Leftovers

• Tracy Durnell ☛ Choosing my pace by shaping my thinking spaces (Part 5)

  The physical and conceptual spaces where we learn and think comprise our intellectual environment: the places we read, listen or watch; and the places where we process what we’ve taken in, whether by talking about it or writing about it.

• Robert Birming ☛ Behind Our Blog

  In the '80s, the Swedish band Docent Död released their song "Solglasögon" (sunglasses). Freely translated into English, with "sunglasses" replaced by "blog," it would sound something like this: [...]

• Kevin Boone ☛ Fun with capital letters

  This article is about the use and misuse of capital letters in English writing. Like the use of apostrophes, there’s a level of disagreement on this topic that some writers might find surprising. Still, there are certain conventions and, if you want your writing to be taken seriously, it’s as well to know what they are.

• Adam Nowak ☛ My kind of person!

  The other day, someone close to me did something in a way that resonated with me, and without thinking, I said: “You’re my kind of person!”1 Later, as I was telling my wife Beata about it, she smiled and said, “Your kind of person, huh?" It made me laugh – we’re so in sync! And that’s when I realized: this would make a great blog post!

  So, what exactly makes someone “my kind of person”? Let me break it down: [...]

• Derek Sivers ☛ Why did I move to New Zealand?

  I was living in Singapore, feeling culturally adventurous, wanting to live everywhere, meet everyone, and get to know the whole world. But then I had a baby.

  At first I thought we’d raise him in Singapore, fluent in all the cultures of Asia. But after a few months, I realized how important it was to me that he have a real connection with nature. Feet in the river, hands in the mud, climbing trees, running in fields, at home in the forest. Great foundation for the soul. Maybe even a competitive advantage in a world where everyone else is dependent on devices.

• The Washington Post ☛ Opinion | Our obsession with this d-word is only growing

  When the news broke in late January that a Chinese start-up called DeepSeek had supposedly developed cutting-edge AI for a relative song, the story reverberated across the world’s boardrooms and social feeds. But in the corners of the [Internet] devoted to professional naming, a question quickly followed: Have we reached peak “deep”?

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ NASA Astronaut Taunts Elon Musk for Cowardice

    "What a lie," European Space Agency astronaut and former ISS commander Andreas Mogensen tweeted. "And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media."

    "You know as well as I do, that Butch and Suni are returning with Crew-9, as has been the plan since last September," Mogensen tweeted. "Even now, you are not sending up a rescue ship to bring them home. They are returning on the Dragon capsule that has been on ISS since last September."

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Over 3,800 VA medical researchers could face layoffs and cuts

    The layoffs come just as the VA celebrates a century of medical research aimed at veterans.

    The VA’s modern research program traces its origins to 1925, when the Veterans Bureau established its first research program and began publishing a monthly medical journal on common veteran health issues. The bureau was later replaced by the Veterans Administration in 1930 and, in 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill turning the Veterans Administration into a cabinet-level department.

  • India Times ☛ US FDA asks fired scientists to return, including some reviewing Elon Musk's Neuralink

    At least 11 employees working at the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health - which oversees medical device reviews - have received calls since Friday saying they could return to work on Monday, according to eight FDA sources who spoke under condition of anonymity. Some of the sources were told the FDA would continue making requests to return throughout the weekend.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Scientists map elusive liquid-liquid transition point using deep neural network

    Water is known for its anomalous properties—unlike most substances, water is densest in its liquid state, not solid. This leads to unique behaviors such as ice floating on water.

    One of several such unusual characteristics has prompted decades of research to understand water's unique behavior, particularly in the supercooled regime.

  • Wired ☛ The Saw-Toothed Function That Broke Calculus

    In 1872, Weierstrass published a function that threatened everything mathematicians thought they understood about calculus. He was met with indifference, anger, and fear, particularly from the mathematical giants of the French school of thought. Henri Poincaré condemned Weierstrass’ function as “an outrage against common sense.” Charles Hermite called it a “deplorable evil.”

    To understand why Weierstrass’ result was so unnerving, it helps to first understand two of the most fundamental concepts in calculus: continuity and differentiability.

  • Axios ☛ Cuts draining federal government of technical expertise

    Employee buyouts, terminations and uncertainty at multiple federal agencies are sparking warnings about an erosion of scientific and technical expertise at a crucial moment.

    Why it matters: No one country now dominates in every scientific field. The U.S. is in a tight competition with China for science and tech leadership as innovation amasses more economic value and geopolitical tensions rise.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-02-19 [Older] Turkey to Export 15,000 Tonnes of Eggs to US Amid Bird Flu Disruptions

  • BIA Net ☛ 2025-02-18 [Older] Dozens dead in Turkey due to counterfeit alcohol as high taxes drive illicit production

  • US stocks are set to open higher. Starbucks is to cut 1100 corporate jobs worldwide

    Major US indices are set to open higher.

