Leftovers

• Kansas Reflector ☛ Pop, soda or coke? The fizzy history behind America’s favorite linguistic debate

  As a linguist who studies American dialects, I’m less interested in this regional divide and far more fascinated by the unexpected history behind how a fizzy “health” drink from the early 1800s spawned the modern soft drink’s many names and iterations.

• [Old] The University of Helsinki ☛ High-brow cultural journals and low-brow political sketches

  Leino stayed in Helsinki during the Civil War in 1918. The war shocked him to the core and he realised that he could not identify with either side in the conflict. Having been a firm advocate of Finnish independence for years, the Civil War came as a severe mental blow for Leino. Maria-Liisa Nevala says that he never fully recovered from this. Leino’s career in journalism ended in that year.

• Terence Eden ☛ Making My Own Hacktoberfest T-Shirts

  Between 2014 and 2022, DigitalOcean sent free t-shirts to developers who completed the Hacktoberfest challenge. For entirely sensible reasons related to sustainability and spammy entrants, they stopped doing physical merchandise in 2023.

• A Simple Website ☛ A simple website

  This website is a trip down memory lane. I'm not trying to tell you to stop modern web development. This website uses technologies not available at the time the content here is about. It works on mobile (tested in Firefox for Android) but you miss out on the background image.

• James G ☛ It’s possible, maybe useful; but is it necessary?

  This experience has me thinking about the role of technology in our lives. It’s possible for me to take pictures of art, and to recognise them with my phone. It’s maybe even useful, too. But is it necessary? I think I’d much rather do a tour of an art gallery and get up close with pieces and to learn as I go. To the extent I can keep my phone in my pocket during the gallery experience, the better, I think.

• Career/Education

  • CBC ☛ 2025-06-27 [Older] Ontario takes control of 4 more school boards over 'mismanagement': minister

  • Luigi Mozzillo ☛ Where we stand · mzll

    My other former employees have more or less all found an alternative in a relatively short time, and this gives me some relief. Not all of them are in a healthy company, and not all of them have yet landed in a team that values them, but at least they are not stuck—both economically and professionally.

• Hardware

  • CBC ☛ 2025-06-28 [Older] Canada orders China's Hikvision to close Canadian operations over security concerns

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Spielberg vs Lynch – two very different perspectives on the film vs digital photography debate | Digital Camera World

    David Lynch says film is a "completely ridiculous dinosaur", Steven Spielberg says it's a "chemical miracle"

  • Sebin ☛ NVIDIA is full of shit

    Since the disastrous launch of the RTX 50 series, NVIDIA has been unable to escape negative headlines: scalper bots are snatching GPUs away from consumers before official sales even begin, power connectors continue to melt, with no fix in sight, marketing is becoming increasingly deceptive, GPUs are missing processing units when they leave the factory, and the drivers, for which NVIDIA has always been praised, are currently falling apart. And to top it all off, NVIDIA is becoming increasingly insistent that media push a certain narrative when reporting on their hardware.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-06-27 [Older] 1 in 6 cancer drugs in four African nations are defective

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-06-29 [Older] Nearly 20% of cancer drugs defective in 4 African nations

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-06-29 [Older] South Africa's new plant breeders' rights system comes into force, with notable parallels to the EU system

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-07-02 [Older] South Africa Reports H5N1 Bird Flu on Poultry Farms, International Agency Says

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Redistribution of wealth via healthcare

    The bill, which was just signed into law, adds massively to the federal deficit, increases spending, reduces revenue by lowering taxes, so they had to at least pretend to be doing something to offset those new deficits, so they are spinning things by saying they're going to save money on Medicaid. As Yglesias points out, you don't "collect" Medicaid, it helps you pay your medical bills, and indeed the vast majority of healthy young people don't rack up medical bills, so there's not much savings to be had there. The way this saves money is by taking people who were getting medical care and either having them stop receiving that care or make them pay out of pocket, something they literally can not do without going into debilitating debt.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Rewiring the brain

    It’s been almost a week since my June experiment ended and I’m starting to notice some interesting and unexpected long-lasting effects. I’m saying unexpected because this was not some crazy long experiment—28 days doesn’t seem like a lot to me—and yet it was apparently long enough to cause some rewiring in my brain.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Lead! It's what lungs crave!

