Leftovers

• Robert Birming ☛ Beyond bragging

  In essence, true confidence is not about loud pronouncements, but about a quiet, assured understanding of one's own abilities, coupled with a genuine respect for others. It’s about playing your part in the playhouse of life with both passion and humility.

• Mike Brock ☛ A Birthday Note of Gratitude

  In a world increasingly optimized for alignment rather than truth, for comfort rather than clarity, you've shown me that there remains a profound hunger for thinking that refuses easy answers while still insisting on the possibility of meaning. You've confirmed my belief that we can face reality squarely without surrendering to cynicism or despair—that we can maintain the rhythm established in that first movement, the dance of complementary forces that makes all existence possible.

• Terence Eden ☛ When Gaussian Splatting Meets 19th Century 3D Images

  Fast forward to 2023 and the invention of Gaussian Splatting. Essentially, using computers to work out 3D information when given multiple photos of a scene. It is magic - but relies on lots of photographs of a scene. Then, in 2024, Splatt3r was released. Give it two photos from an uncalibrated source, and it will attempt to reconstruct depth information from it.

• IBM

  • IBM is laying off thousands of employees and what India could do about it

    Employees in several departments, including consulting, cloud infrastructure, corporate social responsibility, internal IT and sales, were affected. Some learned of the termination through individual messages, while others heard about it in internal meetings, The Register reported .

    Classic Cloud is the company’s original cloud infrastructure platform, formerly known as SoftLayer, which IBM acquired in 2013. It provides a wide range of services, including bare-metal servers, virtual servers, storage, and networking solutions that run in a traditional cloud environment. While IBM continues to support and service its Cloud Classic infrastructure, the company has also introduced a more advanced cloud environment called IBM Cloud VPC. This platform offers improved hardware, increased network performance (200 Gbps vs. 25 Gbps), greater flexibility in resource management, and enhanced security features compared to Cloud Classic. It is logical to expect that IBM Classic Cloud customers will migrate to Cloud VPC, making the division’s downsizing logical.

    Sources told The Register that jobs are being moved overseas. For example, IBM has significantly more open positions in India than in the US, supporting the assumption that a significant portion of the work is being outsourced.

  • Inkl ☛ IBM cuts thousands in Cloud Classic, other units: Report

    IBM is cutting thousands of jobs across multiple locations in the U.S., and its Cloud Classic unit hit especially hard, reports The Register. The company has not publicly acknowledged these layoffs, but insiders suggested to The Register it is part of an ongoing effort to restructure and shift jobs offshore, particularly to India.

• Science

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Archaeologists Unearth the Torso of a Rare Buddha Statue—Nearly 100 Years After They Found Its Head | Smithsonian

    But last month, archaeologists at Cambodia’s sprawling Angkor temple complex unearthed a well-preserved torso section of a statue just 160 feet from where the head was found in 1927. They suspect that the two are a match.

  • Court House News ☛ Oxygen detected in farthest galaxy | Courthouse News Service

    According to studies published by two separate teams of scientists Thursday, oxygen was recently detected on the most distant confirmed galaxy in the universe, JADES-GS-z14-0.

• Career/Education

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Two West Point grads think it's time for another military academy

    The pair started to think about a whole new academy during business trips to Israel and Ukraine. LaValle was in Ukraine last week when he spoke to Task & Purpose.

    Seeing operations in both spots, LaValle and Shannon said, made two things very apparent: the “incredibly” fast-paced evolution of technology in combat and the greater responsibilities of young people either driving the technological change or filling in military leadership positions.

  • [Old] Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Library Staff Are Not Superheroes: a Guest Post by Robin Bradford

    So painting us all with the broad superhero brush is flattering, but unhelpful because we need to be held to account. When libraries have books and/or programs that promote a diverse and progressive world, it can’t be written off as expected. It is, often, extraordinary. Send off a quick email to the library about how glad you are to see such books on the shelves and how you want more of it. Make a big deal out of it because it might, in fact, be a big deal! You never know the fight that had to happen for that book to be purchased or displayed. And if you are not seeing those things, send an email asking where they are. Let it be known that you expect the library to reflect the world and you notice how narrow the worldview is on the shelves.

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ Dell teases 20-petaFLOPS desktop built on Nvidia's GB300

    The Pro Max with GB300 takes its name from the GB300 Grace Blackwell Ultra Desktop Superchip Nvidia announced earlier in the day. The GB300 features an Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPU with next-generation Tensor Cores and FP4 precision. It includes 784 GB of unified system memory – 288 GB of HBM3e in the GPU and 496 GB of LPDDR5X for the CPU – optimized for large-scale training and inference workloads. The GB300 connects via NVLink-C2C, ensuring high-speed, CPU-GPU coherent memory access.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Pro Publica ☛ FDA Found Problems at Indian Drug Factory Linked to U.S. Deaths

    The Food and Drug Administration has found problems at an Indian factory that makes generic drugs for American patients, including one medication that was manufactured there and has been linked to at least eight deaths, federal records show.

