Leftovers

• Yury Molodtsov ☛ Why Greg Egan is the Greatest Living Sci-Fi Author

  These are my favorite sci-fi writers of all time. Each one represents a separate age in human history and science fiction.

• Smithsonian Magazine ☛ On This Day in 1993, Production Began on This Groundbreaking Movie That Transformed Hollywood Forever

  They did know that they were attempting something groundbreaking: the first full-length feature film to be produced entirely with computer animation.

  “Toy Story was shot entirely on location—in cyberspace,” Wired’s Burr Snider wrote in 1995.

• [Old] MIT ☛ Linux takes Hollywood by storm

  "Linux is becoming a significant force for how movies are being made," says Ed Leonard, DreamWorks' chief technology officer. "For a certain amount of investment, you get dramatically increased returns."

  Linux is indeed going Hollywood. Industrial Light & Magic, the San Rafael, Calif., division of George Lucas's production empire that created special effects for Star Wars, says it is preparing to replace nearly half of its 1,300 SGI workstations with a variety of Linux-based hardware still to be decided.

  Pixar Animation Studios, which helped bring Walt Disney Co. into computer-generated animation with "Toy Story," is also converting its workstations to Linux. The studio was in the process of switching from SGI technology to Microsoft's Windows NT platform, but shifted to Linux in midstream as it gained momentum and credibility, says Ed Catmull, president and chief technology officer of the Emeryville, Calif., company.

• [Old] Wired ☛ The Toy Story Story

  How John Lasseter came to make the first 100-percent computer-generated theatrical motion picture.

• Clayton Errington ☛ Jellyfin and SSL

  Selfhosting your media is always a fun choice. We all have various media from music to movies and an open source project like Jellyfin makes it easy to take that from sitting on your hard drive to being watched on your TV.

  It is debatable if using a secure protocol on your own local network is needed, but if it is possible and easy to setup, why not? Jellyfin makes this really simple to get started.

  Many clients and computers look for the secure connection first when doing auto discover and setup, especially for login pages.

• Eric Walker ☛ Blog Question Challenge 2025

  This is a great question and I don’t have a great answer. I know I dabbled back in my High School days of just writing silly things and posting it to a static webpage with just straight HTML. So that would have been at least back in 1998 since I worked at an Internet Service Provider with a good friend of mine. I probably kept doing that off and on then even though college as I have recolections of sites and that is where my Brebs.net domain came from (probably more on that another time). However, I would say actually documented in a CMS kind of blogging software started in 2007 when my wife and I went to Peru we documented out travels and then we started another one up the months before our first was born in 2009. However, you will see this blog really only goes back to 2011 when I started doing one just more for myself again. Also, I don’t really have anything prior to 2007 online either but I do have the Travels and Family one still online that reminds me of another project that I want to do something with them at some point.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Tedium ☛ Test Pattern History: How Color Bars Became a TV Staple

    Today in Tedium: You don’t know Norbert D. Larky and David D. Holmes, but you’ve most certainly seen their work many thousands of times in your life. It’s the kind of thing that has existed in the brains of people who left the TV on an obscure cable channel in the middle of the night, the kind that doesn’t have 24 hours of content to fill their day. Or maybe there was a glitch at the station and they needed to fill some airtime. What Larky and Holmes created in the early 1950s was the one of the most iconic test patterns the world has ever seen. You know the one—with the bright color bars that are hard to miss. And Tedium is going to tell you all about it, and other TV test patterns, in today’s issue. — Ernie @ Tedium

• Science

  • Wired ☛ There’s a New Way to Count Prime Numbers

    Now, two mathematicians—Ben Green of the University of Oxford and Mehtaab Sawhney of Columbia University—have proved just such a statement for a particularly challenging type of prime number. Their proof, which was posted online in October, doesn’t just sharpen mathematicians’ understanding of the primes. It also makes use of a set of tools from a very different area of mathematics, suggesting that those tools are far more powerful than mathematicians imagined, and potentially ripe for applications elsewhere.

