Links 02/02/2025: Website Revamps, Blogging About Blogging, and Self-Harming Tariff Wars (Higher Prices)
Contents
- Leftovers
- Science
- Career/Education
- Hardware
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
- Proprietary
- Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)
- Security
- Defence/Aggression
- Transparency/Investigative Reporting
- Environment
- Finance
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
- Censorship/Free Speech
- Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
- Civil Rights/Policing
- Digital Restrictions (DRM) or Retro Monopolies/Monopsonies
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Leftovers
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Robin Rendle ☛ Notes on blogging
In my late teens the web wouldn’t let me go. My favorite hobby was staying up until 2am reading smart things from smart people so very far away because it felt like an act of rebellion. Hundreds, thousands of people, writing about the web and its potential, about where it should all go next. They were so open and honest! They wrote about love and code, their struggles with their family. They wrote about trying to be better people but failing over and over again.
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TechTea ☛ January 2025 Review
This is the first month of the year and it has been a busy one. Helping a friend move, a new administration has taken power in the United States, a new season of anime has started, and I’ve been trying out new ways to stay organized and mindful.
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Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0100 Blog questions challenge 2025
I've never really seen myself as a blogger, if I'm honest. Which might explain why I'm so bad at it! I'm hardly what you'd call prolific. Johnny.Decimal as an idea is now 15 years old and here we are at post #100.
Which is funny, because I love writing. But I'm also really conscious of people's attention. I dislike how my own is constantly being bartered for, and so I feel that unless I have something useful to say, I'm not going to spew words out to fill the void. There is no void. There's the opposite of a void.
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John J Hoare ☛ Blog Questions Challenge
But there’s also a strand of posts here – lessened over the years, perhaps, but definitely still there – which is about writing for the web in general. Some of this stuff occasionally gets quite widely-read if somebody grabs hold of it and links to it. For instance, this piece I published about the indie web actually did much better than any of the posts about TV I published in 2024. I don’t think the two audiences really have much crossover, which means I’m sure I disappoint a lot of archive TV fans when they see a brand new post on here, and it’s just me wanging on about websites rather than telly.
To which people I say: sorry, this is another of those posts. After seeing this post about blogging habits turn into a little chain letter, posted by people like Jeremy Keith, Luke Dorny and Greg Storey, I thought it might be fun to give it a go.
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Joel Chrono ☛ Looking back at 2024
I gotta say, 2024 was quite a crazy year, I am now a proper adult with a degree and I will probably have to pay taxes for the first time in my life or something.
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Dillon Mok ☛ Website Revamp for 2025
Why did I redesign my website? The old design was fine, it had a few weird formatting issues but it did its job so I never bothered to fix it. With the new year approaching, I wanted to get back into blogging. It had been more than a year since I launched my website and blog, with the goal of writing one post every week. That streak did not last very long, and I stopped blogging entirely after October. I learned that weekly blogging probably wasn't the right approach for me, but I still very much wanted to write. However, I wasn't really proud of how my website looked and that became a demotivating factor. I figured it was time for a new design.
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The Telegraph UK ☛ Daily Mail to axe dozens of journalists
The Daily Mail has been slow to adapt its newsroom for the online era. Its siloed teams for print, digital and Sunday output meant multiple journalists were often working on different versions of the same story.
The publisher, which is owned by Lord Rothermere, has ramped up its modernisation efforts in recent years. It has begun charging readers for access to a small number of premium articles in an effort to reduce its reliance on advertising revenues.
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Rest of World ☛ The winners of Rest of World’s photography contest
The 227 entries we received from contestants — including from Mongolia, the Philippines, Argentina, and Jordan — not only celebrate these stories but reaffirm our commitment at Rest of World to challenge stereotypes about how people use technology in their daily lives.
Here are the top three winning photographs, and six honorable mentions from our 2024 photography contest.
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Henrique Dias ☛ Recently in January '25
January is coming to an end, meaning that around 8% of 2025 has already passed. It felt like a slower month, definitely slower than the previous months in the sense that there was nothing big happening. However, the things that happened, I’m very glad with.
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Science
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Science Alert ☛ Check Out These Amazing Photos of Comet G3 ATLAS Soaring Past Earth
Incredible pictures!
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Science Alert ☛ [Algorithms] Can Predict Incredible Solar Storms Before They Strike
Patterns exist that we never noticed.
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Science Alert ☛ Scientists Just Achieved a Major Milestone in Creating Synthetic Life
The first artificial genome of its kind.
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Science Alert ☛ Dangerous Kind of Fat Hidden in The Body Can Raise Your Risk of Death
Is hidden fat harming your heart?
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Science Alert ☛ Billions of Hidden Black Holes Could Be Lurking in Space
Impossible to detect?
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Career/Education
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The Straits Times ☛ South Korea’s language museum catches fire
One firefighter was taken to a hospital.
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Seth Godin ☛ “Can’t complain” (but it might be worth considering)
The obvious reason to complain is to make a change happen.
If that’s the goal, though, we ought to focus those complaints where they’ll do the most good, and be prepared to do the work to have an impact. Organize the others, take consistent and persistent action, and market the complaint in a format and with a focus that will lead to action.
