Leftovers

• Seth Michael Larson ☛ Blogrolls are the Best(rolls)

  I’ve hosted a blogroll on my own blog since 2023 and encourage other bloggers to do so. My own blogroll is generated from the list of RSS feeds I subscribe to and articles that I “favorite” within my RSS reader. If you want to be particularly fancy you can add an RSS feed (example) to your blogroll that provides readers a method to “subscribe” for future blogroll updates.

• Sara Jakša ☛ My Map of the Internet (In Reply to Tiffany's Help me map the [Internet]!)

  Through Sacha Judd newsletter I have found out about the Tiffany's mapping the [Internet] project. Mentioning the similar project from the 2009 Tiffany was people to draw how the [Internet] looks to people today and to send the visualisation of.

• Joel Dueck ☛ Publishing Nerds

  Listen carefully. I’m not talking about an editor. I’m not talking about a book designer or a web designer. I’m talking about a person who enjoys the activity of packaging and producing words in the same way that the writer enjoys writing words. This person’s interest probably includes things like editing, book design, typography, web design — even writing! — but is not focused on any one of them.

  We have no ready word for this person. My first instinct is to call us “publishers”, but this doesn’t work very well: it suggests a whole commercial concern, not an individual enthusiast. “Publishing enthusiast” would be closer, but it takes too long to say. So I call myself a publishing nerd.

• James G ☛ What’s in my inventory?

  I also bring a notebook in which to write. This is essential. Sometimes I need to write something down or sketch it out. My notebook is where I will write down a few ideas that I want to explore on paper rather than jotting down on my phone. I draw wireframes for web pages. I write stories. My notebook has a sticker of my blog mascot on the front, a little bit of personalisation.

• Alexandru Scvorțov ☛ So many bots

  The first thing to notice is that my blog is much more popular with bots than with humans. The totals are 9141/350/68. Dead Internet theory is real—only 5% of my traffic might be humans and only 1% scrolled to the bottom.

  The next thing to notice is that every page has GETs, often without any corresponding human activity. It’s clear the site got crawled at least 10 times last week. This confuses me a bit because most of the content is static. For example, post 1 hasn’t changed since 2012.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Neanderthals May Never Have Truly Gone Extinct, Study Reveals

    According to the analysis, the long and drawn-out 'love affair' between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals could have led to almost complete genetic absorption within 10,000–30,000 years.

  • SICP ☛ Tony Hoare and negative space | Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers

    Imagine you know the program’s state (or, the relevant attributes of that state) at a point in your program, and you can express that as a predicate—a function of the state that returns a Boolean value—P. In other words, you can assert that P is true at this point. The next thing the computer does is to run the next instruction, C. You know the effect that C has on the environment, so you can assert that it leaves the environment in a new state, expressed by a new predicate, Q.

  • Wired ☛ The Physics of the Northern Lights

    These widespread light shows have been caused by especially strong blasts of solar wind—electrically charged particles shot out from the sun at incredible speeds. The strength of these is down to the sun reaching the peak of its solar cycle, a period of increased solar storms that happens every 11 years. Although the cycle’s peak has just passed, stronger than usual storms—and unusually widespread auroras—are expected to last into 2026.

• Career/Education

  • The Walrus ☛ I Was Warned There’s Little Money to Be Made in Publishing. I Built a Career in It Anyway

    As a business strategy, it is pathetic. As a cultural strategy, it is essential to civilized nations. The great English publisher Geoffrey Faber had the emphasis right: “Books are not mere merchandise. Books are a nation thinking out loud.” That cornerstone aspiration is what drives the model.

  • The Indiana Capital Chronicle ☛ 'Students First': What Indiana’s school funding really looks like

    While the highest dollar amount for K-12 education funding may have emerged from last session, it is not the highest level of funding we have seen. Ball State University Economist Michael Hicks has written that currently, when adjusted for inflation, “in K-12 we are spending $100 less per student each year today than in 2010.” Also, in 2024, the Education Data Initiative reported that Indiana ranks 37th of 50 states in education spending per pupil.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Impostor syndrome in higher ed teachers: Balancing authenticity with professionalism

    New research from Colorado State University demonstrates that faculty sharing an internal sense of unease and inadequacy may significantly shape the ways students perceive their professors' overall competence, likability and effectiveness at teaching.

  • Adrian Roselli ☛ Pre-order “Digital Accessibility Ethics”

    Lainey Feingold, Reginé Gilbert, and Chancey Fleet gathered 36 authors across 10 countries and a commonwealth to write 32 chapters about ethics in digital accessibility. I am one of those 36 authors.

  • James G ☛ I’m going to study art history

    Despite this big change – from full-time work to full-time study – one thing is for sure: I will continue to be here blogging as normal – indeed, writing, like analysing art, excites me to an extent that may take a lifetime to encapsulate in words.

