Leftovers

• Jeffrey Paul ☛ Jeffrey Paul: Subject Lines and File Names: You're doing it wrong.

  Be specific when you name things!

• Lou Plummer ☛ 30 Years of Web Communities

  Although I used a local BBS and AOL chat rooms back in the day, the first online community I ever found a home in was at [Epinions].(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epinions) It was a dotcom company that paid you to write reviews of commercial goods, including books and albums. You could use HTML to dress up what you wrote, so there was a small but satisfying thrill in learning how to be good at that. As usual, they had an off-topic category too, where you could write about whatever you wanted, and I contributed there all the time. People could follow you and send you private messages. I eventually outgrew it, but I tried to find a guy from there recently, after 28 years, and I succeeded because he's still using the same unique username.

• Rachel ☛ Some thoughts on how control over web content works

  Basically, if you actually own some of the items in question, you have options. If you are the owner of the registrar account and it's just some rando tech person who's a contact on it that does the work, you authenticate yourself to the registrar out of band, have them removed, get yourself (or a new tech rando) installed, and continue from there. The same applies for the DNS serving, or the actual web hosting.

• Science

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Trump v. Research: How We Could Turn the Threats into Opportunities

    The truth is that, for decades, many (most?) of us who are involved in scholarly communications have taken it for granted that the benefits of the research we conduct, support, and publish are obvious – and that there will therefore be a pretty much never-ending stream of public support and government money for it. We haven’t collectively made it a priority to properly educate either the public or our policy-makers about the importance of the research their dollars are funding. The open access movement has helped to address this, but it’s one thing to make research articles publicly available and quite another to help people understand the importance of their findings.

• Hardware

  • USMC ☛ The Marines’ unmanned ground vehicle will look a lot like the Army’s

    The test, which emphasized the UGV’s artificial intelligence and machine learning capacity, also underscored the vehicle’s value in contested environments, where rugged unmanned logistics platforms can decrease risk to warfighters and better ensure sustainment of combat operations.

  • Wired ☛ 2025 Is the Year of the Humanoid Robot Factory Worker

    The basic promise of humanoid robots is that they will be able to switch between multiple tasks, just like their human peers. It’s a fundamentally different approach from traditional assembly line automation, which builds an entire environment around the specific tasks required for manufacturing. Jonathan Hurst, cofounder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics, expects its robots to sit alongside that process, not disrupt it.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ Whooping Cough Is on The Rise: An Expert Explains How to Protect Your Family

    It's especially dangerous for babies.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Why Are Young People Everywhere So Unhappy?

    Scholars have long noted that happiness tends to follow a U-shape across the lifespan: Self-reported happiness declines gradually in young and middle adulthood, then turns upward later in life, starting around age 50. The Dartmouth University economist David G. Blanchflower—who, together with his co-author, Andrew J. Oswald, pioneered the U-shape hypothesis in 2008—has reproduced the result in 145 countries.

  • Axios ☛ Luigi Mangione's attorneys seek dismissal of NY murder charges

    Driving the news: Mangione's defense attorneys say in a notice to the N.Y. Supreme Court that the state indictment against him should be dismissed because "concurrent state and federal prosecutions violate the double jeopardy clause" of the Fifth Amendment.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Workers Can Say Goodbye to Heat Protections Under Trump

    If confirmed, David Keeling would be empowered to help his former employers’ multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to kill state and federal heat protections — including a first-of-its-kind federal standard designed to protect workers from heat death amid rising global temperatures.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Children under six should avoid screen time, French medical experts say

    TV, tablets, computers, video games and smartphones have “already had a heavy impact on a young generation sacrificed on the altar of ignorance”, according to an open letter to the government from five leading health bodies – the societies of paediatrics, public health, ophthalmology, child and adolescent psychiatry, and health and environment.

  • CS Monitor ☛ China is a big buyer of US soybeans. These farmers are bracing for tariff impact.

    The stress runs especially high here in Illinois, the United States’ No. 1 soybean-producing state. Soybean prices have fallen to four-year lows. The U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts that the average farmer will lose $100 for every acre of soybeans they plant. The same holds true for corn, but soybeans are far more vulnerable to trade retaliation. The U.S. exports about 15% of its corn; for soybeans, it’s roughly half. Most of those go to a single customer: China.

• Proprietary

  • PC World ☛ Ads have crept into Microsoft's popular free PC Manager app now, too

    Microsoft has really fallen in love with advertisements, haven’t they? Ads have invaded all sorts of spaces over the last few years, including the Windows 11 Start menu, the Surface app, and the Copilot AI assistant, plus Microsoft is even testing a free, ad-supported version of Office. And to no one’s surprise, the ad creep continues.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Apple says most iPhones sold in US will be from India

    "A majority of iPhones sold in the US will have India as their country of origin," Cook said while announcing the company's latest quarterly results.

    Vietnam, meanwhile, would be the country of origin for almost all iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and AirPod products sold in the United States, Cook added.

  • NDTV ☛ Apple Clocks 28% Growth In iPhone Shipments In India: Report

    iPhone 16 series was the highest-selling Apple device, capturing 54 per cent market share, with iPhone 15 series garnering 36 per cent share in Q1 2025, according to data provided by said the report by CyberMedia Research (CMR).

