Leftovers

• Alex Sirac ☛ [Article] IndieWeb Carnival roundup: Cycles and Fluctuations

  As the monthly cycle of the Indieweb carnival has come to an end, I’ve procrastinated a bit but here is, finally, the roundup! 22 people participated and made 23 blog posts on the topic, with lots of opinions that sometimes crossed each other.

• Alexandra Wolfe ☛ Little Miss Why

  ​These days, without siblings or parents to bombard with questions, I use my writing as an outlet, plus scribbling furiously into a daily journal like my life depended on it. And, in a way, I suppose it does.

  And you, are you always eternally asking questions?

• Ben Congdon ☛ Day 15 of Daily Writing

  This is post 15 of my unannounced, self-imposed month of daily writing. I’ve been making soft promises to myself and others to write more for… years. I was inspired by a few of the folks who wrote daily last month for Inkhaven, and so decided to do my own super unofficial version of that.

  It’s been fun so far! And by “fun” I mean it’s been a rewarding challenge. :)

• Mark Simonson ☛ The Scourge of Arial

  An icon of the Swiss school of typography, Helvetica swept through the design world in the ’60s and became synonymous with modern, progressive, cosmopolitan attitudes. With its friendly, cheerful appearance and clean lines, it was universally embraced for a time by both the corporate and design worlds as a nearly perfect typeface to be used for anything and everything. “When in doubt, use Helvetica” was a common rule.

• KnownHosts ☛ knownhosts.net

  To publish a public service here, put a known_hosts file with your public key (or CA) at, for example: [...]

• Science

  • Miguel Young de la Sota ☛ Optimization Countermeasures

    Silicon designers are bad at designing secure hardware. Embarrassingly so, sometimes. This means that low-level cryptography, as well as code which directly handles key material, often needs to be written in a particularly delicate style called “constant-time”.

    “Constant-time” is a bit of a misnomer. It does not mean that the code’s time complexity is O(1)O(1) (although this is a closely related property). Constant-time is a threat model for side-channel timing attacks like Spectre, which ensures that key material is not leaked through the microarchitecture of CPUs.

    Although constant-time is a powerful countermeasure against the silicon designers leaking our keys, the compiler can still screw us. However, there are magic incantations that can be offered to the compiler to make it behave correctly in many relevant situations.

    First: what is constant-time?

  • Quanta Magazine ☛ The Year in Computer Science

    Space and time aren’t just woven into the background fabric of the universe. To theoretical computer scientists, time and space (also known as memory) are the two fundamental resources of computation. Algorithms require a roughly proportional amount of space to runtime, and researchers long assumed there was no way to achieve anything better. In a stunner of a result — “the best thing in 50 years,” in the words of one of the world’s leading computer scientists — Ryan Williams, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that memory is far more powerful than anyone had realized. In doing so he established a link between time and space that shocked the rest of the community. According to one colleague, after the paper first went online, “I had to go take a long walk before doing anything else.”

• Career/Education

  • Digital Camera World ☛ 6 educational things that a drone can teach children beyond learning to fly

    Hand-eye coordination is a good thing, and does come from fast movement, but playing catch is good too. I'd argue that the kind of coordination that drones and games teach is a slightly different one because the brain needs to associate the smaller movement of fingers with more significant movements of the drone.

  • Cassidy Williams ☛ Influencing without authority

    Leading a project without formal authority can be challenging. Having accountability on the success of a project without the authority to direct/prioritize its direction can be frustrating, but there’s some tools in your tool belt you can use to influence decisions: [...]

• Hardware

  • Digital Camera World ☛ This Canon was the most popular camera in November. The second-place camera is a compact camera (but it wasn’t even close)

    The other reason the mirrorless’ success isn’t entirely surprising? It packs in 40fps, and 7K 30p open gate - reviewer James Artaius has already said the R6 Mark III “might actually be the best Canon camera on the market right now.”

