Leftovers

• Tracy Durnell ☛ How I edited my blog post “Accepting Friction”

  I’ve been having fun giving feedback on other writers’ blog posts recently — and it’s also made me remember that it works really well for me to add comments to a piece in track changes 😂 Usually, I do all my drafting in-browser. So, I decided for my next long piece, I’d go through the revision process in Google Docs — and I’m sharing the drafts for anyone who’s interested in how others edit their own work. (I also have a writeup describing my revision process in steps.)

• Simon Willison ☛ Ending a year long posting streak

  I’m calling it: this streak is done. According to my custom dashboard I hit 367 days—December 31st 2023 to December 31st 2024, inclusive (it was a leap year)—1,151 posts in total.

• Paolo Melchiorre ☛ My 2024 in review

  A quick review of my 2024 done in a hurry, trying to remember the many experiences I had, the people I met, the places I visited and the changes I went through.

• Nico Cartron ☛ 2024 (blog) Year in review

  Here we are again, writing this year in review.

• Matt Birchler ☛ Was 2024 a good year? Oh, and all the metrics and earnings info you could ever want.

• Marijke Luttekes ☛ Thoughts on 2024

  It is that time of the year again when we reflect on the previous 365 days.

• Jamie Zawinski ☛ My 50 most popular blog posts in 2024

• James G ☛ Happy New Year!

  I equally love reading the words of others. Others’ stories inspire me; they make me think. Stories connect us all. I enjoy reading what others have learned, and love the moments when I find an essay or educational resource that explains something in a way that resonates with me unlike anything else I have read. I love chatting with friends about what they have written, especially about the questions posited in friends’ writing that makes me think and wonder and imagine.

• Amit Patel ☛ What I did in 2024

  I didn’t have any specific goals for writing articles or topics to learn. So what did I do? The biggest thing is that I’m blogging more than in recent years: [...]

• Cendyne Naga ☛ New Year - Toooo much work

  Another year has come and gone, and unfortunately not with as much writing as I had hoped. Instead, I gained new skills and refined existing skills.

• Chloé Vulquin ☛ My Streaming Setup

  Anyway, this obviously isn’t a big deal to anyone reading this, but I thought it was an interesting setup. Usually, in my experience, more “complex” solutions with many different steps and components tend to go quite poorly, and I tend to try to prefer to make systems that have as a few moving parts as possible. This is a shocking departure from that trend but, at least this time, it worked out quite well! So I decided to share this incarnation of jank, since I decided to write a blog post every month anyway (and I’d rather write this than a status update where I basically say “did some AoC, survived to vacation time at work”). Hope you enjoyed reading about it, and have a happy new year (I had this written a week ago but only posted it now)!

• Rlang ☛ Once more ‘round the sun

  I also need to think about the purpose. I don’t need to make the case for R in the NHS any more. Over the last few years its evolved into how I used R to tackle problems that have cropped up during work, so I suppose I should just continue down that road a bit more. One thing I do need to get comfortable doing is quick, “today I learned” type posts, because I have too many gists and other bits lying around with small examples of things I’ve used to solve various problems.

• The Register UK ☛ 8 things that shouldn't have happened last year, but did

  Instead, here are eight of the tech things that didn't go as planned in 2024, in no particular order and of no particular significance except to paint a picture of the year in tech guaranteed hype free. Why eight. Not five or ten? We just like powers of two. Now, on with the show.

• Greg Morris ☛ What Do You Get Out Of It?

  Getting paid for doing something you enjoy is every person’s dream, yet when I think about getting paid for writing online, I would dread it. I enjoy it much more when my motivation is just for the fun of it. To be kind and put out my thoughts, ideas, and solutions to problems into the world and hope they help someone in a similar position.

• Wired ☛ 24 Things That Made the World a Better Place in 2024

  Let’s face it—2024 has felt at times like a relentless conveyor belt of doom. The climate crisis is still gaining momentum, COP underlined the lack of consensus on what to do about it, and attempts to create a plastics treaty failed. Political violence rose to the surface in the US, and there was an election result that foretells four years of chaos and persecution for many. And war, conflict, and violence continue to afflict millions worldwide, from the DRC to South Sudan, Haiti to Yemen, Ukraine to Gaza.

  But in the midst of the darkness, there were some bright rays of light. Scientists made big strides in countering some of the greatest health problems faced by humanity. Efforts to fight climate change have pressed on. And a cute baby hippo bit her zookeeper’s knee in a fit of childish rage, launching a thousand memes. Here’s our rundown of the best news to come out of 2024.

• Science

  • El País ☛ NASA executive Leslie Livesay: ‘We’re getting closer to being able to answer if there is life beyond Earth’

    One of the scientist’s main objectives in her new position will be to oversee an even more difficult task: to bring samples from Mars back to Earth before its biggest competitor does: China, a country with which the U.S. is also competing for the exploration of the Moon. In this conversation with EL PAÍS, during her recent visit to Spain, Livesay reviews what NASA’s large unmanned space missions will be like, some of which will be essential for astronauts to be able to reach the Moon and Mars later on.

  • Deseret Media ☛ How to catch the Quadrantids, the first meteor shower of 2025

    These meteors usually don't have long trains, but the heads may appear as bright fireballs. The peak may reveal as many as 120 meteors per hour, according to NASA.

