Leftovers

• Linux Made Simple ☛ 2024-12-29 [Older] Linux Weekly Roundup #309

• FSF ☛ FSF associate members to decide the logo for the FSF's fortieth anniversary

  Thank you so much to everyone who participated in the FSF Anniversary Logo Contest! It was an absolute pleasure to see the creative designs that engaged community members came up with for the fortieth anniversary of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Below are the fabulous submissions that we received. FSF associate members are now invited to vote for their favorite logo. On January 22, 2025, we will announce the winning design, which will then be used as the logo for the fortieth anniversary of the FSF. The winning design will be displayed on the FSF homepage, printed on all of the celebration materials, and possibly even stamped on some merchandise.

• Matthew Rocklin ☛ Hammers and Nailguns

  People often ask me, “What is your tool for?”

• Jonas Hietala ☛ Jonas Hietala: 2024 in review

  It’s time for my 15th yearly review.

• Jarrod Blundy ☛ My Blogging Origin Story & Other Questions: A Blogging Challenge

  I’m always down for writing about writing, so here goes!

  The questions are: [...]

• Jarrod Blundy ☛ Some personal news: I’m an unpaid volunteer editor at The Verge (at least until they’re better at linking to things)

  My intent wasn’t to be rude. Merely to point out that readers like me want and expect hyperlinks — the backbone of the web — to at least the primary subject of an article. Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel often brags on The Vergecast about how much traffic out to other websites that the The Verge creates. That’s awesome. But based on how often I have to go searching for missing links to the vacuum (missing link), tv (missing link), or game (missing link) an article discusses, there seems to be neglect among their writers to create those hyperlinks to the source material.

• Cory Dransfeldt ☛ (Most) pages are actually posts

  What I do know is that this site is more than just traditional posts and that's reflected in the individual and combined feeds I make available.

• Clayton Errington ☛ Reviewing 2024

  While deciding what goals I wanted for my website and blog for this next year, I reviewed what I’ve already done.

  In 2024 I wrote 23 posts, which is about 2 posts a month but with most of the posts in June.

• Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Quick and only partially coherent review of 2024

  Not a great year, but also not the worst.

  My freelance business did not fare that well for most of it. It did improve slightly towards the end, so this year is starting on a better note than 2024.

• Task And Purpose ☛ The Marines tried photoshopping uniforms on recruits at boot camp

  One of the milestones of Marine Corps boot camp is when recruits take a break from getting IT’d to get their official photo taken. They stand in a long line to briefly slip on a modified dress uniform coat and white hat, or “cover,” as a photographer snaps a quick picture.

  These (often embarrassing) pictures are treasured by Marines’ families and prominently displayed on their mantles, even though, as Adam Driver’s boot camp photo shows, they are not glamour shots.

  But for some recent Marine recruits, the uniforms in their photos were ‘photoshopped’ on.

• Simon Collison ☛ Accumulated instinct

  I’ve always kept screenshots and bookmarks of interesting visual ideas, but I’ve noticed this habit diminishing with each passing year. Now, when I encounter something visually captivating or potentially useful for future reference, I tend to admire without collecting. Illustrations of colourful feathers in a book at Dreamin' Man coffee shop, Paris, April 2023. Enjoying illustrations of colourful feathers by Ryuto Miyake in his book, Subject & Object.

  No screenshot, no bookmark.

• THT ☛ Blog questions

• Tracy Durnell ☛ 2024 in Review

• Software Freedom Conservancy ☛ Embroidery and resilient software freedom in 2025 [Ed: Absent from SFC, due to very serious injury it seems]

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Trying to Scrap NASA's Moon Program

    One unknown is NASA's incoming administrator Jared Isaacman, a billionaire and private astronaut who has been to space twice with the help of SpaceX — but who so far has expressed support for NASA's existing lunar gameplan.

  • Dhole Moments ☛ Collatzeral Damage: Bitwise and Proof Foolish

    The Collatz conjecture involves a recursive function that contains one branch: If a number is odd, multiply it by 3 then add 1. If it is even, divide it by 2.

    The conjecture states that repeating this operation will eventually reach 1 for all numbers.

  • The Conversation ☛ 2024-12-31 [Older] Time expansion experiences: why time slows down in altered states of consciousness

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-01-03 [Older] As the US and China race to the Moon, these loopholes in space law could cause conflict

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-01-03 [Older] Data centres in space: they’re a brilliant idea, but a herculean challenge

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-01-02 [Older] Seven advances in technology that we’re likely to see in 2025

• Career/Education

  • Chris ☛ Statistical Literacy

    I am convinced there exists something we can call statistical literacy. Unfortunately, I don’t yet know exactly what it is, so it is hard to write about.

    One thing is clear: it is not about knowlege of statistical tools and techniques. Most of the statistically literate people I meet don’t know a lick of formal statistics. They just picked up statistical literacy from … somewhere. They don’t know the definition of a standard deviation, but they can follow a statistical argument just fine.

  • Seth Godin ☛ Working with problems

    If the problem is important enough, we should pick the best available solution, not turn it into a situation.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ I was lost in the cesspit of social media. Then Jane Austen showed me the way out

    More recently, I’ve had the same struggles as everyone else with the cesspitisation of social [control] media. On a long enough timeline, pretty much every platform goes the same way: a quick nudge of the sliders to encourage more engagement, a few bad actors doing a bit of bot-farming and the whole thing collapses in on itself. I’m not sure precisely how many hours I’ve spent carefully composing replies to obvious trolls or worrying about life because I’m being force-fed the worst people in the world’s opinions, but it’s definitely too many. Worse, nothing seemed to keep me completely away: I could set myself time limits, install blockers, delete my accounts, but somehow I would keep sneaking back, spending the last 20 minutes of every evening despairing about the state of the world.

    Eventually, I had an idea. In nutrition circles, there’s a strategy called “crowding out” your diet: adding in more and more healthy food until there’s simply no room for the junk. Eat four eggs at breakfast and an apple for elevenses, and a mid-morning custard cream doesn’t cross your mind. I decided to do the same with books: by committing to reading for two or three hours a day, I would leave myself with no time for online rage, recriminations and doom-scrolling. I would crowd out the Tweetstorms and embrace the literary greats, and everything would be fine.

    Reader, it was not that easy.

