Leftovers

• Rolling Stone ☛ 'Marvel Rivals' Is a Hit With 'Rule 34' Porn Communities

  After its 2016 launch, Overwatch quickly became one of the most featured video games on sites like PornHub, thanks in large part to there being an abundance of models available in Blender for creators to, um, play with. There are currently at least 100 pages worth of Overwatch porn on PornHub, compared to around 32 pages under the Resident Evil category.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ NASA Disgusted by Elon Musk's Disrespect

    That kind of disregard for federal workers — a key characteristic of Musk's systematic dismantling of the government — left them speechless.

  • CNN ☛ NASA staff calls recent layoffs ‘targeted’ and ‘cruel’ as they brace for more changes

    The agency is planning to implement a reorganization plan as it chases some of the most ambitious goals yet in its nearly 67-year history, such as establishing a permanent lunar settlement after working to return humans to the moon’s surface later this decade.

  • Futurism ☛ Astronomers Investigate Whether Dying Star's Blast of Deadly Gamma Radiation Will Hit Earth

    But surprisingly, the astronomers also found that the orientation of the stars' orbits isn't what it was long assumed to be — with the optimistic upshot that, when it does explode, the Earth won't be caught in the crossfire. Hooray!

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Eagle-Eyed Man Discovers Rare Viking Arm Ring That May Have Been Lost in a Marsh in Sweden 1,000 Years Ago

    “What is unusual is that this one is made of iron,” Erlandsson tells radio station P4 Kalmar, per a translation by Sweden Herald. Of the more than 1,000 arm rings in the Swedish History Museum’s collection, only three are made of iron.

• Career/Education

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Promote Far and Wide: Free for All: The Public Library on PBS Premieres April 29th

    "There’s a new documentary celebrating the history and impact of libraries heading to PBS, and the trailer released today touches on the unequivocal positive impact they—and the librarians who work there—have on communities."

  • University of Toronto ☛ In universities, sometimes simple questions aren't simple

    Which answers you want for all of these depends on what you're going to use the resulting number (or numbers) for. There is no singular and correct answer for 'how many professors are there in the department'. The corollary to this is that any time we're asked how many professors are in our department, we have to quiz the people asking about what parts matter to them (or guess, or give complicated and conditional answers, or all of the above).

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Maya

    This is the 83rd edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Maya and her blog, maya.land

  • Eliseo Martelli ☛ The Death of Critical Thinking

    I believe there’s a profound difference between not knowing something and not caring to know. In today’s society, people seem to settle too quickly, satisfied with surface-level knowledge. The habit of questioning, doubting, and pushing deeper is disappearing.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump Orders Elimination of 'Improper Ideology’ at Smithsonian

    The Smithsonian spans 21 museums and, per its website, is the world’s largest museum, education and research complex, encompassing 14 education and research centers, and the National Zoo — “shaping the future by preserving heritage, discovering new knowledge, and sharing our resources with the world.” As the Trump administration tightens its grip on America’s history, which parts of the country’s heritage will be preserved remains to be seen.

• Hardware

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Hasselblad X1D: is the original medium format mirrorless camera still worth a look?

    I know, I know, that's an incredibly overused phrase – but here it was actually true. You have to remember that the Hasselblad X1D was the first ever mirrorless medium format camera, launching the year before the Fujifilm GFX 50S.

  • PC World ☛ I’m a gaming mouse expert: Here's why I carefully select my mouse mat

    Of all the PC gaming peripherals, none is as overlooked as the humble mouse pad (or mat).

    That’s a pity because mouse mats come in a variety of materials which have different speed and maneuverability profiles.

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ Mixing ARM NEON with SVE code for fun and profit

    These processors have special instructions called ARM NEON providing parallelism called Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD). For example, you can compare sixteen values with sixteen other values using one instruction.

    Some of the most recent ARM processors also support even more advanced instructions called SVE or Scalable Vector Extension. They have added more and more extensions over time: SVE 2 and SVE 2.1.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • SparkFun Electronics ☛ The World’s Smallest Particulate Matter Sensor

    The SparkFun Qwiic Particulate Matter Sensor features Bosch’s BMV080—the world’s smallest particulate matter sensor—measuring just 4.4 × 3.0 × 3.0 mm³, over 450 times smaller than comparable devices on the market. The air quality sensor uses an innovative design based on ultra-compact lasers with integrated photodiodes. It applies sophisticated algorithms to track the PM concentration directly in free space, without requiring a fan. It can detect PM1, PM2.5, and PM10 in real time to provide actionable data.

