Distributions and Operating Systems

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

Leftovers

• Brandon ☛ Letting Go of Domains

  Like most bloggers I know, I have a small hoard of domain names I've purchased over the years. Each year, I pay for these domains, and sometimes I find small uses for them, but most of the time they just forward to this site or serve as a weird archive so I can easily pull some old Wordpress posts. Needless to say, this is an expensive waste of my time, because if I haven't utilized the domain in the past three to five years, what makes me think I'm going to magically wake up tomorrow and find a use for it?

• Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Todo notes as a storm approaches

  The political chaos in the US has been more distracting than I expected, and I had dialled my expectations all the way to “eleventyfuckingdisastrous” already.

  But, in between the work that needs to be done and the distractions of living in a dystopian future, there is the work that should be done, and this is my attempt to put some order to it.

• Annie Mueller ☛ Your personal brand makes me want to vomit

  I don’t have a problem with minimalism (I mean, it’s not my vibe, but you do you). This is not about any particular vibe. The process—and the resulting slop—is the same for all the vibes that get turned into branding material.

  I have a problem with anyone pretending to be a gray-toned, one-sided cardboard cutout in order to appeal to us, the consumers, via full-color visual and verbal digital representations.

• The Guardian UK ☛ EU to tighten checks on goods sold by sites such as Shein and Temu

  The commission said many of the billions of low-value products that enter the EU each year were not compliant with its laws, and European companies that respected the rules were losing out to competitors selling unsafe or counterfeit products.

• James G ☛ This place we call the web (should be made by and for everyone)

  At its core, “that’s your [Internet], not mine.” feels like part of a call to action. What is the web you want? How can we make a web that better serves people? Further, how do we make tools for the next decade available to as many people as possible?

• Adam Nowak ☛ Why do we feel the need to fake it?

  That’s also why I like my blog: I can write whatever I want, I don’t have to do anything just to please anyone! I don’t want to ever say that I’m pleased to stop BSing anyone! I’d rather stay silent 🙊

• Science

  • Wired ☛ NOAA Employees Told to Pause Work With ‘Foreign Nationals’

    The email further instructs NMFS employees—responsible for promoting the conservation of sea life and sustainability of America’s seafood sources—to submit details of any ongoing work with international partners for vetting by higher-ups, including those at the US Department of Commerce, the NOAA’s umbrella agency.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ As Scandinavian peninsula rises from sea, new satellite data show gravity changes

    Their latest study reports a refined measurement method that combines remote sensing by satellite and terrestrial gravity data, as well as 3D positioning from GPS and similar satellite positioning systems. The research is published in the Journal of Geodesy.

    The KTH researchers found that the density of the upper mantle is about 3,546 kilograms per cubic meter—slightly more than reported in earlier studies. It is widely believed the land mass rises by as much as 1 cm per year. Both density and lift of the land are factors in how much gravity changes.

  • Futurism ☛ Boeing Has Lost a Staggering Amount of Money on Its Starliner Catastrophe

    While SpaceX CEO and White House advisor Elon Musk and the Trump administration allow NASA's operations to languish, the specter of embattled aerospace giant Boeing's disastrous Starliner project still looms large.

    In an official filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Boeing revealed that it took a staggering $523 million in charges on its ill-fated spacecraft last year.

  • Futurism ☛ NASA Is In Tatters

    The agency is essentially in limbo right now, with interim administrator Janet Petro busying herself with clearing the agency of any references to the administration's current boogeyman: "diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility."

    The warning signs of a SpaceX takeover are certainly there. According to Ars, Petro announced on Friday that former SpaceX head of human spaceflight programs Michael Altenhofen had been appointed as a "senior advisor to the NASA administrator."

• Career/Education

  • LabX Media Group ☛ How to Write a Good Abstract

    The title and the abstract form the gateway to a study, and a well-defined combination rolls out the red carpet for the audience. The ability to write a good abstract is therefore an important skill, and one that scientists go out of their way to develop. However, authors are often tempted to try and fit everything into their abstracts despite character and word limits. This creates crowded, overwhelming, and meandering works that turn the audience away. Writers should remember that a study is best communicated as a narrative—a story—and a good abstract should provide a preview of that story rather than a compressed version of the manuscript as a whole.

  • Sara Jakša ☛ The 70% Rule is a Powerful Rule for Action

    In order to be comfortable with doing things at the 70% or even lower percentage, I think a person needs to have strategies to be able to stay calm and not worry about the outcome.

    It is a skill.

  • Seth Godin ☛ Clarity about the benefits

    There are no all-tuba orchestras, because the mixture of skills and tones in an orchestra is what creates the music. Instead of wasting talent and resources, we can engage with communities and viewpoints ready to produce value. Fairness and opportunity reduce friction, build trust and enhance innovation.

    It’s tempting to focus on how much we need to improve, but it’s helpful to show others how the improvements will help them.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ The Navy Future Sailor Prep Course is producing honor grads

    Just over a year ago, the Navy launched a three-week prep course for new recruits who might never have made it to boot camp. The Navy Future Sailor Preparatory Course gave a path to enlistment to recruits who wanted to be sailors but who were out of shape, or whose test scores were too low. The idea was to boost their qualifications until they qualified to enter regular boot camp that all recruits go through.

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Look for deep discussions, not a mentorship

    I’m a big advocate for mentorships. I’ve been both a mentee and a mentor multiple times throughout my career and the good one have definitely shaped me into who I have become as a person and as a professional. I have also had experiences that were – if not bad, at least – mediocre and there’s been almost always one thing in common with all of them.

    As I was listening to the first episode of Three Rules podcast and D’Avella and Holiday discussing what mentoring means to them and how to get into a mentorship relationship, I started thinking about mentoring for a few good days

  • Axios ☛ Trump-voting states have more to lose if Education Department dismantled

    State of play: Average federal spending in the 2021-22 school year was 17% in Trump-voting states, compared to 11% in states that voted for Harris.

    At 23%, Mississippi had the highest proportion of federal public school funding that school year, with South Dakota and Arkansas following with 22% each, per USA Facts. New York, at 7%, had the lowest. Mississippi spends an average of $12,390 on public K-12 spending per student, compared to New York's $33,440, per the Education Data Initiative.

• Time and Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Telling Time Used To Be A Ball

    If you watch the New Year’s festivities from New York, you know that they mark midnight with the dropping of a big, gaudy ball. You might assume this was just an arbitrary gimmick, but it turns out dropping balls has a place in the history of timekeeping, especially for ships at sea. The New York ball doesn’t work precisely the same, but it was clearly inspired by an ancient method of indicating the time.

  • Hackaday ☛ What Is The Hour? It’s XVII O’ Clock

    When live-action role playing, or LARPing, one must keep fully in tune with the intended era. That means no digital watches, and certainly no pulling out your fantastic rectangle from the future to find out if you’re late picking up the kid.

  • Hackaday ☛ Cyberbass Brings Bass Guitar To Modern Era

    For better or worse, the fundamental design of guitars has remained familiar since they electrified around a century ago. A few strings, a fretboard, and a body of some sort will get you most of the way there for an acoustic guitar, with the addition of electromagnetic pickups and wiring for electric variants. However, technology has advanced rapidly in the last 100 years outside the musical world, so if you want to see what possibilities lie ahead for modernizing guitars take a look at the Cyberbass created by [Matteo].

  • Hackaday ☛ Inside Project Delilah

    The invention of the computer is a tricky thing to pinpoint. There were some early attempts that were not well known and some early attempts that were deliberately secret. [Alan Turing]’s efforts with Colossus were top secret for years, and while that work built on earlier efforts in Poland, [Turing] has as much claim to be the father of computers as anyone. But [Jack Copland] points out in a recent post that the famous computer scientist was also involved in another secret project: Delilah.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ How’s my notebook journey going?

    If you’re following along you’ll know that last year I switched to a physical notebook. It was partly due to overwhelm and trying to make sense of my life situation but also a way to simplify things in a difficult time. I’m heading into big changes and trying to process multiple life events. I thought that being able to journal my thoughts and emotions plus having one place not digital might help.