  • The Washington Post ☛ Apple CEO Tim Cook says tariffs could add $900 million to firm’s costs

    The “vast majority” of Apple’s total product sales outside the U.S. would continue to be sourced from China, he added.

  • Macworld ☛ Apple warns iPhone owners of widespread mercenary spyware attack

    Apple has reacted to what appears to be a huge spyware campaign this week by sending warnings to iPhone owners around the world. Recipients of the warnings are advised that a “mercenary spyware attack” is attempting to remotely compromise their device.

  • TechCrunch ☛ Apple notifies new victims of spyware attacks across the world | TechCrunch

    Apple sent notifications this week to several people who the company believes were targeted with government spyware, according to two of the alleged targets.

  • Stefano Marinelli ☛ Always Available, They Said. My Offline Morning at the Hospital Says Otherwise

    I later confirmed that the entire booking, check-in, and queue system is “in the cloud”. The hospital experienced a connectivity interruption, and all related services stopped. The staff no longer had access to anything, so a technician sent the lists to a manager via another channel, and everything resumed manually.

    For years, I’ve insisted that certain things MUST be local. The healthcare facilities I manage have all the necessary systems for the operation of the facility internally, including patient records. External services like websites, emails, etc., are secondary.

  • India Today ☛ Expedia Group lays off employees as part of organisational restructuring

    Expedia Group has reportedly laid off 500 employees in a recent round of job cuts. The move, though difficult, is a strategy to strengthen its business and position for long-term growth.

  • Expedia Group Undergoes Layoffs Amid Restructuring Despite Strong Financial Performance

    In the latest wave of job cuts sweeping the global tech industry, Seattle-based travel giant Expedia Group has initiated another round of layoffs as part of a broader organisational restructuring effort. While the company has not publicly disclosed the exact number of employees impacted, LinkedIn posts from affected workers reveal that departments such as engineering have been notably affected.

  • Five9 Opens Up on Its Layoffs, Impacting “Most” Departments

    The layoffs will represent a net reduction of $20-25MN in annualized compensation, much of which Five9 will pump into these initiatives.

    In doing so, Five9 also hopes to bolster its “long-term competitive position” and re-establish itself as a Rule of 40 company.

    Such a company achieves a growth rate and profit margin that combine to exceed 40 percent.

    “We’re being very surgical about it,” added Mike Burkland, Chairman and CEO of Five9. “There are some really exciting marketing initiatives that we’re in the midst of, I would say, piloting.”

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Federal News Network ☛ Cyber: Forever a top priority for government IT

      Where data is located deeply affects this trustworthiness. In the case of government agencies, the majority of data — vast amounts of structured, unstructured and semi-structured data points that could be used to train models — is siloed. This type of data structure makes it very difficult to ensure consistency, security and governance due to the lack of cross-validation. Additionally, because public sector programs are funded individually, some departments have migrated workloads to the public cloud already, while others remain hosted in on-premises data centers.

    • Robin Sloan ☛ The Secret Playbook

      This is a three-color Riso­graph print on 11″ × 17″ paper. The poster side bears a design & exhor­ta­tion that are, as of this writing, inde­ci­pher­able to the fron­tier AI models from Google, Anthropic, & OpenAI.

      Ques­tioned at dif­ferent times, they pro­duce wildly dif­ferent readings, all wrong.

      Allow me to report: I didn’t expect that designing some­thing impen­e­trable to AI would feel this good!!

    • Simon Willison ☛ Two publishers and three authors fail to understand what “vibe coding” means

      Vibe coding does not mean “using AI tools to help write code”. It means “generating code with AI without caring about the code that is produced”. See Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding for my previous writing on this subject. This is a hill I am willing to die on. I fear it will be the death of me.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Something Alarming Is Happening to the Job Market

      According to the New York Federal Reserve, labor conditions for recent college graduates have “deteriorated noticeably” in the past few months, and the unemployment rate now stands at an unusually high 5.8 percent. Even newly minted M.B.A.s from elite programs are struggling to find work. Meanwhile, law-school applications are surging—an ominous echo of when young people used graduate school to bunker down during the great financial crisis.

      What’s going on? I see three plausible explanations, and each might be a little bit true.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Seattle Worldcon science fiction convention vets panelists with ChatGPT

      The committee fed panel applicants’ names to ChatGPT — just the names, nothing else — with a prompt that they have not revealed, and they used the bot output to make a decision on letting the person present at the convention.

      This blog post, from committee chair Kathy Wood, isn’t even a non-apology. It’s brazenly unrepentant.

    • PerlMonks ☛ Anonymous Google Chrome browsers now under additional scrutiny

      If you are browing Perlmonks using Google Chrome and are not logged in, your browser needs to send the sec-ch-ua header, otherwise your anonymous access to the site is blocked.

  • Social Control Media

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Moderators seek compensation after years of online violence

      Content moderators working for Majorel in Ghana'scapital Accra told The Guardian that they have suffered from depression, anxiety, insomnia, and substance abuse. They believe this is a direct result of their work as content moderators. They also claim that the psychological support offered to help process disturbing social media content was inadequate.

      Teleperformance, which owns Majorel, reportedly denies these accusations. According to The Guardian, the company employs its own mental health professionals, who are registered with the local supervisory authority. DW asked Majorel for comment yet received no reply. British NGO Foxglove is now preparing a lawsuit.