• Proprietary

  • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Amazon breaks compatibility with third-party S3 providers in JS SDK

    Amazon issued a recent update to their S3 JavaScript SDK that breaks compatibility with many third-party S3 providers.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Futurism ☛ Character.AI's New Parental Controls Are Comically Easy for Kids to Bypass

      In a blog post on Tuesday, the youth-beloved Character.AI characterized the feature as an "initial step" towards developing robust safety and parental control tools. Let's hope so: this tool appears to be absurdly easy for teens to bypass, and it's unclear how much "insight" it will really offer parents.

    • Wired ☛ Anthropic's Claude Is Good at Poetry—and Bullshitting

      Other examples in the research reveal more disturbing aspects of Claude’s thought process, moving from musical comedy to police procedural, as the scientists discovered devious thoughts in Claude’s brain. Take something as seemingly anodyne as solving math problems, which can sometimes be a surprising weakness in LLMs. The researchers found that under certain circumstances where Claude couldn’t come up with the right answer it would instead, as they put it, “engage in what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt would call ‘bullshitting’—just coming up with an answer, any answer, without caring whether it is true or false.” Worse, sometimes when the researchers asked Claude to show its work, it backtracked and created a bogus set of steps after the fact. Basically, it acted like a student desperately trying to cover up the fact that they’d faked their work. It’s one thing to give a wrong answer—we already know that about LLMs. What’s worrisome is that a model would lie about it.

    • Yordi Verkroost ☛ AI Is Just Another Napster Moment

      Whatever your opinion is doesn’t matter. AI has arrived, and it won’t leave. Like every other invention that caught us off guard, AI is the next big, scary thing. But as we’ve seen with all the innovations before it, it will just take some time to get used to and regulate in a way that’s accepted by most people.

    • Six Colors ☛ Is Apple really lagging in AI, or is AI lagging in usefulness?

      The thesis of the piece is not about excusing Apple’s AI missteps, but zooming out to take a look at the bigger picture of why AI is everywhere, and make the argument that maybe Apple is well-served by not necessarily being on the cutting edge of these developments.1

    • CNN ☛ Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown

      Apple, like every other big player in tech, is scrambling to find ways to inject AI into its products. Why? Well, it’s the future! What problems is it solving? Well, so far that’s not clear! Are customers demanding it? LOL, no. In fact, last year the backlash against one of Apple’s early ads for its AI was so hostile the company had to pull the commercial.

      The real reason companies are doing this is because Wall Street wants them to. Investors have been salivating for an Apple “super cycle” — a tech upgrade so enticing that consumers will rush to get their hands on the new model.

    • Matt Webb ☛ Filtered for the rise of the well-dressed robots

      I feel like something that isn’t super well appreciated in civilian world is quite how quickly humanoid robots will arrive, and quite how good they will be.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ How can Tromsø, Norway shut down some schools? Let’s ask the AI!

      So the locals got the report and checked it over — and found that a pile of the sources cited in the report … didn’t exist.

      Stig Johnsen, the municipal director, admitted the report was written with AI. Of 18 references in the report, only seven actually exist. “We discovered multiple errors, which we deeply regret.”

    • The New Stack ☛ Why Centralized AI Fails in Enterprise: The Case for a Federated Architecture

      As companies look to deliver value and ROI from their AI investments, one critical challenge threatens to derail these initiatives. The problem? Traditional AI implementation strategies require centralizing data from diverse sources, an approach that conflicts with enterprise governance policies, security frameworks, and regulatory obligations.

      According to analyst surveys, 90% of enterprises have already developed a multicloud strategy, with data distributed across various systems. This reality makes the conventional “copy all your data to one place” approach inefficient and often completely unfeasible for enterprise-scale implementations.

    • Tedium ☛ Tech Over Art: The Message The OpenAI Studio Ghibli Memes Send

      The thing that is clarifying about this move is not that this is possible but the ethical red line it crosses, in that it specifically disregards the feelings of the animator whose style is getting nicked. Hayao Miyazaki, who largely animates using traditional methods at a time when everyone else uses computers, has spoken out against AI art in a way that makes the images almost seem offensive in full context.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ AIs as Trusted Third Parties

      The paper contains several examples where an AI TTP provides real value. This is still mostly science fiction today, but it’s a fascinating thought experiment.

