Leftovers

• James G ☛ Website reflections

  Guided by wondering “what would I say to my younger self starting a website?”, I started taking notes. Here they are: [...]

• Kevin Kelly ☛ The Technium: Public Intelligence

  Imagine 50 years from now a Public Intelligence that was a distributed, open-source, non-commercial artificial intelligence, operated like the [Internet], and available to the whole world. This public AI would be a federated system, not owned by any one entity, but powered by millions of participants to create an aggregate intelligence beyond what one host could offer. Public intelligence could be thought of as an inter-intelligence, an AI composed of other AIs, in the way that the [Internet] is a network of networks. This AI of AIs, would be open and permissionless: any AI can join, and its joining would add to the global intelligence. It would be transnational, and wholly global – an AI commons. Like the [Internet], it would run on protocols that enabled interoperability and standards. Public intelligence would be paid for by usage locally, just as you pay for your [Internet] access, storage, or hosting. Local generators of intelligence, or contributors of data, would operate for profit, but in order to get the maximum public intelligence, you need to share your work in this public non-commercial system.

• Joel Chrono ☛ I'm a fake fan of many things

  There's lots of things I like where I don't really have what it takes to be a true fan, someone in the know, but well

• Thomas Rigby ☛ Reorganising tags and categories

  I like to tag my posts on this website. I thought it would be helpful — to me as well as others. But then the number of tags grew. And grew. So many tags with one (1) post!

• University of Toronto ☛ Doing multi-tag matching through URLs on the modern web

  This isn't because the idea of stacking selections like this is bad; 'site/wiki/foo/bar' is a perfectly reasonable and good way to express 'a list of articles tagged foo and bar'. Instead, it's because of how everything on the modern web eventually gets visited combined with how, in the natural state of this feature, 'site/wiki/bar/foo' is just a valid a URL for 'articles tagged both foo and bar'.

• Andy Bell ☛ We gave The Index a much needed design refresh and introduced advertising, site-wide

  I’m a big fan of curating links, so I set Piccalilli up originally as a newsletter, then evolved it into a blog and newsletter.

  Unfortunately, I had to stop curating the old newsletter because I just didn’t have the time for it anymore. The Index gives a massive nod to that old newsletter though, which I’m really happy with.

• Vintage Everyday ☛ Edward Penfield: The Father of the American Poster

  Penfield’s style played a significant role in bridging the gap between illustration and graphic design as we understand it today. Here is a collection of impressive covers of Harper’s Magazine illustrated by Edward Penfield in the 1890s.

• Bitdefender ☛ Man found guilty of planting infinite loop logic bomb on ex-employer's system

  When directed to hand in his company laptop following his dismissal, Lu was found to have erased encrypted data - but his [Internet] search history showed that he had researched on the web methods to hide processes, rapidly delete files, and escalate his privileges. Prosecutors claimed that this was a deliberate attempt to prevent his co-workers from fixing the issues that he had caused.

  Investigators found the code for Lu's malicious Java program on an internal Kentucky-based development server, and evidence that it was his user account that had been used to execute the malicious code on the company's production systems. Lu was found to be the only member of staff who had access privileges to the development server

• Science

  • Science News ☛ A quantum computing milestone is immediately challenged by a supercomputer

    In just minutes, a special quantum processor, called a quantum annealing processor, solved a complex real-world problem that a classical supercomputer would take millions of years to complete, researchers claim March 12 in Science. And that supercomputer, the team reports, would consume more energy to run the whole computation than the entire globe uses in a year. However, another group of researchers claims to have already found a way for a classical supercomputer to solve a subset of the same problem in just over two hours.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Trump's 'assault on science': Bad for the US, good for EU?

    The prospect of a US science brain drain is seen as "a great opportunity for Europe as a research location," said Cramer.

    Applications from US scientists to the group of 84 Max Planck Institutes have at least doubled and, in some cases, tripled.

    "But for research as a whole, it is a clear step backwards, something that worries me greatly," he said.

• Career/Education

  • CNET ☛ Department of Education Rocked by Layoffs: Will It Be Abolished?

    President Donald Trump announced recently that roughly half of the Education Department's staff was being cut, amid his contentious plans to axe the department altogether.

  • Robert Birming ☛ The Writer's Engine

    Now, I pick up a book whenever I have a moment. I'm immediately immersed in the story, finding the whole experience both relaxing and inspiring.

  • [Old] OMG Ubuntu ☛ Our Exclusive Interview with Linus Torvalds - OMG! Ubuntu

    His early work to establish the Linux kernel as a reliable, feature-rich and flexible basis for Operating Systems made Linux one of the most prominent and widely used examples of Free Software in the world.

    Torvalds has been named as one of the “most influential people in the world” by TIME Magazine in 2004, and was voted 17th in their “Top 100 Most Important People of the Century” in 2000.

  • The Takeda Foundation ☛ The Takeda Foundation

    [...] The technical achievement honored by the Takeda Award 2001 Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievements for Social/Economic Well-Being is "the origination and the advancement of open development models for system software - open architecture, free software and open source software." The prize is awarded jointly to Ken Sakamura (University of Tokyo), Richard M. Stallman (Free Software Foundation) and Linus Torvalds (Transmeta Corporation). Ken Sakamura is honored for developing and promoting the TRON open architecture, a real-time operating system specification for embedded systems. Richard M. Stallman is honored for starting the free software movement and leading the development of the GNU operating system. Linus Torvalds is honored for developing the Linux operating system kernel by the open source process for software development. [...]

  • [Old] uni MIT ☛ Stallman shares Takeda award of nearly $1M

    This new award from Japan's Takeda Foundation is intended to honor and encourage contributions in science and technology that "enhance the value of human life and lead to an increase in the wealth, richness and happiness of life for humanity." It is aimed at individuals who have demonstrated outstanding achievements in creating and applying new engineering intellect and knowledge. An awards ceremony will be held in December.

    Stallman shares the prize of $800,000 to $900,000 (100 million yen) with Linus Torvalds and Ken Sakamura, for "the origination and the advancement of open development models for system software--open architecture, free software and open source software."

  • [Old] GNU ☛ Richard Stallman Receives Takeda Award - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

    Stallman shares the full 2001 Takeda award of 100 million yen with two other recipients. Ken Sakamura receives the award for developing and promoting the TRON architecture, a real-time operating system specification for embedded systems. Linus Torvalds is honored for his work on the operating system kernel called Linux, which is normally used together with GNU. The GNU/Linux system, which combines GNU and Linux, has over 20 million users worldwide.

    The Takeda foundation will bestow this year's award in a ceremony in Tokyo on December 4th. Stallman will attend the event, and speak about his work in the Free Software Movement.

  • Vox ☛ Department of Education: Why Trump is firing staff and dismantling it

    That’s where the third change comes in: the entry of Elon Musk and DOGE [sic] to the conservative coalition. They have modeled a new approach to dismantling the agencies they dislike, something that has never really been tried at this scale. And now it’s the Department of Education’s turn in the barrel.

• Hardware

  • RFERL ☛ Fiber-Optic Drones The New Must-Have In Ukraine War

    The cable transmits a high-quality image back to the ground, right up to the moment of detonation.

    "These drones can fly up to 60 kilometers per hour, perform maneuvers, and within a range of 10 kilometers, the fiber does not break," says Serhiy Beskrestnov of the Ukrainian military.

  • Nico Cartron ☛ Trail running training and treadmill

    As I explained above, I went for a simpler treadmill with no fancy screen or connectivity, with the idea to use external services such as Kinomap for advanced activities.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Register UK ☛ AI models hallucinate, and doctors are okay with that

    Their work, published in a preprint paper titled "Medical Hallucinations in Foundation Models and Their Impact on Healthcare" and in a supporting GitHub repository, argues that harm mitigation strategies need to be developed.