    There are definitely pros and cons to this experiment so far that I wanted to share.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Leica celebrates 100 Years with a landmark photography exhibition featuring Joel Meyerowitz and Barbara Davidson

    Titled 100 Years of Leica: Joel Meyerowitz and Barbara Davidson, this landmark show brings together the work of two celebrated photographers whose images reflect Leica’s influence on the art of photography. Running from March 01 to March 31 2025, the exhibition offers a fantastic opportunity to experience the power of photography in its most impactful form.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • LabX Media Group ☛ Microplastics Build Up in Human Organs, Especially the Brain

    To investigate the buildup of inhaled microplastics in human organs, researchers analyzed liver, kidney, and brain samples from autopsies conducted in 2016 and 2024. Traditional microscopic spectroscopy methods often miss the tiniest nanoplastics, which are likely to cross the blood-brain barrier and nestle in hidden parts of organs. This can lead researchers to underestimate the scale of tissue pollution with MNPs. To overcome this limitation, Campen and his team turned to pyrolysis gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy, a newer technique for detecting plastic residues in human tissue.

  • [Repeat] Science Alert ☛ Microplastics Could Accumulate in Our Brains More Than in Kidneys And Livers

    "Environmental concentrations of anthropogenic microplastic and nanoplastic, polymer-based particulates ranging from 500 µm in diameter down to 1 nm, have increased exponentially over the past half century," Nihart and team write in their paper.

    The long-term impacts and the potential for incremental effects of plastic particles embedded in our tissues remain unknown, though evidence suggests there might be cause for concern.

  • Futurism ☛ The Weight of All the Plastic in Your Brain May Make You Queasy

    As detailed in a study published in the journal Nature Medicine, a team led by University of New Mexico toxicologist and professor of pharmaceutical sciences Matthew Campen concluded that the average brain now contains the equivalent of one plastic spoon, or seven grams, worth of plastic.

    And it's not just the brain. Scientists also found significant concentrations of microplastics in the liver and kidney.

  • The Walrus ☛ Ear Candy: How Hearing Protection Became Cool

    It was both the unbearable ringing and the heartbreak of losing my music career that brought me to the roof of the university building two years after my diagnosis. And while I didn’t jump that day, my life as a promising musician ended at sixteen. I began on a long journey to learning how to deal with the pain, ultimately trying methods ranging from biofeedback to hallucinogenic drugs. I was also told by doctors that I should wear earplugs—when I played or at loud parties—to protect my ears.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Charities reeling from USAid freeze warn of ‘life or death’ effects

    A stop work order was not needed to carry out a review of aid, she said. “This is wasteful, inefficient and doesn’t keep America safe or make it more prosperous or secure – whereas [PEPFAR] actually does all of those things. This was a deliberate decision to sow chaos and confusion, no matter the human cost.”

    She said any prolonged shutdown would mean “halting service delivery, firing staff, shutting down clinics, rolling back outreach”. “You don’t recover from that kind of whiplash overnight,” she added.

  • Futurism ☛ Official Warns That Elon Musk Is Poised to Kill "Thousands, If Not Hundreds of Thousands" of People

    That "pause" is now spinning out into something much more permanent. On Sunday, at least 1,000 USAID employees reported being locked out of the agency's software en masse. Following a day of mass confusion, it emerged that Musk and Trump are working to axe USAID entirely — exacerbating a crisis in aid funding for an already shocked and overwhelmed international relief effort, and creating the ghoulish possibility of mass international deaths as those relying on the aid are forced to do without.

    "It’s the richest person in the world taking away from the poorest people in the world," an anonymous USAID official told Politico. "People will die from this — like thousands, if not hundreds of thousands."

  • Nebraska Examiner ☛ Children and Americans need protecting from deadly gasoline carcinogens

    In a major shock to the oil industry, Congress adopted President Bush’s proposal. Congress banned lead in gasoline and also required the EPA to ensure the “greatest achievable reductions” in air toxics caused by gasoline carcinogens. That mandatory language is still part of the Clean Air Act, having been reaffirmed by Congress in 2005 in the same law that laid the foundation for the Renewable Fuel Standard.

  • The Scotsman ☛ 400-year-old strand of hair unlocks new thinking on Vitamin D and Scotland's weak winter sun

    Analysis of the super-rare preserved hair, which came from a skeleton buried at the medieval St Nicholas Kirk in Aberdeen, has shown seasonal lows in vitamin D were an issue in Scotland four centuries ago with massive changes in diet and lifestyle doing little to alleviate the condition over time.

  • Vox ☛ Why Trump tariffs may raise drug prices, prompt shortages

    The potential for disruption is enormous: China, which this week has been hit with a 10 percent across-the-board tariff, is the largest supplier of drug or drug ingredients to the US. Pharmaceutical drugs and their components are still the single largest American import from around the world, as longtime health care journalist Merrill Goozner wrote on Monday.

    Generic drugmakers, which produce 90 percent of the prescription drugs in the US and often depend on Chinese chemical imports, don’t have easy recourse. It will be difficult for them to raise prices to make up for the additional tariff costs — there’s a good reason for that, but it has the potential to fuel shortages with a trade war afoot.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Buying candy, soda with food stamps banned under proposed Kansas bill

    Lenardson pointed to Trump health secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a vision to “make America healthy again.” Restricting soft drink and candy purchases with food stamps goes with that, he said.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ No-tillage farming shown to enhance soil carbon in sandy agroecosystems

    A new study published in Ecological Processes by researchers at the Institute of Applied Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reveals that no-tillage (NT) farming could play a pivotal role in combating soil degradation and enhancing carbon sequestration in arid and semi-arid regions.

    The findings highlight NT's potential to restore soil health and reduce carbon emissions, providing valuable insights for sustainable land management in harsh environments.

• Proprietary/Businesses

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Apple Care+ price increase: Apple slowly turning up the dial on more services revenue

    50c doesn’t sound like a lot per month but that’s across the millions of users that have it but it’s the principle. I guess Tim has to get his million dollar donation to the orange one back somehow I guess.

    I would expect the same move across the other services including Apple TV and Apple One and people will pay it because they rely on the services.

  • Macworld ☛ Complete list of Mac viruses, malware names and trojans

    While it’s safe to say that Macs are safer than Windows machines, Macs are not completely safe from attacks [sic]. Even Apple’s Craig Federighi has admitted there is a problem, saying in May 2021 that: “We have a level of malware on the Mac that we don’t find acceptable.” To stay safe, we recommend you read our best Mac security tips and our round-up of the best Mac antivirus apps, in which we highlight Intego as our top pick.

  • Zoom Layoffs Impact Channel Executive Team, Sales

    Zoom layoffs will impact its now former global partnerships and alliances, Mark Jenkins, and more than 20 members of Zoom's professional services team who the unified communications vendor laid off this week, Channel Futures has learned from a source close to the matter.

    Jenkins served just over two years with Zoom in various channel-related capacities. He was promoted to lead Zoom's global partnerships efforts just six months ago. Others impacted by Zoom layoffs include sales managers, sales executives, people in DevOps and security, with Zoom citing "cost-cutting measures," the source told us.

  • CRN ☛ Salesforce Layoffs Include Managers, Directors, Sales, Marketers

    Former Salesforce employees taking to LinkedIn to post about losing their jobs reveal where the enterprise applications vendor is making cuts as it invests in its artificial intelligence wares.

    Multiple former employees holding manager and director titles and coming from sales, marketing and other parts of the San Francisco-based vendor posted to Microsoft-owned LinkedIn about being part of the 1,000 employees targeted for layoffs, representing about 1.5 percent of the company’s global workforce.

  • Newsweek ☛ Walmart to Cut Hundreds of Jobs: What to Know

    Walmart is planning to cut hundreds of jobs and close a North Carolina office as the company continues to focus efforts on its main hubs in California and Arkansas.

    According to a memo issued on Tuesday, a copy of which was first obtained by Fox News, employees in Hoboken, New Jersey, and other smaller posts have also been asked to relocate to Walmart's new headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, and its office in Sunnyvale, California.

    Walmart did not comment when contacted by Newsweek but shared the memo Chief People Officer Donna Morris issued.

  • The Verge ☛ Sonos lays off 200 employees as its struggles continue

    Things at Sonos are getting worse before they get better — if they’re going to get better. Today the company laid off approximately 200 employees, The Verge has learned. The news was announced at around 4PM ET, and a letter to employees from interim CEO Tom Conrad was posted on Sonos’ website shortly thereafter. “One thing I’ve observed first hand is that we’ve become mired in too many layers that have made collaboration and decision-making harder than it needs to be,” Conrad wrote. “So across the company today we are reorganizing into flatter, smaller, and more focused teams.”

    Conrad clearly sees a need to rethink the way Sonos operates as part of the company’s turnaround effort. Sonos is scheduled to report its latest quarterly earnings on Thursday afternoon. And if this is the precursor to that, the near-term outlook probably isn’t very good.