    The agency inspected the factory after a ProPublica investigation in December found that the plant, operated by Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, was responsible for an outsized share of recalls for pills that didn’t dissolve properly and could harm people. Among the string of recalls, the FDA had determined last year that more than 50 million potassium chloride extended-release capsules had the potential to kill U.S. patients.

  • The Revelator ☛ From EPA Staff: An Open Letter to the American Public

  • CBC ☛ I thought my body was safe from microplastics. I was wrong

    Nothing will radicalize you like seeing another person's garbage in your body.

    In my blood, in my lungs and in my guts, there are tiny, invisible particles of plastic bags, medical waste, tire dust, synthetic clothing and food packaging.

    Making the film Plastic People made me realize I am a human landfill.

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Youth gun deaths in the US have surged 50% since 2019

    In 2023, firearms remained the leading cause of death among American youth for the third year in a row, followed by motor vehicle accidents, according to the latest mortality data released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    The data shows 2,581 children aged 17 and under died from firearm-related incidents in 2023, including accidents, homicides and suicides, with a national rate of nearly four gun deaths per 100,000 children.

  • US News And World Report ☛ ADHD Misinformation Rampant On TikTok

    Clinical psychologists gave the more accurate ADHD videos an average rating of 3.6 out of five, while young adults gave them 2.8.

    The psychologists rated the least reliable videos at 1.1 out of five. Young adults rated them significantly higher at 2.3.

  • PLOS ☛ A double-edged hashtag: Evaluation of #ADHD-related TikTok content and its associations with perceptions of ADHD | PLOS One

    However, social media platforms, like TikTok, are designed in ways that may not be conducive to effective psychoeducation. Easily digestible, short, and snappy videos created to grab users’ attention quickly may make it challenging to prioritize nuance [10,11]. Crucially, the TikTok algorithm, ultimately, aims to extend the time users spend on the platform. To do so, TikTok leverages engagement cues such as viewing time, likes, comments, saves, and shares from previous visits to the platform to ensure the videos served to the user cater to their taste, in a process that can go largely unnoticed by users [12,13]. The human tendency for confirmation bias, by which users preferentially read information that supports their pre-existing beliefs about health issues, while ignoring or harshly evaluating information that contradicts them, may compound this process [14]. Repeated exposure to content that aligns with one’s pre-existing beliefs increases the content’s perceived credibility and the probability of sharing it, a phenomenon referred to as the echo-chamber effect [15].

  • Vox ☛ World Happiness Report 2025: More Americans are eating all their meals alone

    The finding, released this week, relies on data from the American Time Use Survey and shows that in 2023 about one in four Americans ate all of their meals alone the previous day, an increase of 53 percent since 2003. The analysis also found that eating meals solo, including at home or out at a restaurant, has become more common in all age groups, but most pronounced among those under 35.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ The Swarm of People Intent on Saving Our Bees | Smithsonian

    Native bees in the United States are dying due to pesticides, disease and habitat loss. These insects play a critical role in nature and on farms, yet we know very little about native bees in part because they’re a challenge to study.

    That’s where a legion of bee enthusiasts and amateur experts, called “beeple,” come in. Armed with nets and jars, they fan out across the country to find, document and study native bees, both common and rare. Host Ari Daniel interviews Smithsonian writer Susan Freinkel and self-proclaimed bee enthusiast Michael Veit about the future of bees through the lens of the beeple who care deeply about them.

• Proprietary

  • Nintendo, Microsoft, EA and others unite to make accessibility messaging a priority [Ed: PR as in perception management, with "messaging"]

    A cohort of major companies have launched the Accessible Games Initiative with assistance from the ESA.

  • The Register UK ☛ Appeals court rules Capital One cracker got off too easily

    Thompson, a former Amazon employee, was in 2022 convicted of stealing the financial information of more than 100 million Capital One credit card applicants and installing cryptomining software on the bank's AWS-hosted servers. She pulled off the heist by writing a tool that scanned for poorly secured AWS S3 cloud storage buckets. These buckets had been misconfigured by their users to be left open to anyone who could locate them.

  • PC World ☛ Microsoft issues emergency Windows update to restore Copilot app

    Other Windows users are still reporting unexpected Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) errors, crashing SSDs, problems with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), issues with printers using USB-connected dual mode where printing works via USB and IPP-over-USB protocols.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft blames Outlook outage on another dodgy code change

    This sort of incident is becoming depressingly commonplace. A lengthy outage occurred at the beginning of March which Microsoft also blamed on some dodgy code.

