – poll

    The most disruptive behaviours cited were student chatter (80%), inattention (75%), inability to sit still (65%) and disrespect towards other students (55%).

  • Troy Patterson ☛ A Different View on AI in Education

    I found this post by Emily (I don’t know Emily, but apparently Emily Bender is a linguist professor) interesting:

    ChatGPT Has No Place in the Classroom

  • University of Michigan ☛ The library study rooms need a rehaul

    With only one library on Central Campus in which undergraduates can reserve rooms, getting a secluded group study spot at the UGLi is always a struggle. My friends and I got tired of wandering the floors until we found a spot, so we started utilizing the reservation system. Joining the rat race to book the best rooms, we noticed the same people booking the same rooms: Before we found our loophole in room booking, we’d see the same fraternity name beat us to it over and over again. As a result, large groups are forced to wander around the UGLi banking on a room to be open until they give up and go somewhere else. It’s clear that the study room system is overwhelmed, and something needs to change.

  • Andy Bell ☛ Complete CSS is now live!

    I’m bringing all of my experience of helping teams — both as a consultant and a design agency founder — not just to write better CSS, but to work more efficiently as an organisation.

  • Lou Plummer ☛ Don't Burn Bridges

    Some of the best advice I ever received was an admonition against burning bridges. An old co-worker told me that when I was getting ready to leave a job at which I was unhappy. The immature side of me wanted to leave in a blaze of glory, letting everyone know what I thought of them and the place that employed them. Somehow I'd convinced myself that my opinion was important and that all those people needed my approval to be happy - none of which was actually true. You may have seen someone do exactly what I contemplated. It's always icky and transparent and never looks good.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Michigan is spending big to hire and retain teachers. Experts see positive signs

    It’s all part of an effort to reduce what officials say have been significant teacher shortages in Michigan, where schools have struggled to fill certain positions for years.

  • Andy Bell ☛ We made an email template to help convince your boss to pay for Complete CSS

    We recently launched Complete CSS, and a lot of people have mentioned that they don’t know how to approach their boss to ask them to pay for it. Here’s an email template for you to help with that.

  • Phirephoenix ☛ the values of work

    Monktoberfest asks that your talk be something you wouldn’t be able to hear at any other conference. Mine was about values and how they show up at work and what happens when there is a gap between your stated and enacted values. It’s a theme that percolates through a lot of my writing and something I’ve spent many sleepless nights ruminating on, and giving this talk to such a receptive, empathetic, and compassionate audience was incredibly meaningful to me.

  • Yordi Verkroost ☛ Teachers Left Behind

    The Dutch parliament recently debated the government’s future plans for education, which include a mind-blowing 2 billion euro cutback. Alongside this financial freefall, the education sector faces another challenge: a shortage of active teachers. Not a shortage of qualified educators, mind you, but a lack of those who hold educational degrees and continue to actively teach. The pool of qualified teachers is big enough to have one teacher available per ten students, but many have left the profession over the last few years.

  • James G ☛ Web Writer’s Workshop on December 3rd

    I am hosting a Web Writer’s Workshop event on December 3rd, 2024. The event, scheduled to last 90 minutes, is a place to chat about all things writing: what to write about, writing tips, staying motivated, how to collaborate on written projects, and whatever else comes up on the topic of writing.

    Whether you publish fiction or non-fiction, introspection or ideas, you are welcome to join us for an informal chat about writing!

• Hardware

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • [Repeat] Kev Quirk ☛ I’ve Been Thinking About a Switch to the Fairphone 5

      Costing around £500, the Fairphone 5 has a 5 year warranty, is supported for 8 years and is repairable at home. On the other hand, the latest iPhone 16 starts at £800, has a 1 year warranty, isn't repairable, and if this site is to be believed, will be supported for 6-7 years.

      Honestly, 6-7 years is actually more than I thought, but my concern is whether the a device would actually last that long without needing repairs that would render the longevity cost prohibitive.

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Huawei waves Android goodbye

      Yu also said the Mate 70 is the first mainstream smartphone to include a satellite paging system, has an improved processor, and runs on Huawei’s own HarmonyOS Next operating system, which together boost performance by 40% compared to previous models.