    It’s an even more substantial wave of job cuts than Sonos made back in August, when it let 100 people go. The company remains in an unenviable position, facing cooling demand for its products and a reputation that has been badly tarnished by last year’s app controversy. The situation eventually became so damaging to Sonos’ business that it led to the ouster of former CEO Patrick Spence last month.

  • Patch ☛ Workday Lays Off 1,750 Workers As Part Of AI Pivot

    Workday, the Pleasanton-based financial and human capital management software company, will eliminate 1,750 positions, or 8.5% of its workforce.

    In an open letter sent to employees, CEO Carl Eschenbach wrote that the cuts are due to a shift toward utilizing artificial intelligence.

    “Companies everywhere are reimagining how work gets done, and the increasing demand for AI has the potential to drive a new era of growth for Workday,” he said. “This means investing strategically, helping teams work better together, bringing innovations to market faster, and making it easier for our customers and partners to work with us.”

  • International Business Times ☛ Workday Axes 8.5% Of Its Workers: 'Realize This Is Tough News'

    The American cloud-based financial management software vendor Workday announced on February 5 that the company is cutting nearly 2,000 jobs—or 8.5% of its workforce—with CEO Carl Eschenbach citing in a memo that the layoffs are necessary for ongoing growth efforts at the company, including a particular focus on artificial intelligence investments.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • 404 Media ☛ ‘Things Are Going to Get Intense:’ How a Musk Ally Plans to Push AI on the Government

      Thomas Shedd, a Musk-associate and now head of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), told government tech workers in a meeting this week that the administration plans to widely deploy AI throughout the government. Shedd also said the administration would need help altering login.gov, a government login system, to further integrate with sensitive systems like social security “to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud,” which employees identified on the meeting as “an illegal task.”

    • Wired ☛ Elon Musk Ally Tells Staff 'AI-First’ Is the Future of Key Government Agency

      "This does raise red flags,” a cybersecurity expert who was granted anonymity due to concerns of retaliation told WIRED on Monday, who noted that automating the government isn’t the same as automating other things, like self-driving cars. “People, especially people who aren’t experts in the subject domain, coming into projects often think ‘this is dumb’ and then find out how hard the thing really is.”

    • New York Times ☛ Musk Allies Discuss Deploying A.I. to Find Budget Savings

      On Monday, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was appointed by the new administration to head technology efforts at the General Services Administration, told some staffers that A.I. would be a key part of their cost-reduction work, according to four people with knowledge of the conversation. At the agency, some staffers have been informed that they will be expected to cut 50 percent of its budget.

    • 404 Media ☛ AI Company Asks Job Applicants Not to Use AI in Job Applications

      Anthropic, the developer of the conversational AI assistant Claude, doesn’t want prospective new hires using AI assistants in their applications, regardless of whether they’re in marketing or engineering.

  • Social Control Media

    • 404 Media ☛ You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism

      “The reality is you are oxygenating the things these people are saying even as you purport to debunk them,” Katherine Cross, a sociologist and author of Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix, told 404 Media. “Whether it’s [New York Times columnist] Ross Douthat providing a sane-washing gloss on Trump’s mania or people on social media vehemently disagreeing and dunking on it, they’re legitimizing it as part of the discourse.”

      Cross’ book contains a meticulous catalog of social media sins which many people who follow and care about current events are probably guilty of—myself very much included. She documents how tech platforms encourage us, through their design affordances, to post and seethe and doomscroll into the void, always reacting and never acting.

      But perhaps the greatest of these sins is convincing ourselves that posting is a form of political activism, when it is at best a coping mechanism—an individualist solution to problems that can only be solved by collective action. This, says Cross, is the primary way tech platforms atomize and alienate us, creating “a solipsism that says you are the main protagonist in a sea of NPCs.”

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ You Can't Post Your Way Out of Fascism

      Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them: [...]

    • Sara Jakša ☛ Control your [Internet] experience (In Reply to Ava's “that’s your [Internet], not mine.”)

      Not not the [Internet] is not meant literally, I do spend more than enough time on the [Internet]. I wrote my own blog, I write way too long emails to some people. I volunteer for two projects that are coordinated online. I read more and more ebooks each year, sizeable chunk not available in the physical form. Along with blog posts and fanfiction and short stories simply available online.

      It is meant in the way, that I am not really aware of what the trends on the [Internet] are. People mention trends to me all the time and when I ask about it, they act like I would need to know about it.

    • The Atlantic ☛ My Friend’s Instagram Account Has Taken a Dark Turn

      The question is: Do you want to help her? Or are you just kind of fascinatedly tracking the downturn in her online vibes? (Another Instagram effect: It turns us into dissociated consumers of one another’s lives.)

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-02-01 [Older] Why is China clamping down on scammers in Southeast Asia?

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • New York Times ☛ Alphabet Earnings Fall Short of Expectations as Surveillance Giant Google Cloud Sales Disappoint

      The internet giant reported cloud sales that narrowly missed Wall Street’s estimates, worrying investors about the company’s Hey Hi (AI) business.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Alphabet’s stock plunges on revenue miss and high Hey Hi (AI) spending

      Investors bailed on Surveillance Giant Google LLC’s parent company Alphabet Inc. in late trading today after it posted fourth-quarter revenue that fell short of Wall Street’s expectations. The company only just came in ahead of expectations on earnings too.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Do be evil: Google now OK with AI for weapons and surveillance — for ‘freedom, equality, and human rights’

      Good news! Google has determined that “responsible AI” is in no way incompatible with selling its AI systems for weaponry or surveillance.

      Google don’t state this directly — they just quietly removed the previous bars on “weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people” and “technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.”

    • Nick Heer ☛ Everyone Knows Your Location

      I know advertising is an important revenue stream — often the only revenue stream — for many products and services. This, though, is not just advertising. It is a staggering abuse of trust happening all the time with — in many regions — almost no control or transparency. Absorbing or resharing this much private information should be criminal.

    • The Register UK ☛ Citrix supremo has 'read-only' access to Treasury payments

      That missive is in response to letters that US Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent to Bessent, raising concerns about the DOGE team's infiltration of the department.

      As widely reported, Musk's DOGE crew of inexperienced techies and others linked to the Tesla tycoon have been granted what's described by Wyden as full access to the Treasury's payments systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, tax credits, and grants and payments to federal employees and contractors.

      The billionaire's associates, with President Trump's blessing, have also drilled into the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the General Services Administration, with the stated intention of rooting out inefficiencies, aka things Musk doesn't approve of.

    • The Atlantic ☛ DOGE Could Compromise America’s Nuclear Weapons

      As recently as yesterday morning, Musk made clear that DOGE will go line by line through the government’s books looking for fat targets for budget-cutting, including those that are classified—especially those that are classified. DOGE employees are bound to notice NNSA, a 1,800-person organization that sits inside the Department of Energy and burns through $20 billion every year, much of it on classified work. But as they set out to discover exactly how the money is spent, they should proceed with care. Musk’s incursions into other agencies have reportedly risked exposing sensitive information to unqualified personnel, and obstructing people’s access to lifesaving medicine. According to several nuclear-security experts and a former senior department official, taking this same approach at the NNSA could make nuclear material at home and abroad less safe.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Lawmakers fear Elon Musk, DOGE not adhering to privacy rules

      Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee said Wednesday DOGE must comply with security and privacy laws as they obtain access to federal systems, something the lawmakers say they don’t seem to be doing. And a group of senators said DOGE was taking “illegal actions” that risk exposure of classified and sensitive information.

      Musk, head of the special governmental board that President Donald Trump has set up as a temporary organization, has reportedly dispatched aides to access databases at the Treasury Department, Office of Personnel Management, U.S. Agency for International Development, Small Business Administration and perhaps others.

    • The Register UK ☛ House Democrats demand answers over DOGE OPM server

      Who bought it, who installed it, and what's happening with the data on it.

      Answers for these key questions, and others, regarding the DOGE server rapidly added to the US government's Office of Personnel Management network, have been demanded from the acting head of the OPM by Democrats.

      The machine in question was put in place by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the days after President Trump's January 20 inauguration. With the commander in chief's blessing, the server was used to send mass emails from hr@opm.gov asking federal employees to confirm they had received test messages, and then repeatedly offering nearly all of them a severance deal

    • Axios ☛ Labor groups sue to block DOGE from accessing key economic data

      Why it matters: This isn't the first lawsuit against Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but appears to be one of the first filed as a preventative measure — instead of after some major action.

