Leftovers

• APNIC ☛ Acting on Member and community feedback from the first half of 2025

  In the first half of 2025 alone, thousands of feedback items were reviewed and analysed. From this, five major themes have emerged as priorities for action.

• Robert Birming ☛ The beauty of blogging

  I’ve been blogging for about 20 years now — give or take a couple of breaks along the way — and I can honestly say it’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever stuck with.

• Rachel ☛ Feedback: working state, mobile rollovers, and IP filtering

  The answer is: back when I used to do that kind of thing, I found it very useful to have a "MMDD" (hey, I'm in the US, so just pretend it's the back half of an 8601 number... you'll see why...) directory, and inside of it, I'd have some short names for whatever I was dealing with that day.

• Mat Duggan ☛ What Does a Post-Google Internet Look Like

  With the rise of the [Internet] came the need to find information more quickly. The concept of search engines came into this space to fill this need, with a relatively basic initial design.

• Greg Newman ☛ Emacs Carnival 2025-07: Writing Experience

  A blog carnival is a fun way to tie together a community with shared writing prompts, and marvel at all the creative interpretations of the topic of the month. I’ve provided a couple of interpretations above, but you may think of something else entirely. That’s amazing, roll with it, that’s what makes this fun!

• Derek Kędziora ☛ Also done with second braining

  This all aligns with my other goal of simply looking at screens less.

• Annie Mueller ☛ Dead happy

  The deep, underwater, dark trough of the wave makes the crest possible. Every part is essential.

• Science

  • Wired ☛ Student Solves a Long-Standing Problem About the Limits of Addition

    In a 1965 paper, the prolific mathematician Paul Erdős asked a simple question about how common sum-free sets are. But for decades, progress on the problem was negligible.

  • [Old] Filippo Valsorda ☛ Why We Don’t Generate Elliptic Curves Every Day

    Picking trustworthy standard parameters is not prohibitively hard1, and most importantly it is a job for the relatively few people whose job is specifying cryptography, instead of falling on the many many more who use it. Given the opportunity to make some people do a lot of extra work to save a lot of people some work, we should always take it.

• Career/Education

  • International Business Times ☛ The 5 Interview Questions You Should Never Answer—And Why They're Illegal in the US

    Job seekers asked illegal questions during an interview have the right to file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) or seek legal advice, according to Joseph Osborne from Florida-based law firm, Osbourne and Francis.

    Here are five common questions you should never be asked under US employment law.

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ Do Freelance Consultants Earn More Than Their Employee Counterparts?

    That means I am not interested in a brut salary or a mean yearly salary: they are useless, especially in Belgium. How much do I earn is a dubious question: is that brut or net? Is that pure salary or with extra benefits? Are we talking company car as well? My question should encompass them all, not provide a very fragmented answer that still does not give a clear overview.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ IndieWeb Carnival: Take Two

    Looking backwards, wishing things were different, seems like a wasted opportunity to me. Because life’s unfolding right in front of you at this very moment and opportunities to do things differently are waiting ahead.

  • Westenberg ☛ Smart People Don't Chase Goals; They Create Limits

    That was the moment I began to question the entire architecture of ambition. Not whether it worked, but whether it asked the right things of a person. Whether a life could be constructed from milestones rather than methods, from outcomes rather than orientation.

    Lately, I’ve paid closer attention to the boundaries that shape my work. The negative space. The rules. The constraints. I stopped asking where I wanted to go and started asking what I was unwilling to violate in order to get there. I noticed a shift: The work got harder, yes. But also clearer.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • LRT ☛ Alcohol consumption trends in Lithuania: less drinking but more drunk driving

    Legal alcohol consumption in Lithuania dropped to its lowest level in a decade in 2024, according to new data presented to the Seimas Committee on Health Affairs. However, the number of alcohol-related deaths rose, highlighting a concerning public health trend.

  • France24 ☛ France bans smoking in parks, beaches and bus stops

    France has struggled to kick its smoking habit. A new public health decree published Saturday aims to change that. In the coming days, smoking will be banned in all French parks and sports venues, at beaches and bus stops, in a perimeter around all schools, and anywhere children could gather in public.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Thailand warns of hand, foot and mouth disease outbreak

    The country's Ministry of Public Health has detected a significant rise in HFMD cases.

