Leftovers

• The Register UK ☛ The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

  All of which made me wonder what other technologies are likely to still be in use 50 or more years after they were first released. Here are the ones my friends and I came up with.

  First, though, I want to point out that the current standard, COBOL 2023, is very different from the COBOL that Admiral Grace Hopper helped create. The same is true of mainframes. The first IBM mainframe, 1952's 701, and even 1965's IBM/360, which became COBOL's top platform, don't look much at all like today's IBM z17. Nevertheless, there's a clear line running from those much earlier technologies to the ones at our fingertips today. Nothing stays the same when it comes to computing, even if the names don't change.

• Vereis ☛ Rebuilding My Blog

  Over the years, especially as I’ve become more competent at this web development thing, I’ve rebuilt my blog a few times.

  My previous two iterations of my blog are probably the most notable, and span basically my entire employed career so far. For my own nostalgia, here’s a quick summary of each.

• MJ Fransen ☛ Added a blogroll like in the old days

  In the heyday of blogs, many blogs published a blogroll, often is a side bar.

  This was a list with which showed a selection of links other blogs. It showed the blogs that had recently been updated.

  I created a blogroll that does the same.

• Doc Searls ☛ On the Scariest Roller Coaster Ever Built

  I’ve also read somewhere that, while the Terrifying Triplets had an identical design, the Palisades version had to fit the same height onto a smaller footprint, requiring steeper drops and more highly banked turns, making it the most terrifying of the three. It also had the shortest lifespan, and was demolished in 1934.

• Chris O'Donnnell ☛ 30 Years of Blogging

  30 years of blogging. I don't even know what to do with that. The word blog had not been invented in 1995 when I launched this site, but from the early days I recognized the utility of giving people a reason to come back. So I was posting regular essays from day 1. I also used to redesign the site regularly, as that was a thing we did in the 1990s when all sites were hand coded. Meanwhile, this site hasn't changed since I launched this version 8 years ago.

• Stefano Marinelli ☛ FediMeteo: How a Tiny €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service for Thousands

  Weather has always significantly influenced my life. When I was a young athlete, knowing the forecast in advance would have allowed me to better plan my training sessions. As I grew older, I could choose whether to go to school on my motorcycle or, for safety reasons, have my grandfather drive me. And it was him, my grandfather, who was my go-to meteorologist. He followed all weather patterns and forecasts, a remnant of his childhood in the countryside and his life on the move. It's to him that I dedicate FediMeteo.

  The idea for FediMeteo started almost by chance while I was checking the holiday weather forecast to plan an outing. Suddenly, I thought how nice it would be to receive regular weather updates for my city directly in my timeline. After reflecting for a few minutes, I registered a domain and started planning.

• Science

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Trump Administration’s Most Paralyzing Blow to Science

    Science did lose out this year, though, in ways that researchers are still struggling to tabulate. Some of those losses are straightforward: Since the beginning of 2025, “all, or nearly all, federal agencies that supported research in some way have decreased the size of their research footprint,” Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist who has been tracking the federal funding cuts to science, told me. Less funding means less science can be done and fewer discoveries will be made. The deeper cut may be to the trust researchers had in the federal government as a stable partner in the pursuit of knowledge. This means the country’s appetite for bold exploration, which the compact between science and government supported for decades, may be gone, too—leaving in its place more timid, short-term thinking.

  • Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence USI-SUPSI ☛ Who Invented the Transistor?

    On 22 Oct 1925, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (a Polish1 professor in Germany) patented the field-effect transistor (FET).[LIL1] In 1928, he also patented the metal oxide semiconductor FET (MOSFET).[LIL2] Lilienfeld's designs worked.[ARN98][ROS95] The much later point-contact transistor (Bell Labs, 1948) was a dead end:[LIL4] today, almost all of the billions of trillions of transistors in our computers and smartphones are FETs of the Lilienfeld type.

• Career/Education

  • Phil Gyford ☛ 2025

    I’ve reached the point where my homeopathic levels of work (as Tom aptly described them) are so low that I’ve begun to say I’m “pretty much retired”.