  • Starbucks Lays Off 1,100 Non-Retail Workers

    Starbucks is joining the mass layoff herd: The retail giant is cutting 1,100 corporate workers.

    The number amounts to 6.9% of the multinational coffee chain’s non-retail staff. Starbucks cites slow sales as part of the reasoning. The company employs around 345,000 hourly global retail workers, none of whom were impacted.

    In addition to the 1,100 job losses, the company will be eliminating hundreds of open but unfilled positions, in yet another bad sign for the labor market.

  • Express And Star ☛ Starbucks lays off 1,100 corporate employees as coffee chain streamlines

    Starbucks plans to lay off 1,100 corporate employees globally as new chairman and CEO Brian Niccol streamlines operations.

    In a letter to employees released on Monday, Mr Niccol said the company will inform employees who are being laid off by midday Tuesday.

  • Crisis at Starbucks? 1,100 Corporate Layoffs Amid Struggles in U.S. and China

    Starbucks will lay off 1,100 corporate employees worldwide. The company wants to simplify its structure and work faster. Chairman and CEO Brian Niccol shared this in a letter to employees on Monday.

    Employees affected by the layoffs will get notifications by Tuesday afternoon. Starbucks will also cut several hundred unfilled positions. This helps the company operate more smoothly.

  • RFK Jr.’s MAHA Commission: A battle plan to dismantle federal science and health

    Three months ago, after Donald Trump had won the 2024 election—and even before he had chosen longtime antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as his nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS)—I characterized RFK Jr. as an “extinction-level threat to federal public health and science-based health policy.” The reason was simple. Last summer, RFK Jr. had abandoned his quixotic and doomed campaign for President as an independent and bent the knee to Donald Trump. As a result, he was rewarded with a promise to be, in essence, Trump’s health policy czar and to have a prominent role in health policy in his administration if he won. During the campaign, RFK Jr. even came up with a slogan that riffed on the long familiar Trump slogan “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) by changing it to “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA). Cleverly, he said nothing at all about vaccines in his “MAHA manifesto“—an absence that his antivax minions noticed right away and were dismayed by—instead planning to “reform” the FDA, emphasize healthy food (depending on your definition), and legalize psychedelics and stem cell clinics. A couple of weeks after the election, President-Elect Trump nominated RFK Jr. for HHS, a nomination that I referred to as a “catastrophe for public health and medical research.”

• Proprietary

  • Security Week ☛ Kaspersky Banned on Australian Government Systems

    Australian government entities have been banned from using products and services of Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Apple update turns AirPods Pro into hearing aids

    A software update is now available in the UK that allows people to test their hearing and then have the earphones amplify the sounds they might not be able to hear.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Security researcher finds vulnerability in [Internet]-connected bed, could allow access to all devices on network

    Cybersecurity researcher Dylan Ayrey of Truffle Security has shared a detailed blog post highlighting his experience with Eight Sleep smart beds since his discovery of an exposed AWS key inside of its firmware, prompting him to deeply investigate its security issues and find ways to alleviate them. Besides the AWS key problem, he also discovered a backdoor allowing SSH (Secure Shell) backdoor access and full arbitrary code execution capabilities, making Eight Sleep beds a disastrously unsafe device to keep on a home network for not just bed surveillance concerns, but the security of all devices involved.

  • John Gruber ☛ Daring Fireball: Linus Sebastian's Thoughts After Switching to an iPhone for 30 Days

    I’ve been meaning, since it came out in December, to link to this video from Linus Sebastian of “Linus Tech Tips” fame, and with the iPhone 16e dropping this week, now seems like a good time. It’s a common genre that dates back decades before YouTube was even a thing: longtime user of platform X switches to rival platform Y for a few weeks, and then explains what they liked, what they didn’t, what confused them, etc. This sort of thing always raises hackles because there’s a natural human tendency to get tribal — if not downright religious — about one’s platforms of choice. And Sebastian’s intro — playing to YouTube’s algorithm — frames it in a way that makes it seem like his overall take on iOS is going to be inflammatory. Right in the first 30 seconds of the 20-minute video, he says: [...]

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Techdirt ☛ Buzzfeed CEO Aims To Solve AI Slop Problem With More AI Slop

      You might recall Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti as the guy who gutted Buzzfeed's talented news division and fired oodles of human beings back in 2023. [...] Peretti complains about something he calls SNARF, an acronym for “stakes, novelty, anger, retention, fear,” he says companies like Meta and TikTok have engaged in to grab consumer attention. Peretti’s solution to all of this? To build a new social media platform called BF Island he says will “allow users to use AI to create and share content around their interests.”

