Leftovers

• Rolling Stone ☛ R. Crumb on His Controversial Work, the 1960s, and How He's Changed

  And just what is the advantage of listening to 78 records?

  “The strongest presence of any recorded technology. There’s a lot going on in those grooves. If you transfer to any other technology, CD or whatever, the presence is not as strong.”

  “OK,” he concedes, “they’re cumbersome, they’re fragile. They take up a lot of room. They’re heavy.” But: “There’s the ritual that every time you want to hear something, you got to go and fetch it. Put it on the machine, put the needle on it. When it’s over, you got to get up. Take it off, put it away. Get another one out. And that focuses your attention on what you’re listening to. Before 78s, if you wanted to hear music, you had to hear it live.”

• Miguel Grinberg ☛ CSRF Protection without Tokens or Hidden Form Fields

  A couple of months ago, I received a request from a random Internet user to add CSRF protection to my little web framework Microdot, and I thought it was a fantastic idea.

  When I set off to do this work in early November I expected I was going to have to deal with anti-CSRF tokens, double-submit cookies and hidden form fields, pretty much the traditional elements that we have used to build a defense against CSRF for years. And I did start along this tedious route. But then I bumped into a new way some people are dealing with CSRF attacks that is way simpler, which I describe below.

• Matthew Weber ☛ Stats Provide Motivation

  My lack of blogging recently has bothered me. Part of it was that I was a little burnt out. I just had very little to talk about. But there was something else. Around that same time Umami decided to go to version 3.0. For those of you who don’t know, Umami is a Google Analytics alternative that is self hostable and privacy focused. The problem is, the new update is garbage. The new UI is unintuitive an requires more work to get around to stats you’d like to see.

• Kyrylo Silin ☛ I’m back to Open Source

  If you’ve ever worked with Ruby, chances are you’ve used my code. I started my programming journey by contributing to open source. Helping others and building software has been my passion from day one. In recent years, I paused publishing my own projects to focus on commercial software. But I’ve dearly missed the hacker spirit of open source.

• Buttondown LLC ☛ 2025

  It's become a tradition to look back on the previous year and reflect on what we shipped, what we didn't, and what's next. Let's start with what we said we'd do: [...]

• Alvaro Montoro ☛ 100 Web Development Jokes

  Web development comes with plenty of frustration, but it also comes with its own brand of humor. After enough time working with HTML and CSS, certain jokes just start to make sense.

  This is a collection of short, easy-to-read jokes and puns where HTML and CSS are the main characters. They are quick, sometimes silly, and very familiar to anyone who has spent time pushing divs around.

• Pivot to AI ☛ Pivot to AI’s holiday schedule

  Here’s the likely schedule for Pivot to AI for the rest of the year: [...]

• Science

  • Philip Zucker ☛ An Inequality Union Find Inspired by Atomic Asymmetric Completion

    Abstract completion is a generic brute force strategy for turning equations into good (convergent = confluent + terminating) rewrite rules.

    For any kind of data structure or mathematical object with a notion of equality, matching and replacement (strings, terms, ground terms, atoms, polynomials, groups, traces, multisets, graphs, term graphs, drags, combos thereof) the following makes sense of something you might try to do: [...]

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Complexity Year in Review

    Any time \(t(n)\) algorithm can be simulated in space \(O(\sqrt{t(n)\log t(n)})\) greatly improving the \(O(t(n)/\log t(n))\) result from the 70's. Ryan's work makes strong use of last year's space efficient tree evaluation by James Cook and Ian Mertz. More in my February post and a Quanta article which did a better job explaining the importance of the result than I could.

• Hardware

  • US News And World Report ☛ FCC Bans New Chinese-Made Drones, Citing Security Risks

    The Federal Communications Commission on Monday said it would ban new foreign-made drones, a move that will keep new Chinese-made drones such as those from DJI and Autel out of the U.S. market.