  • August 'Gus' Mueller ☛ Apple Needs to Get Out of the Way With AI

    The crux of the issue in my mind is this: Apple has a lot of good ideas, but they don't have a monopoly on them. I would like some other folks to come in and try their ideas out. I would like things to advance at the pace of the industry, and not Apple's. Maybe with a blessed system in place, Apple could watch and see how people use LLMs and other generative models (instead of giving us Genmoji that look like something Fisher-Price would make). And maybe open up the existing Apple-only models to developers. There are locally installed image processing models that I would love to take advantage of in my apps.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Security Week ☛ Browser Security Under Siege: The Alarming Rise of AI-Powered Phishing

      Statistics come from Menlo Security’s analysis of 750,000 browser-based phishing attacks targeting more than 800 entities detected over the last 12 months. This analysis reveals a 140% increase in browser phishing, including a 130% increase in zero-hour phishing attacks (effectively, a zero-day attack applied to phishing).

    • Namanyay Goel ☛ Vibe Coding is a Dangerous Fantasy

      He shared his screen with me — a surprisingly polished-looking SaaS product that helped small business with their career path. The UI was clean and the features worked. All built by telling Windsurf what he wanted, occasionally getting frustrated, refining his prompts, and never once understanding the underlying technology.

      “That’s great,” I said, genuinely impressed. “What security measures did you implement?”

      His blank stare told me everything.

    • Matt Birchler ☛ What people do with an empty text box

      LLMs simply aren’t able to handle questions about current events on their own because they don’t constantly consume the entire web and know what’s going on now, which search engines have taught us to expect over the past few decades. This isn’t to say it’s impossible, though. Here’s asking Perplexity the same thing: [...]

    • Felix Krause ☛ How we used LLMs to help us find the perfect piece of land for our home

      My fiancée and I were on the lookout for a piece of land to build our future home. We had some criteria in mind, such as the distance to certain places and family members, a minimum and a maximum size, and a few other things.

    • Declan Chidlow ☛ Build, Use, and Improve Tools

      The main reason people opt not to automate is because it often takes longer to automate something than it does to just do it manually. Handing a task off to a LLM where it can complete it with minimal input from you and likely without the requirement of further prompting if your task is sufficiently simple shaves off a lot of development time. It is true that you might need to make some tweaks, but I’ve personally found it to be much faster than creating things from scratch.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Newspaper editorials written by AI don’t go down so well

      It looks like Seaton really was sincerely trying an experiment. Then the experiment blew up in his face. Hopefully the bad response will put others off.

    • The New Stack ☛ A Hugging Face Project Is Uncovering DeepSeek-R1’s Secrets

      “The technical report did not explain or describe the training data that was used to train and align the R1 model,” he said. “It did not describe the distillation process.”

      Specifically, a Hugging Face research team noted, the report left questions about: [...]

    • NYOB ☛ AI hallucinations: ChatGPT created a fake child murderer

      OpenAI’s highly popular chatbot, ChatGPT, regularly gives false information about people without offering any way to correct it. In many cases, these so-called “hallucinations” can seriously damage a person’s reputation: In the past, ChatGPT falsely accused people of corruption, child abuse – or even murder. The latter was the case with a Norwegian user. When he tried to find out if the chatbot had any information about him, ChatGPT confidently made up a fake story that pictured him as a convicted murderer. This clearly isn’t an isolated case. noyb has therefore filed its second complaint against OpenAI. By knowingly allowing ChatGPT to produce defamatory results, the company clearly violates the GDPR’s principle of data accuracy.

    • The Register UK ☛ ChatGPT falsely says dad is child murderer sparks GDPR gripe

      ​A Norwegian man was shocked when ChatGPT falsely claimed in a conversation he murdered his two sons and tried to kill a third - mixing in real details about his personal life.

      Now, privacy lawyers say this blend of fact and fiction breaches GDPR rules.

    • NYOB ☛ The processing of personal data that results in inaccurate outputs including them by the controller, violating Article 5(1)(d) GDPR: Complaint. [PDF]

      4. The complainant is a Norwegian citizen residing in XXXXXXXXXX His hometown is Trondheim, Norway. He has a family with three sons. He is what people call a “regular person”, meaning that he is not famous or recognisable by the public. He doesn’t hold a position at a public office nor has he ever been under the public eye for any kind of pursuit. He holds a job that does not require him to be under the spotlight. In addition, he has never been accused nor convicted of any crime and is a conscientious citizen.

