Leftovers

• Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Say Goodbye to This Massive 'Hobbit'-Themed Sculpture of Gandalf Riding an Eagle

  On May 9, they took the eagles down, disassembled them and placed them into storage. Airport officials hope the sculptures will find a new home, possibly at a museum, per the AP.

• Ruben Schade ☛ I've (mostly) stopped looking at star ratings

  My initial thought is that star ratings should be limited to reviewing the device, and maybe customer support from the vendor, because who’s seeing star reviews on a retailer site and concluding anything else? If I see a one-star review, my immediate thought is the device being sold doesn’t meet functionality requirements, is bad value for money, isn’t intuitive, has shoddy build construction, ships with bad instructions, is poor quality, or the vendor refuses to fix problems.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Share My Table

  If I’m having coffee alone, or a client has called to cancel a meeting, I’d love to be able to offer other seats at this table to people who need it. They’re wasted otherwise, so why not?

• Pete Brown ☛ Trying to build community is hard when you’re entirely on your own.

  I was just talking with someone the other day about how a friend group that used to be pretty active has largely fallen away. All of us are still around, but we barely even see one another any more, and all of the group chats have gone almost entirely silent.

• Idiomdrottning ☛ Iorist ethics

  I believe good intentions IOR good results is okay. I’m calling it iorist ethics. Ior for the logical gate of inclusive or, and, it’s an initialism for intentions or results.

• Orhun Parmaksız ☛ Am I a musician yet? - Superbooth 2025 Experience - Orhun's Blog

  Unfortunately FL is written in Delphi so the guys at the booth told me that it's a bit difficult for them to release an official/native port on Linux anytime soon. Right now the only problem with FL running in Wine is that you are limited to the stock plugins... which is quite enough for me actually. But let's see!

• Science

  • Vox ☛ NOAA cuts: The National Weather Service faces major cuts under Trump.

    Whether it was on your phone, the five-day outlook in your newspaper, or your friendly TV meteorologist, that forecast was built on a massive government-run network of sensors and computers that get the weather right more often than not while rarely getting the attention they deserve. And now that system is being taken apart, piece by piece.

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the main US science agency that studies weather and climate, has already lost at least 2,000 workers since January thanks to a combination of layoffs, buyouts, and retirements. More job cuts may be looming. The White House says it wants to cut NOAA’s $6 billion budget by almost 30 percent. The upshot is that with these cuts, efforts to make forecasts even more accurate will stall, while existing forecasts may get worse.

  • The Register UK ☛ US National Science Foundation pauses staff cuts

    The memo goes on to say that Deferred Resignation Program (DRP) and Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA) announcements described in Staff Memorandum OD 25-28 are also affected by the judge's order. It says the order prohibits placing employees on administrative leave and prevents relevant agencies from implementing their Agency RIF and Reorganization Plans (ARRPs).

  • RIPE ☛ Navigating Network Measurements - Papers, Reviews and Reproducibility

    'Artefact Evaluation' describes the process of - essentially - checking if the tools used by researchers for an accepted paper can be used by others. Anyone who ever wrote 'some small tool' to do something in one's own infrastructure can likely imagine what kinds of challenges can come with that. Luckily, many academic conferences now run artefact evaluation committees. In those committees, PhD students (usually) try running what others built for their papers, working with the original authors to get things into a reusable or ideally reproducible state.

  • 1517 Fund ☛ Why Bell Labs Worked

    Academia's worse. Scientists at the height of their careers spend more time writing grants than doing research. Between 1975 and 2005, the amount of time scientists at top tier universities spent on research declined by 20%. Time spent on paperwork increased by 100%. To quote the study, "experienced secular decline in research time, on the order of 10h per week."

    Empirical measures are hard to find, but another study found that principal investigators in astronomy spend more than 110 hours per grant. Or, one month per grant. As grants have a 20% success rate, more successful investigators apply to two or more per year.

    [...]

    Reportedly, Kelly and others would hand people problems and then check in a few years later.3 Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, "what's stopping someone from just slacking off?" Kelly would contend that's the wrong question to ask. The right question is, "Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?"

  • Spiegel ☛ USA: Scientists Looking to Leave the U.S. for More Welcoming Environments

    Many researchers are looking for a new home because the Trump administration has launched a broadside attack on science in the U.S. Undesirable students who do not hold American passports are to be deported.

  • Federal News Network ☛ The only member of Congress with a PhD in science weighs in on Trump’s cuts

    Terry Gerton I know you’re one of only a few scientists in Congress. What are you making of the Trump administration’s, by some counts, $3 billion in cuts in science and research programs since they took office?

