Leftovers

• Tedium ☛ Tedium Trends 2026: The Surprisingly Importance Of 26

  The number 26, which gets back-burnered compared to numbers with neater divisibility, is an essential digit. And you’re gonna be hearing all about it in 2026.

• Yordi Verkroost ☛ On Getting Started

  Just start.

• Pedro ☛ Simplifying things

  Well, I finished 2025 trying to simplify things. I left social media a couple months ago. Not entirely, I was still lurking around instagram an embarrassing amount of time. Late December I deleted the app, logged out. Four days after, I downloaded the app again, logged in and deactivated my account. Deleted the app again.

• Ned Batchelder ☛ No more .html

  Through all these changes, the URLs remained the same—they still had the old-fashioned .html extension. I was used to them, so it never struck me as odd. But when it was pointed out today, it suddenly seemed obviously out of date.

• Matthew Weber ☛ 2026 Goals For My Life

  I’m not calling these resolutions. Resolutions never work, they never stick. These are goals. They say that to reach towards the stars, you must first extend your hand. This is me doing just that.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ Year 10

  I distinctly remember waking up early, on January 1st, 2017, going downstairs with my laptop, making myself some coffee, and coding what ended up being the first iteration of this blog. I wanted to write weekly updates to hold myself accountable. I failed spectacularly. Reading that post from 9 years ago made me smile: 27-year-old me wanted to cut down on distractions and get the habit of waking up early back. Guess what? 36-year-old me also wants to cut down distractions and get the habit of waking up early back. Some things apparently never change.

• V H Belvadi ☛ V.H. Belvadi — IndieWeb Carnival Dec ’25 round-up

  Many thanks to all the contributors to this month’s IndieWeb carnival. The prompt asked you to tell us where you see the IndieWeb in 2030, inviting writings on what the IndieWeb means for you, how you see its near future, what you think about its orientations, all with a view to realisable aims or critiques for the next five years.

  I had a great time reading all your submissions, listed below with a short summary,1 in the order in which I received them. There was variety in the contributions, but also several common threads that I have attempted to highlight in this round-up without overshadowing individual contributions. I found them insightful and have no doubt everyone else too will feel similarly.

• Justin Duke ☛ Cameraperson

  It seems fitting that, to close out the year I finally watched Koyaanisqatsi, I also got to watch Cameraperson — which is in many ways, and none of them dismissive or demeaning to either film, a funhouse mirror of its antecedent.

• Giles Turnbull ☛ How to write more postcards

  You can send more postcards to people. I've been doing it recently and it's more fun than texting, particularly when people bother to send a postcard back. You can have a conversation this way. It takes longer but it feels more rewarding.

  If you're interested, I have some tips: [...]

• Canion dot Blog ☛ The Value of Blogging

  I’ve blogged for decades now. The early Blogger and Movable Type accounts are gone now. Some of the latter I saved, but despite not having a full archive here on this site, there is certainly enough.

• Science

  • New York Times ☛ Research Library at NASA’s Goddard Space and Flight Center to Close Friday

    The shutdown of the library at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is part of a larger reorganization under the Trump administration that includes the closure of 13 buildings and more than 100 science and engineering laboratories on the 1,270-acre campus by March 2026.

  • International Business Times ☛ 3I/ATLAS 2025's Most Chilling Theories That Proves It's an Alien Spacecraft Testing Earth's Defence

    One of the most unsettling anomalies involves the object's interaction with the solar system's largest planet. Loeb noted that the trajectory of 3I/ATLAS was 'aligned to within 5 degrees with the ecliptic plane of the planets around the Sun', a precise path with a probability of only 0.2 per cent.

  • Orson R L Peters ☛ Sorting with Fibonacci Numbers and a Knuth Reward Check

    The above sorting algorithm is an instance of the more generic Shellsort. Shellsort, named after Donald L. Shell, does not directly sort all the elements in one step. Rather, it first only sorts subsequences of the array in a process known as $k$-sorting.

