Leftovers

• Yordi Verkroost ☛ Little Luxuries

  I have developed the habit of staying the night at a hotel after a late-night concert. It's a privilege to be able to afford that, sure... it just lets me enjoy a concert so much more when I know I have no need at all to rush to the last train. Being able to slowly gaze at the merch store and having the time to wait in line for the artist's latest album on vinyl is also an added benefit.

• Lou Plummer ☛ What I've Learned on the IndieWeb

  I happen to be a prolific writer, a virtual fire hose of prose, if you will, but that does not make me anything apart from a person who has many files to keep up with. The people who craft one or two gems per month are 100% some of my favorites. IndieWeb blogging is not a competitive sport. It's not about Follower counts, monetization, or page views. As much as I admire clever web design and aesthetics, it's not about that either. To me, IndieWeb blogging is about community, honesty, and creativity. It's being a good neighbor and a helpful and hopefully inspiring presence because, damn, don't we all need a friend and some inspiration?

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: More Everything Forever

  Becker's central question is how many "smart" people (some of them very smart and accomplished, others merely very certain that they are smart despite all evidence to the contrary) can mistake futuristic allegories made up by pulp writers for prophesy?

  In answering this question, he uncovers a corollary of Upton Sinclair's famous maxim that "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it," namely, that "it is easy to get a person to believe something when doing so will make them feel good about themselves."

• Amit Gawande ☛ Introducing Square 101

  TL;DR: I'm starting a newsletter called "Square 101," where each issue is a short (500 words), sharp introduction to terms you hear often but no one ever explains. You can subscribe to the newsletter or follow it here on the blog. I will send the first issue on May 1st and post a new one on the 1st and 15th of every month.

• Science

  • The Dissenter ☛ Hiding Corruption: NOAA Agencies Claim They Have Too Many Records On Musk And DOGE To Produce Them

  • El País ☛ NASA astronaut Kathryn Thornton: ‘All the progress we’ve made over the past 70 years is in peril’

    This week, Thornton will visit Spain to give a talk at the Starmus Festival, which kicks off Friday on the Canary Island of La Palma. In this interview with EL PAÍS, the astronaut reflects on how much space exploration has changed, especially in the current era, which she views with some dismay. She expresses astonishment at Elon Musk’s power and his influence over NASA, as well as concern about Donald Trump’s attacks on science in the U.S.

  • New Yorker ☛ The Cost of Defunding Harvard

    These attacks are part of a broader assault on America’s health-and-science infrastructure. More than ninety per cent of the nine billion federal dollars for Harvard that are now in danger supports life sciences, primarily through the National Institutes of Health. The university itself receives only a fraction of this funding. Three-quarters of it goes to five independent Boston hospitals affiliated with its medical school: Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The threatened defunding, if implemented, would choke off science and research across all of them.

  • Science Alert ☛ Giant Wave in Pacific Ocean Was The Most Extreme 'Rogue Wave' on Record

    Since then, dozens more rogue waves have been recorded (some even in lakes), and while the one that surfaced near Ucluelet, Vancouver Island was not the tallest, its relative size compared to the waves around it was unprecedented.

• Career/Education

  • Phil Eaton ☛ Burn your title

    I've been a developer, a manager, a cofounder, and now I'm a developer again. I ran away from each position until being a founder because I felt like I was limited by what I was allowed to do.

• Hardware

  • BoingBoing ☛ Trump tariffs hit retrogaming

    The tariffs have been described as a "death blow" to the device category, with 35% price hikes in the offing—and that's based on just one analysis of a trade war whose numbers move with the president's whims. Almost all the cheapo brands are based in China.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Trump’s EPA Has Made It Harder to Track Toxic Chemical Plants

    Bowing to the chemical industry lobby, the Environmental Protection Agency has quietly hid data that mapped out the locations of thousands of dangerous chemical facilities across the US.

  • Elliot C Smith ☛ Infinite Avocados

    No market has infinite growth. You can invent great stories to make the market seem bigger than it is but at the end of the day there’s always a limit. That limit might be high, reaching it might be valuable, but pretending its not there is either ignorant or deceptive.

• Proprietary

  • Bitdefender ☛ Crosswalks hacked to play fake audio of Musk, Zuck, and Jeff Bezos

    The fake voices of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, are being played from hacked crossings to the surprise of pedestrians in a number of US cities.