  • India Times ☛ Apollo Hospitals bets on AI to tackle staff workload

    Apollo, which has more than 10,000 beds across its hospital network, making it one of the largest in the country, set aside 3.5% of its digital spend on AI over the past two years and plans to increase it this year, Joint Managing Director Sangita Reddy said, without providing further details.

  • Michal Zelazny ☛ Socialized

    We do not need another social media app.

    What we do need are friends.

    Nothing more. Nothing less.

  • [Old] BBC ☛ Social media apps are 'deliberately' addictive to users

    Social media companies are deliberately addicting users to their products for financial gain, Silicon Valley insiders have told the BBC's Panorama programme.

    "It's as if they're taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back", said former Mozilla and Jawbone employee Aza Raskin.

    "Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally like literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting" he added.

  • [Old] CBS ☛ Facebook is addictive as cigarettes, former executive claims

    Kendall, CEO of time-management app Moment and former director of monetization for Facebook, told the hearing held by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce: "Tobacco companies initially just sought to make nicotine more potent. But eventually that wasn't enough to grow the business as fast as they wanted. And so they added sugar and menthol to cigarettes so you could hold the smoke in your lungs for longer periods, At Facebook, we added status updates, photo tagging, and likes."

  • [Old] Recovery Worldwide LLC ☛ Facebook Addiction - Signs, Symptoms, And Treatment

    Facebook addiction is often included under the umbrella term of social media addiction, but it is important to note that different social media platforms come with their own unique symptoms and risks. When Facebook use becomes a replacement for face-to-face connection, becomes compulsive, or starts causing health issues like sleep disturbances, it may be time to evaluate if there is a social media addiction present.

  • [Old] Time ☛ Will 2022 Be the Year of Reckoning for Addictive Algorithms?

    Often compared to Big Tobacco for the ways in which their products are addictive and profitable but ultimately unhealthy for users, social media’s biggest players are facing growing calls for both accountability and regulatory action. In order to make money, these platforms’ algorithms effectively function to keep users engaged and scrolling through content, and by extension advertisements, for as long as possible.

• Proprietary

  • Ubisoft Silently Negotiating Acquisition Bids From Microsoft, Tencent and EA

    Ubisoft is facing financial difficulties, game performance issues, and large-scale layoffs. Titles like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Skull and Bones, and XDefiant failed to meet expectations, leading to stock losses and studio closures. Assassin's Creed Shadows (delayed to 2025) is Ubisoft's hope to turn its fortunes around. Ubisoft is also considering strategic alternatives, including mergers or acquisitions, to stabilize its future.

    Ubisoft is "horribly mismanaged" and has not disclosed supposed negotiations with Microsoft and EA regarding possible acquisition bids. That's what the Ubisoft minority shareholder AJ Investments stated, suggesting in a memo that it will organize a protest outside Ubisoft's Paris headquarters to help raise its concerns and be heard.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Rotten in Cupertino

    Those are personal context, onscreen awareness, and in-app actions. As Gruber astutely broke down the existing Apple Intelligence features by their degree of reality, I think it is worth picking apart these three, even though Apple is lumping them together under the “more personalized Siri” banner.

  • Bitdefender ☛ Chromecast chaos - 2nd gen devices go belly-up as Google struggles to fix certificate issue

    Indeed, Google goes on to explain that if you perform a factory reset while trying to troubleshoot the issue with your Chromecast, you may find yourself unable to re-setup your device.

  • 9to5Google ☛ Google rolling out Cast fix for 2nd-gen Chromecast and Audio

    Some interpreted this message to mean that Google was deprecating those two models, with nobody offering a true successor to the Chromecast Audio. Meanwhile, the $99 Google TV Streamer might be a cost-prohibitive upgrade, especially if you have multiple 2nd-gen Chromecasts.

    Google has since confirmed that this is a bug rather than any attempt to end support. To date, Google has only stopped updating the original Chromecast. Even then, it can still be used to Cast.

  • PC World ☛ Google issues a fix for Chromecast ‘untrusted’ bug

    The Chromecast bug cropped up on Sunday, when the owners of older Chromecast players and the Chromecast Audio started getting errors that read, “Untrusted device: [name] couldn’t be verified. This could be caused by outdated device firmware.” The devices then refused to play.

  • The Verge ☛ Google is rolling out a fix for broken Chromecasts

    Google is rolling out a fix for Chromecast device issues that left many users with “untrusted device” errors that disabled casting.

    The issue, which appeared over the weekend, seemed to widely affect Chromecast 2nd generation and Chromecast Audio devices. Google has not said what caused the errors, but a user on Reddit claimed it could be because the certificate baked into the devices expired.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ USB ports on Apple Silicon Macs: Accessory Security and liquid detection

    If there’s liquid in one of their USB-C receptacles (ports) when a USB-C cable is connected to it, a sensor should detect it and alert the user, advising them to shut the Mac down, disconnect all cables and leave it to dry. Full details are given in this support note, dated 23 November 2024.

  • Greece ☛ Rising concerns over US control of F-35 software

    According to this theory, Washington has the power to block the use of F-35s in operations it has not authorized. This issue is of particular interest to Greece, as Athens has placed an order for 20 F-35s, with an option for an additional 20.

    In recent days, the “kill switch” controversy has triggered concerns in several countries – both within and beyond the EU – that have invested heavily in these 5th-generation fighter jets from the US.

  • India Times ☛ Musk-led cuts drive US consumer protection agency to ask for Amazon trial delay

    The FTC accused Amazon in 2023 of using "deceptive user-interface designs known as 'dark patterns' to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions."

    Cohen said the case over what he called the world's largest subscription program - which Amazon says has more than 200 million subscribers worldwide - involves claims worth at least $1 billion.

  • The Record ☛ China continues cyberattacks on routers, this time targeting Juniper Networks devices

    The researchers said the state-backed group — dubbed UNC3886 — was behind a campaign last year to deploy custom backdoors on the company’s Junos OS routers. The group appears to be “focused mainly on defense, technology, and telecommunication organizations located in the US and Asia,” they said.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ I’m not used to seeing this

    This is a pretty scathing piece from Gruber on what Apple’s done in the past year talking about Apple Intelligence to both the press and customers.

  • John Gruber ☛ Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino

    What Apple showed regarding the upcoming “personalized Siri” at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis. The Apple that commissioned the futuristic “Knowledge Navigator” concept video in 1987 was the Apple that was on a course to near-bankruptcy a decade later. Modern Apple — the post-NeXT-reunification Apple of the last quarter century — does not publish concept videos. They only demonstrate actual working products and features.

    Until WWDC last year, that is.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Android Police ☛ Google responds to the Trump Administration’s AI Action Plan

      Google highlighted three key areas where it says AI policy must focus: infrastructure, government modernization, and pro-innovation policies. This is in response to an executive order signed by President Trump looking for input into how to position America as the strongest player in artificial intelligence.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Is generative AI ready for streaming? Probably not, as the [Internet] reacts to “horrible” upscaling of classic sitcoms | Digital Camera World

      Fans of the shows, which were recently added to Peacock (Roasanne) and Netflix (A Different World), are taking to social media to point out odd facial distortions and nonsensical text that’s like the result of using AI to upscale the old show, with many users calling the footage “horrible.” For creatives in the video industry, however, the criticism highlights some of the shortcomings that generative AI has yet to scale (pun intended).

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ AI tool tells user to learn coding instead of asking it generate the code

      Upon trying to generate code for skid mark fade effects within a racing game, Cursor AI halted its code generation. Instead of continuing, Cursor responded that further coding should be done manually, highlighting the importance of personal coding practice for mastering logic and system understanding.

