Leftovers

• Robin Rendle ☛ Fix the Signal

  On the flip side: optimism is utopian. The world can be better! The world is better! Sure, there’s a kind of optimism that makes you blind to the suffering of others, there’s cruelty in it sometimes. But there’s nothing but misery to be found in endless snark, in womp-wompism, in all-things-must-be-sad-all-the-time-ism. I fear recently I’ve slipped into that other way of seeing the world — I worry I’ve become a true bummer — perhaps because I’ve been listening and reading to too much of the wrong things, perhaps encouraging all the wrong signals.

  So let’s talk about a few things that make me optimistic about the world right now. Let’s fix the signal!

• Michael Kjörling ☛ Calendars and to-do lists

  More specifically, the calendar focuses on time whereas the to-do list focuses on tasks. The primary focus being on when and for how long versus what and what done looks like.

  I find that both aspects are useful, but for different reasons and serve different purposes.

• Science

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Was the George Foreman Grill The Best Invention of the last 50 Years?

    About 10 years ago I asked my class

    "What is the best invention or tech advance of the last 50 years?"

  • The Atlantic ☛ Scientists Are Caught in a Political Trap

    And yet, these counterattacks may be ensnaring scientists in a catch-22. Their goal is to defend their work from political interference. “If scientists don’t ever speak up, then the court of public opinion is lost,” one university dean, who requested anonymity to avoid financial retaliation against their school from the federal government, told me: Americans would have little reason to question the government’s actions. But in retaliating, scientists also run the risk of advancing the narrative they want to fight—that science in the U.S. is a political endeavor, and that the academic status quo has been tainted by an overly liberal view of reality. “When you face a partisan attack, it’s extremely hard to respond in a way that doesn’t look partisan,” Alexander Furnas, a science-policy expert at Northwestern University, told me. “It’s a bit of a trap.”

• Career/Education

  • BoingBoing ☛ Denmark eliminates 25% book tax to combat declining reading skills

    In a world of digital distractions, instant gratification, gaming, and 24-hour televised doom, folks seem to be reading fewer books than ever. But Denmark's not having any of it. The Nordic nation doesn't want the brains of its citizens bounded in a nutshell—it was noted in a 2021 survey that reading skills of the country's kids were in a steep decline. According to the New York Times, the country's leadership is taking steps to make reading more attractive to its citizens.

• Hardware

  • University of Toronto ☛ It seems like NVMe SSDs have overtaken SATA SSDs for high capacities

    This is not what I found, at least at some large online retailers. Instead, SATA SSDs seem to have almost completely stagnated at 4 TB, with capacities larger than that only available from a few specialty vendors at eye-watering prices. By contrast, 8 TB NVMe SSDs seem readily available at somewhat reasonable prices from mainstream drive vendors like WD (they aren't inexpensive but they're not unreasonable given the prices of 4 TB NVMe, which is roughly the price I remember 4 TB SATA SSDs being at). This makes me personally sad, because my current home desktop has more SATA ports than M.2 slots or even PCIe x1 slots.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ How did a disease from the 14th century reappear in Northern California?

    The plague was introduced to the U.S. in the early 20th century from rat-infested steamships arriving in California from Asia, with the first case identified in the San Francisco area, Swartzberg said.

    To date, the last known case of rat-associated plague occurred in Los Angeles in the 1920s, according to county public health officials.

    The principal source of plague in Los Angeles County today is wild rodents in rural areas.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ When It Comes to Clean Water, Trump Is Betraying MAHA

    To critical observers, it was always obvious which of these mutually exclusive prospects would win out. It comes as no surprise to us on the Left that the Trump administration has spent the last seven months rolling back regulations protecting streams and wetlands, withdrawing limits on PFAS (or “forever chemicals”) pumped into the water supply by chemical companies, and slashing EPA enforcement budgets. In an effort to appeal to the Trump-aligned Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, the administration initially promised to crack down on PFAS. Instead, it’s reducing regulatory pressure on manufacturers and water utilities to eliminate them.