• Career/Education

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ V.H. Belvadi

    This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with V.H. Belvadi, whose blog can be found at vhbelvadi.com.

  • Artyom Bologov ☛ Boredom is Good, Actually

    I remind myself that I must value boredom, because that’s where my most deranged and fun ideas come from (apart from anger, but I didn’t tell you that.) But the period of boredom itself is excruciating somewhat. By definition.

    Now, why do I even tolerate boredom? Here are some quotes that hopefully jot up the setup for my position: [...]

• Hardware

  • Sean Conner ☛ I hope this isn't an omen for the year that just started

    Maybe it's something to do with the compressor, I thought. I examine the unit, and indeed, it was something to do with the unit—I had forgotten to close a valve on the bottom of the unit. All the air it was trying to compress was blowing out the valve used to empty the compressed air from the unit when you're done with it. I use the compressor unit enough to know how to use it to reinflate my tires, but not enough to remember a valve that needs to be closed before it'll work properly.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Wired ☛ Here’s How Long You Should Walk Every Day to Prevent Back Pain

    Back pain is one of the most common chronic diseases in the world. Recent research reveals how much time you should spend walking on a daily basis to prevent it.

• Proprietary

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Oracle EBS Victims Include Korean Air, University Of Phoenix

    The University of Phoenix reported earlier this month in an SEC filing that it was among the Oracle EBS victims, after the company was named as a victim by CL0P on the threat group’s dark web data leak site.

  • Mark Hysted ☛ for faffs sake - I lost an AirPod

    So do I replace it for £69, or wait out and see if it turns up? We all know what is going to happen - replace it and magically it will reappear. Perhaps I could trick it into thinking it has been replaced, then it will show itself?

  • Lou Plummer ☛ How Apple Nearly Ruined My Vacation

    After attempting all these steps, one after another, and seeing little or no changes, I kept seeing the same thing mentioned again and again in my research. The surefire and bulletproof method to freeing up space is the nuclear option. I was to ensure that my phone was backed up to iCloud. Then I was to erase all content and settings, download the backup, and restore it. Being in a foreign country, there was no way in hell I was going to do anything that might brick my phone, even temporarily, because I needed it to be my lifeline back to my life in the States. It held my boarding passes, all of my contact information, and my medical history. So wiping it was out of the question. I managed to capture the photographs that I wanted, although I abstained from making any video files. I checked on my storage daily, but it never budged more than a gigabyte or two in either direction, holding steady at around 75 gigabytes of System Data day after day.

  • David Mead ☛ Watching YouTube has wrong language when using AirPlay

    If I'm watching a video on the YouTube website and send it, via AirPlay, to AppleTV from my laptop I get the wrong audio. I get the video just fine, but the audio is some random language.

    Go back to watching it on my laptop, the original English audio returns.

  • Krebs On Security ☛ The Kimwolf Botnet is Stalking Your Local Network

    There are two major security problems with these photo frames and unofficial Android TV boxes. The first is that a considerable percentage of them come with malware pre-installed, or else require the user to download an unofficial Android App Store and malware in order to use the device for its stated purpose (video content piracy). The most typical of these uninvited guests are small programs that turn the device into a residential proxy node that is resold to others.

    The second big security nightmare with these photo frames and unsanctioned Android TV boxes is that they rely on a handful of Internet-connected microcomputer boards that have no discernible security or authentication requirements built-in. In other words, if you are on the same network as one or more of these devices, you can likely compromise them simultaneously by issuing a single command across the network.

  • Former Head of Elder Scrolls Online Left ZeniMax Due to Microsoft's Actions

    Matt Firor left ZeniMax Online Studios in July 2025 after nearly 20 years of work, where he led The Elder Scrolls Online project. At the time, he did not explain the reasons for his departure, but now he stated that he could not accept Microsoft's actions.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • New York Times ☛ As Schools Embrace A.I. Tools, Skeptics Raise Concerns

      Fueled partly by American tech companies, governments around the globe are racing to deploy generative A.I. systems and training in schools and universities.