    • Matt Birchler ☛ The vast nothingness of Threads

      For a long time, the numbers generally aligned with what it felt like using those platforms, and with how much effort I put into each one. Mastodon had the most followers and most interactions, which made sense as I spent most of my time there. Meanwhile, Bluesky and Threads were quite a bit lower, as I didn't post much on either, lurking quite a bit on Bluesky and a little on Threads. I'm not growth-hacking and I lack any form of social media strategy, so my audience numbers were just slowly climbing on Mastodon and Bluesky and they were actually falling slowly on Threads.

    • Michal Zelazny ☛ Reflections

      It’s all fake. You’re all fake. Those connections are all fake. If somebody can reach me only when I’m on Facebook despite knowing my email and phone number, it means they don’t really care. At least not enough to use something a bit less convenient. Like email. Like Signal. Like a phone call.

    • The Register UK ☛ X marks the drop for European users

      The exodus of European users from Elon Musk's online mouthpiece is not surprising, considering the amplification the billionaire's platform has given to voices that might not be palatable to European tastes – such as rightwing German party AfD's leader Alice Weidel. Musk is also a staunch supporter of the Trump administration, whose rhetoric has not gone down well in Europe.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Nefilim ransomware suspect extradited from Spain to US

      A Ukrainian citizen has been charged and extradited to the United States for allegedly using Nefilim ransomware to attack large companies in the U.S. and elsewhere, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

    • The Register UK ☛ ICO confirms no action to be taken against British Library

      The UK's data protection overlord is not going to pursue any further investigation into the British Library's 2023 ransomware attack.

    • The Record ☛ British Library avoids investigation over ransomware attack, praised again for response

      The British Library — the national library of the United Kingdom and an archive of millions of books and manuscripts — has been praised for its response to the incident. Officials across government have wanted to avoid punishing victim organizations that responded to ransomware attacks in a way that meets the standards of best victim behavior.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Krebs On Security ☛ xAI Dev Leaks API Key for Private SpaceX, Tesla LLMs

    An employee at Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI leaked a private key on GitHub that for the past two months could have allowed anyone to query private xAI large language models (LLMs) which appear to have been custom made for working with internal data from Musk’s companies, including SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter/X, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

  • The New Stack ☛ Linus Torvalds Reflects on 20 Years of Git [Ed: Bad way to mark this anniversary

    It was 20 years ago that Linus Torvalds wrote the Git distributed version control system — April 7 2005 was he made the first commit. So in early April, GitHub celebrated. GitHub staff software engineer Taylor Blau conducted an interview with Torvalds, which GitHub then shared on YouTube (where the git-based service’s channel has 467,000 subscribers).

• Security

  • The New Stack ☛ Linux Security Software Turned Against Users [Ed: Microsoft-sponsored site [1, 2]... Turned Against Users of Linux]

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Appeals court upholds block on DOGE [sic] access to Social Security systems

      In a 9-6 decision, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals kept in place a preliminary injunction from Judge Ellen Hollander of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland that barred individuals with the Elon Musk-led group from rooting around in SSA networks.

      Hollander’s March ruling on the case — which was brought by the Alliance for Retired Americans and several labor groups — ended “DOGE [sic]’s unfettered access to SSA systems of record containing personally identifiable information.”

    • EFF ☛ Ninth Circuit Hands Users A Big Win: Californians Can Sue Out-of-State Corporations That Violate State Privacy Laws

      The case, Briskin v. Shopify, stems from a California resident’s allegations that Shopify, a company that offers back-end support to e-commerce companies around the U.S. and the globe, installed tracking software on his devices without his knowledge or consent, and used it to secretly collect data about him. Shopify also allegedly tracked users’ browsing activities across multiple sites and compiled that information into comprehensive user profiles, complete with financial “risk scores” that companies could use to block users’ future purchases. The Ninth Circuit initially dismissed the lawsuit for lack of personal jurisdiction, ruling that Shopify did not have a close enough connection to California to be fairly sued there. Collecting data on Californians along with millions of other users was not enough; to be sued in California, Shopify had to do something to target Californians in particular.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ US as a Surveillance State

      Two essays were just published on DOGE [sic]’s data collection and aggregation, and how it ends with a modern surveillance state.

    • The Atlantic ☛ American Panopticon

      A fragile combination of decades-old laws, norms, and jungly bureaucracy has so far prevented repositories such as these from assembling into a centralized American surveillance state. But that appears to be changing. Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have systematically gained access to sensitive data across the federal government, and in ways that people in several agencies have described to us as both dangerous and disturbing. Despite DOGE [sic]’s stated mission, little efficiency seems to have been achieved. Now a new phase of Trump’s project is under way: Not only are individual agencies being breached, but the information they hold is being pooled together. The question is Why? And what does the administration intend to do with it?

    • New York Times ☛ Opinion | Elon Musk’s Legacy: DOGE [sic]’s Construction of a Surveillance State

      Over the past 100 days, DOGE [sic] teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security. This month House Democratic lawmakers reported that a whistle-blower had come forward to reveal that the master database will combine data from such federal agencies as the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services. The whistle-blower also alleged that DOGE [sic] workers are filling backpacks with multiple laptops, each one loaded with purloined agency data.