    • Michał Sapka ☛ Ghibli: the latest victim of Altmanizations

      Without this love, the art is no longer art. It's a product.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Scam Altman’s Studio Ghibli memes are another distraction from OpenAI’s money troubles

      Here’s the short version of why OpenAI is in trouble: [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Algorithmic Archiving project at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

      As part of a research project on archiving algorithms and the social data related to them, the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford seek feedback on social media archiving initiatives and practices, as well as input on researchers’ use of social media and algorithmic data. Please see, below, a request for participation in two brief surveys related to this project; both surveys will remain open until April 10, 2025.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Tripwire ☛ VanHelsing Ransomware: What You Need To Know

      RAAS stands for ransomware-as-a-service. The criminals behind VanHelsing lease our their tools and infrastructure to "affiliates" who will launch the attacks, and then share a slice of the money they extort with the VanHelsing operators.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • [Old] XDA ☛ I'm finally getting rid of Discord and self-hosting Mumble

      Discord has grown to be one of the most popular instant messaging and voice chat apps for gamers and beyond. What grew from a means to collate different servers into an intuitive platform has slowly become a bloated mess for some, myself included. Gone are the days when Mumble, TeamSpeak, and Ventrillo ruled the online gaming world, but it's still possible to launch and run servers, and all three are still actively developed. Below, you'll find some reasons why you should consider self-hosting a Mumble server.

    • [Old] Raspberry Pi ☛ HowTo - Mumble server - Raspberry Pi Forums

      mumble is the solution : [...]

    • Privacy International ☛ The Ghost Protocol: More than journalists in your group chats

      This happened to Goldberg as an accident. Yet, security services around the world have pushed for this to be part of their clandestine surveillance operations: the so-called “Ghost Protocol”.

      Governments have been trying to gain access to private online conversations since private online conversations have existed. We have seen examples of governments directly attacking the use of encryption since the 1990s, trying to undermine encryption standards, to directly attacking the devices these conversations are on. Even in the past month, we have challenged the UK Government’s use of secret orders to gain access to Apple’s end-to-end encrypted iCloud services.

    • Windows Central ☛ Windows 11 blocks ability to skip Microsoft Account during setup | Windows Central

      When Windows 11 version 22H2 launched, Microsoft made it so that both Windows 11 Home and Windows 11 Pro required an [Internet] connection and Microsoft Account during setup, but users quickly discovered workarounds.

    • The Verge ☛ Windows 11 is closing a loophole that let you skip making a Microsoft account

      Microsoft is no longer playing around when it comes to requiring every Windows 11 device be set up with an [Internet]-connected account. In its latest Windows 11 Insider Preview, the company says it will take out a well-known bypass script that let end users skip the requirement of connecting to the [Internet] and logging in with a Microsoft account to get through the initialization process of a new PC.

    • Wired ☛ SignalGate Is Driving the Most US Downloads of Signal Ever

      “In Signal’s history, this is the largest US-growth moment by a massive margin,” says Jun Harada, Signal's head of growth and partnerships. “It’s mind-blowing, even on our side.”

      Harada declined to give absolute numbers for Signal's user growth beyond saying that its total downloads are in the “hundreds of millions,” which has been the case for several years. But he said that the week’s rate of adoption has been twice that of a typical week for 2025, which in turn was twice that of a typical week the same time last year. “It happened immediately” after The Atlantic broke the story of Signal's use in the Yemeni bombing, Harada says. “And it’s been sustained. We’ve been maintaining that rate every day.”

    • Lionel Dricot ☛ The candid naivety of geeks

      Did you really think that Amazon was not listening to you before that? Did you really buy an Alexa trusting Amazon to "protect your privacy"?

    • SBS ☛ New travel deal to allow Australians faster entry through US airports

      "Expansion of the Global Entry Program is a testament to the closeness and friendship between our people," she said.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Silicon Angle ☛ DOGE [sic] reportedly planning to rewrite Social Security Administration’s software

    According to the SSA, its software systems contain more than 60 million lines of COBOL code. Originally released in 1960, COBOL is a relatively simple programming language geared towards writing mainframe software. The syntax continues to be used to this date in financial applications because it provides an extensive set of features for processing transaction data.

  • The Record ☛ UK braced for ‘free speech’ row with JD Vance as far-right websites spurn Online Safety Act

    The letter warns those platforms that they have certain duties under the British law to tackle illegal content, for instance material that could amount to a racially aggravated public order offence, and that failing to meet these duties could result in a fine worth £18 million ($23 million), or 10% of their global turnover, whichever is higher.

    Two far-right platforms have publicly announced receiving such letters and rebuked Ofcom. Gab, a messaging platform with a significant neo-Nazi user base, and Kiwi Farms, a harassment forum, both described the legislation as amounting to censorship.

