Leftovers

• Rolling Stone ☛ Pink Floyd Releases 'Wish You Were Here' Video 50 Years Later - WATCH

  Fifty years after the release of Pink Floyd‘s Wish You Were Here, the band returned earlier this month with a massive anniversary box set to celebrate the landmark 1975 album. About a week after the retrospective compilation arrived, the band treated fans to a music video of the stunning title track — filled with everything from nostalgic footage of the band in the studio and running through a subway station to whimsical animations of a figurine floating through time and space.

• Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Denmark's Postal Service Is About to Stop Delivering Physical Letters After 400 Years

  On December 30, PostNord will deliver its last letter in Denmark. The government-owned company, which formed in 2009 as a merger between the Swedish and Danish postal services, will continue distributing packages in Denmark. Letter delivery in Sweden will also continue.

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ As Germans Drink Alone at Home, Community Pubs Are Closing

  Skyrocketing prices and stagnating real wages are forcing more and more pubs to shut their doors. The closing of neighborhood pubs means the loss of leisure space, and of the community built around it.

• Peter Hosey ☛ Idle Time » Blog Archive » Nestle vs. Wakefield: Comparing two versions of the Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe

  The linked article says, in the section on measuring, “Whenever possible, flour should be measured using a scale.” Since I learned that, I’ve made numerous half-batches with the flour scaled by weight, and they’ve come out perfectly every time.

  So I wouldn’t even say you should measure flour by sifting it—you should weigh it. But, of course, that requires knowing what the correct weight is. Back in the recipe, Chu continues: [...]

• Mark Hysted ☛ things I will spend more time on in 2026

  This is the inverse of my recent post about stuff I'd like to dump in 2026. Here is the list of stuff I'd like to spend more time on next year.

  I suppose they are a bit like new year resolutions, but framing in terms of spending more time rather than something I could 'tick off' feels like a longer term aspiration and therefore more likely to happen (in my head anyway).

• André Machado ☛ The Greco-Roman Legacy We Still Live By

  Walk through any modern city and the ancient Mediterranean rises to meet you. A courthouse fronted by columns. A senate debating in a circular chamber. A stadium roaring with civic pride. The Greek polis and the Roman republic are not relics locked in museums. They are the foundation stones of how we organize public life, how we argue about truth, and how we imagine what a good society should be.

  The legacy of the Greeks and Romans is not a single inheritance. It is a layered tradition of ideas, institutions, and habits that were absorbed, rewritten, and challenged over centuries. We live with their brilliance and their blind spots at the same time. Understanding what carried forward helps us see which parts of our culture are ancient echoes and which are modern inventions.

• Tim Bray ☛ Humanist Plumbing

  What happened was, a faucet started dripping. And then I managed to route around the malignant machineries of late-stage capitalism. These days, that’s almost always a story worth telling.

• Seth Godin ☛ Random access

  The first difficult task is to consistently and persistently create one tile after another. Showing up to earn trust, attention and a voice.

  And the second is to make sure it all rhymes.

• Brandon ☛ Thoughts While Digital Cleaning

  Last night, I spent a couple of hours closing out random accounts in my password manager. I do at least once a year, and I always think about how I could be doing something so much more entertaining. How many hours of my life will I spend managing accounts?

• Ben Congdon ☛ Letters Are Still an Option

  I sometimes wish I’d grown up in the era of written letters, or that email and long-form written correspondences were more fashionable than they currently are. There is something quite enjoyable about sitting down and intentionally writing to someone, for hours even. The times that I’ve sat down to write something long-form to a friend, or have received the same, feel qualitatively different from the accumulation of many shorter messages.

• Science

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ The Mysterious Hjortspring Boat That Sank in Denmark 2,400 Years Ago Is Still Revealing Its Secrets

    The Hjortspring boat was nearly 66 feet long, and it could hold 24 men with their weapons and gear. According to the study, however, the trove of iron spearpoints and shields found with the boat would have been enough for 80 warriors. As such, researchers think four Hjortspring-style boats may have attacked Als, and the victors included all the attackers’ weapons with the vessel that they sank “to give thanks for the victory.”

• Career/Education

  • SBS ☛ This country has been crowned the world's 'happiest' for decades. Experts reveal why

    These classes are seen as important developmental building blocks — teaching children skills such as emotional intelligence, building resilience, cooperation and active listening.

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

    Register readers of a certain age will recall the events of the 1970s, where a shortage of fuel due to various international disagreements resulted in queues, conflicts, and rising costs. One result was a drive toward greater efficiencies. Perhaps it's time to apply those lessons to the current memory shortage.

    As memory prices continue to rise, it is time engineers reconsidered their applications and toolchains' voracious appetite for memory. Does a simple web page really need megabytes to show a user the modern equivalent of Hello World? Today's Windows Task Manager executable occupies 6 MB of disk space. It demands almost 70 MB before it will show a user just how much of a memory hog Chrome is these days. The original weighs in at 85 KB on disk. Its successor is not orders of magnitude more functional.