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Hardware
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Edward Snowden slams Nvidia's RTX 50-series 'F-tier value,' whistleblows on lackluster VRAM capacity
An infamous former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower has unexpectedly shared his opinion on the state of the graphics card market. Naturalized Russian citizen Edward Snowden has called the recently released Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 “a monopolistic crime against the consumer” due to its “crippling 16GB.” Imagine his ire if he was considering the upcoming RTX 50 laptop family...
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Clayton Errington ☛ Burning musical memories
It’s crazy how fast technology has advanced in such a relatively short amount of time. I’ll be that tech person who still has old hardware just for moments like these.
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Hackaday ☛ Taking A $15 Casio F91W 5,000 Meters Underwater
When considering our favorite spy movies and kin that involve deep-sea diving, we’d generally expect to see some high-end watch that costs thousands of dollars and is specially engineered to withstand the immense pressures kilometers below the ocean’s surface. Yet what about a humble Casio F91W that can be bought for about $15 if it’s the genuine article and not one of the millions of fakes? Over at the Watches of Espionage site they figured that they’d dress up one of these famous watches to give it the best possible shot at surviving the crushing pressures at a depth of 5 km.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Hyperbaric oxygen treatment can kill
Regular readers—if I still have any, given how sporadic posting has been since my father passed away in December—know that there are at least two things that profoundly anger me. The first is practicing harmful quackery on children. (Remember Abubakar Tariq Nadama nearly 20 years ago?) The second is the existence of “alternative medicine” or “integrative medicine” clinics that practice this sort of quackery, largely unregulated, and get away with it. Combine the two, and this story in our local paper was, alas, just the sort of thing to prod me to get back to blogging after the prolonged absence after my father passed away in December. The reporting drives me a bit crazy, because it doesn’t address the elephant in the room other than obliquely, but the title tells the tale, Boy dies in explosion of hyperbaric chamber at Troy medical facility. It is a tale that led me both to cry and to rage against the quacks whose negligence killed a child, just as I did when a quack killed an autistic child named Abubakar Tariq Nadama with chelation therapy nearly 20 years ago.
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PHR ☛ Doctors Trapped in Hospitals, Clinics Under Fire in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): PHR
In response to mounting conflict and the M23 militia seizing additional cities and towns in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the following statement is attributable to Karen Naimer, JD, director of programs at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR): [...]
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France24 ☛ Sick and wounded Gazan children cross to Egypt for treatment
A group of 50 sick and wounded Palestinian children began crossing to Egypt through Gaza’s Rafah crossing on Saturday, in the first opening of the border since Israel captured it nearly nine months ago. With the health system in Gaza shut down, children suffering from life-threatening illnesses are transferred to Egypt for treatment.
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France24 ☛ 'Deep concern' over released hostages' health
There is deep concern over the health of the three released hostages, FRANCE 24's Noga Tarnopolsky said, citing the men's overall frail look, adding that one of the hostages who was already known of having poor health – 65-year-old Keith Siegel – appeared to have trouble walking.
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New York Times ☛ Health Programs Shutter Around the World After Convicted Felon Pauses Foreign Aid
Lifesaving treatment and prevention programs for tuberculosis, malaria, H.I.V. and other diseases cannot access funds to continue work.
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Proprietary
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Tom's Hardware ☛ Backdoor uncovered in China-made patient monitors — Contec CMS8000 raises questions about healthcare device security
The US-based Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency recently released an investigation report involving three firmware versions used in a patient monitoring system called Contec CMS8000, used in hospitals and healthcare facilities. It was discovered that these devices had a backdoor with a hard-coded IP address, allowing the patient data to be transmitted. This is possible as the devices will enable a connection to a central monitoring system via a wired or wireless network, according to the product description.
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Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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dwaves.de ☛ also with AI: OpenSource for the win – CPU only benchmarking deepseek on local AMD server – can it be funny?
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Cloudbooklet ☛ Gmail Security Warning For 2.5 Billion Users Targeted in Hey Hi (AI) Hack
Stay alert to Hey Hi (AI) powered cyberattacks putting 2.5 billion Gmail users at risk. Learn about the latest threats and how to shield your inbox from hackers.
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The Guardian UK ☛ DeepSeek: cheap, powerful Chinese AI for all. What could possibly go wrong?
And last, but by no means least, R1 seems to be a genuinely open source model. It’s distributed under the permissive [sic] MIT licence, which allows anyone to use, modify, and commercialise the model without restrictions. As I write this, my hunch is that geeks across the world are already tinkering with, and adapting, R1 for their own particular needs and purposes, in the process creating applications that even the makers of the model couldn’t have envisaged. It goes without saying that this has its upsides and downsides, but it’s happening. The AI genie is now really out of the bottle.
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VOA News ☛ UK to become 1st country to criminalize AI child abuse tools
The government will make it illegal to possess, create or distribute AI tools designed to generate sexualized images of children, punishable by up to five years in prison, interior minister Yvette Cooper revealed.
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Futurism ☛ OpenAI's AI Agent Has to Be Monitored Nonstop to Catch Its Constant Screwups
OpenAI has finally debuted "Operator," its very own AI agent, a type of autonomous model designed to do digital tasks on your behalf like shopping for groceries online.
But calling it an AI "toddler" might be more fitting. As a Bloomberg reporter describes her experience using OpenAI's new toy, the experimental tech needs a "lot of adult supervision," frequently screwing up and asking for help when it gets stuck.
