Leftovers

• Thomas Rigby ☛ #TIL: Cone of Uncertainty

  One thing I always tell people at work (apart from "it depends") is “the closer you get to launch, the less you know”.

  This is becoming very apparent at work this week as we start to spec a new product for a client. Unpicking everything that was demonstrated in the pitch and writing requirements, and assumptions — of which there are a few.

• Terence Eden ☛ 2025 – A Year In Review

  And, yeah, I'm getting there! Quitting work (don't call it FIRE) wasn't as traumatic as I thought. It is a little weird shifting into indolence. And it is sometimes terrifying not to have a regular pay-cheque come in. But it has mostly been inconsequential.

• Rachel ☛ More tales about outages and numeric limits

  Outages, you say? Of course I have stories about outages, and limits, and some limits causing outages, and other things just screwing life up. Here are some random thoughts which sprang to mind upon reading this morning's popcorn-fest.

• Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0169 An invoice disappears

  This is a textbook ops manual. Next time I need to raise an invoice, I need to be following a process. Last time, I just made it up on the fly.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Breakthrough Helps Scientists Grow More Realistic Human Brain Models

    Could help reduce animal testing.

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Have Discovered a Special Type of Immune Cell That Slows Aging

    Some immune cells turn into 'zombie assassins'.

  • Science Alert ☛ This Is What Time You Should Eat Dinner During Winter

    When we eat is almost as important as what we eat.

  • The Register UK ☛ Europe joins the US as an exascale superpower

    Built by Eviden and powered by Nvidia's Grace-Hopper GH200 superchips, the Jupiter Booster made its maiden flight at the International Supercomputing Conference in June where it managed 793 petaFLOPS of HPL performance in a partial run that established it as Europe's most powerful super.

  • Rlang ☛ Why you should not use mean imputation for missing data

    I encountered the question today of what to do with missing values when conducting null hypothesis testing or regression? I have seen many suggest doing mean imputation. That is, simply replace any missing values with the mean of the variable calculated from the observed values. I argue that mean imputation is worse than doing nothing. Let’s explore.

• Career/Education

  • Hazel Weakly ☛ To Be a Leader of Systems

    Now, as a person who sees systems, who intuits chaos, who can grasp these concepts of swirling infinities, you have to sit with the uncomfortable idea that if you were to find yourself stranded in the middle of the ocean, it is a death sentence of all but certainty. This might be fine if it were just you; after all, life happens, you know? Sometimes things are bizarre, sometimes luck just runs out. However, I’ve often noticed that people who become known for seeing systems often become in charge of them. In other words, you’re probably a leader–either by name, by identity, or by purpose.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Andre Franca ☛ Fatherhood in the Age of Screens — Andre Franca

    The other day, my son looked up at me while I was scrolling through my phone and asked, “Daddy, are you working or playing?” I froze. The question wasn't accusatory, just curious, but it cut through every rationalization I had been making about my screen time.

• Proprietary

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ [Crackers] steal 1.8 terabytes of data from PC peripheral vendor Logitech — firm says zero-day vulnerability to blame, no sensitive information stolen

    Logitech is one of the biggest PC accessories manufacturers in the world, producing everything from keyboards and mice to audio products, alongside owning independent subsidiaries like Astro and Ultimate Ears. Unfortunately, gaps in cybersecurity can often scale linearly with size, allowing bad actors to exploit any small crevice of unattended IT space. That's what happened with Logitech recently, which has just filed a Form K-8 with the SEC, confirming it was [breache] and 1.8 terabytes of data was taken, but that sensitive data wasn't affected.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Logitech Confirms Data Breach; Follows CL0P Victim Claims

    Logitech’s 8-K filing released on Nov. 14 was short on details, but the company was named as a victim by the CL0P ransomware group earlier this month as part of the threat group’s campaign targeting Oracle E-Business Suite vulnerabilities.

  • The Register UK ☛ Cloudflare broke the internet with a bad DB query

    Prince has penned a late Tuesday post that explains the incident was “triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a ‘feature file’ used by our Bot Management system.”