    One of the disposable e-cigarettes studied released more lead during a day's use than nearly 20 packs of traditional cigarettes: [...]

  • Arne Bahlo ☛ Reclaiming my attention

    Our attention is being stolen. We’re slowly losing the ability to concentrate, not only because of TikTok, but also because we constantly have access to easy consumption. It’s digital fast food.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ ChatGPT's mental health costs are adding up

    Meetali Jain, a lawyer and founder of the Tech Justice Law project, has heard from more than a dozen people in the past month who have “experienced some sort of psychotic break or delusional episode because of engagement with ChatGPT and now also with Google Gemini”.

• Proprietary

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Hola VPN in Zimbabwe: Drains Data Bundles in Background

    Hola is a different kind of VPN. It doesn’t run on its own servers. Instead, it runs on you and the millions of other people using the free version.

    It’s a peer-to-peer network, which means when you access the internet through Hola, your traffic might be going through some guy in Brazil. And some lady in India might be routing her traffic through you.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Bombshell Research Finds a Staggering Number of Scientific Papers Were AI-Generated [Ed: 'Impure' (slop, fake, chatbot-generated) papers will face the same fate as slopfarms. Once caught, nobody will trust the journals and authors again. This is an opportunity for ethical ones to rise while the rest fall.]

      With roughly 1.5 million papers indexed each year on the academic journal database PubMed, that means that at least 200,000 of those papers could have been written with the help of LLMs. That whopping figure may, as the NYT notes, be conservative when accounting for any intentional editing of AI-generated text.

    • The Atlantic ☛ My Road Trip With the Velvet Sundown

      But looking toward the blushing sky ahead of me, I realized that I didn’t even want this music to be art, or to feel that I was communing with its makers. I simply hoped to think and feel as little as possible while piloting my big car through the empty evening of America. This music—perhaps most music now—is not for dancing or even for airports; it’s for the void. I pressed “Play” and gripped the wheel and accelerated back onto the tollway, as the machines lulled me into oblivion.

    • Howard Oakley ☛ A brief history of Internet search

      Google started the transition to using Artificial Intelligence in 2024, and that September introduced Audio Overview to provide spoken summaries of documents. This year has brought full AI overviews, in which multiple pages are summarised succinctly, and presented alongside links to the pages used to produce them. Although some can be useful, many are vague and waffly, and some blatantly spurious.

    • Adnan Siddiqi ☛ Writing Modular Prompts

      Modular prompting is a technique to divide a prompt into multiple sections. These sections are usually interlinked with each other, either referring back or forward. Usually, people write prompts like this, regardless of whether it is a very raw prompt or a one-shot prompt, or COT.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Google Veo 3 fails, week 3 — fail harder with a vengeance

      As we’ve seen over the past two weeks, Veo will not take direction. It has no consistency. It keeps making stuff up.

      When AI promoters tell you that video generators will replace human actors any moment, they are lying.

    • Drew Breunig ☛ Cat Facts Cause Context Confusion

      One of the ways contexts fail is context confusion, “when superfluous content in the context is used by the model to generate a low-quality response.” In the context fails post, we illustrated this by showing how too many tool descriptions can overwhelm the model, causing it to fail benchmarks it would normally ace.

      But a much better example is making the rounds: CatAttack, an LLM attack that uses seemingly harmless phrases to confuse language models.

    • Justin Duke ☛ VC-subsidized tokens

      As always, I remain particularly interested in the field of open source models, not just for the obvious moral and custodial benefits but increasingly for the economic benefits. If you subscribe to the broad idea that open source models will lag a year or so behind frontier models, a lot of these conversations shift towards discussions of trading price for speed, rather than accuracy. (And for much of my Claude Coding, which is of the genre “hey, go run off and do this thing that I thought of while walking the dog”, I do not care about the wall clock time so much as I care about the quality of the final artifact.)

    • Science Alert ☛ ChatGPT: 5 Surprising Truths About How AI Chatbots Actually Work

      Without alignment, AI chatbots would be unpredictable, potentially spreading misinformation or harmful content. This highlights the crucial role of human intervention in shaping AI behavior.