    • The Verge ☛ Grok is undressing anyone, including minors

      In one X post, now removed from the platform, Grok edited a photo of two young girls into skimpy clothing and sexually suggestive poses. Another X user prompted Grok to issue an apology for the “incident” involving “an AI image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16) in sexualized attire,” calling it “a failure in safeguards” that it said may have violated xAI’s policies and US law. (While it’s not clear whether the Grok-created images would meet this standard, realistic AI-generated sexually explicit imagery of identifiable adults or children can be illegal under US law.) In another back-and-forth with a user, Grok suggested that users report it to the FBI for CSAM, noting that it is “urgently fixing” the “lapses in safeguards.”

      But Grok’s word is nothing more than an AI-generated response to a user asking for a “heartfelt apology note” — it doesn’t indicate Grok “understands” what it’s doing or necessarily reflect operator xAI’s actual opinion and policies. Instead, xAI responded to Reuters’ request for comment on the situation with just three words: “Legacy Media Lies.” xAI did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment in time for publication.

    • RTL ☛ 'Obscene and sexually suggestive content': Grok under fire after complaints it undressed minors in photos

      The button allows users to modify any image on the platform -- with some users deciding to partially or completely remove clothing from women or children in pictures, according to complaints.

    • TMZ ☛ Grok Chatbot Let Users Make AI Images Depicting Children in 'Minimal Clothing'

      Musk previously laughed at Grok's ability to make photos sexual when someone shared a picture of him in a bikini Grok had created ... though it seems many online aren't laughing now.

    • The Record ☛ European regulators take aim at X after Grok creates deepfake of minor

      Grok provoked widespread outrage this week after responding to a user’s prompt to remove clothing from an image of a 14-year-old actress, amid a surge of similar activity in which the tool was used to “undress” images of women and pose them in bikinis.

      Musk has not responded directly to the criticisms but appeared to make light of the concerns by reposting a Grok-generated image of a toaster in a bikini. X did not respond to a request for comment about the incident.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Elon Musk’s Pornography Machine

      Earlier this week, some people on X began replying to photos with a very specific kind of request. “Put her in a bikini,” “take her dress off,” “spread her legs,” and so on, they commanded Grok, the platform’s built-in chatbot. Again and again, the bot complied, using photos of real people—celebrities and noncelebrities, including some who appear to be young children—and putting them in bikinis, revealing underwear, or sexual poses. By one estimate, Grok generated one nonconsensual sexual image every minute in a roughly 24-hour stretch.

    • The Register UK ☛ Users prompt Grok AI chatbot to make photos dirty, apologize

      Point being: Grok is not a sentient being. It does not have agency. It is computer software created and maintained by humans. The human creators of most AI bots program them not to generate responses that are obviously illegal, immoral, or otherwise off-putting to the users they are trying to attract. At this juncture, Grok's human creators appear to have failed to prevent it from creating posts that remove the clothing from real people in real photos when asked to do so.

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ Grok is enabling mass sexual harassment on Twitter

      Grok, xAI’s flagship image model, is now being widely used to generate nonconsensual lewd images of women on the [Internet].

    • India Times ☛ Remove Grok-generated obscene content of women within 72 hrs: Govt to X

      In a formal notice issued to social media platform X over its artificial intelligence (AI) powered chatbot Grok being used to generate and spread obscene images and videos of women, the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) on Friday gave it 72 hours to remove objectionable content, and act against the offending users.

    • India Times ☛ MeitY issues formal notice to X over Grok's IT Act lapses

      Amid ongoing concerns over misuse of the platform’s AI tool, Grok, the government has raised the issue of the tool generating and circulating obscene, sexually explicit and derogatory content, particularly targeting women and children, calling it a grave violation of dignity, privacy and digital safety.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ The Year in LLMs: 2025

    • AI 2027 ☛ Summary — AI 2027

    • The New Stack ☛ Advice for People (Still) Entering the Tech Industry in 2026

      Despite 2025 having been another year marred by layoffs, tech industry hiring overall continued to grow.