    Here's what to know about the Quadrantids, that will last until Jan. 16, and other meteor showers.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Quadrantid meteor shower to peak Jan. 3: How to catch the first stargazing event of 2025 - lonestarlive.com

    Just after ringing in the new year, you’ll have the chance to see a spectacular show in the night sky when the Quadrantid meteor shower peaks on Friday, Jan. 3.

    The Quadrantids, which have been active since Dec. 26, 2024, and last until Jan. 16, 2025, are saving their most spectacular celestial activity for this week.

  • [Old] Groot Koerkamp ☛ A lemma on suffix array searching

    We’ll prove that using the “faster” binary search algorithm (see 2.2) that tracks the LCP with the left and right boundary of the remaining search interval has amortized runtime

    \[ O\Big(\lg_2(n) + |P| + |P| \cdot \lg_2(Occ(P))\Big), \] when \(P\) is a randomly sampled fixed-length pattern from the text and \(Occ(P)\) counts the number of occurrences of \(P\) in the text.

    Thus, when searching for patterns that follow the same distribution as the input text, the performance of the faster search method is nearly as good as the LCP-based \(O(|P| + \lg_2 n)\) method when patterns have only few matches.

    First some background.

• Career/Education

  • Lou Plummer ☛ On Framing and Language

    When I was in high-school, I took Speech as an elective my senior year, thinking it would be an easy credit. I've never been shy. I thought my vocabulary was good enough to serve me adequately. I knew little about debate, extemporaneous speaking, expository speaking and the other forms of competition. A good portion of the course was taken up by the study of semantics, the study of meaning in language, including the interpretation of words, sentences, and text in context. It's a key component of understanding how linguistic signs and symbols convey specific concepts and ideas. I grokked it immediately. The class turned out to be a lot of fun. Although I didn't win any awards at the speech competitions we went to, I got a lot from the class. My formal education ended when I was 18, so I've had to make the most out of what I learned back then.

  • Kevin Boone ☛ Kevin Boone: How to write a technical or scientific report

    This article is about writing a technical report or scientific paper. In it, I describe the conventional 'standard model' of report writing, and some possible alternatives. I wrote this article for students who are currently undertaking undergraduate or master's degree projects, or expect to do so in the near future. However, some parts will be relevant to people who write in the course of business.

    When I first wrote this article, back in the mid-1990s, we still presented most reports and scientific papers in printed form. These days, web-based publishing is commonplace, even for prestigious scientific journals. I've encountered the view that it's OK for web-based articles to be rushed and crude, that they don't have to reach the same authorial standards that apply to print. I would argue that the opposite is the case -- there is so much material on the web, both reliable and unreliable, that a high standard of clarity and organization is more important there than in print. There's just too much online, to force ourselves to read things that are disorganized or stylistically jarring.

    Please note that I'm writing primarily for a British readership. Some of what follows may be relevant in other English-speaking countries, but I can't be sure.

• Hardware

  • Air Force Times ☛ Even in the headline-grabbing world of drones, the Predator stands out

    On Dec. 23, 2002, over the no-fly zone in Iraq, an Iraqi Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 engaged an MQ-1 armed with AIM-92 Stinger air-to-air missiles and shot it down, winning the first encounter between a conventional warplane and a UAV.

    In 2011 the 268th and last MQ-1 left the General Atomics plant. By then it had accumulated more than 1 million flight hours and truly earned its Predator moniker.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Zen and the art of PCIe ×1 placement

    It’s been fun researching MicroATX boards again. A lot has changed since I last looked at them, in particular the placement of PCIe slots seems to be entirely arbitrary, and in ways that occasionally even make sense.

  • Hackaday ☛ New Years Circuit Challenge: Make This RFID Circuit

    Picture this: It’s the end of the year, and a few hardy souls gather in a hackerspace to enjoy a bit of seasonal food and hang out. Conversation turns to the Flipper Zero, and aspects of its design, and one of the parts we end up talking about is its built-in 125 kHz RFID reader.

  • Hackaday ☛ VPlayer Puts Smart Display In Palm Of Your Hand

    It’s not something we always think about, but the reality is that many of the affordable electronic components we enjoy today are only available to us because they’re surplus parts intended for commercial applications. The only reason you can pick up something like a temperature sensor for literal pennies is because somebody decided to produce millions of them for inclusion in various consumer doodads, and you just happened to luck out.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ ByteDance plans to sidestep U.S. sanctions by renting Nvidia GPUs in the clown — report says it has set aside $7 billion budget

    ByteDance to become one of the major renters of Nvidia's GPUs for Hey Hi (AI) in 2025 as it intends to spend some $7 billion on this, according to a report. [...]

    The report says ByteDance plans to invest over $20 billion in AI infrastructure, including $7 billion in accessing advanced Nvidia GPUs in the cloud, data centers, and even submarine cables. The U.S. prohibits ByteDance from purchasing Nvidia GPUs and using American cloud services. However, it cannot block ByteDance’s access to cloud services elsewhere, for example, in the Middle East or Asian countries. As a result, ByteDance can access American processors while technically adhering to U.S. sanctions against China’s AI and HPC sectors.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ TikTok parent ByteDance plans to spend $7B on cloud-based GPUs this year to fuel its Hey Hi (AI) ambitions

    TikTok’s parent company ByteDance Ltd. reportedly has a plan to get around tough U.S. restrictions on the export of advanced computer chips to China. The company is said to be planning to spend a whopping $7 billion on Nvidia Corp.’s most powerful graphics processing units to fuel the development of cutting edge artificial intelligence models.