  • Old VCR ☛ Stewart Cheifet has died

    [...] Gary Kildall, of Digital Research fame, was his co-host in many 1980s episodes and the most notable of an august crew that also included George Morrow and Paul Schindler, but Cheifet was the linchpin and carried the show on his formidable shoulders from its 1984 start until the final episode in 2002. The most amazing part of his work, however, is what happened after: the vast majority of the program is preserved for posterity at the Internet Archive, not just with his blessing, but with his active participation. For any computer historian and student of the early industry, the show is not to be missed. Rest in peace.

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ The culture war that we won

    Salaries are a good indicator for prestige. In the USA, in Australia and in Switzerland, « computer people » have high salaries and relatively high status. In the UK as a whole? Not so much. I bet you do better as a « financial analyst » over there.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Recent books

    But! I now have a strong theory as to why my book reading has been down. This was the year that I finally stopped living in denial and bought reading glasses. After doing that I came to realize that I had been following all kinds of stupid rules that I hadn't even noticed, like, "I only read books in direct sunlight".

• Proprietary

  • Xbox Next-Gen Console ‘Largest Technical Leap’ Could be Under Threat [Ed: Death of XBox accelerated]

    It seems this may also affect Microsoft’s Xbox production as well, with the cost of RAM essentially making Xbox consoles too expensive to make.

    This has already been reported to possibly lead to another price hike for current-gen Xbox consoles (which would make it the third price increase since May), but it may also impact the release date and pricing of the upcoming next-gen Xbox.

  • The Register UK ☛ European Space Agency hit again as crims claim 200 GB haul

    According to the alleged attacker, they gained access to ESA-linked external servers on December 18, and were connected "for about a week," during which they claim to have stolen source code files, CI/CD pipelines, API and access tokens, confidential documents, configuration files, Terraform files, SQL files, hardcoded credentials, and a dump of "all their private Bitbucket repositories as well."

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Apple’s 2025 report card - Wearables

    This is the fifth and final in a series of posts reviewing Apple’s 2025 across their major product lines. You can also read my wearables (only Apple Watch) 2024 and 2023 report cards.

  • Engadget ☛ 2025 was the year Xbox died

    Unfortunately, Microsoft squandered most of its good will with the Xbox One. That console was first announced as an "always online" device with restrictive DRM features that limited how you could share and sell games; it was bundled with a Kinect camera that could potentially surveil you; and at $499, it was $100 more than the PlayStation 4. Microsoft quickly reversed many of its DRM-heavy plans for the Xbox One, but by that point the damage was done. Sony ultimately sold more than twice as many PS4 units as the entirety of the Xbox One family (which included the cheaper One S and more powerful One X), according to data from Ampere Research.

  • Bryan Cantrill ☛ Love your customers

    So I guess it needs to be said: suing your customers is gross — and being sued by your customers is shameful. Companies that have disdain for their own customers will be reviled in return. Such companies may be able to thrive in the short term, but they do not endure in the limit. Certainly, these companies not endure as innovators: when coercion is your business model, innovation is not merely unnecessary but actively antithetical.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ It's Starting to Feel a Lot Like Tesla's Robotaxi Program Is Mostly Smoke and Mirrors

      Perhaps that puny market penetration would be less alarming if Tesla offered advanced tech and a passenger experience that Waymo doesn’t, but its self-driving cabs aren’t even fully driverless, requiring the supervision of a human “safety monitor” who must be present in the vehicle at all times. Numerous instances of the cabs violating traffic laws and an alarming crash rate demonstrate why that policy is still necessary.

    • Sightline Media Group ☛ Army stands up AI, machine-learning career field for officers

      The new specialty, designated 49B, will be open to eligible officers through the Voluntary Transfer Incentive Program, beginning in January 2026, with the goal of developing a group of leaders that “advances the Army’s ongoing transformation into a data-centric and AI-enabled force,” the statement said.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ AI model uses social media posts to predict unemployment rates ahead of official data

      The model captured nearly three times more unemployment disclosures than previous rule-based approaches while maintaining high precision. The method also reduced forecasting errors by 54.3% compared to industry consensus forecasts. The approach proved particularly valuable during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it detected the massive surge in unemployment claims in March 2020, days before official statistics were released.