      The big picture: The Labor Department houses an enormous amount of confidential data, and includes the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces important economic data, including inflation readings and market-critical employment statistics.

    • Techdirt ☛ CVS Will Make Shopping Slightly Less Annoying If You Download An App, Consent To Being Tracked

      “To use the feature, customers need to be logged into the CVS app, connected to the store’s Wi-Fi, and have Bluetooth turned on. Tilak Mandadi, CVS Health’s executive vice president, told the Wall Street Journal that CVS plans to expand the pilot to 10 to 15 stores soon, with hopes of rolling it out across its 9,000 U.S. locations in the future.”

      It’s important to remember that despite a lot of inaccurate journalism and lawmaker rhetoric on the subject, there isn’t a “shoplifting epidemic,” and the problem has actually declined in many major cities. That’s not to to say theft isn’t still a problem in many stores and cities, but nothing close to the absolute hyperventilation seen in major press outlets.

    • India Times ☛ DeepSeek ban in US: Texas first to take action

      He said, "‘Texas will not allow the Chinese Communist Party to infiltrate our state’s critical infrastructure through data-harvesting AI and social media apps.”

    • The Register UK ☛ DeepSeek banned from Australian government devices

      A policy issued on February 4th warns that the Chinese chat app conducts “extensive collection of data and exposure of that data to extrajudicial directions from a foreign government that conflict with Australian law.”

      Most government entities have therefore been told to “Identify and remove all existing instances of DeepSeek products, applications and web services on all Australian Government systems and mobile devices” and prevent access to the company’s apps, web services, and other products.

    • 404 Media ☛ Senator Hawley Proposes Jail Time for People Who Download DeepSeek

      The Republican Senator from Missouri Josh Hawley has introduced a new bill that would make it illegal to import or export artificial intelligence products to and from China, meaning someone who knowingly downloads a Chinese developed AI model like the now immensely popular DeepSeek could face up to 20 years in jail, a million dollar fine, or both, should such a law pass.

    • EFF ☛ European Commission Gets Dinged for Unlawful Data Transfer, Sending a Big Message About Accountability

      The case, Bindl vs. EC, underscores the principle that when people’s data is lost, stolen, or shared without promised safeguards—which can lead to identity theft, cause uncertainty about who has access to the data and for what purpose, or place our names and personal preferences in the hands of data brokers —they’ve been harmed and have the right to hold those responsible accountable and seek damages.

    • Techdirt ☛ When It’s Not Just A Coup But A CFAA Violation Too

      All that said, however, I think a colorable, non-frivolous argument can be made that Elon Musk, and everyone on his DOGE team accessing the federal government’s computer infrastructure, is potentially personally liable for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

      What follows is a high-level overview explaining how what Musk and his team are doing qualifies as a violation of the statute, and what the consequence of this violation should be. The argument largely rests on the fact that the access DOGE has demanded for itself is unauthorized because, per statute, there was no lawful power anyone in DOGE could claim for itself, or themselves, with which to demand it. Congress has control over whom the President can empower, yet here he has unilaterally and unlawfully empowered people outside of what the law Congress duly passed allows him to do. Which means there is no power that those he “empowered” can lawfully wield, and so the power they did wield to obtain access was unlawful. That unlawfulness made the access they obtained access “without authorization,” which they have then used to inflict the very sort of harm to America’s computer infrastructure that the CFAA exists to deter and punish.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Musk and DOGE Are Violating American Privacy. This Union Is Suing

      Musk and his team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reportedly have full access to Treasury payment systems that include, for example, Social Security and tax records. The lawsuit claims that DOGE’s cross-agency meddling in Treasury systems is a violation of the Privacy Act of 1974; the Internal Revenue Code; and related regulations that bar sharing of sensitive data, in particular without advance notice.

      The litigation says that the Treasury Department has “a non-discretionary duty” to protect private records and tax data “from unauthorized disclosure” — a legal obligation that’s been flouted by allowing “Elon Musk and/or other individuals associated with DOGE to access” sensitive Treasury records. The suit seeks a court declaration that the Musk-led effort is “unlawful” and injunctions to prohibit DOGE’s current and future access to the Treasury’s treasure trove of Americans’ data.

    • Axios ☛ Trump admin sued over DOGE access to Treasury's sensitive data

      Why it matters: The lawsuit that was filed in D.C. federal court Monday alleges Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent allowed DOGE representatives access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which manages the U.S. government's accounting, central payment systems and public debt.

      It follows reports about DOGE representatives allegedly accessing American citizens' data and classified spaces at the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) D.C. headquarters.

    • The Record ☛ Treasury says DOGE review has ‘read-only’ access to federal payments system

      The response, by the department’s Office of Legislative Affairs, comes as lawmakers, cybersecurity experts and privacy advocates have criticized reported activities by Elon Musk’s Department [sic] of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The ad-hoc White House agency’s access to the Treasury’s payment system has already drawn a privacy lawsuit by labor union groups.

    • US News And World Report ☛ US Treasury Says Musk Team Has 'Read-Only Access' to Payment Data

      The confirmation of a Musk associate's access to the system codes came in a letter from a Treasury official to Democratic Senator Ron Wyden that said the review was being undertaken to "maximize payment integrity for agencies and the public".

    • The Nation ☛ Who Will Stop Elon Musk’s Coup?

      Because Musk and his DOGE minions have strong-armed their way into the offices of the Treasury, OPM, GSA, and USAID, they have access to an astonishing body of public data. Musk can, for example, find the Social Security number of any American citizen and also what funds (if any) they receive from the government.

      [...]

      What’s scandalous is Musk’s nebulous status as both a private citizen and presidential crony, which has allowed him access to data that that can easily be abused. Coming from Silicon Valley, Musk knows that data is power. Now, he has access to the full data set of the federal government, which he is both hoarding to himself and preventing the public from seeing (many government websites have already been shuttered, allegedly as a temporary measure during the Trump/Musk riorganizzazione, including those with public health information and Census data).

• Defence/Aggression

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-28 [Older] Four More South African Soldiers Killed in Congo, Defence Department Says

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-01-27 [Older] A New Military Strategy of French Neocolonialism in Africa: Reorganizing Under the Cover Retreat

  • Defence Web ☛ 2025-01-29 [Older] Lamola urges Rwandan forces to withdraw from DRC

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-02-01 [Older] UK presses Mauritius on deal to protect Chagos Islands base

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-02-01 [Older] US: Small plane carrying 6 crashes in Philadelphia

  • FAIR ☛ Counting the Victims of Israel’s War on Gaza Is Low on Media’s Priority List

    The official death count of Israel’s genocide is climbing as hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians resolutely march back to the north of Gaza. That’s in part because those returning to their demolished homes have been unearthing the remains of their missing loved ones whose deaths went unconfirmed for months.

  • The Dissenter ☛ CIA Analyst's Plea Deal Adds Further Intrigue To Espionage Act Prosecution

  • US Navy Times ☛ US Navy hits drone with HELIOS laser in successful test

    The Arleigh Burke-class destroyer Preble fired its HELIOS system to zap an aerial drone during a weapons testing exercise in 2024, according to an Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation report published in January.

  • Jason Kottke ☛ A Programming Note

    I have pivoted like this a couple of times before: in the aftermath of 9/11 and during the pandemic. This situation feels as urgent now as those events did then. Witnessing the events of this past weekend, I felt very much like I did back in March 2020, before things shut down here in the US — you could see this huge tidal wave coming and everyone was still out on the beach sunbathing because the media and our elected officials weren’t meeting the moment. I believe that if this coup is allowed to continue and succeed, it will completely alter the course of American history — so I feel like I have no choice but to talk about it.

    If you need to check out, I totally understand. I’ve heard from many readers over the years that some of you come to the site for a break from the horrible news of the world, and I know this pivot goes against that. I expect I will lose some readers and members over this — the membership page is right here if you’d like to change your status. For those who choose to continue to support the site, no matter what, my deep thanks and appreciation to you.

  • Wired ☛ This DOGE Engineer Has Access to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

    Government records reviewed by WIRED show that Rajpal has working email addresses with both DOGE and the NOAA. The DOGE address, like others from the agency, is in a format tying it to the Executive Office of the President. Rajpal also appears in the NOAA’s public-facing employee directory.

    According to sources familiar with the situation, on Wednesday, NOAA employees were ordered to grant Rajpal editor access to all NOAA Google sites on instructions of the acting commerce secretary, Jeremy Pelter, by the close of business.