    [...]

    The company is said to be planning to spend a whopping $7 billion on Nvidia Corp.’s most powerful graphics processing units to fuel the development of cutting edge artificial intelligence models. It doesn’t seek to buy any chips, but rather just rent access to them via data centers located outside of mainland China.

  • Hackaday ☛ Quantum Mechanics And Negative Time With Photon-Atom Interactions

    Within our comfortable world of causality we expect that reactions always follow an action and not vice versa. This why the recent chatter in the media about researchers having discovered ‘negative time’ with photons being emitted before the sample being hit by source photons created such a stir. Did these researchers truly just crack our fundamental concepts of (quantum) physics wide open? As it turns out, not really.

  • Hackaday ☛ Sony Vaio Revived: Power, The Second 80%

    A bit ago, I’ve told you about how the Sony Vaio motherboard replacement started, and all the tricks I used to make it succeed on the first try. How do you plan out the board, what are good things to keep in mind while you’re sourcing parts, and how do you ensure you finish the design? This time, I want to tell you my insights about what it takes for your new board revision to stay on your desk until completion, whether it’s helping it not burn up, or making sure the bringup process is doable.

  • Hackaday ☛ Doomscroll Precisely, And Wirelessly

    Around here, we love it when someone identifies a need and creates their own solution. In this case, [Engineer Bo] was tired of endless and imprecise scrolling with a mouse wheel. No off-the-shelf solutions were found, and other DIY projects either just used hacked mice scroll wheels, customer electronics with low-res hardware encoders, or featured high-res encoders that were down-sampled to low-resolution. A custom build was clearly required.

  • Hackaday ☛ A Foil Tweeter, Sound From Kitchen Consumables

    The world of audio has produced a variety of different loudspeaker designs over the last century, though it’s fair to say that the trusty moving coil reigns supreme. That hasn’t stopped plenty of engineers from trying new ways to make sound though, and [R.U.H] is here with a home-made version of one of them. It’s a foil tweeter, a design in which a corrugated strip of foil is held in a magnetic field, and vibrates when an audio frequency current is passed through it.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • [Old] Christopher Fleetwood ☛ A case for client-side machine learning

    What's the future of machine learning going to look like? How can we attempt to predict what's going to come next given the rate of innovation? We can't make any predictions with certainty, but in this post I will examine past trends and ongoing work in an attempt to make predictions about the future.

    The current paradigm of machine learning is "static" - users requests are shipped off to GPUs running in the cloud, inference is performed and results are returned. It seems unlikely that this paradigm will remain unchanged going forward. I believe the next paradigm of ML is "dynamic", with client side encoding of user specific information in model weights, models becoming more personalized, and your tertiary self adapting to you.

    But this isn't some Jetsons fantasy, this future will arrive sooner than you think. Let's apply some first principles thinking in an attempt to understand when and how this will take shape.

  • US News And World Report ☛ PlayStations for Guns Are Offered up in New Orleans

    Over the course of two hours, city police officers received and dismantled 32 revolvers, shotguns and semi-automatics, all traded in with no questions asked as long the guns were functional. In all, the city collected 94 guns through three buybacks over the last six months, all involving swaps for gaming devices.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • India Times ☛ Putin orders Russian government and top bank to develop AI cooperation with China

    Vladimir Putin told the government and Sberbank, which is spearheading Russia's AI efforts, to "ensure further co-operation with the People's Republic of China in technological research and development in the field of artificial intelligence". Russia currently ranks 31st of 83 countries by AI implementation, innovation and investment on UK-based Tortoise Media's Global AI Index, well behind not only the United States and China but also fellow BRICS members India and Brazil.

  • Futurism ☛ People Are Disgusted by Facebook’s Plan to Deploy AI-Powered “Users”

    Folks on social media are in an uproar after Meta announced that it's planning to load Facebook up with AI "users," better known as bots.

    First reported by the Financial Times, this plan to populate the dying social network with these so-called "characters" is geared towards driving engagement — even though other platforms, including Meta's Instagram, have been roiled by unauthorized bots for years.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ The biggest AI flops of 2024

    AI is an unpredictable technology, and the increasing availability of generative models has led people to test their limits in new, weird, and sometimes harmful ways. These were some of 2024’s biggest AI misfires.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ US sanctions Russian, Iranian groups for election interference

    “At the direction of, and with financial support from, the GRU, CGE and its personnel used generative AI tools to quickly create disinformation that would be distributed across a massive network of websites designed to imitate legitimate news outlets to create false corroboration between the stories, as well as to obfuscate their Russian origin,” the Treasury statement said. “CGE built a server that hosts the generative AI tools and associated AI-created content, in order to avoid foreign web-hosting services that would block their activity.”

  • Simon Willison ☛ Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

    A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments.

  • Late Night Software Ltd ☛ Retiring Script Debugger

    January 2025 marks Script Debugger’s 30th anniversary. It’s been a very long run for a two-person effort. Script Debugger began as a Classic MacOS product, survived Apple’s near-death experience, transitioned to macOS X and migrated across 4 CPU processor types. We are so grateful for the support we’ve received over these years. This support allowed us to keep working on Script Debugger much longer than we ever imagined.

    Shane and I are retiring and the effort and costs associated with continuing Script Debugger’s development are too great for us to bear any longer.