    Bill Foster Well, this is going to cause damage that will take generations to fix. It takes decades to build up a scientific research organization or a business or any other effective organization, but it can be destroyed in three months of having no funding. And you’ll see the speed at which they were able to destroy things like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They just told everyone to go home and ripped the sign off the building and stopped paying people and shut down all of the contracts and the grants that made the place work. And so even if we get a court decision that says this is illegal, you have no legal basis for doing this, in many cases the damage has been done. And this is on top of a very deliberate attacks that will be playing out over a longer period of time to just convince people to retire with threats, with moving their place of work to a place where it’s incompatible with their family life and many other strategies that the Trump administration tried using the last time around and is using in force this time around to really show their disrespect to the important jobs that the federal workforce do every day.

  • The Conversation ☛ Could gravity be evidence that the universe is a computer simulation? My new study suggests so

    But if we consider just location rather than energy, then there’s lots of information disorder when particles are distributed randomly in space – the information required to keep pace with them is considerable. When they consolidate themselves together under gravitational attraction, however, the way planets, stars and galaxies do, the information gets compacted and more manageable.

    In simulations, that’s exactly what occurs when a system tries to function more efficiently. So, matter flowing under the influence of gravity need not be a result of a force at all. Perhaps it is a function of the way the universe compacts the information that it has to work with.

  • Quanta Magazine ☛ The Fastest Way Yet to Color Graphs

    Then, in 2024, over the space of a few days, two different groups of researchers came out with new algorithms that were significantly faster than the old standard. Now a paper to be presented in June at the 2025 Symposium on Theory of Computing goes even further. It describes a nearly optimal algorithm — one that’s practically as fast as possible. Astonishingly, this new algorithm doesn’t depend at all on the number of points in your graph, only on the number of lines. It no longer matters how large your airport is, only the number of paths taken by the planes.

• Career/Education

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ American Schools Have Been Feeding Children for More Than 100 Years. Here's How the School Lunch Has Changed

    “The history of school lunches is a history of conflict,” Jesse Smith, director of curatorial affairs at the Science History Institute, tells Peter Crimmins of the radio station WHYY. “People have always been arguing over school lunches, up through the present moment.”

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Sandisk's new WD Black SN8100 claims to be the world's fastest NVMe SSD — 14,900MB/s read speeds and up to 8TB in capacity

    Sandisk has just unveiled its brand new WD Black NVMe SSD, which it says is the world's fastest PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSD on the market. The Sandisk WD Black SN8100 NVMe SSD promises speeds of up to 14,900MB/s and capacities of up to 8TB for gaming, content creation, and, of course, AI.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ DJI Mavic 4 Pro is world's first drone with a revolutionary "Infinity Gimbal" and boasts new 100 megapixel Hasselblad main camera

    Contained within is a new triple camera system, the main being a new 4/3 CMOS 100 megapixel Hasselblad camera with a 28mm EFL, mounted next to 70mm EFL and 168mm EFL cameras for mid and close tele. All three are capable of Dual Native ISO Fusion and RAW stacking.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The FDA’s New Culture of Secrecy

    Once confirmed as the secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr promised a new era of “radical transparency” — but instead, he’s made the agencies he oversees even more opaque.

  • Chris Enns ☛ Brick Your iPhone on Purpose

    Some people claim they have no issues putting aside their devices and focusing on nature and how the ever-present crush of the world today helps them feel so alive—but for the rest of us, something like Brick could help make sure we don't spent 10 hours trying to get to the end of Reels or TikTok.

  • DaemonFC (Ryan Farmer) ☛ Today in MAGA: Republicans Ban Fluoride Prescriptions and Threaten to Take Away Toothpaste

    Today, what’s going on at the FDA is a cruel and unethical experiment against an unwilling public, including those of us who have not lost our minds.

    It’s not enough that these morons can abuse their own children and believe whatever garbage and nonsense they want to.

    In a free country you’re in control of yourself, pretty much, but under fascism you use national laws to invade the States and homes of people who do not want to live like some sort of toothless Trump-voting retard.

    I think my wall of toothpaste is the best I can manage under the circumstances.

    I can hold out for a while and hope to God the fever breaks and Trump leaves office somehow and we get someone in there that starts making sense again.

    The Republican Party meant “State’s Rights” when they weren’t in control of the federal government, and now they use the federal government to steamroll people who want to live in a way that makes sense and not be manipulated by idiots.

    There’s no guarantee that if the FDA bans fluoride toothpaste that you’ll even be able to import it. As an “unapproved drug” customs can seize it and put you on all those sorts of “lists” that fascist dickheads like to put people on.

• Proprietary

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Woman laid off by Microsoft in ‘last-minute meeting’ by super boss: ‘Once an unfamiliar face joined the call…’

    “POV: I was laid off today from MSFT. I had a last-minute meeting added to my calendar by my skip and was spiraling trying to figure out the agenda. FY26 priorities? Reorg? Once an unfamiliar face joined the call, I quickly realized I too was a part of the Microsoft layoffs,” the employee wrote.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Mail de-badged

    Things that did not help: [...]