• Career/Education

  • Redowan Delowar ☛ The domain knowledge dilemma

    This is probably obvious to veterans, but it wasn’t to me when I started. I’ve seen some people get burned by over-specializing, while others pulled off moonshots by spotting opportunities that let them do fantastic, novel work. There’s a line between specialization and hyper-specialization, and most of the time, being more of a jack-of-all-trades isn’t a bad thing. At the same time, it’s neat to be able to identify those rare opportunities where getting involved early can yield outsized returns.

  • Alex Ewerlöf ☛ Individual cost vs value

    This post elaborates one of my career principals with visuals. The goal is to build a mental model that allows self-assessing your career to make deliberate choices that optimize growth.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-06 [Older] What to know about the HMPV outbreak in China

  • James G ☛ Perspective

    Sometimes, walking on a new path gives you a new perspective – opening your eyes to new things, while reminding you of what’s important.

  • France24 ☛ Donald Trump’s pledge to ‘drill, baby, drill’ meets the reality of fracking in rural Pennsylvania

    While their most severe health issues seem to have subsided for now, Jess says she still gets nose bleeds and is worried about the long-term consequences water contamination and air pollution brought on by fracking will have on her family. “If we stay here, I feel like I am failing as a mother because I am signing a death warrant for my kids,” she says as tears fill her eyes.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • CISA ☛ 2025-01-08 [Older] Ivanti Releases Security Updates for Connect Secure, Policy Secure, and ZTA Gateways

  • Fans Are Not Satisfied With The Results After Microsoft Acquired Activision Blizzard

    Microsoft officially acquired Activision Blizzard in late 2023. It was the largest video game acquisition in history, raising many eyebrows. The gaming giant faced many hurdles and even had to go through over a year of legal process in order to close the deal.

  • Employee Engagement in the U.S. Hit a 10-Year Low in 2024

    Employee engagement in the U.S. fell to an all-time low in 2024, marking the lowest numbers that have been observed in a decade. According to Gallup’s workplace satisfaction report, the engagement numbers showed that only 31% of employees were engaged in 2024, with 17% of employees being actively disengaged. Such stats were last seen all the way back in 2014, and the downward trajectory suggests that we may be working backward.

    The U.S. workplace engagement statistics are a helpful way to assess where the workforce stands today, and it clarifies that the decline is not specific to an organization or industry, but has instead been observed on a much larger scale across the country. The decline in employee satisfaction and engagement to dangerously new lows may feel like a temporary program, but could ultimately be damaging to businesses in the long run.

  • [Repeat] Ruben Schade ☛ Stuff doesn’t work

    I’m sure it’s all true, or at least has whiffs of being so. I’m just pointing out the fact that thirty-something me feels like he’s having the same amount of problems that twenty-something me did. And I have this nagging feeling that fourty and fifty-something me will too.

    Do you think that’s part of the reason so many of us are anxious, exhausted, and a bit angry thesedays? We have to use this tech more and more (and more), and the stuff just doesn’t work. They’re like microagressions that build up over the course of a day, until I reach a point where I say NO MORE! So I reach for the TV remote to unwind for a bit, and ABC iView has crashed.

  • Jan Lukas Else ☛ Blocking AI bots ⛔

    Now, don’t get me wrong – I occasionally use tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Microsoft Copilot myself. But it really bothers me that these AI companies use my server resources and bandwidth to build their massive databases, reaping huge profits while leaving me to bear the costs. To make meaningful use of their databases, I’d need to pay for expensive subscriptions or API requests. It feels unfair, and this little plugin is my way of pushing back.

  • Geshan ☛ How to run (any) open LLM with Ollama on Google Cloud Run [Step-by-step]

    Ollama is a great way to run many open Large Language Models (LLMs). You can run Google Gemma 2, Phi 4, Mistral, and Llama 3 on your machine or the cloud with Ollama. You can also host these open LLMs as APIs using Ollama. In this post, you will learn how to host Gemma 2 (2b) with Ollama 0.5.x on Google Cloud Run; let’s get started!

  • AIM ☛ Lights, Camera, AI: The Tech Behind Your Favorite Pixar Movies

    The training set up consists of a PyTorch development environment, a Linux instance with two 24GB NVIDIA Quadro P6000 GPUs. Pixar also has a renderer to synthesise the pairs of images, high-quality scenes with diverse shaders, geometry, and lighting conditions, and a data center fine-tuned to render at tremendous scale.