  • Federal News Network ☛ IRS deploys AI tools to combat emerging tech’s role in new fraud schemes

    Koopman said the agency isn’t currently using AI in these tax recovery cases, but IRS-CI is reviewing AI as a use case for “that exact scenario.”

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Human curation over algorithmic recommendations

    Last year’s big discussion point was definitely artificial intelligence, large language models and recommendation algorithms so let’s start the new year by contrasting all of that with human touch.

    I have grown weary about the constant barrage of companies and products pushing computer generated content and recommendations to my face all the time, everywhere. It has created a counter reaction in me to focus even more on the human interactions.

  • [Old] Cassidy Williams ☛ I miss human curation

    When I say “I don’t know where everyone went,” I know everyone’s out there surfing the web, of course, but it feels like it’s a different place now. When the algorithms are determining everything we should be seeing, it’s a much less personal internet. The “For You” pages of the world are right, I am interested in that content, but I’m not seeing it from my friends, or that one author I like, or that random blog I found when I was learning about an obscure hobby.

  • [Old] Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Rant: Please stop ruining the search

    Search is one of those features that have gained so much from the evolution of technology, from machine learning and the industry's skills in building efficient systems.

    But over the past few years or so, I think we've crossed past the line of improvements and tipped over to start going backwards. And it has nothing do with skills or abilities of developers involved but rather the fact that product people have stopped caring about building products with a user-first mentality and replaced it with a company-first mentality.

    And that really pisses me off.

  • Greg Morris ☛ Not Just The End Product

    I should preface my thoughts on this with the fact that I am not against LLMs’ use as an assistive tool. I do so daily and am a big fan of what they can do for my life and my productivity (yes, I just threw up a bit typing that word out).

    What I really hate is the use of AI to create an end product that means absolutely nothing. I have been quite into this, creating supporting images for my blog posts with AI because I thought it was needed, but I quickly realised that it completely misses the point.

  • Simon Willison ☛ Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

    A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ US Treasury admits major incident, blames China-linked APT

      Agencies including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been working with the Treasury to understand the incident. Third-party forensic investigators have also been called in.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Gift Card Fraud

      It’s becoming an organized crime tactic:

      Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. The crooks then repair the packaging, return to a store and place the cards back on a rack. When a customer unwittingly selects and loads money onto a tampered card, the criminal is able to access the card online and steal the balance.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Straits Times ☛ China defends Covid-19 data-sharing as WHO seeks more access

      Beijing said it "made the greatest contribution to global traceability research" for the disease.

    • France24 ☛ WHO calls for more transparency on COVID-19 from China

      The World Health Organization on Monday implored China to share data and access to help understand how Covid-19 began, five years on from the start of the pandemic that upended the planet. The origins of the pandemic, which killed millions, shredded economies and crippled health systems, remain unclear.

    • EFF ☛ Federal Regulators Limit Location Brokers from Selling Your Whereabouts: 2024 in Review

      As regulators have clearly stated, location information is sensitive personal information. Companies can glean location information from your smartphone in a number of ways. Apps that include Software Development Kits (SDKs) from some companies will instruct the app to send back troves of sensitive information for analytical insights or debugging purposes. The data brokers may offer market insights or financial incentives for app developers to include their SDKs. Other companies will not ask apps to directly include their SDKs, but will participate in Real-Time Bidding (RTB) auctions, placing bids for ad-space on devices in locations they specify. Even if they lose the auction, they can glean valuable device location information just by participating. Often, apps will ask for permissions such as location data for legitimate reasons aligned with the purpose of the app: for example, a price comparison app might use your whereabouts to show you the cheapest vendor of a product you’re interested in for your area. What you aren’t told is that your location is also shared with companies tracking you.

    • Medevel ☛ Why Patients Should Be Aware of Their Digital Privacy!

      Digital privacy may not be the first thing you think about when visiting the doctor, but it’s becoming an increasingly important concern in our tech-driven world. Most healthcare providers now store patient records electronically, and while that often makes medical care more efficient, it also raises questions about data

    • EFF ☛ AI and Policing: 2024 in Review

      Enter law enforcement.

      When many tech vendors see police, they see dollar signs. Law enforcement’s got deep pockets. They are under political pressure to address crime. They are eager to find that one magic bullet that finally might do away with crime for good. All of this combines to make them a perfect customer for whatever way technology companies can package machine-learning algorithms that sift through historical data in order to do recognition, analytics, or predictions.

      AI in policing can take many forms that we can trace back decades–including various forms of face recognition, predictive policing, data analytics, automated gunshot recognition, etc. But this year has seen the rise of a new and troublesome development in the integration between policing and artificial intelligence: AI-generated police reports.

    • EFF ☛ Fighting Online ID Mandates: 2024 In Review

      Age verification bills generally require online services to verify all users’ ages—often through invasive tools like ID checks, biometric scans, and other dubious “age estimation” methods—before granting them access to certain online content or services. Some state bills mandate the age verification explicitly, including Texas’s H.B. 1181, Florida’s H.B. 3, and Indiana’s S.B. 17. Other state bills claim not to require age verification, but still threaten platforms with liability for showing certain content or features to minor users. These bills—including Mississippi’s H.B. 1126, Ohio’s Parental Notification by Social Media Operators Act, and the federal Kids Online Safety Act—raise the question: how are platforms to know which users are minors without imposing age verification?