  • Andre Alves Garzia ☛ Had a good time at Edinburgh Radical Book Fair

    It was good to see so many interesting books covering intersectional topics and cutting through so many hard challenges we face as a society.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ The Future of Teaching Assistants

    In 2016, in the pre-transformer times, Georgia Tech professor Ashok Goel gave a prescient TEDx Talk on an AI teaching assistant for his large online Artificial Intelligence course. Students would ask questions to an online forum, and fellow students and TAs would answer these question. Unbeknownst to the students, Ashok had an AI system answer questions from the forum with the moniker Jill Watson (it was built on technology used for Watson's Jeopardy win). Jill answered questions about administrative issues in the class, so well that most students were surprised it was an AI system. Goel still needed human TAs to handle questions about course content.

    In the talk Goel made comments ahead of his time.

• Hardware

  • Eliseo Martelli ☛ My scanning workflow with the Plustek OpticFilm 8100 and VueScan

    I’ve recently integrated a new piece of hardware into my film photography workflow: a Plustek OpticFilm 8100. After watching the second-hand market for a few weeks, I found a unit on subito.it for €200.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Input diet

    I’m starting to believe that a phoneless life is, for me, the ultimate goal. How to get there, that I don’t know, but I feel like it’s a worthy goal to pursue. And I think this goal is gonna be part of a broader push towards really curating the inputs in my life. By inputs, I mean everything I consume. Because I realised my mental health is deeply affected by what I consume, day after day. The books I read, the posts and blogs I scroll through, the news I ingest, the music I listen to. Everything contributes to how I feel, and I think I’m only now realising how much more strict and diligent I should be with my input diet.

• Proprietary

  • PC Gamer ☛ Looks like it's Tencent's turn to start turning off the money faucet for Western studios, as Bloodhunt developer Sharkmob says layoffs are coming

    Tencent-owned Swedish developer Sharkmob, which announced in October that the supernatural battle royale Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt will be taken offline in April 2026, says it will lay off an unspecified number of employees as part of "planned changes to its organizational structure." The studio said Exoborne, the "tactical open world extraction shooter" announced during The Game Awards 2023, remains in development.

  • Synopsys to Lay Off 10% of Workforce After Ansys Deal – Restructuring Plans Explained [Ed: The company which controls Microsoft Black Duck]

    Synopsys will lay off 10% of its global staff, which is about 2,000 employees.

    The company is cutting jobs to simplify its operations after buying Ansys for USD 35 billion.

  • The Register UK ☛ Amazon: Cisco, Citrix 0-days indicate 'advanced' attacker

    By July, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and private researchers said the flaw was under exploitation and being abused to hijack user sessions - although Citrix still hasn't commented on the attacks.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Cloud Outages Are Inevitable, But Lock-In Shouldn’t Be

    True resilience looks completely different. It means your critical data workloads are natively portable. Imagine being able to move your core applications not just between regions, but also between entirely different cloud providers, and back to your on-prem data centre, without the cost and disruption of a massive, months-long refactoring project.

    That’s the only way to ensure that when one environment goes down, another can take over quickly, securely, and without major disruption.

  • Niel Madden ☛ Were URLs a bad idea?

    In fact, in the vast majority of cases the uniformity of URLs is no longer a desirable aspect. Most apps and libraries are specialised to handle essentially a single type of URL, and are better off because of it. Are there still cases where it is genuinely useful to be able to accept a URL of any (or nearly any) scheme?

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Is Reportedly Burning a Ludicrous Amount of Cash on Sora

      Despite its half-a-trillion-dollar valuation, the reality is that OpenAI is almost certainly burning through cash at an alarming rate.

      According to recent filings, the ChatGPT maker lost a whopping $12 billion last quarter alone. Yet, it wants to spend well over $1 trillion over the next several years, once again stoking fears over an AI bubble that could wipe out the entire US economy if it were to burst.

    • Futurism ☛ AI Is Failing at the Most Hilarious Task Imaginable

      Interestingly, they found that an LLM’s size and complexity didn’t necessarily correlate to more realistic vitriol. For example, “the large Llama-3.1-70B performs on par with, or even below, smaller models,” the researchers wrote. “This suggests that scaling does not translate into more authentically human communication.”

      The findings are particularly ironic given that one of AI’s most prominent use-cases at the moment seems to be spamming social media, particularly the well-trafficked platforms of X-formerly-Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (though other sites, like Reddit, are also being overrun.)

    • Futurism ☛ Perplexity CEO Warns That AI Girlfriends Can Melt Your Brain

      During a fireside chat at the University of Chicago, covered by Business Insider, Srinivas charged that the huge rise in popularity of AI-powered companion chatbots is “dangerous.” The tech CEO fretted that the AI bots — which are designed to mimic doting lovers over text or voice chat — are becoming more sophisticated and human-like, with abilities like remembering intimate details about their users.

    • Fortra LLC ☛ Leading AI Companies Accidentally Leak Their Passwords and Digital Keys on GitHub - What You Need to Know | Fortra

      Many of the world's top artificial intelligence companies are making a simple but dangerous mistake. They are accidentally publishing their passwords and digital keys on GitHub, the popular code-sharing website that is used by millions of developers every day.

