Leftovers

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ There's an Invisible Line That Animals Don't Cross. Here's Why.

    The mysterious rules of nature.

  • Science Alert ☛ The Sun's Fury Is Making SpaceX Satellites Plummet From The Sky

    NASA scientists found a distinct pattern.

• Career/Education

  • New York Times ☛ Even Before Convicted Felon’s Visa Clampdown, U.S. Was Losing African Students

    African students have traded academic institutions in the West for Chinese alternatives. The Forrest Dump administration’s clampdown on international students and visas could accelerate the shift.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Millions sit China’s high-stakes university entrance exam

    The exam results are critical for gaining admission to university.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Millions of students sit China’s high-stakes university entrance exam

    Hopeful parents accompanied their teenage children to the gates of a busy Beijing test centre on Saturday, among millions of high school students across China sitting their first day of the highly competitive university entrance exam.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Building A Cyberpunk Modular Keyboard

    Perhaps you have a tilt towards glowing cyberpunk peripherals. Perhaps you’ve been hunting for a keyboard that you can position perfectly to suit both your left and right hands. In that case, you might just like this nifty design from [Modern Hobbyist].

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Kioxia works with Nvidia to prep XL-Flash SSD that's 3x faster than any SSD available — 10 million IOPS drive has peer-to-peer GPU connectivity for Hey Hi (AI) servers

    Kioxia is developing a 10M IOPS XL-Flash SSD with peer-to-peer GPU connectivity to eliminate bottlenecks and deliver low-latency, small-block access optimized for Hey Hi (AI) training and inference workloads.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Straits Times ☛ ST Picks: Paid less than unskilled labourers - The plight of India’s community health workers

  • Science Alert ☛ Confirmed: Breakfast Cereals Are Getting Sweeter And Less Nutritious

    The most important meal of the day?

  • NYPost ☛ Dangerous salmonella outbreak tied to eggs sends more than 20 people to hospital

    A salmonella outbreak linked to a large egg recall has made dozens of people sick in seven states in the West and Midwest, federal health officials said Saturday.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Indian cities keen to develop riverfronts but bogged down by polluted rivers

    A Singapore-style Cloud Forest is being proposed along Sabarmati River in Gujarat state.

• Proprietary

  • Salih Emin: uCareSystem 25.05.06: Because Even Your WSL Deserves a Spa Day! [Ed: Wasting time and effort grooming Microsoft instead of getting people off Windows]

  • New York Times ☛ Bill Atkinson, Who Made Computers Easier to Use, Is Dead at 74

    A designer for Apple, he created software that made it possible to display shapes, images and text on the screen and present a simulated “desktop.”

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Hackaday ☛ ChatGPT Patched A BIOS Binary, And It Worked

      [Ed: Hype and nonsense for Microsoft slop, more so on proprietary blackboxes]

      [devicemodder] wrote in to let us know they managed to install Linux Mint on their FRP-locked Panasonic Toughpad FZ-A2.

    • Licensing / Legal

      • Pivot to AI ☛ UK — High Court to lawyers: cut the ChatGPT or else

        Sharp and Johnson outline how to apply penalties for fake chatbot citations, depending on whether the lawyer intended to deceive the court, or they were just being an idiot. But a referral to their regulator is the very least penalty that’s likely to apply. Good.

      • Court House News ☛ UK judge warns of risk to justice after lawyers cited fake AI-generated cases in court

        In a ruling written by Sharp, the judges said that in a 90 million pound ($120 million) lawsuit over an alleged breach of a financing agreement involving the Qatar National Bank, a lawyer cited 18 cases that did not exist.

        The client in the case, Hamad Al-Haroun, apologized for unintentionally misleading the court with false information produced by publicly available AI tools, and said he was responsible, rather than his solicitor Abid Hussain.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • France24 ☛ US Supreme Court grants DOGE access to Social Security data on millions of Americans

      The US Supreme Court on Friday allowed members of the Convicted Felon administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to access Social Security Administration records containing confidential data on millions of Americans while a legal challenge plays out.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Straits Times ☛ Thailand, Cambodia reinforcing troops on disputed border after May skirmish, says Thai minister

    The Thai army said Cambodian soldiers and civilians had repeatedly made incursions into Thailand’s territory.

  • RFERL ☛ Iranian TV Alleges Massive Spy Operation Targeting Israeli Nuclear Sites

    Iran’s state media has reported what it describes as one of the largest intelligence operations in history against Israel, claiming Iranian intelligence obtained a vast cache of sensitive documents, including thousands allegedly related to Israeli nuclear projects, from inside Israeli territory.

  • New Yorker ☛ Iran’s Daughters of the Sea

    Forough Alaei’s stunning photographs of a community of fisherwomen on a remote island in the Persian Gulf.

  • New Yorker ☛ Why Ehud Olmert Thinks His Country Is Committing War Crimes

    The former Israeli Prime Minister explains how his view of the conflict in Gaza has shifted.

  • France24 ☛ Proud Boys members sue US govt over Jan. 6 prosecutions

    Five members of the Proud Boys, a far-right militant group, claim their constitutional rights were violated when they were prosecuted for their participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to a lawsuit filed Friday. The lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory damages plus 6% interest and $100 million plus interest in punitive damages.

  • NYPost ☛ IDF airstrike kills head of Palestinian jihadist group that helped Hamas kidnap, murder on Oct. 7

    The leader of a Palestinian jihadist group that was involved in Oct. 7 kidnappings and murders was killed in an Israeli airstrike, the Israel Defense Forces announced Saturday.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • New York Times ☛ How Russian Spies Are Analyzing Data From China’s WeChat App

      Moscow has long been suspicious of foreign messaging apps. WeChat’s weak encryption makes it vulnerable.