  • Social Control Media

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-06-29 [Older] For women in Pakistan, social media can be dangerous

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] 'Manosphere': When influencers normalize misogyny for clicks

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • NL Times ☛ Survey: war, cyberattacks top security concerns; support for European cooperation grows

      A Deloitte Netherlands press release revealed that war and cyberattacks are seen as the greatest threats to security in the Netherlands, according to a survey conducted in June 2025 by PanelWizard among 1,096 Dutch citizens.

      The survey found that 32.7 percent of respondents consider war the primary threat to Dutch security, closely followed by cyberattacks at 29.9 percent. Disinformation, defined as the intentional spread of misleading information often by foreign actors, was cited by 16 percent.

• Security

  • Make Tech Easier ☛ 2025-07-02 [Older] Protect Your Phone From Photos Stealing Malware Like SparkKitty

  • The Age AU ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] Serious cybersecurity risks identified in pathology provider audit

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] More trafficking victims forced into online scam hubs

    • Android Authority ☛ Android 16 can warn you that you might be connected to a fake cell tower - Android Authority

      Android 16's new "network notification" feature can potentially expose when your device is connected to a fake cell tower

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ New Xfinity router motion-detecting feature stokes privacy fears — feature powered by Wi-Fi signals

      Xfinity's new Wi-Fi Motion feature can detect movements in your home and share that data with you, not only by selling it to advertisers but also with government agencies without warrants.

    • Futurism ☛ Scam Altman Just Got Roasted Right to His Face

      Rather than backing down, Roose went all in on Altman.

      "Well thank you for your views," the journalist and podcaster said, "and I'll just say it must be really hard when someone does something with your data you don't want them to."

      Though Altman's opening bid garnered its share of giggles from the audience, Roose's drive-by clapback elicited shrieks of mirth: it's true, after all, that a wave of enormously valuable tech companies led by OpenAI ingested everybody's data to train their AI, without asking permission from anyone — so the hypocrisy of Altman suddenly caring about privacy is pretty striking.

    • PC Gamer ☛ OpenAI execs whine about the New York Times lawsuit and user privacy during live NYT event, get roasted by NYT journalist: 'It must be really hard when someone does something with your data you don't want them to' | PC Gamer

      The NYT's lawsuit against OpenAI alleges that the AI company used the traditional media company's articles in the training of its large language models. Altman's spikiness relates to a new development in which the NYT's lawyers asked that OpenAI be compelled to retain consumer ChatGPT data and API customer data.

    • Bert Hubert ☛ Possible End to End to End Encryption: Come Help

      tl;dr: The European Commission is honestly asking for experts to advise them on ways to institute “effective and lawful access to data for law enforcement”. If you are an expert, I urge you to apply to join this group. You have until September 1st. Do read on for more details!

    • [Old] Mullvad VPN ☛ The chat control proposal does not belong in democratic societies

      The European Commission is working on a legislative proposal called chat control. If the law goes into effect, all EU citizens will have their communications monitored and audited. Now is the time to stop it.

    • [Old] Bert Hubert ☛ End to End Encryption: Talk for the European Internet Forum at the European Parliament

      Around a million years ago (it feels like) but actually 9 months ago I delivered a brief talk on end to end encryption for the European Internet Forum at the European Parliament.

  • Confidentiality

    • 2025-06-27 [Older] Northern Light Health patients affected by security incident at Compumedics; 10 healthcare entities affected

• Defence/Aggression

  • New York Times ☛ U.S. Turns Eight Migrants Over to South Sudan, Ending Weeks of Legal Limbo

    Courts blocked the handover after lawyers raised concerns of torture. Then the Supreme Court intervened to allow the Convicted Felon administration’s plan to move forward.

  • New York Times ☛ Iran Looks to BRICS for Allies, Testing a New World Order

    The alliance of emerging economies hopes to offer a counterweight to the United States and other Western powers. But military strikes on Iran are testing its unity.

  • France24 ☛ Israel 'systematically' violating Lebanon ceasefire deal

    Lebanon said one person was killed and six wounded on Saturday in a series of Israeli strikes in the south despite a fragile ceasefire deal. Lebanese Deputy Prime Minister Tarek Mitri tells FRANCE 24 that Israel is "systematically" violating the ceasefire, with more than 3,500 violations since the deal was signed in November.

  • France24 ☛ Israel conducts deadly strikes on southern Lebanon despite fragile ceasefire

    Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon killed one person and wounded six on Saturday, said the Lebanese health ministry, as the Israeli military continued to target militant group Hezbollah despite a November 2024 ceasefire deal.