      The problem was found by security researchers at Wiz who examined 50 leading AI firms, and discovered that 65% of them had accidentally exposed highly sensitive information online.

    • India Times ☛ Journalists must verify AI-generated content before use: Speakers at Mumbai seminar

      Maharashtra additional chief secretary (Skill Development, Employment, Entrepreneurship and Innovation) Manisha Verma suggested AI training should be designed according to participants' experience and proficiency, focusing on hands-on learning.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ How should open source software projects handle AI‑generated code?

      Users and critics backlash was so intense that on Sunday (9the) one of the project maintainers, Janek Bevendorff, published a post on the official blog detailing their stance on AI‑generated code.

      Worth highlighting from the post: [...]

    • Nick Heer ☛ Google Chrome Feature Makes A.I. Cheating Easier, Teachers Say

      As browsers are increasingly augmented with A.I. features, I expect to see more stories like this one. In Google’s case, it is particularly egregious as the company’s Chromebooks are widely used in education.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: A tale of three customer service chatbots

      AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. Nowhere is that more true than in customer service: [...]

    • Meduza ☛ Russia’s AI robot stumbles and falls on its face in debut appearance

      Journalist Dmitry Filonov noted that Alexey Yuzhakov, head of Russia’s National Technological Coalition, had previously warned that Aidol’s developers had invested little in improving its ability to walk. Vladimir Vitukhin, the founder of the machine’s parent company, told journalists that the problem was caused by the robot’s stereo cameras: they’re sensitive to lighting conditions, and the hall was dark.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Russian AI robot face-plants on stage in viral Moscow debut disaster

      Staff quickly draped a sheet over the fallen robot and hustled it offstage, but not before the footage went viral across social media. The mishap happened within seconds of AIdol's appearance, turning what was supposed to be a proud showcase of Russian AI technology into an unintentional comedy moment.

  • Social Control Media

    • The North Lines IN ☛ Private detectives report sharp rise in infidelity cases as digital addiction strains marriages

      This development reflects the evolving nature of modern relationships and the increasing influence of technology, social media, and lifestyle pressures on marital stability among the city’s upper middle and professional classes. In a recent case that epitomises this emerging pattern, a prominent doctor couple from the Malad area saw their marriage collapse due to allegations of infidelity.

    • Cybernews ☛ China’s law requiring influencers to hold a degree explained

      According to 2025 data, there are about 1.08 billion active social media user identities in China, accounting for about 75% of the country’s population.

      Due to the CCP’s tight grip on freedom of expression, online spaces in the country are under intense scrutiny.

      The Great Firewall, a modern [Internet] censorship system, prevents Chinese [Internet] users from accessing most Western websites and social media, including Google, Wikipedia, and Instagram.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Bitdefender ☛ Russian [cracker] admits helping Yanluowang ransomware infect companies

      Instead of deploying ransomware himself, Volkov is alleged to have obtained network credentials and administrator access, and then passed that access to operators of the Yanluowang ransomware group.

      In return, Volkov received a percentage of any ransom payments extorted from victims. Federal prosecutors say that he earned more than US $256,000 as a result.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Michigan Advance ☛ FCC allows prisons, jails to charge more for phone and video calls

    The 2-1 vote in late October reverses rate caps the FCC adopted last year under a 2023 law that allows the agency to set limits on prison phone and video call rates. Critics say the rates are kept high by limited competition among major providers such as Securus Technologies and ViaPath.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Walrus ☛ Workplace Surveillance Is Here, Counting Your Mouse Clicks and Bathroom Breaks

      Surveillance at work isn’t new. For years, employers have monitored warehouse staff, delivery drivers, and call centre employees—often in the name of efficiency, safety, or customer service. These environments offered early test beds for surveillance tools: GPS location tracking, productivity quotas, call recordings, and biometric scanners. But what began on shop floors and factory lines is now migrating into white-collar professions. Contract lawyers and remote administrative staff are increasingly subject to the same forms of monitoring—only digitized and dispersed across home offices and laptops. For many workers, both remote and in person, the workplace has quietly shifted into a site of constant measurement—where every pause can trigger scrutiny and where productivity is no longer just about results but continuous presence.

    • EFF ☛ Washington Court Rules That Data Captured on Flock Safety Cameras Are Public Records

      The Skagit County Superior Court in Washington rejected the attempt to block the public’s right to access data gathered by Flock Safety cameras, protecting access to information under the Washington Public Records Act (PRA). Importantly, the ruling from the court makes it clear that this access is protected even when a Washington city uses Flock Safety, a third-party vendor, to conduct surveillance and store personal data on behalf of a government agency.

    • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Predator drones shift from border patrol to protest surveillance

      Previous news reports said the drones sent by the Department of Homeland Security conducted surveillance on the weekend of June 7 over thousands of protesters demonstrating against raids conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

      The Predators flew over Los Angeles for at least four more days, according to tracking experts who identified the flights through air traffic control tower communications and images of a Predator in flight.