  • Axios ☛ Teens spent a quarter of the school day on their phones: study

    Why it matters: To understand the risks of too much screen time, researchers say, it's important not just to tally the hours kids spend on devices but to consider what activities are being displaced — in this case, learning.

  • 404 Media ☛ Here's a PDF Version of the CIA Guide to Sabotaging Fascism

    A 404 Media reader made a PDF version of the World War II-era manual that's going viral right now.

  • Techdirt ☛ To Stop The Coup, We Must Be Clear About The Truth: Two Plus Two Equals Four

    Consider how this reality distortion operates in real-time: When Elon Musk illegally shuts down USAID, defenders of this action claim the agency serves “at the pleasure of the president.” This argument asks us to ignore the basic reality that USAID was established by congressional statute—specifically, the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 signed into law by President Kennedy. This isn’t a matter of interpretation or political perspective—it’s as clear as the fact that two plus two equals four. Congress passed a law creating an independent agency. That law remains in force. The president cannot legally shut it down through executive whim any more than he could unilaterally abolish the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Education.

    Yet just as the Party in 1984 demands Winston deny the evidence of his own eyes, we’re being asked to accept an argument that fundamentally contradicts statutory reality. This isn’t just wrong as a matter of law—it represents an attack on the very concept of law itself. If we accept that the president can unilaterally shut down congressionally established agencies, then congressional power to establish agencies becomes meaningless. If executive authority can override clear statutory mandates, then our entire system of checks and balances collapses.

  • Techdirt ☛ First Cracks Appear: Some Conservatives Admit We’re In A Constitutional Crisis

    Budde now faces a barrage of violent threats. The irony of threatening violence in response to a plea for mercy perfectly encapsulates the nature of this ongoing coup: it’s not about conservative governance or even maintaining power — it’s about systematic destruction of democratic norms and institutions, laced with gleeful spite and hatred.

    Timothy Snyder, whose “On Tyranny” has become an essential guidebook for understanding this moment, explains this destructive logic with devastating clarity: [...]

  • The Atlantic ☛ American History Is Key to Understanding Trump

    But the Trump administration is more interested in blowing up the state than in extending its power. Its ideologues, such as they are, are reacting to what they think of as government overreach. They will abuse executive power to do it, but they want to eliminate bureaucracy, not grow it.

    Trump himself is not Mussolini, or Hitler, or Orbán—two of them soldiers with creditable war records, the third an activist against a dying Communist regime. Trump was a draft dodger by choice and a grifter by trade, and more important, he does not read. Unlike others in his orbit, he does not have ideas so much as impulses, whims, and resentments. He is, to be sure, cruel and malicious, but unlike the others, has no real governing vision.

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ Cultural trauma and European identity in Georgia and Armenia

    The initial wave of separation came through the Arab Caliphate’s campaigns in the 730s CE under Marwan the Deaf (Murvan Qru). Unlike previous invaders who sought territorial control or resources, these operations represented the first deliberate attempt to isolate these kingdoms from their natural cultural sphere – the Hellenic-Byzantine world that had shaped their development since antiquity. However, both Georgia and Armenia demonstrated remarkable resilience, and by the 13th century, they had achieved a magnificent cultural and political renaissance, reintegrating themselves into the broader European family.

  • New Statesman ☛ The plot to asset-strip American government

    The Trump administration’s strategy has been to “flood the zone” with so many actions that it’s hard to keep up, let alone respond. But what Americans are seeing now is unprecedented: the systematic dismembering of its government. And it’s coming at the hands of a man who cannot legally run for president, and who is acting as if he’s drunk on his own grandiosity.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Treasury Tells Congress That DOGE Has ‘Read Only’ Access to Payment Systems

    The official sent the letter out of concerns from members of Congress that DOGE's involvement with the payment system for the federal government could lead to security risks or missed payments for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Lawmakers are also concerned that Musk, an unelected citizen, wields too much power within the U.S. government and states blatantly on his social media platform that DOGE will shut down payments to organizations.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Russia’s war against the West will continue until Putin tastes defeat

    The international security situation is now so grave and has escalated to such a level that it can no longer be resolved by appeasing Russia or seeking some kind of compromise peace. Instead, Russia must lose in Ukraine, and must be seen to lose.

    At present, that is not the case. On the contrary, Putin is more confident than ever of victory and sees no reason to end the war. He is projecting strength around the world and is successfully building a coalition of fellow authoritarian powers including China, Iran, and North Korea, who all provide support for the war in Ukraine and share Moscow’s objective of overthrowing the current world order.

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Says It’s Time to Get Rid of All Regulations

    That astonishing mask-off moment — one of many during his short time as a presidential advisor — comes as Musk demonstrates that Trump has deputized him with incredible power to remake the federal government, as evidenced by his assault on the United States Agency for International Development.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Russia’s war against the West will continue until Putin tastes defeat

      Russia's invasion of Ukraine is part of a far larger war against the West. If he succeeds in Ukraine, Putin aims to destroy the existing rules-based world order and usher in a new era dominated by a handful of great powers, writes Andriy Zagorodnyuk.

    • France24 ☛ Zelensky says he is ready for direct talks with Putin

      Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he is ready to sit at the negotiating table with Russian President Vladimir Putin in order to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. He made the comments in an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan posted on YouTube on Tuesday.

    • RFERL ☛ Ukraine Prepared To Take Diplomatic Path To End War, Zelenskyy Says

      Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he would agree to direct talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end almost three years of war, but he would do so if that is the only way to bring peace to Ukraine.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • 404 Media ☛ DOGE Employees Ordered to Stop Using Slack While Agency Transitions to a Records System Not Subject to FOIA

    Employees working for the agency now known as DOGE have been ordered to stop using Slack while government lawyers attempt to transition the agency to one that is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, 404 Media has learned.

  • 404 Media ☛ ‘Forbidden Words’: Github Reveals How Software Engineers Are Purging Federal Databases

    The updates, shown in Github commits, are to a database for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Head Start program. They show a project called “Remove-DEI,” which reveal some of the back-and-forth that is happening behind the scenes to align federal agencies with Donald Trump’s executive orders that forbid almost anything having to do with race or gender within federal agencies. The Github pages show software engineers discussing amongst themselves how to best remove all instances of “forbidden words” from a specific database, and the code updates they used to do it. The changes also show that, while thousands of government datasets are disappearing from the [Internet], even ones that remain are having parts of their utility deprecated or broken in a way that may not be visible to those outside the government.

  • FAIR ☛ As Constitutional Crises Mount, US Press Sleepwalks Into Autocracy

    There is another way to do journalism. It’s called connecting dots, asking questions, not accepting anonymous claims of benevolent intent—and helping people understand the gravity of the situation when unprecedented end-runs around democracy are happening before our very eyes. And it’s heartening to see quite a few news outlets engaging in it.

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Says Naming Specific Government Workers Is Illegal, After Doing Exactly That Himself

    The SpaceX CEO's decrying of basic transparency as unlawful is particularly hollow given that Musk himself has a well-documented history of singling out specific federal employees by name, promoting an X post as recently as November that shared the name of a federal employee singled out for her work in "climate diversification" — and, as a result, launched a throng of woefully ill-informed harassment her way.

    Demands from secrecy by Musk, still a private citizen — despite the White House's hasty declaration yesterday that the billionaire is now a "special government employee" — and the the richest man in the world, is a small, ridiculous piece of what's unfortunately a big and serious assault on constitutional authority and the checks and balances on executive power.

  • Wired ☛ A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System

    Despite reporting that suggests that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force has access to these Treasury systems on a “read-only” level, sources say Elez, who has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems, has many administrator-level privileges. Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.

  • RFA ☛ Is a man in a viral video really a US army recruiter?

    But according to the U.S. Department of Defense, the man in the video is a U.S. army recruiter.

• Environment

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Coal emissions cost India millions in crop damages, new study finds

    In many parts of India, a single noxious pollutant from coal-fired power stations drags down annual wheat and rice yields by 10% or more, according to a new study by Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability researchers.

    The two grains are critical for food security in India, the second most populous country in the world and home to a quarter of all undernourished people globally.

  • Overpopulation ☛ America’s “Serengeti” at risk: Population-driven sprawl threatens the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

    Rampant development and a surging human population are imperiling what has been dubbed “America’s Serengeti”: the iconic Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

    Established in 1872, Yellowstone National Park was the very first in the world. While originally set aside for its unrivaled geologic and hydrothermal features (e.g., geysers and hot springs), Yellowstone has also played a critical role in the survival of such iconic wildlife as the American buffalo or bison (Bison bison), gray wolf (Canis lupus), and grizzly (brown) bear (Ursus arctos).