      The Mate 70 series is the first major commercial roll-out of HarmonyOS Next, a significant step in Huawei’s push for software independence since US curbs cut off its access to Google services in 2019.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Stars And Stripes ☛ Marine sergeant’s romantic evening goes up in flames, Okinawa police say

    The Marine lit about 20 candles in the room, then left to pick up his girlfriend at Naha Airport, according to police. The room caught fire between 10 and 10:30 p.m., the spokesman said.

  • Science Alert ☛ A Toxic Synergy Arises When 'Forever Chemicals' Merge With Microplastics

    Microplastics and persistant materials known as 'forever chemicals' are two of our most concerning modern pollution problems. Now new research has shown how their impact on the environment drastically increases when combined.

    A team from the University of Birmingham in the UK looked at the effects of microplastics and PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) on Daphnia magna water fleas, both separately and mixed together.

  • Science Alert ☛ There's a Surprisingly Easy Way to Remove Microplastics From Drinking Water

    Tiny fragments of microplastics are making their way deep inside our bodies in concerning quantities, significantly through our food and drink.

    Scientists have recently found a simple and effective means of removing them from water.

  • The Hindu ☛ ‘Journalim is an effective tool for transfer of farm information’

    B.D. Biradar, director of research and director of extension, University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Dharwad, said that effective and timely transfer of required agricultural information was possible through the medium of journalism.

  • Wired ☛ Why an Offline Nuclear Reactor Led to Thousands of Hospital Appointments Being Canceled

    NRG’s Petten reactor is one of just six major commercial producers of molybdenum-99, a key medical radioisotope. Molybdenum-99 decays into technetium-99m, which doctors sometimes inject into patients. It’s very safe. The technetium-99m flows into a person’s blood and collects, briefly, in parts of the body such as the heart, lungs, or a cancerous tumor. It is easily picked up by special cameras and allows doctors to take scans, which—unlike an MRI or CT scan—reveal how such parts of the body are actually functioning as well as what they look like.

  • University of Michigan ☛ I am unsubscribing from this constant online drama

    Recently, there has been a rise of “rage bait” in social media content. Rage bait consists of making intentionally provocative content to get an emotional reaction out of people, and generate more views and interaction. Rage bait creators do not care whether reactions are positive or negative, because they get paid either way. Lately, the influx of negative content has been the worst part of social media, with everyone constantly arguing online or posting things that make you feel worse about issues you were already concerned about.

  • Wired ☛ 3 Simple Rules to Beat the Downsides of Aging

    These are all promising, but it will take some time before they are proven to be effective and safe in humans. While we wait for the biomedical establishment to come up with powerful ways to tackle aging itself, there are three simple measures that use our understanding of advances in biology and medicine to keep us in good health as we age.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ TikTok to block teenagers from beauty filters over mental health concerns

    Under-18s will, in the coming weeks, be blocked from artificially making their eyes bigger, plumping their lips and smoothing or changing their skin tone.

    The restrictions will apply to filters – such as “Bold Glamour” – that change children’s features in a way that makeup cannot. Comic filters that add bunny ears or dog noses will be unaffected. The billion-user social media company announced the changes during a safety forum at its European headquarters in Dublin.

  • CBC ☛ Study finds Indigenous people cultivated hazelnuts 7,000 years ago, challenging modern assumptions

    A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science indicates Indigenous peoples in what is now B.C. had been cultivating the beaked hazelnut for thousands of years, which researchers say challenges the notion that pre-colonial Indigenous people in northwestern B.C. were only hunter-gatherers.

    The findings indicate hazelnuts had been transplanted and cultivated for at least 7,000 years by Gitxsan, Tsimshian, and Nisga'a peoples.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • New York Times ☛ F.T.C. Launches Antitrust Investigation Into Microsoft

    Regulators are demanding information from the company on its clown computing, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity products.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ FTC reportedly launches antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s cloud, Hey Hi (AI) and cybersecurity practices

    The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into various aspects of Abusive Monopolist Microsoft Corp.’s business, including the company’s clown computing, software licensing, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence offerings. The investigation comes after FTC was reportedly preparing to launch an investigation into claims that Abusive Monopolist Microsoft earlier this month.