    The file describes malicious bot activity and Cloudflare distributes it so the software that runs its routing infrastructure is aware of emerging threats.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Cloudflare meltdown knocks major websites offline

    It said many websites were showing 500 errors – this is a generic hypertext transfer protocol status code that means the website’s server encountered an unexpected problem and could not fulfil a request.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Cloudflare's CTO apologizes after error takes huge chunk of the internet offline — 'we failed our customers and the broader internet'

    The incident began at approximately 11:48 UTC on November 18, with Cloudflare's official status site acknowledging “internal service degradation”. As the issue spread, users across several regions reported failures to access not only Cloudflare-backed websites but also its Access and WARP services. The company later identified a specific dependency in its bot defense tooling as the source of the problem.

  • Security Week ☛ Cloudflare Outage Not Caused by Cyberattack

    Based on Cloudflare’s status page, the company started investigating the incident at 11:48 UTC, and a fix was announced at 14:42 UTC, but some errors were still seen two hours later.

    Knecht said Cloudflare would soon share a detailed explanation of why the incident occurred.

  • The Verge ☛ Cloudflare explains Tuesday’s outage that temporarily took down ChatGPT

    Cloudflare said last year that about 20 percent of the web runs through its network, which is supposed to share the load to keep websites online in the face of traffic spikes and DDoS attacks. But today’s crash disconnected many of them, knocking out everything from X to ChatGPT to the well-known outage tracker Downdetector for several hours and resembling recent outages caused by problems with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ I was so close to saying something nice about Dia

    But as I signed on to my computer for the morning to get to work, I quickly saw that Cloudflare was having a major outage. This has led to quite a few websites that I use on a regular basis simply refusing to work. Some of the notable ones are ChatGPT, Claude, and Letterboxd. One you may not expect, and hat tip to my friend Niléane for showing this to me first, Dia won't even launch if Cloudflare goes down.

  • Marijke Luttekes ☛ Oh, hey, the [Internet] is broken. Again.

    With the memories of the latest AWS outage still fresh in our heads, we were treated to another web outage today.

    While credits for disrupting a significant portion of the [Internet] usually go to Amazon's infamous "US-East-1" region, Cloudflare reminded us not to forget about them either.

  • Andre Franca ☛ The Fragile Web We Built — Andre Franca

    Today, I was in the middle of writing a blog post when things suddenly stopped making sense. I refreshed the page for a quick reference, and instead of loading, it just… hung. At first, I assumed I had messed something up as usual, maybe a DNS thing... A couple of minutes later, it became clear the problem wasn't me. Cloudflare was down, and with it a ridiculous amount of everything most people depend on daily.

  • The Register UK ☛ Windows Digital Signage mode hides BSoDs after 15 seconds

    None of this works in Kiosk mode, by the way. It’s only for digital signage.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ OpenAI Blocks Toymaker After Its AI Teddy Bear Is Caught Telling Children Terrible Things

      For PIRG, the actions are a welcome move, but a minor victory.

      “It’s great to see these companies taking action on problems we’ve identified. But AI toys are still practically unregulated, and there are plenty you can still buy today,” report coauthor RJ Cross, director of PIRG’s Our Online Life Program, said in a new statement. “Removing one problematic product from the market is a good step, but far from a systemic fix.”

    • The Conversation ☛ Is the AI bubble about to burst? What to watch for as the markets wobble

      But financial markets today are larger, more complex, and less tightly tied to any single lever such as interest rates. The current AI boom has unfolded despite the US keeping rates at their highest level in decades, suggesting that external pressures alone may not be enough to halt it.

      Instead, this cycle is more likely to end from within. A disappointment at one of the big AI players – such as weaker than expected earnings at Nvidia or Intel – could puncture the sense that growth is guaranteed.

    • Science News ☛ Chatbots may make learning feel easy — but it’s superficial

      Large language models, or LLMs — the artificial intelligence systems that power chatbots like ChatGPT — are increasingly being used as sources of quick answers. But in a new study, people who used a traditional search engine to look up information developed deeper knowledge than those who relied on an AI chatbot, researchers report in the October PNAS Nexus.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ GPU depreciation could be the next big crisis coming for AI hyperscalers — after spending billions on buildouts, next-gen upgrades may amplify cashflow quirks

      Most corporations operate with an understanding that their servers will remain relevant for between three and five years, but in the world of "AI factories," where the speed and efficiency of your data center may equate to how much you can earn, even falling one generation behind could be terminal. What happens when the pace of innovation accelerates beyond the potential profitability of the hardware you spent so much time and money investing in?

