Leftovers

• Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-28 [Older] Did Mozart have friends?

• Sean Goedecke ☛ Arguing point-by-point considered harmful

  Sometimes you should. If someone gives you a list of tasks, you ought to respond task-by-task. If you’ve been given a checklist to follow (for instance, before you deploy), you should address each item on the checklist individually. But in cases of disagreement - especially disagreement about technical topics, like planning a software feature - it’s not always wise to go point-by-point.

  If you work at a large tech company for long enough, you’ll see a pattern where two engineers have a completely unproductive point-by-point argument. It goes like this: [...]

• The New Stack ☛ Stop Freezing Your Data to Death

  Let’s explore some of the issues with tiered storage, the benefits of keeping all data hot, and how modern data storage solutions are maximizing the performance of object storage to provide cost-effective, low-latency query performance for petabytes of data that can span years.

• Science

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-05-29 [Older] Astronaut One Day, Artist the Next: How to Help Children Explore the World of Careers

  • Futurism ☛ Trump Advisor Calls on Trump to Nationalize SpaceX Immediately

    Bannon, a far-right white nationalist commentator who served as Trump's chief strategist during his first term, insisted that Trump should sign an executive order invoking a Korean War-era national security mobilization law called the Defense Production Act to assume control over Musk's space firm, as well as its Starlink satellite constellation.

  • Quartz ☛ The tax code time bomb fueling mass tech layoffs

    For almost 70 years, American companies could deduct 100% of qualified research and development spending in the year they incurred the costs. Salaries, software, contractor payments — if it contributed to creating or improving a product, it came off the top of a firm’s taxable income. Advertisement

    The deduction was guaranteed by Section 174 of the IRS Code of 1954, and under the provision, R&D flourished in the U.S.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-29 [Older] China launches mission to get asteroid samples

• Career/Education

  • [Old] Internet Archive ☛ The Famous Computer Cafe 1985-01-08 Bill Atkinson : The Famous Computer Cafe

    The Famous Computer Cafe 1985-01-08 Bill Atkinson. This is part one of the interview. Here's part two. This episode aired on KFOX.

  • [Old] Internet Archive ☛ The Famous Computer Cafe 1985-01-09 Bill Atkinson : The Famous Computer Cafe

    Digitized from reel-to-reel tape by Harbor Digitizing of Friday Harbor, Washington.

  • Axios ☛ D.C. schools are banning cellphones, joining almost half of the nation

    About half of the city's public school students will be affected by the ban. The policy does not apply to the other half, who attend charter schools.

• Hardware

  • Didier Stevens ☛ Quickpost: USB-C Couplers

    If the LED isn’t on (e.g., not current is flowing), I just have to flip one of the male connectors 180°. Then it works.

  • Hackaday ☛ Microsoft Looking To Enforce USB-C Features Through WHCP

    As much as people love USB-C, there’s one massive flaw that becomes very obvious the moment you look at the ports on any computer. This being that there’s no (standardized) way to tell what any of those ports do. Some may do display out (Alt-Mode), some may allow for charging, but it remains mostly a matter of praying to the hardware gods. According to a recent blog post, this is where Microsoft will seek to enforce a USB-C feature set on all (mobile) computers compliant with its Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP).

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-28 [Older] Cats smell — their owners, that is

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-29 [Older] Thailand set to U-turn on recreational cannabis use

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-29 [Older] Survivors of a French doctor who was found guilty of sexual abuse want action to address "institutional failures" — and better protection for children

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-29 [Older] Haribo recalls sweets in Netherlands after cannabis found

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ ‘Unite for Vets’ rally calls for Trump to abandon planned cuts at VA

    The “Unite for Veterans, Unite for America Rally” — which featured a performance from the rock band Dropkick Murphys — was one of 200 events scheduled across the country Friday in an effort to mobilize the veterans community.

  • Science Alert ☛ The Greatest Parasite Is Right in Front of You – And It's Dangerous

    Yet, the greatest parasite of the modern age is no blood-sucking invertebrate. It is sleek, glass-fronted and addictive by design. Its host? Every human on Earth with a wifi signal.

    Far from being benign tools, smartphones parasitise our time, our attention and our personal information, all in the interests of technology companies and their advertisers.

    In a new article in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, we argue smartphones pose unique societal risks, which come into sharp focus when viewed through the lens of parasitism.

• Proprietary

  • Wired ☛ Bill Atkinson, Macintosh Pioneer and Inventor of Hypercard, Dies at 74

    Atkinson was right. His contributions to the Macintosh were critical to that breakthrough he’d whispered to me at the Apple office known as Bandley 3 that day. A few years later, he would singlehandedly make another giant contribution with a program called Hypercard, which presaged the World Wide Web. Through it all, he retained his energy and joie de vivre, and became an inspiration for all who would change the world through code. On June 5, 2025, he died after a long illness. He was 74.