    • US News And World Report ☛ Google's AI Previews Erode the Internet, US Edtech Company Says in Lawsuit

      Alphabet's Google internet search engine is eroding demand for original content and undermining publishers' ability to compete with its artificial intelligence-generated overviews, a U.S. educational technology company said in a lawsuit filed on Monday.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Microsoft plays down AI bubble, cancels data center leases

      By this measure, AI has yet to actually do a thing for the world economy.

      On that supply side, Nadella talked up “hyperscalers” — where you build AI data centers as fast as possible so you can rent GPUs. He’s a big fan! AI can surely fill them all!

      There’s one problem there — Microsoft is cutting back on data centers.

    • Drew Breunig ☛ Building an Easier to Use FFmpeg With LLMs | Drew Breunig

      But my favorite example of this use case is writing FFmpeg incantations.

      For the unfamiliar, FFmpeg is a command-line tool for converting video and audio files. It is ridiculously powerful and ridiculously complex. Most people I know use Google as the primary interface for FFmpeg: search for the job to be done, copy-and-paste the command. This pattern quickly migrated to ChatGPT and Claude, which proved excellent at FFmpeg incantations.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ More Research Showing AI Breaking the Rules - Schneier on Security

      These researchers had LLMs play chess against better opponents. When they couldn’t win, they sometimes resorted to cheating.

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ Advice for prompting reasoning models

      Slightly less intuitively, you can think of regular models as next-token-predictors, and reasoning models as something more like theorem-provers. If you give regular models a constraint, they often struggle to meet it. You can try this by giving models an arbitrary response-format rule, such as the need to respond with a prime number of words. Reasoning models will try much, much harder to meet any constraints you give them. What that means in practice is that they will continue “thinking” (i.e. generating tokens) until they have an answer that meets your constraints (or until some predetermined limit is hit and they give up).

  • Social Control Media

    • VOA News ☛ Australia fines Telegram for delay in answering child abuse, terror questions

      The eSafety Commission in March 2024 sought responses from social media platforms YouTube, X and Facebook to Telegram and Reddit, and blamed them for not doing enough to stop extremists from using live-streaming features, algorithms and recommendation systems to recruit users.

• Security

  • CISA

    • CISA ☛ 2025-02-21 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2025-02-20 [Older] CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2025-02-20 [Older] CISA Releases Eight Industrial Control Systems Advisories

    • CISA ☛ 2025-02-20 [Older] CISA Releases Seven Industrial Control Systems Advisories

    • CISA ☛ 2025-02-20 [Older] ABB ASPECT-Enterprise, NEXUS, and MATRIX Series

    • CISA ☛ 2025-02-20 [Older] ABB FLXEON Controllers

    • CISA ☛ 2025-02-20 [Older] Carrier Block Load

    • CISA ☛ 2025-02-20 [Older] Siemens SiPass Integrated

    • CISA ☛ 2025-02-20 [Older] Elseta Vinci Protocol Analyzer

    • CISA ☛ 2025-02-19 [Older] CISA and Partners Release Advisory on Ghost (Cring) Ransomware

    • CISA ☛ 2025-02-18 [Older] CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2025-02-18 [Older] CISA Releases Two Industrial Control Systems Advisories

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • 404 Media ☛ Former Heritage Foundation Staffer Orders Treasury Employees to Respond to Elon Musk’s Email

      Sources at the Treasury Department told 404 Media that they have not previously received any emails from John W. York, that they are not sure what his job is or whether he actually works for the Treasury Department, and that giving descriptive, substantial rundowns of their work tasks without giving “non-public” or sensitive information is not an easy task.

    • Futurism ☛ Woman Whose Last Name Is "Null" Keeps Running Into Trouble With Computer Systems

      To be clear, though, it's a decreasingly prevalent — but still surprisingly common — issue. Nowadays, there's no shortage of software out there that's totally null-free. But try getting everybody to upgrade their computer systems.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • 2025-02-18 [Older] The Myth of Jurisdictional Privacy

    • TechCrunch ☛ 2025-02-18 [Older] As US newspaper outages drag on, Lee Enterprises blames cyberattack for encrypting critical systems

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Hijackings are outpacing vehicle theft in South Africa - and tech is to blame

      “Hijacking, while terrifying to the victim, can be a highly efficient crime for perpetrators, which has led to its rising occurrence. As vehicle owners become more aware of early-warning tools and free tracking apps, it is becoming increasingly difficult for criminals to steal a vehicle without detection,” said Tracker chief operating officer Duma Ngcobo in a statement on Monday. “A hijacking, however, allows criminals immediate access to the vehicle and its contents, without needing to override tracking technology.”