      Add to this, more than 5 million computer science or equivalent graduates globally and another roughly 400,000 bootcamp grads are entering the market this year.

      We’re not saying it’s the most optimistic tech market to be entering — and entry-level hiring has dropped again — but that doesn’t mean that it’s hopeless. Someone’s going to have to clean up all the mess vibe coding leaves behind!

  • Social Control Media

    • Stephen Smith ☛ 2026 Another Year Avoiding the USA

      The other big problem is US political influence through the billionaires that control the media along with social media. This includes Canadian billionaires like Conrad Black. This influence is probably going to cause two separatist referendums both in Alberta and Quebec. This pipeline of propaganda and disinformation is pushing Canada in directions it shouldn’t take such as greatly expanding oil and gas production during a worldwide glut, never mind the environmental and global warming disaster this causes. Protecting against this propaganda is hard, especially without a willingness to regulate US tech companies. This is probably the US’s most effective weapon against us, causing division and attempting to lead to a MAGA type Canadian government that wants to merge with the USA.

    • Manton Reece ☛ Quotes and notes on the case for blogging

      One of many disappointments from the rise of social media and hot takes is that it sometimes feels that our most nuanced blog posts get over-simplified when quoted online. I’ve had what I thought were pretty balanced essays reframed on Mastodon by people who seemed to be responding to a summary of the post rather than the post itself.

    • Jonathan Kamens ☛ The why and how of backing up your Mastodon data

      Recently, the admin of a relatively prominent Mastodon¹ server, med-mastodon.com, decided to stop maintaining the server and shut it down without warning. This is, generally speaking, a terrible thing to do, but I will give the admin the benefit of the doubt and assume that he had some very good reason why he needed to shutdown without giving his users time to export their data or migrate their account to a new server (though as far as I’ve seen he hasn’t shared any such explanation).

      Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last. Even servers whose admins have agreed to follow the Mastodon Server Covenant, which among other things requires server admins to commit to giving users at least 3 months’ warning before shutting down, occasionally go belly-up without warning.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Nearly 480,000 impacted by Covenant Health data breach

      Covenant Health began sending breach notification letters to victims on New Year’s Eve. Victims are being offered one year of credit monitoring services.

      The organization said its investigation into the incident finished on December 10 and found that cybercriminals had access to its IT systems from May 18 until about May 26. Federal law enforcement was notified of the attack at the time.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ La Poste & La Banque Postale Hit By Cyberattack Disruptions

      This incident follows a previous denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that began on December 22, 2025, and continued until December 26. The earlier attack, which overloads servers to slow or block access, disrupted customers’ ability to track parcels but did not affect deliveries, which continued as normal.

    • [Old] RFI ☛ Cyberattack on French postal service causes disruption during Christmas rush - RFI

      The group said that this has had no impact on customer data, but it has “rendered its online services inaccessible”, disrupting package delivery days before Christmas, the busiest time of the year for La Poste.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ 2 Security Experts Plead Guilty In BlackCat Ransomware Case

      According to the Justice Department, the three men agreed to pay the ALPHV BlackCat administrators a 20% share of any ransom payments they received in exchange for the ransomware and access to ALPHV BlackCat’s extortion platform.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ Surveillance Self-Defense: 2025 Year in Review

      We started this year by taking a deep look at our various encryption guides, which start with the basics before moving up to deeper concepts. We slimmed each guide down and tried to focus on making them as clear and concise as deep explainers on complicated topics can be. We reviewed and edited four guides in total: [...]