    • The Register UK ☛ Linus Torvalds: Vibe coding is fine, but not for production

      Linux and Git inventor Linus Torvalds discussed AI in software development in an interview earlier this month, describing himself as "fairly positive" about vibe coding, but as a way into computing, not for production coding where it would likely be horrible to maintain.

    • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Just Say No to AI: Talking Openly About Ghostwriting

      But also, hiding the fact that they are part of the process is very harmful. Without acknowledging the work of human helpers, the entire industry of celebrity and/or famous people memoirs could get inundated by AI slop. If we are not 100% clear that a human who is NOT the famous person on the cover took time and care to write the books, many people who want their stories out into the world might think AI can just do it for them.

      Let me be even clearer-- having ghostwriters come out from the shadows is important for all of us to fight AI created books from becoming more prevalent.

  • Social Control Media

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Social media use soars as kids drop sports, reading and the arts

      Over the four-year period, daily social media use jumped from 26% to 85%, while participation in almost every other "enriching" activity—including sport, reading, music, and art—sharply declined:

      Reading for fun: The proportion of children who never read for fun increased from 11% to 53%

    • JAMA ☛ Postpandemic After-School Activities Among Youths in Australia | Pediatrics | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network

      Findings This cohort study of 14 350 participants in South Australia during the 4 years before, during, and after the pandemic found rapid increases in social media use compared with all other activities. Everyday use of social media increased from 26% in 2019 to 85% in 2022.

      Meaning These findings provide a timely benchmark for evaluating forthcoming policies aimed at restricting youths in South Australia from accessing social media platforms and suggest that interventions to support activities such as sports, art, and music are warranted.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ The State of the Open Social Web

      When you think of social media, many of the platforms you think of are what we call proprietary: their underlying software is private to the companies that build them, and it’s very difficult to move your data or your connections anywhere else. They are, in a very real way, closed. The indie web movement goes so far as to call them silos.

      These proprietary silos include: [...]

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Take fight to the enemy, US cyber boss says

      Sitting alongside Cairncross was Mandiant cofounder Kevin Mandia, who argued that the current asymmetry in US cyber posture, with American companies and critical infrastructure entirely on the defensive, wasn't sustainable, especially in the age of AI.

    • The Record ☛ Pro-Russian group claims hits on Danish party websites as voters head to polls

      Several party websites — including those of the Conservatives, the Red-Green Alliance, the Moderates and the ruling Social Democrats — were hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Monday, temporarily preventing access. DDoS attacks flood targeted servers with traffic to disrupt normal operations.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Leon Mika ☛ Github FOMO

    So yeah, it’s cold and lonely out here. I’ll keep at it though: I think the benefits that come from having my own place for my code is worth it. But I do wonder if I should move some projects back, at least some of the “big” ones. Not that any of the projects I’m working on need contributors, but just to be where others are. There’s still value in that.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Tracy Durnell ☛ A study in aura

      The original passport photo is loaded with the aura of use, brads punched through, ink smeared on the photo, a stamp across its edge. The touched-up version is a modern attempt to recreate the original portrait as it would have been before being affixed to the passport; it allows us to see Benjamin without the distraction of the damage on the passport scan… does that make it more authentic?

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Techdirt ☛ The Legal Case Against Ring’s Face Recognition Feature

      In order to biometrically identify you, a company typically will take your image and extract a faceprint by taking tiny measurements of your face and converting that into a series of numbers that is saved for later. When you step in front of a camera again, the company takes a new faceprint and compares it to a list of previous prints to find a match. Other forms of biometric tracking can be done with a scan of your fingertip, eyeball, or even your particular gait.

    • Court House News ☛ Civil rights watchdogs sue San Jose police over ‘deeply invasive’ traffic camera searches

      The groups argue San Jose police often violate the California Constitution by using records from automated license plate readers, or ALPRs — fast, computer-controlled cameras that capture photos of every license plate that passes — to search millions of images that include individuals’ “private habits, movements and associations” without a warrant, calling the practice “deeply invasive.” They hope to stop San Jose police from combing the database without a warrant.