      According to Tracker’s findings, a personal vehicle is just as likely to get stolen as it is to get highjacked. But when it comes to business vehicles, the chances of a hijacking are on average double that of theft.

    • The Register UK ☛ All the alternative iApps needed to maintain E2EE

      Apple customers, privacy advocates, and security sleuths have now had the weekend to stew over the news of the iGadget maker's decision to bend to the UK government and disable its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature.

      It comes in lieu of installing a fully fledged backdoor, as was reportedly requested by the Home Office just weeks earlier. It also now means Apple users can no longer enjoy the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) protection from which they and their iCloud data previously benefited.

  • Confidentiality

    • 2025-02-19 [Older] Hundreds of Dutch medical records bought for pocket change at flea market

    • 2025-02-20 [Older] Privilege Under Pressure: The Shifting Data Breach Investigation Landscape

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ The Case for Encryption

      Spying on private messages has long been on the security services’ wish list. In swapping a counter-terrorism argument for one of stopping child sexual abuse material (CSAM), they’ve made headway in their mission. If abusers can flaunt the law by using end-to-end encryption, it follows that this technology enables one of the most heinous crimes in society. A compelling argument in its simplicity, but is that the full story?

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-02-18 [Older] Calls grow for Congo to resolve conflict through dialogue

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-02-19 [Older] Sudan: At least 200 killed in paramilitary's three-day assault

  • 2025-02-19 [Older] Cyberespionage groups or cybercriminals? UAV and C-UAV vendors and buyers are increasingly targeted

  • RFERL ☛ Analysis: Trump Rips Up Longstanding Rulebook Of U.S.-Russia Relations

    "After Donald Trump's statements in the last week, it is clear that the Americans are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe," he said in televised remarks following his party's win in parliamentary elections on February 23.

    "I'm very curious to see how we head toward the NATO summit at the end of June -- whether we will still be talking about NATO in its current form or whether we will have to establish an independent European defense capability much more quickly," he added.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Elon's Email Demand Is Being Met With 'Very Rude' Flood of Spam

    Musk’s latest attempt to gut the federal workforce through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) isn’t going so well — and it has left his detractors desperate to make his life harder by sending spam emails.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Federal judge blocks DOGE [sic] access to sensitive Education Department, OPM information

    A federal judge on Monday blocked the Department [sic] of Government Efficiency’s access to personally identifiable information (PII) at the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management.

  • Wired ☛ DOGE [sic] Is Inside the National Institutes of Health’s Finance System

    Government records reviewed by WIRED show that the four people associated with DOGE [sic] have email addresses linking them to the NIH, the federal agency for health research in the US. Internal documents reviewed by WIRED show that three of these employees are employed in the department that controls the NIH’s central electronic business system, which includes finance, budget, procurement, a property-management system, and a grant-tracking system.

  • RFA ☛ Taiwan bans academic exchanges with 3 Chinese universities amid security concerns

    But on Thursday, Taiwan banned its universities from working with China’s Jinan University in the city of Guangzhou, Huaqiao University in Xiamen and Quanzhou, and Beijing Chinese Language and Culture College, citing their ties with the United Front Work Department.

    “Chinese universities affiliated with the United Front Work Department serve a political purpose rather than a purely academic one,” said Taiwan’s Minister of Education Cheng Ying-yao.

  • The Atlantic ☛ One Word Describes Trump

    There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. Understanding patrimonialism is essential to defeating it. In particular, it has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack.

  • Axios ☛ Trump's loyalty-first FBI: Dan Bongino named deputy

    Why it matters: With loyalist Kash Patel confirmed as FBI director, the bureau can function effectively as Trump's private security force.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Dissenter ☛ Dissenter Weekly: Trump Vs. US Whistleblower Agency

  • RFERL ☛ Exclusive: Russian Defector Leaks Files Revealing Shocking Scale of War Casualties

    His hospitalization for more than a month at the most prestigious facility in Russia's sprawling military medical complex is among the records in a massive nationwide Defense Ministry database of nearly 166,000 soldiers that RFE/RL obtained from a Russian defector.

    The database includes hospitalization records for senior generals down to rank-and-file privates -- along with private mercenaries from at least 10 countries -- beginning in February 2022 until mid-June 2024, meaning it does not reflect that last eight months of fighting, some of the war’s bloodiest.

• Environment

  • The Register UK ☛ The ugliest global-warming chart you'll ever need to see

    It's getting ugly out there. According to the rapidly advancing field of attribution science, global warming and its evil twin climate change are rapidly exacerbating natural weather cycles. What's even uglier is the unarguable fact that not only is the globe getting warmer, it's also getting warmer faster.