      5. On XXXXXXXXXX, the complainant asked ChatGPT the question “Who is Arve Hjal- mar Holmen?”. To this, ChatGPT replied the following:

    • BoingBoing ☛ ChatGPT faces privacy violation for inventing a horrific murder case about an innocent man

      The AI chatbot generated a detailed but completely fictional account claiming the man (we aren't including his name here) had killed two of his sons and attempted to murder a third, resulting in a 21-year prison sentence. While the response included some accurate details about the man — like his hometown and the fact he has three children — the murder allegations were pure fiction.

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Scientists' Efforts to Make an AI Lie and Cheat Less Backfired Spectacularly

      In particular, the phenomenon the researchers observed is known as "reward hacking," or when an AI model takes dubious shortcuts to reap rewards in a training scenario designed to reinforce desired behavior. Or in a word: cheating.

      "As we've trained more capable frontier reasoning models, we've found that they have become increasingly adept at exploiting flaws in their tasks and misspecifications in their reward functions, resulting in models that can perform complex reward hacks in coding tasks," the OpenAI researchers wrote in a blog post about the work.

  • Social Control Media

    • TruthOut ☛ We Must Burst Our Algorithmic Bubbles and Build Together Across Difference

      “We need each other, and interdependence is key to survival for human beings,” says Mariame organizer Kaba. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Kaba talks with host Kelly Hayes about what their book Let This Radicalize You brings to this moment. Hayes and Kaba also discuss the fight for reproductive justice, the problem with schadenfreude, and the need to build collective courage.

    • EDRI ☛ EDRi files DSA legal complaint against X

      As prescribed by the DSA, X provides an online form enabling users to notify the platform about potentially illegal content. The online form is available in various languages. However, in all the EU languages we tested, except English, the form also explicitly states that it should not be used by organisations that have been awarded the special Trusted Flagger status by their national Digital Services Coordinators. Instead, Trusted Flaggers are misled to a different form that is actually reserved for law enforcement, and that refuses any input provided by Trusted Flaggers or any other parties.

      X therefore actively stifles the work of Trusted Flaggers on its platform and thereby infringes its obligation under Article 22(1) DSA to ensure that notices submitted by Trusted Flaggers “are given priority and are processed and decided upon without undue delay.”

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • NEJM ☛ Bankruptcy, Genetic Information, and Privacy — Selling Personal Information

      Questions about the future of 23andMe underscore the challenges inherent to a legal system that relies on privacy policies to protect consumer data, while also treating those data as a valuable asset.

    • Harvard University ☛ What happens to your data if 23andMe collapses?

      The company was valued at $6 billion, or $17.65 a share, shortly after going public in 2021. It has since fallen to about $48 million, or $1.78 per share, after a 2023 data breach and resignation of some board members. The firm said in January that it’s exploring “strategic alternatives,” including a sale of the company or assets, restructuring, or business combination, among other options.

      In this edited conversation, I. Glenn Cohen, one of the paper’s authors and faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School, explains the legal landscape surrounding genetic data, the reasons for more consumer protection laws, and the steps for consumers to protect their personal and genetic data.

    • PC World ☛ Do you want Microsoft Copilot sniffing your OneDrive files? Too late

      Many PC users detest Windows’ OneDrive function, which launches, slurps up your data, and begins sending it to the cloud — taking up CPU cycles and broadband bandwidth. Copilot is really just a glorified app at this point, and not overwhelmingly useful even in the cloud. Anything that Microsoft deems a productivity boost for Copilot is often hidden behind a subscription. (In this case, it is as well: Copilot for OneDrive is only available with Microsoft 365 Personal or Family, and only by the person who pays that bill.)

    • US News And World Report ☛ Swedish Government Proposes Bill to Allow Police to Use AI Face-Recognition

      Sweden has been plagued by gang [sic] violence for more than a decade and had by far the EU's highest rate of deadly gun violence per capita in 2023, the latest year for which there are comparable statistics.

      The violence has come to overshadow all else in Swedish politics, driving the rise of a right-wing coalition that came to power in 2022 with support of the far right. The launch of the coalition ended eight years of rule by the Social Democrats, Sweden's dominant political party since the 1930s.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Maine delegation say they’ll challenge Trump’s dismantling of Education Department

    Congress has the sole authority to shut down the department, and any bill to completely close the agency would face extreme difficulties getting through the narrowly GOP-controlled Senate, with at least 60 senators needed to advance past the filibuster.

  • Freedom From Religion Foundation ☛ FFRF: Trump’s shutdown of Education Dept. shows disdain for Constitution

    “The Freedom From Religion Foundation deplores President Trump’s executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, a move that threatens the very foundation of our nation’s commitment to secular and equitable public education. Its destruction is a key provision of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint to destroy U.S. democracy as we know it.