• Hardware

  • Howard Oakley ☛ Power Modes and Apple Silicon GPUs

    If your MacBook Pro doesn’t have an earlier Max variant or an M4, then what it refers to as Low Power mode in its Battery settings doesn’t appear to be Low Power mode according to that article. That might be the Low Power mode apparently introduced for MacBook and MacBook Pro models from early 2016 and later, when running macOS Monterey 12.0 and later. Juli Clover of MacRumors stated that “reduces the system clock speed and the display brightness in order to extend your battery life even further.”

    Apple uses the words energy and power interchangeably, and in places refers not to Power Modes, but to Energy Modes, which is surprisingly inconsistent and thoroughly confusing.

  • The Register UK ☛ RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision. It's now just Dell

    Dell has used the annual CES extravaganza in Las Vegas this week to announce a branding shakeup that closely resembles Apple's hardware naming policy.

    Gone are the XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, and Precision PC brands.

  • PC World ☛ Dell drops long-running XPS, Inspiron, and Latitude brands

    Branding is important. Corporations spend millions of dollars every year to make sure that words like “Tacoma” and “Sleep Number” press the right buttons in your brain. And Dell has spent decades putting that same work in for terms like “XPS,” “Inspiron,” and “Latitude.”

    Starting in 2025, though, Dell laptops and desktops will just be… Dell. “There’s just one brand,” said executive Sam Burd. “Dell.”

  • The Verge ☛ Dell kills the XPS brand

    The tech industry’s relentless march toward labeling everything “plus,” “pro,” and “max” soldiers on, with Dell now taking the naming scheme to baffling new levels of confusion. The PC maker announced at CES 2025 that it’s cutting names like XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision, and OptiPlex from its new laptops, desktops, and monitors and replacing them with three main product lines: Dell (yes, just Dell), Dell Pro, and Dell Pro Max.

  • The Drone Girl ☛ CES 2025: what the drone industry should watch out for

    While the event formally kicks off on Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025 and runs through Friday, Jan. 10, we already have a pretty good idea of what’s to come in terms of unmanned aerial systems (UAS). Here’s a sneak peek at what drone pilots can expect from CES 2025: [...]

  • The Register UK ☛ Screwed by the cloud: Hardware vendors need DCs to refresh

    "When you look at that inefficiency, and you look not just at the economics on that energy consumption but on the carbon footprint associated with this generation [of servers], in many places, there's a real opportunity to refresh that infrastructure, reduce the energy consumption in an energy constrained world."

    One ProLiant Gen 11 server can replace eight ProLiant Generation 8 machines, he said, giving the same compute but 19 percent less power consumption. This is before improved security and manageability are brought into the mix, McDonald pointed out.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Dr. Vinay Prasad gaslights his readers about RFK Jr. ‘s role in the deadly Samoa measles outbreak

    Early in a new year, I sometimes like to look back at the year that has passed and find common themes. For instance, last year at this time I declared 2023 to be the year that the evidence-based medicine model, specifically the dogmatic version that dismisses any evidence that doesn’t come from randomized controlled trials as being basically crap, had been weaponized against public health interventions ranging from masks to “lockdowns” to vaccines. Other examples include characterizing 2021 as the year that “everything [antivax and quackery] old is new again” and 2020 as the year of physicians behaving badly, because of a disturbing number of physicians who had up to that point been seemingly respectable taking a heel turn to COVID-19 minimization, attacks on public health, and even outright quackery. Unfortunately, all of those things that characterized those years continued in 2024—on steroids!—which led me to go back to what I said about one year that I left out above, specifically 2022. That was the year that a certain antivax activist characterized as the year of “gaslighting” COVID-19.

  • DeSmog ☛ How Big Meat Worked to Rebrand in 2024 — Using Disinformation

  • Doc Searls ☛ The Health Care Mess

    But we are dealing with some of the usual infirmities required by aging, which means we are intimately involved (mostly in very slow motion) with what we generously call U.S. health care system. And, of course, discussions about it. One of those discussions is about the actual nature of this system, versus those of other countries. So I thought it might be helpful to share my answer, eight years ago, to a question on Quora titled “Why do so many liberals still seem to think Obamacare is a success?” Here goes: [...]

  • TMZ ☛ Luigi Mangione Went To Gun Range On Thailand Trip Months Before CEO Shooting

    What becomes clear in our doc ... healthcare was not Luigi's gripe ... he was more concerned with corporate greed ... and viewed the American healthcare system as a prime example.

  • CBC ☛ Did your kid get glasses post-pandemic? Study says myopia rates are soaring around the world

    A paper in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, which reviewed 276 studies published to June 2023 from around the world, concluded that more than one in three of all children and teens are nearsighted, triple what it was in 1990.

    "Emerging evidence suggests a potential association between the pandemic and accelerated vision deterioration among young adults," states the report, published in September.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • THT ☛ Political Bias in AI

    This article is inspired by a research paper by @PKD. While the original paper is an excellent read, I decided to expand on its findings with my own experiments.

  • International Business Times ☛ AI Chatbot Tells '13-Year-Old' How To Kill His Bully With a 'Death Grip' and How To Dispose of His Body

    An investigation by a Telegraph reporter has uncovered shocking behaviour by an AI chatbot, Character AI, which provided a fictional 13-year-old boy with instructions on killing a bully and hiding the body. The revelations come amidst rising concerns about the safety of AI platforms, following a lawsuit linked to the suicide of a 14-year-old user.

  • Security Week ☛ US Sanctions Chinese Firm Linked to Flax Typhoon Attacks on Critical Infrastructure

    Active since at least 2021, Flax Typhoon has hit entities in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, with a focus on Taiwan, exploiting known vulnerabilities to hack computers and establishing persistent access to the compromised networks.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Sam Altman: AI agents will totally replace your employees any year now! Also, ChatGPT Pro is losing money

    Sam Altman: AI agents will totally replace your employees any year now! Also, ChatGPT Pro is losing money

  • Clayton Errington ☛ How to tag AWS EBS volumes on Linux EC2 Servers

    Over the last few months, my team has decided to utilize Linux more in our environment and I took on most of the Linux management processes. For all of our resources we utilize tags to help identify and group resources together.