    The researchers claim that they have trained and deployed a production-quality super-resolution model that consistently produces high-quality, artefact-free upscaled images even on scenes with the depth of field or motion blur. Further, the paper states that their latest trained model shows promise towards a pipeline where one can render at 1K and upscale to 2K, which would save 50-75% of the studio’s render farm footprint if used for all intermediate renders.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Doom ported to a standalone Microsoft Word document — plays well but there's no sound

    A software engineer has ported Doom to a standalone Word document. The single 6.6MB document file, available via GitHub, contains a source port of doomgeneric. Users will need a modern version of Microsoft Office/Word on an x86 computer system, and eschew security warnings, to enable the VBA macro in the document to run.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Moscow Times ☛ Telegram Boss Durov Admits 'Seriousness' of Allegations: Source

      Telegram founder Pavel Durov has told investigating magistrates in France, where he was charged with infractions linked to enabling organised crime, that he "realised the seriousness of all the allegations," AFP learned Saturday from a source familiar with the case.

    • PC Mag ☛ Looking for a TikTok Alternative? Lemon8 and RedNote Are Spying on You, Too

      Not all of the policies are clear about how and when these companies collect your data automatically, so I listed all of the major data types mentioned in each privacy policy in the chart below. To read the text yourself, here are links to the privacy policies for each app: Facebook, Lemon8, RedNote, TikTok, X. Notably, Facebook and RedNote provide detailed instructions for customizing your privacy settings and turning off some of the more invasive data collection methods in the privacy policy.

      This is a good time to point out that Chinese social media apps appear to be collecting much of the same data that US-based social media companies collect. For example, Meta collects data about your credit score, political and religious beliefs, sexual orientation, and web browsing habits. X monitors your device's battery level while you're using the app. Lemon8 and TikTok record your keystroke patterns and rhythms. Is any of that information really necessary for these apps to function?

    • XDA ☛ Microsoft just renamed Office on everyone's PCs, and the new name isn't great

      Long-time fans of Microsoft will know that Office has gone through a few name changes already, so why is it going through yet another one? Well, it's no secret that Microsoft is going all-in on its AI initiative. In fact, Microsoft 365 users recently learned that the subscription price is going up for the first time in 13 years, purely because Microsoft is adding Copilot integration into the base plan instead of relying on people subscribing to Copilot Pro.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-06 [Older] France and Germany falter as Trump presidency looms

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-06 [Older] Indonesia officially becomes full member of BRICS bloc

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-06 [Older] Ivory Coast shifts French military partnership

  • NL Times ☛ Mosque groups consider legal action against De Telegraaf

    The coalition of mosque organizations has warned that if the newspaper does not address these concerns, they may proceed with legal action.

  • New York Times ☛ TikTok Engineered Its Shutdown to Get Saved. But Trump’s Solution May Fall Short

    Nor is it evident that it would address the national security problem inherent in having TikTok’s algorithms — which monitor the selections of users and pick the next thing shown to them — written in China.

  • Deseret Media ☛ TikTok restores service, thanks Trump

    TikTok is restoring service after Trump promised to revive app access. The app was unavailable due to a law citing national security concerns. Trump seeks a U.S. 50% ownership in TikTok to address security issues.

  • New York Times ☛ TikTok Starts Working Again After Trump Says He Will Stall a Ban

    TikTok flickered back to life in the United States on Sunday after President-elect Donald J. Trump said that he would issue an executive order to stall a federal ban of the app.

    The abrupt shift came after just hours after major app stores removed the popular social media site and it stopped operating for U.S. users. The company said in a post on X that in “agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service.”

  • Deseret Media ☛ TikTok stops working for US users, disappears from Apple, Google stores

    Under the statute, mobile app stores are barred from offering TikTok and internet hosting services are prohibited from delivering the service to American users.

  • New Yorker ☛ Is the TikTok Ban a Chance to Rethink the Whole Internet?