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The Register UK ☛ Intel has missed the boat for AI in the datacenter
Any hope Intel may have had of challenging rivals Nvidia and AMD for a slice of the AI accelerator market dissolved on Thursday as yet another GPU architecture was scrapped.
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Evan Hahn ☛ LLMs: harmful to technical innovation?
In short: newer ideas have less available training data so the LLM experience will probably be worse. This could help existing technologies maintain their status.
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Geshan ☛ What is Ollama and how to use it: a quick guide [part 1]
One of the most important features of Ollama is privacy and offline access. You can run open models privately on your machine, even without [Internet] access. This not only enables you to use an LLM (say, for code suggestions) on a plane but also keeps your data on your local machine. Your data and files can stay safe in your local machine, and other big tech companies do not see it or get to use it for other purposes like training an LLM. This is a big advantage of Ollama over other cloud-based LLM services which send your data to the cloud for processing and may use it for other purposes.
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Futurism ☛ Quartz Just Published an AI-Generated Article That Absolutely Butchers the Situation With Boeing’s Stranded Astronauts
Earlier this month, as Aftermath first reported, the G/O Media-owned business news website Quartz quietly started churning out a huge number of AI-generated news articles. Surprise: its news bot is already publishing outrageous errors.
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[Repeat] The Strategist ☛ DeepSeek may be cheap AI, but Australian companies should beware
I wrote in 2023 about the many forms of Chinese AI-enabled technology we use that pump data back to China, where it is sorted by Chinese algorithms before it is sent back here.
These include things such as digital railway networks, electric vehicles, solar inverters, giant cranes for unloading containers, border screening equipment, and industrial control technology in power stations, water and sewerage works. Like DeepSeek, the vendors of these products are subject to direction from China’s security services.
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Sean Goedecke ☛ Why does AI slop feel so bad to read?
I don’t like reading obviously AI-generated content on Twitter. There’s a derogatory term for it: AI “slop”, which means something like “AI content presenting itself as human”, or even just “unwanted AI content”. But I have no problem reading AI-generated content when I talk to Copilot or ChatGPT. Why is that?
Having a good theory of AI slop is important for a few reasons. First, it’s just an interesting question why AI responses feel okay or gross in different contexts. Second, if you’re building products with AI, it’s a good idea to not present them as slop.
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Sean Goedecke ☛ Are DeepSeek's new models really that fast and cheap?
I’m going to largely bracket the question of whether the DeepSeek models are as good as their western counterparts. I think the answer is pretty clearly “maybe not, but in the ballpark”. Some users rave about the vibes - which is true of all new model releases - and some think o1 is clearly better. The benchmarks are pretty impressive, but in my view they really only show that DeepSeek-R1 is definitely a reasoning model (i.e. the extra compute it’s spending at test time is actually making it smarter). So far, so good.
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Social Control Media
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Security Week ☛ Texas Governor Orders Ban on DeepSeek, RedNote for Government Devices
“Texas will not allow the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate our state’s critical infrastructure through data-harvesting Hey Hi (AI) and social control media apps,” Abbott said.
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SBS ☛ Dutton warns young Aussies being 'radicalised' online after more antisemitic attacks | SBS News
The incidents come as federal Opposition leader Peter Dutton put major tech companies in the firing line over concerns young people are being radicalised amid the spate of antisemitic attacks.
Social media platforms profiting off kids need to do more to keep them safe online but failed to do so because of a focus on profits, he said.
"Our kids are on their devices constantly, the same rules should apply online as they do in the real world," he told ABC's Insiders program on Sunday.
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NYPost ☛ Minnesota woman Mariska Nunn was on TikTok when she crashed into grandfather Dean Chadbourne
Phone records show that Nunn was using the TikTok app for up to six minutes before the horrifying crash, the last of which was viewed at 12:14:05 p.m. She called 911 at 12:15 p.m.
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Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)
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Rlang ☛ New year, new blog
My previous setup was: Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub to host the code, on each push the build process...
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The Record ☛ Former Polish justice minister arrested in sprawling spyware probe | The Record from Recorded Future News
Polish police on Friday arrested the country’s former justice minister, alleging that he signed off on the use of government money to pay for spyware used to snoop on opposition leaders and supervised cases where the technology was deployed.
The arrest of Zbigniew Ziobro — who was justice minister from 2015 to 2023 — follows the arrest earlier this week of the country’s former Internal Security Agency chief Piotr Pogonowski, according to local news reports.
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Truthdig ☛ ICE Swiftly Expands Its Sprawling Surveillance Apparatus
ICE, an agency with a long record of rights violations, torture and abuse in its detention facilities and deportation practices, now has the full support and power of the Trump administration, which on the campaign trail promised to carry out mass deportations. Just days into the Trump administration, ICE has carried out immigration raids nationwide and rescinded previous guidance regarding sensitive locations, allowing the agency to carry out immigration enforcement at schools, hospitals and places of worship.
These actions come on the heels of the passage of the Laken Riley Act, which allows ICE to deport people accused of committing minor crimes such as shoplifting, even if they are not found guilty, violating the constitutional right to due process. The bill was approved with the support of Democratic lawmakers, including 10 senators and 48 representatives.
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Defence/Aggression
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JURIST ☛ Libya rescues 263 illegal immigrants from abusive group
Libya’s Criminal Investigation Agency announced the rescue of over two hundred illegal immigrants in Al-Wahat district from a gang that tortured, abused and mistreated them on Friday. The rescued came from countries such as Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, and were subject to horrific conditions, malnutrition, and sexual violence.