  • Lev Lazinskiy ☛ Reinstalling Windows at 1am

    The requirements to take the test remotely are to have a Windows machine, a second computer running zoom to watch you on the first computer, and a quiet and empty room with no one else in it. Aosheng and I decided to travel to New Orleans for the holidays, and I could not find an affordable office on a Saturday morning, so I booked a single night at a separate hotel at the Spring Hill Suites in the Warehouse district. I didn’t have a windows laptop, but I do have a Framework 16 laptop that Aosheng got me for my birthday that I’ve been running Debian on. I installed Windows on it a few weeks before the test and used it for a few weeks without incident.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Sign up for X to see that amber alert. Yikes

    I believe it’s a good thing to meet your constituents where they are, and it likely made sense for the California Highway Patrol to do this for many years. However, it is very bad for them to put essential information on a private website they don’t own and that blocks access from logged out users. Some users said they were able to see the post without logging in, but zero logged out users would see a thread, since for a year or so X has only shown one post at a time to logged-out visitors.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ A lot changed for LLMs in 2024

    I think this speaks to a bubble on the one hand as every executive is going to want to advocate for more investment now, but things like DeepSeek v3 also points towards radically cheaper training in the future.

  • Futurism ☛ It Costs So Much to Run ChatGPT That OpenAI Is Losing Money on $200 ChatGPT Pro Subscriptions

    In a post on X-formerly-Twitter, CEO Sam Altman admitted an "insane" fact: that the company is "currently losing money" on ChatGPT Pro subscriptions, which run $200 per month and give users access to its suite of products including its o1 "reasoning" model.

  • Techdirt ☛ Maine Still Hashing Out The Details Of Its Year Old ‘Right To Repair’ Law As Auto Lobbyists Loom

    Maine’s original and vague law requires manufacturers to give car owners, independent repair shops and licensed dealers transparent access to vehicle data for repair and diagnostic purposes. It also demanded the creation of a Maine Automotive Right to Repair Working Group to determine the contours of the law and help build an independent entity to govern vehicle data transmitted to independent repair shops.

    That’s become… a complicated process.

  • [Repeat] Xe's Blog ☛ They squandered the holy grail

    This is the holy grail for remotely attested trusted compute. This OS is the kind of thing that Richard Stallman was warning about in The Right to Read. You don't get root there. You don't get a compiler. You don't get a debugger. You don't get anything but the ability to run software that was shipped with the OS image. If this OS were shipped to consumers, you would have a nearly unhackable system that would make it basically impossible to tinker with. There are many reasons why you would want such a thing in the era of phone scamming the elderly, but it would make it difficult for people like me to be developed with it.

    However, for something like Private Cloud Compute, it's a perfect match. All the computer can do is known in advance and nothing else is allowed to happen. This makes it a lot easier to ensure that privacy guarantees are that: guarantees.

    It's really frustrating that this foundation of trusted compute is being squandered. I wish I had an OS like Private Cloud Compute's as an option for building production systems.

  • Mat Duggan ☛ Review of Orbit by Mozilla

    Personally I'm not a huge fan of LLMs. I don't really think there is something like a "trustworthy LLM". But I think this is an interesting approach by Mozilla setting up what seems like a very isolated from their core infrastructure LLM appliance running Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B).

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Elsevier rewrites academic papers with AI — without telling editors or authors

    Finally, Elsevier demanded JHE reduce its number of editors — presumably thinking an LLM could do well enough. This was the last straw after ten years of Elsevier cutting services to the journal.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ 25 Years of the Dock and Aqua

    Even going back to the old Aqua toolbar design would be fine. The new Big Sur way—where there’s lots of empty space, yet the window title gets truncated and important buttons, and sometimes even the search field, get stuffed into the overflow menu—is a regression.

• Security

  • CISA ☛ 2024-12-30 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • 404 Media ☛ Telegram Hands U.S. Authorities Data on Thousands of Users

      Telegram, the popular social network and messaging application which has also become a hotbed for all sorts of serious criminal activity, provided U.S. authorities with data on more than 2,200 users last year, according to newly released data from Telegram.

    • 404 Media ☛ Violent Hackers Are Using U-Haul To Dox Targets

      Members of an underground criminal community that hack massive companies, steal swathes of cryptocurrency, and even commission robberies or shootings against members of the public or one another have an unusual method for digging up personal information on a target: the truck and trailer rental company U-Haul. With access to U-Haul employee accounts, hackers can lookup a U-Haul customer’s personal data, and with that try to social engineer their way into the target’s online accounts. Or potentially target them with violence too.

    • 404 Media ☛ Instagram Begins Randomly Showing Users AI-Generated Images of Themselves

      Instagram has begun testing a feature in which Meta’s AI will automatically generate images of users in various situations and put them into that user’s feed. One Redditor posted over the weekend that they were scrolling through Instagram and were presented an AI-generated slideshow of themselves standing in front of “an endless maze of mirrors,” for example.

    • Security Week ☛ Is Your Car Spying on You? What It Means That Tesla Shared Data in the Las Vegas Explosion

      “You might want law enforcement to have the data to crack down on criminals, but can anyone have access to it?” said Jodi Daniels, CEO of privacy consulting firm Red Clover Advisors. “Where is the line?”

      Many of the latest cars not only know where you’ve been and where you are going, but also often have access to your contacts, your call logs, your texts and other sensitive information thanks to cell phone syncing.

    • EFF ☛ EFF Goes to Court to Uncover Police Surveillance Tech in California

      Which surveillance technologies are California police using? Are they buying access to your location data? If so, how much are they paying? These are basic questions the Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to answer in a new lawsuit called Pen-Link v. County of San Joaquin Sheriff’s Office.

      EFF filed a motion in California Superior Court to join—or intervene in—an existing lawsuit to get access to documents we requested. The private company Pen-Link sued the San Joaquin Sheriff’s Office to block the agency from disclosing to EFF the unredacted contracts between them, claiming the information is a trade secret. We are going to court to make sure the public gets access to these records.

      The public has a right to know the technology that law enforcement buys with taxpayer money. This information is not a trade secret, despite what private companies try to claim.

    • Techdirt ☛ Whoops: Volkswagen Leaks Sensitive Data Of 800,000 Electric Vehicle Owners

      Back in 2023 Mozilla issued a report indicating that automakers have some of the worst privacy and security standards in all of tech, routinely hoovering up oceans of consumer behavior and phone data then failing to adequately secure it. Senator Ron Wyden has been at the forefront of calls for Congress to shake off corruption and, you know, actually do something useful about it.

      The U.S. Congress is too corrupt to function, so that never actually happens. Instead we get a rotating crop of avoidable scandals by companies that see no financial or reputational incentive to change.