    • EFF ☛ The Year States Chose Surveillance Over Safety: 2025 in Review

      The good news is that courts have blocked many of the laws seeking to impose age-verification gates on social media, largely for the same reasons that EFF opposes these efforts. Age-verification measures censor the [Internet] and burden access to online speech. Though age-verification mandates are often touted as "online safety" measures for young people, the laws actually do more harm than good. They undermine the fundamental speech rights of adults and young people alike, create new barriers to [Internet] access, and put at risk all [Internet] users' privacy, anonymity, and security.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Papers Please ☛ Collection of biometrics from anyone “associated” with a foreigner

    As part of an array of proposals and rules issued by components of the US Department of Homeland Security to collect a widening array of biometric information and systems from widening categories of individuals, US Citizenship and Immigration Services  (USCIS) is proposing a new rule that would authorize collection of any form of biometric information or samples from anyone, including US citizens, “encountered” by USCIS or “associated with” any applicant for admission to the US, US residency, or US citizenship.

    The proposed rule would give USCIS blanket authority, at its discretion, to order any such individual to report to any location worldwide specified by USCIS, and to submit to collection of facial images (“digital image, specifically for facial recognition”), fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans, retinal scans, voice prints, and/or DNA samples.

    Underlying the proposal is an implicit but impermissible assumption that merely to “associate” with foreigners is sufficiently suspicious to create probable cause for a search.

  • The Nation ☛ Make 2026 the Year of Thomas Paine

    In 2026, the oligarchs and their apologists will seek to use the celebration of America’s anniversary to strengthen their grip on the economy and government. They will insist that the United States was established as an über-capitalist state where billionaires can grift an AI bubble sufficiently to make themselves trillionaires. But as author and frequent commentator on US history Thom Hartmann has noted, “The word ‘capitalism’ appears nowhere in our founding documents, nowhere in our Constitution.” More significantly, the Constitutional Accountability Center reminds us, “The Constitution guarantees rights for ‘people’ and ‘citizens,’ never once referring to protections for ‘corporations.’” And constitutional lawyer John Bonifaz has explained that “the Framers understood that [corporations] were not to be treated as people under our Constitution. James Madison said corporations are ‘a necessary evil’ subject to ‘proper limitations and guards.’ Thomas Jefferson hoped to ‘crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations.’”

  • Truthdig ☛ A New Year Begins, the Old Fight Continues

    The American Revolution was not just a revolt against British rule. It was a revolt against three ancient tyrannies that had dominated human society for thousands of years: warlord kings, the morbidly rich and theocrats.

    The Founding Fathers knew exactly what they were fighting. They wrote about it constantly, in the Declaration of Independence and in decades of letters to one another. They believed those three forces were the natural enemies of freedom, and unless they were restrained they would always claw their way back into power.

    Today, every one of those tyrannies is back. And they’re not even pretending otherwise.

  • The Record ☛ Finland arrests two crew members of ship suspected of cable break

    The Fitburg, which has a crew of 14 — reportedly from Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan — was seized on Wednesday while transiting through Finland’s exclusive economic zone.

    It was boarded by investigators on suspicion of aggravated criminal damage, attempted aggravated criminal damage, and aggravated interference with telecommunications.

  • JURIST ☛ Finland authorities investigate underwater cable damage in the country's Gulf

    According to a police statement, telecommunications authorities detected a fault in the undersea cable linking Helsinki and Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, on the morning of December 31. The discovery prompted an immediate multi-agency response involving the Defense Forces, Customs, and the Finnish Safety and Chemical Agency.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Where We Go from Here

    Back before everyone checked out for the holidays, I did an inventory of the progress we’ve made in four ways to fight fascism (in comments ApacheTrout reminded I should have the courts in there too).

  • Robert Reich ☛ 10 Crucial Things You Can Do in 2026

    Trump 2.0’s second year may be even worse than the first. That’s because Trump, his sycophants, and the billionaires behind him know that with the coming midterm elections, 2026 could be their last unconstrained chance to suppress democracy and siphon off America’s wealth for themselves.

    So, what can you do? Here are the 10 most important actions you can take in 2026: [...]

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Insight Hungary ☛ "They can feel that this is the end," Hungarian opposition leader gives powerful speech on New Year's Eve

      Just like on January 1, 2025, Péter Magyar gave his New Year's speech a few minutes after midnight, accompanied by the national anthem. The president of the Tisza Party began his speech with five numbers: 26, 48, 56, 67, and 89, which he said were defining years in Hungarian history. Four of the five years he referred to were 1848, 1956, 1867, and 1989. The fifth, however, was not 2026, as many might have thought, but 1526, the year of the Battle of Mohács, a warning that the division of the nation "always comes at a heavy price."