  • Paste Media Group ☛ ICE Is Using So Much Tear Gas in Portland, a School Abandoned Its Campus

    Situated just a block from the complex, the Cottonwood School decided to abandon its longtime campus in a 4-2 vote, citing concerns around students’ health. “We have been impacted mostly by chemical weapons that are being used against protesters in the vicinity of our school,” Laura Cartwright, Cottonwood’s interim executive director, explained of the decision to local news. “Daily, we were finding that [sic] munitions on our play yard, we were getting footage in the evening of green gases, and gases were being used near our gardens and enveloping our area.”

• Proprietary

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Politicians Are Trying to Make It Illegal to Sue AI Companies [Ed: Because it should be made illegal to put an end or stop a Ponzi scheme? Also, who's funding these politicians? What happens when white-collar criminals like "crypto" bros and frauds who say "AI" (to describe anything) write the law or buy the law?]

      If passed, only the state Attorney General would have the power to sue AI companies under the act.

      "By saying the Attorney General is the only avenue of enforcement of the Colorado Consumer Protection Act, they're saying that for [the AI] industry, there are fewer avenues for people to seek justice," Colorado representative Javier Mabrey (D), told the Lever.

    • Kevin Kelly ☛ Emotional Agents

      Those same kinds of emotional bonds are coming to machines. We see glimmers of it already. Nearly every week a stranger sends me logs of their chats with an AI demonstrating how deep and intuitive they are, how well they understand each other, and how connected they are in spirit. And we get reports of teenagers getting deeply wrapped up with AI “friends.” This is all before any serious work has been done to deliberately embed emotions into the AIs.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AI winter is in the air! But we think the AI bubble keeps going until 2027

      The AI bubble is a study in the utter nonsense you can pull off if you can just write any old number and put a dollar sign in front of it, then borrow against it. The AI bubble does not run on market forces, or it would have crashed by the end of 2024. Despite all this crash talk in August 2025, the economics have always been just unfeasible. It was always as stupid as it looked.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Political Pollsters Are Trying to Save Money by Polling AI Instead of Real People, and It’s Going About as Well as You’d Expect

      "Obviously, any campaign that used only that AI-generated data would miss the mark — instead of looking at the views of real respondents, it would be looking at a funhouse mirror reflection of a demographic cooked up by a language model with no access to actual data."

    • Zimbabwe ☛ Elon Musk Takes on Microsoft with Macrohard

      It is an artificial intelligence (AI) venture. The idea, according to Musk, is to use AI to build a complete software company from the ground up.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Is the AI bubble about to burst – and send the stock market into freefall?

      It could be 2000 all over again, and just like the bursting of the dotcom bubble it may be ugly, with investors junking businesses that once looked good on paper but now resemble a huge liability.

    • India Times ☛ Danish students to be allowed to use AI for English exams

      The Danish government said the permitted use of AI in the English curriculum from 2026 would be experimental, and apply only to the oral component of the English exam for the high school diploma.

    • Futurism ☛ CEO Boasts That He Laid Off 80 Percent of His Staff Because They Didn't Love AI Enough, Threatens to Do It Again

      Now, even as Wall Street begins to reckon with the empty promises of AI automation, one CEO is bragging about laying off almost all of his workforce in the face of the tech — a move he says he would make again.

    • Futurism ☛ The Average Person Is Far More Scared of AI Than Excited by It, Studies Find

      An overwhelming 71 percent of Americans are worried that AI will put vast swaths of the workforce permanently out of a job, according to a new Reuters poll conducted with the firm Ipsos — a proportion that stands in stunning contrast to the absurd levels of hype being blasted out of the AI industry.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Australian bank rehires workers it replaced with AI chatbot

      The CBA admitted the roles were not redundant once brought to a tribunal, and it has apologized to those it fired. They can return to their jobs or accept exit payments. "We have apologized to the employees concerned and acknowledge we should have been more thorough in our assessment of the roles required," CBA's spokesperson told Bloomberg.

