Leftovers

• Nolen Royalty ☛ Smile Like Zuck

  Humans smile when they’re happy, but sometimes they also smile when they’re uncomfortable!

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Incoming NASA Administrator Brags That He Has No Idea What's Going On

    But what if there's some truth to those rumors? Does Isaacman really not know what's going on, despite being widely expected to take control of NASA? If there's one person who should arguably be clued into any upcoming, potentially existential cuts to NASA's budget, it should be him.

    "This is not a good sign," Keith Cowing, founder of an unofficial NASA advocacy group called NASA Watch, responded. "It would seem by virtue of this tweet that [Isaacman] has not been following the news that closely — even if he is still a nominee."

  • Ars Technica ☛ White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent - Ars Technica

    This includes NASA. As expected, the president's plan for the space agency includes some significant shakeups, including a desire to move elements of NASA headquarters to field centers around the country. However, in perhaps the most drastic change, the White House seeks to massively cut funding for science programs at the space agency.

    Multiple people familiar with the White House proposal said cuts to NASA's "Science Mission Directorate" could be as high as 50 percent. These sources emphasized that no decisions are final, and there are some scenarios in which the cuts to NASA's science programs would be less. But the intent is to slash science.

  • Computers Are Bad ☛ 2025-03-10 troposcatter

    This joint effort had to rise to many challenges. Radar had earned its place as a revolutionary military technology during the Second World War, but despite the many radar systems that had been fielded, engineer's theoretical understanding of radar and RF propagation were pretty weak. I have written here before about over-the-horizon radar, the pursuit of which significantly improved our scientific understanding of radio propagation in the atmosphere... often by experiment, rather than model. A similar progression in RF physics would also benefit radar early warning in another way: communications.

• Hardware

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-03-03 [Older] Servers Used in Singapore Fraud Case May Contain Nvidia Chips, Minister Says

  • PC World ☛ PC insiders weigh in on tariffs: 'Expect pain at the cash register.'

    If you haven’t been paying attention to the news, heads up—prices for tech gear are shooting up. Tariffs are now in effect for goods imported from China, and they’ve doubled since their original announcement. The U.S. government is now imposing an additional 20 percent tax, instead of 10 percent.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-05 [Older] Zimbabwe battles aid shortages as drought bites

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-06 [Older] Long COVID: Have US scientists found a cure?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-06 [Older] Health care workers across Germany go on strike

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ 2025-03-02 [Older] “Close the Gap” or Political Band-Aid? South Africa’s HIV/AIDS Response

  • Futurism ☛ Side Effects of Ketamine Could Explain a Lot About Elon Musk's Behavior

    Along with those unsettling side effects, the psychopharmacology researcher and her team also found that regular users scored very high on delusional thinking scales and seemed to be convinced that they were receiving secret messages sent to them alone. Sounds kind of familiar, right?

    Delusions of grandeur are not, obviously, the sole provenance of ketamine users, and there's little doubt Musk had an outsized opinion of himself long before he discovered "Special K." But his behavior in recent years has grown more and more erratic, especially in the since his purchase of Twitter, in ways that seem to track with those descriptions of frequent ketamine use side effects.

  • Dr molly tov ☛ this relationship may die a natural death

    Since ditching social media, my attention span has grown back - and it continues to improve. I went from barely surviving 1,500-word articles to actually enjoying 15,000-word articles. Ten or twenty pages of the World Book Encyclopedia now go by without my even noticing (the limiting factor is now the arthritis in my hands rather than my attention span). I can watch entire television shows again without jonesing for The Scroll. It's great.

• Proprietary

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-03-01 [Older] Thousands Report Outage Affecting Microsoft Services Like Outlook

  • Israeli AI company D-ID lays off 25% of workforce

    Israeli AI startup D-ID has laid off 22 employees, which accounts for 25% of its workforce.

    These layoffs primarily affect staff in Israel and are part of an efficiency initiative.

    This decision follows the company’s recent partnership with Microsoft. However, no direct link between the partnership and the layoffs has been confirmed.

  • India Times ☛ Apple preparing for a major software overhaul: report

    The revamp, which is loosely based on Vision Pro's software, would include a style update of icons, menus, apps, windows and system buttons, the report said. Vision Pro is Apple's mixed-reality headset.