    • Wired ☛ Think Twice Before Creating That ChatGPT Action Figure

      The data you are giving away when you use an AI image editor is often hidden. Every time you upload an image to ChatGPT, you’re potentially handing over “an entire bundle of metadata,” says Tom Vazdar, area chair for cybersecurity at Open Institute of Technology. “That includes the EXIF data attached to the image file, such as the time the photo was taken and the GPS coordinates of where it was shot.”

      OpenAI also collects data about the device you’re using to access the platform. That means your device type, operating system, browser version, and unique identifiers, says Vazdar. “And because platforms like ChatGPT operate conversationally, there’s also behavioral data, such as what you typed, what kind of images you asked for, how you interacted with the interface and the frequency of those actions.”

      It's not just your face. If you upload a high-resolution photo, you're giving OpenAI whatever else is in the image, too—the background, other people, things in your room and anything readable such as documents or badges, says Camden Woollven, group head of AI product marketing at risk management firm GRC International Group.

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Why ‘Predictive’ Policing Must be Banned

      It may sound like something from a sci-fi film or dystopian novel, but the “Homicide Prediction Project” is just the tip of the iceberg. Police forces across the UK are increasingly using so-called “predictive policing” technology to try to predict crime. Police claim these tools “help cut crime, allowing officers and resources to be deployed where they are most needed.” In reality, the tech is built on existing, flawed, police data.

      As a result, communities who have historically been most targeted by police are more likely to be identified as “at risk” of future criminal behaviour. This leads to more racist policing and more surveillance, particularly for Black and racialised communities, lower income communities and migrant communities. These technologies infringe human rights and are weaponised against the most marginalised in our society. It is time that we ban them for good.

      That is why we are calling for a ban on predictive policing technologies, which needs to be added to any future AI Act, or the current Crime and Policing Bill. We are urgently asking MPs to demand this ban from the government, before these racist systems become any further embedded into policing.

  • Confidentiality

    • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Despite Pete Hegseth, Signal is Good

      So despite the fact that Hegseth’s phone would be one of the more targeted in the world, and Hegseth himself is an idiot, his phone isn’t necessarily compromised. It might be, but it’s hard to be sure. It’s quite hard to hack a modern phone, especially if the person using the phone updates it every time there’s an update released, and doesn’t click on things they don’t know are OK. There are fancy attacks, called Zero-Click Attacks, that don’t require any user interaction, but they’re hard to build and expensive.

    • Tor ☛ Arti 1.4.3 is released: Prometheus metrics support, inital work on Counter Galois Onion and congestion control. | The Tor Project

      Arti is our ongoing project to create a next-generation Tor client in Rust. Now we're announcing the latest release, Arti 1.4.3.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Air Force Times ☛ Air Force starts ground testing Anduril collaborative combat aircraft

    The Air Force has started ground testing its first Anduril-made semiautonomous drone wingmen known as collaborative combat aircraft, which could be flying within months.

  • USMC ☛ MARSOC is fusing traditionally rugged Marines with tech-curious ones

    But he said that environment would also drive the need for MARSOC personnel with the cognitive ability to adapt to new technologies and the desire to adapt.

  • Techdirt ☛ DOGE [sic] Aide Involved In Dismantling Consumer Bureau Owns Stock In Companies That Could Benefit From the Cuts

    Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old Department [sic] of Government Efficiency aide, disclosed the investments earlier this year in his public financial report, which lists as much as $365,000 worth of shares in four entities that the CFPB can regulate. According to court records and government emails, he later helped oversee the layoffs of more than 1,400 employees at the bureau.

    Ethics experts say this constitutes a conflict of interest and that Kliger’s actions are a potential violation of federal ethics laws.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russian Police Raid Gyms and Martial Arts Clubs Amid Spring Conscription Drive

    Russian police are targeting migrants and draft-age men in a wave of raids on gyms and martial arts clubs across major cities, with activists describing them as part of a broader crackdown that intensified ahead of the country’s spring military draft.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ 'We Have Our Own Gestapo': A Russian Military Deserter Recalls His Time Inside a Secret Jail for Defectors - The Moscow Times

    Georgy's story was verified by the Farewell to Arms group and the InTransit crisis group. His last name has been withheld for safety reasons.

  • Mike Brock ☛ An SOS From American Democracy

    Today, American democracy is transmitting an unmistakable SOS. The signal isn't coming from government buildings or official channels—those have largely been captured. It's coming from journalists documenting constitutional violations, judges issuing orders that go unenforced, civil servants purged for following the law, and ordinary citizens watching their democracy transform into something unrecognizable.

    As someone who has dedicated a significant portion of my life to promoting democracy worldwide, I find myself in the unexpected position of sending this distress call rather than answering it. The nation that once stood as democracy's most powerful advocate now requires the world's democratic forces to rally to its defense.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Hegseth wants ‘right to repair’ provisions in all Army contracts

    In an April 30 memo, Hegseth directed the Army secretary to “identify and propose contract modifications for right to repair provisions where intellectual property constraints limit the Army’s ability to conduct maintenance and access the appropriate maintenance tools, software, and technical data.”

    Hegseth said the contracts should ease restrictions while “preserving the intellectual capital of American industry.”

  • The Register UK ☛ Army brass declare for right to repair

    The US Army intends to secure the right to repair its own equipment, a right that hasn't always been available under past procurement contracts - and one of the very few things that Democrats in Congress and the Trump administration broadly agree upon.