    • New Scientist ☛ Revealed: how the UK tech secretary Peter Kyle uses ChatGPT for policy advice

      Now, New Scientist has obtained records of Kyle’s ChatGPT use under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, in what is believed to be a world-first test of whether chatbot interactions are subject to such laws.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ UK science secretary Peter Kyle cribs ChatGPT for advice

      We wrote here in November and in Foreign Policy in March how the United Kingdom’s all-government AI push came out of Tony Blair Institute reports that just faked all their numbers using ChatGPT. These made-up numbers were used to justify the whole UK AI push.

  • Social Control Media

    • Ethan Zuckerman ☛ Focus on the player, not the puck: Finnish approaches to combatting electoral interference - Ethan Zuckerman

      For Robert Fife, Ottawa bureau chief for the Globe and Mail, disinformation operations have forced reporters to look around the world and deeply into local communities. Disinfo often targets Chinese speakers, Punjabi speakers and other groups who often aren’t reading the Globe and Mail, but WeChat, Indian-language media and other sources of information that routinely distribute state sponsored disinformation. The most powerful weapon to counter disinformation is transparency, Fife argues, but to be transparent and effective, Canadian reporters have to better represent what Canada looks like – it speaks not just English and French, but Chinese and Punjabi as well.

    • Sara Jakša ☛ IndieWeb Secret Santa Gift for Antonio: How Small Online Communities can be a Better Place than Large Social Network Websites?

      It was also the time when Snowden revealed the extent the US, the place where the majority of the largest social media were located, was collecting the data on people.

      Meaning, that if I was using the large social media afterwards, I was literally made to do it, and run away as quickly as I could. I left Twitter in 2014, LinkedIn in 2016 and Facebook in 2019 (and I still hate that I needed to create an account there for the study purposes) and Tumblr around that time as well. I was never on TikTok, I was never on Instagram, on Fediverse, on BlueSky, on Google+, never had an account on Reddit.

      But as the the weeks progressed, the more I realised the people talk about it a lot.

    • Crooked Timber ☛ Unbundling and Abundance

      But mostly today I want to talk about the graduate seminar I just finished teaching, about Media, Social Media and Politics. The syllabus is here. To summarize what we spent the most time talking about in class, I’ll quote a sentence from Green et al (2025): “The online information ecosystem in the early twenty-first century is characterized by unbundling and abundance.”

      I taught a similar class four years ago, and let me tell you, the academic literature has not changed nearly as fast as the underlying pheonomena have. The lag is getting worse. But even if it’s slow, scientific progress has been made. In my view, the most important results come not from fancy causal inference but from large-scale quantitative description; this should not be surprising coming from the editor of the Journal of Quantiative Description: Digital Media.

    • Hindustan Times ☛ Two journalists arrested for posting ‘derogatory’ video against Telangana CM

      P Viswaprasad, the additional commissioner of police (crimes and SIT), said, “The alleged video was shot at BRS headquarters in Banjara Hills in February and released on March 10, just ahead of the budget session, as per an orchestrated plan to insult, defame, and abuse the CM. The content of the video is vulgar, derogatory, insulting, and abusive, crossing all levels of decency. The accused have been doing this repeatedly and posting on social media for fame and views. We have evidence that they have received monetary incentives from the BRS. We will investigate every aspect.”

• Security

  • Reuters ☛ White House instructs agencies to avoid firing cybersecurity staff, email says

    The White House is urging federal agencies to refrain from laying off their cybersecurity teams, as they scramble to comply with a Thursday deadline to submit mass layoff plans to slash their budgets, according to an email seen by Reuters.

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • New York Times ☛ Meta Tries to Stop Sarah Wynn-Williams From Further Selling Scathing Memoir

      Sarah Wynn-Williams last week released “Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” a book that describes a series of incendiary allegations of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior by senior executives during her tenure at the company. Meta pursued arbitration, arguing that the book is prohibited under a nondisparagement contract she signed as a global affairs employee.

      During an emergency hearing on Wednesday, the arbitrator, Nicholas Gowen, found that Meta had provided enough grounds that Ms. Wynn-Williams had potentially violated her contract, according to a legal filing posted by Meta. The two parties will now begin private arbitration.

    • Threat Source ☛ Abusing with style: Leveraging cascading style sheets for evasion and tracking

      Features of HTML and CSS can be used together to include comments and irrelevant content that are not visible to the victim (or recipient) when the email is rendered in an email client but can impact the efficacy of parsers and detection engines. We discussed a few examples in our recent blog post, and we will share more throughout the rest of this section. We will not cover cases that are well-known to the security community, such as including zero-sized fonts.

      Threat actors can use the text_indent property of CSS to conceal content in the email’s body. Below is an example of a phishing email that contains text in different places, but the text is not visible when rendered in an email client.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • US Senate ☛ Letter from US Congress to UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal [PDF]

      The U.K.’s attempted gag has already restricted U.S. companies from engaging in speech that is constitutionally protected under U.S. law and necessary for ongoing Congressional oversight. Apple has informed Congress that had it received a technical capabilities notice, it would be barred by U.K. law from telling Congress whether or not it received such a notice from the U.K., as the press has reported. Google also recently told Senator Wyden’s office that, if it had received a technical capabilities notice, it would be prohibited from disclosing that fact. The U.K. embassy has also not responded to a recent request from Senator Wyden’s office regarding potential demands from the U.K. to other U.S. companies.

      The security of U.S. technology companies’ products against surveillance by foreign governments is an important topic for ongoing Congressional oversight because of several recent hacks of the communications of senior U.S. government officials. This includes: [...]

    • US Senate ☛ Bipartisan Members of Congress to UK Spy Court: UK Gag Orders for Surveillance Backdoors Threaten Americans’ Security and Privacy, Impede Congressional Oversight

      “Given the significant technical complexity of this issue, as well as the important national security harms that will result from weakening cybersecurity defenses, it is imperative that the U.K.’s technical demands of Apple— and of any other U.S. companies — be subjected to robust, public analysis and debate by cybersecurity experts,” the members wrote. “Secret court hearings featuring intelligence agencies and a handful of individuals approved by them do not enable robust challenges on highly technical matters.”

    • NL Times ☛ Police databases need stricter supervision: Amnesty International

      Amnesty International wants the governments regulators to sharpen their supervision on the police databanks. Civilians can submit a complaint to the police against the collection and storage of their data, but these are “not effective legal means,” the human rights organization said.

      The organization said in a statement that they have supported 31 demonstrators in their case against the police in the last years. it is reported that many of the complaints are not even dealt with by the police.

      Amnesty pointed out that the police store the identity details of demonstrators, look at what people are putting on social media, and infiltrate group chats. The supervision of this is insufficient, the organization said.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Techdirt ☛ It Is Long Past Time For Democrats To Start Pounding The Impeachment Drum

    Because the question is not whether impeachment can yet succeed (although in a sane Congress there would be no question). The question is whether and when Democrats are going to collectively put their foot down and finally say no to the lawless, unconstitutional sledgehammer Trump and his associates have been taking to our federal government and constitutional order. The question is how much are they going to allow to be destroyed—how many lives are they going to allow to be destroyed—before they finally say enough is enough. How much scientific discovery will be squandered, disease spread, expertise ignored, government services gutted, agencies dismantled, public servants fired, infrastructure vandalized, contracts breached, resources wasted, bigotry celebrated, voices censored, persecutions pursued, civil rights violated, human beings disappeared, rule of law upended, national security compromised, military readiness forfeited, veterans betrayed, allies attacked, alliances trashed, wars threatened, businesses bankrupted, taxes uncollected, corruption enabled, and economies crashed before the national Democratic party shows up to be the party against all these things.