  • Mike Brock ☛ An Open Letter to Trump Supporters

    But what's happening now goes far beyond those legitimate desires. It represents a fundamental assault on the constitutional order itself—not because it's delivering conservative policies or challenging liberal orthodoxies, but because it's dismantling the very structure of democratic governance.

  • TruthOut ☛ Musk Offers Voters $100 Each to Support Republican in Wisconsin Judicial Race

    After spending over a quarter of a billion dollars on Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign, Elon Musk is pouring money into a Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. Musk has spent more than $18 million to support Trump-backed candidate Brad Schimel over liberal Susan Crawford and has been paying Wisconsin voters $100 to help flip the state’s top court. This election could impact abortion rights, unions and Republicans’ ability to keep gerrymandered districts in place to control Congress. “The level of corruption at play here, the level of money at play here, really is a warning sign for what’s happening to our democracy,” says Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones magazine.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Canadians Know Danielle Smith Is a Traitor, Right?

    The Premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, sat on a stage in Florida alongside Ben Shapiro—a man who called Canada “a silly country” and advocated for its annexation by the United States—and discussed strategies to elect Canadian leaders who would be “solid allies” to Donald Trump. This happened at a $1,500-a-head fundraiser for PragerU, an organization that masquerades as an educational institution while functioning as a propaganda outlet, where they collectively raised over $1 million.

    Let that sink in.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Task And Purpose ☛ When are classified war plans neither ‘classified’ nor ‘war plans’

    Zaid has decades of experience litigating Freedom of Information Act requests for classified information. He said he has “no doubt” that the information about the Yemen strikes was classified at the time Hegseth sent it.

    “It’s dumbfounding to even contemplate an argument that this would not be classified,” Zaid said. “It’s reminiscent of the end of the ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ where the wizard is saying, ‘Don’t look over at the man behind the curtain,’ when you’re staring right at him.”

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Data privacy experts call DOGE [sic] actions 'alarming'

    The lack of transparency concerns U.S. Reps. Gerald E. Connolly, (D-Virginia) and Jamie Raskin, (D-Maryland), who filed a Freedom of Information Act request this month requesting DOGE [sic] provide clear answers about its operations.

    The request asks for details on who is in charge at DOGE [sic], the scope of its authority to close federal agencies and lay off federal employees, the extent of its access to sensitive government sensitive databases and for Musk to outline how collected data may benefit his own companies and his foreign customers. They also questioned the feeding of sensitive information into AI systems, which DOGE [sic] touted last month.

  • 404 Media ☛ Pikachu Spotted Fleeing Police Crackdowns During Turkey Protests

    The AI image of Pikachu has gone nearly as viral as the real video of the person in a Pikachu costume running away from the cops, and shows how people looking to take advantage of any widely covered news event are creating AI imagery in near real time with the event itself. 404 Media saw various people sharing the AI image of Pikachu as though it were real, and on first glance it was difficult for us to tell that it was fake, especially because the real video of Pikachu running away is blurry. But, as several news outlets in Turkey have already pointed out, things like mixed-up lettering on the police jackets, distorted details, and inconsistencies in the street lamps give it away as fake.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Reality-Based Communities

    These ideologues – who often cross over from boardrooms into governments – are with the GW Bush official who dismissed a journalist as a member of the "reality-based community": [...]

  • Spiegel ☛ Pete Hegseth, Mike Waltz, Tulsi Gabbard: Private Data and Passwords of Senior U.S. Security Officials Found Online

    Most of these numbers and email addresses are apparently still in use, with some of them linked to profiles on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. They were used to create Dropbox accounts and profiles in apps that track running data. There are also WhatsApp profiles for the respective phone numbers and even Signal accounts in some cases.

  • Meduza ☛ Journalists confirm deaths of 100,000 Russian soldiers in Ukraine

    “This is still far from the full number, even by our methodology,” Mediazona noted. “Our volunteers have more than 10,000 (10,269) obituaries left to review. Not all of them are unique, and the two figures can’t simply be added together, as some information is duplicated.”

  • Raw Story ☛ Someone else was in on the controversial Signal chat who shouldn't have been there: report - Raw Story

    “The recklessness and incompetence of how Trump’s so-called ‘best and brightest’ handled national security information is bad enough when they’re channeling the offhanded attitude of tweeners texting about their plans for spring break,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). “But the fact they included Joe Kent in this buffoonish behavior only magnifies their dangerous sloppiness and total disregard for intelligence since he hasn’t even been confirmed by the Senate.”