    [...]

    He designed a program where information—text, video, audio—would be stored on virtual cards. These would link to each other. It was a vision that harkened back to a 1940s idea by scientist Vannevar Bush which had been sharpened by a technologist named Ted Nelson, who called the linking technique “hypertext.” But it was Atkinson who made the software work for a popular computer. When he showed the program, called HyperCard, to Apple CEO John Sculley, the executive was blown away, and asked Atkinson what he wanted for it. “I want it to ship,” Atkinson said. Sculley agreed to put it on every computer. HyperCard would become a forerunner of the World Wide Web, proof of the viability of the hyperlinking concept.

  • John Gruber ☛ Daring Fireball: Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74

    In addition to his low-level contributions like QuickDraw, Atkinson was also the creator of MacPaint (which to this day stands as the model for bitmap image editors — Photoshop, I would argue, was conceptually derived directly from MacPaint) and HyperCard (“inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985”), the influence of which cannot be overstated.

    I say this with no hyperbole: Bill Atkinson may well have been the best computer programmer who ever lived. Without question, he’s on the short list. What a man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us.

  • [Old] The Codist ☛ The Story Of DeltaGraph

    Remember that in the late 80's Windows was not a viable platform and all new apps debuted on the Mac.

  • Sebastián Monía ☛ For and against Apple Music

    I really wanted a Linux phone or a hardened Android, but as I hinted here before, you can't run, for example, banking apps on them. Switching to an iPhone is the simplest alternative to anything requiring a Google account.

  • PC World ☛ Microsoft begs/threatens Windows 10 users, again

    Microsoft, the decision to sunset Windows 10 is entirely yours. And that means that you’re creating a problem so that you can sell a solution, either in the form of a Windows 11 license or a new laptop. That’s never a good look. It might be worth considering, as Windows has never looked less essential than it does right now.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ A brief history of local search

    Spotlight, the current search feature in macOS, does far more than find locally stored files, but in this brief history I focus on that function, and how it has evolved as Macs have come to keep increasingly large numbers of files.

  • NBC ☛ Harris-Walz campaign may have been targeted by iPhone hackers, cybersecurity firm says

    One of the few companies to specialize in iPhone cybersecurity said in a report Thursday that it has uncovered evidence in a handful of mobile phones of a potential hacking campaign targeting five high-profile Americans in media, artificial intelligence and politics, including former members of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Report on the Malicious Uses of AI - Schneier on Security

      Reports like these give a brief window into the ways AI is being used by malicious actors around the world. I say “brief” because last year the models weren’t good enough for these sorts of things, and next year the threat actors will run their AI models locally—and we won’t have this kind of visibility.

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ AI interpretability is further along than I thought

      I don’t want to overstate how much we know about AI models. The concepts and circuits we can identify are a fraction of the total processing that’s going on, and even how we label the concepts is a human guess - the model could be drawing much subtler distinctions than we realize. But as someone whose mental picture of all this was “we don’t know anything, neural networks are always black boxes”, it’s exciting to learn that we can at least peer (through a glass, darkly) into the mind of the model.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Artificial Intelligence Is Not Intelligent

      These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not “understand” anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another.

      Many people, however, fail to grasp how large language models work, what their limits are, and, crucially, that LLMs do not think and feel but instead mimic and mirror. They are AI illiterate—understandably, because of the misleading ways its loudest champions describe the technology, and troublingly, because that illiteracy makes them vulnerable to one of the most concerning near-term AI threats: the possibility that they will enter into corrosive relationships (intellectual, spiritual, romantic) with machines that only seem like they have ideas or emotions.

    • US House Of Representatives ☛ Written Expert Testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: Hearing titled “The Federal Government in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” [PDF]

      Americans may disagree about who counts as an adversary, but everyone agrees we have them. And the more powerful someone is -- whether they be an individual, a corporation, or the government itself -- the more powerful the adversaries they attract.

      We already know that America’s geopolitical adversaries are attempting to access the consolidated DOGE [sic] data. When DOGE [sic] staff gained access to sensitive NLRB data, a user with a Russian IP address immediately tried to log in with the staffers’ (correct) usernames and passwords [6]. These efforts happened “in near real-time”, with no lag between issuing log-in credentials and the log-in attempts. While these specific log-in attempts were blocked, they are likely the tip of a much larger iceberg.

      What can our adversaries do with data?

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Hearing on the Federal Government and AI - Schneier on Security

      On Thursday I testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform at a hearing titled “The Federal Government in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”

    • The Register UK ☛ Schneier to House: AI fawning obscures security concerns

      Security guru Bruce Schneier played the skunk at the garden party in a Thursday federal hearing on AI's use in the government, focusing on the risks many are ignoring.