  • MacRumors ☛ The MacRumors Show: John Gruber Talks Apple Intelligence and the Future of the Company

    The company has altered its marketing strategy away from the "Hello, ‌Apple Intelligence‌" tagline and the features are finally expected to launch sometime within the next year. With this recent context, we get John's thoughts on how the situation has evolved since he wrote his article, including on the proposed class-action lawsuits against Apple over false advertising. We also look at how Apple may present its suite of AI features at WWDC later this year.

  • [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ FTC sues Uber over Uber One subscription billing practices

    In its lawsuit, the FTC claims that the company signed up “many” customers to Uber One without asking their consent. In one case, the ride-hailing provider allegedly charged an individual who didn’t even have an Uber account. Moreover, the FTC alleges that some users who had signed up for a free trial were billed before the trial expired.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Thomas Rigby ☛ An AI-powered grammar-checker is a plain dumb idea

      Large-language models are usually trained on vast amounts of data from the wider web. Content on the wider web is written by humans that, as the prevalence of grammar checkers suggests, suck at writing gramatically correct text!

      So, your grammar checker has been trained on poor grammar. LLMs don't know anything, they rely on mathematically calculated "best guesses" which they then proffer as hard fact. Your users don't know it's bad grammar so they accept the revisions. Now your grammar checker is even more convinced its "best guess" is "good grammar".

    • Matt Birchler ☛ If this post isn’t a joke, it’ll win my “most cringe blog post of 2025” award

      I don’t have time to read every dumb post about AI that comes across my feeds (it’s a new, massive, growing market so of course there are a bunch of people who are getting it way wrong), so I didn’t think much about this post when I saw it glide by in my Mastodon feed yesterday morning. Then I saw it again…and again…and again, and I had to check it out. Honestly, based on the post title I wasn’t expecting it to be anything crazy, but Building Our "Native-Ai Newsroom"... surprised me.

    • LRT ☛ Government to present guidelines for AI use in Lithuanian schools

      According to Deputy Education Minister Jonas Petkevičius, artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the way students learn and teachers teach, and schools need help adapting.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Generative AI is reshaping South Korea’s webcomics industry

      Lee believes that AI can help him realize his vision. In partnership with Jaedam Media, a web comics production company based in Seoul, he developed the “Lee Hyun-se AI model” by fine-tuning the open-source AI art generator Stable Diffusion, created by the UK-based startup Stability AI. Using a data set of 5,000 volumes of comics that he has published over 46 years, the resulting model generates comics in his signature style.

    • PC World ☛ OpenAI's newest AI models hallucinate [sic] way more, for reasons unknown

      However, according to OpenAI’s internal tests, these new o3 and o4-mini reasoning models also hallucinate significantly more often than previous AI models, reports TechCrunch. This is unusual as newer models tend to hallucinate [sic] less as the underlying AI tech improves.

    • Seth Godin ☛ Technical debt and AI slop

      The end result will be as the end result often is–the first one now will later be last. The shortcuts might not be the best way to get to where you’re going.

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ “I Don’t See Why Not”

      As I’m sure you know from working on problems, “I don’t see why not” moments are usually followed by, “Actually this is going to be a bit harder that we thought…”

  • Social Control Media

    • Sean Monahan ☛ the covid divide

      Polling is a messy art, but when it replicates the same findings over and over again we should listen. And what keeps being replicated over and over again—this time in the Yale Youth Poll—is that the youngest adults, those under 21, have shifted substantially to the right.

    • NL Times ☛ 14 arrested across Netherlands for inciting terrorism on social media, including minors

      The suspects are accused of attempting to incite others to commit terrorist acts, with some of the alleged activity taking place on TikTok. The arrests were carried out in various locations throughout the country and involved multiple regional police units.

    • Tedium ☛ Bluesky & Blue Checks: Here’s Why It Makes Sense

      The situation, involving a well-known writer getting extorted for his domain name by a user who had commandeered dozens of sock puppets that shared usernames of popular Twitter personalities, was touch and go for a bit. On top of blowing up a scammer’s spot, fans of the domain-based verification system were not happy that I pointed out the flaws with that approach. But it ultimately was a valuable discussion to surface.

      See, as much as people hated the haves/have-nots dynamic it created, legacy Twitter’s blue-checkmark system worked for its initial intended purpose. Which is why Bluesky is adopting its own take on it, announced this week. From their blog post: [...]