  • India Times ☛ How AI boom is pressuring videogame console industry in race for memory chips

    "Since memory makes up about a fifth of a ‌PC's total component ‍costs, this hits manufacturers hard," said Joost van Dreunen, games professor at NYU's Stern School of Business.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Independent UK ☛ Officials warn against using AI chatbots when seeking mental health support

    This caution follows a recent survey revealing that over a third of adults had turned to AI chatbots for help with their wellbeing. Dr James noted: "As a psychiatrist, I’ve seen an increase in the number of vulnerable patients turning to AI chatbots for mental health support over the last year. Despite AI now being part of everyday life and a fantastic resource when used appropriately, it cannot be relied upon for everything and in some cases can be dangerous."

  • Mark Hysted ☛ things I might dump in 2026

    A list of things I might dump in 2026: [...]

• Proprietary

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Requiring iOS 26 to fix security issues

    It’s also hard not to see this move as a way to juice the numbers for iOS 26 adoption, given how widely panned the release has been.

    The person in charge of Liquid (Gl)ass recently left Apple to much fanfare from the usual suspects. But I still can’t adequately express the utter dread I have of upgrading either my iTelephones or Macs to the latest systems that feature his work.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ iOS 26.3: Proximity Pairing in EU

    I’m looking forward to Apple’s blog post about how easier Bluetooth pairing will put users at risk. The notification forwarding was previously announced, but I didn’t realize it also included support for reactions.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Apple fined $116M in Italy over ATT privacy feature in iOS

    Many iOS apps collect data about their users to deliver personalized ads. In some cases, apps combine their first-party data with user information from third-party services. That data blending process is carried with the help of an identifier such as IDFA, a unique string of characters Apple assigns to each iOS device. The data points that apps collect about a user are linked to the identifier.

  • Bert Hubert ☛ The European Cloud Situation at the end of 2025

    As the year draws to an end now is a good time to review where we are with Europe’s cloud situation, and what has been achieved. One thing is certain, a lot has happened, and also quite a lot has become clearer.

  • Engadget ☛ What happened to iRobot can happen to anyone

    The company which popularized robot vacuum cleaners around the world has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. iRobot, makers of the Roomba, has been synonymous with the category since its inception, but its star had dulled in recent years. The company plans to sell its assets to its primary supplier, China’s Picea Robotics, in the hope of maintaining its business.

  • Lap Cat Software ☛ I foretold that Mac app notarization is security theater

    I hate to say I told you so but…who am I kidding, I love to say I told you so. In 2019 I wrote a prescient blog post, The true and false security benefits of Mac app notarization, in which I foretold such an attack, suggesting that notarization is security theater.

  • [Old]

    Lap Cat Software ☛ Revisited: The true and false security benefits of Mac app notarization

    It's unclear why the notarization requirements are so lax, and whether that will change in the future. I'd say that Apple should publicly comment on this, but that's a false hope. Apple almost never explains itself on these matters. We developers are as much in the dark as everyone else.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Atlantic ☛ A New Way for Robotaxis to Go Wrong

      Waymo vehicles should be able to call up a human agent for a remote response if they get confused or are unable to operate. But connectivity issues during the blackout may have prevented this safeguard from working. The company is diagnosing the problem, a Waymo spokesperson told me in a statement: “While the failure of the utility infrastructure was significant, we are committed to ensuring our technology adjusts to traffic flow during such events.” The spokesperson added that the driverless cars should have been able to navigate intersections without working traffic lights, but “the sheer scale of the outage led to instances where vehicles remained stationary longer than usual to confirm the state of the affected intersections.”

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ How I learned to stop worrying and love AI slop

      If I were to locate the moment slop broke through into popular consciousness, I’d pick the video of rabbits bouncing on a trampoline that went viral this summer. For many savvy internet users, myself included, it was the first time we were fooled by an AI video, and it ended up spawning a wave of almost identical riffs, with people making videos of all kinds of animals and objects bouncing on the same trampoline.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ When the AI bubble bursts, humans will finally have their chance to take back control

      Economic analysts and historians of previous industrial frenzies, from the 19th-century railroads to the dotcom boom-and-bust at the turn of the millennium, are calling AI a bubble.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can't find a job

      Stanford computer science graduates are discovering their degrees no longer guarantee jobs as AI coding tools now outpace entry-level programmers. Tech companies are replacing 10 junior developers with just two experienced engineers and an AI agent capable of equivalent productivity.

    • Futurism ☛ Top Software Engineering Students Can't Get a Job Because of AI

      As the newspaper describes it, a prevailing idea among those at either end of the software hiring pipeline is that for every ten programmers, companies now only need two, plus a large language model (LLM).

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Unlucky Amazon shopper orders DDR5 memory but gets DDR4 hidden under the heatspreader — RAM sold as new was a switcharoo

      As prices for DDR5 RAM get ever higher and availability becomes ever scarcer, it's unfortunately no surprise that the number of corresponding scams increases. The latest story comes from an unlucky European shopper who got DDR4 sticks in DDR5 clothing.

    • New York Times ☛ Waymo Suspended Service in San Francisco After Its Cars Stalled During Power Outage

      The ride-hailing service remained offline Sunday afternoon and tow truck operators said they had been towing Waymos for hours overnight. Social media was littered with videos of the vehicles at blocked intersections with their hazard lights blinking.

    • PC World ☛ PC prices could rise by 8% in 2026 due to memory shortages

      Research firm IDC predicts that the average price of computers could rise by up to 8% in 2026 due to a global shortage of memory chips (RAM and NAND).