      "The other speakers mostly talked about how cool AI was – and sometimes about how cool their own company was – but I was asked by the Democrats to specifically talk about DOGE [sic] and the risks of exfiltrating our data from government agencies and feeding it into AIs," Schneier explained in a blog post.

    • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Who writes the documentation?

      If developers have to review code and write documentation based on their understanding of what they've read, is that more efficient than having them write and consider the implementation up front?

      Where do requirements and specifications fit in? Are those distilled down to prompts for the code that's generated? Are developers aware of those requirements to help understand the generated code?

    • Court House News ☛ Cyclist sues Waymo | Courthouse News Service

      A bicyclist is suing Waymo in federal court after its autonomous vehicle parked in a no stopping zone and a passenger opened the rear door of the car in the cyclist's path. The cyclist says the collision ejected her from her bike and she landed on a second Waymo autonomous vehicle, which was also obstructing the bicycle lane.

  • Social Control Media

    • John Gruber ☛ Truth Social Is Just Trump’s Blog

      What I’ve realized is that Truth Social is essentially just Trump’s blog. Truth Social is exceedingly unpopular when judged as a social network; but it’s exceedingly successful as a blog. All the other people using Truth Social are effectively reading his blog and shitposting comments and memes in response to his posts, trying to get his attention. I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks, and in that time, Trump’s own posts on Truth Social have made the news on a near-daily basis. I’ve never once, ever, seen a post from anyone else on Truth Social make the news. Trump is not just the one and only person of consequence using it, his is the one and only account on Truth Social that you ever, ever hear about.

    • EFF ☛ EFF to Court: Young People Have First Amendment Rights

      EFF filed the brief in NetChoice v. Brown, a constitutional challenge to the Utah Minor Protection in Social Media Act. The law prohibits young people from speaking to anyone on social media outside of the users with whom they are connected or those users’ connections. It also requires social media services to make young people’s accounts invisible to anyone outside of that same subgroup of users. The law requires parents to consent before minors can change those default restrictions.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Kettering Health confirms attack by Interlock ransomware group as health record system is restored

      Kettering Health, which runs 14 medical centers and dozens of clinics primarily in the Dayton area, attributed the cybersecurity incident to the ransomware group Interlock.

      The ransomware gang took credit for the attack this week, claiming to have stolen troves of data from the company. They offered samples that included financial records and more.

• Security

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-28 [Older] Czech Republic summons Chinese ambassador over cyber attacks

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Android Police ☛ Google is quietly harnessing your user data: here's why

      It's convenient not to have to remember your Gmail login or recent Maps searches. However, the flip side of the coin feels less like "helping hands" and more like "invasion of personal everything." Is there a way to strike a balance between Google's data-pooling and your privacy and comfort? Yes, but it pays to understand the greater scope of this debacle.

    • Osservatorio Nessuno ☛ Italy's intelligence oversight committee (COPASIR) report on Graphite spyware raises more questions than it answers

      The report confirms that Luca Casarini, a prominent figure in the humanitarian NGO Mediterranea Saving Humans, was intermittently placed under surveillance for at least five years. Initially, traditional methods were used; under the current government, however, the highly invasive Graphite spyware was deployed. Mediterranea is no secretive organization: its search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean are conducted under the watch of international observers and journalists.

      This raises serious questions about what could justify such a prolonged and intrusive operation targeting an organization whose goals and methods are transparent and lawful. The mismatch between the invasive tools employed, the years-long duration of the operation, and the meager investigative results is alarming — and difficult to justify.

    • EFF ☛ EFF to Department Homeland Security: No Social Media Surveillance of Immigrants

      Specifically, the proposed rule would require applicants to disclose their social media identifiers on nine immigration forms, including applications for permanent residency and naturalization, impacting more than 3.5 million people annually. USCIS’s purported reason for this collection is to assist with identity verification, as well as vetting and national security screening, to comply with Executive Order 14161. USCIS separately announced that it would look for “antisemitic activity” on social media as grounds for denying immigration benefits, which appears to be related to the proposed rule, although not expressly included it.

    • Axios ☛ DOGE [sic] given access to Americans' Social Security data by Supreme Court

      "[O]nce again, this Court dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them," Jackson wrote.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Supreme Court allows DOGE to access Social Security records

      Per the decision, a majority of the justices voted to grant the administration’s request to stay a lower court decision and concluded that “SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work.”

      While the full vote tally isn’t known, the court said Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor — its three liberals — would have denied the government’s application for a stay.