    • Ars Technica ☛ Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

      But "this was an outright lie," fired workers told FSU. Instead, call volumes had been increasing at the time they were dismissed, with CBA supposedly "scrambling"—offering staff overtime and redirecting management to join workers answering phones to keep up.

      To uncover the truth, FSU escalated the dispute to a fair work tribunal, where the union accused CBA of failing to explain how workers' roles were ruled redundant. The union also alleged that CBA was hiring for similar roles in India, Bloomberg noted, which made it appear that CBA had perhaps used the chatbot to cover up a shady pivot to outsource jobs.

  • Social Control Media

    • Ava ☛ salvaging social media's corpse

      Why do you think you’ll have enough paying users to not have to resort to ads and user data selling after a certain size? Even if you wanted to do away with them, how do you avoid addictive and manipulative design elements when you want and need user retention to get paid? How do you handle the effect the numbers have on the voices, tone and posting habits and avoid negative engagement farming? How will you handle large scale content moderation? How do you handle scaling in general - will you simply deny people at some point? Can you afford to? How is your stance on taking investor money and do you think you will be able to keep that up?2

    • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Linking to books online

      James recommended Bookwyrm, a social site for book reviews and social reading. It’s a Fediverse compatible alternative to Amazon owned Goodreads where users can track their reading, talk about the books and share reviews.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Cybersecurity is your No. 1 risk and you’re likely unprepared

      Executives are not blind to the problem — they understand the financial exposure, the reputational stakes and the business impact of a major breach. They acknowledge gaps in their defenses and recognize the vulnerabilities that could cripple their mission-critical systems. But awareness has not translated into readiness and true business resilience remains elusive for the vast majority of firms.

    • Exponential-e Ltd ☛ Blue Locker ransomware hits critical infrastructure – is your organisation ready?

      Like other ransomware, Blue Locker encrypts the files of impacted organisations, and demands that a ransom be paid in exchange for a decryption key. Specifically, Blue Locker can be recognised by its trait of appending the extension .blue to the filenames of encrypted data.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • [Repeat] The Register UK ☛ Saved you a click: Firefox 142 offers AI summaries of links

      Not geofenced but subject to phased rollout are link previews, for various native-English-speaking regions. Hover over, long-press, or right-click a link and pick Preview Link, and a summary should appear. Mozilla's summary says: [...]

    • Femte Juli ☛ Naomi Brockwell: This is the moment the [Internet] changed forever (video)

      »New surveillance laws such as the UK’s Online Safety Act, the EU’s Chat Control proposal, and a wave of US state-level KYC mandates have transformed the [Internet] from an open network into a system of checkpoints and control.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Nigeria says it killed 35 jihadis near Cameroon border

    Northeastern Nigeria, along the borders with Cameroon, Chad and Niger, has seen an uptick in attacks, including against military facilities, by the Islamist group Boko Haram and their rivals, the so-called "Islamic State West Africa Province" (ISWAP).

  • US Navy Times ☛ Hegseth fires Defense Intelligence Agency head, Navy leaders

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired a general whose agency’s initial intelligence assessment of U.S. damage to Iranian nuclear sites angered President Donald Trump, according to two people familiar with the decision and a White House official.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Sorry, Trump, but Putin will not pursue peace until he is facing military defeat

    It should now be abundantly clear that Russia will continue to reject Trump’s peace overtures until Putin faces significantly more pressure to end the war. At present, the Russian ruler believes he can stall for time and ultimately outlast the West in Ukraine while slowly but steadily pummeling the Ukrainians into submission. Economic measures including increased sanctions and secondary tariffs can certainly impact his thinking, but Putin’s position is unlikely to undergo any fundamental changes unless he loses the battlefield initiative and is forced to confront the possibility of military defeat.

  • India Times ☛ After joining TikTok, Trump says he could extend sale deadline if needed

    Last year's law requires ByteDance to divest of the app's U.S. assets or demonstrate significant progress toward a sale. Trump opted not to enforce it after taking office on January 20.