      "The country cannot have a leader who does not put the welfare of Hungarian children first, who does nothing for years while knowing that thousands of children are being abused," said Magyar, referring to the recent child abuse scandal. He also criticized the prime minister for his sensitive moves in terms of national policy and for increasing poverty. In his words, Orbán "will betray our Hungarian brothers and sisters in Upper Hungary, Transylvania (...) his main task is not to eliminate poverty, but to enrich his own family." 

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Nation ☛ Mar-a-Lago Was Key to Jeffrey Epstein’s Criminal Enterprise

    While Trump and his supporters will claim that the fact Trump barred Epstein from the Mar-a-Lago spa in 2003 exonerates the president, the facts of the case make Trump’s culpability much more evident.

• Environment

  • Louie Mantia ☛ Plastic, Part 2

    Any Japanese politician could solve Japan’s plastic crisis and be a national hero if they championed outlawing all single-use plastic food packaging, forcing the entire country to switch to compostable food packaging.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • TruthOut ☛ As Electricity Bills Rise, Activists Are Demanding Public Control of Utilities

      Public power means public ownership and democratic control of our energy system. It’s an alternative to corporate-owned, profit-driven utilities. Public utilities in the U.S. are not new, and recent campaigns — from Tucson to Milwaukee, from San Diego to Ann Arbor — seek to expand and improve on this precedent, creating a truly democratic public utility system that serves human needs over profits. A notable victory for public power came with the 2023 passage of New York’s Build Public Renewables Act, and a campaign for public power in New York’s Hudson Valley has been gaining momentum.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ The primary purpose of lift lobbies

      I wish there was such maturity when it came to the primary purpose of, say, cars. Modern American “light” trucks don’t even have a primary purpose of safely carrying cargo given their tiny beds, let alone the safety of their occupants… or heaven forbid, those gross pedestrians who are far more likely to die when being hit by one. Imagine if we reframed the debate around cars to be “a safe form of transport for those inside and outside”. But then the industry and society at large would have to confront a lot of things, from pollution to road design. Far easier just to say cars get an exception, safety be damned.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Cyble Inc ☛ The New China Cybersecurity Law Becomes A Reality In 2026

    China has officially entered a new era of cyber regulation. As of January 1, 2026, the amended China cybersecurity law is now in effect, representing the most significant update to the framework since it was first introduced in 2017. The changes redefine how organizations must respond to cyber incidents, how swiftly regulators can impose penalties, and how Chinese authorities can assert jurisdiction, even over foreign entities.

    For organizations operating in China, selling products or services into the Chinese market, or relying on suppliers connected to Chinese critical infrastructure, the compliance landscape has already shifted. Cybersecurity obligations are no longer defined by extended investigation timelines or staged remediation. Instead, the law emphasizes speed, accountability, and immediate regulatory engagement.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • TruthOut ☛ Trump Threatens Child Care Funding Across the US After Bogus Social Media Claim

      Reports of a nationwide freeze came after a video with debunked claims circulated social media this week.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Poland Calls For EU Investigation Of TikTok Over AI-Generated Disinformation Campaign

      Poland’s Ministry of Digital Affairs submitted a formal request to the European Commission, this week, demanding investigation of TikTok for allegedly failing to moderate a large-scale disinformation campaign run using AI-generated content that urged Poland to exit the European Union. The authorities claimed the platform violated obligations as a Very Large Online Platform under the Digital Services Act.

