Leftovers

• Phil Archer ☛ 15 Years of Responsive Web Design

  That's it. That's Responsive Web Design.

  The CSS standards already had the necessary functionality to do this. The concept of media queries was first suggested by CSS co-inventor Håkon Wium Lie in 1994 and formal work to define them began in 2000 but, I think I'm right in saying, that no one had thought to use them in quite the way foreseen by Marcotte. It was a revolution and, 15 years on, is the way all websites are designed. It made a lot of that Device Description work redundant (sorry Rotan and Jo!) but most of the Mobile Web Best Pratices I'm pleased to say remain as pertinent as they ever did.

• Mike Brock ☛ A Letter to Humanity

  On Staying Human When the World Would Make Us Something Else

• Adam Newbold ☛ Seizing the means of discovery

  Information flows freely in an open and social web, and I find that I discover a ton of really neat things through blogs and fediverse feeds. But these moments of discovery are ephemeral: blink and you’ve missed them. And then you’re back to having to use flawed search mechanisms to try to find them.

  The early web directories were born out of necessity, because alternatives (search engines) didn’t exist yet. Today, the alternatives often leave us disappointed. There’s an interesting irony in the idea that web directories could maybe serve as an alternative to the alternative, not just bringing us full circle, but maybe bringing us back to where we should have stayed all along.

• Elliot C Smith ☛ Common modes of communication failure

  For almost everyone, a big part of your professional life will be communicating ideas to others. Your ability to communicate those ideas to others will be directly correlated with your success. I’ve noticed, over many years of trying to communicate ideas, that there are several common failure modes in communication. These failure mores are easy to spot, easy to call out and easy to avoid. At least once you know about them. They wont fix everything but they’ve saved me enough times that I figure they’re worth sharing.

  Here they are, in no particular order.

• Science

  • Ken Koon Wong ☛ Taylor Series Approximation To Newton Raphson Algorithm - A note for myself of the proof | Everyday Is A School Day

    We learnt to derive the Newton-Raphson algorithm from Taylor series approximation and implements it for logistic regression in R. We’ll show how the second-order Taylor expansion leads to the Newton-Raphson update formula, then compare individual parameter updates versus using the full Fisher Information matrix for faster convergence.

  • SusamPal ☛ From Finite Integral Domains to Finite Fields

    In this article, we explore a few well-known results from abstract algebra pertaining to fields and integral domains. We ask ourselves whether every field is an integral domain, and whether every integral domain is a field. We begin with the definition of an integral domain, discuss a few established results, and then proceed to answer these questions.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ How DOGE [sic] Has Impacted the Class of 2025

    New graduates across the country say deep cuts to government programs and funding have led to rescinded job offers and public service careers thwarted before they even began

  • US News And World Report ☛ Scientists Have Lost Their Jobs or Grants in US Cuts. Foreign Universities Want to Hire Them

    Since World War II, the U.S. has invested huge amounts of money in scientific research conducted at independent universities and federal agencies. That funding helped the U.S. to become the world’s leading scientific power — and has led to the invention of cell phones and the internet as well as new ways to treat cancer, heart disease and strokes, noted Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the journal Science.

    But today that system is being shaken.

  • Key Material ☛ There is no Diffie-Hellman but Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellma

    When I first learned about Diffie-Hellman and especially elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman, I had one rather obvious question: Why elliptic curves? Why use this strange group that seems rather arbitrary, with its third intersection of a line and then reflected? Why not use, say, the Monster Group? Surely a monster is better equipped to guard your secrets than some curve thing named after, but legally distinct from, a completely different curve thing!

    I wouldn’t have a satisfying answer to this question until way into my graduate studies, and the answer makes a perfect blog post for the “Cryptography (Incomprehensible)” category of this blog, so here we go.

• Career/Education

  • Nicolas Fränkel ☛ Writing for Developers

    This review is about Writing for Developers by Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop from Manning.

    I started this blog as a hobby seventeen years ago, in April 2008. At the time, I had no clue about technical writing. I’m pretty sure it was not even a thing back then: the only content aimed at developers was technical documentation. Since then, the landscape has changed a lot, to the point that companies hire for technical writer positions.