    • New York Times ☛ In Ukraine, an Arsenal of Killer A.I. Drones Is Being Born in War Against Russia

      Most drones require a human pilot. But some new Ukrainian drones, once locked on a target, can use A.I. to chase and strike it — with no further human involvement.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Contrarians No More: AI Skepticism Is on the Rise

      As 2025 comes to a close, some of the artificial intelligence industry's biggest skeptics may be poised for a victory lap.

      In recent months, AI has taken some hits on several fronts. First and foremost, there are increasing fears about an AI bubble potentially popping as major stocks have dipped. Additionally, several studies have shown many companies have yet to achieve the return on investment they'd hoped for with their generative AI (GenAI) pilots.

    • Ori Bernstein ☛ LLMs Are Not Fun

      Some people describe LLMs as the ultimate programming tool. Others describe it as an extra machine teammate. It's a dark parody of both.

      LLMs are not fun.

      For me, the joy of programming is understanding a problem in full depth, so that when considering a change, I can follow the ripples through the connected components of the system.

      The joy of management is seeing my colleagues learn and excel, carving their own paths as they grow. Watching them rise to new challenges. As they grow, I learn from their growth; mentoring benefits the mentor alongside the mentee.

      Using LLMs undercuts both.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Waymo sues Santa Monica for trying to make it stop beeping all night

      The City of Santa Monica did not suddenly decide it hates technology. It told Waymo to stop running loudly disruptive, brightly lit overnight charging operations at two Broadway locations after residents complained about noise, glare, and constant vehicle movement in the middle of the night. Waymo did not take this as a cue to adjust its operations. Rather than have their cars stop beeping while backing up, they are suing the city.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Musician falsely accused of sex crimes by Google AI

      You can't blame the Sipekne'katik First Nation for wanting to protect its people nor can you blame MacIsaac for feeling that this AI generated bullshit might endanger his life. In an interview with the Globe & Mail, MacIsaac stated that he was worried that a victim of sexual assault might be triggered by the false claim Google AI had made against him. His safety, as a consequence, could be at risk. Hell, musicians travel. Could you imagine what could happen if a guard at the Canadian/U.S. border turned up the false history in a search on MacIsaac or while verifying his social media content? At best, it would kill his ability to play in the United States. At worst? Y'all know all know how well DHS treats the folks it incarcerates.

  • Social Control Media

    • New Statesman ☛ Should Alaa Abd El-Fattah's tweets have legal consequences?

      She was then charged under section 19(1) of the Public Order Act 1986, which provides that a person who publishes or distributes written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting is guilty of an offence if they intend thereby to stir up racial hatred, or having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.

    • Tedium ☛ The Year’s Best Online Video: A Complex Take On Empathy

      Ellis, alas, knows a thing or two about cancellation—she experienced a 2021 tarring and feathering thanks to a controversial tweet that left her open to accusations of casual racism. The concerns didn’t dissipate when she attempted to explain herself—and eventually it took a major toll on her mental health and led to her exit from Twitter.

      Her movie-length autopsy of cancellation inspired by the incident, “Mask Off,” is no longer on the video-sharing juggernaut. (That said, you can find it on Nebula or the Internet Archive. Despite Ellis later expressing regret over the video, it nonetheless has its share of fans.)

    • Victor Kropp ☛ 2025 in Review

      This year I finally realized that I no longer want any social media. Instead, every time I had a spare minute, I improved some detail on my homepage, my very own place in the World Wide Web. I keep saying it every year, but I’d like to write more about it, and post more to my blog as well.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ LinkedIn Job Scams

      These are scams involving fraudulent employers convincing prospective employees to send them money for various fees. There is an entirely different set of scams involving fraudulent employees getting hired for remote jobs.

    • Abhinav Sarkar ☛ Polls I Ran on Mastodon in 2025

      In 2025, I ran ten polls on Mastodon exploring various topics, mostly to outsource my research to the hivemind. Here are the poll results organized by topic, with commentary.

    • The Telegraph UK ☛ Boy, 12, found dead after ‘attempting Squid Game prank’

      “These platforms don’t do anything. It is completely unchecked. They make money and they don’t care.