    • Wired ☛ Bluesky Is Rolling Out Official Verification

      Rolling out what is pretty close to a dupe of Twitter’s original verification system is not groundbreaking stuff. It’s savvy, nonetheless. The reason social networks like Instagram and TikTok aped the blue check approach wasn’t because they necessarily wanted to copy a rival’s features. It was because these symbols had been successfully established as a visual cue that an account had been vetted.

Privatisation/Privateering

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ Price Gougers Are Exploiting Trump’s Tariffs

  “There is perhaps more of a window to make changes to your pricing than there has been before,” Zawada said. Consumers, he explained, were bracing themselves for tariff sticker shock: “Customers expect change.”

  “Now,” he said, “is the time to take advantage.”

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ What Happens When Private Equity Owns Your Kid’s Day Care

  When my toddler’s day care started turning parents away at the door due to staffing shortages, I learned it was owned by private equity — which maximizes enrollment to squeeze profit out of childcare and now owns eight of the 11 largest US day care companies.

Security

• Privacy/Surveillance

  • Papers Please ☛ REAL-ID FAQ: What will happen at US airports on May 7, 2025?

    The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has announced that it will begin “implementation of its REAL ID enforcement measures at TSA checkpoints nationwide” on May 7, 2025.

    What does this mean if you want to fly but don’t have any of the types of ID that the TSA deems compliant with the REAL-ID Act (including a US or foreign passport, a US passport card, a Canadian driver’s license, or a US driver’s license or state ID with a REAL-ID gold star in the upper right corner or that is marked as an “Enhanced Drivers License”)?

    The key thing to know is that — unless the TSA makes undisclosed changes to its procedures — air travelers with “noncompliant” ID on or after May 7, 2025, should be treated, and should be allowed to fly, the same way people with no ID fly today.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Florida bill would allow property owners to use “reasonable force” to stop spying drones, despite FAA warnings

    Florida is currently an “expectation of privacy” state for drone pilots. An expectation of privacy means that drones cannot fly to view something that isn’t possible to see while standing on the ground of publicly accessible property. For example, flying a drone over someone’s privacy fence is illegal in expectation of privacy states because that area cannot be viewed from the road and therefore has the expectation of privacy. Legislation typically has exceptions, such as for first responders, but drone pilots are largely prohibited from flying over expectation of privacy areas without the property owner’s permission.

  • CBC ☛ She felt like she was being watched. Then she found a hidden camera in her bathroom

    She immediately called the RCMP, who she said pulled the camera from the wall, along with a long wire that they traced to the landlord's home upstairs.

  • Michigan News ☛ Dear Abby: Daughter cut ties with us 2 years ago after hearing our conversation on a doorbell camera

    We were recorded on video and audio on our daughter’s porch, thinking we were talking to each other privately. We were discussing how hurt we were that she didn’t want to spend time with us on our 50th wedding anniversary, shortly after she and her husband moved out of state. They could easily have driven to a new RV park close to our house. Her aunt tried to talk with her about seeing family members and being with us, but she refused.

  • Inside Towers ☛ FCC $57M Fine Against AT&T is Vacated - Inside Towers

    AT&T (NYSE: T) successfully petitioned the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to vacate a $57 million fine from the FCC, according to Courthouse News Service. The agency determined last year the wireless carrier failed to protect the privacy of its customers’ location data, Inside Towers reported. In the forfeiture order, the FCC concluded that AT&T violated section 222 of the Communications Act by disclosing its customers’ location information without their consent and without taking reasonable measures to protect that information against unauthorized disclosure.

Defence/Aggression

• YLE ☛ Education committee backs government plans to ban phones in Finnish schools

  Schools would also have the freedom to decide on the use and storage of mobile devices during other parts of the school day, such as breaks and lunch. These policies would need to be included in the school's code of conduct.

• RTL ☛ Smartphone ban in Luxembourg schools: 'Spending hours on a phone cannot be good for young people': Education Minister

  As of Tuesday, smartphones and other connected devices are prohibited in primary schools and drop-in centres ("maisons-relais").

• ANF News ☛ Another ISIS member captured in ongoing security operation in Hol Camp

  As many as 35,323 people are living in Hol Camp, 13,124 of whom are Iraqi migrants. The majority of the camp's inhabitants is made up of the families of ISIS mercenaries. ISIS members are constantly trying to remain active in the camp and organize children with radical ideas.