  • 404 Media ☛ Gone Fishin': 404 Media Summer Break 2025

    This week, we’re going to try something new at 404 Media. Which is to say we’re going to try doing nothing at all. The TL;DR is that 404 Media is taking the week off, so this is the only email you’ll get from us this week. No posts on the website (except a scheduled one for the podcast). We will be back with your regularly scheduled dystopia Monday, July 7.

  • Kevin Wammer ☛ On FOMO and Smartphones

    And we're done. After 30 days, Experimental June is ending.

    In case you forgot what this is all about, here are the rules I wanted to follow: [...]

• Proprietary

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Tanggula 'Free Forever' IPTV Boxes Keep Costing Sellers Big Money

    With an upfront payment starting around $200, buyers can pick up a set-top box and an IPTV subscription that lasts forever, at least as far as the sales pitch is concerned. Thanks to pervasive affiliate marketing, one of the most visible brands right now is Tanggula. Less visible are mounting lawsuits against Tanngula vendors, including a new complaint that strikes beyond local sellers.

  • Macworld ☛ A cheap MacBook powered by an iPhone chip? Here's how it could work

    According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple plans to release a brand-new MacBook model that’s designed for the low-cost market. The laptop will not use an M-series chip, but an A18 Pro, the same chip found in the iPhone 16 Pro. Kuo believes it will have a 13-inch display and come in blue, pink, silver, and yellow.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Apple UPS madness

    Any ideas? For I would like my computer to function on backup power in the future. That would be nice.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Register UK ☛ AI jobs are skyrocketing, but you don't need to be an expert

      It could just be the new 'proficient with MS Word'

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Are we already paying for "Free" AI photography? The hidden costs of generative AI laid bare | Digital Camera World

      Generative AI, like AI processing in general, takes a lot of processing power. So, like, whatever… who cares? Tech gets better all the time, computers get faster, nothing bad has happened, it’s a big tech problem not mine, right?

      Well, hold on. Current estimates suggest that an AI processing search query takes about ten times the electricity of a regular query, and that it’s just the energy requirements we need to think about but the land, water and materials needed for the construction of semiconductor plants and data centers. This is according to a June 2024 analysis from Barclays Research, which suggests annual US data center power demands could grow from 14%-21% every year to 2030. US data-centre demand could triple by 2030, from 150-175 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2023 to as much as 560 TWh – equivalent to 13% of the current US electricity demand.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ ‘AI is no longer optional’ — Microsoft admits AI doesn’t help at work

      Let’s be clear: this is a confession of abject failure.

      Microsoft’s AI tools don’t work. Microsoft AI doesn’t make you more effective. Microsoft AI won’t do the job better.

      If it did, Microsoft staff would be using it already. The competition inside Microsoft is vicious. If AI would get them ahead of the other guy, they’d use it.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ AI won't live on publisher sites

      Although I’m always in favor of experimentation, I don’t think most of these ideas will succeed as long-term products. I’m particularly bearish on interfaces that embed chatbots (whether they’re called that or not) in news websites. I’d like to explore why I think that — even in a world where AI becomes a core part of how we use computers, which is far from a given.

    • Myst Developer Cyan Worlds Holds More Layoffs

      Just three months after its first round of layoffs, Cyan Worlds , the developer behind Myst, have announced more employees were being let go.

      In a post on social media over the weekend, the studio said it was “sorry to say” that it had another round of redundancies.

      “We’ve updated our previously shared sheet to reflect folks still (or newly) looking for opportunities,” they said while sharing a spreadsheet with employee information.

  • Social Control Media

    • Omicron Limited ☛ How social media is changing the game for athletes

      Amateurism was traditionally defined as the notion of athletes playing sport for the love of it rather than for financial reasons. Historically, it was created by upper-class elite groups as a way to exclude others. Today, its definition continues to be contested, especially since many athletes have been exploited by amateurism.