      Secretary of State Dariusz Standerski warned the synthetic audiovisual materials pose threats to public order, information security, and the integrity of democratic processes in Poland and across the European Union.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ ‘I thought, what could they do to me?’ Russian street singer Diana Loginova, jailed for performing anti-war songs, gives first major interview in exile

    In a recent interview with popular Russian YouTube host Yury Dud, Loginova spoke about how the band — known as Stoptime — came together, how the authorities punished their bravery, and how she ultimately managed to leave the country. Dud also spoke to Alexander Orlov, Loginova’s mother, and the “foreign agent” musicians Monetochka and Noize MC, whose music Stoptime performed. Meduza has translated a summary of the conversation from the outlet Vot Tak.

  • ANF News ☛ Iran executed at least 1,500 people in 2025

    Amiry-Moghaddam said the number of executions had shot up ever since protests that erupted in September 2022, sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian-Kurdish woman arrested for an alleged breach of the country's mandatory dress code.

  • NDTV ☛ 8 Journalists, YouTubers Sentenced To Life By Pakistan Anti-Terror Court

    The convictions stem from cases registered after violent protests on May 9, 2023, when Khan's supporters attacked military installations following his brief arrest. Since then, the government and military have launched a sweeping crackdown on Khan's party and dissenting voices, using anti-terrorism laws and military trials to prosecute hundreds accused of incitement and attacks on state institutions.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • ANF News ☛ IFJ: 128 journalists and media workers were killed in 2025

    One hundred and twenty-eight journalists and media workers, including 10 women, lost their lives in 2025, according to the International Federation of Journalists’ (IFJ) final Killed List released on 31 December. The list includes nine accidental deaths. The IFJ deplores another deadly year for journalists, while denouncing the persistent failure of authorities to protect media workers and calling for immediate, decisive action to end the cycle of violence and impunity in 2026.

  • JURIST ☛ RSF calls on eastern DRC rebels to end abductions after journalist found alive

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) called on leaders of the armed rebel coalition controlling Bukavu in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to fully account for the abduction and torture of journalist Honneur-David Safari, and to prevent any further attacks on reporters.

  • Julian Assange ‘has been in prison for his virtues, not his vices’

    But can both perspectives be true, or contain truths that do not rule each other out? A new film about Assange by Eugene Jarecki claims to tell the “real story”, detailing his far-reaching impact and addressing the Swedish criminal investigation into rape and sexual molestation. It took five years to make and it’s called The Six Billion Dollar Man: Julian Assange and the Price of Truth.

    Jarecki is a seasoned documentarian who makes complex, committed films such as The Trials of Henry Kissinger and a critique of the war on drugs called The House I Live In. The Six Billion Dollar Man is so named because, Jarecki tells me on a video call, that was the amount “the United States paid the country of Ecuador to torture Julian Assange”.

  • Hollywood Reporter ☛ How ‘The Six Billion Dollar Man’ Reframes the Saga of Julian Assange: ‘THR Frontrunners’ Q&A With Director Eugene Jarecki and Producer Kathleen Fournier

    During the making of the movie, rumors swirled about Assange being extradited to the U.S. “Everybody on his team said to us, there’s no way he will ever go to the U.S. If he gets extradited, he’ll end his own life,” Fournier says. “So we felt this tremendous, crushing pressure to get the story and to said it out quickly.” The movie was supposed to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, but at the eleventh hour, Jarecki and Fournier learned that Assange’s legal team had negotiated a plea bargain and he was being released. So they held the movie back to recut it, capturing the new footage on the fly, before premiering it in Cannes.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Sweden police dismiss Assange complaint over Machado Nobel win [Ed: Washing their hands, as usual]

    Swedish police said on Dec 19 they would not open an investigation into a criminal complaint filed by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange against the Nobel Foundation over the Peace Prize awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado.

    Mr Assange brought the complaint after Ms Machado won this year’s Peace Prize, saying the decision violated the principles of the Nobel, given the opposition leader’s backing of US President Donald Trump’s campaign against Venezuela’s leftist president, Mr Nicolas Maduro.