  • India Times ☛ TikTok ban not lifted: Officials

    India maintains its ban on TikTok. Government officials deny reports of the app's return. The TikTok website's landing page changed, but content remains unavailable. India banned the ByteDance-owned app in 2020 due to security concerns. This news comes amid shifting India-China and India-US relations. Narendra Modi will visit China for a summit later this month.

  • India Times ☛ Are TikTok, other Chinese apps back in India as tensions subside?

    Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be visiting China later this month to attend the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. These reports come amid a thaw in India-China relations lately and a relative chill in New Delhi's ties with Washington due to the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on India.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Inside Putin’s Fossil-Fueled Victory Lap Around Trump in Alaska

    No sanctions, no cease-fire, no security guarantee, but plenty of fossil fuel deals brew after Trump’s cringeworthy Putin-appeasement on Ukraine.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Constitutional Collapse in Real Time

    This morning, FBI agents raided the home of John Bolton—former National Security Advisor, lifelong Republican, and one of the most establishment figures in American foreign policy. His crime? Writing a book critical of Donald Trump and opposing the president’s surrender summit with Vladimir Putin. The justification? A “national security investigation in search of classified records”—the same bureaucratic language once used to investigate Trump’s actual document theft, now weaponized against Trump’s critics.

    We are no longer operating under constitutional government. We are witnessing its systematic dismantlement by the very people sworn to preserve it. This is what constitutional collapse looks like in real time—not dramatic overthrow or military coups, but the patient corruption of every institution designed to constrain power until they serve only to protect it.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Former war hawk gets a taste of his own jackboots

    The alleged "national security investigation" has all the legitimacy of a Nigerian prince's email. Trump's been gunning for Bolton ever since the mustachioed menace wrote a tell-all that painted Dear Leader as a semi-literate narcissist with the strategic mind of a small soap dish.

    The true horror isn't what's happening to Bolton – it's what this means for everyone else. When a president can sic federal agents on his enemies like they're his personal Attack Chihuahuas, we've crossed from "concerning" straight into "someone check if democracy has a pulse."

  • The Independent UK ☛ National Guard may run out of money because of Trump’s repeated deployments

    National Guard Major General Greg Porter, based in Wyoming, told the state's lawmakers during a meeting of the Joint Transportation Highways & Military Affairs Committee that the costs of Trump's National Guard deployments are still unknown, but they're no doubt eating into the branch's funds, according to WyoFile.

    Porter said that the costs of prolonged deployments will eat into funding intended for things like training and operations.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • JURIST ☛ US Justice Department releases transcripts of interview with Ghislaine Maxwell

    According to the transcripts, Maxwell recalled that she first knew about Donald Trump, and possibly met him, in 1990 when she visited the US on a business trip for her father’s company, and that she first met Epstein the following year.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ ICE Uses Celebrities’ Loophole to Hide Deportation Flights

    Celebrities like Taylor Swift have long used a little-known Federal Aviation Administration program to shield their private jets’ flight records from public view. Now ICE is using the program to hide information about its deportation flights.

• Environment

  • Greenpeace ☛ Low-cost flights up to 26 times cheaper than trains

    “Every route where a plane is cheaper than a train is a political failure,” said Schuster. “We can’t keep rewarding the most polluting form of transport. Europe must make trains the cheapest and easiest option — not the last resort.”

  • Clean Energy Wire ☛ Train travel still pricier than flying on most European routes – report

    “It is absurd that travellers in Europe are being pushed into climate-damaging planes with generous subsidies and tax exemptions, while climate-friendly railways are burdened with countless taxes,” said Greenpeace transport expert Lena Donat. “Anyone who travels by train in a climate-friendly way should always pay less than for flying, everywhere.”

    The price differences are particularly striking on cross-border routes. While trains were cheaper on 70 percent of the 33 domestic connections examined, this was only true for 39 percent of the 109 cross-border routes. In France, Spain and the United Kingdom, trains were more expensive than flights on up to 95 percent of cross-border routes, Greenpeace said.