    • 404 Media ☛ Airlines Will Shut Down Program That Sold Your Flights Records to Government

      ARC says it informed lawmakers and customers about the decision earlier this month. The move comes after intense pressure from lawmakers and 404 Media’s months-long reporting about ARC’s data selling practices. The news also comes after 404 Media reported on Tuesday that the IRS had searched the massive database of Americans flight data without a warrant.

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ EU ‘Chat Control’ Proposal Still Poses ‘High Risks’ Despite Removal of Mandatory Scanning, Experts Warn

      Following a major public outcry, a clarification in the EU’s controversial “Chat Control” law appeared to secure a victory for privacy advocates. However, a group of 18 of Europe’s top cybersecurity and privacy academics has now issued a stark warning that the latest proposal still contains “high risks to society without clear benefits for children.”

    • Open Letter to EC ☛ 17th November 2025 - Comments on the EU Presidency’s new proposal for the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation [PDF]

      Finally, we would like to reiterate that, even if deployed voluntarily, on-device detection technologies cannot be considered a reasonable tool to mitigate risks, as there is no proven benefit, while the potential for harm and abuse is enormous. The effectiveness of detection technology is currently insufficient and unlikely to improve substantially in the future due to the nature of the task and the limits of AI technology (see the letter of worldwide security experts from July 2023). Moreover, implementing detection that informs anyone else except the sender and intended recipient of message content (e.g., the provider or law enforcement) means that the provider can no longer claim to provide end-to-end encryption. Thus, any communication in which results of a scan are reported, even if the scan is voluntary, can no longer be considered secure or private, and cannot be the backbone of a healthy digital society.

  • Confidentiality

    • Trail of Bits ☛ We found cryptography bugs in the elliptic library using Wycheproof

      Trail of Bits is publicly disclosing two vulnerabilities in elliptic, a widely used JavaScript library for elliptic curve cryptography that is downloaded over 10 million times weekly and is used by close to 3,000 projects. These vulnerabilities, caused by missing modular reductions and a missing length check, could allow attackers to forge signatures or prevent valid signatures from being verified, respectively.

      One vulnerability is still not fixed after a 90-day disclosure window that ended in October 2024. It remains unaddressed as of this publication.

• Defence/Aggression

  • RFERL ☛ Wider Europe Briefing: Will The EU Be Able To Create A 'Military Schengen'?  

    What You Need To Know: Europe is ramping up defense spending. But one issue has been largely neglected: how to move military equipment from one country to another as quickly as possible in case of conflict. The idea of a 'military Schengen' -- meaning an area in which arms and troops can move as easily as civilians around the passport-free Schengen zone that comprises most EU states -- has been discussed for years but has remained elusive for both the EU and NATO despite the war in Ukraine.

    On November 19, the European Commission will present its latest attempt to achieve this by the end of the decade.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Tesla Wants to Build a Robot Army

    Yet there is something real buried underneath Musk’s bluster. It’s not just Tesla: Many automakers are trying to pivot to robotics. Rivian, the electric-vehicle start-up, just announced a spin-off company called Mind Robotics. Hyundai is so bullish that it bought the robotics giant Boston Dynamics a few years ago, and it already has robot dogs spot-checking cars at a U.S. plant. Xpeng, a fast-growing EV company in China, recently debuted humanoid robots.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Vox ☛ Congress votes to release the Jeffrey Epstein files: What to know

    What do we expect to learn? We don’t really know, though as my colleague Andrew Prokop reports, the DOJ has explicitly denied the existence of some documents, including an alleged Epstein “client list.” There is a lot there, though: the full files reportedly include more than 100,000 pages of materials.

    The House bill sets a 30-day timeline for the release, in a “searchable and downloadable format,” of all unclassified materials connected to Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, though some materials may be withheld or redacted.

  • The Register UK ☛ Security researcher calls BS on Coinbase breach timeline

    According to Clark, Coinbase's Head of Trust and Safety Brett Farmer responded to his "comprehensive security report" the same day he emailed it to the company's security@ address. In a blog about the incident, Clark says Farmer replied: "This report is super robust and gives us a lot to look into. We are investigating this scammer now."

    And then, he says, he never heard another word from Coinbase, despite four follow-up emails sent in January.