    Last spring, while McCourt was promoting his book, “Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age,” in which he writes that big tech companies have “learned how to tap into our most basic instincts” and “exert untold influence over us,” President Joe Biden signed a bill that would ban TikTok, the famously addictive app with more than a billion active users worldwide, or force a sale of its U.S. operations to an American buyer by January 19th. McCourt saw an opportunity. That May, he announced that he was mounting his own “people’s bid” to buy the app. “I’m not looking to buy TikTok and replicate the tech stack,” he told me. “You know, scrape people’s data, exploit it, so forth.” Instead, he wants to use it to further his goal of building an Internet where users, rather than Big Tech, own their data. “The TikTok bid is just an incredibly fortuitous moment and opportunity,” he said, “where people are aligned, seeing the damage being caused by TikTok to our national security and to kids.”

    McCourt’s family made its fortune doing construction in Boston—they poured pavement at Logan Airport and for the Big Dig—and his understanding of how to fix things is often to think of the problem as one big infrastructure project: in the case of the Internet, the pipes are irreparably broken and need replacing. Users have grown accustomed to giving away more and more of their personal data to big tech companies—a billion little frogs clicking “Accept Terms” and slowly boiling in a putrid stew—in exchange for using social networks and browsing online. When McCourt speaks on the subject, he tends to use the term “digital personhood” to describe the erosion of online autonomy. “We’re talking about something that can control our free will, something that impacts, literally, how our brain forms,” he said. “When I went to school, I was taught that free will is the distinguishing characteristic of the human species; our ability to choose, to make decisions, agency, autonomy—it’s being taken away from us.”

  • International Business Times ☛ When Will TikTok Be Unbanned in the US and Could the Ban Spread to the UK? What We Know

    The UK and other members of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, have already banned TikTok on government devices. Experts suggest that if the US maintains its hardline stance, a broader ban across allied nations may be inevitable.

  • Axios ☛ TikTok goes dark, vanishes from Apple, Google app stores

    Trump has indicated that he will try to keep TikTok alive in the U.S., but facing hefty fines, Google and Apple likely chose not to take the risk of violating the law.

    What they're saying: Apple said it is "obligated to follow the laws in the jurisdictions where it operates" and listed 11 other ByteDance apps that will also not be available — including Lemon8, which some TikTok users had been flocking to.

    Google declined to comment.

  • Variety ☛ Why Did TikTok Go Dark? US Law Bans App, Which Shuts Down for Users

    On Friday, TikTok said it would be “forced to go dark” on Jan. 19 unless it received a “definitive statement” from the outgoing Biden administration that the app’s tech partners won’t be penalized under the law, which bans the app in the U.S. as of Sunday unless China-based parent ByteDance divests its stake in the app to a party that is not located in a country deemed a “foreign adversary.”

  • NPR ☛ TikTok is offline in the U.S. after Supreme Court upholds ban

    TikTok is no longer accessible to users in the U.S., the result of a controversial law forcing the popular platform offline unless it splits away from its China-based owner, ByteDance.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-06 [Older] Two Baltic Sea cables repaired after suspected sabotage

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • [Old] Techdirt ☛ How Toy Story 2 Almost Got Deleted… Except That One Person Made A Home Backup

    The Mythbusters folks wonder if this story was a little over-dramatized, and others have wondered how the technical director would have “multiple terabytes of source material” on her home computer back in 1999. That resulted in an explanation from someone who was there that what was deleted was actually the database containing the master copies of the characters, sets, animation, etc. rather than the movie itself. Of course, once again, that makes you wonder how it is that no one else had a simple backup. You’d think such a thing would be backed up in dozens of places around the globe for safe keeping…

• Environment

  • LabX Media Group ☛ Why Does Geosmin Smell?

    There are few surer heralds of spring than petrichor. It’s the earthy aroma that wafts up after a good rain and comes primarily from chemical compounds called terpenes. Geosmin, for example, is a terpene most commonly associated with Streptomyces bacteria, although other bacteria and fungi also make it, and it’s found in soils and bodies of fresh water the world over. Its ubiquity has long fascinated scientists—not least because it hasn’t been clear why its various producers make it.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-01-10 [Older] The Lies Have It: Xcel Energy Wins Operating Extension for Nation’s 5th Oldest Nuclear Reactor

    • NL Times ☛ 2025-01-08 [Older] Households may soon face higher energy bills with grid fees potentially tripling

    • CBC ☛ Starship explosion raises questions about risk to public, environment

      There is also the more immediate threat, illustrated by this incident, posed by several tonnes of flaming wreckage raining down on the waters and, though the odds are slim, maybe even on some unlucky patch of land.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Ants have smart traffic sense, could solve urban transport challenges

      By analyzing a 30-centimeter ant trail—100 times the body length of each ant—and using deep learning algorithms to track movements in video footage, the researchers mapped the ants’ trajectories, speeds, flows, and densities. The results show that ants use strategies like platoon formation, steady speed, and no overtaking to avoid jams, even at high densities.

