Leftovers

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ Total Chad Gets Bit by Hundreds Venomous Snakes to Develop Universal Antivenom

    Since 2001, the 57-year-old Wisconsin man has let himself be bitten by venomous snakes on an incredible 200 occasions, inuring his immune system to the serpents' deadly toxins.

    Cobras, black mambas, you name it: Friede has weathered them all. That's on top of injecting himself with over 650 doses of increasingly potent amounts of venom.

  • Deseret Media ☛ He injected himself with snake venom hundreds of times. His blood could 'revolutionize' treatment

    Glanville's diamond was Tim Friede, a self-taught snake expert based in California who exposed himself to the venom of snakes over the course of nearly 18 years, effectively gaining immunity to several neurotoxins.

    "We had this conversation. And I said, I know it's awkward, but I'm really interested in looking at some of your blood," Glanville recalled. "And he said, 'Finally, I've been waiting for this call.'"

  • Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ Taking a break

    I've been publishing at least one blog post every week on this blog for about 2.5 years. I kept it up even when I was very sick last year with Lyme disease. It's time for me to take a break and reset.

  • Futurism ☛ Experts Alarmed as ChatGPT Users Developing Bizarre Delusions

    "I am schizophrenic although long term medicated and stable, one thing I dislike about [ChatGPT] is that if I were going into psychosis it would still continue to affirm me," one redditor wrote, because "it has no ability to 'think'’ and realise something is wrong, so it would continue affirm all my psychotic thoughts."

    The AI chatbots could also be acting like talk therapy — except without the grounding of an actual human counselor, they're instead guiding users deeper into unhealthy, nonsensical narratives.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Taking a break from Facebook and Instagram can boost emotional well-being

    With over 35,000 participants, the study offers rare large-scale experimental insight into how short-term social media breaks affect mood and mental health. The study is published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

    "The paper both resonates with some prior work and extends it," Lazer says. "It highlights that there does seem to be a positive effect when you take people off of Facebook and/or Instagram."

  • Science News ☛ Scientists home in on alternatives to ‘forever chemicals’

    A research team has compiled more than a decade’s worth of work from multiple labs to detail chemical principles of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, otherwise known as PFAS. PFAS show up in products as varied as firefighting foams, nonstick cookware and stain-resistant fabrics. While none of the proposed substitutes outperform existing PFAS yet, the best alternatives are approaching the same performance in certain water-repelling applications, scientists report in the July 15 Journal of Colloid and Interface Science.

• Proprietary

  • XDA ☛ 4 tools I run in WSL that are better than their Windows counterparts [Ed: Now is the time to promote GNU/Linux and escape from Vista 10, not more Windows that misuses the "Linux" brand to confuse people]

  • Game Rant ☛ Skype Has Officially Shut Down

    Microsoft has officially ended support for Skype after 22 years, choosing to focus solely on Teams moving forward. It was previously announced that Microsoft would shut down Skype on May 5, but this date certainly marks a sad moment for nostalgic fans who used the once-popular platform in the past, as well as for those who have stayed committed to it over the years.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Arrington kicks off effort to eliminate RMF for DoD software

    The Defense Department’s latest effort to obtain secure software kicked off a 90-day sprint today to develop a framework and implementation plan under the Software Fast Track (SWFT) initiative.

    Katie Arrington, who is performing the duties of the DoD chief information officer, officially launched the initiative in a much-anticipated memo signed on April 24. The Pentagon only made the memo public today.

  • US DOD ☛ Memorandum for Senior Pentagon Leadership Commanders of Combatant Commands, Defense Agency, and DoD [PDF]

    SUBJECT: Accelerating Secure Software

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ MAGA Angry as Elon Musk's Grok AI Keeps Explaining Why Their Beliefs Are Factually Incorrect

      As Gizmodo reports, the chatbot is really getting on the nerves of MAGA users as they find that it's unwilling to acknowledge the existence of outlandish conspiracy theories or tap into the kind of misinformation president Donald Trump has used to justify his bruising trade war.