  • 404 Media ☛ Army Will Seek Right to Repair Clauses in All Its Contracts

    A new memo from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is calling on defense contractors to grant the Army the right-to-repair. The Wednesday memo is a document about “Army Transformation and Acquisition Reform” that is largely vague but highlights the very real problems with IP [sic] constraints that have made it harder for the military to repair damaged equipment.

  • US DOD ☛ SUBJECT: Army Transformation and Acquisition Reform [PDF]

    Identify and propose contract modifications for right to repair provisions where intellectual [sic] property [sic] constraints limit the Army's ability to conduct maintenance and access the appropriate maintenance tools, software, and technical data - while preserving the intellectual capital of American industry. Seek to include right to repair provisions in all existing contracts and also ensure these provisions are included in all new contracts.

  • The Register UK ☛ Dems ask tough questions about DOGE [sic] as Musk departs

    Elon Musk is backing away from his Trump-blessed government gig, but now House Democrats want to see the permission slip that got him in the door.

    Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee sent a pair of letters to White House Counsel David Warrington and the heads of several government agencies demanding documents related to Elon Musk's financial disclosures and security clearance, which they argue are legally required for someone in his position.

  • The Register UK ☛ North Korean in China did gov dev work for Maryland man

    Vong participated in multiple job interviews to land the position, then got assigned to work on a contract for the Federal Aviation Administration. The DoJ describes the contract as "part of a national defense program to develop software used by various other government entities that would allow them to coordinate aviation assets effectively."

  • The Independent UK ☛ A DOGE [sic] staffer who hasn’t even graduated college yet is using AI to rewrite an entire agency’s rules and regulations

    A DOGE [sic] staffer introduced Christopher Sweet, a student with no prior government experience, in an email sent to the department employees this month noting that Sweet was recently a third-year at the University of Chicago, where he was studying economics and data science. The school confirmed that Sweet is “on leave from the undergraduate college,” the outlet noted.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ ‘We Need to Recognize Russia’s Colonial Violence’: Buryat Illustrator Seseg Jigjitova - The Moscow Times

    Colonized by Russia in the 17th century, Buryats have grappled with preserving their native language and Buddhist religious traditions amid Moscow’s ongoing russification attempts.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Bangladesh’s Islamist Regime Defies High Court, Targets Hindu minorities

    “This open contempt for a constitutional verdict is not just a legal anomaly—it is a deliberate act of authoritarian overreach and religious persecution,” said Dr Mathai, also founder chairman of Mumbai-based Harmony Foundation.

  • The Nation ☛ Trump’s Newest Executive Order “Unleashes” the Cops—and Flirts With Martial Law

    Still, while the martial law concerns are significant, we are probably two or three unconstitutional executive orders away from that. The more immediate thrust of this order is to make it nearly impossible to hold cops accountable for crimes. Toward that end, it calls for officers to be indemnified by the federal government when they “unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law.” This essentially extends the concept of qualified immunity to the criminal sphere. Now, even a cop who is held criminally liable can have their expenses paid for.

  • The Register UK ☛ Ex-CISA chief slams cuts as Trump demands total loyalty

    When asked about ongoing CISA job cuts, Easterly attributed "some of these losses" to a "mandate for loyalty to a person over loyalty to the Constitution of the United States of America."

    "That's a loss for everybody in our nation, because cybersecurity is national security," she continued. "Americans should be bothered if there's some other loyalty being required."

  • Wired ☛ North Korea Stole Your Job

    On high alert, Wijckmans grabbed screenshots and took notes. After the call ended, he went back over the job applications. He found that his company’s listings were being flooded with applicants just like these: an opening for a full-stack developer got more than 500 applications in a day, far more than usual. And when he looked more deeply into the applicants’ coding tests, he saw that many candidates appeared to have used a virtual private network, or VPN, which allows you to mask your computer’s true location.

    Wijckmans didn’t know it yet, but he’d stumbled onto the edges of an audacious, global cybercrime operation. He’d unwittingly made contact with an army of seemingly unassuming IT workers, deployed to work remotely for American and European companies under false identities, all to bankroll the government of North Korea.

  • France24 ☛ India-Pakistan: How to break cycle of tensions over Kashmir?

    It’s a 48-year old argument that’s once again got nuclear-armed neighbors in a showdown… and locals on both sides of the border fearing the worst.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ The banjo never left Obninsk How a Russian teacher is keeping American country music alive in a city outside Moscow — Meduza

• Environment

  • Project Censored ☛ Beyond Earth Day and May Day

    The 55th anniversary of Earth Day, on April 22, 2025, has come and gone. Once again, the country’s most prominent news outlets have concluded their annual, half-hearted coverage of the environment and environmental justice. International Workers’ Day is approaching on Thursday, May 1, and, as usual, establishment news organizations will carry a smattering of reports about marches and rallies for workers’ rights, which will take place around the globe.

    Corporate news media clearly do a thorough job of covering certain topics: celebrity deaths, professional sports and professional athletes, the gyrations of the stock market, and natural disasters. They obsessively report on just about everything the President of the United States says or does, no matter how inane. But with the partial exception of April 22 and May 1, CNN, FOX, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the rest of the establishment press pay scant attention to labor issues and workers’ rights, and regularly underreport consequential stories about global climate change, environmental destruction, and ecological degradation.