  • Doug Brown ☛ The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory

    What’s happening here is there is one bulk capacitor for each of the three power rails provided by the power supply. C19 is for +5V, C21 is for +12V, and C22 is for -5V. You can see the trace from C22’s positive terminal going directly to the -5V pin on the power supply connector.

    This arrangement makes sense for the two positive power rails, but it’s backwards for the -5V rail. If the image above isn’t proof enough for you, here are a couple of pictures with my multimeter definitively showing that the positive terminal of C22 goes to -5V and the negative terminal goes to ground. That means when the system is powered on, there will be -5V across this capacitor.

  • Don Marti ☛ opt out of Google Page Annotations

    Ever wish Google would have one button for "opt me out of all Google growth hacking schemes" that you could click once and be done with it? Me too. But that’s not how it works.

  • Baldur Bjarnason ☛ 'The Intelligence Illusion (Second Edition): Why generative models are bad for business' Black Friday launch sale

    Generative models are bad for business. The harm they do to your work and business isn’t limited to their unreliability or regular failures.

    These products are suffused throughout with flaws and errors that expose any company that decides to rely on them or let their employees use them to risks that under normal circumstances would be considered outright untenable.

    But, because we are in the middle of a bubble and because tech companies are now increasingly intertwined with the governments that should be holding them accountable, managers everywhere are rushing to adopt these tools in as many ways as is possible in the belief that they represent an imminent revolution in productivity.

  • The Register UK ☛ Cloudflare broke its logging-service, causing data loss

    Cloudflare Logs gathers logs generated by the cloud services and sends them to customers who want to analyze them. Cloudflare suggests the logs may prove helpful "for debugging, identifying configuration adjustments, and creating analytics, especially when combined with logs from other sources, such as your application server."

  • Wired ☛ Yes, That Viral LinkedIn Post You Read Was Probably AI-Generated

    The Microsoft-owned social media site for business professionals has embraced AI, even offering LinkedIn Premium subscribers access to its own in-house AI writing tools that can “rewrite” posts, profiles, and direct messages. The initiative appears to be working: Over 54 percent of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are likely AI-generated, according to a new analysis shared exclusively with WIRED by the AI detection startup Originality AI. It’s just that the corporate-speak style of AI writing on the platform can be tricky to distinguish from genuine human-penned Thought Leader Blogging.

  • PC World ☛ I switched from X to Bluesky: What I love and hate about it so far

    Along with millions of other people who no longer enjoy the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, I recently switched from X to Bluesky. I still have an account on X, but it’s pretty much inactive now that I’m spending my time on Bluesky instead. And despite having been present on Twitter since 2007, I’ll delete my X account at some point.

    There’s a lot to love about Bluesky and it truly feels like a return to the glory days of Twitter, but there are also some obvious issues that may turn you off if you’re switching from X. Here are some things you might want to consider before switching to Bluesky.

  • VOA News ☛ Prince Harry's phone-hacking lawsuit against Daily Mail to go to trial in 2026

    Prince Harry and other high-profile British figures' privacy lawsuits against the Daily Mail newspaper's publisher will go to trial in early 2026, London's High Court heard on Tuesday, with the parties' legal costs set to exceed $47 million.

    Harry, the younger son of King Charles, is one of seven claimants suing Associated Newspapers over allegations of voicemail interception – commonly known as phone-hacking – and other serious privacy breaches dating back 30 years.

  • Futurism ☛ Zuckerberg Seems Genuinely Alarmed by the Explosive Growth of Bluesky

    Bluesky has apparently become such a successful X-formerly-Twitter alternative that even Mark Zuckerberg is anxiously taking notice. At this rate, the social site could potentially outpace Threads — and Meta clearly isn't happy.

    "The race to replace Twitter has accelerated," Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at the market research company eMarketer, told The Washington Post. "Threads has been the de facto home for many displaced [X-formerly-Twitter] users, but the surge of new users to Bluesky after the election has upped the competition."