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Cost Rica ☛ El Salvador Abandons Bitcoin as Legal Tender After Failed Experiment

      Bitcoin was never used by most Salvadorans, its modern city was never built, and now it will cease to be legal tender in El Salvador, the first country in the world to adopt it in 2021: a complete failed economic bet by President Nayib Bukele. Congress, dominated by the ruling party, approved last Wednesday a confusing reform to the Bitcoin Law at the request of Bukele’s government, which had no other option to receive the $1.4 billion credit agreed in December with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

    • Wired ☛ Trump's Plan to Make European Cars More Expensive Has a Fatal Flaw

      Also, imposing tariffs on European cars won’t supercharge Trump’s plans for US automakers to sell more cars in Europe, experts say. Kirkegaard says putting hefty tariffs on any part of the auto industry could lead to price hikes globally.

      “This is an industry that has very, very long supply chains,” Kirkegaard says. “The imposition of further tariffs on the auto industry would severely disrupt those supply chains.”

    • Trail of Bits ☛ Preventing account takeover on centralized cryptocurrency exchanges in 2025

      Imagine trying to log in to your centralized cryptocurrency exchange (CEX) account and your password and username just… don’t work. You try them again. Same problem. Your heart rate increases a little bit at this point, especially since you are using a password manager. Maybe a service outage is all that’s responsible (knock on wood), and your password will work again as soon as it’s fixed? But it is becoming increasingly likely that you’re the victim of an account takeover (ATO).

    • Futurism ☛ Elon's Bizarre Behavior Is Killing Tesla's Sales

      Sales in California fell almost eight percent in the fourth quarter of last year and are down 12 percent overall for the year, as Bloomberg reports. Annual registrations for the company's best-selling vehicle, the Model 3, slide by over a third in the state. (As a harbinger of the trouble, Tesla posted its first yearly sales drop in over a decade last month.)

      Similarly, the EV maker's performance is down in almost every single European market, with year-over-year sales dropping over 63 percent in France — as Musk has threatened to upend the continent by throwing his weight behind a political party linked to neo-Nazism in Germany.

    • VOA News ☛ Thailand to cut power to Myanmar border areas linked to scam centers

      According to the United Nations, hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked by criminal gangs and forced to work in scam centers and illegal online operations across Southeast Asia, including along the Thai-Myanmar border. A 2023 U.N. report estimated the fast-growing operations generate billions of dollars annually.

    • VOA News ☛ Thailand cuts power, fuel and [Internet] supply to parts of Myanmar

      Thailand has cut electricity, [Internet] and fuel supplies to five border areas in Myanmar, a senior Thai minister said on Wednesday, as the Southeast Asian nation steps up efforts to choke scam centers that have become a growing security concern.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-01-29 [Older] Pug Life: A South African Woman Has Rescued More Than 2,500 of the Lovable 'Clowns of the Dog World'

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Asian elephant Rose-Tu gives birth to 200lb calf at Oregon zoo

      After 20-month pregnancy, Rose-Tu gives ‘smoothest birth’ with baby ‘standing up on her own within 15 minutes’

    • Futurism ☛ Great White Sharks Are Suddenly Washing Up Dead With Swollen Brains

      "Three of these five seem to have the same potentially infectious disease affecting their brain," Megan Jones, a veterinary pathologist at CWHC, told the NYT. "We need to know more about what that is."

    • New York Times ☛ Great White Sharks Washing Up Dead in Canada With Brain Swelling

      Faced with a rash of shark deaths marked by brain swelling, Canadian and American scientists are trying to solve a marine mystery.

• Finance

  • New York Times ☛ China Strikes Back After Convicted Felon Imposes 10% Tariff on Goods

    After a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products took effect on Tuesday, China announced retaliatory measures, including tariffs and an investigation of Google.

  • RFERL ☛ China Strikes Back With Tariffs As Trade War With Convicted Felon Heats Up

    The rapid-fire response from Beijing was announced after Convicted Felon's 10 percent tariff across all Chinese imports came into effect on February 4.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-02-01 [Older] Toman or rial: Can currency reform stop inflation in Iran?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-31 [Older] BRICS currency: Is Cheeto Mussolini's tariff threat justified?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-02-01 [Older] Former German President Horst Köhler dies at 81

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-02-01 [Older] Horst Köhler: Farewell to a humble former German president

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-31 [Older] Belgium: Right-wing strikes deal to lead new government

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-01-31 [Older] German lawmakers reject contentious immigration law

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ The Business Community Is Extraordinarily Stupid

    Here are some of the basic ingredients of a truly pro-business atmosphere: The rule of law; a functional and predictable court system; enforceable contracts; intelligible regulations; trustworthy and accurate government data; widely available well educated and healthy workers; and strong public services that create a customer base that is, itself, healthy and wealthy and flourishing enough to spend money freely. These are the things from which strong companies and economies grow. Encouraging and protecting these things is therefore in the interest of the business community writ large. If these things fall apart, you can be sure that business will, in aggregate, suffer.

  • The Register UK ☛ Palantir designed to 'power the West to innate superiority'

    Palantir CEO Alex Karp says one of his aims when building the controversial spy‑tech company was to "power the West to its obvious innate superiority."

  • The Register UK ☛ Workday erases 8.5% of workforce because of...AI

    In a classic piece of corporate speak, the company said in an SEC filing that the job cuts are “intended to prioritize its investments and continue advancing Workday’s ongoing focus on durable growth.”

  • The Conversation ☛ Why Democrats are switching off the news – a psychologist explains

    In their sample of five countries, they found news avoidance was highest in Argentina (45%) and the US (41%) and lowest in Finland (17%) and Japan (11%), with Israel somewhere in between. The US, it seems, has always been high but there are some suggestions it is getting worse.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • VOA News ☛ Swedish police warn of online misinformation after mass school shooting

      Swedish police said on Wednesday there was no evidence of "ideological motives" behind a mass shooting at an adult education center on Tuesday, and warned of misinformation spread on social media about the Nordic country's deadliest gun attack.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ Democrats Should Be Stopping A Lawless President, Not Helping Censor The Internet, Honestly WTF Are They Thinking

    What is a subject for this post is how, in bizarrely continuing with any sort of normal order in the face of an actual coup taking place under their noses—literally right down the street—the thing that they are trying to do with normal order is censor the Internet.

    It is suicidal idiocy to do either of these things, let alone both. There is no political math that could justify Democrats not only not doing everything in their power to defend Congress’s Article I powers, but then using those powers in ways the First Amendment expressly tells them they can’t.

    And yet that is what at least some Senate Democrats have gone and done by moving forward KOSMA. The bill, which is a “bi-partisan” bill initially pushed by Democratic Senator Brian Schatz (in partnership with fellow Dem Chris Murphy, along with Republicans Ted Cruz and Katie Britt) is sort of a an attempt to create a “more palatable” version of KOSA, but which is still a censorship bill at its core.

  • CPJ ☛ Kazakh political satirist Temirlan Yensebek arrested on incitement charges

    “The incitement charges against Temirlan Yensebek raise concerns that he’s being targeted for his biting political satire,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Kazakh authorities should release Yensebek and drop the charges against him.”

  • Nick Heer ☛ The ‘Twitter Files’ Authors Only Pretend to Care About Power

    Now, Musk works for the government’s DOGE temporary organization and has spent the past two weeks — just two weeks — creating chaos with vast powers and questionable legality. But that is just one of his many very real jobs. Another one is his ownership of X where he also has an executive role. Today, he decided to accuse another user of committing a crime, and used his power to suspend their account.

    What was their “crime”? They quoted a Wired story naming six very young people who apparently have key roles at DOGE despite their lack of experience. The full tweet read:1

  • RFA ☛ Books banned in Hong Kong crackdown find new home in democratic Taiwan

    But even before the 2020 National Security Law ushered in a crackdown on public criticism of the authorities, the Chinese government had been positioning itself to take control of the city’s main publishing imprints and bookstore chains, squeezing out dozens of independent stores as it did so.

    As the political crackdown gathered momentum, libraries also made lists of books likely to run afoul of the new law, and pulled them from the shelves.