• Hardware

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-21 [Older] Nvidia chief calls US export curbs on AI chips to China 'a failure'

  • Hackaday ☛ Unreleased Amiga Hardware Plays MP3s

    The MP3 file type has been around for so long, and is supported by essentially all modern media software and hardware, that it might be surprising to some to learn that it’s actually a proprietary format. Developed in the late 80s and early 90s, it rose to prominence during the Napster/Limewire era of the early 00s and became the de facto standard for digital music, but not all computers in these eras could play this filetype. This includes the Amigas of the early 90s, with one rare exception: this unreleased successor to the A3000 with a DSP chip, which now also has the software to play back these digital tunes.

  • Hackaday ☛ A Quick Introduction To TCP Congestion Control

    It’s hard to imagine now, but in the mid-1980s, the Internet came close to collapsing due to the number of users congesting its networks. Computers would request packets as quickly as they could, and when a router failed to process a packet in time, the transmitting computer would immediately request it again. This tended to result in an unintentional denial-of-service, and was degrading performance significantly. [Navek]’s recent video goes over TCP congestion control, the solution to this problem which allows our much larger modern internet to work.In a 1987 paper, Van Jacobson described a method to restrain congestion: in a TCP connection, each side of the exchange estimates how much data it can have in transit (sent, but not yet acknowledged) at any given time. The sender and receiver exchange their estimates, and use the smaller estimate as the congestion window. Every time a packet is successfully delivered across the connection, the size of the window doubles.

  • Hackaday ☛ NES Zapper Becomes Telephone

    Although there was a time in the 80s (and early 90s for fans of the SuperScope) where light guns were immensely popular, with games like DuckHunt cultural touchstones, their time in the video game world has largely come to an end. We might occasionally pick up a Zapper for the NES and play this classic out of nostalgia, but plenty of people are looking for other things that these unique video game controllers can do instead. [Nick] has turned one of his old NES peripherals into a wireless phone.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ San Cristóbal de Las Casas: Where does all the water go?

    In San Cristóbal de Las Casas, locals are fighting for the right to reliable potable water amid corporate extraction concessions, aging infrastructure and health risks.

  • Michał Sapka ☛ News overload

    While there are still places which provide deep analysis, those are not the places which will fill my crave of the new thing. I need something new, and I need it now. My brain has been rewired, the got me. I'm what we all despise - a content consuming machine.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-21 [Older] 'Tea for two' as Kenya seeks to boost exports to China

  • CBC ☛ 2025-05-19 [Older] 2 MPPs have proposed an Ontario foodbelt. Could it help tariff-proof the ag sector?

  • CBC ☛ 2025-05-18 [Older] Fire forces Puvirnituq, Que., declares state of emergency as water shortage continues

  • CBC ☛ 2025-05-18 [Older] Tracking forever chemicals in Canada; new housing minister focused on supply: CBC's Marketplace cheat sheet

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-21 [Older] Japan minister bows out over rice gaffe

• Proprietary

  • HT Digital Streams Ltd ☛ Walmart layoffs: Who is Suresh Kumar, Indian-origin CTO called out by social media users amid recent job cuts?

    Suresh Kumar, the Indian origin chief technology officer of Walmart in California, has hit the headlines amid reports of the retail giant cutting 1,500 tech jobs.

    Walmart is cutting jobs at its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, along with its global technology team.

    In a memo reviewed by Bloomberg, Walmart CTO Suresh Kumar and US CEO John Furner indicated that the decision to reduce the workforce by nearly 1,500 employees is intended to speed up decision-making and lessen complexities.

  • The Verge ☛ The oldest Fire TV devices are losing Netflix support soon

    Netflix has been emailing owners of the very earliest Amazon Fire TV devices to let them know it’s ending support for the devices next month, reports German outlet Heise. The cutoff for US users is June 3rd, according to ZDNet.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-20 [Older] Why Japan's animation industry has embraced AI [Ed: Slop is not "AI", it's slop]

    • The Register UK ☛ Devs are finally getting serious about efficiency

      First described in the early '90s in a paper [PDF] titled "Adaptive Mixtures of Local Experts," the basic idea is that instead of one great big model trained on a bit of everything, work is routed to one or more of any number of smaller sub-models, or "experts."

      In theory, each of these experts can be optimized for a domain-specific task, like coding, mathematics, or writing. Unfortunately, few model builders go into much detail about the various experts that make up their MoE models, and the exact number varies from model to model. The important bit is only a small portion of the model is in use at any given moment.