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Harvard University ☛ Early research shows benefits of social media break

    In a study of young adults published in JAMA Network Open, those who participated in a one-week social media detox experienced a boost in their mental health, with symptoms of anxiety dropping by 16.1 percent, depression by 24.8 percent, and insomnia by 14.5 percent.

    The findings are only the first phase in a larger research effort, says lead author John Torous, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the director of the digital psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In this edited interview, he discusses what surprised him in the initial findings and offers a preview of the work to come.

  • The Atlantic ☛ ‘Commuting Is Bad’—Particularly for Women

    The negative influence of the commute is so pronounced that it’s hard to imagine making the economy work for moms without acknowledging its impact. And the solution to the commute penalty may be as daunting as it is simple: To help moms work outside the home, society needs to make it easier for them to work near home.

• Proprietary

  • Pete Brown ☛ Self-hosting is a hobby.

    Self-hosting is not a solution to any of this.

    If you self-host, great! Nicely done, and I am glad that it is (mostly) working for you. I say “mostly” because I would bet that somewhere you’ve got a thread or blog post (maybe several!) about your frustrations with your setup and all the hoops you have had to jump through to get it working and keep it working.

    Most of the people writing these paens to self-hosting take the cost and trouble for granted, because many of them are already self-hosting their stuff and were inclined to do so in the first place.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Locking down the digital shop floor: Why defense manufacturers need to rethink data security

    If you build parts for the Defense Department or the aerospace sector, you already know the files that drive your machines, such as G-code, CAD build instructions or even basic QA logs, are gold. Those digital instructions often contain controlled unclassified information or classified data. If that information leaks, the fallout could include lost contracts, compliance penalties or even national security risks that can ripple throughout the supply chain.

  • The Record ☛ Russia’s GRU hackers targeting misconfigured network edge devices in attacks on energy sector, Amazon says | The Record from Recorded Future News

    Moses said Amazon began tracking the campaign in 2021 and saw that it focused on Western critical infrastructure, particularly the energy sector. Amazon was able to detect the campaigns through its large network of honeypots that it calls Amazon MadPot.

    Data Amazon obtained showed “coordinated operations against customer network edge devices hosted on AWS.”

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Russia’s GRU Behind Years-Long Espionage Campaign Targeting Western Critical Infrastructure

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) has attributed a persistent multi-year cyber espionage campaign targeting Western critical infrastructure, particularly the energy sector, to a group strongly linked with Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), known widely as Sandworm (or APT44).

    In a report released Monday, the cloud giant’s threat intelligence teams revealed that the Russian-nexus actor has maintained a “sustained focus” on North American and European critical infrastructure, with operations spanning from 2021 through the present day.

  • Cassidy Williams ☛ Trying out Ente for media backup

    Because I have so many photos and videos, my phone is not enough storage for them. They’re precious enough now that I want to make sure they’re safe (I say “now” because I was relatively careless about them before, not caring much if I lost them, but now they matter to me more).

  • Greg Morris ☛ Locked Out Of Your Life

    An Apple account lockout isn't like getting locked out of Twitter or losing access to Netflix. It's losing every photo you've taken in years, every password you own, access to everything else those passwords unlock. An algorithm flags something and suddenly you can't get into your bank, your email, your work systems. Not because those services locked you out, but because Apple did and that's where all your credentials live.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Against the Federal Moratorium on State-Level Regulation of AI

      The constellation of motivations behind this proposal is clear: conservative ideology, cash, and China.

      The intellectual argument in favor of the moratorium is that “freedom“-killing state regulation on AI would create a patchwork that would be difficult for AI companies to comply with, which would slow the pace of innovation needed to win an AI arms race with China. AI companies and their investors have been aggressively peddling this narrative for years now, and are increasingly backing it with exorbitant lobbying dollars. It’s a handy argument, useful not only to kill regulatory constraints, but also—companies hope—to win federal bailouts and energy subsidies.