  • Reuters ☛ AI firm CoreWeave denies contract cancellations with Microsoft

    IPO-bound AI cloud startup CoreWeave said on Thursday it had not seen any contract cancellations after the Financial Times reported that the company's largest customer, Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab, had moved away from some agreements.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft criticized by Euro cloud crew

    Microsoft is not on track to meet technical commitments that form the basis of a settlement agreement intended to resolve a legal dispute over software licensing with a gaggle of cloud providers in Europe.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Google Chromecast outage: Users report issues with Gen 2 device. Could it be the 10-year cycle curse?

    The Chromecast outage comes amid discontinuation news. Google officially discontinued the Chromecast device, replacing it with the new Google TV Streamer.

  • 9to5Google ☛ Chromecast (2nd gen) and Audio cannot Cast in 'Untrusted' outage

    You can only “close” the dialog box and cannot proceed. There are no end user workarounds, reboots, resets, etc. that will resolve this issue. The screensaver (Google Photos, art, photography, etc.) functionality with the time and weather still works.

  • The Verge ☛ Some Chromecasts are giving ‘Untrusted device’ errors today

    Users say their 2nd-gen Chromecasts and Chromecast Audios are failing with ‘outdated’ firmware warnings.

  • Cal Paterson ☛ An oral history of Bank Python

    Today will I take you through the keyhole to look at a group of software systems not well known to the public, which I call "Bank Python". Bank Python implementations are effectively proprietary forks of the entire Python ecosystem which are in use at many (but not all) of the biggest investment banks. Bank Python differs considerably from the common, or garden-variety Python that most people know and love (or hate).

    Thousands of people work on - or rather, inside - these systems but there is not a lot about them on the public web. When I've tried to explain Bank Python in conversations people have often dismissed what I've said as the ravings of a swivel-eyed loon. It all just sounds too bonkers.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • The Atlantic ☛ DOGE’s Plans to Replace Humans With AI Are Already Under Way

      The bot, which GSA leadership is framing as a productivity booster for federal workers, is part of a broader playbook from DOGE and its allies. Speaking about GSA’s broader plans, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was recently installed as the director of the Technology Transformation Services (TTS), GSA’s IT division, said at an all-hands meeting last month that the agency is pushing for an “AI-first strategy.” In the meeting, a recording of which I obtained, Shedd said that “as we decrease [the] overall size of the federal government, as you all know, there’s still a ton of programs that need to exist, which is a huge opportunity for technology and automation to come in full force.” He suggested that “coding agents” could be provided across the government—a reference to AI programs that can write and possibly deploy code in place of a human. Moreover, Shedd said, AI could “run analysis on contracts,” and software could be used to “automate” GSA’s “finance functions.”

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Let’s write PR pitches with an AI! (report spam, block sender)

      I get so many press releases. That’s fine, nothing wrong with a good pitch. But there’s a lot of utter trash — mostly crypto, increasingly AI. They have no idea what I do or think, and they’re sure I’m interested in their AI quantum blockchain solution.

      The quality has noticeably gone down in the past year or so and the quantity has gone through the roof. What’s going on?

    • Sean Voisen ☛ Vibe coding our way to design homogenization

      And yet … one of the challenges with AI-generated “home-cooked” apps is that many of them don’t really have any weird personal aesthetic. They look, well, boring and corporate. And not just boring and corporate, but the same kind of corporate. In fact, if you prompt Claude or ChatGPT to build you some small, bespoke app without being very explicit in your technical and aesthetic preferences, odds are very high that whatever you get back will be built in React and styled with Tailwind. It will have that characteristic Tailwind-ish aesthetic, with its flat purple buttons, sans-serif system font and rounded corners. The layout, too, will likely be reminiscent of something you’ve seen a million times before, maybe a horizontal navigation bar that collapses to a hamburger menu on mobile.

    • Dan MacKinlay ☛ Developmental interpretability

      Developmental interpretability is an emerging subfield within AI interpretability that focuses on understanding how neural networks evolve capabilities during training. Rather than analyzing only fully-trained models as static objects, this approach examines the dynamics of learning, capability emergence, and concept formation throughout the training process. It builds on mechanistic interpretability while adding a temporal dimension to model analysis.

