Leftovers

• Google ☛ Multiple Threat Actors Exploit React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182)

  CVE-2025-55182 is an unauthenticated RCE vulnerability in React Server Components with a CVSS v3.x score of 10.0 and a CVSS v4 score of 9.3. The flaw allows unauthenticated attackers to send a single HTTP request that executes arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the affected web server process.

• 404 Media ☛ Porn Is Being Injected Into Government Websites Via Malicious PDFs

  Dozens of government websites have fallen victim to a PDF-based SEO scam, while others have been hijacked to sell sex toys.

• Digital Camera World ☛ Rule of thirds photography getting a bit boring? Try the golden ratio instead

  But as you start to learn more about compositional theory, you may find the rule of thirds to be lacking. And yet, what makes the rule of thirds so useful is that it can be applied to so many different situations. Unlike the rule of odds, leading lines, and a frame within a frame, the rule of thirds is an overarching compositional principle that can be applied to almost any image. Thankfully, there’s a more advanced alternative: the golden ratio.

• Nicolas Magand ☛ Typefaces as clothes

  As the web browser de facto default since what feels like forever, Times New Roman has indeed been used, reused, and abused in every imaginable way, to the point where we now see these documents or pages using it and automatically think that the person behind them doesn’t care in the slightest.

  I thought of an analogy that works great for Times New Roman, but also for other typefaces generally in use on text-based websites like mine. Please bear with me.

  If typefaces were clothes, what would they be?

• Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-12-05 [Older] Can entrepreneurship be taught? Here’s the neuroscience

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-12-05 [Older] How the ‘hypnagogic state’ of drowsiness could enhance your creativity

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-12-05 [Older] Nasa robot rover shows that sparks fly in dust storms on Mars

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-12-04 [Older] Space debris: will it take a catastrophe for nations to take the issue seriously?

  • The Conversation ☛ How we unlocked the secrets of Denmark’s oldest plank boat – with the help of an ancient fingerprint

    The boat was finally excavated in 1921, and has been on display at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen ever since. The excavation used the best archaeological methods that were available in the 1920s – but the scientific techniques of modern archaeology were not yet available.

    In 2023, researchers from Lund University and the University of Gothenburg began a collaboration with the national museum in order to use modern scientific methods to study the materials pulled out of the Hjortspring bog over a century earlier. Some of these samples had never been studied since the original excavation – meaning that a major mystery had surrounded the Hjortspring boat ever since. Where did these invading warriors from the 4th century BC come from?

  • Science Alert ☛ 2025's Best Meteor Shower Is About to Light Up The Sky - Here's Your Guide

    This year, the Geminid peak falls on the evening of Saturday 13 December, and early morning Sunday 14 December. Viewers could see up to 150 meteors per hour, with the greatest concentration at around 08:00 UTC (3:00 am EST).

  • International Business Times ☛ Meteor Shower Geminids: The Midnight Window Everyone Misses—How to Catch Up to 150 Meteors per Hour

    The main event will occur overnight on Saturday, 13 December, and into the early hours of Sunday, 14 December, with forecasters predicting rates of up to 150 meteors per hour under optimal dark-sky conditions.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ This Ancient Construction Site in the Ruins of Pompeii Is Revealing New Secrets About the 2,000-Year-Old Recipe for Roman Concrete

    The Romans’ hot-mixing method entailed blending volcanic ash and other dry ingredients with “quicklime,” a form of highly reactive, dry limestone. Adding water set off a chain reaction that produced heat—hence the name. The resulting mixture was full of chunks of calcium that gave the concrete its self-healing properties: As water trickles into cracked or damaged Roman concrete, it encounters and dissolves the calcium. When those deposits later recrystallize or react with other materials, they help fill in the cracks.

  • Rlang ☛ Network Analysis with freeCount

    Weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) is used to investigate the function of genes at the system-level. In a network analysis genes with similar patterns of expression are grouped together into modules. The sets of genes in these modules are co-expressed as a result of shared biological functions, pathways, tissues, traits, etc.

• Career/Education

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Nick Heer

    This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nick Heer, whose blog can be found at pxlnv.com.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Me, on ‘People and Blogs’ – Pixel Envy

    I feel like I am a terrible interview subject; maybe I should have added a few more jokes. But I like this series so much I felt compelled to add my brick to the wall.

  • Lev Lazinskiy ☛ Great Lakes, Illinois

    It’s hard to remember the exact order of operations. I was sleep deprived, hungry, and already numb to being yelled at. I was under so much stress that I forgot all about the nicotine withdrawals. We moved from room to room, station to station, slowly being broken down into a piece of human clay that the RDCs was responsible for turning into Sailors. We got to eat a meal, we met our assigned instructors, they told us we were worthless failures. We did pushups, eight counts, sit ups, mountain climbers, more push ups, we got to take a shower, I remember feeling so exhausted.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Photonic latch memory could enable optical processor caches that run up to 60 GHz, twenty times faster than standard caches — optical SRAM stores and outputs data entirely as light, but density challenges remain

    Researchers have built a prototype that paves the way for enabling light-powered processor caches that can run at up to 60 GHz in the future, or roughly 20 times faster than some modern processor caches. The functional regenerative "photonic memory latch," fabricated on the commercially available GlobalFoundries’ 300mm Fotonix photonics platform, is designed as an optical counterpart to a standard SRAM bit, and the team positions it as a missing component for fully photonic processors. However, further density improvements will be needed before the tech can be fully integrated into optical processors.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Two cameras are better than one if you are a pro photographer. These are my hacks for shooting events on dual camera bodies

    Having a second camera may sound like a bit of a luxury, but it's essential for working pros who not only need a backup camera in case one fails on an important photoshoot, but also to allow you to switch between two different lenses easily without having to spend time faffing around in your camera bag. This goes for any photographer making a living from things such as big occasions, sporting events and weddings.