    • Linuxiac ☛ Global Internet Traffic Rose 19 Percent in 2025, Cloudflare Data Shows

      The company operates one of the world’s largest content delivery, DNS, and security infrastructures, with data centers in hundreds of cities and visibility into traffic for millions of websites, applications, and APIs. Here is a summary of the most important points.

    • El País ☛ ‘Slop’: Merriam-Webster’s word of the year criticizes junk content created by artificial intelligence

      Merriam-Webster, the publishing house behind the leading English dictionary in the United States, has chosen “slop” as its word of the year for 2025. In the current cultural context, the term is used to describe low-quality digital content produced en masse using artificial intelligence.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 'Slop' chosen as Merriam-Webster's 2025 Word of the Year

      "We define slop as 'digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,'" said Merriam Webster, the leading US producer of language reference works.

      Among the examples of AI slop given by the publisher were: [...]

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Amazon discovers AI sucks at automated TV recaps

      Amazon pulled all the Prime Video AI recaps after one day

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Data Centers In Spaaaace!

      The AI bubble has been kept inflated by journalists uncritically reporting whatever CEOs say as they frantically pump the stock. Right now, you can observe a wonderful example of this by searching the Web for "orbital data centers". My recent search turned up pages of links, including SpaceX’s Lofty IPO Valuation Hinges on Big Bet on Outsize Growth from Bloomberg's Bailey Lipschultz, Sana Pashankar, and Loren Grush: [...]

    • Greg Morris ☛ The Questions I'll Never See

      I wrote about how AI summaries stop people clicking through to sources back in July. The data from Pew Research showed only 8% of people click links when they see an AI overview, compared to 15% when they don't. So the fact that anyone's reaching my site at all from these tools feels almost accidental, and also means that I am showing up much more than these small numbers that I can see.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Google AI summaries are ruining the livelihoods of recipe writers: ‘It’s an extinction event’

      AI Mode is mangling recipes by merging instructions from multiple creators – and causing them huge dips in ad traffic

    • Techdirt ☛ When People Realize How Good The Latest Chinese Open Source Models Are (And Free), The GenAI Bubble Could Finally Pop

      Although the field of artificial intelligence (AI) goes back more than half century, its latest incarnation — generative AI — is still very new: ChatGPT was launched just three years ago. During that time a wide variety of issues have been raised, ranging from concerns about the impact of AI on copyright, people’s ability to learn or even think, job losses, the flood of AI slop on the Internet, the environmental harms of massive data centers, and whether the creation of a super-intelligent AI will lead to the demise of humanity. Recently, a more mundane worry is that the current superheated generative AI market is a bubble about to pop. In the last few days, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has admitted that there is some “irrationality” in the current AI boom, while the Bank of England has warned about the risk of a “sharp correction” in the value of major players in the sector.

  • Social Control Media

    • NVISO Labs ☛ Telegram Abuse in Malware: Real Campaigns and KQL Detections

      Adversaries utilizing popular messaging apps throughout different attack phases is nothing new. Telegram in particular has constantly been the subject of abuse by multiple threat actors, favored for its anonymity, accessibility, resilience, and operational advantages. Since the beginning of October 2025, NVISO’s Security Operations Center (SOC) has identified four distinct intrusion attempts involving the abuse of Telegram. These incidents prompted us to take a closer look at the various ways adversaries are leveraging Telegram for malicious activity and provide detection and hunting opportunities.

    • Court House News ☛ Iowa claims in suit Roblox exposes children to harm

      Roblox, a San Mateo, California-based company, operates one of the most popular games in the nation with more than 80 million daily users, including Iowans, and most of whom are children under the age of 18 — some as young as age 4, Bird says in the complaint.

      She says Roblox markets itself as the “#1 gaming site for kids and teens” and that as many as two-thirds of U.S. children ages 9 to 12 have Roblox accounts.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ 20,000 issues on GitHub

    The curl project moved over its source code hosting to GitHub in March 2010, but we kept the main bug tracker running like before – on Sourceforge.