      The background is the sharp increase in demand for HBM memory for AI data centers, which is prioritized over the production of consumer memory, which is less profitable for manufacturers.

    • Wired ☛ OpenAI’s Child Exploitation Reports Increased Sharply This Year

      The company made 80 times as many reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children during the first six months of 2025 as it did in the same period a year prior.

    • Sean Voisen ☛ A bestiary of AI metaphors

      Lately, I’ve been thinking about the many metaphors we use as shorthand for describing and understanding large language models (LLMs). Has any technology in the history of humankind amassed such a rich and diverse collection in such a short amount of time?

      Let’s quickly go through the list: [...]

    • James A Reeves ☛ Holiday Lullaby

      Here in the Middle West, we’ve already enjoyed two excellent snowstorms. This augurs well for a proper winter. Although the year is winding down, the future is still coming fast and dumb. The people in charge are hellbent on giving us artificially intelligent colleagues and companions, and they’re banking on a heavy assumption: that we value the sense of a relationship more than a living person. That we will privilege the feeling over the fact. They might not be wrong. For the past year, C. and I have been playing with a scenario that gives this fork some teeth.

    • Rlang ☛ My Messy Notes on Building a Super Learner: Peeking Under The Hood of NNLS

      Super Learner is an ensemble machine learning algorithm that optimally combines predictions from multiple candidate algorithms to create a single ensembled model. Rather than selecting a single “best” model through traditional model selection methods, Super Learner leverages the strengths of various algorithms by creating a weighted average of their predictions. The fundamental insight is elegant: why choose between a random forest, generalized linear model, or gradient boosting machine when you can let the data determine the optimal combination of all three? This approach was introduced by Mark van der Laan and colleagues and has become particularly popular in causal inference and epidemiology, often paired with Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimation (TMLE) to obtain robust, efficient estimates of causal effects.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Moscow Times ☛ Telegram and WhatsApp Users File Class-Action Lawsuit Against Roskomnadzor

      A group of WhatsApp and Telegram users in Russia has filed a class-action lawsuit against state media regulator Roskomnadzor and the Digital Development Ministry over call restrictions on both messaging apps, Russian media reported Tuesday.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ How social media encourages the worst of AI boosterism

      Put your math hats on for a minute, and let’s take a look at what this beef from mid-October was about. It’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with AI right now.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Inside ICE’s social media machine creating viral arrest videos

      For years, this ICE team had run like a routine government communications shop, dispensing public service announcements and news releases few Americans would see. But during President Donald Trump’s second term, ICE’s public affairs arm has rapidly transformed into an influencer-style media machine, churning out flashy videos of tactical operations and immigration raids.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ DDoS incident disrupts France’s postal and banking services ahead of Christmas

      In a statement on Monday, La Poste said that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) incident knocked key digital systems offline. The company said there was no evidence that customer data had been compromised, but acknowledged that postal operations, including parcel distribution, had been affected.

      The disruption extended to La Banque Postale, the banking service, which warned customers that access to online banking and its mobile app was affected. Card payments at in-store terminals and cash withdrawals from ATMs continued to function, and online payments remained possible if authenticated by text message, the bank said.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ DDoS attack knocks France’s postal service La Poste offline during holiday peak

      According to the most recent update from La Poste, the DDoS attack was still ongoing as of today. Access to online postal services had improved, but the situation overall “remains unstable.” Online banking services were also reported to have resumed, but customers may face delays.

    • The Register UK ☛ Pizza restaurant signage caught serving raw Windows

      It's not clear exactly what has befallen the screen. Some of the icons reference ViPlex Express, a tool for managing digital signage. However, unless the software has a bork mode, or the establishment is seeking to attract the sort of Register reader who likes to snap shots of screens in distress, the lights are on, but nobody's home.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Denmark Accuses Russia of Conducting Two Cyberattacks

    • India Times ☛ Cyberattack disrupts France's postal service, banking during Christmas rush: Report

      The postal service, called La Poste, said in a statement that a distributed denial of service incident, or DDoS, "rendered its online services inaccessible." It said the incident had no impact on customer data, but disrupted package and mail delivery.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ Europe gets serious about cutting US digital umbilical cord

      The core of the problem lies in a direct and irreconcilable legal conflict. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

    • New York Times ☛ Texas Age-Verification Law for App Stores Is Blocked, a Win for Apple and Google

      Texas is among the largest of more than 20 states that have considered or passed similar age-verification laws, which supporters have said are a way to protect minors from toxic online content and behavior. In October, California passed an age-verification regulation that Apple and Google supported because it was less onerous than other state laws.

    • The Register UK ☛ Uber and Lyft rolling Baidu robotaxis into London next year

      Chinese web giant Baidu on Monday announced that a pilot of its Apollo Go robo-ride service will take place in the UK’s capital sometime in the first half of 2026, with help from Uber.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ Proton Moving Out of Switzerland

• Defence/Aggression

  • New Statesman ☛ Britain is blind on immigration statistics

    Net numbers have been high since the millennium. The Conservative pledge of bringing net migration down to the tens of thousands was missed by a long-shot after five years in office. And Britain’s vote to leave the EU came off the backs of net migration numbers that were the highest on the record.