  • Mike Brock ☛ How Does This End? - by Mike Brock - Notes From The Circus

    We are witnessing the answer in real time: institutional capture, norm erosion, and the systematic dismantling of accountability mechanisms. The Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and significant portions of federal agencies are being transformed into instruments of personal power rather than constitutional governance. Meanwhile, DOGE [sic] stands as a parallel government structure, implementing radical changes without congressional oversight or judicial review.

    A particularly dangerous dynamic is now in motion: the “point of no return” for key figures in the administration. As Elon Musk, Trump family members, and others become increasingly implicated in potentially illegal activities, their incentive to preserve democratic processes diminishes proportionally. The more their personal legal and financial survival depends on maintaining power, the more willing they become to take extraordinary measures to keep it.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Channel migrants offered discounts to film crossings for social media

    Migrants are encouraged to film the journeys and then post them on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook in order to lure others into making the dangerous crossings.

    In return, they get a cheaper crossing as the footage boosts business for the smugglers.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Tommy Robinson kept in isolation ‘over murder threats after conflict with Muslim prisoners’

    The court heard he was segregated in HMP Belmarsh on the first day of his sentence after saying he had “conflict with followers of Islam”.

  • YLE ☛ Fewer conscripts drop out of Finnish military training as motivation rises

    Cadets said the war in Ukraine and global political tensions have strengthened their commitment to national defence and increased their dedication to service.

  • The Register UK ☛ Time to ditch US tech services, says Dutch parliament

    Not content to wait for open letters to influence the European Commission, Dutch parliamentarians have taken matters into their own hands by passing eight motions urging the government to ditch US-made tech for homegrown alternatives.

  • The Register UK ☛ Space Force warns of Chinese satellites 'dogfighting'

    China has practiced co-ordinated satellite maneuvers in space that resemble aerial combat, according to a US Space Force General.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ My Old Friend Steve Davis Is Helping Elon Musk Destroy America

    But sadly, as I told The New York Times, my friend who was once a fun outside-the-box thinker is now a drone — blindly subservient to a corrupt billionaire on a self-enriching power trip.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Kuwait strips tens of thousands of citizens of nationality

    The government says the process targets those who have obtained the nationality illegally, but human rights groups say political opponents are affected, and that the country, once a democratic example in the region, is moving toward autocracy.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Bernie Is Right: 60% of Americans Live Paycheck to Paycheck

    The answer is that Bernie is right. In the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), conducted triennially by the Federal Reserve, the median working-age (25–64) household, excluding active business owners, reported its “normal income” as $73,175 per annum, and had $4,521 in transaction balances, such as checking or savings accounts. (All amounts are in 2022 dollars.)

    That’s about 3.2 weeks’ worth of income in cash. If “living paycheck to paycheck” means having less than a month’s worth of income saved in cash, then calculated in this way, the “60%” factoid gets it exactly right: the share of working-age, non-business-owning households living paycheck to paycheck was: [...]

• Environment

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ How bad is glacier melt and why does it matter?

    In response to this alarming retreat, 2025 was proclaimed the International Year of Glaciers' Preservation by the United Nations General Assembly, which also established the first annual World Day for Glaciers on March 21. The goal was to increase awareness of the fundamental role glaciers, snow and ice play in climate and water or hydrological cycles.

  • Science Alert ☛ It's The First World Day For Glaciers – And Scientists Are Concerned

    In mountain ranges around the world, glaciers are melting as global temperatures rise. Europe's Alps and Pyrenees lost 40 percent of their glacier volume from 2000 to 2023.

  • YLE ☛ Scientists, conservation groups slam government over protection of old-growth forests

    The protection of old-growth and natural forests is part of the EU's biodiversity strategy, to which Finland has committed. The strategy is aimed at halting biodiversity loss – but Finnish conservation groups and researchers say the new standards will leave most of the nation’s old-growth woodlands unprotected.

    The issue has spurred a heated public debate about the protection criteria. The European Commission has left it up to member states to set their own national rules for identifying old-growth forests, based on EU guidelines.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ Global Rooftop Solar Generation Could Help Hold Warming Below 1.5°C

      Maximizing the global deployment of rooftop solar could play a crucial role in preventing global temperatures from surpassing the 1.5°C threshold by 2050, while addressing significant climate justice concerns, a new study finds.

    • Wired ☛ Nearly All Cybertrucks Have Been Recalled Because Tesla Used the Wrong Glue

      The recall is related to a cosmetic applique on the vehicle’s exterior, which is attached to the rest of the truck by a kind of glue, according to a filing published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the US’s road safety regulator. On affected Cybertrucks, the adhesive can separate from the rest of the truck, creating a possible “road hazard” for others and increasing the risk of a crash.