      “It’s hard what I’m going to say, but I hope that the loss of my child is going to help some other children to understand. And for the people that run these social media platforms to do something, to stop it from happening.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Verge ☛ Two cybersecurity employees plead guilty to carrying out ransomware attacks

      ALPHV / BlackCat is a hacker group that uses a ransomware-as-a-service model, with the developers who maintain the malware often taking a cut of stolen funds from the cybercriminals who use it to target victims. In 2023, the FBI developed a decryption tool designed to recover data from victims of ALPHV / BlackCat, which has been linked to high-profile attacks on companies like Bandai Namco, MGM Resorts, Reddit, and UnitedHealth Group.

    • Wired ☛ Fears Mount That US Federal Cybersecurity Is Stagnating—or Worse

      As the first year of the Trump administration approaches its end, government cybersecurity experts and even some United States government officials are warning that recent White House initiatives—including downsizing and restructuring of the US federal workforce—risk setting the government back on improving and expanding its digital defenses.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • YLE ☛ Electricity pricing 'remains a mystery' to most Finns, survey finds

    However, Finland is no stranger to very volatile spot electricity prices. Last year, Yle News explained the reasons behind those sometimes drastic fluctuations.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Evan Hahn ☛ Notes from December 2025

    I’m slowly trying to drop GitHub. I moved some of my repositories to Codeberg this month.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ Congress's Crusade to Age Gate the Internet: 2025 in Review

      In the name of 'protecting kids online,' Congress pushed forward legislation this year that could have severely undermined our privacy and stifled free speech. These bills would have mandated invasive age-verification checks for everyone online—adults and kids alike—handing unprecedented control to tech companies and government authorities.

      Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle introduced bill after bill, each one somehow more problematic than the last, and each one a gateway for massive surveillance, internet censorship, and government overreach. In all, Congress considered nearly twenty federal proposals.

    • Techdirt ☛ Judge To Texas: You Can’t Age-Gate The Entire Internet Without Evidence

      Over the summer, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority upended decades of traditional First Amendment standards to say that Texas could put in place an age verification law if that law was intended to keep kids away from porn. As we argued at the time, the ruling had all sorts of problems, but even leaving those aside, it was still pretty clearly limited solely to situations involving age gating adult content. Not news sites. Not fitness apps. Not therapy platforms. Porn.

      Texas, predictably, heard “you can age gate porn” and decided that meant “you can age gate everything.” Because why respect constitutional distinctions when you can just pretend they don’t exist?

    • YLE ☛ Smart ring data reveals Finns are most stressed on Fridays, not Mondays

      The high tech rings — which tracks users' health metrics, providing insights about their sleep, activity and stress levels — revealed that for the majority of people, the most stressful day of the week is Friday.

      The data also revealed that women experience significantly more stress than men, with females being stressed an average of about 120 minutes per day, compared to men's 97 minutes.

  • Confidentiality

    • Feisty Duck ☛ OpenSSL Performance Still Under Scrutiny

      A lot changed when OpenSSL 3 was first released. This version was supposed to bring significant improvements and modernize the project after nearly thirty years of development. Instead, it introduced significant performance regressions, essentially breaking the project for any high-volume deployment. It didn’t help that the previous stable version, the 1.1.1 branch, had been promptly deprecated.

      For a very long time, this was not something that was talked about. There were issues on the OpenSSL tracker, but only those who experienced these performance issues would find them. Eventually, the HAProxy developers wrote an extensive article on the state of SSL libraries in general and OpenSSL in particular. The message was clear: Stay away from OpenSSL 3.x if you care about performance.

      This year, at the inaugural OpenSSL Conference, several talks provided more background information about the performance regressions and other changes in the 3.x branch: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • Finnish Border Guard ☛ Police Investigate Cable Damage in the Gulf of Finland in Cooperation with Other Authorities | The Finnish Border Guard

    Finnish authorities have taken control of the vessel as part of a joint operation. Responsibility for leading the investigation has been transferred from the Gulf of Finland Coast Guard to the Helsinki Police Department.

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Finland detains Russia-linked ship suspected of sabotage

    The Border Guard identified a vessel, the cargo ship Fitburg, which it believed was responsible to the damage to the cable. The Fitburg had departed from St. Petersburg and was sailing through Finland's exclusive economic zone, where the cable damage site was also located.

    According to the Border Guard, the vessel's anchor chain had been lowered into the sea.