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Register UK ☛ AI paper mills are swamping science with garbage studies

      The study, published in PLOS Biology, a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals, found that many post-2021 papers used "a superficial and oversimplified approach to analysis." These often focused on a single variable while ignoring more realistic, multi-factor explanations of links between health conditions and potential causes, along with some cherry-picked narrow data subsets without justification.

    • The Verge ☛ Republicans push for a decadelong ban on states regulating AI | The Verge

      Democrats are calling the new provision a “giant gift” to Big Tech, and organizations that promote AI oversight, like Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI), say it could have “catastrophic consequences” for the public. It’s a gift companies like OpenAI have recently been seeking in Washington, aiming to avoid a slew of pending and active state laws. The budget reconciliation process allows lawmakers to fast-track bills related to government spending by requiring only a majority in the Senate rather than 60 votes to pass.

    • PC World ☛ YouTube hates AI slop movie trailers as much as I do

      After years of letting blatant fakes run rampant on the platform, it looks like YouTube is finally blocking at least some AI "concept" trailer channels from monetizing their videos.

    • Android Police ☛ The next audiobook you listen to might be narrated by AI

      But the audiobook community is not always happy about this. Critics aregue the synthetic voices lack the nuance and emotion of human narrators, and this impacts the listener experience. Others feel this is just another step towards the complete takeover of the arts by AI.

    • Murtuzaali Surti ☛ The Problem With AI Generated Code

      AI models and tools are becoming more and more capable day by day, especially at generating code. With tools like Firebase Studio, Lovable, v0, Augment, one can create entire full stack applications by combining one or more of these tools. But, there's something off once you run the code generated by them.

      In this post, I will walk you through my experience of creating a full-stack application using some of these AI coding assistants/agents and share some of my observations.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?

      You can hardly get online these days without hearing some AI booster talk about how AI coding is going to replace human programmers. AI code is absolutely up to production quality! Also, you’re all fired.

      But if AI is so obviously superior … show us the code. Where’s the receipts? Let’s say, where’s the open source code contributions using AI?

    • Futurism ☛ USA TODAY’s Disclaimers on Its Automated Sports Stories Are Longer Than the Actual Articles

      "Sports media wants to cover gambling because there's an audience for it. People do it and it's popular and it makes money," the professor continued. "But again, looking at this list of 'here's the full schedule for April 27, how to watch all the games,' and then the betting ads on it... this just feels to me — and before you even get to the word salad below — this just feels so sterile."

      It's "almost a naked cash grab," he added.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ North American boreal forest holds 31% more trees than thought

      Estimated using a sophisticated machine learning algorithm, the numbers are 31% higher than a count made through an earlier attempt in a major 2015 global study.

  • Social Control Media

    • Irish Examiner ☛ Why you should think twice before posting photos and videos of kids on social media

      But sharenting raises concerns about children’s safety and privacy. Last year, France adopted the children’s image-rights law to tackle risks associated with sharenting. This law reminded parents that ‘children have the right to privacy and the right to their image, because photos and videos are personal data.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Ubuntu ☛ Canonical + thanks.dev = giving back to open source developers [Ed: Canonical Will Give You Money Only If You Work for Microsoft!]

      Thanks to Canonical for sponsoring me through @thanks_dev! They’re the third company to sponsor me there :)

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Techdirt ☛ Meta Threatens To Pull Facebook And Instagram Out Of Nigeria Over $290 Million Fine Imposed For Violation Of Local Privacy Laws

      The fine itself is small change for Meta, which had a net income of $62 billion on a turnover of $165 billion in 2024, and a market capitalization of $1.5 trillion. Meta’s current revenues in Nigeria are relatively small, but its market shares are high: [...]

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Florida Backdoor Bill Fails

      A Florida bill requiring encryption backdoors failed to pass.

    • TechCrunch ☛ Florida bill requiring encryption backdoors for social media accounts has failed | TechCrunch

      Florida bill requiring encryption backdoors for social media accounts has failed

      A Florida bill, which would have required social media companies to provide an encryption backdoor for allowing police to access user accounts and private messages, has failed to pass into law.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Register UK ☛ Judge puts two-week pause on Trump's mass government layoffs

    Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District Court of California issued a temporary restraining order [PDF] (TRO) Friday, putting a two-week hold on government-wide reductions in force (RIFs) that will lift on May 23. The order freezes RIF efforts at more than a dozen federal agencies affected by the job cuts, including the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which have been largely directing the effort with the support of Elon Musk's cost-cutting pseudo-department, DOGE [sic].

  • The Record ☛ Chinese-speaking hackers disrupt drone supply chains in Taiwan, researchers say

    Earth Ammit, as the group is known, launched two waves of campaigns from 2023 to 2024, affecting a range of industries including military, satellite, heavy industry, media, technology, software services and healthcare.