      A lot of this work seems to be about scaling hypotheses and in particular the phase transition that occurs when a model suddenly starts to generalize well.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Futurism ☛ SpaceX Has a Major Problem: New Versions of Starship Are Performing Worse Than Older Ones

    But the latest attempts to build on that progress have backfired. Both tests of Starship Block 2, which features a slightly larger upper stage with added heat shielding and a redesigned fuel line, have ended in midair explosions before reaching space. Whereas older iterations of the upper stage have successfully made it to orbit, flown thousands of miles, and re-entered for a splashdown in the ocean.

    Destruction is par for the course for SpaceX, whose ethos mirrors Silicon Valley's "move fast and break things" approach. But what's especially worrying in this case with Starship, the NYT notes, is that the failures in both of the Block 2 tests appear to be caused by a similar issue in the area near the vehicle's engines. If so, that hints there's a huge design flaw in the new Starship that engineers haven't been able to figure out yet, according to the newspaper.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-04 [Older] Indians trapped in Myanmar's cyber scam nightmare

    • Dark Reading ☛ 2025-03-06 [Older] Bogus ‘BianLian’ Gang Sends Snail-Mail Extortion Letters

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • 2025-03-06 [Older] A Brief Reminder About the Florida Information Protection Act

    • Site36 ☛ Massive increase in data requests at Surveillance Giant Google & Co while Convicted Felon cancels talks about EU-US e-evidence agreement

      An analysis shows that government requests for user data from tech companies are increasing dramatically. An email provider specialising in encryption refers to this as ‘surveillance capitalism’. Authorities from EU countries are stepping up their surveillance practices by requesting more and more data from large US internet companies.

    • Bryan Lunduke ☛ DOJ Says Surveillance Giant Google Must Sell Chrome, Can Keep AI

      Plus: No more default Search Engine payments to Mozilla or Apple.

    • Harvard University ☛ Hope for life-changing therapies comes with a chilling caveat

      A new discussion paper from the Carr Center for Human Rights welcomes the potential benefits but offers a note of caution drawn from the past, detailing unsettling parallels between an era of new therapies and one of America’s darkest chapters: experiments into psychological manipulation and mind control.

      “In the past, there have been actors who were interested in controlling people’s minds,” Lukas Meier, the paper’s author and now a fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, said in an interview. “It’s not implausible that in the future there will be such actors, at whichever level, state or private sector, who might attempt the same but with improved technology.”

    • The Record ☛ Immigrant groups sue to block Trump administration from accessing IRS data for deportations

      The Internal Revenue Code also bars the IRS from disclosing tax information to facilitate immigration enforcement regardless of who asks for it, the lawsuit says, and undocumented immigrants have long been assured that it is safe for them to pay taxes.

    • Mat Duggan ☛ How to get a DID on iOS easily

      So one of the more annoying things about moving from the US to Europe is how much of the American communication infrastructure is still built around the idea that you have a US phone number to receive text messages from. While some (a vanishingly small) percentage of them allow me to add actual 2FA and bypass the insane phone number requirement, it's a constant problem to need to get these text messages.

    • Nebraska Examiner ☛ Bill to catalog Nebraska school ‘tools of mass surveillance’ hits roadblock

      Legislative Bill 31, from State Sen. Danielle Conrad of Lincoln, would require all of Nebraska’s 245 public school districts to publicly inventory and catalog student surveillance, monitoring and tracking technology tools used by or contracted for use in each district. The bill was debated Feb. 21 and Feb. 24 before not returning to the legislative agenda, at Conrad’s request.

    • Dr molly tov ☛ at war | dr molly tov

      I instantly understood the quote on the Lynx tutorial about being at war with the Internet, because I'd already experienced that as I decoupled my digital life from Big Tech earlier this year. I'm frustrated that I have to be at war with my devices. But here we are.

      Good thing I'm stubborn.