    • Vox ☛ ChatGPT and Claude privacy: Why AI makes surveillance everyone’s issue

      But surfing hobbyists tell me there’s far more information in this image than I thought. The pattern of the waves, the sky, the slope, and the sand are all information, and in this case sufficient information to venture a correct guess about where my family went for vacation. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent. One of Anthropic’s early investors is James McClave, whose BEMC Foundation helps fund Future Perfect.)

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Murderbot surveillancebots

      There is only one way to interpret that sound, and it is as a threat.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-28 [Older] Cambodian soldier killed in clash with Thai army

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-29 [Older] UK: Criminal charges brought against Andrew and Tristan Tate

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-28 [Older] Namibia marks first Genocide Remembrance Day

  • [Old] Charles F Kettering Foundation ☛ Project 2025: The Blueprint for Christian Nationalist Regime Change - Kettering Foundation

    Presumably, First Amendment freedoms would be reserved for only those who agree with this dystopian view.

    In addition to erasing the rights of women and minorities, the Mandate for Leadership: [...]

  • [Old] Brasil de Fato ☛ Understanding Trump’s Nationalist Conservative White Christian Agenda – Brasil de Fato

    About 125 people attend each meeting. Its attendees are even more rarefied than those who attend the World Economic Forum in Davos. In 2024, 32 out of 131 total attendees were from the US. Eleven of these were from big business. The seven from tech were :
    • Thiel Capital LLC (Two people – Peter Theil and his CEO Alex Car)
    • Google
    • Microsoft Research
    • Palantir Technologies Inc.
    • Anduril Industries.
    • Anthropic PBC

    All seven are US military contractors. Also present were seven members of the US government: [...]

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Constitutional Charade

    But let’s talk about constitutional hypocrisy so brazen, so comprehensive, so morally bankrupt that it would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous to the republic.

    I’ve learned something about modern Republicans that crystallizes everything wrong with our current political moment: they care more about the constitutionality of Biden’s student debt forgiveness than they do about the 4th and 5th Amendments being universally applied. Let that sink in for a moment.

  • Jason Becker ☛ Ugly Americans

    When the Insurrectionists showed up in full tactical gear and assault rifles, stormed the US Capitol, pommeled police officers, and destroyed government property, not only did Trump fail to act, he ultimately pardoned them en masse.

  • [Repeat] Digital Music News ☛ Trump Preparing to Extend TikTok Ban Deadline for a Third Time

    The Biden administration signed the law to force divestiture or face a ban on TikTok to go into effect on January 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration. Once he took office, Trump promptly signed an executive order to push the ban by 90 days.

    Trump then announced a second extension in April, claiming they were close to reaching a deal that would allow TikTok to be controlled by a majority-US company, while a minority stake would be retained by Beijing-based ByteDance. Should that deal be completed, the consortium of private sector names will be led by tech giant Oracle, founded by Trump supporter and friend Larry Ellison.

    But that deal quickly went belly up when Trump launched his extensive trade tariffs, with especially rigid sanctions against China: a 145% rate. That rate was already reduced to 30% last month, as talks for a final deal resumed.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Left wing UK political mag Tribune bought by Islam Channel

    The owner of Britain’s Islam Channel has acquired left-wing political magazine Tribune – a title which has been published for 88 years and at one point employed George Orwell.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Debt We Owe June 6, 1944 - by Mike Brock

    The eyes of the world were indeed upon them. And what the world saw was America at its finest hour—not perfect, not without flaws, but rising to meet the ultimate test of its founding principles. What the world saw was a nation that understood democracy was worth dying for.

    What would those eyes see if they looked upon us today?

  • Wired ☛ Cybercriminals Are Hiding Malicious Web Traffic in Plain Sight

    Rather than relying on web hosts to find ways of operating outside law enforcement's reach, some service providers have turned to offering purpose-built VPNs and other proxy services as a way of rotating and masking customer IP addresses and offering infrastructure that either intentionally doesn't log traffic or mixes traffic from many sources together. And while the technology isn't new, Seret and other researchers emphasized to WIRED that the transition to using proxies among cybercrminals over the last couple of years is significant.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ As we mark D-Day's [81st] anniversary, the rule of law wobbles in Kansas and the United States

    After the war, he went to law school and practiced law in the state of Kansas for 30 years. He then served as a Kansas State District Court Judge for another ten years until 1989. He died in 2002. On several occasions, he told me about his incomprehension that a sophisticated society and country, which Germany certainly was in the 1930s, had become mesmerized with a leader and regime that completely bastardized the concept of rule of law. He was enormously troubled that a government’s leadership could use “the law,” as it defined it, to commit mass murder.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Column: Voters who don't vote? This is one way democracy can die, by 20 million cuts

    It is rather astonishing how little we actually participate in democracy, given the amount of tax dollars we have spent trying to convince other nations that our government system is the best on the planet. Capitulating to President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of mass voter fraud, many local conservative elected officials have tried to ram through a litany of “voter integrity” policies under the guise of protecting democracy. However, democracy is not a delicate flower in need of protection. It’s a muscle in need of exercise.