    • New York Times ☛ How The Times Obtained Secret Russian Intelligence Documents

      A directive from Russia’s domestic security service was part of a cache that was advertised online by a cybercrime group.

    • NYPost ☛ Germany plans to revamp shelter system in case of Russian attack as fears of a major war rise

      Germany is planning to expand its network of bomb-proof bunkers and shelters amid worries that Russia could attack another European country in the next four years, according to reports.

    • New York Times ☛ Russia Pummels Kharkiv With Drones and Bombs, Ukraine Says

      Air assaults on Saturday killed at least four people. Kharkiv’s mayor described an overnight strike as “the most powerful attack” since the beginning of the war.

    • RFERL ☛ Russia, Ukraine Trade Accusations Over Delays In Prisoner Exchange

      Ukrainian officials have rejected Russian accusations that Kyiv is stalling the exchange of prisoners of war and the repatriation of fallen soldiers’ bodies, calling on Moscow to stop “playing dirty games.”

    • LRT ☛ ‘The president is not a tsar’: Ethnic Lithuanians from Russia stuck in citizenship limbo

      Following Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, ethnic Lithuanians from Russia and Belarus have been stuck in limbo waiting for the country’s citizenship.

    • France24 ☛ Russian strikes on Ukraine's Kharkiv kill at least 3, injures several

      A large Russian drone-and-missile attack targeted Ukraine's eastern city of Kharkiv on Saturday, killing at least three people and injuring 21, local officials said. The barrage — the latest in near daily widescale attacks — included aerial glide bombs that have become part of a fierce Russian onslaught in the three-year war.

    • France24 ☛ Several killed in Russian strike on Ukraine

      Russia launched an intense missile and drone barrage at the Ukrainian capital Kyiv in the early hours of Friday, killing at least five people, Ukrainian officials said, as powerful explosions reverberated across the country.

    • The Strategist ☛ Ukraine’s drone attack offers fearful lessons for a Chinese invasion force

      Ukraine’s massive drone strike against Russian air bases on 1 June should reverberate across all theaters of conflict.

    • New York Times ☛ Russian Spies Are Suspicious of China, Even as Putin and Pooh-tin Grow Close

      Russia’s spy hunters are increasingly worried about China’s espionage, even as the two countries grow closer.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Straits Times ☛ China issues rare earth licences to suppliers of top 3 US automakers, sources say

      Suppliers of General Motors, Ford and Jeep-maker Stellantis received clearance for some export licences.

    • The Straits Times ☛ India, central Asian countries express interest in joint rare earths exploration

      China is curbing exports of rare earth alloys, mixtures and magnets, spooking many industries.

    • The Straits Times ☛ China says it may speed up rare earths application approvals from EU

      A deal on duties affecting imports of European brandy has also been reached.

    • Hackaday ☛ Scratch-built Electric Boat Shows Off Surprising Speed

      Electric cars are everywhere these days, but what about boats? Looking to go green on the water, [NASAT] put together this impressively nimble boat propelled by a pair of brushless motors.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Science Alert ☛ The Genetic Mystery of Why Cats Purr May Finally Be Solved

      The sound of them buttering you up.

• Finance

  • Lee Yingtong Li ☛ A dynamic, extensible approach to implementing double-entry bookkeeping

    Motivation

    Double-entry bookkeeping is the foundation of modern accounting. I have recently been developing DrCr, open-source software for double-entry bookkeeping, which has proved fruitful – a further article about the software will be forthcoming. In simple terms, generating accounting reports from double-entry transaction data can be sketched out as follows: [...]

  • International Business Times ☛ 2025-06-04 [Older] Was Nvidia Always Destined to Dethrone Microsoft as the World's Top Tech Titan? [Ed: Fake valuations based on hype]

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ In Pictures: Hong Kong police deploy armoured vehicle, take people away on Tiananmen crackdown anniversary

    Police have deployed an armoured vehicle in Hong Kong’s commercial heart, amidst an ongoing heavy security presence on the 36th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Pro Publica ☛ How Richard L. Bean Stayed in Power at a Tennessee Youth Detention Center Despite Scandals

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Straits Times ☛ North Korea hit by major internet outage, likely due to internal cause

    North Korea’s main news websites and its Foreign Ministry internet site were inaccessible.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• KOL467 | Discussing Hey Hi (AI) and IP [sic] with Juani from Argentina

  I was asked one Juani (@witheredsummer), an Argentinian Voluntarist, on Twitter and then later via email, to review his draft article "Ideas Are Free: A Case Against Intellectual Property" (text below) (I note that perhaps ironically, this title is almost identical to one of my own previous publications/speeches, Ideas are Free: The Case Against Intellectual Property: or, How Libertarians Went Wrong). I told him it was too long for me to fisk, got Grok to analyze it (see below), and told him to read up on some of my work and review the analysis, so that we could have a more productive conversation about it, and which I could also at least record for my podcast. This is our discussion.

• Patents

  • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Discovering the Crown Jewels: Irreversible Harm in the Digital Age

    Micron Technology has petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus to reverse a discovery order requiring the company to produce 73 pages of its most sensitive source code in paper form to Chinese state-owned semiconductor manufacturer Yangtze Memory Technologies Company (YMTC). The case, In re Micron Technology Inc., presents significant questions about the enforcement of protective order terms and the consideration of national security concerns in patent monopoly litigation discovery.