  • Confidentiality

    • Lee Peterson ☛ The State of Personal Online Security and Confidentiality

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-05 [Older] Pakistan mourns civilians, soldiers killed in Bannu attack

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-05 [Older] Serbia: What next after Tuesday´s parliamentary chaos?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-05 [Older] South Sudan: Minister and general arrested in crackdown

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-05 [Older] Germany set to spend big on army and infrastructure

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-05 [Older] British court finds PhD student guilty of raping 10 women

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russia’s Fingerprints Seen in Elections Across Eastern Europe

    Experts say these incidents are part of the Kremlin’s broader strategy to sow distrust and sway elections in what it considers to be its sphere of influence as these countries seek to deepen cooperation with the West.

    The election interference patterns seen in Georgia, Romania and Moldova highlight a troubling reality for Europe: Moscow’s hybrid warfare strategies are becoming increasingly sophisticated and pervasive.

  • Variety ☛ Chelsea Handler: 'Did Anyone Vote for Elon Musk to Be President?'

    “I don’t know why we can’t somehow figure out a way to get together and at least have one goal in mind to not be, you know, a Russian asset,” she added.

  • The Conversation ☛ Panic over children’s mobile phone use distracts from the help young people actually want

    It is no surprise that data in my book shows that as young people move into their teenage years they become far less likely to speak to parents about online concerns and turn to their peers instead.

    Sometimes young people view adult approaches to “online safety” as more about control and an unwillingness to accept that young adults are growing up and needing independence.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Stephen Miller Makes a Case to Defund or Deport Elon Musk

    Over the weekend, ICE arrested one of the people involved in Columbia’s pro-Palestinian protests, Mahmoud Khalil. It appears that they first stopped him with the intent of arresting him on a claim his student visa had been canceled; but even after they confirmed he was a Green Card holder, they detained him anyway.

  • [Old] CNN ☛ New Elon Musk biography offers fresh details about the billionaire’s Ukraine dilemma

    But once Ukraine began to use Starlink terminals for offensive attacks against Russia, Musk started to second-guess that decision.

  • [Old] The Hill ☛ Musk acknowledges he turned off Starlink internet access last year during Ukraine attack on Russia military

    Ukrainian submarine drones loaded with explosives were approaching a Russian naval fleet in the Crimean city of Sevastopol when they lost connection and “washed ashore harmlessly,” according to Isaacson.

  • [Old] BBC ☛ Elon Musk says he withheld Starlink over Crimea to avoid escalation

    "By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian military (!) fleet via Starlink interference, Elon Musk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities," he said.

    "Why do some people so desperately want to defend war criminals and their desire to commit murder? And do they now realize that they are committing evil and encouraging evil?" he added.

  • Defence Web ☛ 2025-03-06 [Older] The world has gone from peace through dialogue to peace through force – ACCORD

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] US Stopping All Federal Funding to South Africa, Cheeto Mussolini Says

  • Defence Web ☛ 2025-03-06 [Older] The DRC conflict enters a dangerous new phase

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] South Africa's Defence Minister: Congo Troop Deployment to Be Relooked At

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-04 [Older] North Korea threatens response to US carrier in South

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-04 [Older] Mannheim attack: 'It's daily news now, here in Germany'

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] South Korea: Court cancels Yoon arrest warrant

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] Paris: WWII bomb discovery disrupts trains

  • Defence Web ☛ 2025-02-27 [Older] Defence committee unhappy with President’s SANDF deployment letters

  • Defence Web ☛ 2025-02-27 [Older] Exercises Cutlass Express, Justified Accord 2025 wrap up in Tanzania and Kenya

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] South Africa’s Expropriation Act: Between Legal Reform and Historical Justice

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] Why the U.S. Skipped South Africa’s G20 Summit – and What It Means for Global Politics

  • France24 ☛ Federal decentralized system 'only workable solution' for Syria, analyst says

    The worst violence to hit Syria since Bashar al-Assad's ouster poses a major threat to the transition, with mass killings of civilians throwing into doubt the new authorities' ability to govern. FRANCE 24's Mark Owen speaks to Matt Broomfield from the Rojava Information Centre. He says that the only workable solution for Syria is a federal decentralized system that protects minorities.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • The Gray Zone ☛ USAID funded Ukraine group that smeared VP Vance as pro-Russia ‘propagandist’

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Atlantic ☛ Wait, Who Is Posting Those Unflattering J. D. Vance Memes?