  • France24 ☛ Finland seizes ship sailing from Russia after suspected undersea cable sabotage

    The seized cargo vessel "Fitburg" was en route ​from the Russian port of St Petersburg to Israel at the time of the incident, Finland's Border Guard authority told a press conference ‍in Helsinki.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Finnish authorities seize ship and crew after undersea cable cut, pursuing criminal charges — Finnish special forces board ship, detain all 14 crewmembers

    Authorities are currently investigating whether the vessel's movement and anchoring caused the incident, reports Postimees. Despite the damage, the owner of the cable claims connectivity remains intact due to extensive network redundancy.

  • The Record ☛ Finland seizes ship suspected of damaging subsea cable in Baltic Sea

    The fault was found in part of an Elisa cable running through Estonia’s exclusive economic zone, early on the morning of New Year’s Eve. Damage has also been reported in another subsea cable owned by Swedish network provider Arelion.

    At the time of the damage to the Elisa cable, the suspect ship was identified transiting from Estonia to Finland’s exclusive economic zone. No details have yet been released about the vessel.

  • YLE ☛ Finnish authorities seize vessel following sea cable disruption

    The suspected vessel was intercepted by the Border Guard patrol ship Turva and a helicopter in Finland's exclusive economic zone, while the cable damage reported by Elisa is located in Estonia's economic zone.

    The police have consulted the National Prosecutor's Office, which has issued a prosecution order.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • YLE ☛ Finland's hospitals bolster wartime preparedness

      "The war has shown that hospitals and other healthcare services are not protected from military strikes — they can be targets," said Pekka Tulokas, an emergency manager at the preparedness unit working under the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health.

    • The Next Move ☛ ‘Patriots,’ Populists, and Putinists

      A picture may not be worth a thousand words, always—but that posture sums up a lot.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Mashable ☛ Everything Elon Musk promised in 2025, but didn't deliver

    With 2025 nearly over, Mashable decided to revisit his predictions related to this year. Time has run out. What did Musk promise for this year that didn't come to fruition?

  • BoingBoing ☛ DOJ tracked journalist who exposed Epstein

    The document dump has been, in Brown's words, "sloppy at best." She's pointed out that Trump-linked images remain heavily redacted while her unrelated booking details got published for the world to see. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are now demanding explanations, raising questions about whether the DOJ was monitoring the reporter responsible for embarrassing the department over its handling of Epstein.

  • The Independent US ☛ Why was the DOJ tracking an investigative journalist who covered Epstein? Dems demand answers

    Miami Herald reporter Julie K Brown, author of the book Perversion of Justice, which was published in 2020, posted on X Sunday: “Does somebody at the DOJ want to tell me why my American Airlines booking information and flights in July 2019 are part of the Epstein files (attached to a grand jury subpoena)?

    “As the flight itinerary includes my maiden name (and I did book this flight) why was the DOJ monitoring me?”

  • Anna’s Archive ☛ Backing up Spotify

    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.

    Generally speaking, music is already fairly well preserved. There are many music enthusiasts in the world who digitized their CD and LP collections, shared them through torrents or other digital means, and meticulously catalogued them.

    However, these existing efforts have some major issues: [...]

• Environment

  • Overpopulation ☛ TOP end of year roundup

    2025 was Frank’s, Jane’s and Phil’s eighth year with The Overpopulation Project. Along with our ”truly TOP” research associate Pernilla Hansson, we continue to generate and share new scholarly work exploring the connections between human numbers and ecological sustainability.

    This year, TOP researchers published four new scholarly studies: [...]

  • TruthOut ☛ Millions Across Michigan May Be Exposed to PFAS in Private Water Wells

    For over 100 years, Wolverine World Wide Tannery made the leather for many well-known shoe brands, many of which were coated with Scotchgard, a water and stain repellent created by 3M. The product has since been reformulated without PFAS, but from the 1950s until 2002, the primary ingredient was perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS, one type of PFAS chemical that has been largely phased out from use. PFOS is one of the most pervasive forever chemicals, and can contaminate soil, water and our bodies.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Elon Musk reveals plan to expand xAI's 'Colossus' data center to 2 gigawatts

      The facility, known as “Colossus,” already houses one massive data center building and there is currently a second one under construction at a nearby site that has been dubbed as “Colossus 2.” The third site is adjacent to Colossus 2, located near the town of Southaven, Mississippi, according to property records seen by The Information.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Techdirt ☛ Use The Failures Of The Past As Inspiration For A Better Future

    Every year, my final post on Techdirt is about optimism. For the past decade, I’ve felt like I needed to apologize for it. Not this year. At the lowest points, you need optimism. Things are a mess. But let’s roll up our sleeves and fix stuff. And it’s easier to maintain that optimism when you can see the concrete alternatives already taking shape, even if only in their earliest forms.