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Los Angeles Times ☛ USAID website goes offline amid Trump's freeze on foreign aid
Congressional Democrats battled the Trump administration increasingly openly, expressing concern that Trump may be headed toward ending USAID as an independent agency and absorbing it into the State Department. Democrats say Trump has no legal authority to eliminate a congressionally funded independent agency, and that the work of USAID is vital to national security.
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The Nerd Reich ☛ The Network State Coup is Happening Right Now
Everything Elon Musk and his tech cronies are doing to our government is what Balaji Srinivasan spelled out in his network state cult manifestos – a tech CEO takeover of government, the purging of institutions, the rise of crypto corruption as a dominant economic force, the quest for new territory. But nobody wants to talk about it.
For those of you who are new to this newsletter, I spent last year writing a New Republic series on the network state. Sadly, everything spelled out in those stories is happening now. What Musk and Marc Andreessen are doing to our government is precisely what Srinivasan envisioned. A purge of Democrats, a merging of tech and right-wing forces to remake government and media institutions. Some reporters now observe that Musk is doing to the government what he did to Twitter, but Srinivasan was way ahead of them: [...]
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NDTV ☛ Elon Musk's DOGE Team Now Has Access To US Government's Payments System
The Department [sic] of Government Efficiency (DOGE) - an Elon Musk-led advisory group under the new Trump administration - has now got access to the federal payment system, the New York Times reported citing people familiar with the change.
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Garrett M Graff ☛ Musk's Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government
Imagining how we'd cover overseas what's happening to the U.S. right now
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The Local SE ☛ Inside Sweden: Bombings, citizenship and why foreigners are telling Sweden auf Wiedersehen
The bomb attacks this year are still gang [sic]-related, but not so much gangs fighting other gangs as we've seen in the past few years, but rather attempts to blackmail business owners. There's a worrying increase in the number of children aged under 15 who are getting recruited to carry out these crimes.
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[Repeat] The Strategist ☛ Democracies should learn the TikTok lesson and restrict risky apps from day one
For years, technology and national security analysts have sketched out scenarios of what might happen if a democratic population were to become dependent on a Chinese-owned technology. Once such a technology becomes embedded in people’s daily lives and livelihoods, removing it stirs up a host of domestic political controversies, making it politically untenable to mitigate the national security risks.
That is exactly what has happened with TikTok. Around 170 million Americans—about half the country’s population and an even higher percentage of those using social media—use the short video app, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance. Millions of Americans have become dependent on their TikTok followings, built up over years, for their income or to promote their businesses. Tens of millions more use TikTok as a key source of information [sic], community, and entertainment.
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ANF News ☛ Inan: The Turkish state aims to depopulate Kurdistan by destroying nature
Kurdistan is being destroyed and depopulated through oil drilling, mining, sand quarries, and hydroelectric power plant (HPP) projects. Ahmet Inan, Amed Bar Association’s Head of the Urban and Environmental Commission, told ANF that the environment in Şırnak has been plundered due to the lack of a comprehensive struggle.
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The Telegraph UK ☛ Iran ‘secretly building nuclear missiles that can hit Europe’
Iran is developing nuclear missiles with a range of 3,000km based on designs handed to the Islamic regime by North Korea, The Telegraph can disclose.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which has previously exposed details of Tehran’s secret uranium enrichment facilities, has shared information on how the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are expanding their weapons programmes.
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Reuters ☛ Iran's nuclear programme nearing point of no return, France's Macron says
Iran says it is enriching uranium for peaceful purposes and has stepped up the programme since U.S. President-elect Donald Trump pulled Washington out of the 2015 deal during his first term of office and restored tough U.S. sanctions on Tehran. European powers France, Germany and Britain said last month Iran’s actions had further hollowed out the deal and would heighten its stockpile of high-enriched uranium without a "credible civilian justification".
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The Wall Street Journal ☛ China Is Helping Supply Chemicals for Iran’s Ballistic-Missile Program - WSJ
The two vessels are loaded with around 1,000 tons of sodium perchlorate, a material that Iran could turn into 960 tons of ammonium perchlorate, one of the main ingredients for producing solid propellant for ballistic missiles, the people said. That could be enough to produce 260 midrange Iranian missiles, one of the people, a Western official, said.
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Modern Diplomacy ☛ Boko haram’s ideological crisis
Boko Haram’s rise in Nigeria has sparked significant concerns about its beliefs and actions. This article examines the group’s use of violence in the name of jihad, highlighting how their interpretation deviates from traditional Islamic teachings. The term “jihad” has often been misused by radical groups like Boko Haram to justify violence, contradicting Islamic principles. The study contrasts Boko Haram’s ideology with authentic Islamic concepts of jihad and warfare, drawing on scholarly works, primary texts, and doctrinal analysis. It also offers recommendations for Muslims to challenge and correct these harmful misinterpretations.
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RFERL ☛ Kyrgyzstan Bans Islamic Niqab As Critics Warn It Could Alienate Some Women
Effective February 1, the ban imposes a fine of 20,000 som ($230) on women who wear the niqab in public places.
Female Islamic clothing and men's beards have long been the focus of government campaigns and public debates in Central Asia, where staunchly secular governments fear the growing influence of Islam.