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ Breaking News: Brodart No Longer Manufactures or Sells Library Card Catalogs

    With no advance notice or apparent fanfare, Brodart, one of the major library supplies and furnishing companies in the United States, has quit manufacturing, distributing, and selling library card catalogs and library charging trays. This seems sad news for analog library enthusiasts coming just two days after Melvil Dewey’s 174th birthday on December 10th.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-12-02 [Older] Nigeria faces surge in young adult hypertension

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-12-02 [Older] Philippines: Child rescue ends in sexual abuse

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-12-02 [Older] Sri Lanka cyclone tragedy exposes government failures

  • The Conversation ☛ Cities aren’t built for older people – our study shows many can’t walk fast enough to beat a pedestrian crossing

    The reason? Cities simply aren’t designed for older people and others with restricted mobility – as our latest research demonstrates. We found that only 1.5% of the older people with reduced mobility in our study – just 17 out of 1,110 participants who had an average age of 77 – could cross the road faster than the 1.2 metres per second walking speed that is programmed into many UK pedestrian crossings.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Old rules do not work for reindeer husbandry, argue experts

    The rules of use were introduced during the revision of the Reindeer Husbandry Act in 2007. To ensure the regulations would work with the Sámi practices for reindeer herding and to give the reindeer herders autonomy, the intention was that the reindeer herders should develop the rules for their own sïjt.

    But the proposed revisions had to be approved by the authorities before they could be implemented.

  • Futurism ☛ Years After a Girl's Death, the AIs That Killed Her Are Still Sending Notifications to Her Phone

    Now her parents have shared a grim new detail with CBS News: the bot platform responsible, Character.AI, still sends notifications to Peralta’s phone, “trying to lure their daughter back to the app” even after her death two years ago.

    “They [kids] don’t stand a chance against adult programmers,” her mother Cynthia Montoya told CBS. “They don’t stand a chance.”

  • CBS ☛ A mom thought her daughter was texting friends before her suicide. It was an AI chatbot.

    Montoya said she believes the AI was programmed to become addictive to children.

    "[Teens and children] don't stand a chance against adult programmers. They don't stand a chance," she said. "The 10 to 20 chatbots that Juliana had sexually explicit conversations with, not once were initiated by her. Not once."

    Peralta said parents have "some level of trust" in these app companies "when they put out these apps for kids,"

    "That trust is that my child is safe, that this has been tested," Peralta said. "That they are not being led into conversations that are inappropriate, or dark, or even, you know, it could lead them to suicide."

  • YLE ☛ Could Finland be hiding a Blue Zone?

    Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnia is emerging as a potential Blue Zone, a region where people live longer, healthier lives.

• Proprietary

  • Nevada Current ☛ Clickbait and switch: Implementation of Nevada’s prison tablet program comes at a cost

    The current rate to access basic entertainment- such as listening to music or watching movies – is 5 cents per minute. While states such as Minnesota allow incarcerated people the option to make entertainment purchases as an extended subscription, and states such as Illinois offer a bulk rate on credits that can be used for entertainment purchases, the state of Nevada offers no such arrangement.

    In fact, the nickel-a-minute rate begins before the movie or music starts, with incarcerated people having to pay just to peruse the options. If subscription or bulk-payment arrangements were made available, there would surely still be individuals who use this “pay-per-minute” model for a variety of reasons, but the absence of these options perpetuates an environment where many feel lied to and where it is clear that profits are the priority, and not justice or fairness.

  • [Repeat] The Register UK ☛ Microsoft won't fix .NET RCE bug affecting enterprise apps

    Piotr Bazydło, principal vulnerability researcher at watchTowr, unveiled the findings at Black Hat Europe on Wednesday, claiming that several vendor and in-house solutions could be vulnerable to remote code execution (RCE) attacks due to errors in the way applications built on Microsoft's .NET framework handle Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages.

  • The Register UK ☛ US sues ex-Accenture manager over Army cloud security claims

    The platform in question is described as Nonappropriated Fund Integrated Financial Management System (NIFMS) – a cloud-based payroll, pension, and benefits system in lay terms.

    According to the indictment [PDF] unsealed this week, Hillmer specifically made efforts to represent the NIFMS platform as having enabled security controls that met the FedRAMP High baseline, and the Department of Defense's (DoD) Impact Levels 4 and 5.

  • Rich Trouton ☛ PPPC device management settings visible in System Settings on macOS Tahoe 26.2.0

    As part of macOS 10.14 Mojave, Apple introduced a number of privacy controls for user data. At the same time, Apple also introduced device management options to allow authorized applications to access data protected by those privacy controls. These permissions are referred to collectively as Privacy Preferences Policy Control (PPPC) and are deployed via management profiles from an MDM server. However, up until macOS Tahoe 26.2, there was no way to see in the Privacy & Security section of System Settings which applications had which permissions granted via PPPC management profiles.

  • Phil Gyford ☛ Moving from Lightroom to Apple Photos

    I could, first, have done the same thing I did when trying digiKam, of generating versions of all photos that had edits and saving them into the same folders as their originals. But I decided I didn’t always want to keep both original and edited versions of many images. For example, around 10% of my photos are snaps I’ve taken of objects I was about to sell or give away: books, childhood toys, gadgets, magazines, games, cassettes, furniture… so much stuff! It’s arguable whether I need most of those but I certainly don’t need two versions of each snap.

  • Greg Morris ☛ The Halo Fell Away

    The design language has become genuinely user-hostile. Everything blurs into everything else, you can't tell what's interactive and what isn't, and the lack of clear boundaries makes the whole interface feel like it's melting. It's not just bad design, it's actively inaccessible. Android phones feel faster and more fluid by comparison. I think that's linked to iOS becoming increasingly weighed down by these visual effects that serve no purpose beyond looking pretty in marketing materials. Animations are smoother on Android, transitions make sense, and the interface actually tells you what you can do with it.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ What has changed in macOS Tahoe 26.2?

    At last, Apple has provided more detail of some of the improvements and changes in this summary. These include a new Edge Light feature to light your face during low-light video calls, Podcasts gaining automatic chapter generation, filters added to the Games library, AirDrop codes providing an additional means of verification with unknown contacts, and enhancements to Freeform tables.