  • LRT ☛ Migrants throw stones at Lithuanian border guards after failed border crossing

    Irregular migrants pelted Lithuanian border guards with stones, damaging their SUV after being prevented from entering the country, the State Border Guard Service (VSAT) reported on Friday.

  • Jan Schaumann ☛ July 4th, 2025

    Many immigrants may feel patriotic towards their adopted country, too -- after all, they actually chose it, they gave up something (some gave up everything) to become part of it. The irony that they will face the strongest rejection from "true patriots" is loud and bitter.

    Immigrants who become US citizens, unlike natural born citizens (for however long that concept still holds), actually swear an oath to "support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic" -- an oath that has been made a mockery ten times over by the current president and many of his sycophantic willing executioners.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Secret Police Are Here

    This isn’t political disagreement. This is moral invertebrate behavior so complete, so shameless, that it would make a Vichy collaborator blush. These people have revealed themselves to be exactly what they are: enablers of authoritarianism who worry more about municipal rent control than federal police state construction.

    Let us examine what Congress has actually authorized, since apparently no one else wishes to do so with any precision. ICE now commands resources that would make it the sixteenth largest military force on the planet. The $150 billion allocated for immigration enforcement through 2029 exceeds the annual military budgets of Canada, Italy, and Israel combined.

    This isn’t immigration policy. This is the systematic construction of a domestic terror apparatus funded at the level of a regional superpower’s defense establishment.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Inside Zero Units, the CIA’s Secret Afghan Army

    But for the Afghans fighting with Americans, Zero Unit slots were coveted because of better pay, better training, and the chance to work alongside elite U.S. operators. In later years, there were also opportunities to immigrate and resettle in the U.S. after at least one year of service and a U.S. government recommendation. In the final days of the war in 2021, roughly 81,000 Afghan immigrants — including almost 10,000 members of the Zero Units, along with many of their families — were evacuated by the CIA and resettled across the U.S., according to reports. Many were promised Special Immigrant Visas for their service — visas meant for Afghan and Iraqi nationals who worked directly for the U.S. government. There are close to 4,500 living in the U.S. who are still waiting to secure legal status because of paperwork delays from the federal government.

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini to Sign Order Related to Syria Sanctions Easing, CBS News Reports

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] How Reuters Counted the Dead in the March Killings of Syrian Alawites

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] How Syrian Government Forces and Factions Are Linked to the Mass Killings of Alawites

  • ANF News ☛ 2025-06-29 [Older] Alawite women and girls targeted in Syria: Thirty-Three abductions

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] To prioritize defense, Germany to cut development aid

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] US: At least 2 killed in ambush on firefighters in Idaho

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-07-01 [Older] Turkey detains scores of opposition party members in Izmir

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-07-01 [Older] Turkey Says PKK Disarmament Could Start 'Within Days', Says AK Party Spokesman

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] UK, France, Germany Condemn Threats Against IAEA Head After Iran Newspaper Calls for His Arrest

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-06-29 [Older] Hong Kong's Last Active Pro-Democracy Group Says It Will Disband Amid Security Crackdown

  • International Business Times ☛ 2025-06-27 [Older] Takahiro Shiraishi 'Twitter Killer' Executed: What His Hanging Reveals About Japan's Justice and Death Penalty System

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-06-27 [Older] UN Peacekeeping Chief Warns That Conflict in Sudan Is Spilling Into Central African Republic

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-07-03 [Older] Germany updates: Berlin seeks deportation deal with Taliban

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-07-02 [Older] Can Taiwan help Germany ease its reliance on Chinese drones?

  • New York Times ☛ Khamenei Appears in Public for First Time Since Israel War Began

    The long absence of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, from public life had fueled speculation about his health and threats to his life.

  • JURIST ☛ Sudan sees mass atrocities and attacks on health facilities, rights group says

    Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned on Thursday of ongoing mass atrocities and attacks on medical facilities in Sudan’s North Darfur region, amid escalating conflict between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). MSF called on warring parties to immediately cease indiscriminate violence and to enable urgent, comprehensive humanitarian assistance.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • RFERL ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man Hints At New Sanctions On Russia Amid Ongoing Fighting With Ukraine

      US President The Insurrectionist has said that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin understands that more sanctions “may be coming,” as Moscow continues to reject Washington’s push for a cease-fire in Ukraine.