  • TruthOut ☛ How DOGE [sic] Created an Error-Prone AI Program to Tear Up Veterans Affairs Contracts

    The faulty tool, created by a staffer with no medical or government experience, helped accelerate the gutting of the VA.

  • International Business Times ☛ 'Britain Is Being Mugged': Tory Minister Slams 'Broken' Asylum System, Says UK Can't Be Home for Everyone

    Badenoch placed blame on years of weak border enforcement and legal loopholes that, in her view, have left the country unable to manage immigration in line with national priorities. 'Britain cannot be home for everyone,' she said, vowing to rebuild the asylum framework from the ground up.

  • The Local DK ☛ Inside Denmark: Why burqa ban is back after six years

    The introduction of the law on August 1st 2018 saw public protests against it, while statistics released in subsequent years showed it had been enforced rarely. It has been largely out of the public spotlight for some time, until this week.

    It is now set for a new round of public debate after Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said this week that it should be extended to schools and universities.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • RTL ☛ Tech billionaire: Musk deletes post claiming Trump 'in the Epstein files'

    The Trump administration has acknowledged it is reviewing tens of thousands of documents, videos and investigative material that his "MAGA" movement says will unmask public figures complicit in Epstein's crimes.

    Trump was named in a trove of deposition and statements linked to Epstein that were unsealed by a New York judge in early 2024. The president has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the case.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Pentagon watchdog investigates if staffers were asked to delete Hegseth’s Signal messages

    This comes as Hegseth is scheduled to testify before Congress next week for the first time since his confirmation hearing. He is likely to face questions under oath not only about his handling of sensitive information but also the wider turmoil at the Pentagon following the departures of several senior aides and an internal investigation over information leaks.

• Environment

  • EcoWatch ☛ Earth’s Atmosphere Contains More CO2 Than It Has in Millions of Years

    The number, recorded in May at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii by scientists from University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, represents an increase of 3.5 ppm from May 2024.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ Tesla Seems Terrified These Messages About Its Robotaxi Rollout Will Be Released

      Tellingly, the carmaker is already desperately trying to steer the conversation, closely barring the public from accessing information about the robotaxi service pilot. As Reuters reports, Tesla is trying to prevent the city from releasing public records related to the project, raising urgent questions surrounding Tesla's long-awaited foray into the autonomous ride-hailing space.

    • Reuters ☛ Tesla seeks to block city of Austin from releasing records on robotaxi trial

      The news agency in February requested communications between Tesla and Austin officials over the previous two years. The request followed CEO Elon Musk’s announcement in January that Tesla would launch fare-collecting robotaxis on Austin public streets.

      Austin public-information officer Dan Davis told Reuters on April 1 that “third parties” had asked the city to withhold the records to protect their “privacy or property interests.” Austin officials on April 7 requested an opinion on the news agency’s request from the Texas Attorney General’s office, which handles public-records disputes.

    • Vox ☛ Trump and Musk’s split reflects a nation that’s divided on clean energy

      However, Tesla made about one-third of its profits over the past decade from selling compliance credits to other carmakers in states that adopted California’s vehicle emissions rules as well as in several other countries. The Trump administration is also targeting the programs that created this line of business through executive orders.

    • Wired ☛ Uber Just Reinvented the Bus … Again

      And then there’s the fact that cities like New York grapple with chronic congestion and don’t need more vehicles cluttering crowded streets. During Uber’s big announcement, Kansal showed a video of one possible Route Share ride in the Big Apple. It covered about 3 miles from Midtown to Lower Manhattan, which would take about 30 minutes and cost $13.

    • YLE ☛ Viking Line planning world's largest electric-powered ferry

      The new ferry concept, which the company has dubbed Helios, could begin service in the Gulf of Finland as soon as the 2030s, according to the firm.

      Viking Line said that the electric-powered ferry would feature a battery capacity of around 85 to 100 megawatt hours (MWh), and be able to transport 2,000 passengers across the 80km journey across the Gulf in just over two hours.