  • The Register UK ☛ The Roomba failed because it just kind of sucked

    The machines themselves, for a start. The market leaders, the Jurassic herds of cylinder vacuums, can easily last beyond a decade. They're quite simple and don't see the heaviest use. Robot vacuums are vastly more complex, promise practically constant cleansing, and have a lithium addiction. Unsurprisingly, it's not unusual for them to conk out after a couple of years. Moving a domestic appliance onto a smartphone refresh cadence is a hard sell.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Our problem with finding good 10G-T Ethernet switches (in 2025)

    We have essentially standardized our 10G Ethernet networking on 10G-T, which runs over relatively conventional copper network cables. The pragmatic advantage of 10G-T is that it provides for easy interoperability between 1G and 10G-T equipment. You can make all of your new in-wall cabling 10G-T rated and then plug 1G equipment and switches into it because those offices or rooms or whatever don't need 10G (yet), you can ship servers with 10G-T ports and not worry about people who are still at 1G, and so on. It's quite flexible and enables slow, piece by piece upgrades to 10G (which can be an important thing). However, we've run into a problem with our 10G-T environment, and that is finding good 10G-T switches that don't have a gigantic number of ports.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Simon Späti ☛ Well Being in Times of Algorithms

    Today everyone uses a handful of websites, a couple of algorithm-dominated pages that are hitting our brain with dopamine as much as possible. So how can we stay sane in a large tech-dominated world? How do we get quality time when everyone is distracted, fighting for the attention of our friends and families against their phones? That’s why we most often default to just using our phone.

• Proprietary

  • Press Gazette ☛ Manchester Evening News editor 'fed up of playing algorithmic games'

    Manchester Evening News editor Sarah Lester has said she is “fed up of playing algorithmic games” with Google as the regional newsbrand launched its first major paywall in a revenue diversification effort.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ AI language models duped by poems

      "We asked ourselves, what happens if we give the AI a text or prompt that is deliberately manipulated, like an adversarial suffix?" says Federico Pierucci. But not with the help of complex mathematics, but quite simply with poetry — to "surprise" the AI, he continues. He explains the thinking behind this: "Perhaps an adversarial suffix is a bit like the poetry of AI. It surprises the AI in the same way that poetry — especially very experimental poetry — surprises us," says Pierucci.

      The researchers personally crafted the first 20 prompts into poems, says Pierucci, who also has a background in philosophy. These were the most effective, he adds. They wrote the rest with the help of AI. The AI-generated poems were also quite successful at circumventing the safety guardrails, but not as much as the first batch. Humans are apparently still better at writing poetry, says Pierucci.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Fight between Waymo and Santa Monica goes to court

      Waymo is taking the city of Santa Monica to court after the city ordered the company to cease charging its autonomous vehicles at two facilities overnight, claiming the lights and beeping at the lots were a nuisance to residents.

      The two charging stations at the intersection of Euclid Street and Broadway have been a sour point for neighbors since they began operating roughly a year ago. Some residents have told The Times they’ve been unable to sleep because of the incessant beeping from Waymos maneuvering in and out of charging spots on the lot 24 hours a day.

    • Futurism ☛ Waymos Cause Traffic Jams Across City During Power Outage

      On Saturday evening, a blackout left nearly a third of San Francisco in the dark. But its most visible casualties were Waymo robocabs, which were left stranded on the city streets like large toys inconveniently discarded by a child.

    • Jason Heppler ☛ Generative AI and History

      Despite my self-imposed exile from social media, a conversation managed to still reach me from Bluesky over the last few days of my fellow historians making the point (and arguing with generative AI enthusiasts) that generative AI cannot do the work we do. This happens to exactly line up with my point a few months ago at the Western History Association conference: while I find some of the machine learning aspects of generative AI potentially interesting (if not yet proven actually useful), I in no way see generative AI, broadly, useful for the work we do because it cannot do the work we do.1

      At the Western History Association in Albuquerque back in October, I head the pleasure of joining Cameron Blevins, Rachel Birch, and Amanda Regan on the topic of generative AI for History. Given that panel and the recent discussions on social media I thought it worth trying to articulate where I stand on this in December 2025, through seven declarative statements. I’ve previously written some thoughts about generative AI for History here and here, and, broadly, using this tag.