    It wouldn’t be the first time that politicos have tried something like this. The “Dark Brandon” memes of Joe Biden and the coconut-pilled memes of Kamala Harris initially started out as right-wing attempts to denigrate the Democrats. “Dark Brandon” caricatured Biden’s reputation on the right as a doddering old man by imagining that he harbored a secret personality as a cold-blooded killer. And “coconut-pilled” began when the right harped on a clip of Harris recounting how her mother had once said the phrase “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree.” Harris then awkwardly laughed.

  • US News And World Report ☛ US Judge Says Musk's DOGE Must Release Records on Operations Run in 'Secrecy'

    A federal judge on Monday ordered the government-downsizing team created by U.S. President Donald Trump and spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk to make public records concerning its operations, which he said had been run in "unusual secrecy."

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Foreign Policy: The U.K. Pivot to AI Is Doomed From the Start

    The nice thing about this piece is getting to loudly point out in the serious press that the Tony Blair Institute just committed straight-up data fraud and got ChatGPT to make up the numbers in its reports on why the Labour government should take up AI. These completely fake numbers are the entire justification for the current UK AI push, which is absolutely set to be a ridiculous disaster.

• Environment

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-04 [Older] Just how bad are plastic straws?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] When school is out because of extreme weather

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] Australia orders evacuations as Cyclone Alfred approaches

  • Science Alert ☛ Greenhouse Emissions Threaten The Future of Low Earth Orbit, Scientists Warn

    Under a high-emissions scenario, this could mean a sharp reduction in the amount of satellites that can safely operate in low Earth orbit by 2100 – putting significant limitations on what humanity can put up there, spinning around our world, lest we set off a runaway Kessler cascade of ever-increasing collisions.

    "Climate change and orbital debris accumulation are two pressing issues of inextricable global concern requiring unified action," writes a team led by aeronautical engineer William Parker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

  • El País ☛ Plants in Mesoamerican cloud forests climb mountains to escape climate change

    “It is an important sign that the ecological impacts of this crisis are more complex than we think,” warns Santiago Ramírez Barahona, the lead author of the study that reached this conclusion and that was chosen to be the cover story on the March print edition of the journal Science. Together with several colleagues and with funding from the Mexican Secretariat of Science and Technology, the team has been seeking to understand the vulnerability of cloud forests to climate change since 2019. These figures are the latest piece to be added to a puzzle that they are beginning to put together.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Donald Trump Is Leading an ‘All-Out Assault’ on the Climate

    “It’s an all-out assault on the federal government being involved in tackling climate change,” says Carlson.

    There are many more examples that could be listed, but the consensus seems to be that the Trump administration is doing everything it can to make climate change worse and make Americans reliant on dirty energy for years to come. That’s not exactly surprising, considering the fact he told the fossil fuel industry during the election that he’d do basically whatever they wanted if they gave him $1 billion.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Scientists say Trump cuts threaten climate research, public safety

    Last week, he was among hundreds abruptly fired in a sweeping government purge which, critics warn, will delay hurricane forecasts, cripple climate research and disrupt vital fisheries.

    Still more workers have accepted deferred resignation "buyouts" offered by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, and even deeper cuts are expected imminently.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Race for the Arctic Is Undermining Indigenous Rights

    Complicating matters, he explains, is the fact that internal Sámi borders bisect the borders of the state system. While the Norwegian-Swedish border runs from south to north, “we have our internal borders, with our languages, culture, and reindeer-herding livelihoods crossing the borders, and they go from east to west.”

    As in so many other places around the world, state borders here fail to take into account the lives of people who live on and around them. Even if free movement is possible at the time of their creation, they set those same residents up for future struggles if and when this permissive environment changes.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-06 [Older] Japan: Blast at auto parts plant in Toyota city kills one

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-04 [Older] SpaceX abandons Starship test flight at last minute [Ed: MElon failure, not doing much to run this "company", instead milking the US taxpayers]

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] SpaceX Starship explodes minutes after launch

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-04 [Older] Germany: Aircraft crashes into garden, killing pilot

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] Strikes to hit Frankfurt, 10 other German airports

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-05 [Older] Australia: Canberra's journey to 100% renewables

    • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Data centres drive power demand in Hyderabad's IT hub