  • Greenpeace ☛ “Promoting pollution”: Low-cost flights up to 26 TIMES cheaper than trains, new report reveals

    Greenpeace is urging the EU and national governments to reform transport policy by ending subsidies for aviation, introducing a simple rail ticketing system and investing more in public rail infrastructure; Greenpeace is also calling for the introduction of Europe-wide affordable “climate tickets” — flat-rate passes valid across national and cross-border public transport.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • CBC ☛ 'You don't realize the size of Canada': This man rode his motorcycle from Kitchener to Tuktoyaktuk

      It's a dream trip for many people — a 15,000 kilometre round trip through some of Canada's most beautiful natural landscapes.

      And Kitchener's David Hartwick managed it all on a motorcycle.

      It took him 19 days of riding — plus one day of rest — to get from Kitchener, Ont., to Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T., and back.

    • SBS ☛ Made by hand and powered by the sun, these vehicles are setting off on a 3,000km journey | SBS News

      It often attracts teams from international universities and technical institutes as well as private entrepreneurs.

      Vehicles compete within three different 'classes', allowing a variety of technology to be showcased.

    • CS Monitor ☛ Ford is a bellwether: Electric vehicles are coming, despite Trump policy shifts

      An announcement last week by Ford marks the most definitive statement yet by an American automaker that it is committed to the future of electric cars, no matter what happens in Washington.

      CEO Jim Farley said the company will invest $5 billion in an all-new modular EV platform and assembly process that will make it easier and cheaper to produce electric models in the United States. The company also announced the first product to be built with this system: a small electric pickup set to debut in 2027 for under $30,000.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Can Google reduce it's AI energy footprint? – This Week in Cleantech

      This week’s episode features special guest Tim McDonnell from Semafor, who wrote about Google’s moves to drive down the energy consumption of AI search queries to lower its carbon footprint.

  • Overpopulation

    • RFERL ☛ Iran's Water Crisis Worsened By Taliban Dam

      • New Dam, More Water Problems: Iran's water crisis is going from bad to worse as the Taliban's Pashdan Dam on the Hari River threatens the city of Mashhad's main water supply. Despite longstanding agreements, Iran's water share is being cut off. Experts blame both the Taliban's disregard for neighbors' rights and Tehran's failure to act on warnings.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Silicon socialism? Intel joins ranks of 'too big to fail'

    Analysts doubt the intervention solves Intel’s fundamental issues with clients, profitability and yields.

  • Mike Brock ☛ There's the Truth and Then There's Daddy

    One of the things upon which I spend a lot of time pondering: watching right-leaning, but otherwise intelligent people in my life look at Donald Trump’s systematic destruction of constitutional government and see just mere incompetence, but generally normal politics. These aren’t people force-fed reactionary propaganda in media bubbles. These are sophisticated observers who, if the same fact patterns were playing out in Hungary or Venezuela, would immediately recognize authoritarian consolidation for what it is.

    The only conclusion that makes sense is that some humans simply value tribal loyalty more than truth. Once that choice is made, everything else becomes motivated reasoning in service of protecting the tribe from its designated enemies.

  • The Verge ☛ US government takes 10 percent stake in Intel in exchange for money it was already on the hook for

    The US is investing $8.9 billion into Intel, but most of the funds come from money that the government was supposed to pay the embattled chipmaker anyway. In an announcement on Friday, Intel said the federal government will fund its investment using the remaining $5.7 billion in grants it hasn’t yet received under the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act, in addition to the $3.2 billion received as part of the Secure Enclave program.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • France24 ☛ AI-generated images of amputee Israeli soldiers appear in propaganda and scams

      A number of images of Israeli soldiers who have had both their legs amputated have been circulating on social media. These images were, in fact, created by artificial intelligence. But that hasn’t stopped both pro- and anti-Israeli accounts from picking them up. They’ve also been used for online scams.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK denies visa renewal to Bloomberg journalist 'without reason'

    Speaking personally, the chair of the local press union Selina Cheng said firms must consider the risk of hiring overseas talent: “Unpredictability is simply bad for business and does nothing positive for the Hong Kong government’s mission to have a good story told about itself.”