  • Overpopulation

    • Cost Rica ☛ Costa Rican Fishermen Sound Alarm on Gulf of Nicoya’s Overfishing Crisis:

      “The situation is about to get chaotic. Hunger is going to strike island and coastal communities. Fishing is all we know,” said a fisherman from Isla Chira during the forum, “Awareness on Environmental Care and the Importance of the Oceans,” organized by independent Congresswoman Cynthia Córdoba. The event brought together fishermen, environmental groups, and community leaders to discuss the Gulf’s mounting challenges.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-29 [Older] Nigeria's Tinubu touts economy amid cost-of-living anger

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-29 [Older] Elon Musk leaves Cheeto Mussolini administration role

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-06-04 [Older] How to Win the Nation’s Highest Minimum Wage

  • International Business Times ☛ 2025-06-04 [Older] MrBeast Net Worth 2025: Is World's Most Successful YouTuber Still Rich? Why Is He Borrowing Money For His Wedding?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-28 [Older] US updates: Cheeto Mussolini tariffs blocked by federal trade court

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-05-28 [Older] Visa application pause 'will be felt in every corner' of US

  • International Business Times ☛ Microsoft Reshapes Leadership as LinkedIn's Roslansky Takes Helm of Office Division Amid AI Push

    Roslansky will retain his role as LinkedIn CEO while assuming the position of Executive Vice- President for Office. He will report to Rajesh Jha, Microsoft's head of experiences and devices. This consolidation reflects Microsoft's strategy to integrate AI capabilities across its product offerings, enhancing user experiences and productivity.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Georgian Dream expands crackdown on ‘insults’ towards politicians to target social media users

    The ruling party plans to use one of the many laws passed by Georgian Dream amidst the ongoing anti-government protests, which introduced insulting officeholders as an administrative offence. The article provides for a fine of up to ₾4,000 ($1,500) or administrative arrest for up to 45 days.

    In the past two weeks, six activists have been penalised under this article. In Tbilisi, two were sentenced to 12 days of administrative detention and one was fined for allegedly insulting ruling party MP Mariam Lashkhi, while another was jailed for 10 days for allegedly insulting MP Tea Tsulukiani.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Michigan librarian pushes back against years of harassment from Moms for Liberty adherent

    GET THE MORNING HEADLINES. In an interview with Michigan Advance, Beachler, who has held her position as a librarian for more than 20 years, said Boone has waged a relentless “smear campaign” against her, and that her efforts to challenge books in Lowell Area Schools have not been in good faith nor in the benefit of any child attending the district.

  • ACLU ☛ The Trump Administration is Banning Books on Military Bases. We Sued.

    This rampant censorship is the result of the Department of Defense’s new policies banning books, classroom discussions, events, and extracurriculars that relate to race and gender in military-run schools on bases around the world.

    At the American Civil Liberties Union, we know that all students deserve access to a diverse education and, the DOD’s efforts to strip them of this right violates the First Amendment. So we took the DOD to court.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Koran burner told of imminent terror threat to his life

    The 50 year-old was last week convicted of a racially aggravated public order offence, after shouting “f--- Islam” and “Islam is religion of terrorism” while setting fire to the religious text above his head during a protest on Feb 13.

    His supporters have accused the Met Police and Crown Prosecution Service of putting his life in danger by pursuing a prosecution against him.

  • EFF ☛ EFF to the FTC: DMCA Section 1201 Creates Anti-Competitive Regulatory Barriers

    As part of multi-pronged effort towards deregulation, the Federal Trade Commission has asked the public to identify any and all “anti-competitive” regulations. Working with our friends at Authors Alliance, EFF answered, calling attention to a set of anti-competitive regulations that many don’t recognize as such: the triennial exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the cumbersome process on which they depend.

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ Self-hosting your own media considered harmful (updated)

    In fact, in my own house, for multiple decades, I've purchased physical media (CDs, DVDs, and more recently, Blu-Rays), and only have legally-acquired content on my NAS. Streaming services used to be a panacea but are now fragmented and mostly full of garbage—and lots of ads. We just wanted to be able to watch TV shows and movies without hassle (and I'm happy to pay for physical media that I want to watch).

    But this morning, as I was finishing up work on a video about a new mini Pi cluster, I got a cheerful email from YouTube saying my video on LibreELEC on the Pi 5 (here's the original YouTube link - now dead) was removed because it promoted: [...]

  • Internet Archive ☛ LibreELEC on the Raspberry Pi 5 : Jeff Geerling : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

    Originally published on YouTube in May 2024, this video was removed a year later, in June 2025, under the 'Dangerous or Harmful Content' content strike guideline.

    I'm re-uploading here because I still think people should take ownership over their own media libraries—legally—like I do.

  • Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ☛ Digital Democracy in a Divided Global Landscape

    To make sense of these changing dynamics, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has assembled ten essays drawn from members of our Digital Democracy Network spanning from Thailand and Türkiye to Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda.