      The power demand growth in other areas in the state, however, is consistent with the NEP’s projections. On December 2024, the peak demand had risen by 13 per cent compared to December 2023, and in January 2025, by 10 per cent over the previous year.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ As Heat Deaths Rise, Planting Trees Is Part of the Solution

  • Overpopulation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-04 [Older] South Korea's birthrate rebounds, but is it sustainable? [Ed: It was super-low to begin]

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-04 [Older] Mounting pressure for wealth tax on Africa's super-rich

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-06 [Older] Deutsche Post to slash 8,000 jobs

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-03-05 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini Says No One Has Heard of Lesotho. but Musk Is Trying to Do Business in the African Nation

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-05 [Older] What is Germany's debt brake?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-05 [Older] US: Supreme Court blocks Cheeto Mussolini's freeze of $2 billion in aid

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-06 [Older] Georgia passes repressive laws amid opposition boycott

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-06 [Older] Bosnian Serb leader Dodik rejects court summons

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] Nigeria: Senator suspended after filing harassment claim

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] International Women's Day: Female coaches battling barriers

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] Germans no longer see US as trustworthy partner

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-03-01 [Older] African Leaders Gather for Funeral of Namibia's 'Founding Father' Sam Nujoma

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-03-01 [Older] Namibian Founding President Sam Nujoma Is Laid to Rest and Praised as the Last African Liberator

  • Techdirt ☛ DOGE Has Become What It Claimed To Destroy

    They’re “rescuing” what they called a terrible Biden economy (which was actually remarkably strong) by… implementing policies that have economists screaming about an inevitable recession (or worse).

    But here’s where the projection becomes almost perfectly aligned: DOGE is the deep state. Wired’s Brian Barrett made this crucial observation last week and I can’t get it out of my mind. For all the talk during the last decade of the supposed “deep state” of unelected bureaucrats controlling the government, which was never actually true, DOGE has become the very deep state they falsely claimed existed previously.

  • New York Times ☛ Eric Schmidt Joins Relativity Space as C.E.O.

    Mr. Schmidt, 69, succeeds Relativity Space’s current chief and co-founder, Timothy Ellis, the two people said. It is unclear how much money Mr. Schmidt has invested in the start-up.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-05 [Older] Europe sees rise in disinformation, attacks on media: report

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-03-07 [Older] South Africa Rejects Musk Claim Starlink Can't Operate There Because He's Not Black

    • The Nation ☛ How Trump Plans to Manipulate US Economic Data to Gaslight the Public

      Transparency—or the lack thereof—may just be the least of it.

      The Trump administration and Republican lawmakers are preparing to manipulate the federal budget and doctor US government data in order to mislead the American public about the true cost of their proposed $4 trillion tax cut, the draconian budget reductions needed to pay for it, and the ruinous impact these policies will have on the US economy, which is already veering dangerously in the direction of a recession.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-04 [Older] Iranian artists face worsening persecution

  • VOA News ☛ Trial to begin in New York for men accused of planning assassination of VOA host

    More than two years have passed since police stopped a man who was loitering outside the New York home of Iranian dissident and journalist Masih Alinejad. Inside his car, they found an assault rifle with an obliterated serial number, 66 rounds of ammunition and a ski mask.

    The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran had allegedly sent him there to kill Alinejad, a staunch critic of Tehran.

  • EcoWatch ☛ U.S. National Parks Saw Record Attendance in 2024, but Staff Were Told Not to Publicize the Achievement

    In 2024, the U.S. National Parks received a record-high visitor turnout, even higher than the previous record set in 2016. But based on an internal memo shared by the group Resistance Rangers, which is made up of current and former National Park Service (NPS) workers, NPS staff have been told not to share external communications about the record number of visits.

  • EFF ☛ RightsCon Community Calls for Urgent Release of Alaa Abd El-Fattah

    Alaa should have been released on September 29, after serving a five-year sentence for sharing a Facebook post about a death in police custody, but Egyptian authorities have continued his imprisonment in contravention of the country’s own Criminal Procedure Code. British consular officials are prevented from visiting him in prison because the Egyptian government refuses to recognise Alaa’s British citizenship.

  • Associated Press ☛ ICE arrests Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil

    Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer.