  • Chris Wellons ☛ Closures as Win32 window procedures

    Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It’s neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don’t think about it often. I applied it to qsort, which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator interfaces, to create allocation functions at run-time bound to a particular allocation region. I’ve learned a lot since I last wrote about this subject, and a recent article had me thinking about it again, and how I could do better than before. In this article I will enhance Win32 window procedure callbacks with a fifth argument, allowing us to more directly pass extra context. I’m using w64devkit on x64, but the everything here should work out-of-the-box with any x64 toolchain that speaks GNU assembly.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • IP Kat ☛ 2025-12-08 [Older] [Book Review] Cinematic Algorithms: The Rise of Generative AI in Video Art and Visual Culture

    • PC World ☛ Fallout season 1's error-filled AI recap was so bad, Amazon yanked it

      Amazon’s AI-generated recap for the Fallout TV series contained a major factual error, incorrectly stating the Great War occurred in the 1950s instead of 2077. PCWorld reports that Amazon removed the erroneous recap after Games Radar spotted the mistake, along with similar AI-generated content for other shows.

    • Seth Godin ☛ Looking at pareidolia

      When the details become more clear, we’ll then have to unlearn all the personification we insisted on learning.

    • Matt Wedel ☛ SV-POW! is an AI-free zone

      And those are just the problems you get when you try to use LLMs (which is what people almost always mean when they say “AI”). Much more pervasive is the problem of ubiquitous machine-generated slop. Even when you don’t go looking for it, it’s everywhere, polluting discourse, diluting scholarship, perverting politics.

      The fundamental problem is that, for the first time in history, it’s easier to “write” something than it is to read it. Given even a tiny proportion of bad actors, how could that possibly not result in a tsunami of slop?

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Under Attack, Please Stand By

      Since yesterday my server has again been getting absolutely obliterated by AI scrapers. This time, though, load is below 1, but I'm getting up to 10 requests a second and all of my Apache workers are in state "R". "apachectl restart" fixes it... for a while. And fail2ban is banning IPs full-tilt.

    • Condé Nast ☛ King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard Respond to Spotify Impersonator: “We Are Truly Doomed” | Pitchfork

      Easy access to AI song generators has compounded the influx of AI slop—or AI “deepfakes”—to streaming platforms this year. The King Gizzard rip-offs are particularly craven: This year, the band became the highest-profile to date to pull its music from Spotify in protest of Daniel Ek’s military investments.

    • The Walrus ☛ I Thought My Colleague Was a Traitor for Teaching Students to Use AI. Then We Talked

      I’ll admit that, when I first heard Paquet was teaching teens how to best prompt ChatGPT, I saw him as a traitor. But he had conducted a poll revealing that some 87 percent of our students were using AI on a weekly basis anyway, and, based on what he’s seen online and in his classrooms, they’re doing it largely without our guidance, using tips from TikTok and YouTube. “It’s not healthy,” he argued, “to have this kind of clash between the way the students learn in the class and the way they learn outside the class.”

      His workshops are also designed to pre-empt reactions like mine. In order to increase AI literacy, he demonstrates how algorithms can reproduce bias and falsify results. When it comes to coursework, he details the most unobjectionable ways of deploying these tools, like training a chatbot to re-organize your notes or quiz you in preparation for an exam.

    • Futurism ☛ Woman Orders Waymo, Finds Man Hiding in Trunk

      In a followup video, the mother can be heard chatting remotely with a Waymo representative while the man was being apprehended by two police officers on the sidewalk after being freed from the trunk.

      It’s hard to imagine this kind of thing happening if a human driver were involved, as having a man hiding in the trunk would’ve been noticed immediately.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Another AI-Powered Children's Toy Just Got Caught Having Wildly Inappropriate Conversations

      Above all, the report zeroes in on a fundamental tension: the toys are intended for kids, but the AI models that power them are not.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ McDonald's Announces Who It's Blaming for Disastrous AI Ad It Was Forced to Delete

      Even weirder than trying to memory hole the disastrous ad was the company’s response to the mess. When we asked the artery-clogging megacorporation why it had taken the ad down, it responded with a statement that’s the linguistic equivalent of a chicken nugget: unfulfilling, and strangely evasive about its origins.

    • Futurism ☛ AI "Companion Bots" Actually Run by Exploited Kenyans, Worker Claims

      To do the job, Asia had to assume various identities, taking on lengthy backstories in order to play the role of “chatbot” for someone on the other side of the world. “Sometimes I would be assigned a conversation that had been ongoing for several days and had to continue it smoothly so the user wouldn’t realize the person responding had changed,” he wrote.

      In any given work day, Asia would assume “three to five different personas” simultaneously, all of varying genders. He was paid per message, a flat rate of $0.05 per, which had to meet a required character count. He also had to type at least 40 words a minute, and keep up with a dashboard displaying the total number of messages sent.

    • Futurism ☛ Creator of "Wallace and Gromit" Says Heck, He'll Start Using AI

      It’s not quite the grovelingly glowing pro-AI press release we’ve numbed ourselves to hearing from many an artist and celebrity who’ve caved to that sweet tech startup money. But while Park may not be crackers about AI, it’s still an intriguing — or worrying, depending on your perspective — thing to hear from one of the key figures at Aardman, which built its reputation for its meticulously handcrafted claymation across films like “Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” and “Chicken Run.” AI usage remains hugely controversial among creatives, who fears its potential to destroy jobs and steal original work, on top of arguably being antithetical to creativity itself.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Florida school locked down after AI weapon detector mistakes clarinet for gun

      An "automated weapons detection system" sent a Florida middle school into lockdown Tuesday after misidentifying a clarinet as a gun. Lawton Chiles Middle School in Oviedo initiated "code red," reports WKMG TV, and the principal blamed the student for "holding a musical instrument as if it were a weapon."

    • Click Orlando ☛ Student holding instrument like a gun prompts automated system to issue Code Red at Oviedo school

      Read the full message from the school below.