      EFF’s answer: they can’t. We call these bills “implicit age verification mandates” because, though they might expressly deny requiring age verification, they still force platforms to either impose age verification measures or, worse, to censor whatever content or features deemed “harmful to minors” for all users—not just young people—in order to avoid liability.

       Age verification requirements are the wrong approach to protecting young people online. No one should have to hand over their most sensitive personal information or submit to invasive biometric surveillance just to access lawful online speech.

    • 404 Media ☛ Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South

      That law, passed as Act 440, was introduced by “sex addiction” counselor and state representative Laurie Schegel and quickly copied across the country. The exact phrasing varies, but in most states, the details of the law are the same: Any “commercial entity” that publishes “material harmful to minors” online can be held liable—meaning, tens of thousands of dollars in fines and/or private lawsuits—if it doesn’t “perform reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material.”

• Defence/Aggression

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ 2024 In Pictures: Pandas, landmark court cases, and a new security law for Hong Kong

    Internationally, 2024 was known as the year of elections, with the United Nations estimating that half of the world’s population has headed to the ballot box over the past 12 months.

  • JURIST ☛ Germany prosecutor charges Iraq couple with enslavement, torture, war crimes

    A federal prosecutor in Germany on Monday charged an Iraqi couple with enslavement, torture, and war crimes for their alleged treatment of two young Yazidi girls.

  • New York Times ☛ Syria’s Top Rebel Offers Hint of Timetable for Potential Elections

    Ahmed al-Shara, who led the rebel offensive that toppled Bashar al-Assad, offered little clarity on what the electoral process might look like.

  • New York Times ☛ U.S. Carries Out Strikes on Houthis in Yemen

    The Houthis, who are backed by Iran, have targeted commercial ships in the Red Sea in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza. They launched a missile at Israel overnight.

  • The Straits Times ☛ South Korea’s acting president calls for national harmony and unity

    Mr Choi Sang-mok said the country “is in an unprecedentedly serious situation”.

  • Air, artillery strikes set grim benchmark for civilian casualties in Myanmar in 2024

    The number of total deaths and injuries outpaced that of the prior three years of junta rule combined.

  • BIA Net ☛ Syria | Teachers in Idlib on strike for their rights

    Teachers protesting against the HTS government paying only half of their October and November salaries have quit work demanding that their salaries are paid in full.

  • The Register UK ☛ US Army soldier accused of stealing AT&T call logs arrested

    Wagenius is allegedly an associate of Connor Riley Moucka, one of the men accused of compromising multiple organizations' Snowflake-hosted environments, stealing sensitive customer data housed in the cloud storage service, and then extorting victims for millions of dollars.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ US Army soldier arrested in connection with AT&T, Verizon data breaches

    Federal authorities have reportedly arrested a U.S. Army soldier in connection with a series of cyberattacks that compromised AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. customers’ data. Prominent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs broke the news on Monday. Cameron Wagenius was reportedly apprehended on Dec. 20 near a U.S. Army base in Texas. According to Krebs, Wagenius is known by the hacker pseudonym Kiberphant0m.

  • The Gray Zone ☛ Will the Cuban revolution survive the storm of 2025?

  • The Gray Zone ☛ US judge awards pro-regime change journo Shane Bauer $113 million seized from Iran

  • Crooked Timber ☛ In 2025, let’s make resistance more effective

    Here’s a virtual toast to your flourishing in 2025. But more so than any other year, our wishes should not just be from person to person, but rather wishes for societies – and the society of societies, global humanity. I haven’t felt so gloomy about politics, broadly defined, in a very long time. A genocide is happening while all of us can see it, and mainstream politics and society tries every trick possible to rationalize and justify what is happening. Our politicians are failing to get us off the path to the deadly collapse of Earth’s ecosystems. The rise of autocracy and fascist policies has now reached such levels that we may start to wonder why so many in the generations of our parents and grandparents risked, and often sacrificed, their lives to free us from fascism – only to give us the freedom to vote the authoritarians and the fascists back into power.

  • The Hill ☛ President Biden: New Orleans attacker's social media posts indicated ISIS ties

    President Biden on Wednesday said the individual who carried out an attack in New Orleans that killed at least 15 people posted videos on social media hours earlier indicating they were inspired by ISIS.

  • New York Times ☛ What to Know About ISIS Terror Attacks

    The terrorist group, also known as ISIS, has left a brutal legacy of death and destruction across the world. Though the group no longer controls significant territory in the Middle East, it has continued to launch terror attacks around the world and inspire believers of its extreme ideology to carry out atrocities of their own.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Most Effective Antidote to ISIS Attacks

    In 2014, the group’s spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, kicked off its campaign of terror in Europe by urging followers to improvise weapons. “If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet,” he said, “smash the American or European’s head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car.” Some horrific attacks ensued, including a truck ramming in 2016 that killed 86. But consider the number of Islamic State supporters of European [sic] origin—probably in the tens of thousands—and the easy availability of rocks, knives, and cars. Few have taken Adnani up on his offer, and those who have, tend to be (if the jihadists will pardon the expression) ham-handed.

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Suspect in New Orleans mass fatality had ISIS flag in truck: FBI

    A potential improvised explosive device (IED) was also discovered at the scene, and a flag for the jihadist Islamic State group was found in the truck, along with other firearms, according to the FBI.

  • NDTV ☛ Anger In Germany At Elon Musk's Attempt To "Influence" Parliamentary Polls

    On Monday, German government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann said that "it is a fact that Elon Musk is trying to exert influence on the parliamentary election".