    • Futurism ☛ The AI Industry Has a Huge Problem: the Smarter Its AI Gets, the More It's Hallucinating

      Worst of all, AI companies are struggling to nail down why exactly chatbots are generating more errors than before — a struggle that highlights the head-scratching fact that even AI's creators don't quite understand how the tech actually works.

      The troubling trend challenges the industry's broad assumption that AI models will become more powerful and reliable as they scale up.

    • [Old] IEEE ☛ AI Mistakes Are Way Weirder Than Human Mistakes - IEEE Spectrum

      Humanity is now rapidly integrating a wholly different kind of mistake-maker into society: AI. Technologies like large language models (LLMs) can perform many cognitive tasks traditionally fulfilled by humans, but they make plenty of mistakes. It seems ridiculous when chatbots tell you to eat rocks or add glue to pizza. But it’s not the frequency or severity of AI systems’ mistakes that differentiates them from human mistakes. It’s their weirdness. AI systems do not make mistakes in the same ways that humans do.

    • Leon Furze ☛ Teaching AI Ethics 2025: Bias

      This post is the first in a series of nine articles updating the “Teaching AI Ethics” resources published in 2023. In the original series, I presented nine areas of ethical concern based on research into artificial intelligence, including the growing technologies of generative artificial intelligence.

    • Scott Willsey ☛ Raycast AI as Translator

      Here’s a use case for AI that I really like: a Japanese to English translator that gives me a translation and breakdown of the kanji (Chinese characters) in a Japanese phrase or passage. The reason AI is really good for this as opposed to Japanese apps that let you paste in phrases or do text detection in images is that you get translation, the ability to specify how you want the results returned, the image text detection, AND the ability to ask follow-up questions.

  • Social Control Media

    • India Times ☛ Meta content moderation contractor cuts over 2,000 jobs in Spain: union

      During a meeting on Monday morning the company, which operates locally as Barcelona Digital Services, said it had terminated the contracts "of all workers who were performing content moderation tasks" for Meta, affecting 2,059 people, local union CCOO said in a statement. vab/ds/imm/rl

    • International Business Times ☛ Pinterest Mass Ban: What Is Happening And How You Can Get Your Suspended Account Back

      Pinterest does offer a way for users to challenge suspensions. However, it's been said that they are currently sending out messages indicating delays in the appeal process. These notifications reportedly state that 'our team is experiencing a higher volume of requests than usual,' suggesting that getting your account back might take some time.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ How do candidates skirt Chinese social media bans on political content? They use influencers

      The RECapture research team has been tracking political activity on these platforms for years. Between October 2024 and April 2025, we observed 319 Liberal Party advertisements, 68 Labor Party advertisements, and 258 ads from independent candidates on WeChat. More than 20 Australian politicians used RedNote for self-promotion. Both platforms are becoming increasingly popular among politicians.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Troy Hunt ☛ Troy Hunt: Passkeys for Normal People

      By only being valid for a short period of time, if someone else obtains the OTP then they have a very short window in which it's valid. Besides, who can possibly obtain it from your authenticator app anyway?! Well... that's where the problem lies, and I demonstrated this just recently, not intentionally, but rather entirely by accident when I fell victim to a phishing attack. Here's how it worked: [...]

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Techdirt ☛ Federal Court Says Cell Tower Dumps Violate The Fourth Amendment

      Now, even with a warrant, courts are finding cell tower dumps to be unconstitutional. In 2022, the top court in Massachusetts said these warrants may still be constitutional, but only if law enforcement followed a stringent set of requirements. Earlier this year, a magistrate judge in Mississippi came down on cell tower dumps even more forcefully, declaring that if geofence warrants (those seeking Google location data) were unconstitutional, then it just made sense warrants seeking more accurate data with a similarly-sized dragnet also violated the Fourth Amendment.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Trump administration wants SCOTUS to weigh in on DOGE [sic] Social Security access

      The insurgent tech group has been blocked from SSA systems, which contain the personal data of millions of Americans.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ NLRB whistleblower’s attorney speaks on DOGE [sic], the shedding of federal IT leaders

      Last month, a whistleblower named Daniel J. Berulis submitted a highly concerning report to Congress about his experiences with the Department of Government Efficiency during his work as an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board.