  • Williamette Week ☛ “Signalgate” Snares One of Oregon’s Own

    Kent was among a group of officials who participated in a chat on messaging app Signal to plan an attack on Houthi militants in Yemen.

    The world knows about the chat because the organizer accidentally added a journalist to it: Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. Goldberg withheld much of the chat until the Trump administration claimed none of the information was classified, and therefore no laws were broken. Today, The Atlantic released almost all of it.

• Environment

  • EcoWatch ☛ Coca-Cola’s Plastic Waste Polluting Oceans Projected to Reach 1.3 Billion Pounds per Year by 2030: Oceana Report

    Coca-Cola products will be responsible for up to 1.33 billion pounds of plastic waste making its way into the planet’s oceans and waterways each year by 2030 — enough to fill the stomachs of more than 18 million blue whales, according to a new report by nonprofit Oceana.

  • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ EVs Help Europe Avoid 20 Million Tonnes of CO2 Emissions

    Electric vehicles are set to help Europe avoid 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions in 2025, a new report finds, though changes to climate commitments for carmakers could undermine progress.

  • Stephen Smith ☛ Is Trump Really an Environmentalist?

    I’m not sure Trump intends to be an environmentalist, but this has been a positive result of all his policies. Reduced air travel, reduced car purchases, higher gas prices, lower GDP, lower population are all positives for the environment. Having Trump normalize some of these policies that have been so vilified against environmentalists in the past by the right wing media will be interesting to see down the road.

  • Ish Sookun ☛ PMI Workshop — Decarbonising the construction industry

    On Thursday 27th March 2025, the Project Management Institute Chapter of Mauritius held a workshop at Moka Mocha in Tribeca Mall. The theme was "the importance of decarbonising the construction industry in Mauritius".

  • Energy/Transportation

    • CBC ☛ Is there such a thing as a Made in America car anymore?

      Any vehicle made in North America is manufactured via a complex web of interconnected supply chains that use raw materials and parts suppliers that span the entire continent.

    • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ Climate Change Contributes to Surge in Global Energy Demand

      Electricity demand rose nearly twice as fast in 2024 as the average over the past decade, as heatwaves drove up air conditioning use, industries ramped up production, and the world’s fleet of electric vehicles, data centres, and artificial intelligence systems grew, finds [pdf] the IEA’s annual Global Energy Review. Nearly all of the additional electricity was supplied by low-emissions sources, with solar and wind seeing record expansion, along with an 8% rise in nuclear power generation.

    • Futurism ☛ Sam Bankman-Fried Woken by Guards at 3am, Escorted From Prison

      The 33-year-old SBF famously went from trading billions of dollars' worth of cryptocurrency to peddling commissary ramen packs after a massive federal investigation uncovered rampant fraud perpetuated by his blockchain company, FTX. His sentence is 25 years followed by three years of supervised release, which began in March of 2024.

    • Air Force Times ☛ FAA must do better after fatal DC Black Hawk crash, agency leader says

      Homendy said it is also important to inspect that equipment to make sure it actually works. The helicopter involved in this collision had not transmitted any location data for 730 days. When the NTSB checked the rest of the unit’s helicopters after the crash, it found eight of them that hadn’t transmitted since 2023.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Germany: Deutsche Bahn's ambitious plans

      According to Deutsche Bahn, the operator's infrastructure problems had simply been underestimated, something Lutz referred to as DB's core "weak spot." And this is the root cause of many of the delays. "We cannot ensure stable service on fault-prone and outdated infrastructure."

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Software Supply Chain Attack

      Among the countries the US recently voted with in the UN General Assembly is the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea (DPRK). The US administration may have been impressed with the DPRK's innovative, diversified business model. This includes divisions responsible for supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine with soldiers and arms, counterfeiting $100 bills, drug smuggling, and trafficking wildlife and humans. One of the most profitable divisions is responsible for stealing cryptocurrencies, and on 21st February it had a major success by stealing Ethereum with a notional value of $1.5B from the Bybit exchange.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Trump’s Approach to Public Lands? Expanding the Extractive Economy and Declaring a War on Nature

  • Overpopulation

    • Greece ☛ Cyprus faces water cuts this summer

      “I can’t sugarcoat the situation,” Panayiotou said. “Things are very, very difficult. The quantities of water in our dams are minimal, and the desalination plants aren’t enough to fully supply us.”

