Leftovers

• Russell Graves ☛ Breaking Out of the Baptist Box

  I’ve ended up with a model of the Baptist Box as a moderately sized wooden box sitting on a raft in a very large sea. Think of your standard “wooden shipping crate.” On the inside, we have painted a very pleasant set of peaceful horizons. They’re simple, understandable, safe, and entirely artificial. Outside is… well, a lot more that we don’t see. Every now and then, something “weird” comes poking through the box. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s only a small hole. We can patch it up and carry on as though it never happened.

  Or… at some point, those weird things start splintering the box. We can try to patch it up, but we won’t succeed. The wood is splintering, smashing, and there is more and more that’s visible beyond our nicely painted horizon. It’s distant. It’s dark. It’s scary. And it isn’t safe. So what do we do? Do we keep trying to patch up the box? Or do we start trying to figure out what’s actually out there?

• Ruben Schade ☛ Prolific blogging (or not?)

  I write regularly because it’s how my brain works, and I enjoy it. But I don’t consider it a virtue. It’s why I do worry a bit with those “blog daily” challenges. If you want to do it, and you find the cadence is helping you blog better, that’s great. As soon as it starts to feel like a chore, and you phone in posts to fulfill an arbitrary and self-imposed timeline, you’re not helping yourself or your writing.

• Devon Dundee ☛ No Post on Sundays

  Which is how I found myself checking the mail on a Sunday afternoon. Noah was taking a nap, and it had been a few days since I’d had a chance to get out there, so I took advantage of the opportunity when it arose. Alas, the mailbox was empty. No junk mail treasures to share this particular Sunday.

• Science

  • Wired ☛ Intelligence on Earth Evolved Independently at Least Twice

    A series of studies published in Science in February 2025 provides the best evidence yet that birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently. This suggests that vertebrate intelligence arose not once, but multiple times. Still, their neural complexity didn’t evolve in wildly different directions: Avian and mammalian brains display surprisingly similar circuits, the studies found.

    “It’s a milestone in the quest to understand and to integrate the different ideas about the evolution” of vertebrate intelligence, said Güntürkün, who was not involved in the new research.

  • The Register UK ☛ Britain wants in on drawing US scientists fleeing Trump

    It's like a reversal of the Brain Drain that Britain suffered from the 1960s onwards, where talented and highly educated UK nationals headed west in search of higher pay and better prospects in America.

    Britain is understood to be aiming to attract ten specific classes of researchers, but the relevant scheme is likely to get £50 million ($67 million) in funding.

  • The Register UK ☛ US National Science Foundation axes Equity Division

    For those unfamiliar with the NSF's role, the org does not conduct its own research but serves as a federal funding body, allocating public money to support universities, institutions, and small businesses in advancing scientific progress, education, and innovation across the United States.

  • Rachel Andrew ☛ A matter of fact

    Genealogists were quick to take their research online. The early days of the genealogical web were based around usenet and mailing lists, and the ability to trade information and lookups in local records and graveyards made research easier. In the early 2000s I bought a microfiche reader and fiche copies of the records of some villages I was interested in. I could then provide lookups in those records for other researchers. Volunteers transcribed records, and made them available online. We all built websites to share our trees in GEDCOM format, along with the names and places we were researching. I found distant cousins through name lists kept by family history societies and on more than one occasion received a printed out tree in the mail.

• Career/Education

  • [Old] Internet Archive ☛ All Things Distributed: Why doesn't Academia understand Industrial Work?

    In a comment on his weblog Bryan Cantrill responds to my posting yesterday about papers from industry at conferences. Bryan rejects my statement that one of the main causes that people from industry do not participate in program committees and paper submission is that not sufficient reward is given inside the enterprise culture for these activities, which then basically becomes a personal volunteer effort. According to Bryan, people from cutting-edge software industry are often encouraged to write papers. My experiences are different so we probably both have our score of examples for either side of the story.

    In the same comment Bryan hints at a trend that has many people from industry discouraged to write and submit papers: [...]

  • El País ☛ The library with one door in Canada and the other one (now closing) in the US

    A line on the ground separates the Canadian town of Stanstead and the American town of Derby Line. A library stands right on top, but it had never been a problem. Until Trump returned to power, that is

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ How hard are USAID cuts hitting Africa's healthcare?