      DOGE [sic], he said, had arrived at his agency and possibly enabled a breach exposing government data while they were accessing NLRB systems. Alarmingly, Berulis saw evidence that NLRB information was being accessed by users in Russia in near real-time. While he was preparing his report, Berulis said he was threatened: Someone taped a note to the front door of his home that referenced his disclosure as well as photographs of him recorded via drone.

    • EDRI ☛ Technical experts call on Commissioner Virkkunen for a seat on the table of the European Commission’s Technology Roadmap on encryption

      On 1 April, the European Commission published its new Internal Security Strategy, ProtectEU, setting out its plans for the next five years. This included an announcement to prepare a Technology Roadmap on encryption that has raised several questions because of plans to enable law enforcement authorities access to encrypted data.

      EDRi in a group of 39 organisations and 43 experts published an open letter today to express concerns and to ask for a seat at the Technology Roadmap table for academics, independent technologists, tech and human rights lawyers and civil society actors specialising in these issues with meaningful participation to ensure a scientific evidence-based approach to encryption.

      Read the open letter

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Independent UK ☛ Never-before-see spy letters reveal GCHQ role in VE Day before end of war

    The document, timestamped 8.30am on May 7, 1945, instructs Allied expeditionary forces to “cease all offensive operations” but states that troops should remain in their present positions.

  • RTL ☛ 80th anniversary: Nazi surrender site sets the scene for Wim Wenders short film

    A second act of surrender was signed in Berlin the next day, on May 8, which the Allies declared the official date of victory over Nazi Germany.

    But as European countries gear up to celebrate Victory in Europe Day, the war in Ukraine is a reminder "that peace cannot be taken for granted," said Wenders in a voiceover in the four-minute clip.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Facebook data used to study global human migration patterns

    A team of statistical researchers at Meta, owner of Facebook, working with colleagues from the University of Hong Kong and Harvard University, has applied a specially designed algorithm to analyze Facebook data to track human migration around the world in the year 2022. The team has posted a paper describing their efforts and results on the arXiv preprint server.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Michigan drops charges against pro-Palestinian protesters at U-M

    The camp on the Diag, a traditional site for campus protests, was cleared by police in May 2024 after a month. The university said the camp had become a threat to safety, with overloaded power sources and open flames.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ The Failure of Warren Buffett

    It is not just some dark coincidence that Buffett’s rise has coincided with the increasingly chaotic devolution of America into an unstable oligarchy, ruled by a dangerously narcissistic aspiring king. Buffett may be nicer than many of his wealthy peers, but his wealth has been produced by the same system that produced theirs. Buffett’s capitalism is better than the most cutthroat version, because in his version, investors can still buy into the system and share in the wealth. The pool of beneficiaries is slightly larger. But it is not large enough to keep democracy alive.

  • The Register UK ☛ Trump promises protection for TikTok as sale deadline nears

    Hails DOGE [sic] operatives for computer skills during interview in which he also flubbed some tech investment figures

  • NBC ☛ Trump, asked if he has to 'uphold the Constitution,' says, 'I don't know'

    In an interview last month with “Meet the Press,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “Yes, of course,” when asked whether every person in the United States is entitled to due process.

    Trump, however, isn’t so sure.

    “I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump replied when asked by “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker whether he agreed with Rubio. His comments came during a wide-ranging interview at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, which aired Sunday.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Federal News Network ☛ NLRB whistleblower encourages federal workers to ‘speak up’

    The National Labor Relations Board whistleblower who flagged a possible data breach by DOGE is encouraging federal workers to speak up if they notice something suspicious or untoward.

    Daniel Berulis, an IT specialist at the NLRB, submitted a protected whistleblower disclosure to Congress last month.

  • The Register UK ☛ TeleMessage probes 'hack' of Signal clone used by Feds

    An unidentified miscreant is said to have obtained US government communications from TeleMessage, a messaging and archiving app based on the open-source Signal app and used by ousted national security advisor Michael Waltz.

• Environment

  • The Scotsman ☛ Visitors warned to stop helping themselves to peat on Scottish islands

    Lewis and Harris Trail posted on its Facebook group, where it has 25,000 members, warning it is not possible to harvest the plant matter without permission given certain peat cutting rights.