  • Techdirt ☛ Investigators Used Terrible Computer Fraud Laws To Ensure People Were Punished For Leaking Air Crash Footage To CNN

    The subject matter of the leaked recordings was obviously of public interest. And while the government may have its own interest in controlling dissemination of recording of incidents that involve federal agencies and their oversight, it’s not the sort of government interest most courts consider to be worthy of violating the First Amendment.

    Fortunately, the government has options. For a very long time, the option federal law enforcement deployed most frequently in cases involving pretty much any sort of technology was the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). This broadly written law not only allowed prosecutors to charge people with federal crimes for doing nothing more than interacting with services/servers/etc. in unexpected ways, but allowed companies to, essentially, shoot the messengers for reporting data breaches, unsecured servers, or sloppy user interfaces that could be exploited to display far more information than those running them intended.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Independent UK ☛ They donated millions to Trump — now, ICE detention providers are reaping the rewards

    But one industry has seen exponential growth — and expects even mo

    re to come: immigration detention.

    “Private prison companies have been so giddy since last November, about the prospect of making billions of dollars at the expense of every American,” Stacy Suh, director at Detention Watch Network, told The Independent.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump’s Largest ICE Detention Site Is Former Japanese Internment Camp

    The Trump administration opened an immigrant detention site at a former Japanese internment camp in Texas, leading to condemnation from politicians, advocacy groups, and descendants of survivors of the WWII-era program.

    Fort Bliss, a military base headquartered in El Paso, is slated to be the site of the largest federal detention center in the country. It currently holds around 1,000 detainees, but it is expected to eventually hold 5,000. Costing more than $1 billion in private contracts, it has also been used as a base for deportation flights.

  • Techdirt ☛ Another Bullshit ‘Assaulting An ICE Officer’ Case Falls Apart In Front Of A Grand Jury

    But all that really meant — when the DHS decided to finally be honest about it — was that there had been 69 more assaults this year as compared to last year (79 to 10). And when you have the actual numbers, this supposed “war on ICE” looks more like ICE officers complaining a bit more than they did last year.

    Well, ICE officers brought it on themselves. Their insistence on wearing masks, stripping themselves of identifying badges, driving unmarked vehicles, hanging around in courtroom hallways, chasing day laborers across Home Deport parking lots, lurking in rented moving vans, etc. all but ensured there would be the occasional violent reaction to the sudden appearance of masked kidnappers who somehow can’t manage to obtain the occasional judicial warrant.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Australian Unions Are in Decline, and Labor Isn’t Helping

    But perhaps the most positive news for the movement was the exceptional growth (albeit from a low starting figure) of union membership among young workers. Among workers aged fifteen to twenty-four, the rate of union membership increased by 53 percent, with a further 22 percent increase in union membership among workers aged twenty-five to thirty-four years.

    Yet when viewed in light of the overall situation, these good news stories lose their optimistic glow. Indeed, for many unionists, the movement remains mired in a winter of despair. Even the news about membership growth, on closer inspection, reveals particular and structural vulnerabilities. The largest membership density increases occurred in health care and social assistance and construction, which recorded 2.8 and 2 percent respectively. Employment in both sectors is vulnerable to changes in government policy and may fall victim to future austerity drives in response to a deteriorating global economy.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Friction cannot be reduced, it can only be redistributed

    Of course, there's plenty of workers who don't even get the tipped minimum wage: in most of the country, "gig economy" workers aren't guaranteed any wages. If your boss – the company that made your app – fucked up by charging too much or skimping on ads or having piss-poor customer service, you can clock on for an eight-hour shift and get zero dollars, all the while being available to your boss, just in case they do get a customer. If you're a driver, you only get paid for the time when you're on a delivery or have a passenger, and you bear the expense of the rest of the hours you spend prowling the streets, waiting for a call-out. This allows gig companies to build up a giant workforce that can absorb orders when they come in, while shifting the friction of living on half-wages to the workers who only get paid on the way out to a delivery, but not on the way back.