    Over the past fifty years, Project Censored has tracked precisely which stories the corporate media ignore or cover inadequately and incompletely. When it comes to the environment and workers, the pattern of gaps and omissions has become difficult to ignore.

  • University of Michigan ☛ U-M research sheds national light on transportation insecurity

    Nearly 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. lack access to reliable transportation, making it one of the country’s most common forms of material hardship, University of Michigan researchers say.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Cornstarch sanitary pads cheap enough to avoid tons of ocean plastics, study shows

    A new lifecycle study published in Sustainability Science and Technology has discovered a promising alternative to plastic sanitary products, potentially leading to far reduced sanitary waste. Sanitary pads made with cornstarch are 17 times more environmentally friendly compared to plastic equivalents.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • India Times ☛ Kuwait cracks down on cryptocurrency mining amid power crisis

      [Cryptocurrency] mining activities "constitute an unlawful exploitation of electrical power ... and may cause outages affecting residential, commercial and service areas, posing a direct threat to public safety", the ministry said. Kuwait has banned cryptocurrency trading but has no laws specifically addressing mining.

    • Wired ☛ What Caused the European Power Outage?

      Specialists emphasize that this type of total blackout—an exceptional and infrequent event—is also a security mechanism of the electricity system itself. For a grid to operate stably, energy production must be kept in balance with consumption; imbalances can cause blackouts as well as potentially damage infrastructure.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Renewables not to blame for Iberian power outage say experts

      While renewables are well known for being more intermittent than their traditional counterparts, the consensus amongst the majority of commentators is that the generation source had nothing to do with this week’s blackout.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Corning increases commitment to making solar wafers in the US

      The strength of that whole chain depends upon a foundational source of hyper-pure polysilicon, which is predominantly made in China. Since REC Silicon has thrown in the towel on trying to purify it at both its Butte, Montana, and Moses Lake, Washington plants, HSC is now the only U.S.-owned manufacturer of hyper-pure polysilicon, one of just five companies in the world producing it to the purity level needed to serve the semiconductor market.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ A Single Prehistoric Bone Might Rewrite the History of the World’s Strangest Mammals

      A new study published Monday in the journal PNAS, upended the widely held theory about monotremes—the most ancient living order of mammals, now down to just platypuses and echidnas.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Take It Down Act Expected To Become Law Despite Concerns

    The Take It Down Act – short for the bill’s full title, “Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act” – also creates processes and requirements for removing non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) within 48 hours of notification by victims.

    But some critics say the legislation, while well intended, doesn’t do enough to ensure that it won’t be misused to suppress lawful speech.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Revolving Door Project Condemns Trump’s Appointment of Corrupt Partisans As Inspectors General

    “The Revolving Door Project will continue to track the bad actors running these offices, because the decimation of the institutions structured to hold the government to account impacts us all. IGs have long been bulwarks against the use of public offices and public funds for self-enrichment schemes, for personal gain, for personal retribution and more, and their replacement is a crucial part of the Trump corruption project. Should Trump succeed in staffing them with loyalists and crooked characters, another barrier in the way of autocracy will fall. We encourage all those committed to covering the Trump administration’s abuses to avail themselves of this resource.”

  • Truthdig ☛ Wikipedia Under Threat After Right-Wing Media Uproar

    For all the right-wing media agita about Wikipedia‘s alleged pro-Palestinian bias, there is plenty of evidence that Zionists have for years been trying to push the site into a more pro-Israel direction.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Register UK ☛ Does the Online Safety Act cover misinformation? Depends

      Baroness Jones of Whitchurch, Parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the Department for Business and Trade, said misinformation and disinformation were covered by the Online Safety Act, which came into force in the UK on March 17, 2025.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ More than 600 Maine lawyers sign declaration to reject intimidation by Trump administration

    “We categorically reject the idea that any government can dictate who lawyers or law firms can choose to represent,” said Maine State Bar Association President Susan Faunce, “and we reject the dangerous notion that judges should be punished or threatened for doing their jobs in rendering decisions according to the law and the facts.”

  • Maine Lawyers for the Rule of Law ☛ Maine Lawyers for the Rule of Law

    We call upon all branches of government to support the rule of law and the essential role of lawyers in our democracy, and to reject any efforts to use the tremendous power of the government against members of the legal profession for performing their duty. We further call upon our fellow members of the legal profession as well as members of the public at large to reject any attempt to harass or intimidate our country’s lawyers and judges for simply doing their jobs.

  • The Register UK ☛ Former Space Shuttle manager Wayne Hale's writings deleted

    "I was told to 'try out' some of the new social media applications," he recalled, and kept a blog on the NASA website until he retired from the agency in 2010. The blog moved into NASA's archives, but could still be found until recently, when, after some apparent housekeeping within the US space agency, Hale's posts were removed.

  • The Register UK ☛ Chris Krebs loses Global Entry membership amid Trump feud

    Global Entry is a program that allows low-risk and pre-approved travelers to enter the US while skipping the usual processing lines at border control, saving airport travel time.