  • Meduza ☛ Architects of Chaos Theory How pro-Kremlin pundits use geopolitical turmoil to explain away Russia’s war against Ukraine

    Asked what Chaos Theory reveals about Russia’s military objectives in Ukraine, Barbashin says it helps explain the Kremlin’s willingness to violate pre-existing international agreements and legal norms. “It makes no sense to refrain from using ‘whatever force necessary’ because this is what actually makes new rules and defines if you are capable of being a great power,” he says, following this line of thinking. “If you change the rules based on […] the ‘realities on the ground,’ then you will have the chance to promote your own rules, and others will have to adapt and accept it.”

  • Vox ☛ Supreme Court says Trump’s attempt to use the military on Americans went too far

    The first part of the Court’s response to Trump is a bit alarming. The Court’s order explains that the words “regular forces,” as it is used by the relevant statute, “likely refers to the regular forces of the United States military.” Thus, Trump cannot use the National Guard unless he is somehow unable to enforce the law by using the full might of the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.

    This argument could be troubling, because it seems to goad Trump into actually attempting to use the regular Army or Marines on political protesters. But, the Court’s Illinois order also contains some language suggesting that his power to use the regular military is also limited.

  • The Register UK ☛ US punishes China’s chip ‘dominance’ with 0% tariffs

    The Notice therefore concludes that tariffs on Chinese chips are appropriate, but not urgent because the document sets them at zero percent until mid-2027.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Former Chinese gaming company with China govt ties accused of smuggling banned AI GPUs — Nvidia’s biggest Southeast Asia customer exposes the limits of U.S. AI export controls

    While Nvidia has said it has found no evidence of chip diversion in the past, this latest episode concerning Megaspeed highlights the broader problem of export controls, which are stringent on paper but increasingly difficult to enforce in practice once hardware passes through layers of intermediaries.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ TiKTok parent ByteDance to beef up AI infrastructure spending to $23B next year

    Tuesday’s report, which cites two people familiar with the company’s plans, said it’s expected to increase its capital expenditures to 160 billion yuan (around $23.1 billion) in fiscal 2026, up from approximately 150 billion yuan it spent on AI infrastructure this year. More than half of the proposed amount would be spent on acquiring advanced semiconductors that will be used for training AI models and running AI applications in production, the people said.

  • Wired ☛ NYPD Sued Over Possible Records Collected Through Muslim Spying Program

    Samir Hashmi, a New Jersey resident, was part of the Rutgers Muslim Student Association during the late 2000s. The Rutgers MSA was one of dozens of organizations infiltrated by the NYPD, according to an Associated Press investigation in 2011 that relied on leaked documents outlining the infiltration operations. Following rounds of negative publicity and a civil rights suit that was settled in 2018, the NYPD “demographics unit” was disbanded. Hashmi did not sign on to the settlement and lost his original open-records case in 2018, when a 4-3 Court of Appeals decision affirmed the NYPD’s ability to use a “Glomar” response to his request for documents about the mosque-raking program, neither confirming nor denying the existence of such records.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ TPUSA's America Fest Conference: A Showcase of the Right's Civil War

    What should have been, well, a turning point for the activist group — a punctuation mark on the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s murder and the public presentation of its next chapter — instead descended into a mess of mudslinging, conspiratorial warfare, and public spats that no bloated pyrotechnic budget could mask. TPUSA wanted to project that it is still a force to be reckoned with, still the center or conservative youth organizing. Instead, the various right-wing factions in attendance were at each other’s throats — the inevitable outcome of years spent building a movement around reactionary politics, one that encouraged followers to replace cognitive reasoning with a hunt for conspiracies, where both rising and established stars rely on virality and engagement to fund their operations.

  • The Verge ☛ The year the government broke

    Nearly a year and four extra-legal extensions later, TikTok remains in the States, owned by the same Chinese company lawmakers warned would gravely endanger US national security. It only recently announced it had finalized a deal to sell its US-based business, with a targeted closing date of January 22nd, 2026 — more than a year after it was first supposed to be banned. The whole ordeal felt like a comedy of errors, where ultimately everyone threw up their hands. The few details known about a supposedly coming deal raise questions about whether it will even comply with the law’s original requirements.

  • SBS ☛ Is a wave of 'under-16 refugees' to RedNote possible?

    In January this year, an unprecedented wave of 'TikTok refugees' migrated to the Chinese social media platform RedNote (Xiaohongshu in Mandarin), ahead of a potential United States ban on TikTok.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ TikTok: All you need to know

    It was launched in 2016 by Chinese tech company ByteDance for the local market, where it is called Douyin. The international version, TikTok, was released in 2017.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Independent UK ☛ ‘Many more’ trips on Epstein’s plane and Mar-a-Lago: Trump appears throughout latest file dump from DOJ

    The files also reveal investigators identified potential co-conspirators whose names have not been publicly revealed, and the Justice Department’s partial and heavily redacted release of materials has not yet advanced the public’s understanding of the scope of Epstein's crimes and connections to an alleged sex trafficking ring accused of exploiting and abusing young girls.