• Hindustan Times ☛ Owaisi dares PM Modi: ‘Ask Saudi crown prince if Medina is built on Waqf land’

  The AIMIM president said, “Someone from the BJP said in the Parliament that this particular Muslim country does not have a Waqf. When your plane entered Saudi airspace, fighter planes from Saudi Arabia escorted your (PM Modi's) plane, and we welcomed this gesture. But I want to tell PM Narendra Modi that during his visit to Saudi Arabia, he should ask the crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, if Medina is built on Waqf land.”

• RTL ☛ Strengthening 'shared military capabilities': Nordics, Lithuania plan joint purchase of combat vehicles

  The CV90 combat vehicle is made by BAE Systems Hagglunds in Ornskoldsvik, Sweden.

• US News And World Report ☛ Sweden Eyes Purchase of Combat Vehicles With Norway, Lithuania, Finland

  The four countries are now drafting a statement of intent on cooperation for a purchase of the military vehicles, Kristersson told a joint press conference with his Lithuanian counterpart Gintautas Paluckas.

• The Atlantic ☛ A Ticking Clock on American Freedom

  People sometimes call the descent into authoritarianism a “slide,” but that makes it sound gradual and gentle. Maria Ressa, the journalist who earned the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to save freedom of expression in the Philippines, told me that what she experienced during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte is now, with startling speed and remarkable similarity, playing out in the United States under Donald Trump. Her country’s democratic struggles are highly instructive. And her message to me was this: Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost.

• The Moscow Times ☛ Russian Hackers Targeted Dutch Public Facility, Intelligence Agency Says

  “As far as known, this is the first time that such a sabotage attack has been carried out against such a digital control system in the Netherlands,” Vice Admiral and MIVD director Peter Reesink said in the 52-page report.

• Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

  • Latvia ☛ Latvian and Ukrainian police take action against 'investment' scammers

    Latvian State Police cybercrime investigators, together with Ukrainian law enforcement agencies, have disrupted a fraudulent scheme carried out by an international organized crime group, which affected Latvian citizens, said a police release.

  • France24 ☛ Ukrainians have mixed feelings about Pope Francis's death

    Ukraine’s Catholics, who make up just 10 percent of the country’s population, have mixed feelings about the pope’s passing.  Many in Ukraine are still angry over the pontiff’s call for the country to negotiate with Russia after Moscow’s invasion in 2022. “I hope the next pope to be elected will be more favourable to Ukraine,” says one Ukrainian Catholic.

  • France24 ☛ Denmark: Changing face of war puts country on drone offensive

    As drones transform the face of war from Ukraine to Gaza, Denmark is opening a military drone testing centre to develop cutting-edge technology and boost its national defence. It will be based at Hans Christian Andersen airport in Odense, already home to one of Europe's biggest airspaces dedicated to drone testing. "We're looking into a front line that's becoming more and more dehumanised," says military technology researcher Andreas Graae.

  • LRT ☛ Remains of Lithuanian volunteer killed in Ukraine brought back home

    The body of the Lithuanian volunteer killed in battlefield in Ukraine, Tomas Valentėlis, was brought back to Lithuania and will be interred in his native town of Biržai this week.

  • RFERL ☛ Explosion Rocks Ammunition Depot On Russian Military Base

    A large explosion and fire occurred on April 22 at an ammunition depot on a military base in the Kirzhach district of the Vladimir region northeast of Moscow, regional Governor Aleksandr Avdeyev said.

  • RFERL ☛ Russia Issues Warrant For Film Critic Turned War Critic

    Russian journalist Yekaterina Barabash, who faces up to 10 years in prison for criticizing the military, is the subject of an arrest warrant after she disappeared while under house arrest.

  • RFERL ☛ Russian Attacks Hit Residential Buildings, Leaving 1 Dead In What Zelenskyy Calls 'Deliberate Terror'

    Massive Russian aerial strikes hit residential buildings in several Ukrainian cities, leaving at least one dead and more than two dozen injured, including several children, in attacks President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called "deliberate terror."

  • RFERL ☛ Zelenskyy Demands Russia Return Ukrainian Children In New International Campaign

    Ukrainian officials have launched the ChildrenAreNonNegotiable campaign aimed at rescuing thousands of children who are being held in Russian-occupied areas.