    If you want to see the past final posts of the year, they’re here: [...]

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ TikTok owner ByteDance to reportedly purchase $14 billion worth of Nvidia AI GPUs in 2026 — Company betting on Beijing's approval following Trump admin's ease on AI export controls

    Despite numerous setbacks, ByteDance spent 85 billion yuan on Nvidia chips throughout 2025, marking a significant increase for next year, South China Morning Post reports. ByteDance is one of the biggest local tech players in the region, rivaling Tencent when it comes to AI operations. It was recently evaluated at a market cap of $500 billion, so this spending is part of its massive AI budget for 2026.

  • [Old] 00f ☛ Why we trust strangers’ open source more than our colleagues’

    But here’s the paradox: If the exact same feature is available in an open source project maintained by an employee, suddenly people get suspicious.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Sightline Media Group ☛ ROTC students are helping the military defend against AI deepfakes

      The school doesn’t use these deepfakes to deceive the American public, as many hostile foreign actors seek to do; they use them to build tools that will help organizations including the U.S. military to distinguish truth from hoax. And they’re doing it with the help of some of the school’s Reserve Officer Training Corps cadets.

      For the school, the work dates back to 2020, when the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications got an $830,958 subcontract agreement from DARPA to develop tools to combat the spread of fake news. Since then, the work has expanded and continued, though faculty members said they couldn’t provide many specifics on the scope of their work or the DoD entity they were supporting.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Torrent Freak ☛ 2025: Two Decades of Piracy Reporting: TorrentFreak's Retrospective

    As a tradition, we use the last day of the year to look back at some of the biggest stories of the past twelve months. However, since TorrentFreak just celebrated its 20th anniversary, we're zooming out even further, looking back at some of the key moments in the past two decades.

  • Tedium ☛ The Year’s Best Feature Story: The Absurdity Of The Signal Leak

    I don’t think you can talk about good feature articles in 2025 without talking about the amazing journalism being conducted day after day during the first three months of the year. The political climate seemed to be changing by the hour, and even nonpolitical news had an element of danger. Deadly wildfires on one side of the country, extreme disruption of the executive branch on the other.

    Unfortunately, bad times lead to great stories.

  • The Next Move ☛ Trust Dictators: Garry Kasparov’s New Year’s Resolution

    Last week the National Security Archive released the transcripts of meetings between then-President George W. Bush and still-President Vladimir Putin, made public as the result of a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

    The files go back nearly twenty-five years, and their contents are revealing.

    Had President Bush and other American leaders paid closer attention to the imperial master plan Putin was articulating a quarter century ago, they might have been able to thwart the invasions of Ukraine and Georgia.

  • Forever Wars ☛ Watching Bari Weiss Murder Investigative Journalism at CBS

    I'M NOTICING A PATTERN among certain people within my profession who've jumped to the defense of Bari Weiss, the oligarch functionary installed at CBS by new owner David Ellison to enforce ideological discipline upon its journalists. Caitlin Flanagan, Chris Cilizza—these are not people who produce investigative journalism. These are take-merchants and mouthpieces who publish what powerful people tell them over text and DM as if it's a transgressive secret and not a comms strategy. Such people would not understand what it means to censor the 60 Minutes piece about the CECOT torture prison, because they don't understand what it takes to produce it. As it happens, I do.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Watching Bari Weiss Murder Investigative Journalism at CBS

    Ackerman takes great pains to indicate that CBS was never the bastion of independent journalism that commentators with rose-tinted glasses might have suggested: it had a cozy relationship with the CIA and was indisputably an instrument of power. Still, what Bari Weiss is doing with it rises to some other level: a mouthpiece for right-wing talking points.