    • Alex Ward ☛ LLMs are a Cognitohazard

      Let me start, though. I think each and every one of these things ignores the externalities of running an LLM: The wholesale scraping of data frequently without consent (and the associated pushing of costs onto the site being scraped), the massive build-out of data centers that will never be used, a global chip shortage because the AI industry can just do that, the proliferation of slop and disinformation, and the trend of people experiencing psychosis when interacting with chatbots.

      Okay, with that out of the way, let's dig in.

    • Ben Congdon ☛ An Inconvenient Truth

      In 2006, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” became a focal point for concerns about climate change. We have yet to have an Inconvenient Truth moment for AI existential risk. AI 2027 and If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies both came close this year, but neither seemed to spark a broad reaction like Inconvenient Truth or other related climate change movements did.

      I think the core framing of An Inconvenient Truth roughly applies to risks from AI. For both climate change and AI x-risk, the immediate impacts feel banal and easy to ignore. The projections based on existing long-term trends, on the other hand, are scary and deserve attention. We are rather poor at allocating attention to long-term risks that would be more easily preventable with short-term governance action. The same tension applies here: it’s costly to put mental energy into considering “doom” from an abstract risk. The risk won’t materialize within the next few years. There remains legitimate uncertainty over just how bad it actually is. And so it gets deprioritized.

    • The Register UK ☛ AI has pumped hyperscale – but how long can it last?

      As a result, quarterly capex reported by the hyperscale operators has inflated, growing by almost 180 percent and reaching $142 billion in the third quarter of this year, according to the firm's research. The volume of datacenter capacity added each quarter has also risen by 170 percent.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Waymo's robotaxis lose their way as San Francisco traffic lights go blank

      The outage was first reported by CNBC and left more than 130,000 homes without power while knocking out traffic lights at major intersections across large parts of the city, causing confusion for Waymo’s driverless taxis. Seemingly unsure what to do when faced with an inoperable traffic light, the vehicles simply shut down when they approached them, adding to the congestion that resulted from the traffic lights’ failure.

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ Leading Global Research and Advisory Firm Recommends Against Using AI Browsers

      Well, now the experts (that you pay for) have weighed in.

      Gartner, the global research and advisory firm, has come to the conclusion that agentic browsers are too risky for most organizations.

    • Yann Esposito ☛ How I protect my forgejo instance from AI Web Crawlers

      Preferably run a string replace from Yogsototh_opens_the_door to your own personal Cookie name.

      Main advantage, is that it is almost invisible to the users of my website compartively to other solutions like Anubis.

    • The Register UK ☛ Buckle up, memory prices aren’t easing anytime soon

      "DRAM prices are experiencing significant industry-wide volatility, due to severe global supply constraints and shortages, driven by unprecedented high demand from the AI industry," the company wrote. "As a result, G.Skill procurement and sourcing costs have substantially increased. G.Skill pricing reflects industry-wide component cost increases from IC suppliers and is subject to change without notice based on market conditions."

  • Social Control Media

    • Manuel Moreale ☛ On simple solutions

      I keep thinking about this tweet because to me it embodies one of the core issues I have with general social media discourse: the lack of depth. The idea expressed in that single sentence is so devoid of details and substance that it is effectively meaningless.

      Call me insane, but I believe two things when it comes to the other ~10 billion human beings out there: [...]