• Environment

  • ANF News ☛ Drought pushes Eastern Kurdistan and Lake Urmia basin to collapse

    As one of the most severe drought cycles to hit Iran continues, communities living in the country’s west and northwest, especially in Eastern Kurdistan (Rojhilat), are facing a deep ecological crisis that is making life increasingly difficult. Experts and international bodies note that by 2025 the drought is no longer merely a climatic phenomenon; years of poor water management, state policies and long-term environmental neglect have turned it into a structural collapse.

  • El País ☛ US joins Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia in the group of countries doing the least to combat climate change

    The report analyzes the policies of 63 countries worldwide, which combined are responsible for 90% of greenhouse gas emissions. It is led by Germanwatch, the NewClimate Institute, and CAN International, and its development involves more than 450 climate and energy experts from NGOs, analyst groups, and scientific institutions. Four categories are considered when ranking the nations: greenhouse gas reduction (which carries the most weight in the final score), the development of renewable energy, energy use, and climate policies.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Data centers are the desert’s thirsty new neighbor

    But in a few short weeks, the deal has generated intense controversy. Like the residents of dozens of other U.S. communities facing the arrival of a data center, many in Doña Ana County are wary. A large data center could use millions of gallons of drinking water a day to keep its equipment cool, and the industry already accounts for more than 4% of total U.S. electricity consumption in a given year.

  • Court House News ☛ Environmentalists accuse Trump of rubber-stamping Gulf of Mexico oil sale

    “Opening 80 million acres in the Gulf is a recipe for more spills, more carbon pollution and more damage to coastal communities and marine life,” Irene Gutierrez, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “This sale is proceeding without basic environmental review and has the weakest safeguards we’ve seen in years, and is a step backward on climate, clean energy and a livable future.”

    The groups claim the sale bucks 50 years of precedent requiring the Department of the Interior to consider whether offshore sales comply with the National Environmental Policy Act.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Saudi set to announce slew of AI deals with US firms

    Saudi Arabia is pitching itself to US tech firms as a low-cost compute hub, with its ample land and cheap energy making it an attractive place for hyperscalers to build capacity. Amin’s goal is to make Saudi Arabia the third-largest AI infrastructure provider in the world, behind the US and China, he said at last month’s Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ How much CO₂ does your flight really produce? How to know if carbon footprint claims are accurate

    When two people book the same flight, they can get wildly different carbon footprints from online calculators. Many carbon calculators leave out big chunks of climate impact or rely on oversimplified assumptions.

    Here's what's missing, why it matters and a practical checklist you can use to judge any flight estimate.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ EIA: Fewer U.S. solar projects reporting delays as developers adjust schedules

      Solar remains the country’s fastest-growing source of new generating capacity, largely from utility-scale photovoltaic projects developed by electric utilities and independent power producers. Although delays remain common, they have been trending lower, and most are short.

    • The Register UK ☛ AI datacenters can't run indefinitely on fossil fuel

      Gartner warns that fossil fuel dominance in on-site power generation is not sustainable, given the rapid rise in datacenter energy consumption due to AI servers.

      The research firm forecasts that electricity required by datacenters worldwide is set to expand 16 percent this year alone, and likely to double to 980 terawatt hours (TWh) by 2030.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Hit by a Truck

      It turns out that single different number is the check digit. Entering our Golf’s VIN into the NHTSA decoder validates. The one from the dealership? Nope.

      Ultimately, the dealership listed the car for just shy of $17,000. I hope whomever bought was made aware of its real history, and that repairs are satisfactory. The best case is that a not particularly old car gets to keep working for years to come. If incentives were aligned with repairability, however, that car would still be ours, and we would know its provenance and how it was fixed.

    • Jan Lukas Else ☛ The final ride of the year?

      Over the weekend, I did some more modifications and enhancements to my bike. I finally mounted some compatible mudguards after I initially bought some incompatible ones when I bought my bike. To find them, I used some official list from Cube listing all compatible models with each bike. However, the new mudguards require slimmer tires. So I also replaced the 42-622 Schwalbe G-One Allround with some slimmer 35-622 Continental Terra Trail. It was also the first time I changed tires on my own, but after watching some tutorials and trying a bit, I managed to do it with no problems. 😌

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-11 [Older] Germany: Man arrested for darknet site targeting politicians

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-11-11 [Older] India: Exit polls favor Modi's coalition in Bihar election

  • Breach Media ☛ The AI bubble may be about to burst. Mark Carney must not bail out its Tech Barons

    While Canadian politicians are still caught up in their AI love affair, panic is rippling through the industry—and the AI bubble may be about to burst, with massively damaging consequences for Canada.