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ Europe ready to sacrifice privacy to catch up on AI

      “A gift to Big Tech.” Max Schrems is furious over the European Commission’s plan to revise the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Brussels’ stated goal is to give European companies a competitive edge in training generative AI models amid the global AI arms race. “This would be a massive downgrading of European’s privacy ten years after the GDPR was adopted,” warns the Austrian activist and leading digital rights advocate.

      The GDPR isn’t the only law in Brussels’ sights. As part of a new “digital omnibus” to be unveiled next week, the European Commission also intends to postpone the implementation of certain provisions of the AI Act — the landmark regulatory framework adopted in spring 2024 after fierce negotiations. The proposals will still need approval from EU member states and the European Parliament, both far from guaranteed.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Gray Zone ☛ White House insiders knew of 2020 Venezuela coup in advance, files show

  • France24 ☛ Ten years after the Paris attacks, France prepares to remember

    “The 10th anniversary is here and emotions and tension are everywhere for us survivors,” said 39-year-old Arthur Denouveaux, president of victims’ association Life for Paris. “That kind of shields us from the world in a way, because we’re so focused on the grief and on remembering those who lost their lives.”

    On November 13, 2015, nine Islamic State gunmen and suicide bombers struck within minutes of one another at several locations in the deadliest violence to hit France since World War II.

  • NL Times ☛ Man gets €34,000 payout for dismissal after religious refusal to shake woman's hand

    The subdistrict court of The Hague awarded an employee a severance payment of €34,000 for wrongful dismissal. The man was fired after only three days in employment for refusing to shake a woman’s hand for religious reasons. He successfully argued that he hadn’t been discriminating against the woman because of her gender, but that his former employer discriminated against him based on his religion.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ World War I Armistice Day remembered in Ypres and elsewhere

    World War I fighting officially stopped at 11 a.m. on November 11 in 1918. Ceremonies marking the anniversary took place around much of the world, including the Menin Gate at Ypres in Belgium.

  • Techdirt ☛ Chuck Schumer Doesn’t Know What Time It Is

    What he cannot see—what the framework literally prevents him from seeing—is that the fight itself mattered more than any deal. That people weren’t asking for better negotiating tactics. They were asking for proof that Democrats would hold the line on something. Anything. After Chicago. After ICE raids. After warrantless mass detentions. After watching Trump systematically dismantle constitutional constraints.

    This was the test. Forty days to prove Democrats could fight power instead of accommodating it. And Schumer folded.

    Symone Sanders got it immediately: “The hostage taking worked.” That’s the lesson Trump learned last night. That’s why Chris Murphy is right to fear Trump gets stronger, not weaker. When you teach authoritarians that threatening to hurt people produces Democratic capitulation, you haven’t minimized damage—you’ve guaranteed more hostage situations.

  • Le Monde ☛ 10 years after Paris attacks: A time to remember and heed warnings

    Ten years later, the nation pays tribute to the victims of these senseless killings: The 132 people who lost their lives, the more than 400 physically wounded and the thousands who bear psychological scars of these attacks claimed by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group (IS).

  • Associated Press ☛ France honors victims of 2015 Paris attacks

    On Nov. 13, 2015, nine Islamic State group gunmen and suicide bombers struck within minutes of one another at several locations in the deadliest violence to strike France since World War II.

    They targeted fans at the Stade de France stadium and cafe-goers and ending with a bloodbath in the Bataclan, killing 130 people. Two survivors who later took their own life as consequence of the physical and mental trauma also have been recognized as victims.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ World’s deadliest submarines return to World War–scarred Baltic Sea

    The focus is on strengthening all-domain ASW operations in the Baltic, a shallow, complex environment filled with mines, civilian shipping lanes, and potential Russian threats.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Trump preemptively pardons Michigan false electors

    Trump’s pardons only apply to federal offenses. They do not shield any of the individuals from potential or ongoing state-level legal actions. In July 2023, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced that 16 Michigan residents would be charged with felony offences for their role in the false-electors scheme.

  • El País ☛ ‘Human safaris’ in Sarajevo: Milan investigates 1990s trips where tourists allegedly paid to kill civilians

    Ordinary citizens, with ties to far-right circles and passionate about weapons, allegedly hired this service as a kind of human safari in the besieged city. According to the complaint, they flew from Trieste to Belgrade on the Serbian airline Aviogenex, which at that time operated from the Italian airport. To be weekend snipers, they reportedly paid the equivalent of between €80,000 ($92,800) and €100,000 ($116,000), according to the first hypotheses of the investigation. Shooting at children cost more. Information that has come to light mentions a Milanese businessman who owns a private cosmetic surgery clinic, as well as citizens from Turin and Trieste.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ What's in the explosive Jeffrey Epstein emails accusing Trump?

    Read the excerpts here: [...]

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ US House Dems say newly released Epstein emails show Trump knew about abuse

    The three emails released by Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform were among 23,000 pages of documents turned over to the committee by Epstein’s estate, according to Democrats.