    • The Register UK ☛ Data describing 800K VW EVs exposed online

      We're just as shocked as you that a massive firm left data exposed online, but here we are yet again. This time the issue began at VW subsidiary Cariad, per German outlet Der Spiegel. The wholly-owned VW company, tasked with developing a software platform for VW Group electric vehicles, exposed internal application data through poorly secured web subpages. These subpages could be systematically discovered, revealing the address of a memory dump file from an internal Cariad application. A whistleblower accessed the exposed file and shared their discovery with Der Spiegel and the Chaos Computer Club.

    • EFF ☛ Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry—Here’s How

      What do these privacy violations have in common? They share a source of data that’s shockingly pervasive and unregulated: the technology powering nearly every ad you see online.

      Each time you see a targeted ad, your personal information is exposed to thousands of advertisers and data brokers through a process called “real-time bidding” (RTB). This process does more than deliver ads—it fuels government surveillance, poses national security risks, and gives data brokers easy access to your online activity. RTB might be the most privacy-invasive surveillance system that you’ve never heard of.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-12-28 [Older] UNICEF says record number of children affected by wars

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-12-27 [Older] Poland prepares to succeed Hungary at EU helm

  • Papers Please ☛ Human Rights and “Countering Terrorist Travel”

    In late 2023 the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights released perhaps the most significant independent assessment to date of the human rights implications of travel surveillance and control.

    The Special Rapporteur’s report was released without publicity on the next-to-last day of the Special Rapporteur’s term. Aside from an article by Statewatch, it got little notice.

  • New York Times ☛ Elon Musk and His Megaphone, X, Rattle British Politics

    When Elon Musk asked his 211 million followers on X to vote on whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government,” it seemed as if the post could only be tongue-in-cheek.

    But coming after a barrage of strident posts about Britain by Mr. Musk — assailing the Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer; demanding the release of a jailed far-right agitator; and breaking with a hard-right leader, Nigel Farage — it came off less as a joke than a flex by a powerful man relishing his ability to roil the politics of another country.

  • Chris O'Donnnell ☛ An Easy Way to Cut Back on Facebook Use

    That's it. It isn't rocket science. People that "can't" cut back on Facebook simply don't want to cut back on Facebook. Deleting FB would be ideal, but for many of us it isn't practical, as it has become the place we keep in touch with people we care about.

  • Site36 ☛ Right-wing extremist offences are at a record high in Germany: 2024 was a ‘baseball bat year’

    The ‘baseball bat years’ refer to a period in the 1990s during which there was a wave of right-wing extremist and racist violence in Germany, particularly in East Germany. The term was coined in 2019 by journalist Christian Bangel and refers to the frequent use of baseball bats as weapons in these acts of violence. This era was characterised by numerous attacks on migrants, foreigners and dissidents, with the perpetrators often being young neo-Nazis and skinheads.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ On January 6

    I linked this yesterday, but NYT’s report on how Trump retconned January 6 is quite good.

    Don Moynihan describes all the Republican failures to hold Trump to account.

  • Jason Kottke ☛ The Truth About January 6th

    Today is the fourth anniversary of the attack on Congress and attempted coup of the United States government and the man who incited it will be sworn in as President of the United States later this month. On this dark day, it is important to remember what happened and why, so I went back and looked at some of what I posted in the aftermath of the attack. Here are a few of the videos, articles, and thoughts worth a second look.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Trump’s Bailout Philosophy: Too Loyal to Fail

    Donald Trump’s second term won’t bring smaller government as promised. Instead, it will replace regulations with a system of executive grace and favor. The old bailout standard of “too big to fail” will be replaced by a new one: only the loyal survive.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Coup That Never Was

    This incoming president faces a battery of criminal charges relating to his abuse of office and to personal frauds. He’s been convicted of some already; more are pending. He is also the author of a conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election and seize power by violence. More than 1,000 of his followers have been convicted and sentenced for their roles in his attempted coup d’état.

    These two sets of facts are obviously in considerable tension. How will they be resolved?

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Trump may have been reelected but insurrection must not be forgotten • Michigan Advance

    Amazingly, however, the combination of misinformation and short voter memories has allowed Trump to mount a political comeback and in two weeks he will return to the White House.

    And for those who care about truth and the rule of law, Trump’s return, his promised pardons of the insurrectionists and stated plans to take revenge on opponents mark new low points in America’s national story.

  • New York Times ☛ Biden Warns Americans Not to Forget the Jan. 6 Attack

    President Biden warned Americans not to forget the violent attack that took place at the Capitol four years ago, and he accused President-elect Donald J. Trump and his supporters of trying “to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day.”

    Since Election Day, Mr. Biden has focused on ensuring a smooth and orderly transition of power — something that Mr. Trump refused to deliver as he was leaving office at the end of his first term. But on the eve of the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack, Mr. Biden addressed the issue directly.

  • El País ☛ ‘Trump’s gonna pardon me’: Capitol [insurrectionists] claim victory

    Some of the individuals convicted for the events of January 6, 2021 are asking the judges for permission to attend the inauguration of the Republican president-elect, who has promised a mass pardon on day one of his return to power

  • Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Ban Law's Supreme Court Challenge Moves Forward

    That documents transfer has arrived just days before the Supreme Court will hear a decidedly important oral argument in connection with the TikTok ban challenge.

    As most already know, the app and its ByteDance parent have long been pushing back against the relevant law, under which the latter company must divest from TikTok’s U.S. operation or cease operating the platform domestically.

  • France24 ☛ Three Algerian TikTok influencers arrested in France on charges of inciting violence

    The arrests come amid growing political tensions between Paris and its former North African colony.

    A video blogger known as "Imad Tintin" was arrested Friday outside Grenoble after publishing a video urging followers to "burn alive, kill and rape on French territory".

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump Got Away With Instigating the Jan. 6 Capitol Attack

    The attack on the Capitol was the culmination of a blatantly authoritarian operation by an electorally defeated president to cling to power and shred the nation’s democratic order.

    By late January 2021, Trump finally relinquished the office as a wildly unpopular president during a still-raging global pandemic, leaving behind an immeasurably broken country and a historic mess for his Democratic successor to drown in. At the time, there was no shortage of members of the Republican Party elite rushing to denounce the delusional, soon-to-be former president, with senior veterans of his administration unafraid to unload on him — on the record — with lines like: “Yesterday was the worst day for the Republican Party since Lincoln’s assassination.”

    The attack on the Capitol that Trump instigated led to bloodshed, Americans dying, a second presidential impeachment, a high-profile congressional inquiry, lawsuits, criminal investigations, and the first federal criminal charges of a president in the nation’s history were soon triggered.