      According to Guerrieri, ants are one of the few species capable of managing bidirectional traffic flows, similar to our roads, yet they navigate seamlessly without congestion. He further notes that ants follow pheromone trails marked by a leader ant, moving in platoons with small gaps and without overtaking.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Nikon shows off its new technology inspired by shark skin

      Nikon has been working on this technology for some years as part of its sustainability efforts, helping aircraft towards a carbon-neutral future. It first started applying its riblet technology in 2019, and displayed it at CES last year. Showcasing it this year's show, Nikon wanted to demonstrate its significant developments in the wind turbine industry.

  • Overpopulation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-06 [Older] More Iranian women forced into illegal abortions

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-06 [Older] Germany: Inflation rose to 2.6% in December

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Compliance in advance is always the best strategy

    Update: So this was a performative suicide attempt! Can you get a 5150 hold for a corporation? Corporations being people and all.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Democrats Helped Bring About Trump’s Return

    For years, the Democrats have painted Donald Trump and his version of the Republican Party as an existential threat to democracy. Leaning into this characterization, President Joe Biden’s farewell address warned of an oligarchy taking over the country — a claim that is as true in the moment he said it as it was all those years before, when he didn’t.

  • International Business Times ☛ Why is Donald Trump's Inauguration the Same Date as MLK Day?

    Is this because of a Trumpian scheme to cement his position as a seminal figure in American history, like King or is it just a happy (or unhappy) coincidence?

    The answer is that it is a coincidence brought about by the 20th amendment to the US constitution and the somewhat moveable feast that is Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

  • Associated Press ☛ A brief history of Mark Zuckerberg's apologies

    Whether or not the public always buys his apologies, there’s little doubt that Zuckerberg finds it important to make them himself. Here’s a quick, and by no means comprehensive, compendium of some notable Zuckerberg apologies and the circumstances that brought them on.

  • [Old] Wired ☛ Why Mark Zuckerberg’s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn’t Fixed Facebook

    The Facebook CEO's constant apologies aren't a promise to do better. They're a symptom of a profound crisis of accountability.

  • [Old] The Washington Post ☛ 14 years of Mark Zuckerberg saying sorry, not sorry about Facebook - Washington Post

    From the moment the Facebook founder entered the public eye in 2003 for creating a Harvard student hot-or-not rating site, he’s been apologizing. So we collected this abbreviated history of his public mea culpas.

    It reads like a record on repeat. Zuckerberg, who made “move fast and break things” his slogan, says sorry for being naive, and then promises solutions such as privacy “controls,” “transparency” and better policy “enforcement.” And then he promises it again the next time. You can track his sorries in orange and promises in blue in the timeline below.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-05 [Older] Former Greek PM Costas Simitis dies

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-05 [Older] Fact check: JD Vance is wrong about AfD, Nazis

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-05 [Older] Austrian conservative leader open to talks with far right

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-06 [Older] European leaders decry Elon Musk's meddling

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-06 [Older] Ex-French President Sarkozy on trial over 'Libyan case'

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-08 [Older] We Do Not Censor Social Media, EU Says in Response to Meta

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-07 [Older] Meta ends fact-checking to 'reduce censorship'

  • TruthOut ☛ 2025-01-07 [Older] Washington Post Cartoonist Quits After Paper Censors Criticism of Owner Bezos

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Strategist ☛ To fight disinformation, treat it as organised crime

      Every disinformation campaign begins with an initiator, someone who deliberately spreads untruthful content to distort our view of reality. Disinformation differs from misinformation, which is unknowingly false—an honest mistake.