    • Nathaniel Snelgrove ☛ Nathan Snelgrove | Jony Ive, Scam Altman, and the way AI is changing…

      I think it’s important to clarify that OpenAI isn’t bleeding cash; they’re haemorrhaging it. This is all further reinforced by the fact that OpenAI is purchasing Ive’s company for an astronomical $6.5 billion, and all that money is in privately owned stock funded by equity firms, banks, and desperate venture capital companies.

    • The Beaverton ☛ ChatGPT user delighted to combine sloth with theft - The Beaverton

      Drawing on pilfered data scraped, LLMs algorithmically assemble probabilistic strings of words resembling sentences, paragraphs, even entire novels. Literary quality has been described as “unreadable”, but experts are confident that quality won’t matter. Once LLM-created textbooks dominate, nobody will be able to tell that outputs are slop.

      Accusations that LLMs combine greed with sloth are “narrow-minded”, assert experts. With the right prompts, they insist LLM’s can deliver far more comprehensive moral transgressions.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ ChatGPT user delighted to combine sloth with theft

    • University of Toronto ☛ A thought on JavaScript "proof of work" anti-scraper systems

      An LLM scraper can try to recognize a JavaScript proof of work system but this is a losing game. The other parties have every reason to make themselves look like a proof of work system, and the proof of work systems don't necessarily have an interest in being recognized (partly because this might allow LLM scrapers to short-cut their JavaScript with optimized host implementations of the challenges). And as both spammers and cryptocurrency miners have demonstrated, there is no honor among thieves. If LLM scrapers dangle free computation in front of people, someone will spring up to take advantage of it. This leaves LLM scrapers trying to pick a JavaScript runtime limit that doesn't cut them off from too many sites, while sites can try to recognize LLM scrapers and increase their proof of work difficulty if they see a suspect.

    • The Atlantic ☛ AI in Newspapers. How Did This Happen?

      For this material to have reached print, it should have had to pass through a human writer, human editors at King, and human staffers at the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer. No one stopped it. Victor Lim, a spokesperson for the Sun-Times, told us, “This is licensed content that was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom, but it is unacceptable for any content we provide to our readers to be inaccurate.” A longer statement posted on the paper’s website (and initially hidden behind a paywall) said, in part, “This should be a learning moment for all of journalism.” Lisa Hughes, the publisher and CEO of the Inquirer, told us the publication was aware the supplement contained “apparently fabricated, outright false, or misleading” material. “We do not know the extent of this but are taking it seriously and investigating,” she said via email. Hughes confirmed that the material was syndicated from King Features, and added, “Using artificial intelligence to produce content, as was apparently the case with some of the Heat Index material, is a violation of our own internal policies and a serious breach.” (Although each publication blames King Features, both the Sun-Times and the Inquirer affixed their organization’s logo to the front page of “Heat Index”—suggesting ownership of the content to readers.)

    • Benedict Evans ☛ GenAI’s adoption puzzle

      You could say that this is amazingly fast adoption, and much faster than PCs, the web or smartphones. 30% in two years! In a sense that’s a skewed comparison - ChatGPT is just a website, it gets wall-to-wall media coverage (this is part of Sam Altman’s job), and you don’t need to buy a thousand dollar device or wait for telcos to deploy broadband. Anyone can just go and use it today, so of course adoption is faster. It’s standing on the shoulders of giants. But either way, 30%!

  • Social Control Media

    • Futurism ☛ Nearly Half of Young People Wish the Internet Had Never Been Invented

      According to a new survey conducted in the UK, this appears to be the sentiment held by nearly half of young people — at least across the pond — who are mourning missing out on the diverging timeline where they aren't chronically online and wracked with brain rot.

      Of the nearly 1,300 total participants between the ages of 16 to 21 years old, 68 percent said they feel worse after spending time on social media. A full 50 percent said they would support a "social media curfew" cutting off how long they could spend on these apps. And astonishingly, another 47 percent outright felt that they would prefer to be living their youth in a world without the internet at all.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘My parents didn’t have a clue’: why many digital natives [sic] would not give their kids smartphones

      Online bullying, violence and paedophilia have made young people sceptical of unfettered access to technology

    • The Zambian Observer ☛ Tanzania Shuts Down X Over Security Concerns - The Zambian Observer

      It was reported that [crackers] gained access to the account Police Force’s official account and posted false claims about President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s death and explicit content.

      The posts sparked panic across the entire nation untill a notice was later issued by government to debunked the claim.

      In response to this, the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) ordered [Internet] service providers, including to restrict access to X.