    The group’s long-term goal was “to compromise trusted networks via supply chain attacks, allowing them to target high-value entities and amplify their reach,” according to researchers at cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, which analyzed the campaigns.

  • The Register UK ☛ US tech titans rejoice in $600B Saudi shopping spree

    Prince Mohammed bin Bone Saw will take a few hundred thousand GPUs with his missiles and fighter jets

  • 404 Media ☛ Kanye’s Nazi Song Is All Over Instagram

    While other social media sites and streaming services rush to scrub Kanye West’s pro-Nazi song from their platforms, the curious or the enthused can find memes, remixes, and unedited audio of West’s new song, “Heil Hitler,” all over Instagram.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ Splitting Russia and China Is Geopolitical Fan Fiction

    America is still the world’s foremost power. But Trump’s attempt to break up Russia and China isn’t shrewd diplomacy. It simply places the United States at the bottom of a Chinese-dominated food chain. The contradictions of going hard on China while going soft on Russia are becoming clear as Xi keeps Moscow firmly in Beijing’s orbit.

  • YLE ☛ Minister: Finland plans to change its track gauge to European standard

    Reasons to change the track gauge include improving Finland's security of supply and military mobility, as well as to improve cross-border links to Sweden and Norway.

    According to Ranne, the plans are not exclusively a Finnish matter, but a joint project between Europe as well as [NATO].

    Once started, the track gauge adjustment efforts would begin north of Oulu, a city on the country's northwestern coast.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ DHS ends deportation protections for Afghans

    However, U.S. service members and Afghans who assisted the U.S. during the war in Afghanistan and whose family members still live in the country told Military Times in February that the region was patently unsafe.

    They said they constantly feared for their loved ones’ lives and said the Taliban were actively hunting anyone affiliated with the United States government.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ It's Interesting How the Past Can Make You Think About the Present

    I’ve been reading Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker, a history of the years leading up to World War 2. The entire book takes the form of short, stylized, factual items of a few paragraphs or less, presented in chronological order, which taken together tell the story of societies sliding—often unwittingly—into very dark places.

    While reading the book, I found over and over again that certain entries would vividly remind me of things happening today. The experience was so vivid that I decided to present a few of them to you here—first, Baker’s entry in his book, and then the modern thing that it made me think of. I make no sweeping claims that one thing is just like the other, or that this time is equivalent to that time. I’m only a curious reader, not a professional historian. I make no sweeping claims at all. It’s just interesting. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain said, “but it often rhymes.”

  • YLE ☛ Minister: TikTok data centre could anger the United States

    A government minister suggests that a planned data centre may be a way for China to bypass curbs on AI chip exports.

• Environment

  • James Stanley ☛ Conservation of tins of paint

    The only kind of operation that can reduce the number of tins of paint you have in stock is one that miraculously requires exactly the amount of paint that you happen to have remaining in an existing tin, or one where you don't care if you don't finish, or you don't care if you use several colours, or you throw away a perfectly good half-used tin of paint.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ In Michigan, Great Lakes are a lifeblood and birthright. They’re under attack

    The goal for the Great Lakes today, amid a suddenly frosty relationship between Washington and Ottawa, is to maintain stringent environmental safeguards while using that water within the basin, luring innovative companies and new residents with the vow that reliable, clean water will fuel not only a multitrillion-dollar regional economy but also enable recreation, tourism, and public enjoyment.

    Promoted in regional councils and city halls, the blue economy is many things to many people. Our project found noteworthy successes and gathering headwinds: [...]

  • US News And World Report ☛ How Should Norway Spend Its Cash? Solve Global Problems, Says Citizen Panel

    Norway's $1.8 trillion wealth fund, the world's largest, should invest more money in sectors addressing global challenges such as climate change and health and accept it may get lower returns on these investments, a citizens' panel said on Tuesday.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Wired ☛ An $8.4 Billion Chinese Hub for [Cryptocurrency] Crime Is Incorporated in Colorado

      According to new research released today by [cryptocurrency]-tracing firm Elliptic, a company called Xinbi Guarantee has since 2022 facilitated no less than $8.4 billion in transactions via its Telegram-based marketplace prior to Telegram’s actions in recent days to remove its accounts from the platform. Money stolen from scam victims likely represents the “vast majority” of that sum, according to Elliptic's cofounder Tom Robinson. Yet even as the market serves Chinese-speaking scammers, it also boasts on the top of its website—in Mandarin—that it's registered in Colorado.

    • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ Biking With Or Without Headphones

      I presume most of these bikers also have the noise-cancelling feature turned on as that’s the default on my own headphones. And herein lies the real danger: while navigating the busy morning traffic, you have effectively shut down one of your very important senses to make it to your destination alive: hearing. Your eyes can’t see that car suddenly revving past you if it’s coming from behind. Your eyes can’t see other bikers powered by electronic bikes that nowadays like to drive close to 25 km/h if they’re coming from behind.