  • NPR ☛ CBS News chief Bari Weiss pulls '60 Minutes' story, sparking outcry

    "Government silence is a statement, not a VETO," Alfonsi wrote in the email. "If the administration's refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a 'kill switch'' for any reporting they find inconvenient." (Alfonsi did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Immigrant Derangement Syndrome

    And while the ICE tactics are blatantly illegal according to legal experts, they have been allowed by a corrupt Supreme Court that is clearly more intent on enabling authoritarianism than on than protecting the Constitution.

  • BoingBoing ☛ What travelers need to know about phone searches at the U.S. border

    According to CBP data, agents searched electronic devices belonging to 55,318 international travelers in fiscal year 2025 — still less than 0.01% of the 419 million travelers processed, but reports suggest searches have increased in recent months. There are two types: "basic" searches, in which agents scroll through your phone manually, and "advanced" forensic searches, in which they download everything using external equipment. The latter requires "reasonable suspicion" of a legal violation or national security concern.

    One key limitation: agents can only access data stored locally on the device, not cloud content. They're supposed to put your phone in airplane mode before searching. Your iCloud photos are off-limits unless you've downloaded them.

  • [Old] The University of Alibama at Birmingham ☛ Women – UAB Institute for Human Rights Blog

    The protests triggered by Amini’s death were among the largest Iran had seen in decades, spreading to more than 150 cities. State repression followed swiftly: reports indicate that security forces used lethal force, detained thousands, and committed acts of torture and sexual violence against protesters. A UN fact-finding mission later concluded that many of these violations may amount to crimes against humanity, including murder, imprisonment, torture, and persecution, particularly targeting women. Despite international outcry, accountability has been limited, and the psychological wounds continue to deepen.

  • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Whipped in front of everyone’: three women on being flogged by the Taliban

    Among those who were whipped are women accused of “moral crimes”, which include leaving home without a close male relative to act as a mahram (guardian), or being seen speaking to unrelated men.

    All three women who spoke to the Guardian and Zan Times, an Afghan news agency, said they had been forced to confess to alleged moral crimes before they were punished.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Cops blow up an innocent bystander’s business, and the courts shrug

    Defenders of the ruling (police unions) will insist that letting property owners recover damages would somehow tie the cops' hands and thus end civilization. In reality, what this does is shift the cost of aggressive policing from the state onto random civilians who happen to be nearby. Police violence is socialized, but Police damage is privatized. If your livelihood is vaporized in the process, that is apparently a price the law is perfectly comfortable making you pay. After all, they protect and serve.

  • Reason ☛ L.A. man sued after police blew up his business. Courts say he gets nothing.

    For the latest example, we can look to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled last month that an innocent man whose business was destroyed by Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers in pursuit of a fugitive is not entitled to compensation for damages under the Takings Clause. This is despite the law's pledge that the government provide "just compensation" when it usurps private property for a public use.

    In August of 2022, an armed fugitive threw Carlos Pena out of his North Hollywood printing shop and barricaded himself inside it. Over the course of 13 hours, a SWAT team with the LAPD launched more than 30 rounds of tear gas canisters through the walls, door, roof, and windows. After the standoff, police discovered the suspect had managed to escape. But Pena was left with a husk of what his store once was, the inside ravaged and equipment ruined, saddling him with over $60,000 in damages, according to his lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles.

  • [Old] ML Genius Holdings LLC ☛ Afroman – Will You Help Me Repair My Door Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

    Will you help me repair my gate? Will you help me repair my door? Did you find what you was looking for? Will you help me repair my gate and door?

  • [Old] NPR ☛ Afroman speaks out about being sued by officers who raided his home

    "I asked myself, as a powerless Black man in America, what can I do to the cops that kicked my door in, tried to kill me in front of my kids, stole my money and disconnected my cameras?" he says. "And the only thing I could come up with was make a funny rap song about them and make some money, use the money to pay for the damages they did and move on."

    He released an album with songs about the raid and made music videos out of the surveillance footage. He created merchandise and social media posts calling out the officers who had been involved.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Register UK ☛ IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn’t taken over the world

    "IPv6 was an extremely conservative protocol that changed as little as possible," APNIC chief scientist Geoff Huston told The Register. "It was a classic case of mis-design by committee."

    And that notional committee made one more critical choice: IPv6 was not backward-compatible with IPv4, meaning users had to choose one or the other – or decide to run both in parallel.