  • El País ☛ Salman Rushdie: ‘My story is about beauty facing death’

    If there is a religion that Rushdie believes in, it is the sacredness of books. He recalled a meeting he had a few years ago at Google’s offices in the United States, with 23-year-old readers, technology enthusiasts, to discuss “how sophisticated book technology is.” Books do not easily lose their data, their pages dry out if they fall into water, and an entire section doesn’t vanish the way it might on a computer. “Who uses a fax machine today? Much of its technology becomes obsolete, but the book has been around for centuries and is not obsolete,” he said.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Publishers sue state of Idaho over library book bans

    HB 710’s definition of “harmful” materials is “vague and overbroad”, says the lawsuit. The law allows private citizens to file complaints, putting librarians “in the untenable position of having to guess whether any member of the public might file an objection to a book whose message they disagree with” by claiming the text falls within the law’s definition of harmful.

    Libraries, many of which could not afford the cost of a defence if they were sued, have pre-emptively removed books from their shelves in response to the law. “This type of self-censorship is inimical to first amendment liberties”, said Michael Grygiel, an adjunct faculty member with Cornell Law School’s First Amendment Clinic, which is representing the plaintiffs.

  • RFA ☛ China ‘ramping up’ efforts to suppress Taiwan in South Africa, says Taipei

    China was “ramping up” its efforts to suppress Taiwan in South Africa, the democratic island said, after the South African government again demanded Taiwan’s liaison office in the capital Pretoria be relocated.

    The Taipei Liaison Office, established after South Africa severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan in January 1998, has functioned as a de facto embassy but without official diplomatic status.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Man accused of blinding Salman Rushdie begins in New York

    Matar has been charged with attempted murder and assault after allegedly rushing the stage at a literary event in New York in 2022 and stabbing Rushdie at least 10 times. Matar has pleaded not guilty.

    The trial at the Chautauqua County Court in New York was delayed twice after Matar’s defense team asked to review Rushdie’s then-upcoming memoir as evidence, and then to request the trial be moved to another county. Rushdie is set to testify during the trial.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • VOA News ☛ FCC launches media investigations, reinstates complaints

    That interview is at the center of one FCC complaint — and a $10 billion lawsuit from President Donald Trump — that says CBS doctored the interview. CBS denied any wrongdoing when Trump filed the lawsuit, but its parent company, Paramount, is now considering a settlement, according to media reports.

    The FCC complaint against CBS is one of four that former FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, dismissed earlier in January, saying the complaints “seek to weaponize the licensing authority of the FCC in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the First Amendment.”

  • EFF ☛ Victory! EFF Helps Defeat Meritless Lawsuit Against Journalist

    The CEO, Maury Blackman, didn’t like that. So he sued Poulson—along with Amazon Web Service, Substack, and Poulson’s non-profit, Tech Inquiry—to try and force Poulson to take down his articles about the arrest. Blackman argued that a court order sealing the arrest allowed him to censor the internet—despite decades of Supreme Court and California Court of Appeals precedent to the contrary.

    This is a classic SLAPP: strategic lawsuit against public participation. Fortunately, California’s anti-SLAPP statute provides a way for defendants to swiftly defeat baseless claims designed to chill their free speech.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Govt 'not meeting severity' of challenges facing UK news media

    The UK Government has been accused of failing to “reflect the urgency and severity of the situation” in a response published today to the House of Lords Future of News inquiry.

    The Government said it is considering ways to support local journalism including financial support such as innovation funding and tax relief.

  • CPJ ☛ Blogger killed, editor missing as Mozambique’s press freedom crisis deepens

    These were among the last words that Mozambican blogger Albino Sibia streamed live on Facebook on December 12, 2024, after a police officer shot him twice in the back as he was filming police action against protestors.

    Sibia, also known as Mano Shottas, died about four hours later, as he was taken from a local clinic to a hospital.

    The police “didn’t let him rest even on hisfuneral,” Sibia’s widow, Vânia Tembe, told CPJ. Police opened fire against mourners, killing two people and injuring reporter Pedro Júnior, who was covering the December 14 funeral .

  • JURIST ☛ President Trump continues to 'throttle the free press': report

    President Trump has already settled claims with both Meta and ABC News. Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS News, is now allegedly in talks to settle the $10 billion lawsuit filed by Trump in November 2024 for editing an interview with Vice President Harris and making her more appealing to viewers. Paramount argues that these interview cuts are protected by the First Amendment. While Paramount originally made it clear they would defend themselves, they are now allegedly feeling the pressure to settle by the Federal Communications Commission if they plan to merge with Skydance Media. Most other cases filed by the President are regarding defamation.

    The group also reported that the Department of Defense has required NBC News, The New York Times, Politico, and National Public Radio to vacate their dedicated workspaces in the Pentagon on January 31. Their workspaces are now reassigned to right-wing media outlets, including One America News Network, New York Post, and Breitbart.

  • BIA Net ☛ Journalist Merdan Yanardağ acquitted in trial over assassination claim

    Following these claims, the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office launched an investigation under Article 217/A of the Turkish Penal Code for 'spreading misleading information.' Enacted in 2022, the article has drawn criticism from freedom of expression groups, who argue it is being used to suppress journalists.

  • RFERL ☛ 'Real Journalism Is Dying' -- Tajikistan's War On Independent Media

    In Dushanbe, Hakimova, her lawyer, and her relatives refuse to speak to the media. Sources with knowledge of the journalist's case say they cannot speak because they have been given a gagging order. Hakimova is currently under house arrest.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Atlantic ☛ What Is the Full Cost of Dismantling USAID?

    It took the Trump administration—and, really, Elon Musk—all of 10 days to dismantle USAID, the world’s single largest humanitarian donor. On January 24, a memo from the State Department ordered virtually every foreign-assistance program funded by the United States government to halt work for 90 days. Four days later, the State Department said that lifesaving humanitarian assistance should continue, and that special waivers could be granted to select programs. Nevertheless, soup kitchens stopped handing out food, clinics suspended care, and truckers paid through aid programs stopped delivering medicine.

  • Wired ☛ The Collapse of USAID Is Already Fueling Human Trafficking and Slavery at Scammer Compounds

    The funding cuts and pauses have immediately made it harder for people to safely escape scam compounds, according to half a dozen sources working to combat scams and trafficking. The cuts have also shrunk services that house and care for human trafficking victims and are limiting investigatory work into criminal groups. After just days of funding disruptions, sources say that the cuts have caused “chaos” for staff working to help survivors on a daily basis. Some organizations have already gone dark, and relief workers add that the withdrawal of services could embolden the criminal groups behind the fraud.

  • The Verge ☛ Google ends DEI hiring goals

    Here’s the full text of the memo, which is presented as a Q&A with Cicconi: [...]

  • The Washington Post ☛ Google will end a core DEI program and evaluate others

    The changes at Google come as a growing number of top companies pull back on their DEI programs, including Meta, Walmart and McDonald’s. Many of these changes had been underway in response to the Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision overturning affirmative action in university admissions and the dozens of lawsuits that followed. But the push has come into sharper focus since Trump, in the first days of his second term, issued a pair of sweeping executive orders aimed at quashing DEI in the federal government, the private sector and academia. The Wall Street Journal first reported Google’s memo.

  • European Commission ☛ European Union calls for end of Female Genital Mutilation

    Female genital mutilation (FGM) comprises all procedures involving partial or total removal of the female external genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons, as defined by the World Health Organization. It is estimated that 190,000 girls in 17 European countries alone are at risk of being mutilated while 600,000 women are living with the consequences of FGM in Europe. Every year at least 20,000 women and girls are coming to Europe from FGM-risk countries as asylum seekers.

  • 404 Media ☛ Workers at NASA Told to ‘Drop Everything’ to Scrub Mentions of Indigenous People, Women from Its Websites

    The directive, sent on January 22 and obtained by 404 Media, states:

    “Per NASA HQ direction, we are required to scrub mentions of the following terms from our public sites by 5pm ET today. This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request. Note that the list below is the list that exists this morning, but it may grow as the day goes on.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Did Elon Musk really ‘delete’ the IRS' free tax-filing tool?

    Despite the confusion generated from Musk’s post, the tool still is operating and available in 25 participating states this year. 18f’s website is still active, although the group’s account on X — the social media site owned by Musk and formerly known as Twitter — has been deleted.

    Launching Direct File was already an uphill battle in the U.S., where private companies like Intuit and H&R Block have spent years and millions of dollars in lobbying to ensure taxpayers use their products instead.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ DNS nameservers: Service performance and resilience

    How do we provision DNS nameservers today?

  • APNIC ☛ The DNS root server system gets surprisingly few queries

    Guest Post: Understanding the Root Server System.