    Such funding cuts have been a blow to many African countries. Sub-Saharan Africa is the second-largest recipient of USAID funding worldwide, receiving $12.7 billion (€11.2 billion) in 2024. Up to 4 million additional people could now die from treatable diseases in Africa as a result of the loss of US funding, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC).

  • The Atlantic ☛ The DOGE [sic] Destruction We Aren't Seeing

    Silicosis is typically caused by years of breathing in silica dust at work, and can worsen even after work exposures stop. In recent years, after decades of inaction, the federal government finally took several important steps to reduce the incidence of this ancient and debilitating disease. Under the Trump administration, all that progress is going away, in but one example of the widespread destruction now taking place across the federal government.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ End-of-life router botnet shut, 4 'foreign hackers' charged

    "TheMoon does not require a password to infect routers; it scans for open ports and sends a command to a vulnerable script," the FBI PSA explains. "The malware contacts the command and control (C2) server and the C2 server responds with instructions, which may include instructing the infected machine to scan for other vulnerable routers to spread the infection and expand the network."

  • Linuxiac ☛ Raspberry Pi Connect Goes Stable

    Version 2.5 replaces that pattern with a single, persistent HTTP connection. Now, when a user presses “Connect” in the web dashboard, the server broadcasts a wake-up event to the board, initiating the handshake on demand instead of on a schedule.

  • Macworld ☛ My 64GB iPhone was so low on space it barely worked. Here's how I saved it

    If you also have a device with 64GB of storage and have been struggling with constant low storage alerts, I’m here to help. Here’s how I made my devices usable again without having to buy a new one.

  • Jason Becker ☛ Facebook and Instagram are not your website!

    Turns out they closed lessons and the retail shop in March and moved to a repair only space. They only wrote about this on Instagram and Facebook, and made no note of this on their own website. They had closing sales, but never contacted people whose email they had from past used gear sales or repairs or announced this on their own domain.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ AI Brown-Nosing Is Becoming a Huge Problem for Society

      "AI models want approval from users, and sometimes, the best way to get a good rating is to lie," said Caleb Sponheim, a computational neuroscientist. He notes that to current AI models, even objective prompts — like math questions — become opportunities to stroke our egos.

    • The Atlantic ☛ AI Is Not Your Friend

      Reading about sycophantic AI, I’ve been struck by how it mirrors another problem. As I’ve written previously, social media was imagined to be a vehicle for expanding our minds, but it has instead become a justification machine, a place for users to reassure themselves that their attitude is correct despite evidence to the contrary. Doing so is as easy as plugging into a social feed and drinking from a firehose of “evidence” that proves the righteousness of a given position, no matter how wrongheaded it may be. AI now looks to be its own kind of justification machine—more convincing, more efficient, and therefore even more dangerous than social media.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ “Remove her clothes” – Grok’s latest AI fiasco illustrates one of the key dangers of an autonomous AI | Digital Camera World

      Earlier this month, X users pointed out that Grok would respond to tagged requests like “remove her clothes,” posting AI-altered images of the same person wearing undergarments or a bikini right in the comment threads.

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ Why can't language models come up with new ideas?

      Why can’t large language models come up with new ideas? Human polymaths routinely come up with interesting new ideas by combining insights from different areas. But language models have not come up with any notable new ideas, despite being familiar with a far broader range of knowledge than any human1. Is that surprising? What’s going on here?

    • Connor Tumbleson ☛ AIs talking for us

      I wondered how that person felt after we hung up. From their perspective they called me (a human) and instead got a robotic answer stalling the call asking why they were calling. Maybe that person didn't mind, but if I called someone and had to explain my intention to a robot I'd be a bit upset.

      However, let me count my entire month of May & April call history and sum the calls: [...]

    • Julia Language Blog Aggregator ☛ A Hands on Introduction to Applied Scientific Machine Learning / Physics-Informed Learning

      This is a hands-on introduction to Scientific Machine Learning that does not assume a background in machine learning. We start scratch, showing the mathematical basis of “what is a neural network?” all the way up through adding physical intuition to the neural network and using it solve problem in epidemic outbreaks to improving sensor tracking of Formula 1 cars.

    • Futurism ☛ Scammers Stole the Website for Emerson College's Student Radio Station and Started Running It as a Zombie AI Farm

      Her instincts were correct. The story her professor had cited was the product of the undead carcass of an old WECB domain, which scammers had scooped up and transformed into an AI-powered content farm — complete with fake, AI-generated authors, AI imagery, and boatloads of misinformation — designed to trade on WECB's name and Google standing for profit.