    It took us a few years, but in 2015 we finally ditched the Sourceforge version fully. We adopted and switched over to the pull request model and we labeled the GitHub issue tracker the official one to use for curl bugs. Announced on the curl website proper on March 9 2015.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Krebs On Security ☛ Most Parked Domains Now Serving Malicious Content

      Direct navigation — the act of visiting a website by manually typing a domain name in a web browser — has never been riskier: A new study finds the vast majority of “parked” domains — mostly expired or dormant domain names, or common misspellings of popular websites — are now configured to redirect visitors to sites that foist scams and malware.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Chinese Surveillance and AI - Schneier on Security

    • CNN ☛ China’s censorship and surveillance were already intense. AI is turbocharging those systems

      China’s ruling Communist Party is using artificial intelligence to turbocharge the surveillance and control of its 1.4 billion citizens, with the technology reaching further into daily life, predicting public demonstrations and monitoring the moods of prison inmates, according to a new report.

    • PC World ☛ Pornhub hacked: View and search history for Premium members could leak

      Are you a Pornhub Premium member? You may want to pay closer attention to a notification about a data leak described as a “limited set of analytics events.” That language hides the real story: Your watch and search history could now lie in the hands of hackers, and whether or not it goes public depends on if Pornhub pays the ransom being demanded.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ PornHub Data Breach: Premium User Activity Exposed

      The issue stems from a data breach linked not to PornHub’s own systems, but to Mixpanel, an analytics vendor the platform previously used. On December 12, 2025, PornHub published a security notice confirming that a cyberattack on Mixpanel led to the exposure of historical analytics data, affecting a limited number of Premium users. According to PornHub, the compromised data included search and viewing history tied to Premium accounts, which has since been used in extortion attempts attributed to the ShinyHunters extortion group.

    • The Indiana Capital Chronicle ☛ Attorney general sues pornographic websites • Indiana Capital Chronicle

      Attorney General Todd Rokita is suing about 50 sexually explicit websites, alleging they have violated Indiana’s age-verification law.

      The lawsuits allege that the content made available to children by the defendants — all of whom are associated with a multinational pornographic conglomerate known as Aylo — includes sexual violence, choking, rape fantasies, sex slavery and sex with teen girls.

    • EFF ☛ 🪪 Age Verification Is Coming for the Internet | EFFector 37.18

      In this latest issue, we're sharing how to spot sneaky ALPR cameras at the U.S. border, covering a host of new resources on age verification laws, and explaining why AI companies need to protect chatbot logs from bulk surveillance.

    • NPR ☛ Live cameras are tracking faces in New Orleans. Who should control them?

      He says Project NOLA acts as a kind of clearinghouse for video feeds from over 5,000 cameras that are mounted on the private property of "volunteers," who pay annual connection fees.

      It's a massive amount of video, so in 2022 he added live facial recognition abilities.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Verge ☛ How Silicon Valley turned Trump into a fellow broligarch

    What’s unusual is their aggressive and swift attempt to reshape the law altogether — or, rather, eliminate any law that would place a boundary on them. They’ve tried to get Congress to ban states from writing their own AI laws, without suggesting any federal law to replace them; when those attempts failed, they convinced the president to sign an executive order that would punish the states trying to enforce their own laws. They’ve tried taking over the Library of Congress in order to change copyright enforcement and IP protection and floated several theories for a federal takeover: Mayhaps the Federal Communications Commission’s authority over telecoms could give the feds the power to regulate AI? And they’ve convinced enough people in Washington that they need those laws removed in order to compete against China in the AI race.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The True Catastrophe of Trump, as seen from north of the border

    What I had not anticipated was the second derivative. After a time, that is, people come to expect, not just bad behaviour, but steadily worsening behaviour. So to keep feeding his outrage addiction, Mr. Trump’s behaviour not only has to keep getting worse, but to do so at an ever accelerating rate. And, I suppose, the rate of acceleration must also increase, and the rate of acceleration of the rate of acceleration, and so on. We are in a kind of hyperinflation of presidential derangement, an exponential curve asymptotically approaching Nero.