  • New York Times ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man Promised Deals on Ukraine, Gaza and Trade. Delivering Has Been Tougher.

    So far, the goals of many of Hell Toupée’s negotiations have been unrealized, even those he said would be accomplished in a matter of days or weeks.

  • New York Times ☛ Rubio Skipping Ukraine Talks as Zelensky Rebuffs U.S. on Crimea

    The decision by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to pull out of the meeting and an objection by Ukraine’s leader to a key U.S. proposal raised questions about the state of the negotiations.

  • Meduza ☛ At least one killed in Russian attack on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia — Meduza

  • The Straits Times ☛ Russia's Rosatom says will proceed with Myanmar nuclear plant despite quake

    A plan to build a nuclear power plant will continue in Myanmar, a war-torn Southeast Asian country partly devastated by a massive earthquake in March, the Russian state-owned firm leading the project told Reuters.

  • ADF ☛ Russia Uses ‘Ghost Fleet’ to Evade Sanctions, Traffic Weapons Across Africa

    Russia has used its so-called “ghost fleet” of aging commercial vessels to evade sanctions on oil exports, but experts say the ships have another purpose: to traffic arms to Russian allies in eastern Libya.

  • Meduza ☛ Breaking the ice As the U.S. and Russia tease Arctic cooperation, climate science could offer common ground — but neither side seems interested — Meduza

  • Meduza ☛ Explosion reported in Russia’s Vladimir region, residents near military site evacuated — Meduza

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Blackened feet and potential poisonings’: Russia’s oil-polluted Black Sea beaches haven’t stopped regional officials from welcoming vacationers — Meduza

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Axios ☛ Turmoil engulfs Pentagon as fresh Signal reports hit Hegseth

  Why it matters: The new revelations raise questions about Hegseth's ability to run the nation's largest government agency and who's been privy to typically secret Defense Department communications.

• Rolling Stone ☛ Hegseth Says He Shared Attack Plans on Signal for ‘Media Coordination’

  Once a leaker, often a leaker also seems to be applicable to Hegseth’s own sharing of sensitive Pentagon materials with his allies over unsecure group chats. But the Trump administration is, at least for now, standing by their man.

Environment

• New Yorker ☛ The Failure—and Hope—of Earth Day

  The inaugural Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, had many triggers: an oil spill in Santa Barbara, a river that kept catching fire in Cleveland. But possibly the most important incentive was a picture that arrived, sixteen months earlier, from Apollo 8. “Earthrise,” as it came to be known, showed a blue-and-white orb floating through black space. (“You got a color film, Jim?” Bill Anders asked his fellow-astronaut Jim Lovell. “Hand me a roll of color, quick, would you?”) With that image, we saw where we lived for the first time.

• Digital Camera World ☛ Earth Day: Creating environmentally-friendly photo products is easy!

  One way to identify such brands is by looking for an FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certificate. FSC approval means it meets the highest environmental and social standards, and confirms that the paper is made of responsibly sourced wood fiber.

  A reputable provider will also be transparent about production methods and printing materials, so check if a Sustainability Report can be found on the brand's website.

• CBC ☛ A sequoia forest in Detroit? Plantings to improve air quality and mark Earth Day

  Arborists are turning vacant land on Detroit's eastside into a small urban forest, not of elms, oaks and red maples indigenous to the city but giant sequoias, the world's largest trees that can live for thousands of years.

  The project on four lots will not only replace longstanding blight with majestic trees, but could also improve air quality and help preserve the trees that are native to California's Sierra Nevada, where they are threatened by ever-hotter wildfires.

• The Revelator ☛ The Polluting Paper Mill That Helped Inspire the First Earth Day

  “People began to ask, well, if it’s doing that to my car, what’s it doing to me,” Hayes said. “The answer, with regards to the automobiles, was that instead of reducing the pollution, they put a shower at the end of the parking lot” to rinse cars before they drove home.

• Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ How Earth Day 1970 Sparked a Lifetime of Environmentalism

  In the 1970s, few universities offered environmental science majors. If you were lucky, they had one course. The “ecosystem approach”—examining entire ecosystems rather than isolated parts in separate departments—was considered new and unorthodox, though of course, Indigenous people had always taken that approach. Back then, university geologists studied rocks, biologists, living creatures, chemists, the underlying atoms and molecules, and physicists—well, I never understood what they studied. Never took physics.

• Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ U.S. Climate Non-Profits’ Tax Status Threatened by Trump

  The Trump administration is expected to turn its attention to the tax-exempt status of environmental non-profits next. According to Tenenbaum Law Group, rumors suggest the action would take form as an executive order to “redefine” the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) qualifications for the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status “in a way that excludes conservation and climate non-profits.”

• Los Angeles Times ☛ Republicans helped create Earth Day. Experts say they're now undoing everything it stands for

  In addition to Earth Day, the 1970s saw the creation of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, which experts say are now in jeopardy.

  This year marks the 55th anniversary of Earth Day, but rather than enjoying its golden years, the planet is facing a new kind of peril. In recent weeks, the Republican party — the same party that oversaw the creation of the eco-conscious holiday back in 1970 — has delivered considerable blows to the environment, including taking steps to undo critical Nixon-era policies that protect the nation’s air, water, natural lands and threatened species.

  President Nixon presided over the first Earth Day, founded in large part as a reaction to a devastating oil spill off the coast of California. Nixon and his wife, First Lady Pat Nixon, planted a tree on the White House lawn to commemorate the occasion.

• David Rosenthal ☛ Going Out With A Bang

  In 1.5C Here We Come I criticized people like Eric Schmidt who said that:

  "the artificial intelligence boom was too powerful, and had too much potential, to let concerns about climate change get in the way."

  "Schmidt, somewhat fatalistically, said that “we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway,” "

  In January for a Daily Mail article, Miriam Kuepper interviewed Salomé Balthus a "high-end escort and author from Berlin" who works the World Economic Forum. Balthus reported attitudes that clarify why "3C Here We Come" is more likely. The article's full title is:

  "What the global elite reveal to Davos sex workers: High-class escort spills the beans on what happens behind closed doors - and how wealthy 'know the world is doomed, so may as well go out with a bang' "

  Below the fold I look into a wide range of evidence that Balthus' clients were telling her the truth.

• Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Earth Day: HK gov't should step up indoor air quality control in schools

  Hong Kong should step up management of indoor air quality in schools, an environmental group has said, after the city’s air pollution was deemed “serious” earlier this month due to a dusty airstream.

• YLE ☛ Lapland's Rovaniemi Airport getting €3m expansion

  The expansion plans will increase the size of the airport's departure hall by nearly 1,000 square metres, according to Finavia.

  Construction is scheduled to begin this month and work on the project should be completed in November, the company said.

• Freedom From Religion Foundation ☛ Trump administration desecrates Earth Day

  The list of Trump’s environmental sins is egregious. For instance, in one week in early March alone, his administration: [...]

• Energy/Transportation

  • Joey Hess ☛ Joey Hess: offgrid electric car

    Eight months ago I came up my rocky driveway in an electric car, with the back full of solar panel mounting rails. I didn't know how I'd manage to keep it charged. I got the car earlier than planned, with my offgrid solar upgrade only beginning. There's no nearby EV charger, and winter was coming, less solar power every day. Still, it was the right time to take a leap to offgid EV life.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Amazon also slows down its data centre commitments

    It’s not just Microsoft slowing down on data centres — it’s Amazon too.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ It turns out you’re never too old to go Interrailing around Europe

    In short, Interrailing was a revelation – for me and for my children. Any doubts I may have had about travel broadening the mind were quickly dispelled when, on the first day of our first trip, I saw my elder son’s sheer amazement at the way the departure boards on the metro in Brussels differed from those on London’s tube, or – a few days later – my younger son’s delight at seeing Berlin zoo’s giant pandas.

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ Their halving vs our sharing

    What in the hecktual heck?! Bitcoin is already set up so that no matter how much energy is flushed straight down the waste drain, one block is completed every ten minutes and the reward for each block is awarded in a lottery where the more you waste, the more entry tickets you get, in a race to the bottom unprecedentedly dumb by the measure of any other economic structure humanity has ever haspled forth in stupor.

    But there’s also the backwardly named “Halving”, designed to double the resources spent on mining each bitcoin every four years!

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Tim Bray ☛ CL XLV: Island Spring

    Join me for a walk through a rain forest on a corner of of a small island. This is to remind everyone that even in a world full of bad news, the trees are still there. From the slopes leading down to the sea they reach up for sunshine and rain, offering no objections to humans walking in the tall quiet spaces between them.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Intel to announce a 20% workforce cut this week: Report

  Intel is preparing to announce plans to cut over 20% of its workforce this week in an attempt to reduce costs and cut down bureaucracy at the chipmaker, reports Bloomberg citing a source with knowledge of the matter. The move to eliminate over 20,000 positions from Intel is a part of the company's revival plan designed by chief executive Lip-Bu Tan.