    In a 2011 correspondence with the now-convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein wrote that Trump “spent hours at my house” with a victim whose name is redacted from the email. In the same email, Epstein refers to Trump as the “dog that hasn’t barked.”

  • The Nation ☛ The Epstein Files Could Finally Sink Donald Trump

    Still, Trump’s Epstein escapades stand out, both because of the sheer depravity that characterized Epstein and his trafficking ring and because the specter of rampant child sexual predation has been a centerpiece of MAGA-fueled conspiracy theorizing, thanks largely to the prominence of QAnon activists in the Trump coalition. The prospect that Congress would release damning Epstein documents has been a key concern for Republicans since the start of Trump’s second term—thanks in no small part to the president’s own promise during the 2024 campaign to sign off on the opening of the Epstein files.

  • CS Monitor ☛ House Democrats release Epstein emails saying Trump ‘knew about the girls’

    The emails made public by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee add to the questions about Mr. Trump’s friendship with Mr. Epstein and about any knowledge he may have had in what prosecutors call a yearslong effort by Mr. Epstein to exploit underage girls. The Republican president has consistently denied any knowledge of Mr. Epstein’s alleged crimes and has said he ended their relationship years ago.

  • The Georgia Recorder ☛ Arizona’s Adelita Grijalva sworn in to US House, signs Epstein petition

    The Trump administration said in July it would not release further information related to the case. President Donald Trump had campaigned on releasing the files.

  • Mike Brock ☛ If Morality Had Bankruptcy Lawyers: Michael Wolff, Mike Solana, and the Age of Ethical Insolvency

    One must pause to reflect upon the moral vacuum this represents. A journalist—someone who built a career selling books about Trump, presenting himself as the insider who knew the real story—was coordinating with Jeffrey Epstein about strategic timing for releasing dirt on Trump. Not reporting what he knew. Not investigating. Coordinating. With a pedophile. About when to deploy information for maximum political impact.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Trump ‘spent hours with Virginia Giuffre at my house’, Epstein claimed

    “(redacted) Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever... of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

  • Paris Buttfield-Addison ☛ Slop for the People

    This act of outsourcing the core intellectual labour of a national security chief is revealing, but it is not the critical failure. The true failure, the one that provides a perfect, contained microcosm of the government’s entire AI strategy, is the secrecy and self-preservation that followed… When the FOI request was lodged, the “authorised decision-maker” who signed the letter responding to it was old mate himself. It’s always a good sign when the subject of an inquiry becomes its gatekeeper, right?

  • The Atlantic ☛ Wait, Are the Epstein Files Real Now?

    But the revelations are a bit too damning to be dismissed as a news-cycle gambit, so the White House took a different tack a few hours later. It released a statement noting that the unnamed victim in the Epstein email who “spent hours” with Trump at Epstein’s house was Virginia Giuffre, who “repeatedly said President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing whatsoever.”

  • Hindustan Times ☛ ‘Knew about the girls’: What Epstein wrote about Trump in new leaked emails

    Epstein’s death by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges ended his legal battles but left behind lingering questions about his powerful network of associates, Trump among them.

• Environment

  • France24 ☛ Global fossil fuel emissions to hit record high in 2025, study says

    Global fossil fuel emissions are expected to reach an all-time high in 2025, a new report warned Thursday, adding that keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius is now effectively out of reach. The annual Global Carbon Budget study found that despite rapid growth in renewable energy, rising demand will increase oil, gas, and coal emissions.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Fossil fuel projects around the world threaten the health of 2bn people

    A quarter of the world’s population lives within three miles (5km) of operational fossil fuel projects, potentially threatening the health of more than 2 billion people as well as critical ecosystems, according to first-of-its-kind research.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ How nuclear power aims to wean Finland off Russian energy

      Up until then, the country had been receiving half of its energy imports from the neighboring country, with which it shares a 1,300-kilometer (807-mile) border. They included electricity, oil and natural gas deliveries.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Ghost Reefs of 2083: The Paleontology of Color (A Speculative ‘Fiction’)

    • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Have Trained Bumblebees to Understand a Form of Morse Code

      It's the first demonstration that Bombus terrestris can make decisions about where to forage based solely on the duration of a visual cue. This means that bumblebees can process temporal information, much like vertebrates can – an ability that could mean the difference between life and death, out in the wild world.

• Finance

  • US News And World Report ☛ US Mint in Philadelphia to Press Final Penny as the 1-Cent Coin Gets Canceled

    Still, many people have a nostalgia for them, seeing them as lucky or fun to collect. And some retailers have voiced concerns in recent weeks as supplies ran low and the last production neared. They said the phase-out was abrupt and came with no guidance from the federal government on how to handle customer transactions.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Futurism ☛ Meta's Top AI Scientist Is Quitting as Zuckerberg's Spending Spree Sputters

    It’s a genuinely startling decision. LeCun, who joined Meta in 2013, is a towering figure in the AI industry. A Turing Award winner, the 65-year-old is considered to be one of the three so-called “godfathers” of modern AI for his pioneering work on neural networks, the tech that underpins the large language models used by much of the AI industry. As such, his presence at Meta has imbued the company’s often-struggling AI efforts with an aura of credibility.