    "In Germany, elections are decided by voters at the ballot box," she told a regular press conference, adding that the country's "elections are a matter for Germans".

  • VOA News ☛ Georgians ring in New Year with mass pro-EU rally

    In the first 10 days of protests, riot police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse demonstrators — some of whom threw fireworks and stones.

    The Interior Ministry reported more than 400 arrests, while the country's top human rights official, ombudsman Levan Ioseliani, and Amnesty International have accused security forces of "torturing" those detained.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Elon Musk insults German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier

    The comments from Musk, an ally of US President-elect Donald Trump, referred to Steinmeier speaking out against outside influence in his speech on the dissolution of the Bundestag.

  • Defence Web ☛ Sub-Saharan Africa becoming less peaceful, new report reveals

    Sub-Saharan Africa faces several security crises, most notably the increase in political unrest and terrorism in the Central Sahel region. Burkina Faso has the highest terrorism impact of any country in the world, and five of the ten countries with the highest terrorism impact are in sub-Saharan Africa.

  • The Record ☛ US sanctions Russian and Iranian entities for interfering in presidential election

    The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned several entities on Tuesday for allegedly spreading disinformation in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential elections on behalf of Russia’s and Iran’s intelligence services.

    The sanctions are the latest in a string of actions taken by the Biden administration to hold Moscow and Tehran to account for alleged election interference and for influence campaigns targeting American voters.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Migrants crossing Channel in small boats up 25pc, figures show

    The number of migrants arriving in the UK in 2024 after crossing the English Channel in small boats was up by a quarter on the previous year, figures show.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Migrants crossing English Channel to UK surged by 25% in 2024, new figures show

  • RTL ☛ Surging numbers: Migrants crossing Channel to UK in 2024 soar by 25 percent

    Some 36,816 people were detected in the Channel last year, a 25 percent increase from the 29,437 who arrived in 2023, provisional figures from the interior ministry showed.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Finland Imposes Travel Ban on Tanker Crew Amid Cable Sabotage Probe

    The tanker, flying the Cook Islands flag, is currently anchored near Porvoo’s Kilpilahti oil port, where crime scene investigations and crew interviews are underway. The crew members are suspected of involvement in the damage to the Estlink 2 submarine cable, which links Finland’s electricity grid with Estonia.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • LRT ☛ Lithuania and beyond – 2024 in pictures

      Here are some of the key events that took place in and around Lithuania in 2024 through the lens of LRT’s photojournalists – Justinas Stacevičius, Edvardas Blažys, Domantas Umbrasas, Vilmantas Raupelis, and Benas Gerdžiūnas.

    • Meduza ☛ In New Year’s address, Putin says Russia has met ‘difficult challenges’ with strength, assures ‘everything will turn out well’ — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ In the closing days of 2024, Putin signed more than 50 new laws. Here are the most important changes coming to Russia next year. — Meduza

    • New York Times ☛ Putin Declares ‘Everything Will Be Fine’ Despite Russia’s Growing Challenges

      Speaking on the 25th anniversary of his rule, President Vladimir V. Putin delivered an upbeat and vague New Year’s Eve message that did not address casualties in Ukraine or rising inflation at home.

    • RFERL ☛ Ukraine Says It Downed Russian Air Target With Sea Drone For First Time

      Ukraine claims that for the first time, one of its sea drones has downed a Russian military target in the air during a day of intense attacks by both sides as the war edges closer to its three-year anniversary.

    • Latvia ☛ Riga Security Forum podcast: 'Belarus, Authoritarianism and the Global Impact of Unchecked State Violence'

      The Riga Security Forum podcast is back with another topical discussion.

    • Meduza ☛ ‘The guards threw firecrackers outside our cell windows’: What Russian political prisoners freed in this year’s swap remember from New Year’s Eve behind bars — and what they hope for in 2025 — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • International Business Times ☛ 'No More Donations to Wikipedia': Elon Musk Slams Site Over Alleged Erroneous Deletions to Bill Clinton's Page

    The controversy began when online creator Ian Carroll, who was conducting research for an upcoming documentary, claimed he noticed edits to Bill Clinton's Wikipedia page. Carroll alleged that on 22 July 2024, an anonymous user removed an entire section detailing Clinton's connections with Epstein, including his reported use of Epstein's private plane.

  • The Register UK ☛ FAA allegedly ignores more than 90 percent of whistleblowers

    Curious over a series of high-profile failures at Boeing followed by a glut of whistleblower reports, the Seattle Times dug into Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reports to Congress from 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. The Times found that of the 728 safety complaints received, only 8.5 percent (62 cases) resulted in findings of violations, while nearly 40 percent of complaints were dismissed before reaching the fact-finding phase.

  • NDTV ☛ OpenAI Whistleblower Suchir Balaji's Parents Say Autopsy Points To Murder

    The parents of Suchir Balaji, a former employee ChatGPT maker OpenAI, have alleged that his autopsy had shown signs of struggle such as a head injury. Twenty-six-year-old Balaji, who had flagged ethical concerns about OpenAI's functioning after he left the Artificial Intelligence giant, was found dead at his San Francisco flat in November. Authorities have said he had died by suicide.

    Balaji's parents Balaji Ramamurthy and Purnima Rao spoke to NDTV about their son's tragic death and their fight for justice.