    How much faster? We'll get to that.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-02-18 [Older] Continental: German auto parts giant to slash thousands of jobs

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-02-19 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini tariffs would up US prices for German cars

    • EcoWatch ☛ Canada to Build One of the Largest Urban Solar Power Plant Projects in North America

      The 325 megawatt (MW) Saamis Solar Park proposal was recently sold to Medicine Hat, as Mother Jones reported. The project, developed by DP Energy, is slated for a brownfield site with otherwise limited development potential, as it contains a capped phosphogypsum stack.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ World’s largest data center gets go-ahead from Korean govt — facility to require 3 GW of power

      Investment firm Stock Farm Road (SFR) just signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with South Jeolla Province Governor Kom Young-rok to build the largest data center in the world. The facility will be located in the southwest corner of South Korea with a projected cost of about $35 billion and a capacity of 3 GW, according to a report by Interesting Engineering. This would dwarf other data centers being built around the world, like Portugal’s Sines Data Center (1.2 GW) and Oracle’s 1 GW AI data center. This could potentially even be bigger than Elon Musk’s plan to put a million GPUs in his Colossus supercluster.

    • The Korea Times ☛ 1 in 3 foreign visitors in Korea use railway service in 2024: data

      A total of 5.54 million foreigners used such services last year, sharply up from 3.44 million in 2023, according to Korea Railroad Corp. (KORAIL).

      Given that 16.37 million foreigners visited Korea in 2024, about one in three of them used the country's rail transport services.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ First responders are turning to specialized training to fight EV fires

      An EV battery is essentially a tightly packed array of thousands of cells, each of which ranges from approximately the size and shape of an AA battery to the size of a legal envelope, depending on the battery model. If a single cell gets damaged–such as by getting crushed, overcharged, or waterlogged–that cell can heat uncontrollably in a process called thermal runaway. It will release so much heat and flammable gas that it generates its own fire, which spreads to the other cells.

      Older lithium-ion battery packs exploded “like a pipe bomb” when that happened, Durham says; today’s battery packs have release valves so that during thermal runaway they avoid an explosion by instead spewing flames in what Durham describes as “essentially a blowtorch.” The location of an EV’s battery—underneath the car, between its axles, within a protective case—complicates things further. The batteries are much safer from collision damage than they would be under the hood, but they are also much harder to reach and douse if they ignite.

      The result? Fires such as one at an Illinois Rivian plant in 2024, where one EV caught fire and approximately 50 cars parked nearby ended up burning. Or one in Hollywood, Florida, in 2023, where a Tesla was accidentally driven off a dock and burst into flames even though it was underwater.

    • Maine Morning Star ☛ Proponents moving full steam ahead with passenger rail expansion efforts in Maine

      An emergency proposal from Rep. Tavis Hasenfus (D-Readfield), LD 487, is seen as the first step in the expansion. It seeks to direct the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority to apply for federal funding to identify a potential passenger rail corridor from Portland through Auburn, Lewiston, Waterville, Bangor and ending in Orono. The study could also consider other appropriate station locations.

      The bill is co-sponsored by Sen. Joe Baldacci (D-Penobscot), who sponsored the similar proposal that failed last session. Though it wasn’t recommended by a majority of the Legislature’s Transportation Committee and failed in the House, that bill did pass in the Senate.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Microsoft scraps some data center leases as Apple, Alibaba double down on AI

      Microsoft’s lease cancellations were detailed on Friday in a note from TD Cowen analysts. According to Bloomberg, the investment bank believes that Microsoft has voided contracts for data centers with about 200 megawatts in combined capacity. One megawatt corresponds to the electricity usage of several hundred households.

      The software and cloud giant reportedly told suppliers that it’s canceling the contracts on account of delays in facility construction and power delivery. According to Bloomberg, Meta Platforms Inc. once used the same arguments as part of a push to reduce capital expenses.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-02-19 [Older] Why do whales and dolphins strand?

• Finance

  • Forbes ☛ DOGE Layoffs Pose ‘Growing’ Risk To U.S. Economy And Markets, Says Apollo Economist

    66.5%. That’s the proportion of contract workers comprising the broader federal workforce which includes civil, military and postal workers, according to Brookings Institution analysis of data from 2023’s fiscal year. In 2002, contractors made up only 50.7% of the federal workforce.