• Finance

  • Yahoo News ☛ Apple is reportedly losing $1 billion a year on its streaming service as churn levels increase

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Why happiness matters for democracy

    "But if you were to look just at youth, the United States wouldn't even make it to the top 60," Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a researcher from Oxford University's Wellbeing Research Centre who worked on the report, told DW.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Emperor’s New Philosophy - Paul Krugman

    Look, I understand that it’s more fun to write an article about the supposed emergence of a new economic philosophy than to write yet another article about how ignorant men are, once again, saying stupid things. And I guess some journalists are uncomfortable at the thought that people with great power to shape policy have no idea (or rather nothing but false ideas) what they’re doing.

    But trying to put an intellectual gloss on Trumpist international economic policy is sanewashing that misinforms readers rather than helping their understanding.

  • Molly White ☛ Issue 79 – Mundus sine Caesaribus

    Her message was clear: we need a world resilient to the outsized power of Zuckerbergian billionaire emperors. And we need platforms that are, as she and Masnick put it, “billionaire-proof”. I couldn’t agree more.

    Sadly, for now we remain in a very much not billionaire-proof world, so I will now update you on how that’s all been going.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ SoftBank to acquire Arm CPUs for datacenter firm Ampere in $6.5 billion cash deal

    Ampere was established in 2018 in Silicon Valley with the backing from Carlyle Group and Oracle with an aim to develop CPUs tailored for the needs of cloud service providers (CSPs), which the company calls 'cloud-native' processors. Since then, the company released two product families — the Ampere Altra with up to 128 cores made on TSMC's N7 node and the AmpereOne with up to 192 cores made on TSMC's N5 manufacturing technology — that gained limited traction in the CSP.

  • The Register UK ☛ Asahi Linux loses another prominent dev as GPU guru quits

    "Lina joined the team to reverse engineer the M1 GPU kernel interface, and found herself writing the world’s first Rust Linux GPU kernel driver. Outside of GPUs, she sometimes hacks on open source VTuber tooling and infrastructure."

  • Inside Towers ☛ Geoffrey Starks to Leave FCC

    FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, the senior Democratic Commissioner, announced he’s leaving the agency “this spring.” He says he sent a letter to President Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) advising them of his decision on Tuesday.

    His departure will leave two vacancies on the commission, as the Senate has not yet confirmed Olivia Trusty, a Republican nominated earlier this year by President Trump, to the other spot. He did not give a reason for his exit, but Punchbowl News reported in December that he was looking to leave his post.

  • The Record ☛ Major web services go dark in Russia amid reported Cloudflare block | The Record from Recorded Future News

    In a statement to a local news agency, Russian internet regulator Roskomnadzor said the disruptions affected services that rely on foreign server infrastructure and recommended that local organizations switch to Russian hosting providers.

  • FAIR ☛ Leading Papers Give Two Cheers for DOGE

    Donald Trump is back in office. Tech mogul Elon Musk, now a senior adviser to the president, is helming a government advisory body with an acronym derived from a memecoin: DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). That organization is sinking its teeth into the federal government, and drawing blood.

  • Pro Publica ☛ ProPublica’s Russ Vought Reporting Outlined Trump’s Plans for the Federal Government

  • Insight Hungary ☛ Vsquare: Orban's secret service to blacklist NGOs and media outlets

    Viktor Orbán has ordered Hungary’s central intelligence agency to compile a list of NGOs and media outlets that have received foreign funding over the past decade, Vsquare reports. The directive, given to the National Information Center (NIC), comes after a chilling speech in which Orbán vowed to “dismantle the financial machinery” behind what he described as “politicians, judges, journalists, fake NGOs, and political activists”. It follows an earlier February statement from the Hungarian PM to achieve “full elimination of the Soros network”. It signals a dangerous escalation in the government’s further crackdown on independent civil society and press freedom.

    According to Vquare's Goulash newsletter, the decision does not apply to Chinese- or Russian-linked organizations but is instead focused on human rights groups and independent news outlets that have received support from the U.S. or European donors. While Hungary’s use of Pegasus spyware against journalists has previously been documented, this marks the first time Orbán’s government has openly tasked national security agencies with identifying and listing perceived foreign-backed ‘enemies.’ The fate of this intelligence report remains uncertain — but critics fear it could be used to justify further legal harassment and orchestrated smear campaigns.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • ACLU ☛ A Statement from Constitutional Law Scholars on Columbia

    The First Amendment protects speech many of us find wrongheaded or deeply offensive, including anti-Israel advocacy and even antisemitic advocacy. The government may not threaten funding cuts as a tool to pressure recipients into suppressing such viewpoints. This is especially so for universities, which should be committed to respecting free speech.