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New York Times ☛ Dictator Orders Airstrikes Against ISIS in Somalia
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that “multiple operatives” had been killed in remote mountains in the country’s north.
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RFERL ☛ Dictator Orders First Military Action Of New Term, Targets IS Affiliates In Somalia
U.S. President The Insurrectionist said he ordered military strikes on a senior “attack planner” of the Islamic State (IS) extremist group in Somalia who had been hiding with other members in the impoverished and unstable East African nation.
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France24 ☛ US conducts airstrikes against Islamic state group in Somalia
US President The Insurrectionist said he ordered military airstrikes to root out Islamic state (IS) group operatives in Somalia on Saturday, in an operation supported by Somalia’s government.
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The Straits Times ☛ S’porean suffers head, body injuries after defending family from attackers in Johor; 1 suspect held
Attackers set off firecrackers, splashed paint outside the family’s home and smashed the windows of 2 cars.
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France24 ☛ Sudanese paramilitary forces kill scores of civilians in attack on Khartoum market
At least 54 people were killed and 158 wounded at a market place in greater Khartoum on Saturday in a strike by the Sudanese paramilitary, according to Sudan's health authorities. The Rapid Support Forces have been locked in a brutal conflict with the country’s regular army since April 2023, leaving tens of thousands dead and over 12 million uprooted.
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France24 ☛ Gunmen in Syria kill at least 10 in Alawite village, war monitor says
Gunmen killed at least 10 people in Syria on Friday in an attack on a village from former president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority, in what the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights called a "massacre". The war monitor said the attacks “bear all the hallmarks of sectarian killings”.
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Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-02-01 [Older] Russia launches new aerial assault across Ukraine
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-02-01 [Older] Ukraine war: Wounded Russian soldiers sent back to the front
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-02-01 [Older] Russian Air Attack Kills 11 in Ukraine, Gas Infrastructure Targeted
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-02-01 [Older] Russian Court Places Two Former Rosnano Executives in Pre-Trial Detention
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-02-01 [Older] Russian Drone and Missile Attacks Kill 8 in Ukraine
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-31 [Older] Could Russia's military exercises mean a new mobilization?
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The Local SE ☛ 2025-01-31 [Older] Norway seizes ship with Russian crew over suspected cable sabotage
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-31 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini Says He and Putin Could Do Something 'Significant' Toward Ending Russia's War in Ukraine
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-31 [Older] Russian Missile Attack Seriously Damages Historic Centre of Ukraine's Odesa
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-30 [Older] Borussia Dortmund's new coach: Why Nico Kovac?
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The Local SE ☛ 2025-01-30 [Older] 'I think it's the Russians': Swedish defence expert on cable sabotage
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-30 [Older] Russia Says Air Defences Down 17 Ukrainian Drones
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The Local SE ☛ 2025-01-29 [Older] Sweden ‘sending a message’ to Russia with seizure of ship
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-29 [Older] EU Proposes Ban on Video Game Sales to Russia in New Sanctions
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-29 [Older] Dubai-Moscow Flight Makes Emergency Landing in Southern Russia
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-29 [Older] Ukraine Drones Hit Russian Oil Pumping Station, Missile Storage Site, Kyiv Source Says
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-28 [Older] Russian diplomats arrive in Syria to smooth ties
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HRW ☛ 2025-01-28 [Older] New Campaign Focuses on Russia-Ukraine Detainees
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The Local SE ☛ 2025-01-28 [Older] Man arrested after attempting to drive into Russian embassy in Stockholm
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-28 [Older] Lawsuit Says Russian Officials Stole Millions Meant to Fortify Border Region Attacked by Ukraine
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-28 [Older] Poland Says Russia Trying to Recruit Poles on Dark Net to Influence Election
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-28 [Older] Russian Delegation in First Syria Visit Since Assad Fall, TASS Reports
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-28 [Older] Senior Russian Official to Visit Syria, Sources Say
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-28 [Older] Swedish Police Arrest Man Trying to Force His Way Into Russian Embassy in Stockholm
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-27 [Older] EU renews Russia sanctions, calls for unity against Cheeto Mussolini
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-27 [Older] EU Prolongs Its Russia Sanctions for 6 Months After Hungary Lifts Its Objections
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-27 [Older] EU Renews Russia Sanctions After Hungarian Hold Up
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-27 [Older] Iran's Revolutionary Guards Commander Says Iran Purchased Russian-Made Sukhoi 35 Fighter Jets
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-27 [Older] Russian Forces Retake Village in Kursk Border Region, Defence Ministry Says
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-27 [Older] Russia Summons Moldovan Ambassador Over Calls to Expel Moscow's Top Diplomat in Chisinau
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-27 [Older] Ukraine's Air Force Says It Downed 57 Russian Drones Launched Overnight, Infrastructure Hit
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Scheerpost ☛ 2025-01-26 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini Says He Wants To Work With China and Russia on ‘Denuclearization’
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US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-26 [Older] Ukraine's Military Says It Downed 50 Russian Drones, Attacked Big Oil Refinery
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Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-24 [Older] Hungary's Orban threatens to block EU sanctions on Russia
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The Local DK ☛ 2025-01-24 [Older] Denmark places navy vessel close to Russian ship in Kattegat sea
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RFERL ☛ Kyiv Says Russia Bombs Boarding School In Kursk Region, Kills 'Own Citizens'
The Ukrainian military and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces had struck a boarding school in the Ukrainian-occupied Russian region of Kursk, killing at least four of “their own citizens” and injuring dozens as the civilian death toll continues to mount in the war.