    "We read the second autopsy, there are signs of struggle such as head injury, more details from the autopsy reveal it is murder," his mother said.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji's death: Mother alleges murder

    Poornima Rao, the mother of Suchir Balaji, claimed that her son's death was a "cold-blooded murder declared by authorities as suicide." She also mentioned that a private autopsy report differed from the initial police report.

    Additionally, she stated that her son's apartment had been "ransacked," and there were signs of a struggle in the bathroom that suggested he had been hit. "We hired private investigator and did second autopsy to throw light on cause of death. Private autopsy doesn't confirm the cause of death stated by police. Suchir's apartment was ransacked, sign of struggle in the bathroom and looks like some one hit him in bathroom based on blood spots. It's a cold blooded mu*d*r declared by authorities as suicide. Lobbying in San Francisco city doesn't stop us from getting justices. We demand FBi investigation." Poornima Rao wrote on X.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Nation ☛ Trump’s Crackpot [Cryptocurrency] Scheme to Reduce Inflation Would Be a Financial Catastrophe

      For all the [cryptocurrency] sector’s ritualized pledges to bring greater transparency and integrity to its currency exchanges, these sorts of shakedowns remain a feature of [cryptocurrency] trading. As Jacob Silverman and James Block reported for The Nation earlier this year, fly-by-night scams are endemic in the [cryptocurrency] market—so that when Colorado Governor Jared Polis declared that his state would serve as a model of lightly regulated [cryptocurrency] trading, the state was promptly overrun with [cryptocurrency] brokers who sported nameplate incorporations in foreign countries, and who then vanished altogether when the deals they set up turned out to be bot-led pump-and-dump schemes.

    • Kevin Boone ☛ Kevin Boone: A USB power supply with a real on-off switch

      How much energy do I waste in the long term, leaving the media player permanently connected to its USB charger? I don’t know. What are the electrical safety implications? I don’t know that, either. Similarly, I don’t fully understand the electrical safety implications of leaving a wireless charging pad powered all the time. There have been reports of these devices overheating and starting fires, when metallic objects have fallen onto the pad. I believe that modern wireless charging pads are resistant to this kind of accident, but do you want to take the chance? Again, my wireless charging pad is powered by a USB wall-wart behind a stack of equipment, and isn’t easy to disconnect when I’m not using it.

      I can’t believe I’m the only person on Earth who worries about being unable to switch off USB chargers. But I’ve sought in vain a USB charger from a reputable manufacturer that has a real mains on-off switch. It can’t be that difficult, or expensive, to make one. Can it?

      To find out, I decided to make one of my own, and try it out.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Straits Times ☛ Nepal's kung fu nuns kick off reopening of nunnery to public after five years

    The nunnery was forced to close its doors to the public due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

  • India Times ☛ Tech layoffs in 2024: The year that saw big tech job cuts surge

    Industry giants such as Microsoft, Google and Apple were at the forefront of this trend. Google reduced top management roles by 10% as part of a broader push to double efficiency. Microsoft cut 1,900 jobs in January at Activision Blizzard and Xbox, representing about 8% of its Gaming division.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Elon Musk allies join lawsuit accusing OpenAI of anticompetitive tactics

    Tech mogul Elon Musk intensified his legal battle with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI in the days after Christmas. Court filings show two prominent tech investors lending support to the billionaire’s allegations that the company unfairly blocked potential backers from investing in its rivals.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • John J Hoare ☛ Shame.

    I’ve written many times in the past about how I think people should keep their website archives online. In fact I’ve talked about it to the point of obnoxiousness, and then far beyond that. About how old stuff can suddenly become found and loved, about the history of the web disappearing, about what remains of the public record, about accidentally destroying a web community, about losing memories… or simply about letting things live.

    It’s all true. But today I want to talk about another reason I feel so strongly about this. A reason I haven’t really touched on before, but I think is one of the most important of all.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • ANF News ☛ MKG: You cannot silence the voice of women journalists!

    The company, which is based in Sulaymaniyah city in southern Kurdistan (northern Iraq) and also produces programs for Jin TV, said after the raid that no official notification was given as to why the closure was ordered.

    The statement noted that the company was closed without any official notification or legal record, in cooperation with the security forces, the Iraqi central government, the Kurdistan Regional Government and regional security institutions.

  • VOA News ☛ Press freedom groups call for Iran to release jailed Italian journalist

    Cecilia Sala, who works for the daily Italian newspaper Il Foglio, was arrested on Dec. 19 and is being held in Iran's notorious Evin prison. The 29-year-old was reporting in Iran on a journalist visa and was due to return to Italy on Dec. 20.

    The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, said Sala's jailing underscores Tehran's harsh suppression of independent journalism in the country.

  • France24 ☛ Palestinian Authority takes Al Jazeera off air after coverage of Jenin clashes

    Tensions between the network and the Fatah movement of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas have risen in recent weeks due to the channel's coverage of clashes between Palestinian security forces and resistance fighters in Jenin.

  • VOA News ☛ Palestinian Authority suspends Al Jazeera broadcasts

    The Palestinian Authority’s decision to suspend Al Jazeera isn’t expected to be implemented in Hamas-run Gaza, where the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority does not exercise power.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • EFF ☛ Kids Online Safety Act Continues to Threaten Our Rights Online: 2024 in Review

    KOSA, first introduced in 2022, would allow the Federal Trade Commission to sue apps and websites that don’t take measures to restrict young people’s access to content. Congress introduced a number of versions of the bill this year, and we analyzed each of them. Unfortunately, the threat of this legislation still looms over us as we head into 2025, especially now that the bill has passed the Senate. And just a few weeks ago, its authors introduced an amended version to respond to criticisms from some House members.  