  • The human cost of insidious tech layoffs

    Workforce reductions have metastasized into a grim epidemic, with the list of tech layoffs in 2025 swelling by the day; Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, Blue Origin, Sophos and Amazon cutting thousands of jobs within weeks of the new year. These IT job cuts in 2025 signal more than a mere layoff trend in tech; it’s telling of a callous corporate culture that now deems human workers expendable in comparison to artificial intelligence (AI). The biggest tech layoffs in 2025 are not abstract statistics. These are gut-wrenching realities of thousands of people now. In today’s story, we lay bare the human cost of tech layoffs in 2025, a stark indictment of an industry that preaches innovation.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-02-19 [Older] Vietnam approves bold reforms to streamline ministries

  • Techdirt ☛ John Oliver’s Content Moderation Episode Isn’t Just Funny — It’s Absolutely Accurate

    It’s worth watching, if only to see someone explain in 30 minutes what we’ve been trying to hammer home for years. (And no, I’m not just saying that because he mentions Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem — though that certainly doesn’t hurt.)

    The segment hits on several key points: [...]

  • The Register UK ☛ Apple promises to spend $500B, hire 20K over next 4 years

    The commitment, announced Monday, comes as the White House pushes through wave after wave of new tariffs on everything from Chinese imports to key commodities including foreign-made steel and aluminum. The administration has also signaled steep import taxes on foreign-made semiconductors. These levies are likely to be passed onto American end buyers.

  • Apple Inc ☛ Apple will spend more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years

    Teams and facilities to expand in Michigan, Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Iowa, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington

  • India Times ☛ Meta lays off 3,600 workers—Then hands execs up to 200% in bonuses

    Meta has increased executive bonuses to 200% of their base salary while laying off 3,600 employees, citing “low performance.” The decision, justified as an alignment with industry standards, has triggered backlash online. Many accuse Meta of prioritising top executives over workers. Former employees claim layoffs were more about cost-cutting than performance. While some acknowledge the pay hike as standard practice, the timing has raised serious ethical concerns about Meta’s treatment of its workforce.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Pro Publica ☛ Facebook Boosts Viral Content as It Drops Fact-Checking

      Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, users spread a false claim on Facebook that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was paying a bounty for reports of undocumented people.

      “BREAKING — ICE is allegedly offering $750 per illegal immigrant that you turn in through their tip form,” read a post on a page called NO Filter Seeking Truth, adding, “Cash in folks.”

    • Pro Publica ☛ The Trump Administration Keeps Citing an Untrue Stat as It Targets Federal Workers

    • Vox ☛ Conspiracy theories are driving Trump administration policy

      The embrace of conspiracy theories isn’t new, but now that Trump is back in power, there is a direct pipeline between online conspiracy theories and government policy — and in some cases, it’s happening at breathtaking speed.

      At times, the administration takes a kernel of truth and then distorts it wildly. At others, it’s entirely unclear where the theories are coming from. Here are four examples of this government by conspiracy theory: [...]

    • The Independent UK ☛ Elon Musk’s Grok AI was specifically instructed not to say he spread misinformation

      Grok, the AI assistant made by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm, was specifically told not to use sources that said he was responsible for spreading misinformation.

      There were specific rules written into Grok’s system prompt – the instructions that it is given to decide how it will reply to questions – that told it not to use “sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation”, users found.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • BIA Net ☛ 2025-02-20 [Older] Leaders of Turkey's largest business group detained after sharp criticism of government

  • Torrent Freak ☛ VPN Providers Consider Exiting France Over 'Dangerous' Blocking Demands

    In France, rightsholders have taken legal action to compel large VPN providers to support their pirate site blocking program. The aim is to reinforce existing blocking measures, but VPN providers see this as a dangerous move, leading to potential security issues and overblocking. As a result, some are considering leaving France altogether if push comes to shove.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ South Africa hits Google with R500-million demand for news media

    And its proposals don’t stop at Google: the commission also has X, Meta Platforms and other tech and social media companies in its sights. It’s also warned that if the companies targeted in its findings don’t cooperate on the proposed remedies, it may seek a 5-10% levy on the tech giants to compensate the local media industry.

    The commission said it wants Meta to stop de-prioritising news on Facebook “to restore referral traffic to the media from its peak with at least a 100% increase in referral traffic”. Elon Musk’s X and Meta must also “cease de-prioritising news with links in the user feed”. These demands set up the commission for a big fight with these global tech giants, which have pushed back against such proposals in other jurisdictions.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Papers Please ☛ Supreme Court reinstates new requirement for IDs and mug shots of corporate principals

    The US Supreme Court has stayed the nationwide injunction against enforcement of a Federal law requiring owners or principals of all corporations to submit copies of ID documents, including photos, to the  Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the US Department of the Treasury.