      It's an old model for SEO scammery: snatch up a trustworthy domain when it expires, and use it to farm low-quality SEO-targeted content meant to cash in on lucrative display ads.

    • India Times ☛ Pope Leo XIV lays out his vision of papacy, identifies AI as a main challenge for humanity

      Toward the end of his pontificate, Francis became increasingly vocal about the threats to humanity posed by AI and called for an international treaty to regulate it.

    • Futurism ☛ Teachers Using AI to Grade Their Students' Work Sends a Clear Message: They Don't Matter, and Will Soon Be Obsolete

      That's causing some fed-up teachers to fight fire with fire, using AI chatbots to score their students' work. As one teacher mused on Reddit: "You are welcome to use AI. Just let me know. If you do, the AI will also grade you. You don't write it, I don't read it."

    • CS Monitor ☛ Can AI be ‘democratic’? Race is on for who will define the technology’s future.

      Yet the meaning of “democratic AI” is elusive. Artificial intelligence is being used for everything from personal assistants to national security, and experts say the models behind it are neither democratic nor authoritarian by nature. They merely reflect the data they are trained on. How AI affects politics worldwide will depend on who has a say in controlling the data and rules behind these tools, and how they are used.

    • Ciprian Dorin Craciun ☛ [remark] Bot countermeasures impact on the quality of life on the web

      I think enough has already been written on the subject of fighting against rogue bots (today mostly for LLM scraping) that are ruining the web, not only by strip-mining human creativity and turning it into average slop, but especially by taking down hosting infrastructure through uncoordinated crawling that turns into DDoS.

      And it's not only the "bad LLM" companies that engage in this; even Google is slamming anything alive that happens to have its HTTP endpoint open!

  • Social Control Media

    • Westenberg ☛ The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied.

      The fediverse is a jailbreak. It’s not a product, not a single platform, it’s not something you can buy stock in or use to enrich yourself at the cost of our shared humanity. It’s a network of independent, interconnected social platforms, all running on open protocols like ActivityPub. It’s an ecosystem where you - not some incellionaire obsessed with eugenics - own your digital identity. Where your social graph belongs to you, not an algorithm’s shifting fucking whims. Where moving from one service to another doesn’t mean losing everything you’ve built and everything you’ve ever said.

    • Ars Technica ☛ Kids are short-circuiting their school-issued Chromebooks for TikTok clout

      Schools are also warning that damage to school property can result in disciplinary action and, in some states, legal action.

    • Gray Local Media ☛ Hospitalized Plainville student to face criminal charges for suspected ‘Chromebook challenge’

      “Through an investigation, it was determined that a middle school student intentionally stuck scissors into a laptop causing smoke to emit from it,” said Superintendent Brian Reas.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ A new TikTok challenge has kids attempting to short-circuit school-issued Chromebooks

      There have been multiple reports of students trying the challenge, which sometimes results in their laptop smoking or catching fire. And because there’s a high risk of explosion with damaged lithium batteries, these incidents resulted in classroom evacuations, class cancellations, and, in some cases, deployment of firefighters or other first responders. One incident had a student sticking a pair of scissors into a laptop, causing it to release a lot of toxic smoke. This led to one student being sent to the hospital for inhalation, while the offender is now facing charges in juvenile court.

    • IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Weaponizing Facebook Ads: Inside the Multi-Stage Malware Campaign Exploiting Cryptocurrency Brands

      A persistent malvertising campaign is plaguing Facebook, leveraging the reputations of well-known cryptocurrency exchanges to lure victims into a maze of malware. Since Bitdefender Labs started investigating, this evolving threat has posed a serious risk by deploying cleverly disguised front-end scripts and custom payloads on users’ devices, all under the guise of legitimate cryptocurrency platforms and influencers.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ You think ransomware is bad? Wait until it infects CPUs

      "We should not be talking about ransomware in 2025 — and that fault falls on everyone: the vendors, the end users, cyber insurers," Beek told The Register.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Nicolas Fränkel ☛ Cloudflare Tunnel for Home Assistant

      I continue to take care of my Home Assistant. This week, I replaced my original setup with Cloudflare Tunnel.

      This is the 6th post in the My journey with Home Assistant focus series.Other posts include: [...]