    • El País ☛ Do we need publicly-owned social networks to escape Silicon Valley?

      In February, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called for “the development of our own browsers, European public and private social networks and messaging services that use transparent protocols.” Former Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero — who governed from 2004 until 2011 — and the left-wing Sumar bloc in the Spanish Parliament have also proposed this. And, back in 2021, former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn made a similar suggestion.

      At first glance, this may seem like a good idea: a public platform wouldn’t require algorithms — which are designed to stimulate addiction and confrontation — nor would it have to collect private information to sell ads.

    • The Atlantic ☛ What Are People Still Doing on X?

      The Nazi bar is an apt analogy, yet it doesn’t fully capture the weirdness of a social network and of the strange, modern power of algorithms to sort and segregate experiences. Many people use X merely to post about sports, follow news, or look at dumb memes, and they’re probably having a mostly normal online experience; I don’t have any wish to judge them. To torture the metaphor, though, they’re sitting at a table outside the Nazi bar; their friends are there, they’re having a good time, maybe they hear a slur emanate from the window from time to time. Others fully recognize that they’re at a Nazi bar, but this was their bar first and they don’t want to cede the territory; they’re hanging around to debate, never mind that the bar’s owner is palling around with the new customers.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • International Business Times ☛ Teen [Cracker] Admits to Breaching Data of 70 Million Pupils and Teachers in Shocking US Cyberattack

      Although not explicitly identified in court, the details of the case align closely with a data breach confirmed by PowerSchool earlier this year. The company admitted in January that its systems were compromised between August and September 2024.

      PowerSchool is widely used by schools across North America to manage grades, attendance, health records and personal student data.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • CBC ☛ 2025-05-20 [Older] Ontario wants to expand vehicle stop-and-searches. Some experts say it could lead to racial profiling

    • The Register UK ☛ China approves national ‘online number’ ID scheme

      China’s government will issue the credential, sometimes referred to as “Cyberspace IDs” or “online numbers”, after citizens provide verifiable identity documents. A “National Network Identity Authentication Public Service Platform” will run the enrolment process and the federated authentication tools that make them usable by third-party services.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deseret Media ☛ Russia launches war's largest air attack on Ukraine, kills at least 12 people

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on the United States, which has taken a softer public line on Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin, since President Donald Trump took office, to speak out.

    "The silence of America, the silence of others in the world only encourages Putin," he wrote on Telegram.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ I Survived the Bucha Massacre

    Yet countless millions of people around the world today must literally, physically fight for their liberty.

    Olya Bilan is one such person. She’s a courageous Ukrainian television journalist, who not only survived the massacre in her hometown of Bucha—she endured even greater danger to broadcast the truth of what the Russian war machine was doing.

    In this piece, she provides a visceral description of what she lived through—and how it should inform American policymakers, who believe that this conflict is merely about land and could therefore be solved through “compromise.”

  • Modern Diplomacy ☛ Why Turkey’s Development of Stealth Fighter Jet Should Alarm the Region and the World

    For decades, Islamic countries throughout the world have made half-hearted attempts at unifying behind their shared religion, although very little progress has been made in creating an effective bloc of nations. The promise of a high-tech new fighter jet, however, appears to be doing more than anything else to bring such countries together, with a joint program to produce the KAAN aircraft potentially involving only Islamic countries. While military cooperation in the Islamic world is unlikely to pose a challenge to the West in the short term, it does pose a very real threat to Israel, which will undoubtedly fear that the likes of the KAAN jets could be used in military operations against its military.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Bruce Springsteen v. Donald Trump: Inside the Battle

    “The America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration,” Bruce Springsteen declared from a Manchester, U.K. stage May 14. At the kick-off show of his newly rechristened Land of Hope and Dreams Tour with the E Street Band, Springsteen framed his criticism of Donald Trump in patriotism: “The America that I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real, and regardless of its faults, is a great country with a great people. And we will survive this moment.”