  • The Local DK ☛ How will you pay for postage and send letters in Denmark when PostNord services end?

    The company said it has recorded an increase in interest from members of the public who want to know how letters will be delivered after PostNord’s withdrawal.

    This includes future use of red postboxes for sending letters, with existing postboxes -- a feature of Danish streets for decades -- set to go out of commission.

  • Sergio Visinoni ☛ Tech leaders are turning leadership into a fad

    The essence of the article, which I invite everyone to read, can be summarised as follows: the definition of good engineering leadership in the tech industry is highly volatile, and you’d better adjust rather than being stuck on a version that has fallen out of fashion.

    That is me paraphrasing, and I might have gotten something wrong. Here is an excerpt from the article itself, summarising the author's conclusion: [...]

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ We're not living in America

    Arguably a lot of the problem rests with the electorate, with the general public. Media has a big responsibility there. People have long been subject to racist flimflam and climate downplaying and self-righteous hypocritical nationbuilding. Things that are absolutely hecked up mad world have been normalized.

  • Centricular Ltd ☛ Linking and shrinking Rust static libraries: a tale of fire

    At the GStreamer project, we produce SDKs for lots of platforms: Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, and Windows. However, as we port more and more plugins to Rust 🦀, we are finding ourselves backed into a corner.

    Rust static libraries are simply too big.

    To give you an example, the AWS folks changed their SDK back in March to switch their cryptographic toolkit over to their aws-lc-rs crate [1]. However, that causes a 2-10x increase in code size (bug reports here and here), which gets duplicated on every plugin that makes use of their ecosystem!

  • 00f ☛ The state of the Rust dependency ecosystem

    Over the past few days, I analyzed over 200,000 crates from crates.io to uncover patterns in maintenance, developer engagement, security, and overall ecosystem health.

    The results: a mix of fascinating insights, concerning trends, and reasons for optimism.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Washington Post ☛ Georgia moves closer to Russia, banning parties and jailing opposition

      One year after a pro-Russian party’s victory in elections, the European Union said Georgia is a candidate in “name only” amid “democratic backsliding.”

    • Idiomdrottning ☛ Gullible like a fox

      When a lie is being presented as an obvious truth, it can still fool a lot of folks. But to a certain “clever” kind of personality, a lie that’s presented as a secret truth becomes much more convincing. When it’s wrapped in “well actually” trivia. When it’s “if you memorize this fact you’ll know something most people don’t know”, that becomes tasty to them even when that fact is an outright lie.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ Cowardice And Capitulation At Cornell

    On Friday it was announced that my alma mater, Cornell, had caved to the Trump administration and agreed to a “deal” the federal government had offered them to get back the funding it had illegally cut off from Cornell as part of its authoritarian efforts to bully top universities into submission. This capitulation came just days after the American electorate showed that they were in strong agreement that the Donald Trump regime is out of control and needs to be stopped. Doing this now suggests that the administration at Cornell has no business running a top university.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Right-Wing Attack on Wikipedia

    This is why Republicans in Congress have recently begun sending letters that accuse the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the encyclopedia, of ideological bias and demand the names of certain volunteer arbitrators who help address factual disagreements. It’s also why some of the most powerful people in the world are demanding “reforms” to Wikipedia—or launching their own copycats.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ The University of Michigan is censoring a quilt?

    The exhibit was supposed to open on October 16, with the various pieces displayed in high traffic areas on the ground floor. Instead, the quilt and most of the other artworks in the exhibition are in an obscure room that opened on Nov 6 for six weeks only.

    Why?

  • Court House News ☛ Russian court extends jailing of teenage singer over street performance of anti-war songs

    A Russian court Tuesday extended the jailing of an 18-year-old street singer on charges seen as punishment for performing anti-war songs, an action denounced by human rights activists as part of a rampant crackdown on free speech over the war in Ukraine.

  • Doc Searls ☛ Does one need a license to have opinions online in China?

    Toward confirmation, a comment below points here, which I can't read because it wants me to turn off the ad blocker I don't have. (I only block tracking, which for website ad systems means the same thing.) Another comment points to a Times of India piece that loaded for me then disappeared.

    So I did more digging. Here what I've got so far: [...]

  • US News And World Report ☛ Russian Court Extends Jailing of Teenage Singer Over Street Performance of Anti-War Songs

    Diana Loginova was ordered held for another 13 days by the court in St. Petersburg on charges of violating public order with her October performance. It was the third consecutive sentence for Loginova, who has remained in custody since her initial arrest on Oct. 15.