    • Light Blue Touchpaper ☛ Human HARMS: Threat modelling social harms against technical systems

      As smart home technology, connected devices, and online platforms continue to evolve, we must think beyond just technical security. Our HARMS model highlights how technology, even when working as intended, can be used to control and harm individuals. By also incorporating human-centered threat modelling into designing software development, in addition to traditional threat modelling methods, we can build safer systems that help prevent them being used for abuse.

    • Data Protection Commission Ireland ☛ Irish Data Protection Commission fines TikTok €530 million and orders corrective measures following Inquiry into transfers of EEA User Data to China | 02/05/2025 | Data Protection Commission

      The Irish Data Protection Commission has today announced its final decision following an Inquiry into TikTok Technology Limited (“TikTok”). This Inquiry was launched by the DPC, in its role as the Lead Supervisory Authority for TikTok, to examine the lawfulness of TikTok’s transfers of personal data [1] of users of the TikTok platform in the EEA to the People’s Republic of China (“China”). In addition, the Inquiry examined whether the provision of information to users in relation to such transfers met TikTok’s transparency requirements as required by the GDPR.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk's Plan for Americans' Sensitive Data Has Security Experts Terrified

    In short, it's the difference between sending treasure hunters to find and collect individual coins that have been scattered across an ocean, or sending them after one big pot of gold. Which one would you rather track down?

    "Separation and segmentation is one of the core principles in sound cybersecurity," Charles Henderson, an executive at the security firm Coalfire, told WaPo. "Putting all your eggs in one basket means I don't need to go hunting for them — I can just steal the basket."

  • JURIST ☛ European Commission takes Hungary to EU court for violating laws on migrant smuggling

    The commission argues that this practice undermines EU efforts to deter migrant smuggling and violates both Council Directive 2002/90/EC and Council Framework Decision 2002/946/JHA. These legal instruments require member states to impose effective, proportionate, and dissuasive penalties for facilitating unauthorized entry, transit, or residence in the EU.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ 173rd Airborne builds its own FPV drone lab to get them quickly

    The lab, set up at the 173rd’s base in Caserma Del Din, Italy, is operated by soldiers from the brigade and the 414th Contracting Support Brigade. In fact, it was set up to get soldiers the tiny devices quickly and without having to go through larger procurement systems. Col. Joshua Gaspard, the head of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, ordered the lab to be established so that each one is made in-house, quickly and cheaply. The Army noted that each one costs roughly $1,000 to construct.

  • YLE ☛ Hyperco accuses Rydman of stalling TikTok data centre project in Kouvola

    He also pointed out that Hyperco is no longer Western-owned, with its ownership now based in Dubai.

    In March, Hyperco announced a partnership with Edgnex, a subsidiary of the Dubai-based property developer Damac Group. As part of the deal, Edgnex became a shareholder in Hyperco.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Register UK ☛ DOGE worker’s old creds found in malware data dumps

    What is attributable to a lapse of security hygiene, however, are the four infostealer logs that link to Schutt. Such logs contain usernames and passwords stolen by infostealer malware, suggesting one or more of Schutt's computers were compromised at some point.

• Environment

  • Deseret Media ☛ Conservation doesn't have to be controversial — just ask this man

    He recently officially retired in 2024 and was honored recently amid wetlands on the eastern shores of a terminal body of salt water people are so desperately trying to save. It was, and is, Livermore's vision to lift up this unique landscape that has been so often overlooked, criticized and misunderstood: the Great Salt Lake.

    During his long tenure, Livermore and the strength of this organization accomplished a few notable things, including: [...]

  • Energy/Transportation

    • NL Times ☛ The Hague demands free transit for residents during NATO summit

      The municipal council of The Hague has unanimously called on the Dutch cabinet to make public transportation free during the NATO summit at the end of June. The council urged the national government to approve the temporary measure “as a gesture to the residents of The Hague,” citing major expected disruptions throughout the city during the event.

    • Undeadly ☛ Improved ACPI WMI support (may be) incoming

      This is a likely starting point for even better support of these features and make OpenBSD life on various devices significantly more pleasant.

    • The Register UK ☛ Duffy floats ambitious 3-year air traffic system overhaul

      Many of the systems targeted in the proposal were not expected to be fully replaced until the 2030s or later under historical FAA funding levels. The DoT now aims to accelerate these upgrades within a three-year framework running through 2028.