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RFERL ☛ Dictator Able To End Ukraine War In 'Months, Not Years,' Aide Keith Kellogg Says
U.S. President The Insurrectionist has a “solid” strategy to end the war in Ukraine within months, the president’s special representative for Ukraine and Russia has said.
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France24 ☛ Russian air strikes leave several dead, damage energy infrastructure in Ukraine
At least 11 people were killed on Saturday after Russia fired a torrent of drones and missiles on Ukraine, gutting dozens of residential buildings and damaging energy infrastructure across the country, according to Ukrainian officials.
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Stanford University ☛ History in the policy room
Historians, political scientists and former policy practitioners reflect on the use of history in the analysis of the Russia-Ukraine War.
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Dispatches from Europe, No. 15, January 31, 2025 – Talking about U.S. Politics with Ukrainian Leftists
On Saturday, November 9, I met with members of the democratic socialist organization Sotsialnyi Rukh in Kyiv. I gave a talk about U.S. politics, followed by discussion. I used the same notes for my talk in Kyiv that I would use for later meetings with the Kryvyi Rih and Lviv locals Sotslianyi Rukh.
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Dispatches from Europe No. 14, January 23, 2025 – Ukraine and Georgia Today: A Firsthand Report
With Russia’s annexationist invasion of Ukraine raging, and the political crisis in Georgia deepening, Howie Hawkins visited both countries as well as Poland and the Czech Republic this past fall.
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Latvia ☛ NATO STRATCOMCOE podcast explores the Ukrainian perspective
There is a new podcast available from the Rīga-based NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence (STRATCOMCOE).
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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US News And World Report ☛ The Power of Independent Journalism: From Her Brooklyn Apartment, She 'Scooped' the Nation's Media
First word of the Trump administration's since-rescinded order to freeze spending on federal loans and grants came not from a major news organization, but from a woman working alone in her Brooklyn apartment.
Marisa Kabas' scoop this past week was a key moment for a growing cadre of journalists who work independently to gather and analyze news and market themselves as brands. Many are refugees from legacy outlets while others are scrappy newcomers like Kabas, who found traditional career paths unappealing or out of reach.
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Ken Shirriff ☛ The origin and unexpected evolution of the word "mainframe"
What is the origin of the word "mainframe", referring to a large, complex computer? Most sources agree that the term is related to the frames that held early computers, but the details are vague.1 It turns out that the history is more interesting and complicated than you'd expect.
Based on my research, the earliest computer to use the term "main frame" was the IBM 701 computer (1952), which consisted of boxes called "frames." The 701 system consisted of two power frames, a power distribution frame, an electrostatic storage frame, a drum frame, tape frames, and most importantly a main frame. The IBM 701's main frame is shown in the documentation below.2
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Environment
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The Atlantic ☛ Trump Is Threatening California in the Wrong Way
If Trump wants California to mend its ways before receiving federal disaster relief, he could make some reasonable requests: The state should stop encouraging suburban sprawl in fire-prone areas, for example, and start pushing property owners to take more precautions. To the exasperation of emergency-management experts and budget hawks alike, California fires are like many other disasters all around the country. They lead to massive insurance settlements and outflows of government aid, which in many cases pay for rebuilding the same physical environment that left people and their homes vulnerable in the first place.
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Energy/Transportation
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New Yorker ☛ How to Understand the Reagan Airport Crash
A federal investigation will take time, but the lines of inquiry that it will pursue are clear.
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The Straits Times ☛ Malaysia looking at LRT or tram-bus system for RTS Link to ease congestion in JB
Federal government will invite private firms to submit proposals on project details by 1H2025.
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Axios ☛ After D.C. collision, think the skies are crowded? Just wait
This week's midair collision between a commercial plane and an Army helicopter in Washington, D.C., underscores the complexity of the National Airspace System — and that's before lots of drones and electric air taxis are added to the mix.
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Futurism ☛ Pardoned by Trump, Founder of Silk Road Now Appears to Be Squandering Donations on Stupid Meme Coins
According to blockchain analysis firm Arkham Intelligence, the wallets linked to Ulbricht have already lost an estimated $12 million worth of donations on Pump Fun, the infamous meme coin platform that's often used by celebrities for blatant pump-and-dump schemes.
It remains unclear whether Ulbricht was behind the disastrous bets on the platform, or somebody else with access to his wallet keys.
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Positech Games ☛ A proper full month of solar farm generation data
Ok so January is OVER. Woohoo. This means I have a full month where my solar farm was actually operating at full capacity (well not quite…we have not replaced the missing 10 panels from the storm damage, and I suspect some strings may be turned off as a result, but its fairly minimal). Because we had our farm switched on in the middle of a month, and then had the storm damage, and also had some brief downtime for meter related stuff, there have not been long periods of uninterrupted operation so that I can analyze the data. Hopefully this is almost over and we can get to the point where the generation is steady and predictable… Anyway for those new to this blog, this is a 1.23kwp solar farm, kind of near the midlands UK. Commissioned in October 2024. here are the details: (first the Solis inverter combined data)
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Wildlife/Nature
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Science Alert ☛ Shock Discovery Reveals Penguins Don't Mate For Life After All
"There's often a bit of hanky-panky happening on the side."