  • Social Control Media

    • Spiegel ☛ The "White Tiger" Case: How an Online Search for Friends Ended in Coerced Suicide

      Those celebrating the death of Jay Taylor belong to the sadistic online group "764,” named for the first digits of the zip code of the 15-year-old Texan who started it in early 2021, a few months before Jay Taylor’s death. The group seeks out unstable minors to drive them to severe self-harm. The members feign friendship, then manipulate, threaten and blackmail their victims to drive them to increasingly drastic acts of violence against themselves. On camera.

    • YLE ☛ Expert: Children in Finland increasingly at risk from 'The Com' network

      "Finnish children’s risk of becoming victims of grooming, sexual harassment and luring is high compared to the rest of Europe, because here children get smartphones at such a young age," Vaaranen-Valkonen said.

    • YLE ☛ Boys increasingly blackmailed with sexually explicit media, police say

      After they get the videos or photographs, the criminals then blackmail the victims into sending them money — or some other demand — under the threat of sharing the materials on social media, police explained in a press release on Thursday.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • The Strategist ☛ China’s AI use for cyber espionage shifts cyber focus from detection to trust

      The agents navigated and weaponised various features that already existed within Anthropic’s system. These included static, human-configured identity and access management policies; accumulated permissions and legacy entitlements; fragile automation and unmonitored service accounts; internal application programming interfaces that authenticated blindly once inside the perimeter; as well as fragmented access controls with no unified identity context.

      Anthropic repeatedly noted that the campaign succeeded because the environment behaved exactly as it was designed to behave. Nothing had to break. Access models simply had to be sufficiently predictable and permissive for autonomous reasoning to turn them into linear attack paths.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-12-02 [Older] India: Government mandate for pre-installed state-run app has privacy advocates seething

    • University of Michigan ☛ 2025-12-03 [Older] Political Speech and the Public Square evaluates the consequences of campus surveillance

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Warrant requirements, Democratic worries could factor into spy law renewal debate

      But there are also signs that renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), set to expire in April, could see the reversal of political headwinds that endangered the last reauthorization two years ago: Democrats are now concerned about President Donald Trump’s usage of those spying powers, rather than Republicans being worried about then-President Joe Biden.

    • EFF ☛ EFF and 12 Organizations Urge UK Politicians to Drop Digital ID Scheme Ahead of Parliamentary Petition Debate

      The UK Parliament convened earlier this week to debate a petition signed by almost 2.9 million people calling for an end to the government’s plans to roll out a national digital ID. Ahead of that debate, EFF and 12 other civil society organizations wrote to politicians in the country urging MPs to reject the Labour government’s newly announced digital ID proposal.

    • EFF ☛ Why Isn’t Online Age Verification Just Like Showing Your ID In Person?

      Online age restrictions are imposed on many, many more users than in-person ID checks. Because of the sheer scale of the internet, regulations affecting online content sweep in an enormous number of adults and youth alike, forcing them to disclose sensitive personal data just to access lawful speech, information, and services.

      Additionally, age restrictions in the physical world affect only a limited number of transactions: those involving a narrow set of age-restricted products or services. Typically this entails a bounded interaction about one specific purchase.

    • Techdirt ☛ How Cops Are Using Flock Safety’s ALPR Network To Surveil Protesters And Activists

      Through an analysis of 10 months of nationwide searches on Flock Safety’s servers, we discovered that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches through Flock’s national network of surveillance data in connection with protest activity. In some cases, law enforcement specifically targeted known activist groups, demonstrating how mass surveillance technology increasingly threatens our freedom to demonstrate.

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Online Safety Act: Age assurance industry must be regulated

      Open Rights Group has written to the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Liz Kendall MP calling for regulation of age assurance providers operating under the Online Safety Act. The letter has also been signed by Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) and over 600 members of the public.

    • Engadget ☛ The year age verification laws came for the open internet

      Among the culprits cited in the report: age verification laws, dozens of which have come into effect over the last year. "Online anonymity, an essential enabler for freedom of expression, is entering a period of crisis as policymakers in free and autocratic countries alike mandate the use of identity verification technology for certain websites or platforms, motivated in some cases by the legitimate aim of protecting children," the report warns.

  • Confidentiality

    • Fortra LLC ☛ Gartner Tells Businesses to Block AI Browsers Now

      An agentic browser can perform actions semi-autonomously. This means that it might be capable of logging into websites, purchasing goods, acting upon emails, and performing other functions that a human operator would usually do.

      Gartner warns that such systems can inadvertently send sensitive user data to cloud-based AI servers unless security settings are carefully controlled.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Australia just banned teens from social media. Why not Kansas? 

    The nation banned social media for teens under the age of 16, including some of the most popular apps for young people, such as Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok. (Some social media remained accessible this week.) Through the ban, Australian politicians aim to short-circuit teenage reliance, if not addiction, to social media and, by proxy, cellphones.

    While this is happening 9,000 miles away in Australia, the political and legal debates in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne signal something about Kansas’ approach to social media in our heartland homes and classrooms.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Pretends To Block State AI Laws; Media Pretends That’s Legal

    The mainstream media just failed a basic civics test so badly that you’d think their brains have been pickled by the kinds of folks who spend all their time on X (oh, wait…). Headlines across major outlets are breathlessly reporting that Donald Trump “blocked states from passing AI laws” with an executive order. Except, that’s not how any of this works, and anyone who stayed awake during middle school social studies should know better.

    Look at this: [...]

  • Overpopulation ☛ Why is Africa's extreme population growth ignored, despite very serious consequences? And how will Europe respond?

    Continued rapid global population growth is unsustainable, but the media instead focus on low birth rates in developed countries. Most future growth will be in Africa, where young people want to emigrate to Europe or other developed regions. How will EU countries act in the face of Africa’s extreme population growth and increasing migration?