  • Matt Birchler ☛ AI hype in the workplace is cooling, but usage is still on the rise

    This study is a real Rorschach test for what one wants to be true with AI exactly 2 years in the ChatGPT revolution. If you’re a skeptic, then the headline is exactly what you want to see. “See!? People don’t want this stuff!” On the other hand, enthusiasts will point to the fact that the usage numbers are still going up and the blockers employees reported more align with training misses than distaste for the tech.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ X claims ownership of all X accounts in battle for The Onion to acquire Alex Jones’ Infowars  

    Who actually owns your social media account came into question on Monday after lawyers for Elon Musk’s X Corp. argued that the accounts belonging to Alex Jones’ bankrupt InfoWars site were its exclusive property.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ We need to start wrestling with the ethics of AI agents

    Generative AI models have become remarkably good at conversing with us, and creating images, videos, and music for us, but they’re not all that good at doing things for us.

    AI agents promise to change that. Think of them as AI models with a script and a purpose. They tend to come in one of two flavors.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ The way we measure progress in AI is terrible

    Every time a new AI model is released, it’s typically touted as acing its performance against a series of benchmarks. OpenAI’s GPT-4o, for example, was launched in May with a compilation of results that showed its performance topping every other AI company’s latest model in several tests.

    The problem is that these benchmarks are poorly designed, the results hard to replicate, and the metrics they use are frequently arbitrary, according to new research. That matters because AI models’ scores against these benchmarks will determine the level of scrutiny and regulation they receive.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Justice Department OIG calls out lack of an updated public AI strategy

    The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General called out the agency’s lack of an updated public strategy for artificial intelligence and underscored the need to be proactive in a report on its management and performance challenges Monday.

    The comments came as part of the OIG’s determination that maintaining cybersecurity and keeping up with emerging technologies, such as AI, were among the top challenges for the DOJ. For AI specifically, the report underscored how long ago the department’s public AI strategy was released.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Europe’s fight for AI transparency faces staff and pacing challenges. The US can take note.

    In the United States, there’s still no broad-based artificial intelligence legislation. Nevertheless, myriad federal agencies, driven in part by the AI executive order, have begun hiring staff equipped to confront — and potentially study and audit — artificial intelligence systems. Private organizations, including nonprofits and civil society organizations, have worked to do the same.

    To understand the technology and its potential harms related to discrimination, privacy, civil rights or exposing sensitive scientific information, experts want to pry open the black box and uncover how algorithmic systems actually work. To do that, they typically need two critical ingredients: technical expertise and access to data and model architecture.

  • El País ☛ Rose Wang, Bluesky COO: ‘People are tired of the algorithm deciding everything’

    Bluesky is thriving. A week after Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, the platform had gained a million users. By the second week, it was adding a million new users per day. As of Sunday, the user base had reached 22 million. And everything indicates it will continue to grow amid the widespread dissatisfaction with Elon Musk’s management of X.

  • New York Times ☛ Opinion | Are Algorithms Killing Creativity?

    As you scroll through the [Internet], you’ve probably noticed the same problem Kirby Ferguson has: “Everything looks the same, sounds the same, is the same.” In the Opinion Video above, the filmmaker argues that our culture often appears to be plagued by a dearth of creativity. But what if, beneath the surface of mainstream culture, there was a world of wild imagination waiting to be discovered — if only a powerful force would stop suppressing it?

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Spines: a VC-funded vanity publisher with added AI

    Nobody wants AI-generated books — they only ever get bought by accident. Spines’ income stream comes from charging authors up to $5,000 to produce a book. Spines purports to use AI for “editing, proofreading, formatting and cover design” and even “AI-driven marketing” — the parts most needing a human on the case. [SiliconAngle; Publishers Weekly]

  • Cal Paterson ☛ Building LLMs is probably not going be a brilliant business

    Large language models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT and Claude.ai are whizzy and cool. A lot of people think that they are going to be The Future. Maybe they are — but that doesn't mean that building them is going to be a profitable business.

    In the 1960s, airlines were The Future. That is why old films have so many swish shots of airports in them. Airlines though, turned out to be an unavoidably rubbish business. I've flown on loads of airlines that have gone bust: Monarch, WOW Air, Thomas Cook, Flybmi, Zoom. And those are all busts from before coronavirus - times change but being an airline is always a bad idea.