  • teleSUR ☛ Newly Released Epstein Files Cite Multiple Flights With Trump in the 1990

    The information appears in a new batch of thousands of previously unpublished files related to the Epstein case that the U.S. Department of Justice released on Monday afternoon but later appeared to remove. The Washington Post, however, was able to download the documents before they became unavailable.

    Unlike the documents published on Dec. 21, the newly released files include several references to Trump, who has sought to distance himself as much as possible from Epstein and his crimes.

  • RTL ☛ Amid mounting criticism: New Epstein files dump contains multiple Trump references

    A first collection of heavily redacted files made public last Friday sparked criticism that the Justice Department was deliberately excluding references to Trump.

    Trump figures prominently, however, in the thousands of documents published on Tuesday, underlining his close ties to the disgraced financier who was already a convicted sex offender when the more serious trafficking case began.

  • RTL ☛ 'Young nubile girls': Trump in the Epstein files: Five takeaways from latest release

    The most concrete new detail is an internal email dated January 7, 2020, in which a New York prosecutor said flight records showed Trump took eight trips on Epstein’s private jet between 1993 and 1996 – more than investigators were aware of at the time.

    The email – marking the most detailed account yet of Trump’s travel alongside Epstein – says Ghislaine Maxwell was aboard at least four of those flights.

    Maxwell is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for offenses including sex trafficking a minor. It also describes one flight where the only passengers were Epstein, Trump and an unidentified 20-year-old woman, plus two other flights involving women described as possible Maxwell-case witnesses.

  • TMZ ☛ President Trump Accused of Rape in Jeffrey Epstein Files

    The claim is part of an unclassified FBI intake form from October 2020 ... and the document says someone called the FBI National Threat Operations Center Unit to report potential information related to Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Epstein Files Only Get Worse

    These details alone are a lot to take in. That they are just a few needles of newsworthy information in a PDF haystack is dizzying. Blearily tabbing through the files at random this morning, I came across screenshots of what appear to be emails between prosecutors in Epstein’s 2008 sex-crimes case, which resulted in Epstein getting a cushy plea deal (almost all of the names in the email are redacted). I can think of no reason that the names of those who afforded him such an arrangement shouldn’t be made public. In one of the emails, from late May of that year, one person mentions an unnamed person, presumably Epstein, spending only 90 days in jail. “Please tell me you are joking,” the other replies. “Maybe we should throw him a party and tell him we are sorry to have bothered him.” Such emails, although redaction-heavy, are the kind of information that journalists and investigators have longed for—they shed partial light on the government’s leniency in the case. Still, the release is piecemeal and difficult to comb through; as a result, it paints an unclear picture.

  • TruthOut ☛ DOJ Releases New Epstein Files With Disclaimer Attempting to Exonerate Trump

    An internal DOJ email from 2020, meanwhile, states that Trump flew with Epstein on his private plane at least eight times between 1993 and 1996, which was more than had been previously known.

    On two occasions, Trump and Epstein shared flights with two people whom the DOJ described as “possible witnesses” in a criminal case against Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime Epstein accomplice who is serving a prison sentence for conspiring to help him sexually abuse minors.

  • El País ☛ Trump traveled on Epstein’s plane ‘many more times’ than previously thought, according to new documents

    Pending a detailed examination of the entire set — which, once again, is heavily redacted — one item stands out: an email sent by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York on January 7, 2020. It is titled “Epstein Flight Records.” It can be read here and states: “For your situational awareness, wanted to let you know that the flight records we received yesterday reflect that Donald Trump traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware), including during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case.”

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Democratic states sue Trump administration for attempts to defund consumer watchdog agency

    The coalition of states, led by Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, is asking the court to prevent the Trump administration from requesting $0 in funds for its operations and to order it to request money from the Federal Reserve to fulfill its duties as required by the law.

    Rayfield filed the lawsuit Monday in U.S. District Court in Eugene.

  • International Business Times ☛ 'Incompetent' Trump Administration Filing Error Allows Public To Unredact Epstein Files

    The Department of Justice (DOJ) began publishing millions of pages of records relating to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his associates under a new law requiring full public disclosure.

    However, errors in the way files were processed and uploaded have permitted people with moderate technical skills to circumvent redactions, exposing previously blocked text.

  • BoingBoing ☛ DOJ releases and removes Epstein documents implicating Trump

    The Trump administration's Epstein file dump has turned into a slow-motion train wreck with the U.S. Department of Justice briefly posting and then disappearing an alleged Jeffrey Epstein letter, written during Trump's first term, that complains he is in jail while "our president" walks free. At the same time, a separate tranche of documents reveals prosecutors privately flagging convicted felon Donald Trump for as many as eight previously undisclosed flights on Epstein's plane. Seems the Orange Menace may have been racking up frequent flier miles on the Abuse Express.

  • Futurism ☛ Photos Are Being Deleted From the Epstein Files

    Even before the Department of Justice’s release of a major collection of files pertaining to late billionaire sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, lawmakers were concerned they would be heavily censored.