    Then, despite everything, Trump got away with it.

  • Times Media Limited ☛ How the UK became ‘western capital’ for sharia courts

    The number of sharia courts, also known as councils, in Britain has grown to 85 since the first began operating in the country in 1982.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Teach children to identify as Muslim instead of British, says frontrunner for Islamic body

    Khalid Mahmood, a senior fellow at Policy Exchange and Britain’s longest-serving Muslim MP from 2001 to 2024, said: “The views exposed by Policy Exchange are deeply disturbing.

    “That the MCB keeps getting it wrong is no accident - it is a design fault, rooted in its ideology. The Government rightly refuses to engage with the MCB and this demonstrates why that policy should not change.”

  • The Hill ☛ Muslim and Arab American voters uncertain about political future

    An exit poll from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) found Stein won among American Muslims nationwide, with 53 percent of the vote compared to 21 percent for Trump and 20 percent for Harris. One specifically for Michigan showed Stein ahead with 59 percent to Trump’s 22 percent and Harris’s 14 percent.

  • International Business Times ☛ New Orleans Attacker Used Meta Glasses To Scout City Before Rampage

    Weeks before his deadly rampage in the French Quarter, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, now called the New Orleans attacker, cycled through the city wearing smart glasses, filming his surroundings, the FBI revealed.

    Federal authorities disclosed Sunday that Jabbar, the man who rammed a truck into a crowd on New Year's Day, had used Meta smart glasses to record footage of the French Quarter during a bicycle ride in October. These are the same smart glasses he allegedly wore during the deadly attack months later.

• Environment

  • Truthdig ☛ The Blood in Our Phones

    So far, the mainstream U.S. media is mostly ignoring the story, continuing its decades-long indifference to what continues to be one of the greatest humanitarian disasters since World War II. As many as 6 million people may have already died in a zone that has become one of the most dangerous places on the planet; since fighting broke out in 1998, more than 5.6 million have been displaced. The U.S. and the European Union have largely ignored the violence, along with Rwanda’s complicity in looting DRC’s minerals.

  • The Register UK ☛ Chromebooks still set for scrap, even with 10-year lifecycle

    The appliance-like laptop devices were introduced by megacorp in 2011, running its Linux-based ChromeOS platform. They have been produced by a number of hardware vendors and proven popular with buyers such as students, thanks to their relatively low pricing.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Jimmy Carter Raised Climate Change Concerns 35 Years Before the Paris Accords

    Nearly a half-century later, environmental advocates are remembering Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100, as a president who elevated environmental stewardship, energy conservation and discussions about the global threat of rising carbon dioxide levels.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ A Brief History of the Goodyear Blimp, Which Celebrates Its 100th Anniversary This Year

      This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Goodyear Blimp and the 70th anniversary of providing aerial event coverage. To celebrate, the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company is taking its iconic airship on a tour of North America and Europe. It’s also giving fans a chance to ride in the blimp, something only 0.0006 percent of Americans can say they’ve done, according to a statement from the company.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Pentagon to blacklist China’s largest EV battery and tech firms

      The Pentagon will blacklist China’s largest EV battery manufacturer and its largest tech firm beginning in June 2026, barring them from Defense Department contracts and sending a powerful signal to American firms about the potential risks of doing business with them.

    • The Register UK ☛ Demand for AI servers sees Foxconn fly and suppliers spike

      The contract manufacturer, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, posted its December 2024 results on Sunday with the first-mentioned figure being unaudited consolidated revenue of NT$654.8 billion ($20 billion) – which represented a 2.64 percent month-over-month dip and a 42.31 percent year-on-year surge.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Chicago keeps its New Year’s resolution: All city buildings now use 100% clean power

      It takes approximately 700,000 megawatt hours of electricity to power Chicago’s more than 400 municipal buildings every year. As of January 1, every single one of them — including 98 fire stations, two international airports, and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet — is running on renewable energy, thanks largely to Illinois’ newest and largest solar farm.

      The move is projected to cut the carbon footprint of the country’s third-largest city by approximately 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year — the equivalent of taking 62,000 cars off the road, according to the city. Local decarbonization efforts like Chicago’s are taking on increasing significance as President-elect Donald Trump promises to reduce federal support for climate action. With the outgoing Biden administration doubling down on an international pledge to get the U.S. to net-zero emissions by 2050, cities, states, and private-sector players across the country will have to pick up the slack.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2024-12-27 [Older] Drought, Fires and Deforestation Battered Amazon Rainforest in 2024

    • TruthOut ☛ 2025-01-01 [Older] Amazon Nears Ecological Tipping Point as Fires and Drought Ravage Rainforest

    • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-01-03 [Older] Amazon’s Global Warming Counterweight Threatened

    • The Revelator ☛ 2025 From A to Z

    • Science Alert ☛ Storm-Surfing Bats Seen Using The Weather to Cover Astonishing Distances

      One species' has a trick up its membranous sleeves, new research reveals, allowing it to surf storm fronts for hundreds of miles.

    • Nebraska Examiner ☛ Man rides 6,000 miles through 25 states to spotlight wild horse crisis​

      After passing through 25 states — from Utah to the coastline in New Jersey and back — braving busy roads, navigating remote backcountry trails, trudging through blizzards, even taking a harrowing swim across the Delaware River, and at times knocking on doors to ask for safe places to sleep and eat, Jake and his horses’ ride was almost at an end.

      Jake coined the journey the “Year of the Mustang.” His mission? Raise awareness of the power and plight of the wild horse. How grazing, population growth and development pressures have made life increasingly difficult for these animals, even though they’re idolized as a patriotic symbol for their role in helping settle the West.

• Finance

  • Yahoo News ☛ Bayer attacked bureaucracy by firing some 5,000 managers and asking teams to ‘self-organize.’ Here’s how it’s going after one year

    When you’ve covered business for a long time, radical corporate strategies tend to get your attention. Whether ahead of their time, truly bizarre, or just plain doomed, it’s certainly interesting to see companies go completely off-script. (The Zappos experiment with “Holocracy” memorably comes to mind.) So I was intrigued to read last year about the radical plan to attack bureaucracy at German pharma company Bayer. The company, which invented aspirin, eliminated nearly all managers and instead asked teams to ‘self-organize’ for 90-day work sprints.