    That's odd, because other businesses, even ones which seem really stupid, are much more profitable. Selling fizzy drinks is, surprisingly, an amazing business. Perhaps the best. Coca-cola's return on equity has rarely fallen below 30% in any given year. That seems very unfair because being an airline is hard work but making coke is pretty easy. It's even more galling because Coca-cola don't actually make the coke themselves - that is outsourced to "bottling companies". They literally just sell it.

  • Greg Morris ☛ See Into Sam Altman’s Soul

    Not putting them in the bin himself, he’s too busy for that. He just throws them on the floor and relies on his housekeeper to pick them up whenever they are around. The whole podcast / video is well worth watching, but this part in particular is really revealing about the personality of the man in charge of Open Ai.

  • Wired ☛ We Need a New Right to Repair for Artificial Intelligence

    The technology isn’t the problem here. The power dynamic is. People understand that this technology is being built on their data, often without our permission. It’s no wonder that public confidence in AI is declining. A recent study by Pew Research shows that more than half of Americans are more concerned than they are excited about AI, a sentiment echoed by a majority of people from Central and South American, African, and Middle Eastern countries in a World Risk Poll.

  • Security Week ☛ Recent Zyxel Firewall Vulnerability Exploited in Ransomware Attacks

    The bug, tracked as CVE-2024-42057, could allow remote attackers to execute OS commands on vulnerable devices, without authentication.

  • India Times ☛ Widespread Microsoft outage takes email and video conferencing offline

    Microsoft's customers were unable to gain access to their email or videoconferencing systems on Monday, as a wave of outages spread across the country after a faulty software update inside the company's huge computer network.

    The outages primarily affected Microsoft Outlook, the company's email software, and Microsoft Teams, the company's video and communications program.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • India Times ☛ GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke: At Microsoft and GitHub, we’re not worried about AI taking away 50% engineering jobs, we’re much more worried that

    GitHub, the Microsoft-owned software development platform, has revised its earlier prediction that India would surpass the US as the world's largest developer community by 2027. The new forecast now suggests this will happen in 2028, citing factors like global economic conditions and the rapid growth of the US developer market, fueled by AI advancements.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • The Register UK ☛ FTC warns smart product makers about software updates

      Makers of software-enabled products have been put on notice by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for failing to disclose how long their products will receive software updates.

      A paper [PDF] published on Tuesday from the trade watchdog observes that while non-connected devices generally last until they fail, so-called smart products have a lifespan that depends on software and network services.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ ‘Putin only understands force’: Former U.S. special envoy for Ukraine negotiations Kurt Volker on how Trump could seek to end the war — Meduza

    • New Yorker ☛ What Can Stop the Cycle of Escalation in Ukraine?

      As the Biden Administration approves new weaponry for Ukrainian forces, Putin has invoked Russia’s nuclear arsenal, but neither move is likely to significantly alter the trajectory of the war.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Leaflet from Daniel Pocock – Independent- Dublin Bay South – 2024 General Election

    A leaflet from Daniel Pocock who is running as an Independent in Dublin Bay South in the 2024 General Election

  • 8GB Swiss Archive offered to Irish voters by Dáil candidate

    Google search results are wrongly suggesting that Mr Pocock was eliminated. In fact, no candidates have been eliminated. This is more proof that multinationals are interfering in our democracy.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Trademarks

  • Bryan Lunduke ☛ Deno v. Oracle: JavaScript Trademark Dispute

    Legal action seeks to cancel Oracle's "JavaScript" trademark, which it renewed fraudulently and has abandoned.

  • TTAB Blog ☛ Another Strategic Partners Argument Fails: TTAB Affirms Refusal of "REACH & Design" for Vehicle Parts

    The Board upheld a Section 2(d) refusal to register the mark shown below, for vehicle radiators and air conditioner parts, finding confusion likely with the registered mark REACH for "Motor vehicles, namely, automobiles, trucks, vans, sport utility vehicles and structural parts therefor; trucks and structural parts therefor; vans and structural parts therefor." Applicant Reach International argued that, under the Strategic Partners approach, its prior registration for a similar mark should serve to overcome the refusal. The Board, however, found that Reach overreached. In re Reach International, Inc., Serial No. 97335655 (November 25, 2024) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Mark A. Thurmon).