  • Ethan Zuckerman ☛ Freedom Interrupted: Electoral Interference - Ethan Zuckerman

    That’s not to say we’re not seeing old-fashioned election interference. Marcus Kolga of DIsinfowatch offers a chilling overview of Russian interference in Moldovan and Romanian elections. Russia directly paid hundreds of thousands of Moldovans to vote against a pro-EU candidate, and ran massive pro-Russian campaigns on Telegram. These were unsuccessful and the pro-EU candidate was re-elected.

    But Russian disinfo did manage to spoil the first round of Romanian elections, Kolga tells us. Calvin Georgescu, an obscure fringe candidate, rose in prominence during the first round of the elections through a suspiciously successful TikTok campaign. There’s lots of evidence that Georgescu, who advocates ties between Romania and Russia, perhaps most compellingly the fact that investigators found $10 million dollars and a ticket to Moscow buried under his house. While Romania threw out results from the first round of the election, JD Vance spoke in favor of Georgescu, complaining that Romania was unfairly overturning results.

  • The Washington Spectator ☛ Senator Claude Malhuret on the End of American Democracy | Washington Spectator

    Senator Claude Malhuret on the End of American Democracy, speaking in the French Senate, Tuesday, March 4, 2025.

  • Nebraska Examiner ☛ Immigrants help push Omaha metro past 1M population mark as more Nebraska counties grow

    Also revealed in population estimates released Thursday are county-level growth patterns that showed 48 of Nebraska’s 93 counties gaining population and two remaining the same in the latest year tracked, mid-2023 to mid-2024.

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Immigration buoyed population in large counties, agricultural Midwest

    The surge of newcomers to the United States was the primary driver in population changes for 38% of counties nationwide and for most counties in states across a large swath of the Midwest: Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and North Dakota. Immigration also was the largest growth factor in most counties in Louisiana and Massachusetts.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Pentagon Asked for Military Options to Access Panama Canal, Officials Say

    Any move by a foreign power to take the canal by force would almost certainly violate international law.

    The U.S. and Panama are treaty-bound to defend the canal against any threat to its neutrality and are permitted to take unilateral action to do so.

  • Greece ☛ Hooked on TikTok? Tool developed by Athens University helps you find out

    A research team from the University of Athens has developed the world’s first tool specifically designed to measure addiction to TikTok.

    The TikTok Addiction Scale (TTAS) consists of 15 questions assessing six dimensions of problematic use: preoccupation, mood changes, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict and relapse. Respondents rate statements on a scale from “very rarely” to “very often.” A score above 3.2 suggests excessive use, prompting the need for a professional evaluation.

  • The Local SE ☛ 'I would love to see Sweden set age regulations on smartphones'

    With young children of her own, Katie Dodd Syk kept returning to these questions and soon found she had an ally in her neighbour Roksana Schnittger. Noticing that their conversations increasingly revolved around this issue, the pair decided to take action and set about forming Smartphone Free Childhood Sverige, the Swedish chapter of a global grassroots organisation.

  • NL Times ☛ Instagram’s ‘teen accounts’ provide false sense of security, consumer group warns

    Instagram’s newly introduced “Teen Accounts” feature is meant to provide better online protection for young users, but a new study by the Dutch Consumers’ Association (Consumentenbond) finds the safeguards largely ineffective. The organization warns that Meta, Instagram’s parent company, is misleading consumers with promises of automatic protections that do not adequately address the platform’s risks.

    Instagram has implemented several default settings for accounts belonging to users between 13 and 17 years old. These accounts are automatically set to private, preventing strangers from viewing their posts. Additionally, teenagers can only receive private messages from users they already follow. While these measures reportedly offer minor improvements, the study finds that they fail to tackle the platform’s fundamental issues, including addictive algorithms, harmful content that may damage self-esteem, and extensive data collection on teenage users.

  • The Local SE ☛ US imposes sanctions on Sweden's Foxtrot Network and its leader

    Describing Foxtrot as one of Sweden's "most notorious criminal gangs [sic]," the US Treasury and State Departments also placed sanctions on its leader Rawa Majid, with both agencies saying in statements that he had "specifically cooperated with the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security."

    "Iran's brazen use of transnational criminal organizations and narcotics traffickers underscores the regime's attempts to achieve its aims through any means, with no regard for the cost to communities across Europe," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

  • The Strategist ☛ More than ever, airpower will depend on sharing data. Watch Sweden

    Such teaming means that more-numerous, less-costly, even expendable uncrewed vehicles can bring more weapons to the fight and force the adversary to deal with more targets. More-expensive and survivable crewed vehicles, meanwhile, can stand back, offering human supervision of the entire formation.

    But none of that will work without maintaining real-time common operational pictures. Everyone and everything in a team needs to know what the others know—about each other and about the enemy.

  • International Business Times ☛ MPs Compare Photos of Muslim Women Without Hijabs to Child Abuse Images and Call for Criminalisation

    Members of Parliament have sparked controversy with a new proposal recommending that possessing photographs of Muslim women without their hijabs—taken without consent—should legally qualify as possessing 'non-consensual intimate images'. If adopted, this offence could become law by the end of 2025, and be treated with the same severity as the possession of child sexual abuse material. This unprecedented move has ignited debate, as it would provide unique protections to Muslims under British law, a privilege not currently extended to other religious groups.

  • The Record ☛ At Ukraine’s major cyber conference, Europe takes center stage over US

    For 2025, however, the situation was different. The U.S. loomed large as an unspoken presence, but no Trump administration officials attended the conference amid geopolitical tensions between Kyiv and Washington, which hold different visions of how to end the war with Russia.

    Unlike last year, when U.S. representatives openly discussed ongoing cooperation and continued donor support for Ukraine, the conversations this week largely steered clear of questions regarding future collaboration between the countries.

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ The digital Trojan Horse in Romania’s elections

    TikTok played a crucial role in Georgescu’s rise to fame, as the platform saw a sharp increase in engagement with his content in the weeks leading up to the election. According to the data below, the hashtag #călingeorgescu surged during this period. This spike illustrates how TikTok’s algorithm can effectively disseminate political messages and influence public opinion on a large scale.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Space Force teaming with Air Force on Joint Simulation Environment

    “The Space Force needs to provide space effects to the joint warfighter to ensure the joint warfighter can validate in their training events and their exercises, whether or not they’re going to be effective,” Klopstein said March 5 at the Air Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. “The Space Force also needs a high-fidelity environment to be able to validate not just our system performance in the threat environment that we anticipate, but also our tactics, and validate our tactics.”

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Wired ☛ Researchers Propose a Better Way to Report Dangerous AI Flaws

    In a proposal released today, more than 30 prominent AI researchers, including some who found the GPT-3.5 flaw, say that many other vulnerabilities affecting popular models are reported in problematic ways. They suggest a new scheme supported by AI companies that gives outsiders permission to probe their models and a way to disclose flaws publicly.

  • The Record ☛ Calls grow for UK to move secret Apple encryption court hearing to public session

    Politicians and civil society groups in the United Kingdom are calling for a secret court hearing expected on Friday about the British government’s encryption demands on Apple to be held in public.

    It follows warnings from experts, including from Britain’s own intelligence community, that the government’s attempts to access encrypted messaging platforms should be more transparent. Academics described the Home Office's ongoing refusal to either confirm or deny the legal demand as unsustainable and unjustifiable.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Supreme Court Lobbyists Don’t Want to Reveal Their Funders

    A government committee in charge of federal judiciary rules wants to make Supreme Court lobbyists disclose who is funding them. Some of the most powerful corporate and conservative forces in DC are trying to keep that information secret.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Newsmax deletes interview criticizing FCC

    Within hours, the piece had been removed from the news organization’s website without explanation. Network chief Chris Ruddy sought its removal, a person familiar with the decision-making process said. In an email to Semafor, a Newsmax spokesperson said that removing the article was an editorial decision, but did not elaborate on why the article was taken down.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Gov tech layoffs could hamper SHARE IT Act software mandates

    Experts say recent cuts at the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services and elsewhere could hinder implementation of the “Source Code Harmonization and Reuse In Information Technology Act,” or the SHARE IT Act.