  • CNN ☛ Chris Krebs kicked off CBP’s Global Entry program

    On Wednesday afternoon, Krebs received an email saying that his Trusted Traveler Program status had changed. He logged into the program and learned his Global Entry program membership had been revoked, he told CNN. Global Entry is the US Customs and Border Protection program that gives low-risk travelers expedited clearance when they arrive in the US.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Did Trump — or ABC News — choose who would interview the president?

    For news outlets, the decision over what concessions should be made to a news subject could come down to the importance of getting the access.

  • 404 Media ☛ Polygon Acquired by Porn Mogul Who Co-Founded Brazzers

    Polygon, Vox Media’s video games website, has been acquired by Valnet, a company founded and helmed by Hassan Youssef, a former pornography mogul and the co-founder of the popular adult entertainment site Brazzers.

  • International Business Times ☛ What Happened To Viktoria Roschyna: Kidnapped Journalist Returned Without Eyes, Brain And Larynx

    Ukraine alleges that Russia deliberately removed her body parts to conceal severe torture Roschyna endured during detention

  • Greece ☛ Swedish journalist gets 11-month suspended prison term in Turkey for insulting Erdogan

    Medin, a journalist with the daily Dagens ETC, was detained March 27 as he arrived at Istanbul airport to cover last month’s nationwide protests that erupted following the arrest of Istanbul’s popular mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu. The journalist was jailed days later on charges of insulting Erdogan and membership of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

    No trial date has been set for his second trial, where he could face maximum nine years in prison.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Atlantic Hires Missy Ryan as Staff Writer

    Below is the full announcement from The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg: [...]

  • Press Gazette ☛ Essex Police loses accuracy complaint versus Telegraph over Allison Pearson questioning

    IPSO also rules that it is fine for publishers to cover ongoing criminal investigations.

  • Politico LLC ☛ Trump renews attacks on CBS’ ‘60 Minutes’ amid mediation talks for lawsuit

    A spokesperson for The New York Times brushed off Trump’s remarks in a statement, saying his post “follows a long list of legal threats aimed at discouraging or penalizing independent reporting about the administration.”

  • BoingBoing ☛ Trump gets ugly with reporter who won't agree to tattoo lie (video)

    "On his knuckles, he had "MS-13," Trump insisted in an interview with Terry Moran, who politely disagreed before trying countless times to move on. But in uncomfortable footage, Trump would not move on.

    For over a minute, Moran kept trying to pivot to Ukraine, but Trump could not get past the fact that Moran would not kiss the ring. And every time Moran responded with simple straightforward truths like, "He did not have the letters 'M-S-1-3'" (so let's move on) and "That was Photoshopped" (so let's move on), Trump grew more agitated, calling Moran part of the "fake news."

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Starbucks and unionized baristas locked in a wage standoff

    Out of some 490 baristas who voted on behalf of the company’s more than 550 unionized U.S. stores, 81% voted against the proposal, the union said.

  • The Hindu ☛ Trade union organisations celebrate May Day; decry ‘anti-worker policies’ of the government 

    A procession was also taken out through the main thoroughfares of the city, and members of the All India United Trade Union Centre, CITU, AITUC, etc., took part in it. The trade union organisations said that both the Centre and the State were pursuing “anti-worker policies” and were favouring the capitalists.

  • ANF News ☛ May Day celebration in Shengal

    Nayîf stated that the Yazidi people have lived by their own labor throughout history and that today's economic and moral struggle is a continuation of this tradition.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Investigation Reveals Systematic Torture of Ukrainians in Russian Prisons

    Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman says 16,000 civilians have gone missing as of April 2024. Journalists identified 29 facilities, with 11 in occupied Ukraine and 18 inside Russia, some as far as 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) from the border.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Make May Day Great Again

    We’ve come a long way from the days of Cold War paranoia, when unions wanted nothing to do with the Communist-sounding International Workers’ Day, also known as May Day. Can it become a real American holiday celebrating class struggle?

  • Science News ☛ A Pueblo tribe recruited scientists to reclaim its ancient American history

    “Our elders knew we had always been here, but it was very moving and powerful to see it validated on paper that we have a maternal genetic link to Chaco Canyon,” said Craig Quanchello, Picuris Pueblo lieutenant governor and study coauthor, at an April 29 press briefing.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ FCC Proposes to Codify and Streamline Foreign Ownership Regulations

    The FCC has proposed rules to codify certain foreign ownership requirements and streamline its review processes. To account for increasingly complex foreign ownership structures over the past decade, the Commission has employed certain practices but has never codified them into its rules. The changes would impact common carrier, broadcast and aeronautical radio licensees.

    Without clear definitions, it’s harder for entities to understand and navigate FCC requirements, which puts them at risk for inconsistent outcomes, and can needlessly raise costs, say agency officials. Monday’s action takes steps to define and simplify these requirements.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Apple Music Shuffle—Ole Obermann & Rachel Newman In

    Apple Music has continued to leverage high-profile sponsorships, such as the Super Bowl Halftime Show partnership—which achieved record viewership in 2025. With Ole Obermann’s expertise in viral music marketing and the AI-driven content challenges faced by streaming platforms, the dual leadership structure aims to capitalize on social media’s growing virality factor for streaming economics in an era of the music industry that is practically driven by online influencers—be that people, games, movies, or TV.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Apple faces criminal sanctions for defying App Store antitrust order

  Epic, makers of the wildly popular Fortnite video-game, have waged a one-company war against the "app tax" – the 15-30% rake that the mobile duopoly of Apple/Google take out of every penny we spend inside of apps.