    Despite its many amendments in 2024, we continue to oppose KOSA. No matter which version becomes final, the bill will lead to broad online censorship of lawful speech, including content designed to help children navigate and overcome the very same harms it identifies.   

    Here’s how, and why, we worked to stop KOSA this year, and where the fight stands now.  

  • RTL ☛ Record number: Saudi executes at least 338 people in 2024: AFP tally

    Saudi Arabia has put six Iranians to death for drug trafficking, the interior ministry said Wednesday, after a year in which it carried out a record number of executions, according to an AFP tally of official reports.

  • The Age AU ☛ We’re becoming a nation of prudes, our nude beaches shut by the nanny state

    Elsewhere in Europe, public nudity has been popular for decades. In Finland, Denmark and France women fought for and won the right to be topless on beaches and public swimming pools (a movement called top freedom) and nudism has long been accepted in Greece, Italy, Spain and Iceland. Tartu, in Southern Estonia, where I spent the last European summer, had its very own nude beach on the Emajogi River, said to have been a naked swimming and sunbathing spot dating back to Soviet times.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Don’t Let Terror Shut America Down

    Getting on with activities as normal, to whatever extent is possible, is the correct approach. Responses to terror or violent attacks need to be based on the specifics of the incident, but the default should always be to remain open. A nation, any nation, must have the capacity to mourn and move forward simultaneously.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Export PDFs, don’t print them

    When you’re preparing a document for PDF to share, remember to use your application’s Export feature, and not Print to PDF. Exporting retains the metadata, structure, and accessibility features that Print to PDF strips out, which hampers screen readers among other tools.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Taliban bans windows to stop women from being seen at home

    Hibatullah Akhundzada, the leader of the Taliban, ordered that buildings should not have windows looking into places where a woman could be sitting or standing.

    The order applies to both new buildings and existing ones, according to a four-clause decree posted on social media site X (formerly Twitter) late on Saturday.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Neil Young Pulls Out of Glastonbury: 'It Is a Corporate Turn-Off'

    It’s unclear what exactly Glastonbury and the BBC were requesting of Young that he found distasteful enough to pull out of the festival. The BBC broadcasts and streams large portions of the event, and it was available globally for the first time last year. (Rolling Stone reached out to reps for Glastonbury for comment.)

  • Duke University ☛ Public Domain Day 2025 | Duke University School of Law

    On January 1, 2025, thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1924. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon.[2] 2025 marks a milestone: all of the books, films, songs, and art published in the 1920s will now be public domain. The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. In film, Mickey Mouse speaks his first words, the Marx Brothers star in their first feature film, and legendary directors from Alfred Hitchcock to John Ford made their first sound films. From comic strips, the original Popeye and Tintin characters will enter the public domain. Among the newly public domain compositions are Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Ravel’s Bolero, Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, and the musical number Singin’ in the Rain. Below is just a handful of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2025.[3] To find more material from 1929, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.

  • Techdirt ☛ And We’re Off! The Public Domain Game Jam Starts Today

    It’s a new year, and that means new works are entering the public domain, and that means it’s time for the latest installment of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929!

  • The Verge ☛ Popeye and Tintin are now in the public domain

    It’s a new year, and that means more works are headed to the public domain. This year, thousands of copyrighted works created in 1929, including the earliest versions of Popeye and the Belgian comic book character Tintin, are now free to reuse and repurpose in the US.

    Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of Public Domain has once again rounded up all the most iconic works that have been freed from the bounds of copyright, which also includes sound recordings from 1924. As pointed out by Duke Law School, 1929 was a particularly pivotal year for film, as it was the first with sound.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Piracy Shield: Top 10 Countries Blocked For Hosting IPTV Pirates in 2024

    Controversies litter the past eleven months. Cloudflare and Google were both wrongfully targeted as enthusiasm to prevent piracy took precedence over the interests of [Internet] users, and previously promised transparency gave way to almost complete unaccountability. What can or will be done to prevent further overblocking in 2025 remains to be seen but, thankfully, we can offer a little more transparency right now.

  • Deseret Media ☛ From Popeye to Hemmingway: 25 notable works entering the public domain in 2025

    As noted by the Library of Congress, "It's a Wonderful Life" only became a Christmas classic after Republic Pictures let its copyright run out under the old set of copyright laws. The decision sent it to the public domain in the 1970s, and it became one of the few options for television stations to run during the holidays, altering its place in history.

    Today, most new items are at least 95 years old when their copyrights expire. Only time will tell which old works will find new life in 2025 or beyond, but these are 25 classics that stand out from this year's public domain class.

  • RTL ☛ Public domain: Tintin, Popeye, Hemingway among US copyrights expiring in 2025

    The center, part of the Duke University School of Law in the southeastern US state of North Carolina, makes the list available on its website for anyone to peruse.

    "In past years we have celebrated an exciting cast of public domain characters: the original Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh, and the final iterations of Sherlock Holmes from Arthur Conan Doyle's stories," center director Jennifer Jenkins wrote on its website.

    "In 2025 copyright expires over more aspects of Mickey from his 1929 incarnations, along with the initial versions of Popeye and Tintin."