    As CEO Bill Anderson wrote for Fortune in an Op-Ed last spring, “Bureaucracy has put Bayer in a stranglehold. Our internal rules for employees span 1,362 pages. We have excellent people, with expertise in a range of disciplines and exceptional commitment to our success. But they are trapped in 12 levels of hierarchy, which puts unnecessary distance between our teams, our customers, and our products.” But little changes, he ventured, would hardly make a difference. “Consider this question: If workers are hobbled by 1,000 rules, does it make a meaningful difference to reduce the rules to only 900? This is why most efforts fail—and why lasting progress requires eliminating all of the rules and then starting fresh with a new approach.”

  • Don Marti ☛ ads.txt for a site with no ads

    This site does not have programmatic ads on it.

    But just in case, since there’s a lot of malarkey in the online advertising business, I’m putting up this file to let the advertisers know that if someone sold you an ad and claimed it ran on here, you got burned.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ Tencent added to US list of 'Chinese military companies'

    Tencent appeared in a Tuesday update to the “Section 1260 list”, a document that US law requires be compiled annually to list companies operating in the USA that Washington wonks believe participate in China’s “Military-Civil Fusion strategy”, under which the People's Liberation Army (PLA) works with local companies to ensure it can get the technologies it needs to modernize and defend the People’s Republic.

  • The Washington Post ☛ UFC’s Dana White joins Meta’s board, as company moves closer to Trump

    The company said Monday that White, a friend of President-elect Donald Trump and president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, joined Meta’s board along with John Elkann, chief executive of the European investment company Exor; and Charlie Songhurst, a technology investor who served as head of global corporate strategy at Microsoft.

    “Dana is the President and CEO of UFC, and he has built it into one of the most valuable, fastest growing, and most popular sports enterprises in the world,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Facebook. “I’ve admired him as an entrepreneur and his ability to build such a beloved brand.”

  • New York Times ☛ Dana White, U.F.C. Head, Joins Meta’s Board

    Meta is adding Mr. White, a longtime friend of President-elect Donald J. Trump, to the social media company’s leadership amid a series of moves to strengthen its ties to the incoming administration. Last week, the company shook up the top of its policy team, appointing a longtime executive known for his Republican ties as head of global policy. Meta has also donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inaugural fund.

  • The Record ☛ Russia blames telecom network accident for widespread [Internet] outage

    A massive outage affecting several online services in Russia was caused by issues on the main network of a telecom operator, Russia's [Internet] regulator said Monday.

    According to the regulator, Roskomnadzor, the incident has been resolved and services are being restored. In comments to state-owned media, the agency did not name the affected telecom operator, nor did it specify the cause of the incident.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Winning coalitions aren’t always governing coalitions

    Winning an election is easier than it looks: all you have to do is convince a bunch of different groups that you will use power to achieve their desires. Bonus points if you can convince groups with mutually exclusive goals that you'll deliver for them – the coalition of "people who disagree about everything" is hard to assemble, but it sure is large!

  • EPIC ☛ NetChoice v. Bonta

    Is it a company’s protected expression under the First Amendment to present a user with whatever content the company’s algorithm thinks will maximize the amount of time the user spends on the company’s website?

    Does blocking a social media website from sending push notifications to minors during school hours and late at night constitute a First Amendment violation?

    Does a regulation requiring a social media company to publish statistics about the number of minor users on its website and their aggregate settings choices violate the First Amendment?

    Does a law requiring an online service provider to estimate a user’s age before allowing them to use certain website features violate the First Amendment?

  • The Hill ☛ China fires shot across Trump's bow with defense sanctions

    The United States maintains a “one China” policy that takes no stand on the issue, though Washington supplies Taiwan with weapons and other military equipment, to the ire of Beijing.

    The sanctions on the U.S. defense firms appear to “send a signal that they could cripple us if they wanted to be a lot tougher,” Reinsch said.

  • Inside Towers ☛ What Happens to BEAD Grants Under Trump?

    The FCC and NTIA have played key roles in efforts to bridge the digital divide. The two agencies have helped drive the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment, or BEAD, program, funded under the 2021 infrastructure law. But in previous writings, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who is Trump’s choice to lead the FCC, has appeared skeptical of BEAD, which he criticized repeatedly, Inside Towers reported. Carr said under the Biden Administration, lots of broadband deployment grants have been doled out, but no shovels turned as of 2024.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Nokia completes sale of Alcatel Submarine Networks to French State

    Nokia has concluded the sale of Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN), its submarine networks business, to the French State, represented by the Agence des participations de l'Etat.

    The transaction was completed on 31 December 2024. Nokia retains a 20% shareholding with board representation to ensure a smooth transition until targeted exit, at which point it is planned for the French State to acquire Nokia’s remaining interest.

  • The Register UK ☛ After China's Salt Typhoon, the reconstruction starts now

    An industry unable to learn something in 40 years has no legitimacy. And there’s no sign it is learning now. Verizon’s corporate emissions are full of bland statements that there wasn’t much of a problem, it’s been "contained," and all of its highly respected friends agree. There are no specifics, nothing independently verifiable, just words they want us to believe.

  • [Old] TechCrunch ☛ In letter to EU, open source bodies say Cyber Resilience Act could have 'chilling effect' on software development | TechCrunch

    Thirteen organizations, including the Eclipse Foundation, Linux Foundation Europe, and the Open Source Initiative (OSI), also note that the Cyber Resilience Act as its written “poses an unnecessary economic and technological risk to the EU.”

    The purpose of the letter, it seems, is for the open source community to garner a bigger say in the evolution of the CRA as it progresses through the European Parliament.

    The letter reads: [...]

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Six Colors ☛ Apple Intelligence summaries might get warning labels. That’s not enough.

      The statement uses the beta tag it has placed on Apple Intelligence features as a shield, while promising to add a warning label to AI-generated summaries in the future. It’s hard to accept “it’s in beta” as an excuse when the features have shipped in non-beta software releases that are heavily marketed to the public as selling points of Apple’s latest hardware. Adding a warning label also does not change the fact that Apple has released a feature that at its core consumes information and replaces it with misinformation at a troubling rate.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Le Monde ☛ The 'Charlie Hebdo' and Hyper Casher attacks: Three days of blood, terror and tears

    On Wednesday, January 7, 2015, at 10:19 am, Chérif Kouachi sent a text message to Amedy Coulibaly on the line dedicated solely to their exchanges. The message was deleted, but it was probably the kick-off to three days of blood and gunpowder, three days of terror that changed France. These two names, hitherto known only to the police, would soon emerge from anonymity.