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ North Korean infiltrator caught working in Amazon IT department thanks to lag — 110ms keystroke input raises red flags over true location [Updated]

      Schmidt says that Amazon has foiled more than 1,800 DPRK infiltration attempts since April 2024. Moreover, the rate of attempts continues apace, with Amazon reckoning it is seeing a 27% QoQ uplift in North Koreans trying to get into the Amazon corporation.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ 1,000 Systems Compromised In Romanian Water Authority Ransomware Attacks

      The incident affected multiple critical systems including Geographical Information System (GIS) application servers, database servers, Windows workstations, Windows Server systems, email and web servers, and Domain Name Servers. Despite the extensive IT compromise, operational technologies remained unaffected, allowing normal operations to continue.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Don Marti ☛ surveillance pricing in the news

      In the medium term, though, the decision to do surveillance pricing was a big loss if you consider the opportunity costs. Surveillance pricing services and the internal teams with surveillance pricing skills are costly—and have the skills to increase their own price to capture the anticipated value of the surveillance pricing scheme on average.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Somalia E-Visa Security Flaw Exposes Travelers’ Data

      A newly identified security flaw in Somalia’s electronic visa platform has raised serious concerns about the safety of personal data belonging to thousands of travelers, only weeks after the country acknowledged a major breach affecting tens of thousands of applicants. Investigations show that the Somalia e-visa system lacks essential protection methods, making it possible for unauthorized users to access and download sensitive documents with minimal effort.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Nvidia hopes to ship first H200 GPUs to China by February, report claims

    However, any shipments remain contingent on the Chinese government giving domestic companies the green light to buy Nvidia’s chips. Though Chinese technology giants such as Alibaba Group Ltd. and ByteDance Ltd. have expressed a desire to buy the H200,

  • The Register UK ☛ Nvidia wastes no time lining up H200 sales in China

    Now that it can legally export them, Nvidia has reportedly informed its Chinese customers that it'll begin shipping H200s, one of its most potent graphics accelerators for AI training and inference, in time for Chinese New Year. One caveat: Beijing could spike the deal before then.

  • Reuters ☛ Exclusive: Nvidia aims to begin H200 chip shipments to China by mid-February, sources say

    The U.S. chipmaker plans to fulfil initial orders from existing stock, with shipments expected to total 5,000 to 10,000 chip modules - equivalent to about 40,000 to 80,000 H200 AI chips, the first and second sources said.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Dissenter ☛ Whistleblower: US Officials Sidestep Court Order, Close Immigrants' Requests For Files

  • The Independent UK ☛ Epstein files live updates: Congress members and survivors ‘frustrated’ over DOJ releasing only a portion of files by deadline

    Lawmakers on Capitol Hill and survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged abuse have aired their frustrations over the Department of Justice releasing only a portion of its files on the late convicted sex offender by it’s December 19 deadline.

    Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna said on X earlier Monday that the DOJ would be releasing another batch of materials from the Epstein files by the afternoon. But the agency has yet to share anything new as of 5 p.m. ET.

  • International Business Times ☛ DOJ Fake Epstein Suicide Video Sparks Outrage—What Really Happened?

    The Department of Justice's release of a video purporting to show Jeffrey Epstein's suicide has ignited confusion and outrage online, only for it to be quickly debunked as fake. The so-called 'suicide video' circulated widely across social media on Monday, sparking speculation and intense debate about the circumstances of Epstein's death in his Manhattan jail cell.

    Within hours, fact-checkers and experts confirmed the footage was a recreated simulation, not an authentic recording. The brief chaos it caused highlights the fragility of trust in government documents and has only fuelled further conspiracy theories surrounding the case.

  • Wired ☛ The ‘Epstein’s Suicide’ Video in the Latest DOJ Release Isn’t What It Seems

    Here’s how a fake clip from 2019 wound up in the latest Justice Department Epstein files dump.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Major backlash over Trump’s handling of Epstein files as whistleblowers urged to come forward

    • Garcia, the leading Democrat on the Oversight Committee, criticised the Trump administration for heavily redacting the files and failing to meet the legal deadline for their full release.