    Signed into law late last year, the SHARE IT Act requires agencies to share their custom-developed software code publicly or on a private listing that can be accessed by other agencies.

• Environment

  • Truthdig ☛ Trump Administration Launches All-Out Assault on Environmental Protection

    Zeldin’s announcements mark the start of a dismantling process that could take months or even years. To undo regulations that go back decades, EPA staff would have to write proposals, gather public comments and possibly hold hearings and create a scientific and legal record justifying any decision. The latter will be needed to defend against inevitable lawsuits by environmentalists and states. All of this will have to be carried out by an agency that is severely hobbled by firings and plans to slash its funding to the lowest levels in its 55-year history.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ In LA, cooking emissions rival fossil fuels as ozone pollution source

    According to new research from NOAA, the potent and often pungent volatile organic compounds (VOCs) given off from cooking food are now responsible for over a quarter of the ozone production from VOCs generated by human activity in the LA basin. This is roughly equal to the amount of ozone produced by VOCs from on-road and off-road motor vehicles.

    The new study, published in Atmospheric Chemistry & Physics, takes a more complete look at the mix of VOCs in urban air by adding chemical compounds specific to cooking emissions to an air quality model set up to replicate the conditions in and around Los Angeles.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • GreyCoder ☛ Bitcoin's Growing Role in Government and Business

      Some companies have made notable Bitcoin purchases recently. Metaplanet added 162 Bitcoin to its holdings, bringing its total to 3,050 BTC. Rumble, another company, announced it holds $17.1 million in Bitcoin. It sees it as a way to guard against inflation. They purchased 188 BTC for around $91,000 each. This is part of their $20 million Bitcoin strategy they announced earlier. The company, backed by Tether, may buy more based on market conditions and cash needs.

    • Wired ☛ What’s Lost When the Human Drivers Are Gone?

      If you’ve spent time in San Francisco or Phoenix in the past couple years, chances are you’ve probably seen a self-driving car making its way around. This week, we’re joined by WIRED’s Aarian Marshall to talk about the race to flood our streets with self-driving cars. We’ll get into safety regulations, the pros and cons of robotaxis, and we imagine a future where driverless cars become mainstream.

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft says natural gas needed to keep up with AI

      The rapid expansion of bit barns from Microsoft and others has, however, created problems in accessing enough energy to power them all, coupled with warnings that their energy requirements could expand 160 percent by 2027, exceeding the ability of utility providers to keep pace.

      At the CERAWeek Global energy conference in Houston this week, Microsoft indicated there was plenty of potential for wind and solar expansion in the US, but conceded it is "open" to deploying natural gas with carbon capture technology to meet its energy requirements.

    • Public Citizen ☛ Senate Banking Committee: Vote NO on [Cryptocurrency] Stablecoin Bill (GENIUS Act)

      What inescapably explains this Committee’s and Congress’ unreasonable attention to [cryptocurrency] is the flood of political spending by a handful of [cryptocurrency] financiers in the 2024 election cycle, and the threat of more in the next cycle. Lawmakers must not allow political spending by an inherently harmful sector to shape important policy.

      What follows is a description of stablecoins, an outline for responsible legislation, and a critique of the GENIUS Act.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ A Gulf of Misunderstanding

    • Nature ☛ Ecological drivers of ultraviolet colour evolution in snakes

      Ultraviolet (UV) colour patterns invisible to humans are widespread in nature. However, research bias favouring species with conspicuous colours under sexual selection can limit our assessment of other ecological drivers of UV colour, like interactions between predators and prey. Here we demonstrate widespread UV colouration across Western Hemisphere snakes and find stronger support for a predator defence function than for reproduction. We find that UV colouration has evolved repeatedly in species with ecologies most sensitive to bird predation, with no sexual dichromatism at any life stage. By modelling visual systems of potential predators, we find that snake conspicuousness correlates with UV colouration and predator cone number, providing a plausible mechanism for selection. Our results suggest that UV reflectance should not be assumed absent in “cryptically coloured” animals, as signalling beyond human visual capacities may be a key outcome of species interactions in many taxa for which UV colour is likely underreported.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Snakes' secret language of ultraviolet color: A hidden world of predator evasion and camouflage

      The researchers discovered that UV color is found widely across the snake tree of life, and that it is frequently used for predator avoidance, says study co-author Hayley Crowell, a doctoral student in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Study says endangered Asian elephant population in Cambodia is more robust than previously thought

      "With sufficient suitable habitat remaining in the region, the population has the potential to grow if properly protected," the report concludes.

    • US News And World Report ☛ Study Says Endangered Asian Elephant Population in Cambodia Is More Robust Than Previously Thought

      From their work they estimated that there are 51 elephants in the Prey Lang, Preah Roka, and Chhaeb Wildlife Sanctuaries, with greater genetic diversity — a “critical factor for long-term viability,” the researchers said — than in two other areas of the country in which they live.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The New Stack ☛ Intel's New CEO Will Make Changes to Reshape Software Strategy

    The new CEO has experience with software as the former CEO of Cadence Systems, but a different kind of software — development tools to design chips. He has limited experience in software application development and open source.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Water officials knew Trump's demand to open dams was ill-advised

    “To intentionally create a situation where that could have been the outcome, it’s depraved and mind-blowing,” Willis said.

    Indeed, many California water officials and experts agreed that the plan had the potential to be ruinous. Local water managers pushed back when they learned of the plan by corps officials to release water from the dams, telling the agency that the water wasn’t needed this time of year and that the abrupt surge of water could do damage.

  • Reuters ☛ Exclusive: TSMC pitched Intel foundry JV to Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom, sources say

    Under the proposal, the Taiwanese chipmaking giant would run the operations of Intel's foundry division, which makes chips adapted for the needs of customers, but it would not own more than 50%, the sources said. Qualcomm (QCOM.O), opens new tab has also been pitched by TSMC, according to one of the sources and a separate source.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Report: TSMC could launch joint venture with partners to run Intel’s fabs

    The company is said to have pitched the idea to Nvidia Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Broadcom Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. Under the plan, the chipmakers would take stakes in a joint venture tasked with operating Intel’s fabs. TSMC, which is reportedly eyeing a stake of up to 50%, would be responsible for the day-to-day management of the plants.

  • Linuxiac ☛ Rust Takes Root in Ubuntu 25.10

    However, recent efforts like uutils’ re-implementation of these tools in Rust signal a major transformation on the horizon. In light of this, starting with Ubuntu 25.10 and continuing into Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, if everything goes according to plan, the distro is set to adopt some of these Rust-based tools as the new default.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • VOA News ☛ Foreign bloggers help China spread propaganda, analysis finds

      "It is a long-standing tradition of the Chinese Communist Party to use foreigners to voice its propaganda for added credibility," said Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.

      Foreign influencers cooperate with the Chinese government, the media and third parties to create and boost content that supports government narratives, Ohlberg said. One of the most common topics that foreign influencers focus on is whitewashing human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The U.N. Human Rights Office and groups like Amnesty International estimate that more than 1 million people – mostly Uyghurs – have been confined in internment camps in Xinjiang.