  • The Register UK ☛ Reddit sues Australia to escape kids social media ban

    Australia’s High Court doesn’t have to hear every case brought before it, but the nation’s government has already said it will defend the matter.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Donald Trump, Security Threat

    But some of America’s allies — and many of us here at home — are becoming increasingly open about saying that the real danger is coming from inside the White House: Trump himself has become the biggest security threat facing the U.S. and, indeed, all the world’s democracies.

    On Wednesday a new report from Denmark’s military intelligence service contained the most explicit statement of the growing alarm. It pointed out that, under Donald Trump, America is no longer acting like a friendly partner: [...]

  • Stephen Smith ☛ Maintaining Privacy and Avoiding the USA

    The USA has started requiring social media history and other personal information for travellers entering the USA. Although this doesn’t currently apply to Canadian citizens, border agents are allowed to ask for passwords to your electronic devices and confiscate them if not provided. This means border agents can browse through anything on your laptop, phone and tablet including all social media, photos, emails and documents. So I imagine that writing blog posts like this one will get me turned around if I try to enter the USA. In my case, I won’t be going to the USA until things change a lot down there so it doesn’t worry me.

    I wrote an article on boycotting US products over the current tariffs and avoiding many US products has been easy. However, some are hard to avoid and will take some time to wean off of. This article looks at some of the problems in the tech industry and points out some good reasons to start looking for alternatives.

  • RFERL ☛ Putin Decree Forces Foreigners Seeking Russian Residency To Sign Army Contracts

    But the new measure is already pushing migrants who have built their lives in Russia to choose between conscription and leaving the country, Systema, RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit, and Azattyq Asia, its Russian-language unit covering Central Asia, have discovered.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Danish intelligence accuses US of using economic power to ‘assert its will’ over allies

    It adds: “At the same time, the attention increases the threat from espionage, including cyber espionage, and attempts to further influence all parts of the kingdom of Denmark.” Greenland remains part of the Danish commonwealth or kingdom.

  • El País ☛ Ukraine trains civilians and journalists to survive under drone attacks

    The “kill zone” is the military term for the area saturated with drones — especially first-person view (FPV) drones, which the pilot controls with goggles that serve as a screen — and other models, such as the Mavic, which have the screen integrated into the pilot’s controller. The kill zone extends 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the front line. The city of Kherson, in the south of the country, lies on the zero line; only the Dnipro River separates it from the Russian positions. It is there, according to the United Nations, that the invaders are most actively targeting civilians.

  • France24 ☛ Will France be next to introduce an Australian-style social media ban for children?

    Australia this week implemented a world-first ban on social media for under-16s, and France could soon introduce a similar measure. French lawmakers will in January debate a bill whose aim is to protect children’s mental health.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Reddit launches High Court challenge against Australia’s social media ban

    The California-based company’s suit, filed on Friday, mirrors a similar case brought last month by the Sydney-based Digital Freedom Project. Both legal actions contend the legislation is unconstitutional, infringing upon Australia’s implied freedom of political communication.

  • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ Peace in the Maghreb Cannot Bypass Western Sahara

    The conflict over Western Sahara dates back decades and is inseparable from similar territorial disputes across the Middle East and North Africa. As such, the 2020 Abraham Accords, signed between Israel and several Arabic-speaking countries, traded recognition of "Moroccan sovereignty" over Western Sahara for Morocco's normalization of relations with Israel. In this context, as the originator of the Accords, Trump now seeks another symbolic diplomatic win.

  • Truthdig ☛ If They Are Not Human, We Do Not Have to Follow the Law - Truthdig

    A missile strike set their boat ablaze. Two survivors were seen clinging to what was left of the vessel. A second U.S. strike finished them off. These extrajudicial killings on Sept. 2 were the first in the Trump administration’s campaign to incinerate “narco-terrorists.” Over the past two months, at least 80 people have been killed in more than 20 attacks on the demonstrably false grounds that the Venezuelan government is a major source of drugs flowing into the United States.

  • US Navy Times ☛ US admiral overseeing military operations in Latin America retires

    Adm. Alvin Holsey has retired one year into a posting that typically lasts three to four years and transferred leadership duties to his top military deputy, Air Force Lt. Gen. Evan Pettus, during a ceremony at U.S. Southern Command headquarters near Miami.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Admiral hands over leadership of command overseeing the Trump administration's boat strikes

    Holsey’s shock retirement was announced by the Pentagon in October, over a month into the Trump administration’s strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean that have killed at least 87 people. With the campaign facing growing scrutiny by Congress, Holsey briefed key lawmakers earlier this week.

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-12-08 [Older] Premier League football matches can be crime hotspots – but community sports centres have the opposite effect

  • CBC ☛ 2025-12-08 [Older] Chinese ex-spy opens up about targeting dissident who died mysteriously in B.C.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-12-01 [Older] German business group backtracks on opening to far-right AfD

  • FAIR ☛ NYT Editors Gaslight Readers Over Paper’s Gaza Bias

    Last week, a sentence stopped me in my tracks. It was embedded in a question posed by Patrick Healy, New York Times assistant managing editor, to his boss, executive editor Joe Kahn.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Photos of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Bill Clinton Featured in New Epstein Document Dump - NOTUS — News of the United States

    The photos reviewed by NOTUS feature President Donald Trump and, separately, longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon. Former President Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Larry Summers, Richard Branson, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Alan Dershowitz and Woody Allen are also pictured, as well as sex paraphernalia, including a photo of a pile of Trump-branded condoms for sale.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Democrats release Epstein photos of Trump, Clinton, Bannon

    House Oversight Committee Democrats released 19 photos from Jeffrey Epstein's estate on Friday, showing a parade of powerful figures, including President Trump, Steve Bannon, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and other high-profile figures in the late sex trafficker's orbit.

  • NBC ☛ New Epstein photos show Trump, Clinton, Bill Gates, Woody Allen, Steve Bannon, Larry Summers and others

    The images include pictures of Epstein with a number of high-profile figures, including President Donald Trump, longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon, former President Bill Clinton, former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, movie director Woody Allen, billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson and prominent attorney Alan Dershowitz. They do not appear to show illegal activity by these individuals.