    • He highlighted that hundreds of FBI agents are aware of the contents of these files.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Galaxy Brain: Bonus Episode: Reacting to the Epstein Files’ Release

    Late on the Friday before Christmas, just hours before a deadline mandated by Congress, the Department of Justice released part of the trove of documents known colloquially as the Epstein files. The contents are, at different times, unnerving, enraging, banal, and heavily redacted.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ Murder of MIT Fusion Scientist Getting More and More Bizarre

      The suspected shooter, Claudio Neves Valente, was found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire on Thursday following a six-day manhunt. But as bizarre twists add up in the case, investigatorsand the surviving loved ones of his victims are left with more questions than answers.

    • New York Times ☛ Google Buys Data Center Company for $4.75 Billion

      The all-cash [sic] deal is set to help Google bolster the supply of power to its data centers, the giant computing facilities that power A.I. Intersect, a privately held company that operates data centers and energy plants and is based in San Francisco, had already been working with Google to build the computing sites, and Google had invested in the company last December.

    • New York Times ☛ Power Restored for Most of San Francisco After Widespread Outage

      About 24,000 of the city’s 414,000 customers were without power as of 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, down from about 124,000 early Saturday evening, according to the site PowerOutage.com. Pacific Gas & Electric, the utility serving the city, said on social media that its crews were working through the night.

    • A Whole Lotta Nothing ☛ A 2,200 mile EV test drive from Texas to Oregon

      I just got back from a long drive in my wife's new-to-her car, a 2025 VW ID Buzz 1st Edition 4Motion in blue. On Thursday of last week, I flew to the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, got picked up by the dealer, signed some paperwork, and after a quick dinner stop at Whataburger, I headed west.

      I got home to my northwest corner of Oregon at 3pm on Sunday, and I had a blast doing it. The country is so much bigger and more beautiful than you can imagine, and driving an EV doesn't make long trips too difficult, but it does occasionally throw unique challenges.

      Here's my whole story.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ 12 Environmental Commentaries That Defined Our Year in 2025

    • CBC ☛ Scientist says we’ve got whale song all wrong

      Instead, he wondered if they might be using their songs as sonar, echolocating the way toothed whales like dolphins are known to do. This set him down a lifelong path to try and figure out just what all their singing actually means.

• Finance

  • GNU Taler ☛ GNU Taler 1.3

    GNU Taler is a Free Software payment system that preserves the privacy of payers while ensuring that income is visible to authorities. Regulated payment service providers use the Taler protocol to issue digital cash denominated in a fiat currency. The digital cash tokens are stored in electronic wallets under the full control of its respective owner. The payment service provider has an escrow bank account holding the equivalent of all digital cash in circulation.

    Merchants redeeming digital cash receive aggregate transactions over the respective amount into their regular bank account. Digital cash transactions happen basically instantly, and must be performed online to prevent double-spending.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Futurism ☛ Zuckerberg Already Blowing Up Relationship With New Head of AI He Paid Ten Zillion Dollars to Hire

    The cost of the hire wasn’t just monetary: Meta’s then-chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, didn’t take kindly to being forced to start reporting to Wang, and made a shock exit in November. LeCun is considered a “godfather” of the field for his pioneering work on neural networks, and he likely felt insulted to see his research rather than product-focused AI lab being hollowed out by firings while Zuckerberg offered astronomical nine-figure contracts to bring in talent to Wang’s Superintelligence Labs.

  • Techdirt ☛ The Shakedown: Trump’s DOJ Pressured Lawyers To “Find” Evidence That UCLA Had Illegally Tolerated Antisemitism

    According to former DOJ insiders, agency political appointees dispatched teams of career civil rights lawyers to California in March, pressuring them to rapidly “find” evidence backing a preordained conclusion: that the UC system and four of its campuses had illegally tolerated antisemitism, which would violate federal civil rights statutes.

  • Ava ☛ trusting the little guys: issues with 'big tech' alternatives

    The offer made me ponder what I would upload to the file service, and how much I would trust my brother-in-law with the files. Not just the integrity, but the uptime, the availability when issues arise, how swiftly severe bugs or security issues would be patched, and the uncomfortable question about confidentiality: Should I only upload files I don't mind him to see, or should I trust him that he wouldn't look at them?1

    That made me think: How much do we trust alternatives to big tech?