• Finance

  • Insight Hungary ☛ Hungarian National Bank foundations under investigation for fraud

    Hungary’s police confirmed an ongoing investigation into the foundation linked to the Hungarian National Bank (MNB), following a complaint filed by the State Audit Office (ÁSZ) over suspected financial misconduct, 444 reports. The controversy dates back to 2014 when then-Governor György Matolcsy funneled HUF 266.4 billion ($715m) from the central bank into the Pallas Athéné Domus Meriti (PADME) Foundation. Over time, the foundation’s assets ballooned, primarily managed by Optima Investment Ltd. However, according to ÁSZ’s latest findings, these funds were invested through an opaque structure, making their true value difficult to assess.

    The audit has also flagged suspicious financial dealings involving Neumann János University’s foundation, which received nearly HUF 150 billion ($402m) in state funding but diverted much of it into Optima’s corporate bonds instead of investing in education. Another suspicious detail is a EUR 170 million loan granted to PADME by MBH Bank, a financial institution partly owned by the Hungarian state and a close associate of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. 

  • FSF ☛ "Free" filing should be free as in freedom

    A modern free society has an obligation to offer electronic tax filing that respects user freedom, and the United States is not excluded from this responsibility.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ EU could charge fees on PayPal in US tariff dispute, says senior lawmaker

    The European Union could charge fees on PayPal as part of a tariff dispute with the United States, a senior European lawmaker said on Friday.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • El País ☛ Trump - Musk: ‘Hypnocracy’: The regime to numb critical thinking

      It’s a warning that’s been made by a multitude of studies: memes are not harmless; for extremists, they are the most effective language for spreading their ideas. Social networks are tools of polarization and sophisticated interference. AI-generated hoaxes create fake reality that is indistinguishable from the real and are threatening democracy. Artificial intelligence itself is inherently biased, and these biases are far from innocent.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ “Pink Slime Journalism” Takes Aim at Greenpeace

      “Pink slime journalism” is the term I coined in 2012 to describe a kind of news site that conceals its slanted or misleading information behind the appearance of a traditional local news outlet, much like the gooey filler added to processed meats without a warning label. On an episode of National Public Radio’s This American Life, I blew the whistle on Journatic, a Chicago-based company that attempted to disrupt the newspaper industry by outsourcing journalism to a virtual sweatshop in the Philippines — with some writers earning pennies per story.

      Instead of reforming their ways, Journatic simply rebranded, first to Local Labs, Locality Labs, and now Metric Media. Then, Journatic’s CEO, Brian Timpone, pivoted to a business model even more toxic than the original: pay-for-play partisan political news in which politicians or PACs can purchase news coverage and editorials. After all, there was little money to be extracted from the dying local news industry.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Columbia University President Resigns After School Accepts Trump Demands

    Earlier this month, the Trump administration sent a letter to the university with nine demands to meet as a precondition to negotiations surrounding its federal funding. With $400 million in key funding on the line, one of the nation’s most prestigious and oldest universities conceded and agreed to ban students from wearing masks on campus for the purpose of concealing identity during protests, with exceptions for religious and health reasons. Columbia also agreed to increase its campus security by hiring 36 new security officers, who unlike in the past, will have the authority to arrest students, and to install a new senior vice provost to monitor the department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies.

  • The Nation ☛ With Trump in Office, How Much Will TV Networks Self-Censor?

    The deeper problem is that journalists are under pressure not only from Trump but from their corporate owners. It’s no accident that ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN all capitulated by employing “off the coast of Florida” or other euphemisms for the Gulf of Mexico, Darcy argued. Broadcast news operations, he noted, have “standards departments” that rule on what their reporters can and cannot say on the air—departments that answer to corporate superiors.

  • Martin Chang ☛ Nostr, my thoughts on a new decentralized pubsub protocol - Martin's website/blog thingy

    Every publisher on Nostr owns a private and public key pair (secp256k1) and signs each publication with said key, pushing their content to relays. Relays then verify the signature to ensure the content is authentic. Then if the relay has subscribers interested in the content (specified by tags or subscription to public keys), it will push the content to the subscribers. Or if the subscriber is offline (in reality subscribing runs on a per-connection context, so relays don't need to remember about subscription from clients), the relay will hold the content until the subscriber comes back online.

    For censorship resistance, Nostr does the dead simple approach - since content publication is attached to your public key and not domain or IP address, even if your content is so controversial that the ISP decides to block you, you can just find a local cafe and poke relays there. Also if the relays decides to block you... well, you can just find another relay. This is drastically different from previous attempts at censorship resistance, like GNUnet where the FS (file sharing) service built probable deniability into the protocol. I have seen this described as a "pro censorship" approach where nodes can censor all they want, but the protocol itself remains censorship resistant.