    • Seth Godin ☛ Energy and systems complexity

      Back to the original source–the energy we use to power all of this. When there were giant pools of oil just below the surface (oil that took millions of years to produce) we could extract energy from the ground virtually for free. A hundred years ago, we had to expend one unit of energy to get 100 out of the ground. It was easy and cheap and needed very little coordination, technology or investment.

      Today, the EROI (energy return on investment) for some kinds of oil has dropped from 100 to 3. We only get 3 units of power for every one we invest to get it processed. It’s generally understood that once an energy source is less than 8 or 9 by this measure, it’s no longer economically feasible. It costs too much to get the energy.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ E-bikes

    • [Repeat] Computers Are Bad ☛ 2025-05-11 air traffic control

      Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it. Well, that's a long-term trend, resulting from decades of under-investment, severe capture by our increasingly incompetent defense-industrial complex, no small degree of management incompetence in the FAA, and long-lasting effects of Reagan crushing the PATCO strike. But that's just my opinion, you know, maybe airplanes got too woke. In any case, it's an interesting time to consider how weird parts of air traffic control are. The technical, administrative, and social aspects of ATC all seem two notches more complicated than you would expect. ATC is heavily influenced by its peculiar and often accidental development, a product of necessity that perpetually trails behind the need, and a beneficiary of hand-me-down military practices and technology.

    • Cost Rica ☛ How Panama’s New Railway to Paso Canoas Will Transform Costa Rica

      Spanning 475 kilometers with 14 stations—Albrook, Ciudad de la Salud, Panama Pacifico, La Chorrera, Chame/Coronado, Río Hato, Penonomé, Divisa, Santiago, Soná, San Félix, David, Bugaba, and Paso Canoas-Frontera—the train will carry passengers at speeds up to 180 km/h and freight at 100 km/h. The three-hour trip from Panama City to Paso Canoas will cut the current 12-hour drive from San José to Panama City dramatically.

    • The Verge ☛ Toyota is shortening the bZ4X’s name to just ‘bZ’

      Now styled as just bZ, the compact SUV is also getting more range, thanks to expanded battery capacity, and an improved design. The front-wheel drive bZ with 74.7 kWh battery will be able to travel an estimated 314 miles on a single charge, while a 57.7 kWh battery option for the front-wheel drive version will get just 236 miles. Toyota said it would announce prices closer to the date when the new bZ arrives at dealerships, which is expected later this year.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Why The Revelator Banned AI Articles and Art

    • Vintage Everyday ☛ The Kolb Brothers Attempting to Get the Perfect Shots of the Grand Canyon in the Early 20th Century

      In the Grand Canyon, brothers Emroy and Ellsworth Kolb rig a rope system to lower to a ledge 55 feet below. Should anything happen, the cameraman would fall 300 feet. The brothers spent their lives as Grand Canyon photographers, with their studio located on the rim of the canyon.

• Finance

  • Paris Buttfield-Addison ☛ Don't use Wise

    On 6 May 2025, with no notice, and with no out of the ordinary or large transactions happening, Wise started declining our card on all transactions, and blocking any ACH/wire transfers out of the account.

  • Andy Bell ☛ We need your support to do free projects for good causes and publish free high quality education

    We’re trying a rather radical new approach at Piccalilli. We’re going to do real world projects — for real clients — in the open, sharing as much of the process as we possibly can. This gives us a context to provide genuine high quality, real world education for free at the point of entry. This is a complete business model shift — one that is focused on giving back more than we take.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ NCSC assures CISA relationship unchanged post-Trump

    "My direct peer is still in place," said Ollie Whitehouse, CTO at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) during last week's CYBERUK, referring to CISA's technical director, Chris Butera. "Our relationship has not changed. I was in country last week. [Our relationship] is enduring. It is unwavering."

  • Industry Dive ☛ LinkedIn Facing Job Cuts as Microsoft Rationalizes Costs [Ed: If they provided a breakdown of the layoffs, it would be easier to show they lie about the scale of the layoffs]

    LinkedIn is facing more job cuts, with parent company Microsoft announcing that it’s culling around 6,000 roles, or 3% of its global workforce, to “reduce management layers.”

    And LinkedIn jobs will be impacted. How many, exactly, Microsoft hasn’t said, but it has noted that LinkedIn will be included in the cuts.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft chops 3% - mid-managers top the list

    Redmond telegraphed the move last month. During Microsoft's Q3 earnings call in late April, CFO Amy Hood said the company was "reducing layers with fewer managers" as part of its push for agility and high-performing teams - a clear hint the axe was already being sharpened.