    The Supreme Court’s ruling leaves business owners and officers, and FinCEN, scrambling to figure out what to do — at a moment when how the Federal government might use personal information in ways that weren’t anticipated when it was collected is a hot topic.

    The original deadline for filing of Beneficial Owner InformatIon (BOI) with FINCEN was to be January 1, 2025. But by then, multiple lawsuits against the Corporate Transparency Act had been filed, and the judge in one of those caseS had issued a nationwide injunction against enforcement of the law while the lawsuits were pending.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ This Fired Federal Worker Wants His Colleagues to Fight DOGE [sic]

    Two Fridays ago, roughly fifty people were fired from the department, which used to be known as the US Digital Service (USDS) and was, prior to Donald Trump’s inauguration, responsible for working on government-related tech projects: making sure government websites were working well and safe from hackers, for instance. In one case, USDS streamlined and modernized the Social Security Administration’s digital presence to the tune of $285 million worth of taxpayer savings.

    One of those fired USDS workers was Jonathan Kamens, a cybersecurity specialist who had worked within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) on its digital infrastructure, and who wants to use his story to raise the alarm among the public and galvanize federal workers into resisting DOGE [sic]. Kamens spoke to Jacobin magazine’s Branko Marcetic last week.

  • 404 Media ☛ All 50 States Have Now Introduced Right to Repair Legislation

    Right to repair legislation has now been introduced in all 50 states, a milestone that, despite not all passing, shows the power of the grassroots political movement. Thursday, Wisconsin became the final state in the country to introduce a right to repair bill.

    So far, right to repair laws have been passed in Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon. Another 20 states are formally considering right to repair bills during this current legislative session. The rest have previously introduced bills that have not passed; so far we have seen that many states take several years to move a given right to repair bill through the legislative process.

  • Troy Patterson ☛ History Learnings

    I recently read an article by Dan Sinker entitled “What Felt Impossible Became Possible“. This is a good article to remind us of the history of the United States, ok, a portion of the history of the United States.

    Dan Sinker is writing about the KKK in the 1920’s. Most people do not realize how prevalent the KKK was.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Black History: 65 years ago, sit-ins were born. Has their time come again?

    This February marks the 65th anniversary of the sit-in movement, which started in Greensboro, North Carolina. Four students from a historically Black university, North Carolina A&T, sat at a Woolworth’s counter and did not move until the store closed.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Ars Technica ☛ ISPs fear wave of state laws after New York’s $15 broadband mandate

    We asked AT&T if it still believes that it would be impossible to comply with the zero-rating rule only in California. We also asked AT&T if it is complying with all of the requirements in the California net neutrality law throughout the US since it argued that the Internet does not recognize state borders. AT&T declined to answer our questions, and a spokesperson said that "most of the things you asked about are industry-wide issues not specific to AT&T."

    "AT&T's claims were and continue to be false," Stanford Law School professor Barbara van Schewick, a prominent net neutrality supporter, told Ars. Van Schewick is also director of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society.

  • Stanford University ☛ ISPs fear wave of state laws after New York’s $15 broadband mandate

    The California net neutrality law is the only state-level law that matches all of the protections in the FCC rules that are no longer enforced, van Schewick said. But contrary to AT&T's claims, she says it's possible for ISPs to comply in California and implement other policies in different states.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Senator Deb Fischer Named Chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Broadband - Inside Towers

    Senator Deb Fischer (R-NE) has been appointed as the new Chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband, a legislative body overseeing U.S. telecommunications policy. The Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband plays a critical role in shaping policies that impact the deployment, regulation, and expansion of broadband infrastructure across the nation. The committee’s work directly influences rural connectivity, broadband accessibility, spectrum policy, and emerging telecom technologies. In her new role, she is expected to push for broadband expansion initiatives that ensure high-speed [Internet] reaches every American, regardless of geography.

  • India Times ☛ US could cut Ukraine's access to Starlink [Internet] services over minerals, say sources

    Ukraine's continued access to SpaceX-owned Starlink was brought up in discussions between US and Ukrainian officials after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy turned down an initial proposal from US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the sources said.

    Starlink provides crucial [Internet] connectivity to war-torn Ukraine and its military.

  • Michigan News ☛ Washtenaw County could be first in Michigan with 100% high-speed [Internet] coverage - mlive.com

    Some received federal or state funding, and then the county filled in some gaps by using American Rescue Plan Act relief funds to make it more feasible for providers to build out fiber optic cable [Internet] to more homes and businesses.

  • Techdirt ☛ ARPA Is Quietly Funding Cheap ($50-$65 A Month) Community-Owned Gigabit Fiber Access To Long Neglected Neighborhoods

    The 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) continues to quietly help fund a number of extremely popular community-owned, open access fiber deployments that are challenging entrenched U.S. monopoly power, and driving super cheap, community-owned and operated fiber networks into long neglected towns.