  • BBC ☛ Charlie Hebdo: Magazine releases special issue decade after attack

    Things changed for France on 7 January 2015, marking in bloodshed the end of all wilful naivety about the threat of militant Islamism.

    Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi burst into a meeting at the Paris office of the satirical weekly, murdering its star cartoonists Cabu, Wolinski, Charb and Tignous.

    Overall, 12 people were killed by the brothers, including a Muslim policeman on duty outside. Two days later they were cornered and shot dead by police at a sign-making business near Charles-de-Gaulle airport.

  • Le Monde ☛ 'Indestructible': 'Charlie Hebdo' unveils special edition 10 years after attack

    The 2015 attack by the al-Qaeda-trained Kouachi brothers was said to be revenge for Charlie Hebdo's decision to publish caricatures lampooning the Prophet Mohammed, Islam's most revered figure. The massacre of some of France's most famous cartoonists signaled the start of a gruesome series of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State plots that claimed hundreds of lives in France and Western Europe over the following years.

    The edition unveiled to the media on Monday will go on sale on Tuesday when public commemorations by President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo are set to take place.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Charlie Hebdo marks 10 years after terror attack with special issue

    It will also feature an Ifop poll on “the French and the right to caricature, blasphemy and freedom of expression”; conducted in June last year, it showed 76% of French people asked believed freedom of expression – including “freedom to caricature” – was a fundamental right. Of those polled, 62% said they approved of the right “to criticise a religious belief, symbol or dogma in an outrageous manner”.

  • The Fire ☛ A decade after ‘Charlie Hebdo’ killings, we are still failing blasphemers

    Dozens of countries, from Poland to Italy to Saudi Arabia to Bangladesh, maintain blasphemy laws, and six of them still threaten accused blasphemers with the death penalty. Even if the state is not willing to kill, its subjects may be. In places like Pakistan or Nigeria, an accusation alone can inspire deadly mob violence. Police in Pakistan sometimes even assign themselves the role of executioner without waiting for a judge or jury.

    While the situation remains grim in nations that have long enforced these laws, it’s also worsened in countries and institutions that generally promise better protections for free expression.

  • The Economist ☛ Ten years after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, satire is under siege

  • The Times Of Israel ☛ Charlie Hebdo to mark 10 years since terror attack with special God-mocking edition | The Times of Israel

    The attack by two Paris-born brothers was revenge for Charlie Hebdo’s decision to repeatedly publish caricatures lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, Islam’s most revered figure.

    The massacre of some of France’s most famous cartoonists signaled the start of a gruesome series of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State plots that claimed hundreds of lives in France and Western Europe over the following years.

  • Reuters ☛ French weekly Charlie Hebdo marks 10th anniversary of attack with special edition

    The magazine, which has long tested the limits of free speech, had published cartoons mocking the Prophet about a decade earlier. In Islam, depictions of the Prophet are considered blasphemous. Over the next two days, a third attacker killed a female police officer and then four Jewish hostages in a kosher supermarket in a Paris suburb. That gunman said in a video that the attacks were coordinated and carried out in the name of the militant group Islamic State. All three gunmen died in shootouts with the police in separate standoffs.

  • France24 ☛ France to mark 10 years since the Charlie Hebdo attacks

    Charlie Hebdo has published a special edition to mark the 10-year anniversary that features a front-page cartoon with the caption "Indestructible!"

    In a typically provocative move, the militantly atheist publication also organised a God-themed cartoon contest that invited submissions of the "funniest and meanest" caricatures of religious figures.

  • The Hindu ☛ French weekly Charlie Hebdo marks 10th anniversary of attack with special edition

    French political leaders will attend events on Tuesday commemorating the attacks.

  • RFI ☛ Charlie Hebdo defies terror with special issue for attack anniversary

    France is preparing to mark 10 years since terror attacks targeting satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket left 17 people dead in Paris. The three days of violence, triggered by the magazine's publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, sparked worldwide debate about freedom of expression and religious sensitivities.

  • Cartooning for Peace ☛ 10 years after the attack on Charlie Hebdo - Cartooning for Peace

    How many of us would take to the streets today to defend the right to satire and blasphemy in the face of censors and extremists of all stripes? It’s hard to say, except that press freedom seems to be in decline around the world. Half the world’s population lives under a dictatorial regime, religious or otherwise, where satire is banned or restricted. It is more necessary than ever to defend the right of cartoonists, who are all too often under threat, to make fun of others, to provoke thought and to nurture critical thinking. Democracy depends on it!

  • Variety ☛ Pamela Anderson Shares Airplane Attack, Mistaken for a Dixie Chick

    “Yeah. Ended up he thought I was a Dixie Chick. Remember that whole Dixie Chick thing?” Anderson continued. “I almost got killed on a plane. I was scared to fly after that, a little bit.”

    Anderson chuckled while recounting the story, but it was no laughing matter at the time. The Golden Globe nominee did not disclose when the incident took place, but it was likely sometime in 2003 amid the national firestorm against The Chicks after lead singer Natalie Maines said during a March 10, 2003 concert in London that her band was ashamed President George W. Bush was from Texas amid the invasion of Iraq. The band’s reputation imploded and their music sales plummeted due to the controversial remark. The backlash is chronicled in The Chicks’ 2006 documentary “Shut Up and Sing.”

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Pamela Anderson: She Was Mistaken for the Chicks, 'Almost Got Killed'

    Although Anderson didn’t specify when the incident happened, it was likely soon after the Chicks‘ criticism of former President George W. Bush after he declared war on Iraq in March 2003. At the time, the then-Dixie Chicks were performing in London when lead singer Natalie Maines said on stage that they were “ashamed” that Bush was also from Texas. The backlash was swift and brutal, and the trio was blacklisted from country radio stations across the U.S. As the country music community shunned the group, their album and tour sales were decimated.

  • AntiWar ☛ How the Foreign Agents Law Is Used To Silence American Dissidents

    These examples highlight the government’s growing reliance on private-sector cooperation to stifle opposition under the guise of protecting public discourse. Yet the idea of labeling speech as “misinformation” or its messenger as a “foreign agent” is not new – it echoes historical attempts to discredit dissent.

    This tactic has resurfaced with a vengeance with the rediscovery of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), now a favored tool for deplatforming speakers under the pretext of transparency while stigmatizing dissent as foreign interference. As you will soon see, FARA is Un-American!