  • Security Week ☛ Microsoft to Lay Off About 3% of Its Workforce

    Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, said the layoffs will be across all levels and geographies but the cuts will focus on reducing the number of managers. Notices to employees began going out on Tuesday.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Microsoft to lay off 6,000 workers, 3% of staff, in new restructuring initiative

    About a third of the affected employees work at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Regulatory documents the company filed in the state today indicate that the local job cuts will go into effect on June 12.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Macquarie to acquire 100% of Danish telco TDC Group

    Macquarie Asset Management already owns 50% of TDC and, through a consortium that includes its managed funds, will acquire the remaining 50% from three Danish pension funds ATP, PFA, and PKA.

    This investment will result in Macquarie managing 100% of the capital in TDC Group.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ xAI Has Failed to Publish Final Version of Its Safety Policy - 512 Pixels

    The three month deadline given in the draft passed earlier this week… and that draft only applied to “not currently in development” future AI models the company may work on in the future.

  • TechCrunch ☛ xAI's promised safety report is MIA | TechCrunch

    As The Midas Project noted in the blog post on Tuesday, however, the draft only applied to unspecified future AI models “not currently in development.” Moreover, it failed to articulate how xAI would identify and implement risk mitigations, a core component of a document the company signed at the AI Seoul Summit.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Republicans Are Trying to Block State Regulation of AI

    As part of House Republicans’ must-pass budget reconciliation bill, lawmakers just snuck in a ten-year federal preemption of state-level artificial intelligence laws — effectively nullifying all local efforts to regulate the explosive spread of AI technology.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Nation ☛ Why Only Republicans Have Free Speech

    The Republican justices seem to think that they, as Republicans, are also entitled to be insulated from criticism. The Supreme Court is “being hammered daily,” Justice Alito whined to The Wall Street Journal, and “nobody, practically nobody is defending us.” Alito has insisted certain speech is unacceptable based on its content—like anything that criticizes the court too strongly. “Saying or implying that the Court is becoming an illegitimate institution or questioning our integrity crosses an important line,” according to the justice. He has said critics’ mere use of certain words such as the “term ‘shadow docket’” “feeds unprecedented efforts to intimidate the Court.” Speaking at a conference, Justice Alito mocked people who said mean things about his opinion overruling Roe v. Wade. He singled out former English prime minister Boris Johnson, who criticized Dobbs but “paid the price.” (Johnson resigned amid an ethics investigation.) In his keynote address to the Federalist Society, Alito called some Democratic senators’ amicus brief “bullying” and berated a post from a Harvard law professor’s blog. During one recent oral argument, he “joked” about how the court’s “public information officer… maybe… whenever they [the press] write something that we don’t like, she can call them up and curse them out.”

  • International Business Times ☛ Access Denied: Indian Government Has X Block Over 8000 Accounts, Is Yours Affected?

    Imagine clicking on your favourite social media app or trying to access a website you visit daily, only to be met with an 'Access Denied' message. This sudden digital silence has become the unsettling truth for potentially thousands of X users in India, where a reported government action has swept over 8,000 accounts into a blocked void. Could your digital life have just hit a wall?

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ New Kansas antisemitism law takes aim at free speech, does nothing to protect Jewish people

    In February, I testified against House Bill 2299, a bill to put the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism into statute, focused on university campuses and punishable by prosecution by the state’s attorney general, Kris Kobach. A watered-down version (Senate Bill 44), which took out most of the enforcement provisions, passed at the end of the session.

  • CPJ ☛ Belarus opens criminal cases against more than 60 journalists in exile

    Journalists are being charged under so-called “special proceedings,” a 2022 addition to the criminal procedure code that allows Belarusian authorities to convict people in absentia. At first, the proceedings were mostly used against dissidents, politicians, and activists; in 2024, authorities began charging journalists in an escalation against the exiled press, according to the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), a trade group operating from abroad since 2021. (Four of BAJ’s own employees face criminal cases according to the organization.)

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ As Trump visits Saudi Arabia, groups call for the kingdom to end repression of journalists

    As global attention turns to U.S. President Donald Trump's first international visit to Saudi Arabia on May 13, many journalists inside the kingdom will be unable to cover the event as they are behind bars, banned from writing, or silenced by fear of censorship.

    We, the undersigned organizations, call on the Saudi authorities to release all detained journalists and writers, lift arbitrary travel bans, end legal and digital attacks, and uphold press freedom.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ, partners condemn Saudi Arabia's press freedom record ahead of Trump's visit

    Saudi Arabia is one of the most dangerous countries for journalists, with at least 10 behind bars on December 1, 2024, making it the 10th worst jailer of journalists globally in CPJ’s latest annual prison census.

