Leftovers

• Barry Hess ☛ Capture & Reset

  So I am going to capture before resetting. The tab links are going into a note. Some might go to a draft blog post, which will hopefully inspire me to close the loop that I started with a saved tab. (I will also be heading back to Safari from Arc.) The newsletter subscriptions will filter to a folder, which effectively means I won’t look at them. The RSS feed subscriptions will likely be exported to an OPML file. Screenshots of my mobile phone screens will be taken and apps will be deleted. I will be logging out of socials, checking in weekly.

• Bob Monsour ☛ What was I thinking? Posts, Notes, & TILs?

  So, I wanted to write this to "announce" to myself that I will be collapsing the Notes and TILs into my the Posts type. This, fingers crossed, will allow me to write more freely without the mental overhead of categorizing my thoughts into these different types.

• James G ☛ Futures for the web

  I think one of the most important things for us to do is to imagine new futures for the web.

  I have previously written about the potentials of the web, including these short sentences which summarise a duality of the web: [...]

• James G ☛ Communicating the indie web

  This leads me to a bigger question: what do we want the indie web to be? What is the indie web?

• Ava ☛ re: what does the indie web need right now?

  I guess my conclusion and opinion is that the Indieweb needs even more people willing to lead and model the core values. In my view, it's okay the Indieweb grows organically, stays smaller, doesn't work for everyone and cannot accommodate everyone, because that means there is a distinct culture, specific goals and limitations that also make it unattractive to get the techbro-treatment squeezing money out of it. The people who are interested in alternatives will find it, and lots of people recommend Bearblog, 32bit Cafe, Neocities and more in comments where people ask for alternatives, and that should continue. Some features people are used to are just not feasible without recreating social media and its issues (that are not only cultural, but also financial and legal) and personal websites cannot make up for them well. Despite that, we should be acting in ways that underline, not undermine, personal websites and blogs if we want people here and be a good example of how it can work without a feed.

• Career/Education

  • The Register UK ☛ US signals intention to rethinkjob H-1B lottery

    "That same year, our federal government handed out work permits to at least 110,098 foreign workers in computer occupations through just three major guest worker programs. That's equal to 82 percent of our graduating class who are guaranteed jobs even before any Americans walk across the stage for their diploma."

    US government policies, he argues, favor foreign workers over American students.

  • Mira Welner ☛ Being Piledriven: Thoughts after Contracting at Hermit Tech

    The first few times I worked with Nikhil I was confused as to why he was paying me. As far as I could tell, he was paying me quite well for my time, and in exchange for the money, I was allowing him to patiently tutor me in Elixir and duckdb. Great for me, but not a stellar business practice. He claimed it was so he could hire me full-time later, but it is entirely possible that by the time he has the funds to hire me full-time, I will have a job I would rather stay at than leave to work for Hermit Tech, and he is fully aware of this. I was very confused about his motivations, and assumed that either he wanted to practice teaching junior programmers, or that he was planning on writing a self-aggrandizing blog post about how his consultancy is so incredible that they can just hire unqualified people, pay them far above market rate, and still make a profit. I still haven't fully ruled out that last possibility.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Lusaka ZM ☛ Zambia : Zambia Positioned as Regional Seed Production Hub – Minister Kapala

    Speaking during the official opening of the 3rd National Seed Congress in Lusaka, Mr. Kapala noted that Zambia’s strategic efforts have enabled it to become one of Africa’s top seed exporters.

• Proprietary

  • Android Police ☛ Google Maps removes a crucial feature from its navigation experience

    For now, this means Google Maps users on Android will have to stick to standard app controls for music, which isn't ideal if you rely on smartphone-based navigation. You can also use Maps on an iPhone to get back the media controls, though Maps on iOS lacks support for YouTube Music, with only Apple Music and Spotify supported.

  • 9to5Google ☛ Google Maps navigation missing media controls on Android 

    After the deprecation of Assistant Driving Mode earlier this year, Google Maps is now missing media playback controls for YouTube Music and Spotify on Android.

  • PC World ☛ A Windows 11 bug is asking users to eject their GPU. Don't do it!

    This bug has been showing up for years, apparently as an unintended UI expression of the option to disable some discrete laptop graphics and switch to integrated graphics to save power. (Note that “disabling” and “ejecting” are very different terms, and probably shouldn’t be conflated for regular PC users.) Windows Central notes that there are registry hacks available to turn off this alarming and apparently unintentional message.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The New Stack ☛ How the Free Software Foundation Battles the LLM Bots

      As the Free Software Foundation approaches its 40th anniversary, it's facing ongoing and increasing distributed denial-of-service attacks.

    • Luna Winters ☛ They're putting blue food coloring in everything

      And I still don't like the taste.

    • Paddy Carver ☛ I’m Tired of Talking About AI

      I am, deep in my bones, tired of talking about this. The first time I mentioned AI (that I can find) on Mastodon was in May, 2023. The post was about how tired I was of hearing about it. In over two years, I have not become less tired of it.