  • ADF ☛ Marginalized Voices Could Hold Key to Defeating Boko Haram

    With al-Qaida backing its agenda, Boko Haram has moved beyond rhetoric, engaging in abductions and raids to firmly impose its demands for an exclusive Islamic state governed by a strict interpretation of Islamic law.

  • El País ☛ From ‘Nazi’ to ‘moment for reflection’: Latin America’s left feels the blow of Kast’s victory in Chile

    In any case, Lula and Sheinbaum chose to downplay an outcome that, while obviously uncomfortable for them, is no longer an anomaly on the regional stage. In recent months, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, and now Chile have shifted toward the far right. Colombia’s Petro, on the other hand, is not afraid of ideological confrontation. Quite the contrary: he seeks it out, even if it provokes angry reactions, diplomatic tensions, and the indignation of his targets.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Why is Joe Walsh selling a bunch of his old stuff?

    So who does Walsh owe money? “No, no — I’m not in debt,” he tells me with a laugh in the Troubadour’s upstairs bar. “I just want all of these things to have a good home instead of lying in a dusty storage room because I don’t use them anymore.” A portion of the auction’s proceeds will go to Walsh’s VetsAid organization, which provides assistance to veterans of the armed forces and their families. Advertisement Lukas Nelson

    Music Lukas Nelson on competing for a Grammy against his famous dad Dec. 11, 2025

    “Veterans don’t get enough care, and that really bothers me,” says Walsh, whose flight-instructor father was killed while stationed with the Air Force in Japan when Walsh was just 20 months old. “To see a whole street of homeless vets — it’s like, why?”

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Pentagon ‘escalating’ investigation into Arizona Sen. Kelly for illegal-orders video

    Hegseth also remained silent on the matter after rebuking Kelly weeks ago for posting the video where he and five other Democrats warned against illegal orders.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Devil’s Cheap Date

    Not because he didn’t know the answer. He knows. We all know. A child knows.

    He ran because answering honestly would cost him something, and Mike Johnson has already decided what he’s willing to pay to keep his gavel.

    Manu Raju and Eric Michael Garcia caught Johnson between meetings. Simple question: “Do you condemn the President’s remarks about Rob Reiner?”

  • Atlantic Council ☛ ‘Putin is lying’: Zelenskyy visits front to expose false claims of Russian gains

    In order to maintain this air of inevitability, Putin stands accused of routinely inflating Russian battlefield achievements. At a time when Kyiv is already coming under mounting pressure to make painful concessions, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is well aware of the dangers posed by these exaggerated claims. In a bid to expose the Kremlin’s disinformation efforts, Zelenskyy traveled personally to the front lines in eastern Ukraine last week to visit a city that Putin and his colleagues have repeatedly bragged of seizing.

  • The Age AU ☛ Epstein fallout: The Epstein files will soon be made public. Here’s what to know

    The clock is ticking for the US government to open up its files on Jeffrey Epstein.

    After months of rancour and recriminations, Congress has passed, and President Donald Trump has signed legislation compelling the Justice Department to give the public everything it has on Epstein – and it has to be done before Christmas.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Newsom trolls Trump with website of president's 'criminal cronies'

    Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a new state-run website Tuesday that tracks what his office calls the “criminal cronies” around President Trump — just the latest trolling tactic by the California governor that directly mirrors Trump’s own use of public resources for political score settling.

    Newsom pegged the website’s rollout to recent crime statistics, which were released in early November showing falling rates of homicide and assault in California. The governor’s website catalogs what it calls the top 10 criminal convictions that were followed by pardons offered thus far by Trump — from Jan. 6 rioters to former politicians and business figures convicted of fraud, drug trafficking and financial crimes. The website calls Trump the “criminal in chief.”