• Environment

  • TruthOut ☛ This Ojibwe Band Is Suing to Stop a Pipeline From Polluting Their Wetland Home

    In October, USACE granted Enbridge a permit to build a 41-mile addition to Line 5 in order to circumvent the Bad River reservation, but Earthjustice, a nonprofit litigation organization representing the tribe, argues the permit failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act. Earthjustice says the pipeline will cross waterways that flow onto the Bad River Reservation and leaks would threaten the watershed and ecosystem, needed for wild rice harvesting and fishing. After the largest inland oil spill from Enbridge’s pipelines in the U.S. in 2010 — flooding more than a million gallons into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan — the largest spill in Wisconsin’s history happened last year. The company reported around 69,000 gallons of oil spilled onto the ground near a rural town in the south of the state. Initially, the spill was reported as two gallons; it was a month before the public officially knew the spill’s size.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • NDTV ☛ Trump In New Epstein Files: Jet Flights To Mar-a-Lago Subpoena - 5 Takeaways

      The most concrete new detail is an internal email dated January 7, 2020, in which a New York prosecutor said flight records showed Trump took eight trips on Epstein's private jet between 1993 and 1996 -- more than investigators were aware of at the time.

    • Hindustan Times ☛ New Epstein files revive scrutiny of Trump ties, as justice department disputes ‘love of young, nubile girls’ letter

      The documents include records of Epstein’s private jet flights and social contacts from that period, in which Trump’s name is cited among several public figures. One document circulating online contains a letter purportedly signed by Epstein that makes a crude reference to a shared interest in young women, apparently in connection with Trump.

    • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk's Starship Explosion Endangered Hundreds of Airline Passengers

      Countless videos circulating online showed a massive stream of reentering pieces of the Starship rocket blazing across the evening sky over the West Indian islands of Turks and Caicos. It was a dazzling sight to behold as the destruction streaked across the sky, like something from science fiction.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ US state launches massive 160-MW solar farm on abandoned coal mine

      A former coal mine in western Maryland has recently been transformed into the state’s largest solar farm and now generates enough electricity to supply power to more than 30,000 homes.

    • India Times ☛ AI data centers are forcing obsolete 'peaker' power plants back into service

      The Fisk power plant is among a growing number of ⁠so-called "peaker" electric generating units being pressed into duty across the U.S. as the nation's electrical grids struggle to keep up with growing demand from data centers powering Big Tech's investments in artificial intelligence.

    • Truthdig ☛ Top DOJ Official Halts Crypto Enforcement While Holding Over $150,000 in Crypto Assets

      The second-highest official at the DOJ, Todd Blanche rose to prominence as Trump’s personal defense attorney. His actions violated the federal conflicts of interest law and his ethics agreement, experts told ProPublica.

    • Vintage Everyday ☛ 28 Amazing Photos of Iran Air Flight Attendants Before the 1979 Revolution

      Before the 1979 Revolution, Iran Air (known as the “Homa”) was one of the fastest-growing and most prestigious airlines in the world. Its flight attendants were the “face” of a modernizing, cosmopolitan Iran, and the role was considered a highly coveted, elite career for young Iranian women.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Alphabet acquires renewable energy company Intersect for $4.75B

      Founded in 2016, Intersect develops solar and wind power installations with on-site battery arrays. Those batteries ensure that there’s a steady supply of energy when power generation capacity is limited, such as when cloudy weather decreases solar panels’ output. Intersect’s website states that its completed and ongoing energy infrastructure projects represent 10.8 gigawatts of power generation capacity.

    • The Verge ☛ The FCC’s foreign drone ban is here

      The FCC says it received a National Security Determination on December 21st from an interagency body saying that “uncrewed aircraft systems” (UAS) and critical UAS components produced in a foreign country could “enable persistent surveillance, data exfiltration, and destructive operations over U.S. territory” and that “U.S. cybersecurity and critical‑infrastructure guidance has repeatedly highlighted how foreign‑manufactured UAS can be used to harvest sensitive data, used to enable remote unauthorized access, or disabled at will via software updates.”

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ US bans ex-EU commissioner, others over social media rules

    The GDI called the US action "immoral, unlawful, and un-American" and "an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship."

  • France24 ☛ US bars five Europeans over alleged pressure on tech firms to censor speech

    The five Europeans were identified by Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, in a series of social media posts. They include leaders of organizations that address digital hate and a former European Union commissioner who clashed with tech billionaire Elon Musk over broadcasting an online interview with US President Donald Trump.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Admin Reinvents US Digital Services Program After Elon Musk Fired All Their Actual Tech Experts

    Last week, the administration excitedly announced a new “Tech Force”—a program to bring tech talent into government for two-year stints to modernize federal technology. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s precisely what the US Digital Service (USDS) and 18F successfully did for over a decade. You know, until Elon Musk and DOGE gleefully fired the entire 18F team in March and gutted USDS into a husk of what it once was.

    USDS and 18F were genuine success stories. Obama-era programs that brought engineers from Silicon Valley into government to help all Americans by modernizing creaking federal systems. Here’s how USDS described itself two years in: [...]

  • The Verge ☛ Trump administration bans five people from the US over online content moderation

    One of the researchers the State Department says is banned and now deportable, is Imran Ahmed, who runs the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an organization aimed at identifying and pushing back against hate speech online that Elon Musk tried and failed to censor with a lawsuit that was dismissed in early 2024. In his decision, Judge Charles Breyer wrote that X’s motivation for suing was to “punish CCDH for CCDH publications that criticized X Corp. — and perhaps in order to dissuade others.”