  • Social Control Media

    • CBC ☛ Online misogyny seeping into classrooms in 'frightening' ways, teachers and experts say

      Emberley has been teaching for nearly two decades and says the sexist and offensive remarks started cropping up only in the last few years. She teaches drama in classrooms across all grade levels and said these attitudes are more common among boys in junior high and high school.

      She is not the only one noticing this rhetoric in the classroom.

    • Caroline Crampton ☛ I'm Done With Social Media

      That's all without considering the role of the platforms themselves in this. I spent several months last year feeling grim about the amount of free content I had uploaded to platforms owned by the likes of Meta and Elon Musk. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok — these are all outlets that purport to capture and manipulate their users' attention, meaning that, as a "creator", if you catch the wave of the algorithm just right you can surf it all the way to a huge following, then fame and fortune. I don't doubt that the select few who make this equation work for them do get well paid for their work once they become successful. Everyone else, though, is just uploading for free so that there is enough stuff on the app to keep users scrolling forever. Infinite scroll means infinite ad inventory. The platforms also invest in promoting the idea that being a "full time creator" is an attainable goal and incentivise their top creators to sell the idea that anyone can achieve their success, if they just start now and work really hard for nothing as long as is necessary. The more I thought about it, the harder it became not to view the so-called creator economy as a blatant pyramid scheme underwritten by some of the worst corporations in the world. The way to succeed is to get in early, then become an aspirational figure to those who come along later.

    • Mike Brock ☛ The Human Experience in an Information Age

      Our survival depends not just on managing information, but on preserving the human experience that makes information meaningful in the first place.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • GreyCoder ☛ A List Of Email Providers That Don't Track You

      Regular email is an insecure medium by its nature. This is because email is always sent to someone else—thus releasing it to other hosts. For example, if you email someone who uses Gmail, Google and the NSA will scan your email.

      To avoid this situation, encrypt all your emails. Send only to those with encrypted email installed (see “Encrypted Email Providers” below).

    • Nick Heer ☛ French Data Under U.S. Firms Is Not Protected From U.S. Government Access

      The U.S. set up a new court to handle European complaints, but it is under the umbrella of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board which currently has a single board member, who happens to be a Republican. That is because the other three members of the board — all Democrats — were told to leave after Donald Trump retook the presidency, thus making it non-functional. Is the court hearing cases? That is a good question; the whole thing is one big secret.

  • Confidentiality

    • The Register UK ☛ Quantum computers still can't factor as well as an abacus

      Gutmann's argument is simple: to this day, quantum computers – which he regards as "physics experiments" rather than pending products – haven't managed to factor any number greater than 21 without cheating.

      Quantum computers and PQC are both enormously complex. But the common process for cracking RSA public key encryption is relatively straightforward. Given a key pair modulus n, you have to factor it into two prime numbers, p and q, such that n = p * q.

    • Jan Schaumann ☛ Post-Quantum Cryptography Proof of Concept Implementations

      The names should be reasonably self-explanatory. Where possible, I tried to extract the negotiated group1, HTTP protocol spoken, and whether or not a HelloRetryRequest (HRR) was performed. However, not all implementations or servers provide that level of detail.

      A few notes on each of the endpoints: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • Harvard University ☛ Workers' Capital Project - Center for Labor and a Just Economy

    The Workers’ Capital Project creates a framework for studying responsible investment and labor’s capital and how they have been deployed in efforts to resist shareholder primacy, short-termism, and the social harms of financialization. Through research, programmatic convenings, and on-going engagement with practitioners, this project acts as a home for innovative work related to investment practices, fiduciary regulation, and the developing landscape of ESG investment, especially focused on labor and work.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ The deadly al-Qaeda affiliate terrorising western Africa

    Mali has been in deep crisis since early last decade, when Tuareg separatists and radical [sic] Islamist factions took over Timbuktu, Gao and other towns across the north.

    French military intervention had some early success pushing them back, but Paris soon became bogged down in a difficult counter-insurgency mission marred by strained ties with the government.

    The violence spread into Niger and Burkina Faso and in 2017 JNIM was founded in a merger of jihadist groups including al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

  • Vox ☛ Elon Musk, the America Party, and a brief history of third-party candidates

    On Today, Explained, co-host Noel King dove into voters’ desires, the history of third parties, and possible solutions to the two-party stranglehold with Lee Drutman, senior fellow at the New America think tank and author of Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ He’s the Boss: Unitary Executive Theory and Workplace Authoritarianism

    As President Trump continues to amass authoritarian power, we should consider the shocking role of the Supreme Court in facilitating his power grab. Trump v. United States declared the President immune from prosecution for breaking any criminal law as long as he uses his Presidential powers to commit his crimes. It allowed Trump to get away with gross violations of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause. It foreclosed all feasible paths for enforcing the 14th Amendment’s Insurrection Clause against Trump and other participants in the attempted coup of Jan. 6.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Financing Our Own Destruction