  • US Navy Times ☛ Hegseth says he won’t publicly release video of Sept. 2 boat strike

    Hegseth said that members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committee would have an opportunity this week to review the video, but did not say whether all members of Congress would be allowed to see it, even as a defense policy bill demands that it be released to Congress.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ The Epistemology of the Epstein Scandal

    And tomorrow, DOJ will be forced to hand over the Epstein files themselves.

    For five months, Epstein has remained at least a low-level burn undermining Trump’s ability to manage the public’s focus and his own policy goals. The Epstein thing was the first thing that led Republicans to defect, and now they’re defecting left and right.

  • Trigger ☛ How we got hit by Shai-Hulud: A complete post-mortem

    The attacker had access to our engineer's GitHub account for 17 hours before doing anything visible. According to our GitHub audit logs, they operated methodically.

    Just over two hours after the initial compromise, the attacker validated their stolen credentials and began mass cloning: [...]

• Environment

  • PC World ☛ Space is getting crowded: Starlink and Chinese satellites nearly collide

    Nine satellites were reportedly launched last week from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China, Nicolls writes, and it appears the satellites’ orbits weren’t coordinated with other space agencies. As a result, one Starlink satellite at an altitude of ~350 miles passed one of the new satellites at a distance of ~650 feet. Way too close for comfort.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Fossil fuel industry's 'climate false solutions' reinforce its power, aggravate environmental injustice, study suggests

    Published in Energy Research & Social Science, the study denounces how fossil fuel incumbents increasingly portray themselves as "part of the solution" to the climate emergency, with the primary aim of neutralizing social, legal and political pressures calling for a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Register UK ☛ Senate trio questions DC operators over rising energy costs

      Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) sent letters to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, CoreWeave, Digital Realty, and Equinix on Monday, demanding answers on their contributions to rising utility rates, which the lawmakers blame firmly on the explosion of datacenter construction projects.

      Because the massive scale of AI datacenters requires more power than most grids can supply, the Senators explain in their letters, utility companies have to build out their grids to the tune of billions of dollars.

    • YLE ☛ No plans for new probe of Estonia ferry tragedy, investigators confirm

      According to Estonian, Swedish and Finnish authorities, it is not necessary to reopen an investigation into what caused the Baltic ferry Estonia to sink in Finnish waters in 1994, killing more than 850 people.

      Investigators from the three countries announced the decision in a final report about the disaster probe.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ A Few More Environmental Books From 2025 We Couldn’t Let You Miss

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Europe’s Tech Lag: Does It Matter?

    I tend to spend more time than most American economists thinking about Europe. Comparisons between countries are a good way to understand how policies and events play out in the real world. And, on top of that, I really care about maintaining Europe as a bastion of liberal democracy as we, in America, go badly off the rails. You can listen to or read my recent discussion of issues European with Adam Tooze here, and my primer on why Europe’s economy is better than you think here. But today I want to go into a quite specific and somewhat technical question: The significance or lack thereof of the difference between U.S. and European productivity growth.

    I’ve written about this before. But I believe that I’ve managed to sharpen the analysis and find a clearer way to make my points with data. So here we go.

  • Simon Willison ☛ ty: An extremely fast Python type checker and LSP

    ty: An extremely fast Python type checker and LSP (via) The team at Astral have been working on this for quite a long time, and are finally releasing the first beta. They have some big performance claims: [...]

  • Greg Newman ☛ Trying Ty for my LSP in Emacs

    Astral announced Ty Beta today, the new Rust-based Python type checker. I’ve been using Ruff and uv for a while now, and they’ve consistently delivered on the “rewrite Python tooling in Rust to make it absurdly fast” promise. So when they claimed Ty is 10-80x faster than Pyright for incremental checking, I had to try it.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Why Americans are going batsh*t over the cost of living

    But the bigger news is that almost no jobs have been added to the American economy since April.

    In fact, 710,000 more people are unemployed now versus November 2024.

  • The Verge ☛ Trump admin threatens retaliation against Spotify and others over EU tech regulation

    The Office of the US Trade Representative posted on X Tuesday, claiming that US service providers have been hit by “a continuing course of discriminatory and harassing lawsuits, taxes, fines, and directives” from the EU. Earlier this month, X was fined $140 million under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), in addition to new laws, fines, and investigations that have affected US tech giants like Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta over the past few years.