  • RFERL ☛ Russian Musicians Get Third 13-Day Jail Term Over Performing Anti-War Songs

    Loginova, Orlov, and drummer Vladislav Leontyev were first arrested and jailed on October 15. Loginova and Leontyev each received 13-day sentences, while Orlov was sentenced to 12 days. The court ruled that the group’s street performance had obstructed an entrance to a metro station.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • New Yorker ☛ The Mess at the BBC Will Never End

    Over the weekend, Auntie—as the BBC used to be known, for its prudish, familiar, and slightly condescending ways—imploded. Both the chief executive of BBC News, Deborah Turness, and Davie, its over-all leader, announced that they would resign. Trump celebrated the news on Truth Social. “These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election,” he wrote. “On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for Democracy!” On Monday, he threatened to sue the BBC for a billion dollars.

  • Press Gazette ☛ The public haven’t been fooled: it’s time to stop pretending Leveson lessons were learned

    More than a decade on from the Leveson Inquiry, the British public remains unconvinced that its lessons were ever truly learned.

    New YouGov research commissioned by the Press Recognition Panel (PRP) shows that people believe many of the same problems persist.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Threatens BBC With Billion-Dollar Lawsuit For Correctly Pointing Out He Supported A Violent Insurrection

    Clearly emboldened by his success at bullying weak-kneed U.S. media outlets, Trump has now taken aim at the BBC for some edits made to a documentary about Trump’s violent insurrection attempt. The documentary in question, “Panorama,” mashed together two parts of Trump’s speech clearly encouraging his followers to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021: [...]

  • Semafor Inc ☛ BBC in crisis over resignations and Trump threats

    The crisis comes at a particularly fraught time for the BBC: Its government charter is up for renewal in 2027.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ The BBC’s editing error was serious, but the response is way out of proportion

    So, yes, this was a bad mistake that was not adequately acknowledged or corrected when there was a chance to do so. That is something that calls for internal examination and external acknowledgment, some of which has occurred.

  • The Nation ☛ The Shuttering of “Teen Vogue” and the Silencing of Progressive Voices

    Teen Vogue’s dissolution signals a more troubling shift: the quiet disappearance of expert community voices from mainstream media and, more broadly, the silencing of those who challenge the dominant fear-mongering narratives that consolidate support for right-wing political agendas. It’s no coincidence that this silencing is unfolding alongside a broader assault on labor itself—evident in newsroom union fights like Condé Nast’s and a weakened National Labor Relations Board. These attacks are central to how authoritarian forces consolidate power and exert control.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ TorrentFreak Turns 20: What a Ride!

    Today marks TorrentFreak's 20th anniversary. After covering a changing piracy and copyright landscape for two decades, I'd like to take a moment to reflect and look forward. The site has accomplished more than I ever imagined, and it will remain independent indefinitely. While life and priorities may change, the two-man team aims to stay the course, writing content and adding value wherever we can.

  • 404 Media ☛ Our New FOIA Forum! 11/19, 1PM ET

    It’s that time again! We’re planning our latest FOIA Forum, a live, hour-long or more interactive session where Joseph and Jason will teach you how to pry records from government agencies through public records requests. We’re planning this for Wednesday, November 19th at 1 PM Eastern. That's in just over a week away! Add it to your calendar!

  • BoingBoing ☛ Police chief's botched newspaper raid costs town $3M settlement after 98-year-old dies from raid stress

    Police Chief Gideon Cody, who led the raid, resigned in October 2023 and now faces felony charges for interfering with the judicial process. "The raid also came after the newspaper had dug into the background of the police chief at the time who led the raid," reports the Associated Press. His criminal trial begins in February. He has pleaded not guilty. Meyer plans to use the settlement money to keep his paper running.

  • Associated Press ☛ Kansas county agrees to pay $3 million, apologize over raid on newspaper

    During the raid, authorities seized cellphones and computers from the newsroom and rifled through reporters’ desks. Search warrants linked the raid to a dispute between a local restaurant owner and the newspaper, which had obtained a copy of her driving record while reporting on her request for a city liquor license. The raid also came after the newspaper had dug into the background of the police chief at the time who led the raid.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Papers Please ☛ A case study in the importance of anonymous travel

    The case of Rutgers University professor Mark Bray and his family provides an object lesson in the importance of being able to travel anonymously, and how the practices of governments and airlines endanger travelers by making them identifiable.

    Dr. Bray, his partner Dr. Yesenia Barragan (also  a professor at Rutgers), and their two young children tried to flee the US last month after being denounced by members of the Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA, doxxed,  and receiving death threats. They planned to spend the rest of this academic year teaching remotely from Spain, where Dr. Bray had lived on previous research trips.

    Trying to get away from death threats isn’t an uncommon reason for travel, unfortunately. The factors behind the threats against Dr. Bray and his family — Dr. Bray’s scholarship as a historian of anti-fascist activism in Europe and North America since World War II — may be atypical. But thousands of people in the US flee their homes every day to escape from threats or ongoing patterns of domestic violence, often including credible death threats. We’ll never know how many of them have been stalked through their airline reservations.