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Science Alert ☛ Study Reveals a Simple Trick to Communicate With Your Cat
It really works!
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Finance
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The Straits Times ☛ Brisk business for pet sitters in China during CNY despite dismal economy
The willingness to spend on pets comes as more young people turn to them for companionship.
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JURIST ☛ US federal judge issues second block on Convicted Felon administration’s federal aid freeze
A US federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked an attempt by President The Insurrectionist’s administration to freeze federal aid funding, finding that the administration’s directive was likely unconstitutional. The decision came after a federal judge in Washington, DC, blocked the same order in a separate lawsuit earlier this week.
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CS Monitor ☛ Dictator imposes steep tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China. Will it sabotage economic growth?
President The Insurrectionist has signed an order to impose stiff tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada, and China, fulfilling a campaign promise but raising the prospect of increased prices for American consumers.
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New York Times ☛ Here’s What to Know About Convicted Felon’s Tariffs
Canada, Mexico and China account for more than a third of the products brought into the United States. Tariffs could lead to higher prices for consumers.
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NYPost ☛ Canada, Mexico strike back with retaliatory tariffs on American goods hours after Convicted Felon’s executive action
Dictator put a 25% tariff on Mexican and Canadian imports, while Chinese products will receive a more modest 10% tariff.
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France24 ☛ Dictator to levy tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China
Dictator is set to unveil fresh tariffs Saturday on major trading partners Canada, Mexico and China, threatening upheaval across supply chains from energy to autos and raising inflation concerns. Convicted Felon has promised to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico and 10 percent on China.
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France24 ☛ Dictator set to unleash tariffs as critics warn of disruptions to supply chains
President The Insurrectionist is expected to impose hefty new tariffs Saturday on three key US trading partners -- Canada, Mexico and China -- in a move critics say could cause major disruptions to supply chains.
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NYPost ☛ Young cashiers at NY grocery store allegedly reject man’s $2 bills, believing they were counterfeit
A New York man claims that a local grocery chain refused to accept his $2 bills — with young cashiers believing the unusual, but legal, notes to be counterfeit, he claims in a Facebook (Farcebook) post.
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India Times ☛ Meta to fire more employees? Facebook chief information security officer gives a stern warning to employees
Facebook parent company Meta's chief information security officer Guy Rosen said that the company would take serious action against those employees who will leak confidential information. Recently, the company terminated relationships with employees who inappropriately leaked confidential information and sensitive documents. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staffers in a Thursday all-hands to be ready for an "intense year."
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TechStory Media ☛ Google Offers ‘Voluntary Exit’ Program After 1,400 Employees Demand Job Security
In a surprising move, Google has introduced a “voluntary exit” program for some employees after intense internal pressure from its workforce. This decision follows a petition signed by 1,400 Googlers, demanding job security amid ongoing layoffs and corporate restructuring.
As tensions rise within the tech giant, this program signals Google’s attempt to navigate workforce concerns while managing its long-term business strategy.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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FAIR ☛ With Zero Evidence, NPR Suggests Trump May ‘Work for Working Class’ in Second Term
Elving presents the politics of the second Trump administration as a perplexing paradox: [...]
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Futurism ☛ Members of AI Fringe Group Arrested for Two Killings
As Open Vallejo reports, two young computer scientists and apparent lovers, identified as 22-year-old Maximillian Snyder and 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut — admirers of the Bay Area-based fringe ideological group known as "Zizians," who want to speed up AI's takeover of humanity — were arrested this month for slayings that took place on opposite coasts.
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The Register UK ☛ Intel next-gen GPUs scrapped, E-Core Xeons delayed
Intel capped off a tumultuous year with a reality check for its product roadmaps.
Plans to commercialize the American giant's next-gen GPU architecture, codenamed Falcon Shores, have been scrapped, while its next generation of many-cored CPUs has been delayed until 2026, interim co-CEO Michelle Johnston Holthaus revealed Thursday along with the biz's financial figures for 2024.
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The Register UK ☛ Trump's plans put tech between rock and hard place
The other involves spending cuts driven by Elon Musk's Department [sic] of Government Efficiency, which aims to reduce oversight and deregulate industries; Forrester suggests this could slow economic growth, potentially leading the Fed to lower interest rates, but at the cost of reduced imports - impacting major US trade partners. Either way, the global tech industry - and the imported goods the US relied on - is caught between a rock and a hard place.
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Dan Sinker ☛ Write it Down
The last two weeks have felt surreal. I probably don't need to tell you this. These early days of Trump's second presidency—with their non-stop executive orders, the chaotic and unconstitutional freezing of government funds, the cruel and constant attacks on our trans friends and family, plane crashes, immigrant roundups, an illegal attempt to shrink the government workforce, Elon Musk and his technofascist henchmen commandeering government computers, and plenty of other things that I don't have the time or heart to document here—have been enough to make you feel like you're losing your mind.
You aren't.
Part of the design of of all this is to overwhelm you and the other part is to deny that you are seeing what you're seeing.