  • Privacy International ☛ Election observers adopt Principles and Guidance for Observing Personal Data Use in Elections

    Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the Declaration of Principles (DoP) for International Election Observation. Over 50 endorsing election observation organisations representing all regions of the world met at the United Nations to reaffirm their commitment to supporting genuine democratic elections and to the principles for international election observation as set forth in the Declaration.

  • EFF ☛ Trends to Watch in the California Legislature

    If you’re a Californian, there are a few new state laws that you should know will be going into effect in the new year. EFF has worked hard in Sacramento this session to advance bills that protect privacy, fight surveillance, and promote transparency.

    California’s legislature runs in a two-year cycle, meaning that it’s currently halftime for legislators. As we prepare for the next year of the California legislative session in January, it’s a good time to showcase what’s happened so far—and what’s left to do.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Verge ☛ A vague study on Nazi bots created chaos in the Taylor Swift fan universe

      Two months later, new research by a little-known social listening firm seemed to upend what the public knew about how that viral discourse spread. Rolling Stone reported on research compiled by a company called Gudea, which promises clients “early visibility into rising narratives” on social media platforms. Gudea had analyzed 24,679 posts from 18,213 users on 14 different online platforms as they discussed Swift in the days following the album release. According to the report, “inauthentic” narratives that started on fringe platforms like 4chan eventually jumped to other more mainstream platforms like X and TikTok, where real people began debating whether Swift was pushing Nazi symbols and comparing Swift with Kanye West.

    • RTL ☛ Grok spews misinformation about deadly Australia shooting

      Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok churned out misinformation about Australia’s Bondi Beach mass shooting, misidentifying a key figure who saved lives and falsely claiming that a victim staged his injuries, researchers said Tuesday.

      The episode highlights how chatbots often deliver confident yet false responses during fast-developing news events, fueling information chaos as online platforms scale back human fact-checking and content moderation.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Australian Strategic Policy Institute ☛ The party’s AI: How China’s new AI systems are reshaping human rights

    This report shows how the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming China’s state control system into a precision instrument for managing its population and targeting groups at home and abroad.

    China’s extensive AI‑powered visual surveillance systems are already well documented. This report reveals new ways that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems to automate censorship, enhance surveillance and pre‑emptively suppress dissent.

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ ‘I want to know what happened’ — Georgian protesters on the lingering effects of chemical exposure

    So when on 1 December the BBC released an investigation suggesting a World War I-era chemical weapon, ‘camite’, may have been mixed into the water that evening, Mariam vowed to look further into her own condition.

  • RFERL ☛ Detained Iranian Nobel Laureate Mohammadi Says She Was Beaten During Arrest

    Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi says she was violently beaten and arrested by security forces in Iran's northeastern city of Mashhad and later accused of “cooperation with the State of Israel,” the Nobel Peace Prize laureate's first comments since she was detained last week.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ Most Press Arrests In 2025 Resulted In Zero Criminal Charges

  • Meduza ☛ Twelve independent journalist stand trial as Azerbaijan’s ‘Meydan TV case’ gets underway

    The investigation widened in February 2025 with the arrest of Shamshad Agaev, editor-in-chief of arqument.az and a regular contributor to Meydan TV, as well as freelance journalists Nurlan Gahramanli and Fatima Movlamly. In May, former Voice of America correspondent Ulviyya Ali was also detained, followed in August by freelance photojournalist Ahmed Mukhtar.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Is the article dead?

    The written article — linear, static, and designed for a broad audience — was optimized for a world of scarce publishing space and shared attention. That world is disappearing. Referral traffic is collapsing. Homepages matter less than they once did. Increasingly, people encounter journalism through feeds, summaries, notifications, and recommendations shaped to their individual context.

    That doesn’t mean the article is obsolete. But it does mean we shouldn’t assume it will stay the same forever.