    • Ethan Zuckerman ☛ Taylor Owen: Canadians now see the US as the most serious disinfo threat

      Owen warns that Silicon Valley companies have changed their status. It’s not just performative alignment with Trump: major platforms are ending the ten year era of “trust and safety”, turning moderation over to crowdsourcing. These platforms are moving from minimal transparency to complete opacity. These US government as well as US platforms are participating in the persecution of disinformation researchers. And we’re no longer worried about ideological segregation within platforms so much as we are worried about platforms becoming tightly aligned with political points of view.

    • Indian Express ☛ Newsmax to pay $40 million to settle defamation suit over 2020 election claims

      Newsmax Media has agreed to pay $40 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by voting technology company Smartmatic, which accused the broadcaster of spreading false claims that it helped rig the 2020 US presidential election in favour of Joe Biden over Donald Trump, according to a court filing, reported by Reuters.

    • CNN ☛ Newsmax faces ‘bet-your-company’ defamation trial over 2020 election lies

      The Newsmax case revolves around the same false claims, championed by former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies, that the 2020 election was rigged by Smartmatic software and others. The Florida-based company sued Newsmax and other right-wing outlets and figures in 2021, alleging that its reputation was destroyed by the lies.

    • The Independent UK ☛ Newsmax reached a ‘confidential’ settlement with Smartmatic last year. We now know how much the MAGA outlet paid

      In a regulatory filing released this week by Newsmax as part of its planned initial public offering, the channel revealed that it agreed to pay Smartmatic $40 million as well as issue a “five-year cash exercise warrant” for the voting machine firm to purchase 2,000 shares of preferred stock in the conservative cable channel.

      The investment prospectus also noted that there was an inherent risk to investors due to the ongoing defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which is set to go to trial next month.

    • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ Newsmax and Smartmatic settle 2020 US election defamation lawsuit

      After the 2020 election, Newsmax aired several false claims about the company, whose voting machines were only used in Los Angeles county in 2020. The network repeatedly aired false claims from Trump allies that the software was widely used across the country and that it had been hacked to change votes.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ Meta, Apparently, Really Wants Everyone To Read This Book (By Trying To Ban It)

    By going to arbitration and trying to block publication, then, suddenly, it all gets that much more attention.

    The arbitrator’s ruling reads like a corporate revenge fantasy rather than enforceable legal reality. Yes, Wynn-Williams probably should have engaged with the arbitration process rather than just appearing on podcasts to discuss Meta’s attempts to silence her. But the arbitrator’s order is nonsensical: telling her not to make disparaging remarks about Meta, not to promote a book that’s already on sale, and to stop distribution “to the extent within [her] control” (which is effectively zero since Macmillan controls distribution and isn’t bound by the arbitration).

    This fits a pattern for Meta. For all of Zuckerberg’s grand pronouncements about free speech and open dialogue, the company seems pretty quick to freak out when strong criticism comes along.

  • Futurism ☛ Facebook Is Desperately Trying to Keep You From Learning What's in This Book

    The memoir, "Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism," released this week, rips into Meta's toxic work culture and provides a behind-the-scenes look at how the company handled some of its worst scandals. Among her cavalcade of damning allegations, Wynn-Williams also reveals the repeated sexual harassment she faced from senior Meta executives.

  • Techdirt ☛ My New Podcast ‘Otherwise Objectionable’ Explains Why Everyone’s Wrong About Section 230

    The episode explores how gutting Section 230 would reshape the [Internet] in ways most of its critics haven’t considered. Small websites and communities would face an impossible choice: either become purely broadcast platforms with no user interaction, or be forced to host truly toxic content with no ability to moderate it. The result wouldn’t just be fewer places to comment — it would fundamentally break the [Internet]’s ability to foster genuine communities and enable collaborative knowledge-sharing. The only survivors would be the largest tech companies with enough lawyers and content moderators to manage the risk.

    Neither would be a great outcome.

  • RFA ☛ Hong Kong media urged to back up Facebook protest videos – Radio Free Asia

    There are concerns that much of the online footage of those protests, most of which is banned in the city amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent, will no longer be available to the general public.

    That will make it easier for the authorities to impose their own narrative on events in the city’s recent history.

    Facebook notified users last month that it will be deleting archived live video streams from June 5, while newly streamed live video will be deleted after 30 days from Feb. 19, 2025.

  • Organization for Transformative Works ☛ OTW Signal, February 2025 | Organization for Transformative Works

    Chinese censors have arrested dozens of writers in the national crackdown on Taiwan-based online erotic fiction website Haitang (海棠) Literature. A translated article from Radio Free Asia (RFA) discusses the way Chinese [Internet] censors ban explicit adult writing to “anything below the neck” and even vaguely euphemistic phrases such as love and nature, which may mean sex when combined in a certain way. Similarly, Chinese online fiction platform Jinjiang Literature City (晋江文学城) was also summoned by consumer protection officials, but refused to turn up, accusing authorities of “fishing”, according to the Lianhe Zaobao (联合早报).

  • VOA News ☛ Zimbabwe journalist still in custody after case adjourned

    A High Court judge in Zimbabwe on Wednesday adjourned the case of a journalist arrested over his interviews with a war veteran-turned-politician who criticized the country's president.

  • New Yorker ☛ The Silencing of Russian Art

    Bi-2’s members soon learned that they had landed on a list of undesirable artists, which had circulated among regional administrations and cultural departments. “Officially these lists don’t exist,” a concert promoter, who was forced to remove Bi-2 and a half dozen other bands from the lineup of a rock festival that summer, said. “They don’t have any legalistic basis.” Rather, he went on, they functioned as “indications of undesirability.” A producer described seeing a color-coded list—black, yellow, and red—with dozens of musicians and other performers on it. “It was like an intern prepared it,” the producer said. In some cases, first and last names were mixed up; other entries listed band members who had left their groups years earlier. “The whole thing looked awfully unserious,” the producer told me. “But the consequences were as serious as it gets.”

  • [Old] Quote Investigator ☛ The Trouble About Fighting for Human Freedom Is That You Have To Spend Much of Your Life Defending Sons-of-Bitches – Quote Investigator®

    “The trouble about fighting for human freedom,” he remarked once, “is that you have to spend much of your life defending sons-of-bitches; for oppressive laws are always aimed at them originally, and oppression must be stopped in the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

    In this version of the quotation, the term “sons-of-bitches” occurred instead of “scoundrels”. The bowdlerized variant with “scoundrels” began circulating by 2003.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Democrats Must Defend Mahmoud Khalil

    It’s fair to say that the overall Democratic response so far to what has roundly and correctly been called the most serious assault on the First Amendment in years has been a mixed bag. The case is the exact kind of authoritarian overreach that high-ranking Democratic officials have claimed to be fighting the last eight years.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Free Speech Means Free Mahmoud Khalil

    Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is a cut-and-dry free speech issue that makes two things clear. First, the Right was always disingenuous when it claimed to care about free speech. Second, the Left should never have ceded the issue.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ, partners urge FCC to stop threatening press freedom and free speech

    The Committee to Protect Journalists and 16 other organizations, led by the nonprofit group Public Knowledge, sent a letter to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr on March 7, expressing concern about recent developments that threaten to erode long-established safeguards for editorial independence and free expression.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Starmer's plan to redefine terrorism 'would threaten free speech'

    Mr Hall was asked to investigate whether the definition should be widened after Sir Keir pledged to tackle the threat of loner misfits fixated on violence in a speech the day after Southport killer Rudakubana pleaded guilty. Current terrorism law requires the suspect to have carried out an act in the name of a specific ideology, but Sir Keir said he would change it, if needed, to include perpetrators who commit violence for the sake of violence.

  • [Old] Clouse Brown PLLC ☛ Can You Fire Someone for Participating in Public Protests?