  • Techdirt ☛ Federal Court Issues Injunction Permanently Blocking Deployment Of Military Troops To Portland

    This has already happened once. And, for reasons that went mostly unexplained by two of three judges ruling in favor of the administration, a stay was issued that allowed it to continue exploring its martial law options in a city Trump has already admitted he might have been lied to about in terms of civil unrest.

  • American Oversight ☛ What Records Tell Us About How ICE Is Using Guantánamo

    In January, Trump announced his intent to re-open and expand the use of the detention center in Guantánamo Bay for immigration enforcement. The first round of transfers in February drew widespread condemnation after detainees reported harsh conditions and limited access to lawyers. In June, despite bipartisan concern and an immense cost — estimated at $100,000 per detainee per day — the administration ramped the operation back up. Since February, the administration has held more than 700 migrants at Guantánamo.

  • Wired ☛ DHS Kept Chicago Police Records for Months in Violation of Domestic Espionage Rules

    The Department of Homeland Security collected data on Chicago residents accused of gang ties to test if police files could feed an FBI watchlist. Months passed before anyone noticed it wasn’t deleted.

  • NL Times ☛ Cops looked up climate protester's personal data hundreds of times: Ombudsman critical

    The National Ombudsman is highly critical of the police looking up a climate protester’s personal details hundreds of times, including data about his family, and then repeatedly refusing to handle the protester’s complaints about this. “The police seemed more focused on dismissing the complaint than on finding a solution or learning from the situation,” the ombudsman said, Trouw reports.

  • YLE ☛ State workers upset over government's tightening of remote working rules

    "If the staff from all of the agencies in Pasila would arrive at the same time, there would certainly not be enough workstations," said Timo Vihavainen, a senior engineer at the Energy Authority and union shop steward.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ [Podcast] The politics of undersea cables

    Once the basic physics of running long-distance wires to form an electric circuit were mastered, telegraph services quickly became essential to economic and intelligence operations. This is why, at the outbreak of both World War I and World War II, the British Navy cut the submarine cables linking Europe to the rest of the world. Forcing communications onto radio made it possible to intercept transmissions — and, with some luck and clever minds, decipher them.

  • APNIC ☛ Network edge design checklist: Part 2 — Network edge design

    In the first two posts of this series, we explored the fundamentals of building a resilient network edge. Part 1 focused on circuit design and active/active considerations — from physical path diversity to Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) strategies that keep traffic flowing even when things go wrong.

    In this post, we’re taking a step back to look at the big picture. Designing the network edge isn’t just about cables and configurations — it’s about planning, documentation, and making sure every critical element is accounted for before you start. To help with that, here’s a comprehensive checklist of considerations you can use as a starting point.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Macworld ☛ Five years later, the M5 chip just made Apple silicon exciting again

    We can see that reflected in the M5 MacBook Pro. Both before and after it launched, this device was framed as an iterative update with very little to differentiate it from the M4 version. We were told to just expect a chip refresh and very little else, with many experts and analysts warning that the true update would be coming next year with the M6 MacBook Pro.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Hindustan Times ☛ Microsoft giving ‘gift cards’ to users not switching to Google Chrome: Report

  Microsoft is reportedly offering users reward points, convertible into gift cards, as part of a new campaign to stop them from switching to Google Chrome. According to a report by Windows Latest, the tech giant is promoting Microsoft Edge by giving 1,300 Microsoft Rewards points to users who continue using the browser instead of downloading Chrome.

• Bruce Lawson ☛ Tim Berners-Lee on Apple’s WebKit monopoly

  I recently listened to a podcast called Decoder with Nilay Patel, in which Tim Berners-Lee was interviewed. Nilay asked Sir Uncle Timbo about browser competition on iOS. I’m happy to report that the inventor of the Web agrees with me that Apple inexplicably doesn’t want the Web to compete with its single-platform rent-extraction App Store.

  Unfortunately, you can only access a transcript if you’re a subscriber (yes, really!), but the audio is downloadable and I own MacWhisper, so here’s the salient part: [...]

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Dutch Court Orders ISP to Block Music Piracy Sites 'Newalbumreleases' and 'Israbox'

    Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has secured a new site-blocking injunction. The Rotterdam Court ordered internet provider Ziggo to block access to music piracy platforms 'newalbumreleases' and 'Israbox,' which reportedly had 100,000 monthly visits from the Netherlands. The court granted a dynamic injunction, rejecting the ISP's key defenses.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ GEMA wins against OpenAI on copying song lyrics

    The Munich court did not buy OpenAI’s argument. Language models can absolutely just reproduce their training data, and GPT very obviously did that precise thing.

    The court said that training was fine. It was spitting out copies that constituted spitting out copies.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Getty Images loses UK suit against Stable Diffusion

    Stability’s scraping was pretty blatant. You could see Getty watermarks in the generated images!

    But Mrs Justice Joanna Smith in the High Court ruled the AI would have had to actually store or reproduce the images for it to be a copyright violation. And Getty failed to show that.