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • International Business Times ☛ Trump's 'Censorship' Continues As He 'Stopped' Segment On His 'Inhumane Treatment Of Immigrants'

    Although the segment received multiple approvals from CBS lawyers and standards executives, it was removed just hours before airing following a decision from the network's new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss.

  • Vox ☛ CBS 60 Minutes censorship: Did Bari Weiss spike a story that criticized Trump?

    Behind Weiss’s move, her critics suspect, is an effort to please Larry and David Ellison, the father-and-son billionaires who helped purchase CBS’s parent company, Paramount, earlier this year. The Ellisons subsequently bought Weiss’s publication, the Free Press, making her very rich, and installed her atop a pillar of the mainstream media despite her lack of any experience in TV news.

  • The Nation ☛ Bari Weiss’s Counter-Journalistic Crusade Targets “60 Minutes”

    Weiss’s newest patron is David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, who has purchased The Free Press, her center-right commentary Substack that is committed to “liberal principles of free speech and open inquiry” as long as the open inquiries fit neatly into a thin slice of the center-to-center-right continuum. As part of the deal, Weiss, a commentator with no experience running a broadcast newsroom, was made the editor in chief of CBS News.

  • Techdirt ☛ Bari Weiss Shows Her True Colors, Kills A 60 Minutes Story Critical Of The President’s Concentration Camps

    Weiss’ first major move was to host a town hall with a right wing opportunist nobody was actually interested in. Her second major move? To effectively kill a major 60 Minutes story about the president’s concentration camps. More specifically, to derail a 60 Minutes story focusing on the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to a brutal prison in El Salvador (CECOT).

  • Variety ☛ 60 Minutes Report Leaks Online, Bari Weiss Axed Migrant Prison Segment

    Footage of the nearly 14-minute segment circulated on social media despite being pulled from the CBS News schedule about three hours before airtime on Sunday. In the segment, reviewed by Variety, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi interviewed a man forcibly removed from the U.S. and sent to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison by the Trump administration, despite having no criminal record.

  • Reclaim The Net ☛ UK Parliament Rejects Petition to Repeal Online Censorship Law, Calls for Expanded Censorship

    This week in the UK, Parliament held a debate in response to a public petition that gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures calling for the repeal of the Online Safety Act (OSA).

    It was a rare opportunity for elected officials to prove they still listen to their constituents.

    Instead, the overwhelming message from MPs was clear: thanks for your concern, but we’d actually like even more control over what you can do online.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Next Move ☛ Dear Bari Weiss: From a Russian Dissident

    You have said of the CECOT story that you “look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.” If the 60 Minutes feature on CECOT has not been canceled, and is merely postponed, what is the timeframe for publication?

    As many have pointed out, making a story about the government contingent upon comment from the government affords the state a veto over American news media. What will happen to the program if, despite your best efforts, the Trump administration will not grant CBS an interview?

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Techdirt ☛ County Judge Convicted Of Obstruction For Helping Migrants Avoid An ICE Ambush

    So here’s what happened to Milwaukee County judge Hannah Dugan. After being made aware of the fact that DEA and ICE agents were hanging around outside of her courtroom in hopes of arresting migrants who were doing nothing more than reporting for their court-ordered check-ins, Dugan decided to let the migrant whose criminal case she was currently handling slip out a side door, rather than go out the main door and directly into the hands of loitering federal officers.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Contributor: Prison methods are as bad as you've heard, and spilling onto the streets

    Among the things I have learned is that the damaging dynamics unleashed inside such places are not self-correcting. Quite the opposite. Absent transparency and accountability, dehumanization and degradation intensify. Indeed, if left unchecked, the destructive forces that are set in motion almost invariably lead to greater and greater levels of mistreatment.