    From an employment standpoint, this means that government employees cannot be terminated for participating in public protests. However, these protections do not apply to private employers. Therefore, under federal law, private sector employers may terminate at will employees for voicing political beliefs or participating in political activities that the employer deems offensive.

    In the social media age, employees should be mindful that their off-duty tweets and updates may garner employer scrutiny. Roseanne Barr learned this the hard way when she tweeted a racially charged comment about a former White House advisor and was fired by ABC within hours. While many employers have social media policies, it’s a good idea to review and update them periodically to cover new technologies and increased social activism.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Ethan Zuckerman ☛ Jay Rosen and Taylor Owen: Can journalism survive Trump? Can democracy?

    Now that the Republican Party has gone “off the rails in a direction we can call anti-democratic”, it created an asymmetry. The Democratic Party is still a recognizable political party, but the Republicans are not. The press still has not adjusted to this shift. Owen suggests we need to start further back than 2016 to examine the collapse of journalism and the transformation of American politics – Trump is the middle of the story, not the beginning.

    Jay got interested in “the savvy style of political journalism” some years ago – it’s a focus on who’s ahead, who are the winners and the losers. Who are the spin doctors and what tactics have them come up with? This journalism appealed to many people in Washington DC, NY and in many state capitols… but it’s enormously alienating to folks who are not interested in politics as a game.

  • El País ☛ Former Spanish military man who spied on Assange for the CIA is investigated for falsifying evidence

    A new legal battle has begun for David Morales, a former Spanish military man who spied on Julian Assange for the CIA during the latter’s time at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Madrid Court No. 45 is officially investigating Morales — who is the owner of UC Global S.L., the company that was in charge of security at the Ecuadorian embassy in London — for allegedly falsifying official documents and committing procedural fraud. Judge Fernando Fernández Olmedo has summoned Morales to testify as a suspect, according to court documents obtained by EL PAÍS.

  • VOA News ☛ ‘I was there to try to kill the journalist,’ gunman tells New York court

    The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran was allegedly behind the plot, according to prosecutors. Amirov and Omarov, both from Azerbaijan, have pleaded not guilty. If convicted, they face decades in prison.

    Media advocates say the case highlights how far the Iranian government will go to silence its critics. Iran’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately reply to VOA’s email requesting comment.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ, partners call for Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora’s release

    Judge Erick García ordered Zamora’s return to prison on March 10, executing a appeals court order that revoked the journalist’s house arrest. At the hearing, García reported threats and intimidation, raising concerns over judicial independence and press freedom in Guatemala.

    The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled in July 2024 that Zamora’s continued imprisonment violated international law. A TrialWatch report detailed severe due process violations in Zamora’s case, concluding that his prosecution was likely retaliation for his investigative journalism.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • FAIR ☛ ‘These Strikes Are a Good Example of Why We Shouldn’t Just Succumb to Despair’:CounterSpin interview with Eric Blanc on worker-to-worker organizing

  • FAIR ☛ Did Left Journalists Buy Into Right-Wing Ideology–or Were They Bought?

    Some wonder if their political conversion is related to their departure from traditional journalism to new, high-tech platforms for self-publishing and self-production. In Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices of the Left (2025), Eoin Higgins focuses on the machinations of the reactionary tech industry barons, who live by a Randian philosophy where they are the hard-working doers of society, while the nattering nabobs of negativism speak only for the ungrateful and undeserving masses. Higgins’ book devotes about a chapter and a half to Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, but Musk is refreshingly not the centerpiece. (Higgins has been  a FAIR contributor, and FAIR editor Jim Naureckas is quoted in the book.) The tech billionaire class’s desire to crush critical reporting and create new boss-friendly media isn’t just ideological. Higgins’ story documents how these capitalists have always wanted to create a media environment that enables them to do one thing: make as much money as possible. And what stands in their way? Liberal Democrats and their desire to regulate industry (Guardian, 6/26/24). 

  • Truthdig ☛ Workers Respond as Trump Tries To Bust Airport Screeners Union

    In a memo that that one TSA employee said sounded like “a teenage blogger writing about someone they don’t like,” the Department of Homeland Security announced March 7 that it was cancelling the union contract for 47,000 workers at the Transportation Security Administration.

    The American Federation of Government Employees signed its contract with TSA in May 2024, and it wasn’t set to expire until 2031.

    DHS also stopped deducting union dues, and ordered all union officers to immediately return to their duties. Workers voted in the union in 2011.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Unions sue DHS to save TSA collective bargaining contract

    In addition to AFGE, the plaintiffs include the Communications Workers of America and its affiliate union, the Association of Flight Attendants.

    Meanwhile, Noem, DHS, TSA and Adam Stahl are named as defendants. Stahl is TSA’s chief of staff and is currently performing the duties of the TSA administrator.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers

    When you have a new, abusive technology, you can't just aim it at rich, powerful people, because when they complain, they get results. To successfully deploy that abusive tech, you need to work your way up the privilege gradient, starting with people with no power, like prisoners, refugees, and mental patients. This starts the process of normalization, even as it sands down some of the technology's rough edges against their tender bodies. Once that's done, you can move on to people with more social power – immigrants, blue collar workers, school children. Step by step, you normalize and smooth out the abusive tech, until you can apply it to everyone – even rich and powerful people. Think of the deployment of CCTV, facial recognition, location tracking, and web surveillance.

    All this means that blue collar workers are the pioneering early adopters of the bossware that will shortly be tormenting their white-collar colleagues elsewhere in the business. It's as William Gibson prophesied: "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" (it's pooled up thick and noxious around the ankles of blue-collar workers, refugees, mental patients, etc).

  • RFA ☛ Dalai Lama book excerpt: Tibetans’ only leverage is ‘power of truth’

    In the case of Tibet, for instance, it has now been more than seventy years since Communist China’s invasion in 1950. Despite the physical control of the country, through brutal force as well as economic inducements, the Tibetan people’s resentment, persistent resistance in various forms, and moments of significant uprising have never gone away.

    Even though generations and economic conditions have changed, very little has changed when it comes to the Tibetan people’s perception and attitude toward those they still view as occupiers. The simple fact is that insofar as the Tibetans on the ground are concerned, the Communist Chinese rule in Tibet remains that of a foreign, unwanted, and oppressive occupying power.

    The Tibetan people have lost so much. Their homeland has been forcibly invaded and remains under a suffocating rule. The Tibetan language, culture, and religion are under systematic attack through coercive policies of assimilation. Even the very expression of Tibetanness is increasingly being perceived as a threat “to the unity of the motherland.”

  • RFA ☛ Dalai Lama says his successor will be born in ‘free world,’ outside China – Radio Free Asia

    China took control of Tibet in 1950, leading to tensions and resistance.

    Nine years later, at the age of 23, the 14th Dalai Lama fled to India with thousands of other Tibetans after a failed uprising against the rule of Mao Zedong’s Communists.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ RouteViews Peering Policy updated

    Most of us will know that the Internet, true to its name, is a network of networks. Each network, whether a local ISP or a global content provider, must connect with others to enable the worldwide flow of data we know as the Internet. We have two ways to interconnect: Transit, where one network pays another for connectivity to the rest of the Internet, and peering, where networks agree to exchange traffic directly.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Public IPv4 addresses are now valuable loan collateral and can be worth millions

    IPv4. Global has launched a new lending program that uses a borrower's IPv4 addresses as collateral. The firm, which describes itself as "the world's largest, most trusted and transparent IPv4 marketplace," says the new loan facility is a first-of-its-kind offer to customers.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Macworld ☛ M3 Ultra exposed: Inside Apple's hybrid chip powerful enough to take on Nvidia

    That means the M3 Ultra is an in-between chip, mostly based on the older M3 generation, but with a few high-end additions that push it up toward the M4 in terms of capability. In my conversations with Apple representatives, I’ve gotten the impression that these changes, including the upgrade to Thunderbolt 5, had an impact on the release date of the chip.