    The post said: “There will be someone on the island who has paid for the right to cut peat there, so the peat belongs to them and is their fuel for the winter months.

  • NL Times ☛ Overshoot day: Netherlands has used up annual allotment of raw materials

    The overshoot date for each country is calculated by dividing the availability of natural resources (biocapacity) by its consumption (ecological footprint), and then multiplying it by the number of days in a year. The Netherlands has a large footprint, but relatively few natural resources, which is why its overshoot day falls early in the year. For the rest of the year, the Netherlands is living “on credit.”

  • Science Alert ☛ NASA Reveals 'Higher Than Expected' Sea Level Rise in 2024

    Up until now, Earth's melting glaciers accounted for up to two-thirds of the sea level rise each year, but this too unexpectedly switched last year.

    In 2024, two-thirds of sea level rise was caused by thermal expansion of liquid seawater, NASA found, despite the loss of glacial ice also still accelerating. Warmer water is less dense, so it takes up more room than cold water – and following Earth's record atmospheric heat, our oceans were the warmest they've been in three decades of records.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Mosquitoes spread in Scotland amid rising temperatures

    Climate change is thought to be behind the spread, and though the mosquitoes do not spread human diseases, some carry viruses which can affect birds. The UK is seeing higher-than-ever temperatures, with today expected to be the hottest start to May on record.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Tracy Durnell ☛ Ebike options

      I mostly stopped biking for transportation five years ago because a) I stopped going anywhere 😅 and b) after one too many close calls, I decided it was unreasonable that I should have to risk my life because roads are designed unsafely for bikes. The car-free infrastructure near me is getting better: a bike path is finally opening on the nasty route I used to take to the coffee shop in the next town over (six years* after I wanted it 🙄) and my city is building a safe crossing for a heinously dangerous intersection as well as a new car-free route downtown this year. In the next five to ten years*, there will be a couple more major connections in the bike network on the Seattle Eastside. But is it enough?
      *(Why does this shit take so long to build??? We’ve needed it for a decade, we won’t get it for another decade. Can we get some fucking urgency up in here?)

      I don’t think an ebike would necessarily make me feel safer to ride more streets than I currently do on my standard bike. But hopping on the ebike might feel like less of a barrier than the nonmotorized bike, in that I wouldn’t have to put on my special lil clippy shoes and get all sweaty.

    • Wired ☛ Signal Clone Used by Mike Waltz Pauses Service After Reports It Got Hacked

      President Donald Trump's now-former national security adviser Mike Waltz was captured by a Reuters photographer last week using an unauthorized version of the secure communication app Signal—known as TeleMessage Signal or TM Signal—which allows users to archive their communications. Photos of Waltz using the app appear to show that he was communicating with other high-ranking officials, including Vice President JD Vance, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ High-speed rail leaders sound alarm over train's financial future

      Authority staff said that contracts include termination clauses if there isn’t enough money and that contingency funds existed to make up a shortfall if funding fell through. Ghielmetti argued that the termination of any contract would only move the project further off course and stressed that if the goal is to get back on schedule, those funds need to exist.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ This Is What Community-Powered Restoration Looks Like

    • Associated Press ☛ Arborists bring huge, ancient trees to the Motor City’s urban landscape

      Detroit is the pilot city for the Giant Sequoia Filter Forest. The nonprofit Archangel Ancient Tree Archive has donated dozens of sequoia saplings that were planted Tuesday by staff and volunteers from Arboretum Detroit, another nonprofit, to mark Earth Day.

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Giant Sequoias Are Taking Root in an Unexpected Place: Detroit

      The trees are being planted in Detroit’s Poletown East neighborhood through a partnership between two nonprofits, Arboretum Detroit and Archangel Ancient Tree Archive.

• Finance

  • PwC to lay off 1,500 US employees amid persistently low attrition – FT

    PwC is cutting around 1,500 jobs in the U.S., or roughly 2% of its 75,000-strong workforce, amid ongoing pressure from historically low staff turnover, the Financial Times reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter.