    According to the complaint posted by WikiLeaks on social media this week, the prize represented a “gross misappropriation” of funds and the “facilitation of war crimes” under Swedish law.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • ANF News ☛ SAMER: 420 women were murdered, 508 others died under suspicious circumstances in Turkey in 2025

    According to SAMER, the low clearance rate is striking. In 60.1 percent of cases, the perpetrator was not identified. In the remaining cases, the perpetrators were predominantly people from the social environment of the victims: [...]

  • Futurism ☛ Grok Is Being Used to Depict Horrific Violence Against Real Women

    When we dug through this content, we noticed another stomach-churning variation of the trend: Grok, at the request of users, altering images to depict real women being sexually abused, humiliated, hurt, and even killed.

    Much of this material was directed at online models and sex workers, who already face a disproportionately high risk of violence and homicide.

  • MinnPost ☛ Did less than 30% of ICE detainees in 2025 have criminal records?

    In 2025, about 29% of the people who were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were convicted criminals, compared with 71% who had no criminal convictions, according to the agency.

  • TruthOut ☛ Big Union Contract Fights Are Coming in 2026. Here’s a Preview of What’s Ahead.

    The coming year could keep the strikes rolling through steel mills, state offices, telephone lines, axle plants, baseball diamonds, and hospitals from coast to coast. Union contracts expiring in 2026 could open up major fights by manufacturing, education, entertainment, and government workers.

  • Wired ☛ How Protesters Became Content for the Cops

    The tactics behind protest policing are changing—from one of cooperation to intentional antagonism for political marketing purposes.

  • ANF News ☛ PJAK: The Iranian regime has no solution other than to yield to the people's legitimate demands

    PJAK stated that the new popular resistance movement, which began on December 28, 2025, was launched to condemn the policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran targeting economic and social life, saying the following: "The Islamic Republic has divided all communities in Iran from one another through policies of killing, suppression, silencing, and fragmentation for nearly half a century. The Islamic Republic of Iran is trying to maintain its power by creating social crises through various methods. For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic has tried to divide Iranian society by polarizing it and impoverishing the people through its policies of killing, oppression, and silencing.

    The Islamic Republic of Iran has been the source of economic crises due to its plundering of all Iranian wealth, and its use of this wealth for war and to support radical groups in other countries.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • India Times ☛ Social media should take responsibility of content they publish: Vaishnaw

    Social media firms should take responsibility for content they publish and a standing committee has already recommended a tough law to fix accountability of platforms, Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Friday.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Is Spotify Sunsetting the 'Basic' Music-Only Subscription?

    After Spotify integrated audiobooks into its Premium Individual, Family, and Duo plans in late 2023, it reclassified these tiers as ‘bundled subscription offerings’ under the Phonorecords IV agreement between publishers, songwriters, and digital service providers (DSPs). This move allowed Spotify to exploit a Phonorecords IV provision that allows lower mechanical royalty rates for services that combine music with non-music content, such as audiobooks.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Forgotten Star Wars Racer Revenge game is key to jailbreaking PlayStation 5, price soars 1,900% overnight amid leaked ROM keys exploit — Physical copies of the PS4 game go from $20 to $400 on eBay

    Star Wars Racer Revenge, which sports the CUSA-03474 game code, hides a rare vulnerability that lets developers inject code directly into the PlayStation system—an exploit that’s quietly evaded patches since the game’s 2002 PlayStation 2 debut. Critically, only the PlayStation 4 physical edition (not the PlayStation 2 original) is vulnerable to the jailbreak. That version was released as an ultra-limited run of just 8,500 copies worldwide, making it a hot ticket for jailbreakers.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ Musician Sues Stability AI for Training Despite Opt-Out Requests

    Stability AI has publicly claimed that artists were given the ability to opt out of being used to train its Stable Audio AI model. However, Anders says he was repeatedly denied removal by AudioSparx, the company’s licensing partner. At the same time, he claims Stability’s in-house counsel deferred to their partner’s position.

    According to the complaint, the works were used under a 2015 agreement that did not grant authorization to copy or use the works for artificial intelligence training. The lawsuit claims these uses were “not contemplated by, disclosed in, or authorized under” the original license, which pre-dates artificial intelligence.