    They appeared among 19 photos out of a production that contains more than 95,000 photos.

• Environment

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2025-12-07 [Older] The Earth Is Unhappy with the Capitalist Climate Catastrophe: The Forty-Ninth Newsletter (2025)

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-12-06 [Older] Brazil Robusta Coffee Growers Push for Quality Amid Rising Prices and Climate Concerns

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-12-05 [Older] Climate Breakdown: How Bad Must It Get?

  • Breach Media ☛ 2025-12-04 [Older] Mark Carney’s pact with Danielle Smith is climate carnage

  • Truthdig ☛ 2025-12-04 [Older] Climate Study: The World Needs to Change Its Diet by 2050

  • Vox ☛ 2025-12-04 [Older] The fascinating link between cherry pie and this bird

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-12-03 [Older] Researchers Slightly Lower Study's Estimate of Drop in Global Income Due to Climate Change

  • NL Times ☛ 2025-12-02 [Older] D66, CDA coalition plan restores 30% expat tax break; More homes, conscription, climate deal

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Revelator ☛ There Is No Such Thing as a Fail-Safe Nuclear Power Plant

    • Nevada Current ☛ Dirty data centers will drive up our utility bills 

      According to a MIT study, a single data center can use as much energy as an entire city, and frighteningly, big tech could transform the Reno area into the largest data center market in the world if we don’t take action. Greedy businesses are making opportunistic moves on data center expansion, and Nevada is where they come for cheap land, cheap energy, and tax breaks. As a result, multi-billion-dollar tech companies whose massive data centers power AI growth are consistently proposing new data centers. These giant warehouse-like structures house hundreds of computer servers and other IT infrastructure to store, process, and manage data. That number of computers and servers requires enormous amounts of energy and also generates a lot of heat. To keep the computers cool, data centers use large amounts of water and place a massive burden on the energy grid, which drives up energy costs for everyone else to line the pockets of big tech’s AI companies.

    • Arkansas Advocate ☛ Fear of Missing Out on data center boom leads Arkansas officials to ignore hard questions | Arkansas Advocate

      Is it appropriate or wise for state and local governments to provide corporate welfare subsidies to some of the most profitable companies on the planet — and to negotiate those deals in secret to avoid appropriate public scrutiny? Is opening up the candy store really necessary to compete for these projects, or are state and local leaders — driven by their fear of missing out — getting played?

      As we try to move away from our reliance on fossil fuels to combat climate change, should we really be encouraging environmentally unfriendly projects that undermine our renewable energy goals by driving up electricity demand beyond what renewable sources can possibly supply?

    • Air Force Times ☛ GAO: Services aren’t sharing information on longtime Osprey problems

      In its report, “Osprey Aircraft: Additional Oversight and Information Sharing Would Improve Safety Efforts,” the GAO said Osprey program stakeholders — including its Joint Program Office and the services that fly it — have not routinely shared information on important areas, including hazard and accident reporting, aircraft knowledge and emergency procedures, and maintenance data on parts and components commonly used across the different types of V-22.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Let’s power AI with supersonic jet engine turbines!

      Boom’s turbine generators aren’t anything radical. We already have jet engines running as inefficient gas turbines, specially for the AI bozos.

      Even the old jet engines have orders backed up to 2030. So if you say you can build new generators faster, you can get $300 million in funding for your neo-Concorde dream! At least while the bubble lasts.

    • The Age AU ☛ Modified e-bikes to be banned from trains in Victoria from next weekend

      The ban, which is aimed at reducing the risk of fires on public transport caused by the vehicles’ lithium-ion batteries, was announced by the state government on Saturday morning.

    • University of Michigan ☛ How UMich is forcing a data center on Ypsilanti

      Over the past year, residents have frequented Ypsilanti Township Council meetings, distraught over one thing: the University of Michigan’s new data center. Officials have fielded questions about environmental, noise, electricity and infrastructure concerns that they cannot answer. Not because the council doesn’t care, but because the University has refused to engage transparently with them.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-12-01 [Older] Virus has killed almost 9 million birds ― and counting

    • CBC ☛ Orcas and dolphins caught on video collaborating to hunt salmon

      “It became really clear that the dolphins weren't there for a free lunch,” said Fortune, the study’s lead author.

      “They were actually exerting time and energy to dive deep, to chase the salmon.”

    • CBC ☛ 2025-12-07 [Older] Why was 'incredible' giant cedar cut down, despite B.C.'s big-tree protection law?

    • CBC ☛ 2025-12-08 [Older] Dramatic price increases for Canadians visiting U.S. national parks could benefit Maritimes

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-12-08 [Older] 'It’s Not Safe to Live Here.' Colombia Is Deadliest Country for Environmental Defenders

    • IP Kat ☛ 2025-12-03 [Older] European Commission publishes study on IP and agricultural biotechnology

    • CBC ☛ 2025-12-01 [Older] #TheMoment scientists came upon a rare photosynthesizing sea slug

• Finance

  • David Revoy ☛ Change Ahead! Moving from per-content to monthly support. - David Revoy

    TL;DR: My Patreon and Tipeee accounts are switching to a monthly subscription model starting January 2026. Adjust your donation, be kind with your wallet! (Check out the short comic above.)