    The layoffs, which primarily impact the firm’s audit and tax divisions, come after months of internal review and follow a prior effort to reassign staff from slower-growing areas to higher-demand units, the report said.

  • PwC to lay off 1,500 employees, affecting freshers and THESE key departments

    PwC has announced plans to lay off approximately 1,500 employees across its US operations, including fresh graduates, as it grapples with sustained low staff turnover and changing business demands. The move marks the second major wave of job cuts at the firm in less than a year, sending ripples across the professional services sector already facing mounting pressure.

    The redundancies, which account for roughly 2% of PwC’s 75,000-strong US workforce, will primarily impact the firm’s audit and tax divisions. People familiar with the matter said affected employees began receiving notifications earlier this week, with many learning of their job status via urgent Microsoft Teams invites marked “time sensitive.”

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Phirephoenix ☛ manifesto for the toronto that could be

    I believe the best way to fix this is to get off our phones and meet our neighbours in person, to talk face-to-face about our challenges and hopes. Unfortunately, that same vibrant diversity I love about Toronto can also feel overwhelming and alienating. There’s an incredible amount of good organizing work happening in Toronto, and there is a vast group of people who want to be part of that work who don’t know how to get started.

  • India Times ☛ Anduril to acquire Ireland's Klas to bolster AI warfare systems

    Anduril Industries will acquire Ireland-based Klas to enhance its AI-driven defense tech. The deal boosts Anduril’s autonomous systems by integrating Klas’s tactical communications hardware, aiding real-time battlefield data sharing. Klas will continue operations and expand manufacturing amid growing defense tech demand.

  • India Times ☛ Google has tweaked employee review system to boost rewards for top performers: Report

    The company said the new system would reward top-rated employees with improved bonus and equity awards starting in 2026. “More Googlers will have the opportunity to achieve that rating during annual reviews,” wrote John Casey, Google’s vice president of global compensation and benefits, in the company-wide memo.

  • Wired ☛ Security Researchers Warn a Widely Used Open Source Tool Poses a 'Persistent' Risk to the US

    For decades, open source software has underpinned large swathes of the technology industry and the systems people rely on day to day. Open source technology allows anyone to see and modify code, helping to make improvements, detect security vulnerabilities, and apply independent scrutiny that’s absent from the closed tech of corporate giants. However, the fracturing of geopolitical norms and the specter of stealthy supply chain attacks has led to an increase in questions about risk levels of "foreign" code.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Atlantic ☛ Fact-Checking Is Out, ‘Community Notes’ Are In

      Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called the pivot on misinformation a return to the company’s “roots,” with Facebook and Instagram as sites of “free expression.” He announced the decision to adopt Community Notes back in January, and explicitly framed the move as a response to the 2024 elections, which he described as a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” Less explicitly, Meta’s shift to Community Notes is a response to years of being criticized from both sides of the aisle over the company’s approach to misinformation. Near the end of his last term, Trump targeted Facebook and other online platforms with an executive order accusing them of “selective censorship that is harming our national discourse,” and during the Biden administration, Zuckerberg said he was pressured to take down more posts about COVID than he wanted to.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Google is getting into the filmmaking business to promote a more positive view of tech

      Google LLC is teaming up with a talent management company called Range Media Partners on a new film and TV project that aims to improve the public perception of its technology.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Axios ☛ Trump's tax fight with Harvard sends chill through nonprofit sector

    Threat level: Harvard's president, Alan Garber, told the Wall Street Journal Friday that Trump's threats are "highly illegal, unless there is some reasoning that we have not been exposed to that would justify this dramatic move."

  • Axios ☛ Harvard has new grant funding halted by Trump administration

    The big picture: The Ive League university has been at the center of President Trump's escalating war against colleges and universities as he seeks to influence and reorient their priorities through federal funds.

  • BIA Net ☛ Down to earth

    On 1st of May, there was in fact little or no emergency. It was helped by closing İstanbul down and arresting as many people as possible.

  • Techdirt ☛ Otherwise Objectionable: Will Section 230 Survive?