  • The Verge ☛ Meta’s beef with the press flares at its antitrust trial

    During a heated cross-examination of the FTC’s key economic expert, Scott Hemphill, Meta’s lead attorney, Mark Hansen, noted that Hemphill joined Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and former Biden official Tim Wu in pitching regulators on an antitrust probe of the company back in 2019. The pitch deck for the probe that was shown in court included “public recognition” of the company’s aggressive acquisition strategy from two reporters: Kara Swisher, who currently hosts two podcasts for The Verge’s parent company, Vox Media, and Om Malik, the founder of the early tech blog GigaOm who is now a venture capitalist.

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Journalists rally outside Rustavi prison to mark Mzia Amaghlobeli’s birthday

    Georgian journalists gathered outside of Rustavi No. 5 Penitentiary Facility on Monday evening to show solidarity with detained media manager Mzia Amaghlobeli on her 50th birthday. The date also marked exactly four months since her arrest.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Pope Leo decries polarizing language in first meeting with journalists

    He offered special thanks to journalists who have put their lives and liberty at risk to cover global conflicts, sometimes dying in the process.

    “Let me … reiterate today the church’s solidarity with journalists who are imprisoned for seeking and reporting the truth while also asking for their release,” he said. “The church recognizes in these witnesses — I am thinking of those who report on war even at the cost of their lives — the courage of those who defend dignity, justice and the right of people to be informed, because only informed individuals can make free choices.”

  • Press Gazette ☛ Study finds journalists are on AI frontline and yet to be replaced by tech

    For journalists themselves, using these AI tools appears to be something of a mixed blessing. Software developers are more than twice as likely to report increased job satisfaction from using chatbots compared to journalists (30.5% compared to 12.6%).

    The study was based on two survey rounds in late 2023 and 2024, each covering 25,000 people across multiple professions in Denmark.

  • CPJ ☛ Taliban intelligence detain journalist Sulaiman Rahil following critical Facebook posts

    “Sulaiman Rahil is the latest of many Afghan journalists to be swept up by the notorious General Directorate of Intelligence without explanation or charge,” said CPJ Asia Program Coordinator Beh Lih Yi. “The Taliban continue to show zero tolerance for independent journalists who report anything other than the group’s strictly censored narratives. The Taliban’s intelligence agency is attempting to control the media through fear and to prevent any honest reporting about the difficulties of life in Afghanistan today.”

    Rahil, director of the local, independent Radio Khushal, was detained in Ghazni city after publishing a video on Facebook highlighting the plight of two impoverished women, according to the exiled Afghanistan Journalists Center watchdog group. CPJ was unable to locate the video.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • YLE ☛ Zero-hour contracts increasingly common among summer workers, survey finds

    Employees on zero-hour contracts are not necessarily guaranteed a given number of working hours, but rather called to work as needed.

    "Although it was not a major increase, the trend is worrying," SAK's education and employment policy expert, Kirsi Rasinaho, said in a press release.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Judge refuses to block IRS from sharing tax data to identify and deport people illegally in U.S.

    A federal judge on Monday refused to block the Internal Revenue Service from sharing immigrants’ tax data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the purpose of identifying and deporting people illegally in the U.S.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Mobile internet gender gap narrows in sub-Saharan Africa

    “Women are half the population, so this is critical for not just economies and governments, but also for businesses, to reduce this inequality in their customer base,” said Sibthorpe.

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ ORG slams use of e-visas for immigration raids

    The white paper calls the shambolic and flawed e-visa scheme a ‘success’ and says that it will be used to support immigration raids.

    Sara Alsherif, Migrant Rights Programme Manager at Open Rights Group said: [...]

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ In 1832, a Cumbrian Farmer Sold His Wife for 20 Shillings and a Dog

    Wife selling persisted in England in some form until the early 20th century; according to the jurist and historian James Bryce, writing in 1901, wife sales were still occasionally taking place during his time. In one of the last reported instances of a wife sale in England, a woman giving evidence in a Leeds police court in 1913 claimed that she had been sold to one of her husband’s workmates for £1.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ Let’s talk about CGNAT and IPv6, again

    As part of my network consulting business, I work with Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation (CGNAT) and IPv6 almost daily. After a few exchanges with a fellow blogger on IPv4, NAT, CGNAT, and IPv6 (here, here, and here), and repeatedly seeing misunderstandings about how to implement Network Address Translation (NAT) properly, I felt compelled to write this post.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Who Broke the Internet? Part II

    The thesis of the show is straightforward: the [Internet] wasn't killed by ideological failings like "greed," nor by economic concepts like "network effects," nor by some cyclic force of history that drives towards "re-intermediation." Rather, all of these things were able to conquer the open, wild, creative [Internet] because of policies that meant that companies that yielded to greed were able to harness network effects in order to re-intermediate the [Internet].