    Billionaires are bailing on AI stocks, and even tech giants are preparing for a correction that could send a colossal tremor through markets and public pension funds.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Intuit partners with OpenAI in $100M deal to integrate its finance applications with ChatGPT

    The multiyear deal, which is expected to generate more than $100 million in revenue for OpenAI, was described as an “end-to-end agreement” that will expose Intuit products such as TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma and Mailchimp to thousands of potential users through ChatGPT.

  • Wired ☛ The 4 Things You Need for a Tech Bubble

    Chatter about an AI bubble has been everywhere lately, and top tech companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft have doubled down on their AI investments for 2026. But how have analysts in the past accurately identified forming tech bubbles? Hosts Michael Calore and Lauren Goode sit down with Brian Merchant, WIRED contributor and author of the newsletter Blood in the Machine, to break down the four criteria some researchers have used in the past to understand and brace for the worst.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Entropy Budget

    Never trust a person who wants to live forever.

    I don’t mean this as hyperbole or metaphor. I mean it as a practical heuristic for navigating power in the 21st century. Because once someone has decided they should persist indefinitely, everyone else becomes a threat to that project. Not because you’re malicious, but because you exist. You breathe their air. You consume resources they’re counting on for century five of their existence. You reproduce, creating more competition for the finite materials required to maintain their indefinite persistence.

  • Dan McQuillan ☛ Opening Statement to the Irish Parliament Committee on AI

    1. AI is both a set of technologies, such as neural networks and transformer models, and a range of rhetorical claims. The technology and the claims are only loosely connected.

    2. I will argue that AI undermines the ideals of truth and democracy.

  • European Commission ☛ EU Quantum Act

    This initiative aims to accelerate the research, development and industrial deployment of quantum technologies in the EU. It aligns with the goal of the 2024 Quantum Declaration to make Europe a leading ‘quantum continent’.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI and Voter Engagement

      Over the past few years, a new technology has become mainstream: AI. But still, no candidate has unlocked AI’s potential to revolutionize political campaigns. Americans have three more years to wait before casting their ballots in another Presidential election, but we can look at the 2026 midterms and examples from around the globe for signs of how that breakthrough might occur.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Russian university fires long-time American studies scholar amid online attacks on his family

    Arkhangelsk college students lost a beloved American studies scholar earlier this month. Alexey Feldt didn’t die — he was fired after teaching at Lomonosov Northern Arctic Federal University (SAFU) for more than 30 years. A new investigation by T-invariant shows how an online harassment campaign targeting the liberal politics of Feldt’s son and daughter-in-law likely played a role in his dismissal. At the same time, it’s unclear whether the Feldt family’s affiliations drove SAFU’s decision or whether the university merely used them as an excuse to force out a professor who challenged the administration.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Trump Administration’s Favorite Tool for Criminalizing Dissent

    The videos have become commonplace. Federal officers wearing masks and bulletproof vests subdue a moped driver in the middle of a busy D.C. street. A 70-year-old protester in Chicago is pushed to the ground by an armed Border Patrol agent holding a riot gun. In Los Angeles, an agent shoves away a demonstrator.

    These videos capture the aggressive tactics of immigration officers under the second Trump administration. But they share something else, too. In each instance, following documented violence by federal officers toward protesters and immigrants, the Justice Department pressed charges—against the victim of that violence. Those three people, according to the DOJ, had all broken a law prohibiting “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” federal officials.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump, Brendan Carr Threaten To Censor Some More Comedians For The Crime Of Comedy

    So it’s certainly possible that NBC executives could fire Seth Meyers in order to gain regulatory approval of Warner Brothers, but they, of course, won’t admit there would be any connection between the two. But even then, it would be quite a gambit with Trump’s popularity cratering.

  • 2600 ☛ HOPE Conference Banned by St. John's University | 2600

    What we're told - and what we find rather hard to believe - is that all of this came about because a single person thought we were promoting an anti-police agenda. They had spotted pamphlets on a table which an attendee had apparently brought to HOPE that espoused that view. Instead of bringing this to our attention, they went to the president's office at St. John's after the conference had ended. That office held an investigation which we had no knowledge of and reached its decision earlier this month. The lack of due process on its own is extremely disturbing.