• Los Angeles Times ☛ Apple must halt non-App Store sales commissions, judge says

  Apple Inc. violated a court order requiring it to open up the App Store to third-party payment options and must stop charging commissions on purchases outside its software marketplace, a federal judge said in a blistering ruling that referred the company to prosecutors for a possible criminal probe.

• Open Web Advocacy ☛ Industry Voices Caution Against DOJ’s Plan to Force Sale Of Chrome

  In late 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), in conjunction with state attorneys general representing 11 states, brought a landmark antitrust case against Google for unlawfully maintaining a monopoly in the general search engine market. In August 2024, Judge Mehta ruled that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly”.

  We believe this ruling was correct, necessary, and that the DOJ’s case is compelling.

• Nick Heer ☛ MacDailyNews’ Sexist Response to Yesterday’s Epic Games Ruling – Pixel Envy

  Apple could have taken this up in a legally justifiable way that, plausibly, could have given it some reasonable commission on some sales. It did not do that, so now the court says no commission whatsoever is permissible. Simple. Besides, developers pay for hardware, a developer membership, and plenty of Apple’s services. They are not getting a free ride just by linking to an external payment option.

• Nick Heer ☛ U.S. Judge Rules Apple Is Not in Compliance With Injunction in Epic Games Case

  Throughout this filing, Phil Schiller comes across very well, unlike fellow executives Luca Maestri, the aforementioned Alex Roman, and Tim Cook. In internal discussions, he consistently sounds like the most reasonable voice in the room — though Rogers still has stern words for him throughout. (For example, Schiller claimed external purchasing links alongside in-app options would make users more susceptible to fraud, even though under Apple’s rules it must review and approve those links. The judge writes “[n]o real-time business documents credit that view”.)

• Techdirt ☛ Judge In Apple / Epic Case Is Spitting Mad At Apple’s Willful Contempt

  Apple should have been happy with this result. But Apple apparently was not. Yesterday, District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers issued one of the most scathing rulings I’ve ever seen a court issue, calling out what appears to be Apple’s willful decision to disobey the injunction and play games to avoid doing the little bit it was required to do.

  Let’s let the judge take it from here: [...]

• Patents

  • Digital Camera World ☛ New patent suggests Samsung might be working on an interchangeable lens phone

    A recently discovered patent suggests Samsung might be working on a phone with interchangeable camera lenses. The patent diagrams show a specially-designed device housing, along with a distinctly separate lens component. How the lens would attach to the phone remains to be seen, but a magnetic system would seem the simplest and easiest method. Interestingly, the patent also mentions a motor or actuator being present, enabling the movement of the sensor or lens assembly. The precise purpose of this isn't yet specified, however it could be required for lens focussing or optical zoom, or if it were to be used to move the sensor, then it's possible the actuator is there for the purposes of sensor-shift image stabilization.

  • Software Patents

    • Stanford University ☛ How Often Do Non-Practicing Entities Win Patent Suits? [PDF]

      In this Article we present empirical results that provide insight into both questions. Drawing on a comprehensive data set we built of every patent lawsuit filed in 2008 and 2009 that resulted in a ruling on the merits, we find that the situation is rather more complicated than simply comparing operating companies to NPEs. While operating companies fare better in litigation than NPEs overall, breaking NPEs into different categories reveals more complexity. And once we remove certain pharmaceutical cases from the mix, no patent plaintiff fares very well. That is particularly true of software, computer, and electronics patents.

    • [Old] Faruki PLL ☛ Avoiding the Patent Troll Toll

      The PTAB has not been a panacea, however, because of several interrelated phenomena. First, the sheer volume of cases brought by Non-Practicing Entities virtually ensures that the PTAB alone will be unable to stem the flood of litigation. Second, the former Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) endorsed an interpretation of the AIA that allows the PTAB to decline review upon a determination that traditional litigation was likely to resolve validity issues more quickly than PTAB review. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the intense consolidation of patent litigation in just a few jurisdictions nationwide has frustrated overarching efforts, including those of the PTAB, to minimize trolling.

    • [Old] European Parliament ☛ Parliamentary question | Addressing the problem of patent trolls in the EU | E-005354/2020 | European Parliament

      The tactics used by patent trolls clearly demonstrate that the European patent system is not optimised for innovative companies, but instead is more geared towards financial companies that exploit the system for pure financial gain.

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ Copyright Lawsuit Over "Dancing With a Stranger" Revived

    Now, the appeals court says the case should have gone before a jury. The court emphasized that there isn’t a well-defined standard for assessing similarities in the arrangement and selection of songs to determine whether infringement has occurred.

  • Wired ☛ A Judge Says Meta’s AI Copyright Case Is About ‘the Next Taylor Swift’

    Meta’s copyright battle with a group of authors, including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, will turn on the question of whether the company’s AI tools produce works that can cannibalize the authors’ book sales.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ US: Vietnam Remains a "Piracy Haven" Despite Fmovies Crackdown

    The Office of the United States Trade Representative has released its annual Special 301 Report, calling out countries that fall short on anti-piracy enforcement and other forms of intellectual property protection. Vietnam is once again one of the key targets and still perceived as a piracy haven, despite the historic takedown of the Fmovies piracy ring last summer.