      Speaking on Air Force One on July 4, Convicted Felon said: “You know, we talk about sanctions a lot and he understands that it may be coming.”

    • JURIST ☛ Russia becomes the first country to recognize Taliban government in Afghanistan

      Russia became the first country to formally recognize the Taliban government in Afghanistan on Thursday, according to local media, with the Taliban flag being hung from the embassy in Moscow.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Walrus ☛ How I Solved the Century-Old Mystery of a Miraculous Shipwreck Survivor

    None of what appeared in the Vancouver Province actually happened. It was all one reporter’s wild speculation. And even though Davidson tried to correct the information himself, that one reporter’s version from two days after the shipwreck is what was repeated and embellished in newspaper articles, in books, and even in his own obituary eight years later.

  • IT Wire ☛ What should you do if your employer is breaking laws?

    What do you do when your employer is breaking the law?

    Whether it’s financial fraud, unsafe working conditions, wage theft, discrimination, or some other type of misconduct, you’re not just facing a moral dilemma – you’re walking a legal tightrope. Speaking up might feel risky. Staying silent might feel just as bad.

    The truth is, there’s a path forward – but it requires you to tread carefully. Here’s what to do if you suspect or discover your employer is doing something illegal.

• Environment

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-06-29 [Older] Europe swelters as early summer heat breaks records

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-06-28 [Older] Flood-Hit China Expands Social Security Net as Extreme Rain Takes Toll

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-07-03 [Older] What are urban heat islands?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-07-02 [Older] Europe heat wave intensifies as fresh warnings issued

  • Futurism ☛ Major Satellite Suddenly Disappears

    Many scientists fear, however, that we're actually underestimating its impact. That's because methane is a very leaky greenhouse gas, meaning that a lot of it escapes as it's stored, transported, and drilled without being accounted for. Research suggests that gas companies are drastically underreporting their real methane emissions as a result, with it being in their best interests to turn a blind eye.

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Obtains Permit to Spew Pollution

    In Boxtown, the historically Black neighborhood in South Memphis where xAI's data center is situated, Musk's unfettered pollution has ripped the band-aid off a wound that had barely begun to heal. As Capital B News reported earlier this year, the neighborhood was once home to the Allen Fossil Plant, an electrical facility that left pits of noxious coal ash and a lengthy legacy of environmental racism behind when it was forced to close in 2018.

    In the year since the data center opened and Colossus went online, the smog from Musk's gas turbines has been veritably choking out local residents in a district already struggling with heightened asthma rates due to its proximity to industrial pollution.

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Admin Quietly Accelerates Massive Crude Oil Project on Colorado River

    The goal of the plan is to transfer an additional 70,000 barrels of oil per day from the Wildcat Loadout Facility, which is located in Utah, down to the Gulf Coast refineries via a route that runs along the Colorado River. Controversially, the Trump administration is also plowing ahead with the project by invoking emergency powers to address energy shortages despite the fact that the United States for the last couple of years has been producing record levels of domestic oil.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-06-27 [Older] How do renewables contribute to energy security?

    • BIA Net ☛ 2025-07-02 [Older] Turkey raises natural gas prices, marking 150% increase in 16 months

    • BIA Net ☛ 2025-06-25 [Older] KRG says halt in oil exports to Turkey caused 25 billion dollars in losses

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] US rural communities bearing the brunt of bitcoin mining

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-07-03 [Older] Indonesia: Dozens missing after boat sinks near Bali

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-07-03 [Older] Liverpool striker Diogo Jota dies in car crash

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-07-03 [Older] French air traffic controller strike strands thousands

    • CBC ☛ 2025-06-25 [Older] Enbridge says it would pitch new Alberta-B.C. pipeline only under right conditions

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • ANF News ☛ 2025-07-03 [Older] Turkey’s dams cause the Afrin River to dry up

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-07-03 [Older] Wildfire in Turkey’s Izmir Province Spreads to Residential Area, Killing Bedridden Man, Report Says

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] Wildfires Burn in Turkey and France as Early Heatwave Hits

    • BIA Net ☛ 2025-06-29 [Older] Massive wildfires sweep western Turkey as strong winds hamper response