      The concept of NIL (name, image and likeness) has only exacerbated this by encouraging athletes to promote themselves on social media. Some sport organizations now even factor social media presence into recruitment decisions.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • FSF ☛ Defending Savannah from DDoS attacks

      Savannah is under heavy attack, likely from one or more organizations using a massive botnet to build a dataset for training large language models (LLMs). Since January 2025, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack has been underway. With metrics for our IP blocklist reaching five million in February 2025. In this article, we will introduce Savannah and some tools and techniques that the Savannah hackers and FSF system administrators use to mitigate DDoS attacks against GNU resources and the FSF network. This series of attacks is not limited to Savannah: staff and volunteers have read about similar attacks against other software forges including Sourceware, Pagure, GitLab instances, SourceHut, and Codeberg, as well as Gitea and Forgejo instances. We hope this article can help others fight these attacks as well.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • The Register UK ☛ US shuts down a string of North Korean IT worker scams

      The feds say that they uncovered [PDF] the North Korean IT staff working at over 100 US companies using fictitious or stolen identities and not only drawing salaries, but also stealing secret data for delivery to Pyongyang's servers. They were also on the lookout for virtual currency. In one case, a fake worker is accused of stealing around $740,000 in digicash from their US employer.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Arrest, seizures in latest U.S. operation against North Korean IT workers

      The workers obtained employment at more than 100 U.S. companies using stolen and fake identities, costing them millions in damages and losses. The crackdown also included the seizure of websites and searches of 29 known or suspected “laptop farms” across 16 states that hosted victim company-provided laptops used to deceive companies.

    • Wired ☛ Identities of More Than 80 Americans Stolen for North Korean IT Worker Scams

      On Monday, the Department of Justice announced a sweeping operation to crack down on US-based elements of the North Korean remote IT workers scheme, including indictments against two Americans who the government says were involved in the operations—one of whom the FBI has arrested. Authorities also searched 29 “laptop farms” across 16 states allegedly used to receive and host the PCs the North Korean workers remotely access, and seized around 200 of those computers as well as 21 web domains and 29 financial accounts that had received the revenue the operation generated. The DOJ’s announcement and indictments also reveal how the North Koreans didn’t merely create fake IDs to insinuate themselves into Western tech firms, according to authorities, but allegedly stole the identities of “more than 80 US persons” to impersonate them in jobs at more than a hundred US companies and funnel money to the Kim regime.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Scammers have a new tactic: impersonating DOGE [sic]

      Scammers are impersonating the Department [sic] of Government Efficiency in an effort to steal personal information and possibly take advantage of people who believe they’ll receive direct compensation from the Elon Musk-created group’s supposed efforts to cut down on waste, fraud and abuse.

      An email reviewed by Scoop News Group, and subsequently analyzed by experts at the cybersecurity firm Proofpoint, revealed a new scheme that involved scammers pretending to be a DOGE [sic] agent looking to steal personal information.

    • The Record ☛ Porn-site age checks will be harder to fight after ruling on Texas law, experts say

      The court essentially ruled that the Texas law does not violate the First Amendment by interfering with access to protected speech.

      The decision will have a significant impact elsewhere in the U.S., said Hayden Schottlaender, a partner specializing in state and federal regulation of technology companies at Perkins Coie, because the court said Texas’ law is “materially similar” to those in at least 21 other states.

      Only one sentence in the court’s majority opinion obliquely refers to data privacy and potential breaches, saying that website operators and the third-party services they work with “have every incentive to assure users of their privacy.”

    • Canada ☛ Canada rescinds digital services tax to advance broader trade negotiations with the United States

      The DST was announced in 2020 to address the fact that many large technology companies operating in Canada may not otherwise pay tax on revenues generated from Canadians. Canada’s preference has always been a multilateral agreement related to digital services taxation. While Canada was working with international partners, including the United States, on a multilateral agreement that would replace national digital services taxes, the DST was enacted to address the aforementioned taxation gap.

      The June 30, 2025 collection will be halted, and Minister Champagne will soon bring forward legislation to rescind the Digital Services Tax Act.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Canadian Government Caves on Digital Services Tax After Years of Dismissing the Risks of Trade Retaliation

      At every step, there were better options. This year, the likelihood that the DST would come to a boil was obvious to anyone who was paying attention. But rather than following the UK strategy, which managed to salvage a smaller DST (2% rather than 3%) as part of a bigger agreement that includes a commitment to support UK digital access to the U.S. market and to negotiate a larger digital trade deal, Canadian officials seemingly assumed that the U.S. was bluffing and would not retaliate.

    • Michael Geist ☛ The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 238: David Fraser on Why Bill C-2’s Lawful Access Powers May Put Canadians’ Digital Security At Risk

      The Bill C-2 lawful access focus has thus far primarily centred on the creation of a new warrantless information demand power and the expansion of production orders to access information. Those provisions are found in Part 14 of the bill, but there is also a Part 15 that requires closer scrutiny. It grants law enforcement access to electronic service provider networks, including inspection, oversight, and demands regarding the equipment on their networks. At issue is everything from the use of end-to-end encryption to notifications of network vulnerabilities.