  • The New Stack ☛ Microsoft's Bold Goal: Replace 1B Lines of C/C++ With Rust

    Hunt said Microsoft will combine AI and algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases.

    “Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code,’” he wrote.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Report: SoftBank scrambles to find $22.5B for OpenAI before the end of the year

    SoftBank Group Corp. needs to come up with $22.5 billion by the end of the year to make good on a commitment to its artificial intelligence partner OpenAI Group PBC.

    Reuters said in an exclusive report today that SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son has a number of levers he can pull in order to get the money together, one option being to use untapped margin loans tied to the Japanese tech conglomerate’s investment in Arm Holdings Plc.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ The US has now banned all new foreign-made drones. What does that mean for American drone pilots?

    Just hours before drone giant DJI was to face an automatic drone ban in the US, the US Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau added all foreign-made drones and components to the FCC Covered list, effectively banning all new non-American drones from being released in the US.

    The change does not affect existing drones, but prevents all foreign-made drones announced after December 22 2025, from entering the US. That means that previously released products will continue to be available for sale in the US, but future launches will be unble to obtain the FCC approval required to sell the new models in the US.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Mike Brock ☛ Bari Weiss and David Ellison Threaten to Sue the Internet

    And now, CBS and its parent company Paramount Skydance are frantically issuing copyright takedowns across the internet to prevent people from seeing what their own legal team approved, what their own standards team cleared, and what their own Canadian affiliate already broadcast.

    They’re threatening to sue people for watching journalism about torture.

    Let me be very clear about what’s happening here: this isn’t editorial judgment. This is institutional suppression using copyright law as a weapon. And the desperation of the response—the “flurry” of takedown notices hitting X, YouTube, and other platforms—proves everything I said yesterday about Weiss handing the administration a kill switch over journalism.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Annexed Crimea Joins Russia’s Ulyanovsk in Restricting Internet Until War’s End - The Moscow Times

    Mobile [Internet] access will be restricted in annexed Crimea for the duration of Russia’s war in Ukraine as a security measure, the peninsula’s Moscow-installed Governor Sergei Aksyonov said Tuesday.

  • ANF News ☛ Iran threatens families of detained activists

    Nazemî stated that the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence sent messages to the families of some activists detained at the memorial ceremony for Xosro Ali Kurdi, telling them that “if they refrain from providing information to the media and remain silent, the detainees will be released.”

  • BoingBoing ☛ That cancelled 60 Minutes piece is up on Canadian TV

    Bari Weiss apparently yanked a 60 Minutes piece on Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador's CECOT prison because it was not friendly enough to the Trump Administration. Somehow, the piece aired in Canada anyway.

  • CBC ☛ 60 Minutes prison segment postponed by CBS briefly viewed in Canada on Global TV

    A portion of a postponed 60 Minutes segment critical of the Trump administration's deportation policies was temporarily available to watch Monday through a Canadian network.

    CBS News pulled its report on a mega-prison in El Salvador hours before it was set to air on Sunday night, but part of the episode briefly appeared on Global TV’s free website and app on Monday.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russian Investigative Journalist Roman Anin Stripped of Citizenship

    The move marks the first known case of a Russian journalist being stripped of their citizenship for their reporting on the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

  • Techdirt ☛ Support Techdirt: Where Bari Weiss Is Not Our Editor In Chief

    On Sunday night, CBS News’ newly imported “editor in chief,” Bari Weiss, killed a 60 Minutes story about Trump’s illegal deportations to a Salvadoran concentration camp—hours before it was set to air. Why? Because it might upset the White House. And because Weiss apparently doesn’t understand how television production works, she waited so long to kill it that it still got sent to foreign partners, meaning the story she tried to bury spread all over the internet anyway.

  • Techdirt ☛ FCC Boss Brendan Carr Bullied Bay Area AM Radio Station For Telling Locals The Truth

    While his higher profile targets have gotten all the attention, the Associated Press has a very good story you should read about Carr’s efforts to bully a Bay Area radio station (KCBS) after it accurately informed locals about the goonish behavior of masked ICE agents.

    Carr opened a fake investigation into the network last February, claiming the station had violated ambiguous public interest standards. The fake inquiries were tethered to a right wing antisemitic propaganda campaign attempting to link George Soros to these stations despite Soros’ limited investment involvement being both irrelevant and three or four layers deep.

  • CPJ ☛ Jordanian journalist arrested on arrival, denied lawyer and family visits

    “Detaining a journalist without disclosing charges, denying access to a lawyer, and preventing family visits raises serious concerns about due process and press freedom in Jordan,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Jordanian authorities must immediately reveal Mohammad Faraj’s whereabouts, clarify the legal basis for his detention, and allow him access to his family and legal counsel.”

  • Robert Reich ☛ Farewell to "60 Minutes"

    Once you begin surrendering to Trump, he always wants more. You can’t appease a tyrant.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • TruthOut ☛ Condé Nast Upheaval Signals a New Level of Corporate War on Media Workers

    The Guild has denounced the company’s treatment of the Fired Four as blatant union busting: Avalle is the vice president of the Guild, and Lo and Dewey had both previously served as vice chairs for their units. And the arc of labor conflict over just a few days — from the gutting of the staff at a major youth publication to the canning of other journalists who challenged the management’s decision — suggests a new level of intolerance for media workers who are vigilant about democracy inside and outside Condé Nast headquarters.