    At the same time, the First Amendment of course doesn’t protect antisemitic violence, true threats of violence, or certain kinds of speech that may properly be labeled “harassment.” Title VI rightly requires universities to protect their students and other community members from such behavior. But the lines between legally unprotected harassment on the one hand and protected speech on the other are notoriously difficult to draw and are often fact-specific. In part because of that, any sanctions imposed on universities for Title VI violations must follow that statute’s well-established procedural rules, which help make clear what speech is sanctionable and what speech is constitutionally protected.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Trump’s Deportations Are a Throwback to Red Scare Politics

    The detention and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil stands in a long tradition of the US government using border policy as a tool for political control, stretching back to First and Second Red Scare efforts to crack down on left-wing dissent.

  • Truthdig ☛ The Israeli American Trump Mega-Donor Behind Speech Crackdowns - Truthdig

    Adelson’s support for the administration’s campaign to stifle criticism of Israel on college campuses isn’t a new focus, but her alignment with the levers of state powers to implement her vision are unprecedented. In fact, tax documents reveal that she is directly overseeing a social media campaign targeting Khalil and Columbia University.

  • BoingBoing ☛ French scientist denied entry to US after a search of his phone revealed messages critical of Trump

    According to France's research minister Philippe Baptiste, a French scientist who arrived in the U.S. on March 9 to attend a conference was denied entry and expelled after American authorities searched his phone and found "exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration's research policy." [...]

  • The Guardian UK ☛ French scientist denied US entry after phone messages critical of Trump found

    “This measure was apparently taken by the American authorities because the researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy,” the minister added.

  • CPJ ☛ Bénin Web TV suspended for reporting on media regulator’s budget

    In its March 12 decision, the HAAC also withdrew Benin Web TV director Paul Arnaud Deguenon’s press card over his outlet’s January 21 and 23 reporting that said the HAAC presented “erroneous” figures to parliament’s budget committee and its president demanded a new official car.

  • The Record ☛ Turkey restricts social media following arrest of president’s main rival

    According to internet monitoring service NetBlocks, the disruptions began early Wednesday. Local media reported that many users across Turkey struggled to log in, refresh feeds or share content on social media.

  • Axios ☛ Trump's anti-DEI purge is erasing these military legends

    Between the lines: What some see as an effort to erase "wokeness" and DEI initiatives, is a battle over how America accepts, acknowledges or edits its pasts, Axios' Delano Massey writes.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Exiled Pakistani journalist’s brothers ‘abducted,’ another journalist disappears

    Khehtran disappeared on March 13 from his home district of Barkhan in Balochistan province, and there has been no information about his whereabouts, according to independent news outlet ANI news and human rights lawyer Imaan Mazari, who is following the case and spoke to CPJ.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Politics Live presenter Jo Coburn to leave BBC after 28 years

    Coburn has presented weekday lunchtime politics show Politics Live since its launch in 2018. The news, interview and panel programme airs for 45 minutes four days a week at 12.15pm on BBC Two with a longer programme on Wednesdays to take in Prime Minister’s Questions.

  • Doc Searls ☛ It’s Over

    Whatever. I’d rather they fix it than kill it. They wanted it dead, and now it is.

  • Reason ☛ Trump's Awful Decision to Gut Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

    Trump's order is a blow to America's "soft power" and to dissidents battling anti-American authoritarian regimes. VOA, RFE/RL and other similar media are among the few federal programs whose value far exceeds the money expended on them.

    During the Cold War, millions of people living under communist regimes listened to these networks, and got news and analysis that countered regime propaganda. These media helped inspire dissident movements, and the eventual overthrow of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe in 1989-91. My own parents were among the many Soviet citizens who clandestinely listened to VOA broadcasts, and it helped solidify their opposition to the regime.

    In more recent years, VOA and RFE/RL operate on the internet as much or more than on traditional radio. But they continue to be valuable resources for dissidents and others living under authoritarian regimes, such as those of Russia and Belarus. Radio Free Asia and Radio Marti provide similar services for China and Cuba, respectively.

  • BBC ☛ 'Discarded like a dirty rag': Chinese state media hails Trump's cuts to Voice of America

    Critics have called the move a setback for democracy but Beijing's state newspaper Global Times denounced VOA for its "appalling track record" in reporting on China and said it has "now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag".

  • France24 ☛ Trump mutes Voice of America, makes space for Russian and Chinese influence

    US President Donald Trump last week cut funding for international public radio stations Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which broadcast programmes aligned with “democratic values” to millions of listeners around the world. In their absence, Russia and China are now set to fill the gap with their own state media offerings.