  • Dan Sinker ☛ Announcing the Inaugural Snooping Newsie Awards for Excellence in Independent Journalism

    This year has been hard—perhaps the understatement of the year, I know—but one thing that has stood out to me throughout this endless struggle of a year has been the importance of small-scale, truly independent journalism to stand up for communities and to expose the abuses and corruption of the powerful. Nowhere has this work been more critical than in covering the raids of our communities by ICE and the US Border Patrol, where tiny news organizations with no budget and barely any staff have been a critical lifeline to understand the scale and impact of these attacks on our neighbors, our family, and our friends.

    This year, as I was turning to tiny news orgs to find out what was happening down the street from me, I remembered that Magic: The Gathering card again, that Snooping Newsie and her dogged pursuit to expose the ills on the streets in order to bring new life to her community. It felt exactly like what was happening right now.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Trump sues the BBC in Florida

    Like Trump's routine lawsuits against U.S. media, this is a nuisance lawsuit whose purpose is to harrass the target and exploit the fact that it's cheaper to settle than to fight. In other words, you bribe him to go away. ABC News paid him $15m and Paramount $16m to settle lawsuits that experts said Trump had no reasonable prospect of winning. CNN held its ground and won. A case is outstanding against the New York Times.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Techdirt ☛ As Federal Prisons Run Low On Food And Toilet Paper, Corrections Officers Are Leaving In Droves For ICE

    Workers at detention centers and maximum-security prisons from Florida to Minnesota to California counted off the number of co-workers who’d left for ICE or were in the process of doing so. Six at one lockup in Texas, eight at another. More than a dozen at one California facility, and over four dozen at a larger one. After retirements and other attrition, by the start of November the agency had lost at least 1,400 more staff this year than it had hired, according to internal prison data shared with ProPublica.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: America’s collapsing consumption is the world’s disenshittification opportunity

    When Trump and Microsoft colluded to shut down the International Criminal Court by killing its access to Outlook and Office365 (in retaliation for the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu), the world took notice. Trump and Microsoft bricked the ICC, effectively shuttering its operations. If they could do that to the ICC, they could do it to any government agency, any nationally important corporation, any leader – anyone. It was an act of blatant cyberwarfare, no different from Russian hackers bricking Ukrainian power plants (except that Microsoft didn't have to hack Outlook, they own it).

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ 85% of Indies Face 'Negative Impact' from Spotify Stream Minimum

    Enter the aforementioned study, for which ANMIP-BG fielded responses from 71 labels and artists based out of Southeast Europe.

    85% of these respondents confirmed suffering a revenue reduction due to Spotify’s 1,000-stream minimum – with 65% sustaining a “significant negative impact.”

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Trademarks

  • The Verge ☛ ‘Twitter never left:’ X sues Operation Bluebird for trademark infringement

    Last week, Operation Bluebird filed a petition asking the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to cancel X Corp.’s ownership of the “Twitter” and “Tweet” trademarks. It alleged X Corp. “legally abandoned its rights” to Twitter’s brand with “no intention to resume use.” At the same time, Operation Bluebird filed a trademark application for Twitter as part of plans to launch a new site, called Twitter.new.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Elon Musk’s X Corp sues social media startup over bid for ‘Twitter’ brand

    X said in the lawsuit in Delaware federal court that its Twitter brand is still "alive and well" and "not ripe for the picking," and that Operation Bluebird's attempt to "steal" the name constituted trademark infringement.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Judge: GoDaddy Must Unmask Owners of 100+ "Copyright-Infringing" Domains

    In late May 2025, a Gibraltar-based company asked GoDaddy to deny service to over 100 domains, based on allegations of widespread copyright infringement. A subsequent DMCA subpoena, compelling GoDaddy to disclose the operators' personal details, was challenged by the anonymous operator of two of the domains. With the identities behind 100 domains at stake, an ambitious defense - including a First Amendment component - aimed to keep privacy intact.