    While these voices span the ideological spectrum and likely disagree on many policy issues, all of them think that Section 230 is an important and useful law. And in this discussion, we explain why we all believe Section 230 was (and remains) the right law for the internet.

    Much of the discussion focused on whether or not there were any lessons from Section 230 for new technologies, like AI. There was also surprising optimism about 230’s chances for survival — though I remain more skeptical given the current political climate (and widespread ignorance about the law).

  • US News And World Report ☛ Trump Administration Freezes Future Grants to Harvard

    The U.S. Department of Education informed Harvard University on Monday that it was freezing billions of dollars in future research grants and other aid until the nation's oldest and wealthiest college concedes to a number of demands from the Trump administration, a senior department official said.

  • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Harvard will receive no new grants until it meets White House demands

    The official spoke on condition of anonymity to preview the decision on a call with reporters.

  • Site36 ☛ Police critical police inspector in Berlin receives letter with bullet to his protected address | Matthias Monroy

    Von Dobrowolski, who published the book “’I’m fighting for a better police force”’ in 2022, reported the incident to the authorities. He decided to publish it after similar threats against a journalist and a politician in Berlin became known.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Trump Administration Says Harvard Will Receive No New Grants Until It Meets White House Demands

    The action was laid out in a letter to Harvard’s president and amounts to a major escalation of Trump’s battle with the Ivy League school. The administration previously froze $2.2 billion in federal grants to Harvard, and Trump is pushing to strip the school of its tax-exempt status.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • RFERL ☛ Russian Journalist Secretly Flees To France After Being Charged For War Criticism

    Yekaterina Barabash, a film critic who had written critical messages to Facebook about the Russian invasion, appeared on May 5 at a Paris news conference organized by Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group known by its French acronym, RSF.

    "Her escape was one of the most perilous operations RSF been involved in since Russia's draconian laws of March 2022," the group's director, Thibaut Bruttin, said during the conference with Barabash.

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ With US support gone, Belarusian democratic organizations struggle to survive

    US funds have suddenly vanished for exiled Belarusian civil society groups, throwing them into a fight for survival. Youth initiatives, media outlets and human rights defenders are cutting down on their staff and programmes, creating dangerous gaps that state propaganda is now rushing to fill. Belarusian activists show stubborn determination in the face of this financial earthquake, but without new support, the democratic resistance to Lukashenka's regime stands on increasingly shaky ground.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Papers Please ☛ What can you do if you aren’t allowed to fly without REAL-ID?

    On Wednesday, May 7, 2025, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) plans to start treating driver’s licenses and state IDs that don’t comply with the REAL-ID Act as “unacceptable” ID at TSA checkpoints. That doesn’t mean that travelers without REAL-ID won’t be allowed to fly. What the TSA has said is that it will subject travelers without REAL-ID on or after May 7th to its current procedures for airline passengers with no ID or unacceptable ID.

    In a sample of incident logs and reports released in response to one of our Freedom Of Information Act requests, 98% of the airline passengers who showed up at TSA checkpoints with no ID or unacceptable ID were allowed to fly after additional “security theater”.

    But given the numbers of people without REAL-ID, even 2% of those who try to fly without REAL-ID could be a significant number. And if you’re the one being told, “You can’t fly today”, any number of unlawful and denials of your right to travel is significant.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Indigenous people raise awareness about their missing and murdered

    Some parents say they will use Monday’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Awareness Day to make sure children understand what’s at stake.

  • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ Trump and the U.S. (Non-)Recognition of the Armenian Genocide

    Indeed, many observers thought the die had been cast. It wasn't. The message issued in late April by Trump reverts to the evasive language of so many previous American presidents, without naming the Armenian genocide as such. Trump's statement, like the ones he had issued during his first term, uses the Armenian term Meds Yeghern, which can be translated as "Great Catastrophe." It speaks of "one of the worst disasters of the 20th century" and of "one and a half million Armenians [who] were exiled and marched to their deaths in the final years of the Ottoman Empire," but without using the g-word. While it does not explicitly annul President Biden's policy of genocide recognition, it implicitly does, making the issue of actually calling this what it was a taboo again in the White House. Trump's reversal seemed to make genocide recognition taboo not only in the White House, but in the whole executive branch. As State of Secretary Marco Rubio declared in a social media post commemorating the anniversary, "Today, we remember the Meds Yeghern."