  • Authors Alliance Inc ☛ Updates on AI Copyright Law and Policy: Section 1202 of the DMCA, Doe v. Github, and the UK Copyright and AI Consultation

    Authors Alliance has been closely monitoring the impact of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Section 1202. As we have explained in a previous post, Section 1202(b) creates liability for those who remove or alter copyright management information (CMI) or distribute works with removed CMI. This provision, originally intended to prevent wide-spread piracy, has been increasingly invoked in AI copyright lawsuits, raising significant concerns for lawful use of copyrighted materials beyond training AI. While on its face, penalties for removing CMI might seem somewhat reasonable, the scope of CMI (including a wide variety of information such as website terms of service, affiliate links, and other information) combined with the challenge of including it with all downstream distribution of incomplete copies (imagine if you had to replicate and distribute something like the Amazon Kindle terms of service every time you quoted text from an ebook) could be potentially very disruptive for many users.

    In order to address the confusion regarding the (somewhat inaptly named) “identicality requirement” by the courts in the 9th Circuit, we have released an issue brief, as well undertaken to file an amicus brief in the Doe v. Github case now pending in the 9th Circuit.

    Here are the key reasons why we care—and why you should care—about this seemingly obscure issue: [...]

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Register UK ☛ Mozilla tells DOJ to let Google continue search payments

  Mozilla, which in 2023 received about 75 percent of its revenue from royalties paid by Google and other search providers for search engine usage in Firefox, worries that the US Justice Department's proposed ban on the very same Google Search payments would be rather harmful.

  American federal prosecutors last week filed their revised proposed remedies [PDF] in their case against Google to restore competition in the web search market, which the [Internet] titan was found to have unlawfully monopolized.

• Mozilla Petition ☛ Mozilla: it’s time to ditch Google

  The open, global [Internet] is a remarkable resource that connects us all and empowers individuals to share ideas, collaborate, and innovate. It embodies our collective hopes for a better future, fostering learning, understanding, and solutions to the challenges we face together.

  As passionate supporters of Mozilla and its mission, we want to express our thoughts on the current landscape, especially in light of the ongoing U.S. v. Google LLC case and its implications for Mozilla’s search partnerships. While Mozilla has always championed user privacy and an open web, the increasing reliance on Google for revenue raises important questions about our shared commitment to these values.

• India Times ☛ Apple blocks Tinder owner, startups from commercial secrets in India antitrust case

  An investigation by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) last year found Apple exploited its dominant position in the market for app stores on its iOS operating system to the detriment of app developers, users and other payment processors.

  Apple has denied wrongdoing and said it is a small player in India where phones using Google's operating system are dominant.

• Copyrights

  • Carl Svensson ☛ Copyright and the Demo Scene

    The irony is apparent, bordering on parody: A bunch of hardened game crackers complaining about software theft. The floppy disk copy program Fast Lightning was a commercial title (which later evolved into the famous X-Copy), and its code, "byte for byte", was defended by a cracker group because one of their members wrote it. Of course, both Fast Lightning and X-Copy were, in turn, cracked and spread by other groups.

    This paradoxical duality of writing commercial software and cracking games defines the complex and often incomprehensible attitude towards copyright or intellectual property - for lack of a better word - on the demo scene.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Record labels attempt to bankrupt Internet Archive over grandpa's dusty old 78s

    This time they're targeting the Internet Archive for the unforgivable crime of preserving history. According to Ars Technica, major labels are now seeking a $700 million in damages over the Archive's Great 78 Project, which digitizes those ancient, crackly records your great-grandparents stored in their basement.

  • Ars Technica ☛ Music labels will regret coming for the Internet Archive, sound historian says - Ars Technica

    Labels told the court the new complaint was warranted, since these 493 new recordings are evidence of alleged ongoing infringement that they claimed occurred after the case was filed in 2023. If the motion is granted, the recordings at issue in the case would then total 4,624, potentially each worth $150,000 in damages in an IA loss.

    The case still has a long way to go before a verdict will be reached and IA's fate potentially decided. IA continues to argue that the Great 78 Project is a fair use under copyright law, and not everyone agrees that the maximum potential damages will be awarded, even if IA loses. In September, Sam Trust, a music-publishing vet currently overseeing the Doris Day estate, told Rolling Stone that the potential damages that labels seek are "absolutely absurd," suggesting that he "would be surprised if it’s $41,000 worth of damages."

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post – The Future Is Not Perpetual (But it could be yours for just several thousand dollars per year...)

    Clarivate, the provider behind a number of resources key to academic libraries, including ProQuest, recently announced that it is shifting to a “subscription-based access strategy,” meaning that it will no longer allow academic libraries to purchase perpetual licenses to content. This is bad news for libraries. Leo Lo, the president of the Association of College and Research Libraries, told Publishers Weekly that “Clarivate’s move away from any ownership option forces libraries into a cycle of ongoing payments, intensifying concerns about collection stability and the ability to preserve scholarly materials for future use.”

  • Authors Alliance Inc ☛ Fair Use, Censorship, and Struggle for Control of Facts

    While most websites disappear from benign neglect, others are intentionally taken down to remove records from public scrutiny. Exhibit A may be the 8,000+ government web pages recently removed by the new presidential administration, but there are many other examples (even whole “reputation management” firms devoted to scrubbing the web of information that may cast one in an unfavorable light).

    The most well-known bulwark against disappearing [Internet] content is the Internet Archive, which has, at this point, archived over 900 billion web pages. Over and over again, we’ve seen its WayBack Machine used to shine a light on history that powerful people would rather have hidden. It’s also why the WayBack Machine has been blocked or threatened at various times in China, Russia, India, and other jurisdictions where free expression protections are weak.

    It’s not just the open web that is disappearing. A recent report on the problem of “Vanishing Culture” highlights how this challenge pervades modern cultural works. Everything from 90s shareware video games to the entirety of the MTV News Archive are at risk. As Jordan Mechner, a contributor to the report explains, “historical oblivion is the default, not the exception” to the human record. As the report explains, it’s not just disappearing content that poses a problem: libraries and consumers must grapple with electronic content that can be remotely changed by publishers or others as well. As just one example among many, in just the last few years we’ve seen surreptitious modifications to ebooks on readers’ devices—some changing important aspects of the plot—for works by authors such as RL Stine, Roald Dahl, and Agatha Christie.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Turbo Beats $10 Million Copyright Infringement Lawsuit

    Britt alleged in his suit that he “was never given notice that his voice was being used, never properly credited for his contributions to the songs in question, and was never compensated from any of the royalty payments, profits, or other income generated from the exploitation of his recorded voice.”

  • JURIST ☛ France creative sector brings copyright action against Meta under EU AI Act

    Several French publishing associations filed a joint legal complaint on Wednesday against Meta for its alleged unauthorized use of copyrighted work to train its generative artificial intelligence, contrary to the EU Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act.

    The National Publishing Union (SNE), the Société des Gens de Lettres (SGDL) and the National Union of Authors and Composers (SNAC) filed a complaint to be heard before the Paris Judicial Court. In a joint press release, the SNE said that it is taking action against Meta for its non-compliance with the EU AI Act, which entered into force in August 2024.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Disqus is Deleting Pirate Site Communities on Short Notice

    After 15 years or so of relatively plain sailing, comment platform Disqus is cracking down on sites that violate its terms of service. Pirate manga and anime sites have received notifications that Disqus will no longer provide services after copyright infringement came to its attention. With evictions now spreading to sites including FitGirl Repacks and KickassAnime, it's a race against the clock to export years of chat in the 24/48 hours notice given.