  • Air Force Times ☛ Hegseth signs memo authorizing arming of Guard in DC

    Another official, speaking to Military Times on condition of anonymity, said the service would likely carry SIG Sauer M17 service pistols as opposed to longer guns. Guard members in the nation’s capital do not have law enforcement authorities.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • [Old] New York Times ☛ The Cluetrain Manifesto

    Well, OK, a few things did happen in between. One of those things was that the Internet attracted millions. Many millions. The interesting question to ask is why. In the early 1990s, there was nothing like the Internet we take for granted today. Back then, the Net was primitive, daunting, uninviting. So what did we come for? And the answer is: each other.

  • [Old] Medium ☛ What happened to Cluetrain?

    But the most interesting thing about Cluetrain is how influential it continues to be for the thought-leadership industrial complex (the term “cluetrain” is still used almost every day on Twitter), but how little impact it’s had on the actual business world it was meant to revolutionize. You could even argue that brand communications have gone backward in the 21 years since it came out.

    I recently talked to one of Cluetrain’s four co-authors, Doc Searls, to find out why that might be the case, and how he thinks about their 21-year-old manifesto. Rather than pretend this was a linear Q&A, I’ve cobbled together some of the more thought-provoking bits from our conversation.

    So here’s Doc with the wisdom.

  • Carnyx Group Ltd ☛ 'The [Internet] is a conversation': Lessons from the Cluetrain Manifesto 17 years on

    You can build gorgeous websites and apps. You can publish lovely looking branded content via Instagram and Facebook. But if your product or service doesn’t meet my expectation and you don’t give me the opportunity to have a proper conversation with you, I’m going to use those channels to call you out.

    We shouldn’t be surprised. The Cluetrain Manifesto predicted exactly what would happen. In 1999 it foretold that markets are conversations and that the [Internet] enables the world’s biggest conversation.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Doc Searls ☛ The Hotel Model of AI

  Note that the winners are giants. You and I? We’re just consumers. Our agency in this system will be no greater than what these giants allow us. Each giant will be (hell, already is) a hotel with a know-it-all concierge who can get us what we want, within the hotel’s confines. But the space is not ours. So, what Cluetrain said in 1999— [...]

• Copyrights

  • Futurism ☛ Using AI for Work Could Land You on the Receiving End of a Nasty Lawsuit

    A recent breakdown by The Register highlights the legal dangers of AI use, especially in corporate settings. If you use generative AI software to spit out graphics, press releases, logos, or videos, you and your employer could end up facing six-figure damages, the publication warns.

    This is thanks to the vast archive of copyrighted data that virtually all commercial generative AI models are trained on.

  • Techdirt ☛ AI Training: What Creators Need To Know About Copyright, Tokens, And Data Winter

    As the conversation about AI’s impact on creative industries continues, there’s a common misconception that AI models are “stealing” content by absorbing it for free. But if we take a closer look at how AI training works, it becomes clear that this isn’t the case at all. AI models don’t simply replicate or repackage creative works—they break them down into something much more abstract: tokens. These tokens are tiny, fragmented pieces of data that no longer represent the creative expression of an idea. And here’s where the distinction lies: copyright is meant to protect expression, not individual words, phrases, or patterns that make up those works.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ UK Live Sports Piracy Sets New Record, Movie Piracy Returns to 2019 Peak

    A new edition of the UK's Online Copyright Infringement Tracker has landed after taking a year off. The headline figure indicates a small decrease in the overall piracy rate, down from 32% in 2022 to 29% in 2024. In the movies, music and live sports categories, pirate consumption increased in 2024, with live sports increasing to a new high at the same time as legal subscriptions fall.