  • JURIST ☛ UNAMA: Taliban systemically erasing women's public life and freedom of movement

    The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) on Thursday released its first quarterly human rights report of 2025, stating that the Taliban continues to implement decrees aimed at erasing women from public life and restricting their fundamental freedoms, including access to education, work, health care, and freedom of movement.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ County Terminates Broadband Contract with All Points Broadband Over Delays

    After years of delays and unmet promises, Culpeper County (VA) has officially terminated its contract with All Points Broadband (APB), a Leesburg-based company that was contracted to bring high-speed internet to 4,300 underserved rural addresses. The county made the decision after only one home had been connected since the partnership began in 2020, according to the Culpeper Star-Exponent.

  • Seth Michael Larson ☛ Voicemail for notifications

    Phones used to be a way to get someone's attention in the moment and have a conversation if the other party was available. "Getting someone's attention" was the whole point. The lack of authentication and filtering controls meant that the many-to-many attention-grabbing network was destined for this fate. Now notifications are in a very similar boat, and I am "calling" (heh) that one day notifications will either be a thing of the past (ie, most people disable them) or more configurable and filterable to match user expectations.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• India Times ☛ Apple will appeal contempt ruling in Epic Games case over App Store

  Apple has appealed a US judge’s ruling finding it in contempt for violating a 2021 injunction in the Epic Games antitrust case. The judge ordered Apple to open its App Store to more competition and referred the company for possible criminal contempt, citing willful noncompliance and misleading tactics to retain revenue.

• India Times ☛ Apple hit with app developer class action after US judge's contempt ruling

  Apple is facing a class action lawsuit accusing it of defying a 2021 court order meant to loosen App Store restrictions, costing developers potentially billions. Filed by Pure Sweat Basketball, the suit claims Apple imposed inflated commissions and ignored the injunction, prompting calls for financial restitution and possible criminal investigation.

• Digital Music News ☛ Apple Hit with Lawsuit for App Store Injunction Violations

  Hagens Berman alleges that Apple’s actions deprived developers of billions of potential revenue. The lawsuit claims Apple engaged in internal analyses to devise the best ways to sidestep the injunction. Only 34 out of 136,000 developers were able to implement third-party payment options—representing only 0.025% of eligible apps. That’s over the course of a 15-month injunction where app developers were supposed to be able to communicate with their user base about outside payments.

• Copyrights

  • Futurism ☛ Google's AI Is Scraping Even Sites That Ask to Be Ignored

    The scale of this scraping is staggering. An internal document from 2024 cited by Aguilar showed that Google had collected a total of 160 billion tokens — short units of text — in AI training data. Half of the tokens were stated to have been removed since they came from publishers who opted out of AI training. But based on Collin's new testimony, those 80 billion tokens are still being used to train AI at Google, just not at DeepMind itself.

    In another example of Google slipperiness, there actually is one way to opt-out of having your website trawled by an AI: by opting out of being indexed in Google's search engine entirely. That's a death sentence for any website, a choice that's really no choice at all.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Swedish IPTV Crackdown Tested as Users Seek Workarounds

    Viaplay and other rightsholders have grown increasingly worried about this trend and these concerns have reached lawmakers too. Earlier this year, Swedish Minister of Culture, Parisa Liljestrand, said that the authorities started looking into a possible ban on viewing pirate IPTV streams.

  • Leon Mika ☛ On AI, Process, and Output

    I guess my point is that I think these two camps are more porous then people think. There are times where the process is half the fun in making the thing, and others where it’s a slog, and you just want the thing to be. This is true for me in programming, and I can only guess that it’ll be similar in other forms of art. I guess the trap is choosing to join one camp, feeling that’s the only camp that people should be in, and refusing to recognise that others may feel differently.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ UK backtracks on AI ‘opt out’ scheme for creative works

    We should expect the government to keep trying to push as much through as they can now, and maybe backtracking later if they’re forced to — dragging their feet the whole way.