    • Wired ☛ ICE’s Deportation Airline Hack Reveals Man ‘Disappeared’ to El Salvador

      WIRED also shed light this week on a recent CBP memo that rescinded a number of internal policies designed to protect vulnerable people—including pregnant women, infants, the elderly, and people with serious medical conditions—while in the agency’s custody. Signed by acting commissioner Pete Flores, the order eliminates four Biden-era policies.

    • Ted Unangst ☛ fan service

      ASUS laptops generally have a feature that lets the user toggle the fan speed. Fn-F5 on some models, Fn-F on others. The direct effect is to limit the fan speed, from whisper mode to megablast, and indirectly control performance. But it doesn’t work in OpenBSD, so I needed to write an ASUS ACPI WMI driver.

  • Overpopulation

    • Atlantic Council ☛ By focusing on water, extremism, and trade, India and Pakistan can turn this cease-fire into an enduring peace

      Three main items should be on the agenda.

    • The Nation ☛ Mothers Don’t Need Medals— They Need a Better World for Their Children

      The roots of the fertility crisis engage the bread-and-butter issues that have long been the domain of Democrats. US birthrates have hit a record low not because the nation has become “almost pathologically anti-child,” as JD Vance asserted to The New York Times. Instead, surveys have shown that would-be parents want to own a home, repay student debt, and have money for childcare before starting a family. Yet the average age of a homebuyer has climbed to 56, almost double what it was 40 years ago. And 43 percent of young people currently carry student debt, compared to 28 percent in 1993. The problem isn’t lack of interest—it’s too much interest being paid on record high loans.

• Finance

  • GNU Taler ☛ GNU Taler v1.0 released

    This release is a special milestone, as with it we are ready to launch our operation in Switzerland. Starting today, Taler Operations AG is legally operating the GNU Taler payment system in Swiss Francs open to individuals and businesses in Switzerland. We consider this a public beta, primarily because at this point there are no shops accepting the payment system. While a few rough edges remain, we believe at this point operating the system is legal and users assets are safe. We are also committed to ensuring backwards compatibility of every future release to the previous release.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Walrus ☛ The Death of Shopify’s Start-up Dream, One Layoff at a Time

    Shopify’s mass graveyard of shuttered projects includes a stock photography website and an app to sell limited-edition streetwear that restricts bots from buying up the stock. Then there’s the 2019 launch of Shopify Studios, a production company that developed I Quit, an ill-fated reality series tracking aspiring entrepreneurs who ditched their day jobs to pursue their business dreams. In 2022, the company faced another stumble: in a long-running attempt to compete with Amazon, Shopify acquired Deliverr, an e-commerce fulfillment company, only to sell it a year later. The company shed about $118 million in market value that year.

  • [Old] ZDNet ☛ Microsoft's lobbying efforts eclipse Enron | ZDNET

    An expert who monitors political influencers says Microsoft and its employees have been big spenders on the political scene--even outpacing Enron.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • ANF News ☛ Kurdish journalist sent to Karaj prison to serve one-year sentence

    In late December 2024, Branch Three of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Karaj sentenced Piri to one year in prison on charges of “propaganda against the state”, with the additional penalty of a two-year ban on online activity.

  • JURIST ☛ India censorship spurs concerns amid military tensions with Pakistan

    The statement followed the arrest of freelance journalist Hilal Mir on Monday after Indian police claimed Mir was “spreading anti-national content” by criticizing the government’s policies on the Indian-administered region of Kashmir. The Indian government also ordered X (formerly Twitter) to block more than 8,000 accounts, including accounts of international news organizations. The government additionally restricted access to 16 Pakistani YouTube channels, including prominent news outlets such as Dawn News.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Free Speech Is Under Attack in Texas

    Texas is currently one of 35 states with robust legal protections against SLAPP suits. New Texas resident Elon Musk is banding together with entrenched fossil fuel interests in a campaign to roll these protections back.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • JURIST ☛ CPJ urges release of journalist Veronika Orlova as Russia intensifies crackdown on dissent

    Orlova, a reporter for independent outlet SOTAvision, was arrested Tuesday near Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, where she had been filming emergency crews responding to activist Grigory Saksonov—detained after jumping into the river with a sign reading “Putin–Hitler.” Authorities accused Orlova of “disobeying a police officer,” a charge she denies. Her outlet and lawyer emphasized she had no connection to the protest.