  • The Register UK ☛ More than half a billion dollars burned by Starliner in 2024

    The loss went up significantly from the $288 million reach-forward loss for Commercial Crew that Boeing reported in 2023. That estimate, it said, was primarily due to expected costs associated with delaying the Crewed Flight Test (CFT) following problems that included parachute issues.

  • Techdirt ☛ Ontario Cancels, Then Restores $100 Million Starlink Contract Over Trump’s Ignorant Tariff Threats

    SpaceX’s Starlink service can be a big improvement for those completely out of range of broadband access. But contrary to what many Republicans and c-tier comedians turned conspiracy podcasters imply, Starlink is not magic. And it comes with a growing list of caveats. Including the increasingly unhinged behavior and far right political alliances of its conspiratorial CEO.

    The technology has been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. It’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable, and making it scale to meet real-world demand is many years away.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Scholarly Publishing Based On a Zero Trust Architecture

    In information security, momentum has grown behind a framework called a Zero-Trust Architecture (ZTA), defined by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) security team in 2020. This model developed out of years of discussions around network security dating back to at lest 2010. Recognizing that scholarly publishing is facing a range of security-related issues, during the STM Future Labs meeting in December, Chef alumnus David Smith made a comment that perhaps we should consider the entire STM publishing ecosystem as a zero-trust environment. Building on David’s suggestion, I thought it important to bring to reader’s attention, both what a zero-trust security framework is and how it might apply to scholarly communications processes.

    There are many elements to a zero trust architecture and there is no one correct or complete set of principles that define this entire framework since it grew out of NIST five years ago. Over the years it has been applied in a variety of contexts and has been built upon. The basics principles can be distilled to a few core elements, which include: [...]

  • Techdirt ☛ New York State Isn’t Enforcing Its New $15 Low Income Broadband Law, So Journalists Are Doing Their Job For Them

    As recently noted, New York State now has a law requiring that ISPs (with more than 20,000 subscribers) offer low-income state residents a 25 Mbps broadband tier for $15. Big Telecom didn’t much like that, but their efforts to kill the law, first passed in 2021, fell apart when the Supreme Court refused to hear their challenge.

    But despite several years of legal battles, New York officials don’t appear all that interested in actually enforcing the new law so far. As a result journalists like Jon Brodkin over at Ars Technica have been left with the job of reminding ISPs in the state they’re violating the law.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Apple rumored to kick off M5 chip production using TSMC performance-enhanced 3nm node

    Apple's M5 is the next-generation CPU for entry-level Macs as well as high-end iPad Pro tablets. The M5 family is projected to include M5, M5 Pro, M5 Max, and M5 Ultra processors, though Apple has not formally disclosed its plans concerning the lineup. Also, the company did not disclose any specifications of these units, though we expect them to feature new general-purpose cores, revamped GPUs, improved NPUs, and possibly enhanced memory subsystems.

  • The Register UK ☛ No Windows 11 hardware requirement workaround for you!

    For the past three years, Microsoft documented a way to run Windows 11 on PCs that lack Trusted Platform Module 2.0 hardware - but that workaround has now disappeared from its help page.

    Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a security technology that encrypts sensitive data such as encryption keys and helps to verify the authenticity of hardware and operating systems. The tech can be implemented with a discrete chip on a PC’s motherboard or integrated into a CPU.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• New York Times ☛ With China’s Antitrust Investigation Into Google, What’s at Stake?

  China said it had started an antitrust investigation of Google, which works with Chinese companies on smartphones and advertising outside the country.

• The Straits Times ☛ China says to probe Surveillance Giant Google over anti-monopoly violations

  Beijing also said it would add US fashion group PVH Corp and biotech giant Illumina to a list of “unreliable entities”.

• Tariff war escalates: China counters US with 15% duties, Surveillance Giant Google investigation

  The action came minutes after the blanket 10% additional US tariffs on Chinese goods came into effect.

• Tom's Hardware ☛ China reopens antitrust probe into Google, Nvidia, and defective chip maker Intel may be next

  China reopens investigations targeting Surveillance Giant Google and Nvidia to gain leverage in upcoming negotiations with U.S. President Convicted Felon. defective chip maker Intel could be next.

• New York Times ☛ How a Sale of Fentanylware (TikTok) Would Work and Who Might Buy It

  A new law says Fentanylware (TikTok) must be sold to a non-Chinese owner or face a ban in the United States. President Convicted Felon has thrown out a lot of options for a potential sale.

• Digital Music News ☛ Dictator Creates Sovereign Wealth Fund Ahead of Possible Fentanylware (TikTok) Deal

  President Convicted Felon signed a executive order directing the United States to begin developing a government-owned sovereign wealth fund. He says it could be used to profit from Fentanylware (TikTok) if it finds an American buyer.

• CBC ☛ 2025-01-24 [Older] Canada calls for review of 'business relationship' with Amazon after Quebec closures

• Patents

  • JUVE ☛ df-mp hones structure to focus entirely on litigation [Ed: Seems like marketing spam for a company looking to profit from trolls and pain. Very unethical, JUVE.]

    Twenty-five years after it was founded, the Munich IP outfit df-mp Dörries Frank-Molnia & Pohlman has restructured and further sharpened its profile in regard to patent monopoly litigation.

  • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ USPTO’s Rapid Policy Shifts Threaten Patent System Stability

    The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office faces unprecedented challenges as recent executive directives force dramatic changes to its operations. I think that folks across the spectrum from right to left would agree that current changemaking at the White House is following a brutalist approach that treats all federal employees and agencies as interchangeable parts rather than recognizing their unique roles, specialized expertise, and operational requirements. Rather, it is following the old adage that to make an omelet you must break  a few eggs.  The White House appears willing to sacrifice individual careers, institutional knowledge, and what Reagan Appointee Sandra Day O'Connor termed a "carefully crafted" systems, in pursuit of its broader agendas and the hope of later instilling federal workers who are more favorable to conservative control.  So far, USPTO Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart has been silent except to indicate that she is fully implementing White House orders and requests.

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ NMPA Hits Spotify With ‘Extensive Podcast Takedown Action’ Targeting Alleged Infringement — ‘We Will Not Stop Until the Platform Fixes Its Podcast Problem’

    After pledging an “all-encompassing” response to Spotify’s bundling craze, the NMPA has fired off north of 2,500 “detections of infringement” concerning on-platform podcasts.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Piracy Victories for Hollywood & Premier League Spark Progress Concerns

    In 2024 the Motion Picture Association and the Premier League celebrated notable anti-piracy wins in Vietnam. The collapse of the Fmovies empire and the conviction of a person linked to a major IPTV provider, marked rare progress in a difficult region. Yet, increasing doubts over what happens next in Vietnam has sparked concerns that not even the biggest wins offer guaranteed progression.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ KickAssAnime Flagged for 'Suspected Phishing' by Cloudflare

    The streaming portal, which relies on third-party hosted videos, is particularly popular in the United States.

    Over the years, rightsholders have attempted to pinpoint the site’s operators, presumably to shut it down. Just last summer, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) obtained a DMCA subpoena, requiring Cloudflare to provide all information the company had on file.

  • Tedium ☛ Why Is Warner Brothers Discovery Dumping Old Movies On YouTube?

    It is embracing a service where a popular type of video is basically watching someone else’s video and commenting on top of it. In some cases, it is likely that those reaction videos will get more views than these movies.

  • Press Gazette ☛ FT policy chief: Protecting copyright from AI ‘question of right and wrong’

    Matt Rogerson, director of global public policy and platform strategy at the FT and the former Guardian Media Group director of public policy, said watering down UK copyright law to help AI companies gather content to train large language models (LLMs) would be “a huge mistake”.

    The UK government is currently consulting on proposals to introduce an “opt-out” copyright regime for AI companies which would automatically permit the tech businesses to scrape publisher and creatives’ content from the web unless those rightsholders explicitly forbade it.

  • Techdirt ☛ YouTube Bad Takedowns Continue, Details Behind The Silicon Curtain As Always

    Were we to try to duplicate that brilliant bit of writing, and update it to include all of the bad takedowns we’ve written about in the intervening thirteen years, we might find ourselves having constructed a fifty-thousand word paragraph. The point is that the problem with these bad takedowns has continued and, if anything, has gotten worse. Add to that the general lack of transparency by Google in many of these cases and you have people reliant on the platform with channels that appear to survive at the pleasure of a techno-politburo operating behind a silicon curtain.

    Take what just happened to the operator of one channel, which was disappeared and then reinstated in days, all without a scintilla of detail as to what the hell happened.