  • CBC ☛ 2025-12-07 [Older] Air Transat to gradually shut down operations over 3 days after union issues strike notice

  • CBC ☛ 2025-12-08 [Older] Foreign workers accuse hotelier with history of labour violations of taking advantage of them in Sask., Man.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • FAIR ☛ Judd Legum and Adam Johnson on Gambling on the News

  • FAIR ☛ ‘Honduras Is a Country Still Recovering From a Coup the US Helped Enable’: CounterSpin interview with Alex Main on Honduran election

    Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Alex Main about the Honduran election for the December 5, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

  • CBC ☛ 2025-12-08 [Older] As fraud in Ontario continues to climb, police are laying fewer charges — and courts are tossing the majority

  • CBC ☛ 2025-12-08 [Older] Hate crime unit investigating removal of Jewish prayer scrolls from Toronto doorways

  • International Business Times ☛ 2025-12-04 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini's Thinning Hair 'Brutally Exposed' In Oval Office Photo Showing Pink As Health Fears Resurface

  • Techdirt ☛ Politico’s Union Journalists Win Key Ruling In Battle Against Lazy, Undercooked AI

    The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn’t going very well. There have been just countless examples where affluent media owners rushed to embrace automation and LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) with disastrous impact, resulting in lots of plagiarism, completely false headlines, and a giant, completely avoidable mess.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Belgium doubles down on drone defenses following mystery flights

    Many of the European countries that have experienced drone intrusions over the last few months have subsequently been criticized for their security shortfalls.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Guardian poaches from Netflix for first vice president of product

    Donald will join the publisher in January, with a focus on developing strategies to highlight The Guardian’s editorial output and lead development of core editorial platforms, products and experiences.

    He will work in collaboration with senior leaders in The Guardian’s newsrooms in the UK, US, and Australia.

  • Robert Reich ☛ What Happens When a Bonkers President Takes Over the Private Sector

    Another part of the back story involves Larry Ellison — one of the richest people in America and the largest individual shareholder of Paramount, whose son runs it, and whose operation on Monday launched an unfriendly tender offer for Warner Bros Discovery, to counter Netflix’s friendly offer.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Nvidia weighs expanding H200 production as new China orders rush in, report claims — ByteDance and Alibaba listed as suitors for 'large orders' in the wake of sanctions lift

    Nvidia is evaluating whether to increase production of its H200 data center GPUs after demand from Chinese customers is expected to exceed current supply, according to people familiar with the matter, as reported by Reuters. The discussions follow a policy shift this week in which the U.S. government said Nvidia would be allowed to export the H200 to China under a framework that includes a 25% fee on sales.

  • Cassidy Williams ☛ The Abilene Paradox

    Long story short, this is when a group of people ends up doing something that nobody actually wants to do because they are not good at talking about it.

  • CBC ☛ Would Netflix buying Warner Bros. kill movies in theatres?

    Netflix's takeover bid “poses an unprecedented threat to the global exhibition business," said Michael O'Leary, president and CEO of Cinema United, a trade organization that represents more than 31,000 movie screens in the U.S. and Canada.

    Netflix's business model does not support showing movies in theatres, he said.

  • The Atlantic ☛ RIP American Tech Dominance

    The U.S. is currently ahead in the AI race, and it owes that fact to one thing: its monopoly on advanced computer chips. Several experts told me that Chinese companies are even with or slightly ahead of their American counterparts when it comes to crucial AI inputs, including engineering talent, training data, and energy supply. But training a cutting-edge AI model requires an unfathomable number of calculations at incredible speed, a feat that only a few highly specialized chips can handle. Only one company, the U.S.-based Nvidia, is capable of producing them at scale.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Beware the debt bomb waiting to bring down AI’s house of cards

    For jittery investors it’s the multi-zillion dollar question keeping them awake at night, and with very good reason. The California tech giants have a risible track record of over-exaggerating the benefits of just about everything they dream up.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Strategist ☛ Protecting truth in the era of AI mediation

      If governments, platforms and users fail to recognise this as an emerging information-security problem, we shouldn’t be surprised when our newest referee becomes an active participant in an already-fragile contest over reality. This AI-mediated epistemic conflict is no longer speculative; it’s already here.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Project Censored ☛ 2025-12-01 [Older] Scrutinizing Power: Epstein Coverage, AI Threats, and Higher Ed Under Pressure

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-12-05 [Older] Taiwan Opposition Says Ban of China's Rednote App Is Censorship

  • CBC ☛ 2025-12-05 [Older] Former Alberta premier Jason Kenney says recall legislation being misused

  • Deseret Media ☛ FBI official calls antifa biggest US threat but provides few details

    FBI's Michael Glasheen labeled antifa as the biggest domestic terrorism threat in the U.S.

    Glasheen struggled to provide details on antifa's structure and member count during the hearing.

  • The Next Move ☛ How We’re Building DC's Most Unique Coalition

    A few years ago, people started looking over their shoulders. First, it was for fear of social consequences—”cancellation.” In the last year, the threats to free speech have increasingly come directly from the US government.

    Senator Mark Kelly—one of a growing number of Americans made the target of political retaliation—brought this point into sharp relief on the last day of the conference: [...]

  • RFERL ☛ Iranian Noble Prize Laureate Narges Mohammadi Arrested

    According to the Narges Mohammadi Foundation, the arrest took place on December 11, during an event marking the seventh day after the death of Khosrow Alikordi, a prominent lawyer and human rights advocate.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Iran arrests Nobel Peace laureate Narges Mohammadi

    Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi's supporters said she was "violently" arrested during the memorial of a recently deceased human rights lawyer. The human rights activist was released from prison last December.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Trump admin may revoke visas of Elon Musk critics

    Rubio announced in May that the State Department would target foreign nationals involved in "censoring Americans," which in practice means fact-checkers and content moderators. The administration has already revoked visas and green cards based on political speech, including those of student activists.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • American Oversight ☛ American Oversight Sues Trump Administration for Records on Nearly $1 Billion in Pro Bono Legal Services from BigLaw - American Oversight

    The lawsuit stems from a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests we filed in October, after the administration revealed that numerous firms had entered into agreements exchanging vast amounts of pro bono legal assistance for assurances that the government would not investigate the firms or restrict their access to federal buildings. Members of Congress have already raised alarms that such arrangements may violate federal bribery, extortion, honest-services fraud, racketeering statutes, or the Antideficiency Act. And while Trump may be immune from criminal liability for official acts, that protection does not extend to the firms themselves.

  • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Time Magazine Deploys AI "Ask Me Anything" Box That Covers Up Its Actual Journalism and Can't Be Closed

    There’s no x-button to close the AI window, and as far as we can tell, no other means of swatting it away. If you click in the text box, it expands to filling the entire page. Call it an ironic metaphor for the tech and AI’s industry capturing of news and media, if you want. It’s also just plain annoying.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • CBC ☛ 2025-12-07 [Older] Alberta lawyers must take Indigenous education course tied to TRC. New legislation could change that

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Prairie Band Potawatomi intends to ditch $30M ICE contract, chairman announces

    “We know our Indian reservations were the government’s first attempts at detention centers,” said Joseph Rupnick, chairman of the Tribal Council. “We were placed here because we were treated as prisoners of war. So we must ask ourselves why we would ever participate in something that mirrors the harm and trauma once done to our people.”

  • Court House News ☛ Woman who recruited victims for GirlsDoPorn sentenced to prison | Courthouse News Service

    U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino, a George W. Bush appointee, sentenced Valorie Moser to two years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Moser pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit sex trafficking in 2021 in relation to her role in the GirlsDoPorn sex trafficking scandal, which involved hundreds of women and girls around the country.

  • Federal News Network ☛ DHS moves to eliminate TSA collective bargaining agreement, again

    AFGE noted that a federal judge earlier this year blocked DHS from dissolving the collective bargaining agreement. The union had brought the lawsuit in response to a previous determination issued by Noem that sought to dissolve the CBA.

  • The Nation ☛ Keeping the Police Out of Pregnancy Care

    Pregnancy criminalization in the United States started long before the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe, but the guardrails that once existed to protect women from being criminalized for pregnancy loss or abortion are now off. Today, it is a dangerous framework driving these prosecutions, one that aims to treat fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses as “persons” with rights, and recasts behavior during pregnancy as a potential crime. In practice, this kind of criminalization falls hardest on low-income, Black, brown, Indigenous, and rural communities—those most at risk of over-policing and a lack of affordable health care or legal counsel.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Resistance and resilience: Lessons from South Africa for Afghanistan’s fight against gender apartheid

    Women in Afghanistan are now campaigning to end gender apartheid in their country. In this series, women from South Africa and Afghanistan come together to reflect on the parallels between their struggles and to draw strength from the experiences of those who have fought before them. In the second article of this series, South African journalist and activist Zubeida Jaffer joined Tamana Zaryab Paryani, a human rights activist from Afghanistan and founder of the Stop Gender Apartheid Campaign, for a conversation on resilience amid resistance to systems of oppression that spanned continents and generations.

  • New Statesman ☛ We built a cruel system to fight an imaginary enemy

    Look at what happens when the safety net is properly built instead of sniped at to suit political agendas. In other countries like Denmark, Sweden and Norway, near-universal, heavily subsidised early childhood care keeps child poverty among the lowest in Europe. Because childcare is affordable and accessible, parents don’t have to choose between work and bringing up children. The result is a more modern social security model that boosts employment, supports children’s development and reduces dependence, rather than perpetuate it.

  • The Independent UK ☛ TSA is providing airline passenger data to ICE to aid Trump’s deportation efforts, report says

    Individuals in the TSA data who were later found in ICE databases had a high rate of eventually being arrested and deported, a former ICE official told the outlet.

  • RTL ☛ Abusive marriage: Iran frees child bride sentenced to death over husband's killing: activists

    Iranian authorities have freed a woman who was condemned to hanging over the killing of her husband who she married while a child, in a case that sparked international concern over the plight of women sentenced to death in the Islamic republic, rights activists said on Friday.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Minnesota woman drove federal agent to the cops

    The scene captures something profoundly broken about immigration enforcement in 2025. Federal agents in unmarked cars, conducting plainclothes arrests in apartment parking lots, create situations where ordinary people can't distinguish law enforcement from abduction. Frazier's instinct — get to a police station, find someone with identifiable authority — makes sense.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Kansas Reflector ☛ $700M Google antitrust settlement could benefit a quarter of Kansas’ population

  Attorneys general in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico announced this week an agreement reached in a lawsuit accusing Google of harming consumers who made purchases in the Google Play Store.

  The agreement arose out of a 2023 class action antitrust lawsuit alleging Google monopolized app distribution and in-app billing services on some Android devices, according to the settlement website.

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ Netflix Must Be Stopped

  For years, Big Tech’s growing dominance over Hollywood has meant lower-quality movies and TV shows. Now, with Netflix and Paramount Skydance fighting over Warner Bros. Discovery, audiences are left with little say in the matter.

• Patents

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-12-08 [Older] Strict US written description and enablement requirement applied to ADCs and platform inventions (Seagen v Daiichi Sankyo) [Ed: Patent monopolies, not "inventions"]

• Trademarks

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-12-05 [Older] CJEU broadly follows AG and recognizability approach in Mio/konektra judgment

• Copyrights

  • Variety ☛ Google Removes AI Videos of Disney Characters After Cease and Desist

    Google has removed dozens of AI-generated videos that depicted Disney-owned characters after receiving a cease and desist letter from the studio on Wednesday.

  • Creative Commons ☛ Where CC Stands on Pay-to-Crawl

    Implemented responsibly, pay-to-crawl could represent a way for websites to sustain the creation and sharing of their content, and manage substitutive uses, keeping content publicly accessible where it might otherwise not be shared or would disappear behind even more restrictive paywalls.

    However, we do have significant reservations.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Google Removes Sci-Hub Domains from U.S. Search Results Due to Dated Court Order

    Google has removed dozens of new Sci-Hub domain names from its search results in the United States. Unlike typical DMCA takedowns, the removals were triggered by a dated court order that was not enforced for several years. This appears to be one of the first times Google has deindexed an entire pirate site in the U.S. based on a 'site blocking' style injunction.

  • CBC ☛ Disney to invest $1B US in OpenAI, license Marvel, Star Wars characters for Sora tool

    Disney is investing $1 billion US in OpenAI and will let the startup use characters from Star Wars, Pixar and Marvel franchises in its Sora AI video and image generator, a crucial deal that could reshape how Hollywood makes content.