      We used to think that content moderation and fact checking were the solution, but alone they are ineffective.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • TruthOut ☛ 2025-01-10 [Older] Meta’s Allowance of Hate Speech Is Another Side Effect of Big Tech Monopoly

  • CBC ☛ 2025-01-10 [Older] Vancouver strip club marquee cited as hate speech on X

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ L.A. wildfire coverage shows why local TV news matters in a crisis

    The availability of local TV news on digital platforms provided horrific yet compelling images of destruction to a global audience well beyond Los Angeles. Stations saw viewership double and triple for their news programming during the first week of wildfire coverage, according to Nielsen data, with more than 1 million watching in prime time on Jan. 7.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • TruthOut ☛ MLK’s Legacy Is One of Class Struggle. To Fight Trump, We Must Carry His Torch.

    The symbolism of Trump being inaugurated on MLK Jr. Day is chilling. Is King’s legacy dead? How can we be observing MLK Day by handing power to a politician who ran a blatantly racist campaign to beat the first Black woman to have run as a major party’s presidential nominee? Has the goal of transforming the United States from a white ethno-state into a multiracial democracy been vanquished? If so, does that leave us plunging headlong into a permanent Republican oligarchy?

  • Times Media Limited ☛ Guardian staff ‘deeply disturbed’ over AI use during strike

    The move has unsettled employees because they claim that they were told that it would only be deployed following consultation and with readers fully informed

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Newspaper AI roundup: Guardian AI strike-breaking, Apple switches off bad summaries, WaPo wants to go AI, AFP, Axios – Pivot to AI

    Guardian Media Group sold The Observer, its Sunday edition, to Tortoise, over the protests of its journalists. During union members’ four-day walkout in December, Guardian bosses tried just a touch of AI-assisted strikebreaking, getting LLMs to write headlines and alt-text for images. This happens to be directly against the Guardian’s editorial code, which states that “AI systems should not be used to generate text or images intended to be directly inserted into published journalism outside of exceptional and specific circumstances.” Management has denied the claim in a manner that admits it.

  • SBS ☛ Finland's housing policy has shrunk homelessness rates. Could Australia do the same?

    It was born out of a collaboration between the Y-Foundation, a Finnish housing provider and the country's largest "non-profit landlord", and ELMU, a live music NGO.

    The 74 apartments that make up Jallukka are divided into two wings: one with 49 regular flats, run by the Y-Foundation, and another with 25 reserved for music workers, run by ELMU.

    The basement includes rooms for instrument storage and is set up with sound mixers, microphones and amps.

  • [Old] Lexology ☛ Cops Sue Afroman Alleging "Lemon Pound Cake" Violates Their Right of Publicity

    Last August, the Sheriffs in Adams County, Ohio, executed a search warrant and raided Afroman's house on suspicion of drug trafficking and kidnapping. Ultimately, the cops found nothing, and no charges were filed. Afroman contends, however, that the officers caused $20,000 of damage to his house and stole cash from him (a charge the Sheriff’s Office denies). His ex-wife and children live nearby and recorded the raid on a cell phone, and additional footage was captured by Afroman’s home surveillance cameras.

    About a month later, Afroman released Lemon Pound Cake, a new album with songs about the raid. The eponymous single “Lemon Pound Cake” describes a moment during the raid (captured on surveillance) when the attention of one of the officers, upon entering Afroman’s kitchen with his gun drawn, appears to linger (lovingly?) on a domed cake plate on the counter, the kind you would expect to find in Martha Stewart's house. These are the song's opening lyrics: [...]

  • NL Times ☛ 2025-01-07 [Older] Court rules that firing high school teacher for nude photos online was unjustified

  • Licensing / Legal

    • Deseret Media ☛ Why are lone homes left standing after the fires? It's not entirely luck

      "Because there are, say, 50 ways a fire can burn your house," said Greg Faulkner, of Faulkner Architects in California, who has focused on less combustible home exteriors for more than a decade. "If you eliminate half of those, or three-quarters of them, that's not luck, that's increasing your odds."

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ 'Piracy Shield' Fails to Convert Pirates to Paying Subscribers, Data Suggest

    Despite blocking thousands of illegal streaming sites, Italy's 'Piracy Shield' anti-piracy program has failed to deliver increased viewership for legal services like DAZN. This revelation appears in data provided by telecoms regulator AGCOM, which oversees the blocking regime. It adds fuel to the already heated discussions, which divide stakeholders and copyright representatives.