  • Harvard University ☛ Judge blocks Trump order on international students

    Judge Allison Burroughs of U.S. District Court in Massachusetts had already halted the government’s effort to terminate Harvard’s participation in the Student Exchange Visa Program. Her Thursday ruling came hours after the University amended its visa lawsuit in response to the executive order, which was signed Wednesday.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Harvard wins temporary reprieve from Trump’s foreign student ban

    US District Judge Allison Burroughs ruled that enforcing the proclamation to restrict student visas would cause “immediate and irreparable injury” to Harvard, which has more than 7,000 international students and researchers. She set a hearing for June 16.

  • ACLU ☛ 13 “Woke” Books Banned in DOD Schools

    Below, find the books the DOD claims promotes allegedly “woke” ideologies. A list of 233 of the 555 books alleged to be banned can be found here.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Cloudflare Warns EU About Extensive Piracy Overblocking, Calls for Safeguards

    American Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare is pushing back against increasing calls to broaden pirate site blocking in the EU. The company notes that since similar efforts in Spain and Italy have resulted in extensive collateral damage, there's a need for more transparency and constructive collaboration on the anti-piracy front. Cloudflare also wants rightsholders to pay for their overblocking mistakes.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ ITV ‘censored’ Martina Navratilova for claiming boxer Imane Khelif was male

    She said: “It’s shocking that the UK’s largest commercial broadcast network has censored hundreds of gender-critical comments on social media, many of them simply referring to Imane Khelif as male.

    “Hiding a simple truth about a major news story is a remarkable failure by a journalistic organisation.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Zimbabwe ☛ AI Laws Won’t Save Zimbabwean Journalism, Let’s Think This Through

    They raised many valid concerns: AI’s potential to enable misinformation, steal journalists’ work, and flip the media business model on its head. They called for regulations to address these issues and for investments in local AI platforms that better reflect our culture and languages.

    These are important conversations to have. But reading through the communique, I couldn’t help but feel that much of what is being said here sounds like the mainstream Western talking points around AI, just thrown onto Zimbabwe.

  • JURIST ☛ Convictions of two individuals over journalist's death sparks calls for further justice in Malta

    Head of the RSF European Union and Balkans desk Pavol Szalai called the convictions “undeniable progress in the quest for justice,” but noted that the trial “highlighted the Maltese state’s failure to dismantle—at every stage—the complex scheme devised to kill a journalist, and the difficulty of untangling it in a drawn-out judicial process.”

    RSF also criticized the Maltese authorities for failing to implement most of the press freedom reforms recommended in the 437-page Public Inquiry Report issued after the journalist’s death.

  • JURIST ☛ Zambian court order and cyber laws raise concerns over press freedom

    The legal action stems from concerns raised by Chinese commercial entities regarding the portrayal of their operations in Zambia. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce argued that recent reporting misrepresented their practices and requested judicial intervention to prevent reputational harm. The court will determine the merits of the case at the upcoming hearing.

    CPJ’s Africa Program Coordinator Muthoki Mumo stated that the preemptive “censorship of News Diggers’ documentary is a stark reminder that press freedom is imperiled in Zambia.” She urged the authorities to support, rather than obstruct, public interest journalism.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Trump Can Bar AP From Some White House Events for Now, US Appeals Court Says

    The divided ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit temporarily blocks an order by U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, who ruled on April 8 that the Trump administration must allow AP journalists access to the Oval Office, Air Force One and White House events while the news agency's lawsuit moves forward.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • US News And World Report ☛ Trump Deploys California National Guard to LA to Quell Protests Despite the Governor's Objections

    Tensions were high after a series sweeps by immigration authorities the previous day, including in LA's fashion district and at a Home Depot, as the weeklong tally of immigrant arrests in the city climbed past 100. A prominent union leader was arrested while protesting and accused of impeding law enforcement.

    The White House announced that Trump would deploy the Guard to “address the lawlessness that has been allowed to fester.” It wasn't clear when the troops would arrive.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ SEIU California President David Huerta detained during L.A. ICE raids

    “What happened to me is not about me; This is about something much bigger,” he said in a statement from the hospital. “This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening. Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice.”

    The labor union said in a statement that Huerta was detained while “while exercising his First Amendment right to observe and document law enforcement activity.”

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ California’s Yurok Tribe gets back ancestral lands that were taken over 120 years ago - lonestarlive.com

    Roughly 73 square miles (189 square kilometers) of homelands have been returned to the Yurok, more than doubling the tribe’s land holdings, according to a deal announced Thursday. Completion of the land-back conservation deal along the lower Klamath River — a partnership with Western Rivers Conservancy and other environmental groups — is being called the largest in California history.

    The Yurok Tribe had 90% of its territory taken during the California Gold Rush in the mid-1800s, suffering massacres and disease from settlers.The Yurok Tribe had 90% of its territory taken during the California Gold Rush in the mid-1800s, suffering massacres and disease from settlers.