  • Politico ☛ Inside the scramble to save America’s pro-democracy media outlets from Trump

    Speaking to POLITICO after a day of hectic lobbying of Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the chief executive of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Stephen Capus, blasted the Trump administration’s decision to halt the funding of the Prague-headquartered RFE/RL as unlawful. He said he hopes the Kremlin’s gloating will turn out to be premature.

    The outlet was founded during the Cold War and broadcasts in 27 different languages to 23 countries, including Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Iran and Afghanistan,

  • Foreign Policy ☛ Trump's Cuts to Voice of America, Radio Free Asia Will Limit China Reporting

    Funding cuts and layoffs at Voice of America and Radio Free Asia will reduce reporting on Xinjiang and Tibet.

  • Gannett ☛ Trump ends Voice of America as Kari Lake, Russia clap | Opinion

    Voice of America is supposed to operate independently of any presidential administration which naturally makes it a prime target of Trump.

  • CPJ ☛ Yemeni journalist disappears after threats from Houthi group

    The Iranian-backed Houthis, who control Sanaa and govern more than 70% of the country’s population, have been fighting a Saudi-backed coalition since 2015.

  • CPJ ☛ Somali journalist killed in Al-Shabaab bombing, at least 22 others arrested for reporting attack

    The journalists were detained for about two hours at a police station, where they were warned not to broadcast such content, and released without charge. Risaala had resumed operations by the evening.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Harvard University ☛ How World War I veterans shaped Civil Rights Movement

  Black men drafted into the U.S. Army during World War I were significantly more likely to join the NAACP and to play key leadership roles in the early Civil Rights Movement as a result of the discrimination they experienced while serving the country, according to a new study by Harvard Kennedy School economist Desmond Ang and Sahil Chinoy, a doctoral student in economics.

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ Rising GDP Lifts Only the Boats of the Wealthy Few

  What we’ve seen over the past forty years is that the vast majority of economic growth has been captured by the top 1 percent. Since 1982, the incomes of the top 1 percent have increased fivefold. The market incomes of the bottom half of Canadians have increased only 150 percent, one and a half times. If we look even more closely at the top 0.01 percent, which is about 3,000 people in Canada today, their incomes have increased 950 percent — nearly 10 times — since 1982.

• Modern Diplomacy ☛ Taliban’s Deepening Divisions: A Regime at the Edge of Chaos

  To strengthen his grip on power, Haibatullah has institutionalized gender apartheid, isolated Afghanistan from the international community, and maintained ties with terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), reportedly meeting with their leaders regularly. However, these efforts have failed to consolidate his rule or ensure internal cohesion. His push to centralize authority favoring commanders from his own Noorzai tribe has deepened divisions rather than fostering unity. Over the past three years, the Taliban had a crucial opportunity to bring peace and stability to Afghanistan, but they have squandered it.

• CS Monitor ☛ The joy of a letter. Maybe not in Denmark.

  The trendsetting Scandinavian nation plans to end four centuries of universal letter delivery. Other countries are watching this social experiment.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Eliseo Martelli ☛ I’m Regretting Switching MNO

  My recent decision to switch to TIM, one of Italy’s largest telecom providers, turned into a frustrating experience filled with technical glitches, hidden fees, and customer service challenges. If you’re considering TIM, you might want to think twice.

• Techdirt ☛ Trump FCC Boss To Destroy Whatever’s Left Of U.S. Broadband Consumer Protection

  Over at the FCC they’ve already killed net neutrality. They’ve butchered the agency’s efforts to stop racial discrimination in fiber deployments. They’re already ending all the agency’s investigations into predatory telecom bullshit like usage caps or predatory fees. Trump-stacked courts are about to kill longstanding programs that helped poor rural Americans and school systems afford broadband access.

  They’re utterly disinterested in protecting consumers or smaller competitors from the harms created by shitty giant telecom monopolies. Gone is even the pretense of concern about the impacts of unchecked corporate power. Gone is any effort to protect consumers and healthy markets.

• Seth Michael Larson ☛ I fear for the unauthenticated web

  I suggest everyone that uses cloud infrastructure for hosting set-up a billing limit to avoid an unexpected bill in case they're caught in the cross-hairs of a negligent company. All the abusers anonymize their usage at this point, so good luck trying to get compensated for damages.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Vox ☛ Spotify, YouTube, and Apple use algorithms to feed you music. You can make them better.

  This is why algorithms tend to be viewed as villains these days. They’re the technology behind TikTok’s For You page, which keeps feeding you weird videos you can’t stop watching, and Amazon recommendations that appear to know what prescription you’re taking. Facebook’s algorithms, meanwhile, have been radicalizing Americans for at least a decade, and Instagram’s algorithmic feed is wrecking the mental health of an entire generation. The implications of Spotify’s algorithms, you could argue, are quaint by comparison.