  • New York Times ☛ Opinion | This Is the Greatest Threat to Free Speech Since the Red Scare

    But the fact that it was easy to see this ideological crackdown coming shouldn’t obscure how serious Khalil’s detention is. If someone legally in the United States can be grabbed from his home for engaging in constitutionally protected political activity, we are in a drastically different country from the one we inhabited before Trump’s inauguration.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Meta braces for ex-Facebook employee’s tell-all book

    The company has been aggressively campaigning against the book all week. It shared information earlier this week with media writers Oliver Darcy and Brian Stelter, sent a letter to the book’s publisher, and dispatched spokespeople Andy Stone and Frances Brennan to criticize the book and its claims on X.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • RFERL ☛ RFE/RL Contributor Vladyslav Yesypenko Marks 4 Years In Russian Jail

    During his trial, Yesypenko testified that he was tortured with electric shocks to force him into a false confession.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-05 [Older] Trauma: How child abuse victims deal with parenthood

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-03-05 [Older] Germany lags behind in boardroom gender equality

  • Bryan Lunduke ☛ Microsoft Still Promoting and Funding Sex Changes for Children

    Mandatory corporate insurance for "Gender Affirming Care" for children as young as 3 years old.

  • Associated Press ☛ Today in History: March 10, the Tibetan uprising of 1959

    On March 10, 1959, thousands of Tibetans rebelled against occupying Chinese forces, surrounding the Dalai Lama’s palace to protect him from potential harm; fierce fighting between Tibetans and Chinese forces ensued in the following days, causing the Dalai Lama to flee Tibet for India, where he remains in exile.

  • Central Tibetan Administration ☛ Statement of the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile on the 66th Anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising Day - Central Tibetan Administration

    We are commemorating today a momentous occasion in the history of our nation, marking the 66th anniversary of the 10th of March 1959, when Tibetans from all the three provinces, being of one mind, united in a non-violent, spontaneous action to stage an uprising against the violent mentality and perpetrations of the Communist Chinese government. [...]

  • HRW ☛ Governments Should Step Up Support for Tibetans in Exile | Human Rights Watch

    In Tibet, there is no independent civil society, freedom of expression, association, assembly, or religion. Under the pretext of national policing campaigns such as “the anti-gang crime crackdown” and the “anti-fraud” crackdown, the Chinese government has decimated what little Tibetan civil society remained, shut down Tibetan websites that promote Tibetan language and culture, and closed privately funded schools; even those that followed the government-approved curriculum.

  • Techdirt ☛ 5th Circuit: No Immunity For Cop Who Killed Woman By Shooting Her Through Her Own Backyard Window

    Atatiana Jefferson was never given a chance to comply. She was executed in less time than it took for Officer Aaron Dean to utter these phrases. The Ft. Worth PD released the body cam footage promptly, but mainly to demonstrate that officers found a handgun inside the home, while glossing over the inconvenient fact that no officer actually saw Jefferson carrying the gun. (And even if she had been, she was well within her rights to do so in her own home, especially if she saw people she didn’t know prowling around in her home’s backyard.)

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Alabama couple sues Tennessee agency, police after kids taken for months after traffic stop

    An Alabama couple has filed suit against the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services and Sevierville law enforcement alleging their two children were illegally taken for nine months after they were wrongly arrested during a traffic stop.

    [...]

    The charges were later dismissed by a local prosecutor and subsequently expunged, according to Aaron Kimsey, a Sevierville attorney representing the family. Kimsey declined to comment further on the lawsuit.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ We Can Organize Amazon, but Only If We Understand It

    Organizing Amazon workers is both an existential challenge and an opportunity for labor. But the company’s cash advantages and operational flexibility mean that traditional union tactics won’t be enough. We need strategies that combine disruption and scale.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Europe Left Out, Africa Plugged In: Meta’s 50,000 km Undersea Cable

    By bypassing Europe, Meta could potentially reduce its reliance on European telecommunications providers and regulatory frameworks. Why? We’ll have a special section below for those so inclined.

    Back to the cable. Unlike traditional cables, Waterworth will feature 24 fibre pairs, which would offer unmatched data capacity.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • John Gruber ☛ 2025-03-01 [Older] ★ Why Can’t We Screenshot Frames From DRM-Protected Video on Apple Devices?