    “Detaining a journalist for simply filming in a public space is a blatant violation of press freedom,” said Anna Brakha, CPJ’s senior researcher for Europe and Central Asia.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Trump again tries to defund NPR and PBS, sparking a new congressional battle

    The Corporation for Public Broadcasting allocates funding to National Public Radio, or NPR, and the Public Broadcasting Service, or PBS, as well as more than 1,500 local radio and television stations throughout the country.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ 538’s former top numbers guy to launch data journalism site

    The former head of 538, shuttered last year by ABC News, is building a new media outlet aimed at recapturing the defunct polling news site’s audience and building the kind of serious data journalism that has been abandoned by most legacy news organizations.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Researchers warn marginalized young adults in low- and middle-income countries face 'growing online abuse'

    The study—the largest of its kind—focuses on Colombia, Ghana, Kenya and Vietnam, and reveals how stigma, harassment, digital exclusion and fear are creating major barriers to accessing essential health information and support online for some of society's most marginalized groups.

  • RFA ☛ Devotion and defiance: Highlights from RFA Tibetan

    Since Radio Free Asia’s inception, it has reported epochal moments in the history of modern Tibet.

  • The Verge ☛ The FTC puts off enforcing its ‘click-to-cancel’ rule

    The agency says it chose to push enforcement back even further after “a fresh assessment of the burdens that forcing compliance by this date would impose.” The FTC voted 3-0 for the delay, but as TechCrunch notes, two of a typical five commissioners were absent from the vote. That’s because they were illegally fired by Donald Trump in March.

  • CBS ☛ Trump administration "actively looking" at suspending habeas corpus to deport migrants, Stephen Miller says

    A writ of habeas corpus requires authorities to produce in court an individual they are holding and justify their confinement. Article I of the Constitution says the "privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Doc Searls ☛ How to Make Customers Hate You

    SiriusXM is a special case, however, because the “regular” price is more than 5x the promotional price, as we see above.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Register UK ☛ If Google is forced to give up Chrome, what happens next?

  Here's what's in the cards. First, Google may end up selling Chrome. Chrome is worth serious money. It's easily the most popular web browser. The best market numbers for browsers, I've found, are those provided by the US federal government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP). It gives us a running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits. While it doesn't tell us much about global web browser use, it's the best information we have about American web browser use.

• CNBC ☛ Fortnite applies to Apple's App Store after Epic Games court win

  Fortnite was booted from iPhones and Apple's App Store in 2020, after Epic Games updated its software to link out to the company's website and avoid Apple's commissions. The move drew Apple's anger, and kicked off a legal battle that has lasted for years.

  Last month's ruling, a victory for Epic Games, said Apple was not allowed to charge a commission on link-outs or dictate if the links look like buttons, paving the way for Fortnite's return.

• Copyrights

  • Axios ☛ Trump administration fires US copyright official in Library of Congress overhaul

    The big picture: Politico first reported that Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter's removal Saturday came soon after her office issued a report on artificial intelligence that raised concerns about using copyrighted works to train AI, an industry outgoing DOGE [sic] leader Elon Musk is involved in via his startup xAI.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Trump Fires Director of US Copyright Office After AI Training Report

    President Trump has fired Shira Perlmutter, who heads the US Copyright Office as the 14th Register of Copyrights. The news was reported by several outlets and confirmed by Democratic Representative Joe Morelle on the Committee for House Administration.

    Perlmutter took her position back in 2020 during the first Trump administration, and was appointed by Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden. Hayden was also fired by Trump this week.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Soundcloud claims the right to train AI on all your songs — but swears it hasn’t yet, honest

    Soundcloud added this new wording on 12 February 2024. It just escaped notice until now — because Soundcloud didn’t tell anyone. People checked back through their email archives and there wasn’t a word from Soundcloud about this.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ The Substance: Pre-Release Piracy Made People MORE Eager to Visit the Cinema

    The major Hollywood studios are unshakeable when it comes to the damage caused by pre-release piracy, let alone when a leaked movie appears online in unusually high quality. Yet when The Substance leaked online under precisely those conditions, online piracy triggered the opposite effect. Director Coralie Fargeat says she didn't expect it, but when people saw what the movie was all about, that made them even more eager to see The Substance at the cinema.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Judge in A.I. Training Data Case Questions Meta Over Fair Use Claims

    So let me get this straight: if an artist makes a song sharing only a similar vibe with another one, that is copyright infringement, but if a massive corporation downloads illicit copies of a bunch of books to enrich its A.I. training, that is fair use? Perhaps copyright law is entirely the wrong domain for both of these issues.