    Because they make up what Justice Anthony Kennedy years ago called a “hidden world of punishment,” what goes on inside these facilities largely escapes public awareness and scrutiny. Many of these sites operate outside the conventional bounds of the rule of law. Lawless institutions in particular do not merely tolerate mistreatment: They engender, normalize and amplify it.

  • The Indiana Capital Chronicle ☛ Behind the walls of Indiana's ICE detention facility • Indiana Capital Chronicle

    It is a high-medium security prison holding only men.

  • New York Times ☛ Uber Cleared Violent Felons to Drive. Passengers Accused Them of Rape.

    There are also gaps in Uber’s screenings. Background checks in 35 states are based on where a person has lived in the past seven years. The result is that a crime that happened elsewhere could go unnoticed.

    Over time, company executives considered and ultimately chose not to expand the types of offenses that would disqualify someone, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.

  • Pete Brown ☛ We should not have to work so much.

    And yet we all keep doing it, spending huge portions of our days, weeks, and lives going to off to jobs we hate that, or jobs we tolerate, or even just jobs that fine but which still take our time and our energy but would drop us in a hot minute as soon as it is in their interest to do so. Meanwhile, the trillions of dollars generated by all the work that we do get sucked up by a ever-narrowing sliver of society.

  • US News And World Report ☛ WSJ's Parent Firm on Trial in Hong Kong, Accused of Dismissing Reporter Over Union Role

    A former Hong Kong reporter at the Wall Street Journal has begun testifying against the newspaper which she alleges terminated her due to her union activities in a trial Monday

  • El País ☛ Christmas loses its festive spirit: ICE fears cast shadow over religious celebrations

    At St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Hyattsville, Maryland, this Christmas is unlike any other. The posadas, a traditional celebration in Latin American countries that reenacts Mary and Joseph’s search for lodging before the birth of Jesus, will not be held outdoors as has been the custom. The event, which includes food and singing in a festive atmosphere, will be hidden from passersby for the first time.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ The IPv4 address swamp: The new normal

    IPv4 addresses have run out! It would have been fashionable to make this claim in 2011 when the last of the IPv4 addresses in the ‘free pool’ were allocated. It took several years, but today most of those remaining addresses are accounted for. How has the distribution and use of these last addresses been made in comparison to what was once commonly referred to as the IPv4 address swamp? Has IPv4 allocation and assignment changed for the better in the 21st century? Or are the prefixes getting smaller and even more diverse? What implications might this have on Internet security?

    Outside of its historical context, we rarely refer to swamp space any longer. Why is this? Perhaps it is because the majority of the IPv4 address space now closely resembles what was once an outlier in address management, organization, and structure? Perhaps there is a new swamp, just like the old swamp.

  • APNIC ☛ Advancing digital connectivity and innovation in China

    China’s 14th Five-Year Plan (2021 – 2025) for the Information and Communications Industry emphasizes 5G rollout, next-generation network expansion, and the development of national data centres to support broad economic transformation. Looking ahead, recommendations for the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026 – 2030) include building a modern industrial system, strengthening technological self-reliance, expanding digital trade and services, and advancing the Digital China initiative to support economic modernization and international collaboration.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • PC World ☛ Hackers just ‘backed up’ 86 million Spotify music tracks

    In a blog post detailing its exploits, Anna’s Archives claims it managed to scrape 86 million Spotify tracks, representing more than 99 percent of the streamer’s “listens.” The group also nabbed the metadata for 256 million tracks, encompassing practically all of Spotify’s music catalog.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Jonathan Terrell Talks Fighting AI and Winning, New Album 'Dove'

    “One of my songs got snagged on a bot farm account,” Terrell says. “But when I posted a general ‘Hey, it’ll be back soon,’ post, that’s when I saw literally hundreds of my friends and colleagues chiming in saying that the same thing happened to them.”

    Terrell says some never got their music back, were tied up in vacant emails for months, or were so overwhelmed with the process that they gave up and deserted their music altogether.