• The Register UK ☛ CISA officials jump ship, both pushed for Secure by Design

  Zabierek also referenced her work on the Secure by Design initiative, which included wrangling more than 250 software makers into signing a voluntary pledge to do seven things, such as bake multi-factor authentication into their products, reduce default passwords, and increase patching by customers.

• Wired ☛ Investors Worry Trump’s Tariffs Could Cause a ‘World of Hurt’ for Startups

  The biggest factor determining how much a VC firm will be impacted by the tariffs, Drummond says, is whether its portfolio companies are subject to first-order effects of the tariffs, meaning they’re directly reliant on global trade, or whether they’ll primarily feel the second-order effects of an eventual reduction in customer spending if the economy goes into a recession.

• Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

  • Politico LLC ☛ Al Gore compares Trump administration to Nazi Germany

    Former President Barack Obama in a recent speech said he was “deeply concerned with a federal government that threatens universities if they don’t give up students who are exercising their right to free speech,” adding that the values of the U.S. under Trump have eroded. Former Vice President Kamala Harris accused the Trump administration of taking unconstitutional actions and said they are contributing to a “sense of fear.” And former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in a New York Times guest essay that Trump was “squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security” — contributing to the battery of free-wheeling attacks as current officeholders in the Democratic Party calibrate their day-to-day approaches to the White House.

  • CBC ☛ Did TikTok tell you to buy luxury goods straight from China? Experts say proceed with caution

    Some videos contain hallmarks of online propaganda, according to a disinformation expert

  • India Times ☛ Elon Musk reacts as X becomes top news [sic] app in India

    Billionaire Elon Musk, who owns social media platform X, sparked a conversation online after reposting a message by a user with the handle DogeDesigner, which claimed that “X is now the #1 news [sic] app on the AppStore in India.”

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Q-Pilled Family Members: Redditors Worry Loved Ones Are Lost for Good

    QAnon is a conspiracy theory that posits the country is run by a cabal of Satanic, pedophilic Democrats who can only be stopped by President Donald Trump. When QAnon first began spreading in 2017, it was treated as fringe, but by 2020, Republican politicians who had voiced support for QAnon were winning elections. Now, the sitting President has repeatedly openly embraced the movement, leaving those fighting against it — like the sub members of r/QAnonCasualties — pessimistic and exhausted.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Rolling Stone ☛ Woman Dragged From Idaho Republican Town Hall Sues for $5 Million

  The First Amendment nightmare unfolded on the afternoon of February 22, at a town hall meeting of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, held at the auditorium of Coeur D’Alene High School in northern Idaho. Borrenpohl, who previously ran for an Idaho state House seat as a Democrat, was a vociferous participant in the meeting, and was not shy about addressing local officials out of turn, including hollering at a moderator who asked the audience to pipe down: “Is this a town hall or a lecture?”

• CBC ☛ U.S. academic leaders unite against Trump's higher education policies

  Tuesday's joint statement is the latest show of resistance from U.S. higher education leaders as the Trump administration seeks to leverage its financial heft to overhaul academia.

• CS Monitor ☛ Why Harvard and other colleges are fighting for ‘essential freedom’

  University research helped American astronauts go to the moon, launched the atomic bomb, and created everything from the microwave and the internet to the billionaires of Silicon Valley.

  Fast-forward to the present day. Universities have had billions in federal research money frozen or cut by the Trump administration. The White House has justified the cuts because of allegations of antisemitism on campus during protests over the war in Gaza or because transgender athletes were allowed to participate in sports.

  Harvard University vowed to fight – and the White House immediately suspended $2.2 billion and threatened to cut another $1 billion. Harvard filed a lawsuit on Monday, citing the First Amendment and other federal laws around terminating federal financing. Columbia University acquiesced to the Trump administration’s demands, but so far its hundreds of millions of dollars in funding have yet to be restored.

• Semafor Inc ☛ Harvard sues Trump administration

  “The tradeoff put to Harvard and other universities is clear: Allow the Government to micromanage your academic institution or jeopardize the institution’s ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and innovative solutions,” Harvard’s lawyers wrote.