    • International Business Times ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] Is the Turkey Wildfire Trapping Tourists? How It Could Affect Your Holiday

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] Firefighters in Turkey Battle to Contain Wildfires for Second Day

    • CBC ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] Wildfires burn in Turkey, France as early heat wave hits parts of Europe

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-07-03 [Older] Crete: Wildfire on Greek island prompts evacuations

    • Howard Oakley ☛ Paintings of Norwegian Fjords 1827-99

      With summer here at last, if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s time to head north away from the heat and spend a weekend exploring the fjords of Norway in the company of some of the nation’s great landscape artists. Today we’ll see the development of painting during the nineteenth century, then tomorrow we’ll conclude with the early twentieth century.

• Finance

  • BIA Net ☛ 2025-06-30 [Older] Turkey’s unemployment rate at 8.4% in May

  • CBC ☛ 2025-06-27 [Older] What is Canada's digital services tax — and why does Cheeto Mussolini dislike it so much?

  • CBC ☛ 2025-06-27 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini wants Canada's digital services tax gone before trade talks resume

  • Nick Heer ☛ Pressure on Substack

    It would be odd if the economics of Substack — a collection of writers and publications with paying subscribers — are somehow better than those of, say, a magazine publisher today — also a collection of writers and publications with paying subscribers. It does have a tech sheen and the vibe of social networking, though, and there are no printing costs.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ Artificial intelligence rules to go ahead, no pause, EU Commission says

    The European Commission confirms that the Artificial Intelligence Act will proceed as scheduled. There will be no delays or grace periods. Obligations for general-purpose AI models start in August. High-risk model obligations will commence in August 2026. This decision follows pressure from companies and EU countries for a temporary suspension.

  • India Times ☛ Microsoft shuts down Pakistan office as global firms lose faith in local market

    The move, which sparked speculation on social media, was first brought to public attention by a LinkedIn post from Jawad Rehman, the former head of Microsoft Pakistan. Citing insider information, he claimed the tech giant had "officially closed its operations" in the country.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Microsoft Closes Pakistan Office After 25 Years Amid Global Restructuring

    Microsoft has announced its decision to shut down its limited operations in Pakistan, citing its ongoing global strategy to reduce workforce and streamline regional engagements. The move, confirmed on Friday, has been described by stakeholders as a worrisome indicator of Pakistan’s deteriorating business climate.

  • Futurism ☛ CEOs Say AI Is Poised to Wipe Out an Astonishing Number of Jobs

    Billionaire tech moguls aren't the only ones doomsaying about artificial intelligence layoffs. CEOs across a range of industries are now jumping on the bandwagon, saying it's no longer a matter of "if," but "how many" jobs AI will take.

  • Gregory Hammond ☛ Why I try to avoid using companies that raised money

    It’s fairly easy to have an idea and start a company around it, however, what’s hard for many is continuing the business. Usually continuing refers to the number of years that a business exists for, but it can also refer to getting bigger (more money, more customers, or offering more products are the more common ones). One way companies continue is by going to venture capitalists (also known as angel investors, which I’ll use interchangeably) and asking for money in return for something. There are positives and negatives to this, not only for the business but also the end customer.

  • Bert Hubert ☛ European Cloud Modules

    To create credible advanced cloud providers here in Europe, we can build on our existing hardware/network/storage providers. And one could then base advanced services on existing (open source) software. But a big challenge is converting/completing that software into something you can successfully build a business on.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • CBC ☛ More and more influencers are offering financial advice on TikTok and YouTube. Should you take it?

      Canadians are increasingly turning to online personalities for financial advice

    • The Moscow Times ☛ Russia Removes Peace Symbol from School Textbook Cover

      Russia has removed the image of a dove of peace from the cover of its official high school history textbook, Vladimir Medinsky, a senior aide to President Vladimir Putin and co-author of the textbook, said Friday.

      The change is the latest in a series of symbolic and editorial changes aligning education more closely with the Kremlin’s narrative.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-06-27 [Older] Crowds Block Armenian Security Forces Seeking to Arrest a Clergyman Who Criticized the Government

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-07-02 [Older] Australia cancels Kanye West's visa over Nazi song

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ 2025-07-01 [Older] Israeli airstrike on Gaza kills journalist Ismail Abu Hatab, injures another

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-07-01 [Older] Homeland Security Secretary Noem Says CNN May Be Prosecuted Over Report on Migration App

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Reuters X Account Withheld in India

    No official reason has been provided by the Indian government or X, leaving the exact cause unclear.