  • The Register UK ☛ Internet Society wants to improve terrestrial fibre maps

    The Internet Society wants to help improve maps that depict terrestrial optic fibre networks by having regulators and carriers alike promote and adopt the Open Fibre Data Standard it helped to create.

    Internet Society senior director Steve Song on Monday explained that the standard was developed partly in response to his efforts to map Africa’s terrestrial fibre networks.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ As TikTok's Discovery Power Fades, Chartmetric Delivers a More Sophisticated 'Talent Search Tool'

    Those stats aren’t shocking for data players like Chartmetric. The company quickly realized that music executives were shifting away from TikTok signing derbies and more towards sophisticated data analytics to identify the next generation of chart toppers. After nearly two years of intensive research, the company recently launched a predictive talent search tool, promising to give companies an edge in the race to identify tomorrow’s superstars.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

    Windows 11 24H2 has been available to customers for months, yet Microsoft felt compelled in its February update to confirm that builders, specifically, must use Intel's 11th-generation or later silicon when building brand new PCs to run its most recent OS iteration.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• India Times ☛ US demands EU antitrust chief clarify rules reining in Big Tech

  The request came two days after US President Donald Trump signed a memorandum warning that his administration would scrutinise the EU's Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act "that dictate how American companies interact with consumers in the European Union".

  The Digital Markets Act sets out a list of dos and don'ts for Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Booking.com, ByteDance, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, aimed at securing a level playing field and giving consumers more choices.

• Patents

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ Sheinbaum prioritizes USMCA as tariffs loom: Monday recap

• Copyrights

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-02-17 [Older] [Guest post] The UK’s AI and copyright consultation – will data protection law render any commercial TDM exception ineffective?

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Emulation Console Update Bakes in Instant Free [Pirated] Game Downloads

    The RGXX range of handheld games consoles are seen by many as the perfect way to dip an initial toe in the emulation waters. Manufactured by Anbernic in China, devices often arrive with a Micro SD card loaded with more games than can be reasonably played in a lifetime. Whether that will continue is unclear but with a new firmware update, retro games can be browsed on-screen, downloaded for free straight to devices, and then installed in seconds.

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-02-18 [Older] A single piece of US copyright: Are AI-generated images original artistic works or banal compilations?

  • Press Gazette ☛ How publishers should fight back against the greatest heist in history

    This is not just about news publishers being robbed. Content creators across all industries are being exploited. Journalists, musicians, poets, artists, authors, filmmakers, comedians, and short-form video creators – no one is immune. When tech companies scrape content from the web, they’re taking from creators who have put in years of work to perfect their craft. Whether it’s a musician’s melody, a filmmaker’s script, or a comedian’s punchline, big tech companies make their AI models smarter by stealing what we’ve made. They don’t have consent, nor do they compensate the content owner, and they’re not held accountable.

    This isn’t just about tech companies collecting ‘public content’, this is not about ‘fair use’, or a ‘data scraping’ issue. This is theft of intellectual [sic] property [sic] on a massive scale.

    And there is added hypocrisy: these companies profit from our work, refuse to give us fair compensation and yet they claim it is unlawful when an AI competitor copies their models.

  • 404 Media ☛ A Slop Publisher Sold a Ripoff of My Book on Amazon

    Curious whether this product was an AI-generated rip-off of my work, I bought a copy. Flicking through the digital pages, the summary, rather expectedly, condensed each of my chapters into a few page overview. Details I had gone to incredible lengths to get, including flying around the world to meet criminals face-to-face, or sneaking into a law enforcement conference, or slowly building trust with understandably scared sources was plopped into this new book with little context on how they got there or why they mattered.

  • Broadband TV News LLP ☛ Cloudflare takes legal action over LaLiga’s “disproportionate blocking efforts”

    Cloudflare called the effort misguided and said LaLiga had left it with no other option than to pursue the legal action. “LaLiga secured this blocking order without notifying cloud providers, while concealing from the court the predictable harm to third parties and the public good. LaLiga’s actions pose a clear threat to the open Internet. Cloudflare has now filed a legal action to challenge the order and establish that LaLiga’s disproportionate blocking efforts are unlawful.

    “Instead of addressing Spanish users’ concerns about excessive content blocking, LaLiga has attempted to deflect with baseless claims against Cloudflare while doubling down on its unlawful blocking practices. Cloudflare hopes this legal action helps prevent future indiscriminate blocking measures, and makes it clear that rightsholders cannot prioritise their commercial interests over the fundamental right of millions of consumers to access the open Internet.”