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Switzerland to expand EU defense ties with new cyber-defense role

    The decision allows Switzerland to become part of the Estonian-led Cyber Ranges Federations project under the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) framework, marking a notable advance in Swiss–EU military cooperation. This comes despite Bern’s famously longstanding policy of strict military neutrality.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Poland, Romania lead a drone bonanza in Eastern Europe

    On May 15, the Polish ministry signed a framework agreement with local private defense company WB Group to buy some 10,000 units of the Warmate loitering munition. The contract foresees deliveries until 2035.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-21 [Older] Germany deploys troops on NATO's eastern flank

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-21 [Older] Germany updates: Police nab suspected far-right extremists

  • CBC ☛ 2025-05-20 [Older] Canada wants to join Golden Dome missile-defence program, Cheeto Mussolini says

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-21 [Older] Pakistan: Suicide bomber targets children's school bus

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-20 [Older] Taiwan wants peace with China but needs tight defense — Lai

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ ‘A ruthless strike aimed at civilians’ At least 12 dead, over 60 injured in one of Russia’s largest air assaults on Ukraine — Meduza

• Environment

  • CBC ☛ 2025-05-19 [Older] The surprisingly low-tech way a B.C. ski resort is saving its snow

  • Vox ☛ Why aren’t Trump and RFK Jr. helping Milwaukee with its lead poisoning crisis?

    Normally, cities navigating such a crisis could depend on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for federal support. When the lead poisoning was first detected in January, at the tail end of the Biden administration, city health officials were immediately in contact with the CDC environmental health team, which included several of the country’s top lead poisoning experts, Milwaukee health commissioner Mike Totoraitis told me. A group of federal experts were planning a trip to the city at the end of April.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-20 [Older] What the blackout in Spain, Portugal says about renewables

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-21 [Older] What is China's space mission Tianwen-2?

    • Deseret Media ☛ 94-year-old Navajo man gets electricity for the first time

      Bracewell and his crew from Murray came all the way to the Navajo Nation as part of a joint program with Navajo Tribal Utility Authority.

      While the trip gave Murray's newer line workers a unique training opportunity and needed hours for their apprenticeship, it also gave them the unique chance to change a life.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-21 [Older] Extensive wildfires fueled record forest loss in 2024

    • The Hindu ☛ Elephant census concludes in South Karnataka; incessant rains affect final day exercise

      Rain affects waterhole count but officials say two-day data robust to estimate population trends

    • Vox ☛ Jaguars in Arizona and Mexico are endangered. Can cattle ranchers save them?

      While it’s clear how photos of jaguars might make someone fall in love with wild cats, that doesn’t explain how ranchers like Hurtado learned how to farm in such a way that protects both felines and cattle. Wolf, of NJP, says it often comes down to individual experiences. Ranchers learn over time that by leaving deer alone or creating new water sources for animals, fewer livestock go missing. What’s also crucial, he said, is that by earning money for photos of cats, people in the program become more tolerant of their presence — and more open to compromise and finding ways to live with them.

• Finance

  • CBC ☛ 2025-05-19 [Older] Canada Post receives strike notice; workers plan Friday walkout

  • CBC ☛ 2025-05-21 [Older] Canada Post rejects union's offer to delay potential strike

  • CBC ☛ 2025-05-20 [Older] Subaru of America is the latest carmaker to raise prices citing market conditions

  • CBC ☛ 2025-05-18 [Older] A 'really cool giant Lego box': What prefabricated homes could do for Canada's housing shortage

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ Even a humble keyboard is now political at Computex

    A manufacturer of mini-PCs offered a different take: Smugness at having long ago chosen to target Asian and European markets rather than customers in the US, thereby avoiding the trade war.

  • [Old] Ed Zitron ☛ OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry

    I also want to add that, as of writing this sentence, this money is yet to arrive. SoftBank's filings say that the money will arrive mid-April — and that SoftBank would be borrowing as much as $10 billion to finance the round, with the option to syndicate part of it to other investors. For the sake of argument, I'm going to assume this money actually arrives.

  • International Business Times ☛ OnlyFans Up for Sale: Why the Porn Giant Can't Find a Buyer Despite Eye-Watering Profits

    OnlyFans, the London-based platform best known for revolutionising adult content in the digital age, is quietly on the market—but finding a buyer may prove harder than expected. Despite its profitability, the site's explicit nature is reportedly deterring investors, exposing the limits of adult industry valuation and raising questions about the sustainability of its business model.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Moral Emergency We Cannot Feel

    This isn't stupidity. It's something more troubling: the collapse of our collective ability to calibrate moral response to moral reality. And if we can't distinguish between different categories of ethical offense, we can't defend democracy—because we can't even recognize when it's under attack.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-18 [Older] Former US President Biden diagnosed with 'aggressive' cancer