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Macworld ☛ Apple was smart to leave Apple Intelligence off the iPad

  AI is such a priority for Apple that it’s affecting everything else it does. When it launched the iPhone 16e last month, the waiting world was shocked by the price tag: a resolutely mid-market $599, while the iPhone SE it replaced cost $429. (You can argue that it actually replaced the iPhone 14, but either way, the SE is gone and the range now starts at that higher point.) The 16e costs as much as it does because of the high-end processor Apple was determined to include so it can run Apple Intelligence. In other words, Apple abandoned the massive budget phone market for at least a year purely so it could get more people on its AI platform.

• The Verge ☛ Forza Horizon 5 will require a Microsoft account on PS5

  The FAQ says that players will be prompted to link the two the first time they load the game. And if you unlink later, you “will be constrained to relinking to only that specific and originally linked” Microsoft account.

  The requirement stings given that there’s no cross-platform saving, so the progress you make in the PS5 version isn’t reflected in the Xbox version. It’s the same situation for the Steam version, as the FAQ points out. As the page also notes, Horizon 5 players will need a PlayStation Plus subscription to access the game’s multiplayer feature, and there are “no plans for a disc release.”

• Copyrights

  • The Register UK ☛ Meta may have illegally removed copyright info in AI corpus

    The Friday ruling by Judge Vince Chhabria concerned the case Kadrey et al vs Meta Platforms, filed in July 2023 in a San Francisco federal court as a proposed class action by authors Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, who reckon the Instagram titan's use of their work to train its neural networks was illegal.

    Their case burbled along until January 2025 when the plaintiffs made the explosive allegation that Meta knew it used copyrighted material for training, and that its AI models would therefore produce results that included copyright management information (CMI) – the fancy term for things like the creator of a copyrighted work, its license and terms of use, its date of creation, and so on, that accompany copyrighted material.

  • Hollywood Reporter ☛ Inside Amazon’s 007 Takeover, Impact on Future of James Bond

    The whole reason the Academy decided to devote six full minutes of the ceremony to Bond music was that Broccoli and Wilson were the recipients of this year’s honorary Irving G. Thalberg Oscar, an accolade bestowed upon them in November at the Governors Awards to celebrate the half-siblings’ 30 years of unwavering stewardship over the spy franchise they inherited in 1995 from their father, legendary Bond producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. “Let me tell you, they don’t just produce Bond movies,” one-time Bond Girl Halle Berry gushed about Broccoli and Wilson in her introduction from the podium, “they were the heart and soul of this franchise for decades.”

  • Indie Wire ☛ Jeff Bezos Wanted Broccoli Gone After She Called Amazon Execs 'Idiots'

    As THR now stated, Bezos “read her quote in the Journal and got on the phone and said, ‘I don’t care what it costs, get rid of her,'” according to an unnamed insider. The outlet further included how Broccoli bristled when Amazon content chief Jennifer Salke referred to Bond films as “content,” and Broccoli’s half-brother Michael G. Wilson (who also steered the Bond franchise for decades) was iced out of meetings by Amazon executives.

  • Far Out Mag ☛ Jeff Bezos wanted to "get rid" of James Bond producer

    Although Amazon had purchased MGM in 2022, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson had maintained their control over the James Bond IP. This resulted in drawn-out discussions between the company and the producers before Amazon’s eventual takeover.

    Before the deal was finalised, The Wall Street Journal released a report in which they stated that Amazon had a “decayed relationship” with Broccoli. The differences in opinion between Amazon and Broccoli had resulted in an impasse which had stalled any plans regarding further instalments.

  • India Times ☛ What made Amazon founder Jeff Bezos say, I don't care what it costs, get rid of her …

    What made Amazon founder Jeff Bezos say, I don't care what it costs, get rid of her … Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, reportedly ordered executives to buy out Barbara Broccoli's stake in the James Bond franchise after she was quoted calling Amazon executives "fucking idiots" in a Wall Street Journal article, according to sources close to the billion-dollar deal. The alleged directive—"I don't care what it costs, get rid of her"—came as tensions between Amazon and the longtime 007 producers reached a breaking point, The Hollywood Reporter reports.