  • 404 Media ☛ HOPE Hacking Conference Banned From University Venue Over Apparent ‘Anti-Police Agenda’

    HOPE was held at St. John’s University in 2022, 2024, and 2025, and was going to be held there in 2026, as well. The conference has been running at various venues over the last 31 years, and has become well-known as one of the better hacking and security research conferences in the world. Tuesday, the conference told members of its mailing list that it had “received some disturbing news,” and that “we have been told that ‘materials and messaging’ at our most recent conference ‘were not in alignment with the mission, values, and reputation of St. John’s University’ and that we would no longer be able to host our events there.”

  • The Next Move ☛ In ‘The City of Freedom,’ Part II

    On average, says Kara-Murza, five people a day are arrested in Russia “on politically-motivated charges.” And there are more political prisoners in Russia today than there were in the whole of the Soviet Union during the last stage of the Cold War.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ Moral rot in elite journalism is killing the whole field

    All the tawdry details aside, between Nuzzi’s ethical lapses, the revelations from the Epstein emails of journalists withholding information, and Trump’s continued degradation of the press, what’s been reinforced is a crisis of elite control of journalism and of profound rot. That rot appears in journalists in different forms: debasing themselves at the feet of power because it’s rewarded; allowing themselves to be debased by the powerful to maintain status and access; and identifying more with their powerful subjects than regular people because they believe it will insulate them from retribution. Each scenario reinforces how people behave differently under crumbling institutions than in a stable democracy: As rot spreads across journalism, politics, academia, law, and more, achieving success has become more of a riddle than a road map.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Saudi prince calls Khashoggi killing a 'mistake' on US visit

    The visit is the prince's first since the grisly 2018 killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi agents that US intelligence services concluded were very likely operating on the crown prince's orders.

  • New York Times ☛ ‘Things Happen’: Trump Brushes Off the Murder of Khashoggi

    The crown prince had not been on U.S. soil since March 2018, about seven months before Mr. Khashoggi was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. During the Biden administration, U.S. intelligence officials released a report determining that Prince Mohammed had ordered the killing, but the White House declined to take direct action against him.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ President Bone-Spurs capes for Prince Bone-Saw

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Trump: MBS knew nothing about Khashoggi murder

    The US president mounted an extraordinary defence of Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, as he welcomed him to the White House for the first time since the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

    Mr Trump insisted MBS was not responsible for Khashoggi’s death, as the crown prince was greeted in Washington with cannon fire, a military band, and a US Air Force fly-past. The trappings signalled that the Crown Prince was an honoured guest and Mr Trump leapt to his defence when asked by a reporter about Khashoggi’s death.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Papers Please ☛ Another court turns down TSA appeal for impunity for checkpoint staff

    Another Federal appeals court has overruled arguments by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that its checkpoint staff are immune from any liability for sexual assaults or other offenses committed in the course of their official duties.

    In its decision last week in Elisabeth Koletas v. USA, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t reach the question of whether sexual or other assaults on airline passengers are within the scope of TSA officers’ duties. But a panel of the 11th Circuit held that . The panel was unpersuaded by a decade-old, unpublished, nonprecedential decision by an earlier panel of the 11th Circuit that failed to address the text of the law that makes the US government liable for the wrongful acts of “any officer of the United States who is empowered by law to execute searches.”

    It would seem beyond argument that “Transportation Security Officers” (TSOs), as they are identified by the TSA and on their uniforms and badges, are “officers  of the United States”. And the entire reason for their job is to “execute searches” of travelers.

  • JURIST ☛ Trump defends Saudi crown prince, dismisses human rights concerns during White House meeting

    When a reporter asked about US intelligence conclusions that the crown prince orchestrated journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s 2018 murder, Trump dismissed the question as coming from “fake news” and said the Saudi leader “knew nothing about it.” The president described the journalist, who had been critical of the crown prince’s policies, as “extremely controversial,” saying “a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman.”

  • CBC ☛ Once shunned, Saudi crown prince is Trump’s guest of honour. Canada is warming up, too

    For a leader whose toxicity over a horrific killing made him a pariah, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has come a remarkably long way.

  • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ The Trump Administration is Enabling and Exploiting the Saudi Regime’s Repression

    Washington is once again preparing to welcome Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) on Nov. 17. While most world leaders have long looked past the global pariah's crimes, including the gruesome murder of journalist and DAWN founder Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, campaigns of brutal torture and sexual harassment targeting human rights activists and the vicious bombing campaign in Yemen, the fact is that the autocratic Saudi king has not changed. Indeed, his return to Washington represents the normalization of repression, a turn to a world increasingly desensitized to violence and impunity, especially after Oct. 7 and the atrocities committed by Israel, and amid the resurgence of Donald Trump and his embrace of authoritarian power.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Greg Morris ☛ The Weight Is Optional

    Not the real things that actually matter. But the manufactured urgency? The constant noise demanding my attention? The engagement farming dressed up as activism or self-improvement? No thanks.

    Everyone knows it's broken. Creators hate making clickbait titles but do it anyway. I hate clicking them but the algorithm only shows me those. We're all stuck playing a game nobody actually wants to play. The system rewards the worst version of everything, so that's what we get.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Digital Music News ☛ StubHub Speaks on UK Gov Plan to Introduce Ticket Resale Caps

  Viagogo, meanwhile, said that processes to verify tickets would be a more effective way to stop illegal bot activity than limiting resale prices.

• The Washington Post ☛ Judge finds Meta isn’t an illegal monopoly and can keep Instagram, WhatsApp

  District Judge James E. Boasberg rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s argument that Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp violated antitrust laws.

• Deutsche Welle ☛ US: Meta wins major antitrust case, avoids forced break-up

  The case posed an existential challenge to the company, charging that it had simply purchased Instagram and WhatsApp to stave off competition. An unfavorable ruling would have forced the company to divest from Instagram and WhatsApp.

• New York Times ☛ How TikTok Helped Meta Land an Antitrust Victory

  To blunt government efforts to rein in the most powerful tech companies, Silicon Valley has increasingly pointed to rapid technological advances. The companies have cited changes, from the ascent of new social media platforms to the explosion of artificial intelligence, to make the case that government regulation is unnecessary or even perilous.

• BBC ☛ Meta does not have social media monopoly, judge rules

  The decision hands a defeat to the Federal Trade Commission, the US antitrust watchdog, which sued Meta in 2020 claiming the company secured a monopoly in social media by purchasing its rivals.

  "The Court ultimately concludes that the agency has not carried its burden: Meta holds no monopoly in the relevant market," wrote Judge James Boasberg on Tuesday.

• NPR ☛ Judge sides with Meta in antitrust trial, will not spin off WhatsApp and Instagram

  A federal judge on Tuesday handed Meta a victory, ruling against the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in an antitrust suit that claimed the social media giant stifled competition and bolstered a monopoly by buying upstart rivals.

  The FTC sued Meta five years ago alleging anti-competitive behavior in what has amounted to the biggest legal challenge yet to one of the world's most influential social media companies. The case followed an investigation that began during the first Trump administration.

• Politico LLC ☛ Judge rules Meta doesn’t have a social media monopoly

  The ruling is the latest blow to the government’s effort to challenge Big Tech companies’ dominance over the [Internet] after another federal judge in September refused to break up Google for monopolizing the online search market.

  Both the Meta and Google cases started under President Donald Trump’s first administration and were viewed as potential harbingers for how receptive judges are to the government’s request to break up the world’s largest tech companies.

• CBC ☛ Facebook owner Meta wins U.S. antitrust case, won't have to break off Instagram, WhatsApp

  U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued his ruling Tuesday after the historic antitrust trial wrapped up in late May.

  His decision runs in sharp contrast to two separate rulings that branded Google an illegal monopoly in both search and online advertising, dealing regulatory blows to the tech industry that for years enjoyed nearly unbridled growth.

• Copyrights

  • Techdirt ☛ Book Reports Potentially Copyright Infringing, Thanks To Court Attacks On LLMs

    The Authors Guild has one of the many lawsuits against OpenAI, and law professor Matthew Sag has the details on a ruling in that case that, if left in place, could mean that any attempt to merely summarize any copyright covered work is now possibly infringing. You can read the ruling itself here.

    This isn’t just about AI—it’s about fundamentally redefining what copyright protects. And once again, something that should be perfectly fine is being treated as an evil that must be punished, all because some new machine did it.