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2024-12-28 [Older] Rome urges Iran to free Italian journalist Cecilia Sala

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Open Thread: Reading Is Fundamental As Is Journalism

    The essential issue is journalism — apparently we need to burn it all down and start with the basics, by which I mean crack a book used as journalism curriculum in J-school.

    The book I find essential was recommended by journalism instructors I once worked with. At less than 300 pages in paperback, it’s a straightforward and slim read: The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. There have been four editions published to date, any of them are worth reading, and there are +100 copies available now through used book reseller Alibris so you don’t have to go to Bezos’ Amazon.

  • NL Times ☛ Harassment of journalists in the Netherlands surges in 2024

    Most of the incidents involved threats, which occurred 99 times, followed by discrimination or intimidation (72 incidents) and physical violence (56 cases). While threats decreased compared to 2023, instances of physical violence and intimidation rose. PersVeilig reported that 68 incidents took place in person, while 46 occurred via social media.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Indian journalist found dead in septic tank

    India was ranked 159th last year on the World Press Freedom Index, run by Reporters Without Borders.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • FAIR ☛ Baltimore Media ‘Create a False Impression That Youth Are Responsible for a Lot of Very Dangerous Crime’: CounterSpin interview with Richard Mendel on youth crime coverage

    Janine Jackson interviewed the Sentencing Project’s Richard Mendel about coverage of youth crime for the December 20, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

  • Pro Publica ☛ ND Ethics Commission Consistently Restricted by State Legislature

    Fed-up North Dakotans, led by a group of women calling themselves the BadAss Grandmas, voted to amend the constitution and establish a state Ethics Commission six years ago. Their goal was to investigate and stop unethical conduct by public officials.

    But the watchdog agency has achieved less than the advocates had hoped, undermined in large part by the legislature the commission is charged with overseeing, an investigation by the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica has found.

  • International Business Times ☛ 2024-12-30 [Older] German Amazon Workers Can Apply To Work From Home Despite Company's Global RTO Mandate

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-01-02 [Older] The Teamsters’ Amazon “Strikes”: a Critical Assessment

  • Techdirt ☛ Another Court Says A Drug Dog Sniff Is A Search, Requires Probable Cause To Justify It

    Here’s the latest ruling that changes the probable cause calculus, via FourthAmendment.com. A Minnesota appeals court has come down on the side of the Fourth Amendment, ruling that a drug dog sniff is governed by the Fourth Amendment, rather than just another trick cop dogs can perform to generate alleged probable cause.

    After tracking a suspect with a pen register order that somehow allowed investigators to receive “pings” from the targeted device in near real-time (pen register orders generally aren’t used for real-time tracking because they’re used to collect phone records after the fact, not while facts are still in progress — something that suggests this was cover for a Stingray device, rather than ping info delivered to investigators by the service provider), cops applied for an arrest warrant for Glenn Johnson. To effect this arrest, they received permission to stop Johnson’s car if they came across it while patrolling.

  • La Quadature Du Net ☛ Investigation: in Marseille as elsewhere, digital infrastructures are taking over the territory

    Since the end of 2023, the Marseille collective Le Nuage était sous nos pieds (The cloud was beneath our feet) has been investigating, analysing and fighting against the social, ecological and political impacts of digital infrastructures in Marseilles, in particular international undersea cables and data centres. The collective is made up of Marseille residents affiliated to at least three organisations: the collectif des Gammares a Marseille collective for popular education on water issues, Technopolice Marseille which analyses and fights against police surveillance technologies, and La Quadrature du Net, an association for the defence of fundamental freedoms and rights in the digital environment. In this article, we present part of the collective’s investigation into digital infrastructures in Marseille, their socio-environmental impact and the noxious world they represent, an investigation that we are extending beyond the Marseilles area, inspired in particular by the debates at the Le nuage était sous nos pieds festival that took place on 8, 9 and 10 November 2024 in Marseille.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Conversation ☛ 2024-12-31 [Older] Writing long reads for The Conversation can be ‘instrumental’ in developing research – Insights story updates

  • Inside Towers ☛ Federal Appeals Court Strikes Down Net Neutrality Rules

    The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down net neutrality rules recently reinstated by the FCC. The action marks a significant setback for Democrats’ telecom policy. The court ruled that broadband [Internet] providers are “information services,” not “telecommunications services,” as the agency had reclassified them, noted Inside Radio. The ruling aligns with a Supreme Court decision limiting federal court deference to expert agencies like the FCC, emphasizing a stricter interpretation of the statute.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • CNBC ☛ Disney Hulu+ Live TV and Fubo to combine

    Disney will combine its Hulu+ Live TV service with Fubo, merging together two [Internet] TV bundles.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft declares 2025 the year of Windows 11

    Not that users have much of a choice to move with Microsoft to a Windows 11 world - support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025, after which date the then 10-year-old OS will stop receiving security or feature updates. Mehdi describes this as "helping customers stay protected by moving to modern new PCs," but the marketing speak doesn't necessarily line up with reality.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• IP Kat ☛ 2024-12-31 [Older] ECS’s Opinion on Pelham II and its potential implications for AI-generated pastiches – Part 1 [Ed: "AI-generated" or just CG with misleading buzzwords? ]

• Trademarks

  • IP Kat ☛ 2024-12-30 [Older] [Guest post] Trade mark trouble in Paris: Pierre Cadault’s journey beyond Netflix

  • IP Kat ☛ 2024-12-30 [Older] General Court: Trade marks for virtual goods and services to be assessed like trade marks for the real goods and services

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-01-03 [Older] Tetra Laval’s 3D shape mark not exclusively functional, rules EUIPO Board of Appeal (and, no, it’s not automatically bad faith to seek longer IP protection for a successful product)

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft mimics Google UI when Bing users search for Google

    Once the shift to hide the actual Bing bar is complete (the remaining search window is just another Bing search field, not a Google one), there's no obvious Microsoft branding at first glance - just a small banner promoting its Rewards points as a reason to "choose Microsoft Bing." Searches for other engines don't return similar results, nor do any other search terms we tried.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Anti-Piracy Group Wants to Expand Italy's 'Piracy Shield' to Protect Movies

    Italy's 'Piracy Shield' blocking system was originally invented to protect time-sensitive live sports streams from pirates. A year later, rightsholders are pushing for an update to cover a wider range of content, including films. This move, which is expected to be discussed in a forthcoming consultation, aims to gradually expand the 'next-gen' blocking system.