• Vox ☛ Trump’s attacks on Harvard and the right-wing conspiracy behind them

  The assault on Harvard is part of a broader Trumpian assault on elite universities, which is itself part of a yet broader federal assault on progressive institutions and groups deemed enemies of the president (from Big Law firms to liberal nonprofits to mainstream media outlets).

  The attacks have various pretexts, but they fit a larger strategy that right-wing activists advocate. They believe that the best way of strengthening the right’s cultural power is to force liberal and left-leaning institutions to bend the knee — or be destroyed. And though destroying Harvard will be a tall order, tactics like these likely will have massive long-term consequences, forever transforming the relationship between the federal government and academia.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Washingon-Baltimore News Guild ☛ The Hill Guild statement on politically motivated firing of journalist - Washington-Baltimore News Guild

  That’s not an exaggeration, and you can read the reporting by Max Tani. He shows how Trump sued 20 newspapers for reporting that his Truth Social platform was losing money.

  All those papers are fighting him in court — except The Hill, which is run by Nexstar. Which is also, as Semafor’s reporting found, run by Trump’s former business partners, and which needs some very specific things from his Federal Communications Commission.

• Press Gazette ☛ PA Media proposing to cut 8% of UK editorial staff

  Staff were told on Tuesday morning that 74 members of the UK content team were being put at risk of redundancy with the aim of cutting up to 25 roles.

  They were told this would equate to reducing the team by about 8% (which would mean a current UK content team headcount of about 312 people).

• CPJ ☛ DRC journalist Émérite Amisi Musada reports being abducted, tortured over war coverage

  “DRC authorities and the M23 rebels, who now control the city of Bukavu, must conduct thorough investigations into the abduction and mistreatment of journalist Émérite Amisi Musada and ensure accountability,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa regional director, from Luanda, Angola. “The safety of journalists must be a priority for all sides in the fighting, which has intensified in the eastern DRC.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Tampa Bay ☛ US border officials can search your phone without a warrant. What to know

  In an age where the data of an entire life can be held in the palm of your hand, a fundamental question has emerged about rights to digital privacy when crossing international borders: Can U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers demand access to your phone or laptop at airports and seaports?

  The short answer is yes, and this applies to citizens and noncitizens alike. But there are many layered steps travelers can take to protect themselves.

• BoingBoing ☛ Stop border agents from searching your phone: Wired explains

  Other tips include bringing a paper boarding pass and removing apps you don't need. And finally, if you're a U.S. citizen, you can ignore Wired's advice and deny the search (at least for now) — just realize that will allow border goons to detain and interrogate you. And if you go this route, the writers still strongly suggest you "make sure to disable biometrics used to unlock your device, like face or fingerprint scanners," and "use only a PIN or an alphanumeric code (if available on your device)."

  Welcome to Trump 2.0.

• The Nation ☛ The Pope Who Decried the Savage Inequalities of Billionaire-Class Capitalism

  Just months after he became the head of the Catholic Church in 2013, Pope Francis condemned the “new tyranny” of unfettered capitalism and the “idolatry of money.” In an apostolic exhortation issued in the fall of that year, he argued, “As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.”

• BoingBoing ☛ Private security goons charged with dragging woman at town hall meeting

  These cosplay commandos are also charged with "security agent uniform violations." That's right — they couldn't even dress up properly for their cosplay operation.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Techdirt ☛ Verizon CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath Gives Predictably Wimpy Response To Being Bullied By Radical Trump FCC

  Whether privacy rules or popular net neutrality rules, Verizon (and its lobbying proxies at various think tanks) insisted that these modest, loophole-filled efforts were “radical government overreach.” Even government efforts to create accurate broadband map data, or make sure poor people could afford broadband were treated as government extremism and greeted with endless whining and lawsuit after lawsuit. I can’t overstate how obnoxiously whiney Verizon has been about oversight, historically.

  Fast forward to 2025, the FCC is actually now radical, and Verizon is just, apparently, a helpless little baby.

• APNIC ☛ IPv6 capability reaches 50% in the Asia Pacific region

  We’re delighted to announce that APNIC Labs has now recorded a consistent 30-day average of IPv6 capability exceeding 50% across all 56 APNIC economies. This marks a significant milestone, achieved 25 years after the regional journey with IPv6 first began.