    • Privacy Guides ☛ Privacy is Also Protecting the Data of Others

      If you care about privacy rights, you must also care for the data of the people around you. To make privacy work, we need to develop a culture that normalizes caring for everyone's data, not just our own. Privacy cannot solely be a personal responsibility, data privacy is team work.

      Whatever measures and tools you use to protect your own data, you would never be able to protect it fully without the collaboration of others.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton

• Defence/Aggression

  • Katharine Hayhoe ☛ Are we really doomed?

    When I get these kinds of comments, I usually reply with a link to one of my favorite Global Weirding episodes, “Is it too late?”. But I made that video almost eight years ago. What’s changed since then? Has the clock finally run out?

    That’s why I’ve made this special edition of Talking Climate—to take a fresh look at the rise of climate doomerism, explore what the science says today, and remind us all (myself included) why there’s still every reason to act.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ An Analysis of Links From The White House’s “Wire” Website

    As a self-professed connoisseur of websites and link blogs, this got me thinking: “I wonder what kind of links they’re considering as ‘real news’ and what they’re linking to?”

    So I decided to do quick analysis using Quadratic, a programmable spreadsheet where you can write code and return values to a 2d interface of rows and columns.

• Environment

  • New York Times ☛ Europe Heat Wave Drives Record-High Temperatures, Prompting Health Alerts

    Extreme heat has gripped Europe with record-high temperatures, health alerts and wildfires, from France and Spain to Greece.

  • The Nation ☛ Bill Moyers Helped Break the Media’s Climate Silence

    In recent days, the journalism world has been paying tribute to Bill Moyers, and rightly so. Moyers died last Thursday, June 26, at the age of 91. Obituaries and tributes have cited his work as the White House press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s and his subsequent decades of TV journalism at PBS and CBS, where his eyewitness reports, probing interviews, and incisive commentary on a vast range of subjects were lauded as equaling Edward R. Murrow’s.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ More Than One-Third of Tuvalu's Population Has Applied for a 'Climate Visa' to Relocate to Australia

    “Internal relocation in Tuvalu is not an option; we are totally flat,” Feleti Teo, Tuvalu’s prime minister, said at the United Nations Oceans Conference on June 12, per CNN’s Angus Watson. “There is no option to move inland or move to higher ground, because there is no higher ground.”

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Vintage Everyday ☛ Peel Trident: The Tiny Car With a Space-Age Dream

      The Peel Trident is a microcar produced by the Peel Engineering Company on the Isle of Man between 1965 and 1966. As one of the smallest cars ever made, it was designed for urban convenience, boasting a futuristic, almost toy-like appearance with its clear bubble dome roof, compact body, and seating for two (or one adult and a child).

    • [Old] BBC ☛ Warning AI industry could use as much energy as the Netherlands

      The artificial intelligence (AI) industry could consume as much energy as a country the size of the Netherlands by 2027, a new study warns.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Save This Species: Owston’s Civet

• Finance

  • The Straits Times ☛ South Korea’s President Lee names finance minister, makes other picks

    South Korean presidents may appoint their nominees even without parliament approval.

  • We. Communications lays off 2% of global staff

  • Manton Reece ☛ What did it cost? Everything

    There are several good segments in today’s interview with Matt Mullenweg. My favorite might be the exchange with Nilay Patel around whether Tumblr is profitable yet. It actually lines up well with my post from last year, I support the mad king.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • New York Times ☛ Republicans Seek Votes for Convicted Felon Policy Bill as Senate Begins Debate

    New official estimates showed the bill would swell deficits while slashing health programs and insurance coverage, posing potential problems as the legislation moved forward in the Senate.

  • Wired ☛ Here Is Everyone Mark Zuckerberg Has Hired So Far for Meta’s ‘Superintelligence’ Team

    Over the past few months, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on a recruiting frenzy to poach some of the most sought-after talent [sic] in AI. The social media giant has invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and hired Alexandr Wang, its CEO, to run Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. News of the memo was first reported by Bloomberg.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ How Cybersecurity Fears Affect Confidence in Voting Systems

    American democracy runs on trust, and that trust is cracking.