  • PC World ☛ How to know if you can get by with mobile broadband

    Today, both 4G and 5G networks have been rolled out and cover large parts of the country. Operators selling mobile broadband promise speeds of up to 1Gbit/s — more than many fixed connections. Does this mean that you can just as easily choose mobile broadband and ignore fiber?

  • The Verge ☛ Net neutrality was back, until it wasn’t

    The fight for net neutrality never seems to be truly won or lost.

    Federal net neutrality rules have been on and off for the past 15 years. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed the Open Internet Order under President Barack Obama in 2010, prohibiting ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful [Internet] traffic, the baseline rule of net neutrality. Then, at the request of those ISPs, a court blocked its rules. An updated framework was passed by the FCC in 2015, only to be overturned in 2017 under President Donald Trump’s first administration. It seemed poised for a comeback in 2024, but the victory lasted mere months before a court overturned it — kicking off a rough year for the open [Internet] and broadband regulation as a whole.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Did Taylor Swift Single-Handedly Save Vinyl in the UK in 2025?

    While vinyl still makes up a relatively small portion of total music consumption (7.6 million albums compared with 189 million “streaming equivalent albums”), record sales grew by 13.3% in 2025. That’s the 18th consecutive year of growth, and streets ahead of the 5.5% increase notched by streaming.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Michael Green ☛ Post-Capitalism is Dead, Long Live Capitalism

  What proponents call “Post-Capitalism” is merely monopoly extraction optimized for the digital age. By relying on unpaid “peer production” (identical in function to the unpaid domestic labor that “goosed” GDP as women moved from non-market to market economy), the system offloads costs onto the user while privatizing the profits of the infrastructure. This game is coming to an end.

  Far from escaping the market, the “Post-Capitalist” economy is simply a new way to sweat the assets of the physical world while pretending the limits of physical reality don’t exist. In the 2020s, we’re discovering that assumption is wrong.

• Don Marti ☛ what if Ed Zitron is an optimist?

  What if Ed Zitron is an optimist? And for at least some of these companies, their legacy monopoly businesses are in trouble, too? Amazon may be the exception, at least for now, since they are not as far along in building a retail monopoly as the Google/Meta ad duopoly is with their market. But the decisions by Google, Meta, and Microsoft to enshittify are signs of weakness.

• Trademarks

  • Techdirt ☛ How The Viral Cheese Grater Foam Hat Came From A GB Packers C&D Letter

    While the Packers didn’t event the foam cap, they did buy the rights to it decades ago and those hats are now official Packers products sold on the team’s storefront. Plenty of other companies out there make variants of them as well and the Packers have been known to fire off legal notices and C&D letters as a result.

• Copyrights

  • CopyrightLately ☛ The 5 Worst Copyright Decisions of 2025

    Welcome to Copyright Lately’s sixth annual countdown of the year’s biggest judicial misfires. When I started this tradition back in 2020, I thought courts might eventually stop handing out new material. Fortunately, they remain committed.

    Between AI cases raising hard questions and courts botching the easy ones, 2025 delivered no shortage of head-scratchers. But these five went above and beyond. Remember: the smaller the number, the bigger the miss—and we don’t stop until we hit rock bottom.

    On with the countdown.

  • US Library of Congress ☛ Lifecycle of Copyright: 1930 Works in the Public Domain | Copyright

    Copyright law arises from Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, which grants Congress the power, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The Copyright Act describes the exclusive rights of copyright owners : the right to use and give permission for others to use their work in many ways—making copies of and distributing the work, creating derivative works, and publicly performing or displaying the work. Under the Constitution, these rights last for “limited times.” The first federal copyright law, dating back to 1790, protected registered works for fourteen years with a fourteen-year renewal option. The law has changed over time, and today, the term of copyright protection lasts for the author’s life plus an additional seventy years.

    When copyright protection ends, a work enters the public domain, and the exclusive rights granted by copyright no longer exist. This means that without a need to seek permission, a work may be reproduced, may be performed or displayed publicly, and may also be used in the creation of new works, such as adaptations and translations. However, even when copyright protection ends and a work is in the public domain, it is important to note that it may still be subject to other protections.

    Below are just a few of the historical and cultural works that entered the public domain in 2026.