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-18 [Older] Germany and other EU countries are bulking up militaries

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-19 [Older] UK, EU seek major reset of ties at London summit

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-19 [Older] Romania: Historic victory for pro-European candidate

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-19 [Older] Tundu Lissu defiant' as treason trial begins in Tanzania

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-19 [Older] Portugal: Far-right rise a warning for political center

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-19 [Older] Poland vote: Pro-EU Trzaskowski wins first round

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-19 [Older] Okinawans split over whether US bases are worth the burden

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-19 [Older] Nigeria: Can a gender bill bring political inclusion?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-19 [Older] NATO corruption probe 'reminder' of defense boom risks

  • Truthdig ☛ 2025-05-19 [Older] The End of Canada’s Geographical Naivete

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-05-19 [Older] G7 Finance Leaders to Seek US Consensus on Non-Tariff Issues at Canada Meeting

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Futurism ☛ Terrifying Survey Claims ChatGPT Has Overtaken Wikipedia

      The data, compiled by UK-based market research company GWI, shows a steady decline in the proportion of users visiting Wikipedia worldwide, excluding China. In less than a year following its launch in late 2022, ChatGPT appears to have surpassed the online encyclopedia, in a striking reversal of fortunes.

      If the data — which is based on survey responses and not site visits — is to be believed, it's a good reason to be concerned about the reliability of information people are seeking out online. While Wikipedia has never been known to be an infallible source free of bias or inaccuracies, generative AI has proven to be far more unreliable, thanks to widespread hallucinations [sic] and biases present in its training data. And while Wikipedia is built on prominently displayed citations, AI systems like ChatGPT often struggle to explain where their info is coming from, even cooking up fake references wholesale.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-21 [Older] Is Pakistan's cybercrime law silencing dissent?

  • The Atlantic ☛ Shutting Down Salman Rushdie Is Not Going to Help

    Salman Rushdie, the author who was nearly murdered three years ago because of a novel he wrote, once articulated what he thought supporting free speech meant: “The defense of free expression begins at the point at which somebody says something you don’t like.”

    Rushdie called this view “old-fashioned,” and, in 2025, it might very well be: Just last week, he was pressured to cancel an appearance because of something he said that a group of students did not like. In an interview with a German podcaster a year ago, Rushdie expressed surprise that young people on college campuses protesting on behalf of Palestinians were not being more circumspect about the fundamentalism and murderousness of Hamas, who started the current Gaza war. “I feel that there’s not a lot of deep thought happening,” he said about the demonstrations. “There’s an emotional reaction to the death in Gaza, and that’s absolutely right. But when it slides over towards anti-Semitism and sometimes to actual support of Hamas, then it’s very problematic.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CBC ☛ 2025-05-18 [Older] 'Losing an icon': Long-running Lloydminster TV stations abruptly shut down

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • CBC ☛ 2025-05-17 [Older] How trauma can affect memory and court testimony

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-21 [Older] Why Iran 'cannot turn back time' on public hijab rule

  • ACLU ☛ Five Years After George Floyd, the Fight for Police Accountability Isn't Over

    This violence reflected a deeper failure across the country: police department policies, practices, and culture encourage police to disregard civil rights protections. Despite progress made over the last few years, today the Trump administration is encouraging police brutality and dismantling oversight of police departments known to violate the Constitution. But we are not backing down. The ACLU and our partners across the country are coming together to advance transparency about police brutality and push forward reforms that prevent abuse.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ The first rule of ICE Club? Don't talk about ICE Club. And treat all migrants as criminals.

    Stick with me, because this is not a story about a murder that took place eight decades ago, but about due process in America in 2025. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the Constitutional guarantee of due process, which means everyone should have access to fair and adequate legal proceedings when the government threatens to deprive us of life, liberty or property. This is regardless of what Kristi Noem, director of Homeland Security, may say it and habeas corpus are.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • CBC ☛ 2025-05-21 [Older] Bell says services fully restored after widespread outage hit Ontario, Quebec

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Hackaday ☛ The Commodore 64 Gets An HDMI Upgrade [Ed: HDMI is for DRM, this is not an upgrade]

    The Commodore 64 may remain the best selling computer of all time, but it has one major flaw. It doesn’t have HDMI! That makes it a total pain to use with modern displays. Thankfully, [Side Projects Lab] has whipped up an HDMI output board to solve this concerning oversight from the original designers.

Monopolies/Monopsonies