    Nearly half of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, question whether elections are conducted fairly. Some voters accept election results only when their side wins. The problem isn’t just political polarization—it’s a creeping erosion of trust in the machinery of democracy itself.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Etiquette of Collapse

    I’ve been doing a bit of writing about my unvarnished views of the moral bankruptcy of the oligarchs who have seized our public sphere—those who treat nuclear war as entertainment content while hawking luxury goods, Supreme Court justices who create doctrines of presumptive presidential constitutionality, federal police conducting explosive raids on family homes while children sleep inside. I’ve used words like “evil” to describe people who systematically dismantle democratic institutions for personal profit. I’ve reminded the powerful that their power, like all power, is temporary.

    The response has been illuminating—not because of disagreement with my analysis, but because of the exquisite moral priorities revealed by those who rushed to scold me for my tone.

  • Matt Webb ☛ AI could be conscious tomorrow and we wouldn’t care (Interconnected)

    But because (Eurasian) humanity already had its Copernican moment, tens of thousands of years ago, animism means that humans have always been one mere consciousness among thousands.

    Humanity has never felt alone and this is as humble as we get.

  • Krebs On Security ☛ Senator Chides FBI for Weak Advice on Mobile Security

    But according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the advice the FBI provided to Senate staffers was largely limited to remedial tips, such as not clicking on suspicious links or attachments, not using public wifi networks, turning off bluetooth, keeping phone software up to date, and rebooting regularly.

    “This is insufficient to protect Senate employees and other high-value targets against foreign spies using advanced cyber tools,” Wyden wrote in a letter sent today to FBI Director Kash Patel. “Well-funded foreign intelligence agencies do not have to rely on phishing messages and malicious attachments to infect unsuspecting victims with spyware. Cyber mercenary companies sell their government customers advanced ‘zero-click’ capabilities to deliver spyware that do not require any action by the victim.”

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Press Gazette ☛ Former Newsnight presenter warns of misinformation deluge

      Speaking at the University of Leeds, where Esler studied for his MA, he said the “toleration of lying” has resulted in society being “deluged by misinformation, disinformation, deliberate falsehoods, deceit and mendacity.”

      He added: “Those in leadership positions attacking or undermining the truth has led to the normalisation of lying in not just our public life, in that of democracies elsewhere including the United States.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Record ☛ Cloudflare confirms Russia restricting access to services amid free [Internet] crackdown

    In November, Roskomnadzor blocked thousands of websites using Cloudflare’s Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), a privacy-enhancing feature that conceals which websites users are attempting to access. The agency claimed the technology enabled users to bypass government censorship and violated Russian law.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ Prosecution Against Journalist For Allegedly Violating Wiretapping Law Endangers Right To Gather News

  • Project Censored ☛ The Right to Criticize: Honoring Independent Journalism at the Izzy Awards

    The Izzy awards are named after the famous and indeed infamous and intrepid muckraker I.F. ‘Izzy’ Stone…

    So this week, we’re featuring remarks by presenters, journalists and media scholars as well as remarks by this year’s winners. Project Censored director and radio show host Mickey Huff was the host of the awards show. He is also the distinguished director of the Park Center for Independent Media.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ Supreme Court Upholds Universal Service Fund

    The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the funding mechanism for the FCC’s $9 billion Universal Service Fund (USF) used to subsidize low-income phone service, rural broadband, and school, library and healthcare telecommunications connectivity. In a 6-3 decision, the court reversed a lower court ruling that the USF contribution mechanism is unconstitutional. The court also rejected a conservative group’s claims that Congress delegated away too much power in setting it up, reported The Hill.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Quanta Magazine ☛ Researchers Uncover Hidden Ingredients Behind AI Creativity

    Now two physicists have made a startling claim: It’s the technical imperfections in the denoising process itself that leads to the creativity of diffusion models. In a paper that will be presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning 2025, the duo developed a mathematical model of trained diffusion models to show that their so-called creativity is in fact a deterministic process — a direct, inevitable consequence of their architecture.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Supreme Court Grants Cox's Bid to Reexamine Liability for Pirating Subscribers

    The U.S. Supreme Court announced today that it will take up a landmark piracy liability lawsuit between Cox Communications and several record labels. The Court granted Cox's petition for a writ of certiorari. It review the contributory infringement standards that determine how ISPs should respond to pirating subscribers, as well as the associated willfulness finding. The record labels' cross-petition was denied.