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ NOSTR moderation?

    Fedi is even worse in one regard; I found out that on Akkoma, if I just “block” someone, I’m still hosting their posts and while I can’t see those posts myself, if someone else visits my Akkoma instance, even when they’re not logged in, they’ll see those posts. They can still see them. I only hid them from myself, I’m still providing rent-free webhosting to them. (The fix for that on Akkoma is to go into the user list and “delete” the user as if it were a local user.)

  • Freedom From Religion Foundation ☛ Nigerian ‘blasphemy’ victim interviewed for FFRF TV show after prison release

    Mubarak explains his loss of faith, how he went on — despite stigmatization — to establish a Nigerian humanist group, and how he was officially abducted and taken to a Nigerian state with Sharia laws and, ultimately, imprisoned.

  • John Gruber ☛ Daring Fireball: The Website That Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss (You’re Reading It)

    Maybe I’ve lost my fastball, and I just don’t write so good no more. Or maybe it’s not me, but the Hacker News audience that has changed in recent years.1 But it seems to me there’s something fishy going on. What bothers me isn’t so much that Daring Fireball is shitlisted at Hacker News — even though I really did enjoy reading the commentary on my posts back when they regularly surfaced there, and still do when one slips through the cracks. What bothers me is that it’s unexplained. Which, ultimately, seems not so much censorial as just cowardly.

  • University of Toronto ☛ US sanctions and your VPN (and certain big US-based cloud providers)

    Getting around geographical restrictions by using a VPN is a time honored Internet tradition. As a result of it being a time honored Internet tradition, a certain large cloud provider with a lot of expertise in browsers doesn't just determine what your country is based on your public IP; instead, as far as we can tell, it will try to sniff all sorts of attributes of your browser and your behavior and so on to tell if you're actually located in a sanctioned place despite what your public IP is. If this large cloud provider decides that you (the person operating through the VPN) actually are in a sanctioned region, it then seems to mark your VPN's public exit IP as 'actually this is in a sanctioned area' and apply the result to other people who are also working through the VPN.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • FAIR ☛ Tufts Grad Student Targeted by DHS Wrote Suspiciously Pro-Humanity Op-Ed

    The journalism world has been reeling from news that a BBC correspondent was deported from Turkey, after he was “covering the antigovernment protests in the country” and was “detained and labeled ‘a threat to public order’” (New York Times, 3/27/25). Turkey has an abysmal reputation for press freedom (CPJ, 2/13/24; European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, 10/5/23), placing 158th out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders index, so as distressing as this news is, it’s in character for a country many think of as illiberal and authoritarian (Guardian, 6/9/13; HRW, 1/29/15). Journalists have been arrested in the latest unrest in Turkey (AP, 3/24/25).

  • US News And World Report ☛ Swedish Journalist Jailed in Turkey on Terrorism, Insult Charges

    His employer, Dagens ETC newspaper, had raised concerns over his whereabouts after he was unreachable for two days.

    Dagens ETC Editor-in-Chief Andreas Gustavsson told Swedish TV4 that Medin had done nothing wrong and was merely being punished for doing his job as a reporter.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ The AP and Trump administration renew court fight over White House press access

    The two journalists, and other AP reporters, have also been refused entry to most larger White House events, including in the East Room, and the tarmac for Air Force One departures.

    The AP, which has been a member of the White House press pool since the 19th century, maintains that the sudden ban violates its First Amendment and due process rights and has hurt its competitiveness as a wire service that reaches thousands of newsrooms.

  • Press Gazette ☛ US court dismisses defamation and free speech lawsuit against NewsGuard

    The publication also argued that, because of contract work NewsGuard had done tracking online misinformation for the US government, its First Amendment rights had been violated.

  • International Business Times ☛ US Government-Funded Media Sue Trump Officials Over 'Unconstitutional' Shutdown Orders

    These developments come in the wake of what has been dubbed 'Bloody Saturday', when multiple US Agency for Global Media (USAGM)-funded outlets were abruptly defunded in what Trump officials claimed was an effort to reduce federal bureaucracy. Critics, however, see it as a targeted attack on public-interest media.

  • BIA Net ☛ Journalist among seven detained during protest in Balıkesir

    According to the Interior Ministry, more than 1,800 people were detained nationwide between Mar 19 and Mar 27 in connection with the demonstrations, with 260 formally arrested.

    At least 14 journalists have been among those detained.