  • TruthOut ☛ ICE Arrests David Huerta, Beloved Labor Leader and SEIU California President

    Unions and allies in California and across the United States on Saturday are demanding the immediate release of David Huerta, president of SEIU California and SEIU-United Service Workers West, after the highly regarded labor leader was injured and then arrested while witnessing a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on Friday.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — European Accessibility Act: Navigating the Challenges of EAA Compliance

    For the last few years, achieving compliance with the European Accessibility Act (EAA) has been a strategic goal for many scholarly community organizations. While it is greatly satisfying to see organizations across our industry working very hard to meet the June 28, 2025 deadline, many have communicated that the process comes with its own set of challenges. Understanding these challenges and the strategies used to overcome them can provide valuable insights into the compliance process. With that in mind, we’d like to ask: What has been the most challenging aspect of achieving EAA compliance for your organization, and how have you been addressing it?

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ This is my classroom. ICE isn’t welcome here.

    If ICE comes to my classroom, the first thing I would do is start recording and ask my students to record me. I would then explain that this classroom is only for students enrolled in the class, and I would ask ICE agents to leave, something I would do anyway for anyone interrupting my class. I would also advise my students of their constitutional right to remain silent. I learned through the “Know Your Rights” workshops that, as citizens, we protect those who are not citizens by refusing to answer questions about our own citizenship status. We have also distributed the red rights cards on campus.

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ A Group of Child Laborers Going in for a 12-Hour Night Shift at a Mil in North Carolina, 1908

    While Lewis Hine was documenting these child laborers, many employers passed them off as at least 16 years old. In reality, children as young as eight were already hired for different jobs.

    Mr. Hine studied sociology and later on became a teacher. He encouraged his students to use photography as a tool for their education. Later on, he realized that photojournalism was his true calling.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • University of Michigan ☛ Turn off your playlist and turn on the radio

    For my birthday this year, I was gifted a retro-style Bluetooth speaker equipped with AM/FM radio, and it has lit up my life in a way that streaming never could.

  • The Washington Post ☛ White House security staff warned Musk’s Starlink is a security risk

    The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, said those who were managing White House communications systems were not informed in advance when DOGE [sic] representatives went to the roof of the adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building in February to install a terminal connecting users in the complex to Starlink satellites, which are owned by Musk’s private SpaceX rocket company.

    The people said those managing the systems weren’t able to monitor such connections to stop sensitive information from leaving the complex or [crackers] from breaking in.

  • [Repeat] Ruben Schade ☛ Australian Navy ship blocks Kiwi Internet

    I believe this maneuver is referred to in nautical IT circles as a Malcolm Turnbull. Sorry, New Zealand! Normally Australia keeps its subpar Internet shenanigans confined within our borders.

  • RNZ ☛ HMAS Canberra accidentally blocks wireless internet and radio services in New Zealand

    The radar interference triggered in-built switches in the devices that caused them to go offline, a safety precaution intended to prevent wireless signals from interfering with radar systems in New Zealand's airspace.

    Stuff reported that the outages were first raised with Radio Spectrum Management, an agency within the government's business ministry.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Patents

  • EFF ☛ 2025-06-03 [Older] The PERA and PREVAIL Acts Would Make Bad Patents Easier to Get—and Harder to Fight

• Copyrights

  • Futurism ☛ The Tech Industry Said It Was "Impossible" to Create AI Based Entirely on Ethically-Sourced Data, So These Scientists Proved Them Wrong in Spectacular Fashion

    That's because the text in the over eight terabyte dataset they put together, which they're calling the Common Pile v0.1, had to be manually cleaned up and reformatted to make it suitable for AI training, WaPo explains. Then there was the amazing amount of extra legwork that had to be done of doublechecking the copyright status of all the data, since many online works are improperly licensed.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Copyright Office Legal Battle to Run Into At Least July

    In any event, the high-stakes suit doesn’t appear to be trending towards an immediate resolution; it’ll be worth charting the above-described motion and responses throughout June.

    And in the bigger picture, as explored in detail by DMN Pro, there’s quite a lot riding on the Copyright Office’s future from an IP [sic] policy perspective. While nothing is set in stone, the available evidence suggests Perlmutter’s reinstatement might be unlikely.

  • Techdirt ☛ Calling All Cars Named Eleanor! The Ninth Circuit Has Decided You’re Not Copyrightable After All

    Given this state of affairs, then, it is particularly important to have some limits on whether a character would be entitled to copyright in the first place, because if even flimsy, ill-defined characters could be copyrightable then some copyright holder would be able to prevent anyone else from being able to express anything using characters that might share some of the same rough contours with a character already in existence. But before this new decision by the Ninth Circuit in Carroll Shelby Licensing v. Halicki there were far fewer limits.