  • El País ☛ John Koch: ‘Doctor Death’, the journalist who has witnessed 105 executions in Florida

    Since 1989, John Koch has been present at the execution of every person sentenced to death in his home state, which this year reached a record high at 19

  • ANF News ☛ Nearly 340 executions reported in Iran in one month

    According to the same report, 127 people were detained in Iran and Eastern Kurdistan. In addition, 23 citizens were handed a combined total of 975 years in prison, 159 lashes, and 448 million and 300 thousand tomans in fines.

    The report also documented 103 human rights violations inside prisons in Iran and Eastern Kurdistan. Of these, 37 violations occurred in sections where minorities are held, 14 were related to freedom of religion, 11 concerned students’ right to education, and the violations affected a total of 160 children and young people.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Futurism ☛ Activists Downloaded Pretty Much All of Spotify

    Along with the files, the hacktivists sorted the song metadata and analyzed it in their blog post. The result is a fascinating birds-eye view of the Spotify catalogue that was previously unavailable to the public.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Pirate archivist group scrapes Spotify's 300TB library, posts free torrents for downloading 86,000,000 tracks — investigation underway as music and metadata hit torrent sites

    Spotify, the largest music streaming platform in the world with hundreds of millions of active users, and an extensive library of music has allegedly been hacked by Anna's Archive. The shadow library, who labels itself as archivists, has apparently scraped nearly the entirety of the platform, downloading roughly 300 TB of music that is now being distributed illegally via torrents.

  • The Record ☛ Spotify disables accounts after open-source group scrapes 86 million songs from platform

    They did this through user accounts set up by a third party and not by accessing Spotify’s business systems, they added.

    Anna’s Archive published a blog post about the cache this weekend, writing that while it typically focuses its efforts on text, its mission to preserve humanity’s knowledge and culture “doesn’t distinguish among media types.”

    “Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text. This is such a case. A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation,” they said.

  • Superdavey ☛ So it’s Christmas and I cannot watch pre Disney+ Doctor Who in...

    So it’s Christmas and I cannot watch pre Disney+ Doctor Who in Australia via streaming. So is it actually Christmas?

  • PC Mag ☛ This Is the Only Way to Watch 'A Charlie Brown Christmas' for Free [sic] This Year

    No, A Charlie Brown Christmas isn't on Netflix. You see, Apple scooped up the Peanuts rights to bring beloved specials to its video streaming service, including classics like It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. The company also produced new holiday-themed specials, such as Snoopy Presents: For Auld Lang Syne and Snoopy Presents: To Mom (and Dad), With Love. So, there's only one place to watch the Charlie Brown specials, including A Charlie Brown Christmas: Apple TV. At least for now! Sony purchased a majority stake in Peanuts Holding, so it may be a matter of time before Charlie Brown and friends jump ship to a new platform.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Los Angeles Times ☛ Larry Ellison pledges $40-billion personal guarantee for Paramount's Warner Bros. bid

  Oracle founder Larry Ellison personally guarantees $40.4 billion to support his son’s Paramount bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, an $108.4 billion deal.

• Trademarks

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Why is Snoopy everywhere right now? All the Peanuts collabs explained

    Rick Vargas, the senior vice president of merchandising and marketing at specialty retailer BoxLunch, said his team regularly returns to the Schulz archives to mine material that could resonate with customers.

    “As long as you have a fresh look at what that IP [sic] has to offer, there’s always something to find. There’s always a new product to build,” Vargas said.

• Copyrights

  • Digital Camera World ☛ A proposed law could allow photographers to buy a subscription for US Copyright registration, rather than a per-upload fee

    New legislation could simplify how visual artists register for Copyright in the US. The Visual Artists Copyright Reform Act (VACARA) is proposed legislation that aims to make copyright registration simpler by increasing the limit for batch registrations, creating lower fees for high-volume creators, introducing an optional subscription model, and creating a searchable photo registry.

  • India Times ☛ New York Times reporter sues Google, xAI, OpenAI over chatbot training

    New York Times reporter and "Bad Blood" author John Carreyrou filed the lawsuit in California federal court with five other writers, ‌accusing the ‌AI companies of pirating their books and feeding them into the large language models (LLMs) that power the companies' ‌chatbots. The lawsuit is one of several copyright cases brought by authors and other copyright owners against tech companies over the use of their work in AI training. The case is the first to name xAI as a defendant.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Bandcamp Fridays in 2025 Deliver $19M to Indie Labels & Artists

    Now closing out its fifth year, the initiative has routed more than $154 million directly to artists and labels since launch. Outside of Bandcamp Fridays, the platform’s business model means creators typically receive 82% of every sale, contributing to over $1.5 billion that Bandcamp reports having paid out to artists and labels to date.

  • Press Gazette ☛ AI legal rulings around the world

    Getty has been given permission to appeal parts of a ruling it lost over Stability AI’s alleged use of its images.

    It’s the latest in a series of legal battles going on around the world pitting news publishers against AI companies which have taken their content without permission and used it to train their answer engines and image creation technology.