    Republicans know that money equals power, and they understand the sort of impact that enormous pension funds could have if they were able to place political or moral criteria on their investment decisions, and they go to great lengths to short circuit that possibility with a thicket of regulations about fiduciary duty, even as they themselves do things like pass laws saying that their states won’t do business with you if do anything that could be construed as “ESG,” or try to make consumer boycotts illegal. They play this game better than us! All of these legal restrictions should be understood as having political motivations. It is not easy to get pension funds to divest from things, but it is, at its core, a battle of self-preservation, and one that should be undertaken in earnest. This is the low-hanging fruit of fighting fascism, people. We need to be on this. This is not you getting shot by riot police or thrown into an ICE prison. This is “maybe as a public employee my retirement money should not be invested with the guys whose personal project is to destroy the entire public sector.” It is very difficult to say, with a straight face, that workers and their representative institutions are taking seriously the urgency of the threat to their livelihoods, their freedom, their democracy, and their brothers and sisters lives, when we can’t even rouse ourselves to fucking invest our money in firms other than those controlled by the architects of the right wing takeover of America.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Why Is Todd Blanche Risking the Conviction of a Sex Trafficker Rather Than Use Fruits of Already-Completed Review?

    As I’ve mentioned, Todd Blanche was in such a rush to ask a judge to unseal Jeffrey Epstein grand jury files that he didn’t update his SDNY filing profile first. As a result, his request to unseal grand jury records was filed under the identity he had when formally serving as Donald Trump’s defense attorney: Todd Blanche, Blanche Law, a firm set up exclusively to serve Trump.

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Framed by social control media: Alex Belfield, Voice of Reason

    Yet in terms of social control media and online stalking, people have a right to engage with public figures on those platforms. If you go to a celebrity's house then it can very easily be described as stalking but if you engage with them on social control media every day, that doesn't cross the threshold of a crime.

    Moreover, social control media tends to groom people to become stalkers. The algorithms create a connection between Belfield and the people he engages with. As outsider observers, we may think that Belfield has commented about those people spontaneously and without any provocation whatsoever. The accusers rightly claim they did nothing to provoke Belfield. But we are missing the big picture.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Android Police ☛ E Ink tablets: The ultimate productivity hack you're missing out on

      Unlike conventional tablets with LCD or OLED screens, my E Ink tablet can last for days on a single charge, with negligible standby drain. The less often I have to charge something, the more likely I am to use it.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Michael Kjörling ☛ Quit saying that individual choices are meaningless

    If individual choices donʼt matter now, then how come individual choices mattered during the build-up to the current situation? Correspondingly, if individual choices did matter previously, then what inherent about our world has changed such that individual choices no longer matter? Such that the total is no longer even approximately proportional to, let alone equal to, the sum of the parts?

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Labour’s Islamophobia law could hand Reform 100-seat majority

    Last month, Baroness Casey’s report on grooming gangs found that hundreds of girls had suffered unimaginable sexual abuse in part because some in authority had not tackled the issue because they feared appearing racist.

    Ministers insist the definition of Islamophobia [sic] will be written in such a way as not to stifle free speech.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ Russian Photographer Gets 16 Years For Sharing Public Soviet Bunker Data

    Skvortsov's friends say architecture had always been a passion of his. In 2010 he graduated from the Perm Construction College with a degree in architecture, but he soon earned success as a photographer.

  • GreyCoder ☛ Unblock YouTube Anywhere In The World Using ProtonVPN - GreyCoder

    You can unblock YouTube anywhere in the world by: [...]

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • TMZ ☛ Cop Caught on Video Punching Protester in Cincinnati Anti-ICE Protest

    Ohio police brutally beat peaceful protesters—holding a vigil for chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital who ICE arrested.

    A reporter was also taken away—charged with felony rioting in first degree.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Trump’s DOJ wants states to turn over voter lists, election info

    The DOJ is also demanding Colorado turn over all records related to the 2024 election, a massive trove of documents that could include ballots and even voting equipment. The Colorado inquiry, the most sweeping publicly known request, underscores the extent of the administration’s attention on state election activities.

    At least nine states have received requests for information over the past three months, according to letters from the DOJ obtained by Stateline. Some states also received emails from a DOJ official last week asking for meetings to discuss information-sharing agreements.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Economics of Immigration and Deportation

    So the first thing I should say in this post is that human rights and the rule of law are by far the most important things at stake right now. Having the secret police — because that’s what ICE has become — assault and kidnap people, accuse them of trumped-up crimes, hold them incommunicado from legal representation and their families, and fail to give them proper medical care or food is a lot more important than the impact of these actions on GDP. Trump seeks to dehumanize immigrants, by calling them rapists, murderers and thieves. Yet, in fact, immigrants are on average more law-abiding than native-born Americans.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Thelonious Monk's Lost Concert: True Story Behind a Found Recording

    If it hadn’t been for the high school custodian who taped Monk’s show, it would have been lost forever. When the long-lost recording finally came out five years ago, it earned rave reviews (Rolling Stone picked the “remarkable show” as a top-10 reissue of 2020), shot to the top of the Billboard jazz charts, and seemed a shoo-in for a Grammy. But the battle behind the scenes went deeper than anyone knew. “Record companies are still taking advantage of musicians,” Scher says. Or, as Monk’s 75-year-old son, drummer T.S. Monk, puts it, “They fucked him over.”