Which is why you need to write it down.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Rolling Stone ☛ Trump’s New Administration Has Air Traffic Control Offices in Chaos
Another one of the four sources says they recently deleted several of their own social-media posts, just in case someone at the Department of Transportation began monitoring or scouring for anti-Trump content made or written by staff. (This is not an idle concern, given that during the first Trump administration, the State Department conducted a weeks-long investigation — in which at least 10 Trump administration staffers were grilled by superiors — all because somebody at the United States’ Brussels mission had apparently “liked” a Chelsea Clinton tweet.)
That was all before the crash happened.
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New Statesman ☛ Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of The Sacred Fig is an act of resistance
Rasoulof’s eight films have not been shown in Iran, where he has been repeatedly arrested, interrogated and condemned, serving 11 months in the notorious Evin prison, including 65 days in solitary confinement. In April last year, he was sentenced to a further eight years’ imprisonment and banned from leaving the country. But he escaped, and appeared at Cannes for the film’s premiere, receiving a standing ovation.
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It's FOSS ☛ Everything is Spam on Facebook Unless It is Paid Post (or Actual Spam)
If yes, you may have seen a message that your post was removed.
It doesn't matter if it was shared by It's FOSS Facebook page or a reader like you on their wall. You share a URL from itsfoss.com or news.itsfoss.com, it gets removed as 'spam'.
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Hindustan Times ☛ Elon Musk's X sues these companies for collective ad boycotting: Report
The amended complaint filed in a Texas court on Saturday alleges that members of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which is now a defunct initiative from the advertiser trade body the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), illegally conspired to "collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue" from X
[...]
These companies include Nestlé, Abbott Laboratories, Colgate, Lego, Pinterest, Tyson Foods, Shell, WFA, CVS Health, Mars, Ørsted, and Twitch.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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VOA News ☛ 4 media organizations 'rotated' out of Pentagon press corps offices
The memo on a "New Annual Media Rotation Program" said it would also remove National Public Radio, NBC News and Politico, which must vacate their spaces by February 14. In their place, it would give dedicated office space to the New York Post, One America News Network, Breitbart News Network and HuffPost News.
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US News And World Report ☛ Trump's Pentagon Says It Will 'Rotate' Out Some Media From Offices
More than two dozen news organizations operate out of the Pentagon, including Reuters, reporting on the daily activities of the U.S. military.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Discover How Four Black College Students Sparked a Nationwide Civil Rights Movement, on This Date in 1960
Wanting to draw attention to racial segregation and discrimination in the U.S. South, the students walked up to the L-shaped lunch counter and took a seat. Each then asked for a cup of coffee. They were all refused service. Staff called the police, but since McNeil, McCain, Blair and Richmond hadn’t done anything wrong and were paying customers (having purchased goods at the store’s non-segregated counter earlier that day), police officers decided not to take any action. In the meantime, local Greensboro merchant Ralph Johns, a white ally of the students who encouraged sit-ins as a form of protest, had already alerted the media. The four men stayed at the lunch counter until the store closed for the night.
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Pivot to AI ☛ Cleveland police use AI facial recognition — and their murder case collapses
The police got a search warrant — but did not mention the use of Clearview to the judge, nor that NEORFC had identified other possible suspects. Police searched the suspect’s girlfriend’s house and found a gun and “other evidence.”
The defense argued that the warrant was granted on misleading claims, so evidence from it should be thrown out. Judge Richard McMonagle agreed.
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The Washington Post ☛ Whole Foods union win stuck in limbo after Trump’s labor board firings
The same night workers voted 130-100 to join the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, President Donald Trump rendered the federal agency that protects workers rights to unionize effectively toothless. He fired two leaders of the National Labor Relations Board — including one historically considered immune from presidential dismissal.
That unprecedented move late Monday temporarily disables the NLRB until Trump appoints his own board members, creating an opportunity for employers such as Amazon-owned Whole Foods.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM) or Retro
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Hackaday ☛ RedBox In The 80s: Meet The VHS Vending Behemoth
Redbox was a company with a moderately interesting business model—it let you rent DVDs from automated kiosks. It’s an idea so simple it’s almost surprising it didn’t appear sooner. Only, it did—all the way back in the VHS age!
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Petard, Part III
Last week, Trump's FCC chair Brendan Carr reversed a rule that banned your landlord from taking kickbacks in exchange for forcing you to use whatever ISP was willing to pay the biggest bribe for the right to screw you over: [...]
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Copyrights
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International Business Times ☛ Oh, So Now We Care About Copyright? OpenAI Drags DeepSeek for Alleged Model Theft
As a result, several publishers have taken OpenAI to court. Earlier this year, The New York Times filed a lawsuit accusing the firm of copyright infringement, stating that it never granted ChatGPT the right to use its material. Meanwhile, additional complaints from multiple Indian publishers and Canadian organisations have also been made public, alleging copyright infringement by OpenAI.
Experts often argue that OpenAI 'gets away' with numerous legal complaints because the legal framework surrounding copyright infringement by AI models remains unclear. They therefore urge policymakers and government bodies to introduce regulations to address copyright infringement and 'AI distillation'.
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Torrent Freak ☛ Anna’s Archive Urges AI Copyright Overhaul to Protect National Security
One of the internet's leading shadow libraries is calling for an overhaul of copyright law. Anna's Archive believes that if countries want to stay relevant in the AI race, change is a necessity. While it's unlikely that the trove at Anna's Archive will ever be legally accessible by consumers, the site argues that access for AI companies is paramount. "It's a matter of national security," Anna's Archivist says.
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Monopolies/Monopsonies
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