  • BIA Net ☛ Two journalists covering protests detained by anti-terror police

    The DİSK Press Workers (Basın-İş) union criticized the raids, saying, calling them an attack on press freedom and the public’s right to know.

    “You cannot silence the truth by silencing journalists. The detained journalists must be released immediately," the union said.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Deseret Media ☛ HB267 referendum effort says it has 130K signatures, support from Fraternal Order of Police

    A coalition working to put a referendum on the ballot to undo the Legislature's bill to strip public unions of collective bargaining rights says it has already collected nearly 130,000 signatures — and just received backing from the state's largest association of police officers.

  • Vox ☛ The controversial craft of prison architecture

    Ultimately, what a prison looks like on the outside has seemingly little to do with the conditions on the inside. But questions of design get at something deeper: What our prisons look like says a lot about how we think about crime and punishment, what we think about prisoners, and how we like to think of our own society.

  • NPR ☛ Trump signs order ending union bargaining rights for wide swaths of federal employees

    In a fact sheet, the White House says the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA) gives him the authority to halt collective bargaining at agencies with national security missions.

    This provision has traditionally applied to certain employees at agencies such as the CIA, the FBI or the National Security Agency.

    But Trump's order, signed late Thursday, is more far-reaching, and includes employees whose jobs touch on national defense, border security, foreign relations, energy security, pandemic preparedness, the economy, public safety and cybersecurity.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ They Are Going to Take Everything If We Don't Stop Them

    There are more than a million union members working in the federal government. I have not seen an official count, but this executive order targets most of them. It is also meant to establish the precedent that the president is capable of destroying entire unions using flimsy legalistic pretexts. Oh, the Environmental Protection Agency is “determined to have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work,” so you can throw out its fairly negotiated existing union contract, and that is okay? Sure. Treating any of this as a legitimate political position is a mistake. This is just running into the middle of organized labor swinging around a chainsaw.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• PC World ☛ Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup

  I’m being flippant, but it’s understandable that Microsoft would want to give Office a performance boost, even if it is somewhat illusory. And in the company’s defense, the announcement in the Microsoft 365 Message Center Archive (spotted by The Verge) does say that the new tool will only be enabled on PCs that have at least 8GB of RAM and 5GB of free disk space. I think even trying to run Windows 11 on just 8GB of RAM is kind of optimistic these days, but at least there’s a floor.

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Big Tech and “captive audience venues”

  The reason Facebook was once a nice place to hang out and talk with your friends and isn't anymore is that Mark Zuckerberg is no longer disciplined by competitors like Instagram (which he bought) nor by regulators (whom he captured), nor by interoperable tech like ad-blockers and alternative clients (which he uses IP law to destroy) nor by his own workforce (who have become disposable thanks to workforce supply catching up with demand). It used to be that Mark Zuckerberg couldn't really move the enshittification lever in the Facebook C-suite because these disciplining forces gummed it up. He had to worry about losing users, or about users installing alternative technology, or about regulators hitting him hard enough to hurt, or about workplace revolts. Now, he doesn't have to worry about these things, so he's indulging the impulses that he's had since the earliest days in his Harvard dorm, when he was a mere larval incel cooking up an online service to help him rate the fuckability of his female classmates.

• India Times ☛ Google to pay $100 million to settle advertisers' class action

  Google has agreed to pay $100 million in cash to settle a long-running lawsuit claiming it overcharged advertisers by failing to provide promised discounts and charged for clicks on ads outside the geographic areas the advertisers targeted.

• Trademarks

  • Futurism ☛ Lawyer Says Studio Ghibli Could Take Legal Action Against OpenAI

    While it's a "complex question" whether the Japanese animation studio would have enough grounds, the company "might have the ability to claim OpenAI has violated the Lanham Act which provides the basis for claims related to false advertising, trademark infringement and unfair competition," Rosenberg, now the founder of Telluride Legal Strategies, told Futurism.

    The Lanham Act, which was enacted in 1946, is the primary federal statute governing trademark law in the US, and establishes a national system of trademark registration that allows owners to pursue infringement lawsuits.

• Copyrights

  • Silicon Angle ☛ OpenAI's viral Studio Ghibli-inspired AI art comes under hailstorm of criticism

    Studio Ghibli and its North American distributor have yet to comment. The studio’s founder, Hayao Miyazaki, 84, also hasn’t commented, but he may perceive this as blasphemy in art. In 2016 after being shown an early version of AI-created art, he said he was “utterly disgusted,” though this was concerning the image of a head dragging a body. Nonetheless, he said he would never “incorporate this technology into my work at all” and that it is “an insult to life itself.”