  • France24 ☛ Forbidden Stories: An anti-corruption journalist's murder in Haiti and a prosecutor above the law

    Reached by phone a few days ago, the investigating judge in charge of the Tesse case was neither reassured nor reassuring. Jean Michelet Séide warned of the difficulties he is facing with this case. “I want to know, and I want society to know who murdered the journalist. But my life is at stake; I don't even have a weapon or an armoured vehicle. After four unanswered letters requesting security measures, I’m at risk of having to leave the case,” he said.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • YLE ☛ Union dues are tax-deductible – but probably not for long

    A poll shows that the government's plan to cancel the tax deductibility of union membership fees is deeply unpopular.

  • RFA ☛ At 90, Dalai Lama still charts an uncertain future

    The young Dalai Lama’s childhood ended abruptly in 1950 when the Chinese Communist regime’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) invaded Tibet. He was only 16 when he assumed full temporal and spiritual leadership of his nation as Chinese troops overwhelmed Tibet’s poorly equipped army. For nearly a decade, he sought to find accommodation with China’s new communist rulers, even traveling to Beijing to meet Chairman Mao Zedong in 1954-55.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Militarized zones now make up 1/3 of southern border, stirring debates

    The Army has posted thousands of the warnings in New Mexico and western Texas, declaring a “restricted area by authority of the commander.”

    It’s part of a major shift that has thrust the military into border enforcement with Mexico like never before.

  • El País ☛ Latinos denounce ICE’s use of racial profiling to detain US citizens: ‘I am American’

    “Now that ICE is having to meet higher quotas for arbitrary arrests than ever before, we’ll see more and more cases like these,” Nareen Shah, director of Government Affairs for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told EL PAÍS. “The problem is that even when people claim to be U.S. citizens and can prove they are, we’ve still seen cases where they’re detained,” Shah said.

    Under the Fourth Amendment, Americans are protected from random searches unless law enforcement has probable cause to believe they are involved in criminal activity. In the case of ICE, they cannot legally detain a citizen because their powers are regulated by immigration law, according to federal legislation.

  • ANF News ☛ Kurdish prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement over Kurdish song lyrics in his notebooks

    Kurdish prisoner Agit Kortak, who is being held in Erzincan High Security Closed Prison, was sentenced to 11 days in solitary confinement over Kurdish songs found in his notebooks.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Happy Birthday, GamingOnLinux - 16 years today

    Time really flies huh? GamingOnLinux has now been around officially for 16 years.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ Publisher group files EU antitrust complaint against Google over AI Overviews

  The Independent Publishers Alliance, the group behind the antitrust push, submitted its complaint to the European Commission on June 30. The document also has two other signatories. They are The Movement for an Open Web, which represents digital advertisers and publishers, and U.K. nonprofit Foxglove Legal Community Interest Company.

  The antitrust complaint focuses on Google’s AI Overviews feature. Released last May, it displays a natural language answer to the user’s query above standard search results.

• Reuters ☛ Exclusive: Google's AI Overviews hit by EU antitrust complaint from independent publishers

  Alphabet's Google has been hit by an EU antitrust complaint over its AI Overviews from a group of independent publishers, which has also asked for an interim measure to prevent allegedly irreparable harm to them, according to a document seen by Reuters. Google's AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear above traditional hyperlinks to relevant webpages and are shown to users in more than 100 countries. It began adding advertisements to AI Overviews last May.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Google's DMCA Transparency Report 'Freezes' After Recent Volume Surge

    After more than a decade of timely updates, Google Search's takedown transparency report has stalled since mid-April. The absence of new data makes it harder for journalists and researchers to analyze these DMCA takedown efforts, which have increased significantly over the past year and a half. Notably, Google continues to send these notices to the Lumen database, providing some ongoing visibility.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate IPTV Trio Sentenced to 14 Years Prison For Money Laundering

    A court in Brazil has handed down prison sentences totaling 14 years to three individuals for money laundering offenses linked to a pirate IPTV service. A software developer who made the service available through a popular IPTV app, his sister, and a mutual friend handled thousands of transactions through bank accounts, with funds laundered through a small hosting company.