  • Futurism ☛ Lawmakers Want to Cut Low-Income Schoolchildren Off from the Internet

    "It would be a disgrace if we deprive those students and their families of this vast resource, of literally life-changing access to a really necessary service that helps them not just now but throughout their futures," said senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, after voting against the repeal. "We ought to expand Internet access, not constrict it. We ought to be enhancing it, not cutting it off."

    As Blumenthal noted, Cruz's resolution, if it passes the House of Representatives and is signed into law by president Donald Trump, will also bar the FCC from instating similar programs in the future, thus restricting such access in perpetuity.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ "Never Terminate" Policy: Music Labels Slam Grande's Supreme Court Piracy Appeal

    Major music companies have fired back at Grande Communications' Supreme Court plea, arguing that the ISP's questions about copyright liability are "utterly divorced from reality". They note that the ISP's liability is not the result of shortcomings in copyright law, but from Grande's own "egregious" policy of never terminating even the most rampant infringers.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ 1k-0036 means sad eyeballs on my LG

    For a to me unknown reason IPv6 connectivity has been failing to my home the last few days. When I try to curl curl.se I get to see a lot of IPv6 related failures and instead it connects to and uses one of the IPv4 addresses.

    IPv6 has been working fine for me non-stop for the last few years before this. I suspect there is something on the ISP side and they are doing some planned maintenance in a few days that might change things. It’s not a big deal, everything I do on my machine just magically and transparently adapts.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• [Repeat] The Register UK ☛ Microsoft facing legal claim over how it sells software

  The claim alleges that "the software giant abused its market dominance and engaged in conduct that restricted competition to its new licenses from pre-owned licenses for Microsoft products. That conduct affected and inflated the prices of both new licenses and pre-owned licenses."

  The software products concerned include Office and Windows. The claim is on behalf of Brits who bought a license to use one of the products from October 1, 2015. The claim alleges that Microsoft overcharged these customers.

• Android Police ☛ Ticket companies are boasting about transparent fees now that they're legally required

  And while there has been pressure to make things clearer for consumers in the past, nothing really ever materialized — until now. A new FTC rule has gone into effect, prompting brands like TicketMaster and AXS to change their ways. From this moment forward, companies will be required to put pricing upfront, without any type of hidden fees. The same applies to apps and services that provide hotel rooms and rental spaces.

• Vox ☛ Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar: Stadium tours are on the rise. Are fans loving them?

  Fans have blamed Beyoncé, Ticketmaster, and its parent company Live Nation Entertainment for a lack of communication and transparency (but mostly Live Nation and Ticketmaster). In general, it seems like these large-scale concerts don’t really serve fans the way they should. Instead, they require a lot of money and effort for an experience where it’s often difficult to simply enjoy the music.

  As Kendrick Lamar, SZA, Post Malone, Billie Eillish, and Ed Sheeran all embark on or resume stadium tours this year, it raises a crucial question about the future of concertgoing: Does anyone actually want to see a concert with 80,000 other people?

• Copyrights

  • International Business Times ☛ Carla Hayden Fired: What Is A 'Librarian of Congress' and How Much Does The Role Make

    Hayden's story has been remarkable. A librarian who stood up to the Patriot Act? That takes guts. Before her landmark appointment by Obama in 2016, she ran Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library for over two decades. During the 2015 Baltimore unrest, while businesses around her shuttered, she kept the library's doors open as a community sanctuary.

  • The Verge ☛ Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa call on the UK to pass AI copyright transparency law

    Last week, Paul McCartney, Dua Lipa, Ian McKellen, Elton John, and hundreds of others in the UK creative industry signed an open letter backing an effort to force AI firms to reveal the copyrighted works used to train their models. They support an amendment to the UK’s Data (Use and Access) Bill proposed by letter organizer Beeban Kidron, adding the requirement, which the UK government has opposed.

  • The Verge ☛ Musk’s apparent power grab at the Copyright Office fractures the MAGA-tech alliance

    When Trump fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden last week and Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter over the weekend, it was seen as another move driven by the tech wing of the Republican Party — especially in light of the Copyright Office releasing a pre-publication report saying some kinds of generative AI training would not be considered fair use. And when two men showed up at the Copyright Office inside the Library of Congress carrying letters purporting to appoint them to acting leadership positions, the DOGE takeover appeared to be complete.

    But those two men, Paul Perkins and Brian Nieves, were not DOGE at all, but instead approved by the MAGA wing of the Trump coalition that aims to put tech companies in check.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Copyright Office head fired after failing to bless copyright exemption for Big Tech's AI training

    The report serves AI companies' interests in ways you won't see done for other blatant pirates—"Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative"—but it failed to go the final millimeter, and that was whole race: [...]

  • Digital Music News ☛ SoundCloud Pushes Back Amid Generative AI Training Controversy

    Is SoundCloud using your music to train generative AI models? The company says it “doesn’t allow AI training or scraping with music on our platform,” but questions remain in light of a controversial terms of service update.