Leftovers

• Scribbles ☛ 20 years

  … of my blogging history in English, mainly thanks to WordPress.com which has hosted most of my posts without issues. I have moved away from the platform a couple of years ago, but still I own an account since my usage of other "Automattic" services like Akismet or Reader feature or, most importantly, the Gravatar service.

• Chris Enns ☛ The Blogging... It's Working!

  That's how easy it is.

• Ava ☛ offline regains its value

  We can see it in art and culture as well: A renaissance of live performances, physical art, analog photography, older or dumbed down devices, and unedited (or uneditable) recordings gain a sort of social currency. They are harder to fake, or fake something on, and imperfection is evidence of authenticity. When almost anything becomes infinitely manipulable via screens, all we have left is avoiding the screen. It's the late-stage consequence of all the simulacra online that already started with the fake lives of influencers, and has increased dramatically with image and text generation.

• Terence Eden ☛ A small collection of text-only websites

  A couple of years ago, I started serving my blog posts as plain text. Add .txt to the end of any URl and get a deliciously lo-fi, UTF-8, mono[chrome|space] alternative.

  Here's this post in plain text - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites.txt

• Dan Q ☛ A small collection of text-only websites

  This provocation is only intended to get you to think about “what does it mean for a markup language to be ‘human readable’?” Where do you draw the line?

• Ankur Sethi ☛ I'm not listening to full albums anymore

  In the last few years, I’ve lost my appetite for discovering new music. The main reason is that I’ve focused on listening to full albums for most of the last decade, but increasingly I find it irritating and anxiety-inducing to listen to albums from start to finish.

• David Murphy ☛ Adding insular script like it's 1626

  While my parents’ primary association with it are literally being rapped on the knuckles for getting it wrong, for me it’s the type of official signage on old buildings and at historical sites - it’s antiquity and heritage. (For more examples, check out the CLÓSCAPE Project, dedicated to cataloging use around Dublin.)

• [Old] Catherine Geaney ☛ Cló Gaelach - Irish Script font project — Nine Arrow

  I have been fascinated by cló gaelach / seancló for years. It's the beautiful Irish script we see on sign posts or shop signage (I loved seeing it everywhere in Kerry last year). But I really didn't know much about it and I’m sometimes unsure of how to read it. So I’m starting a mini series focusing on cló gaelach one letter at a time! In this blog post I will update it with each letter and any interesting facts and links to further reading that I find.

• BoingBoing ☛ Japanese users prefer dense, busy websites

  Shoin Wolfe, who runs a data-driven agency that works with major Japanese sites, tested minimal redesigns for real estate site Lifull Home. Cleaner pages, more negative space, and hidden rarely-clicked information. The result? Less engagement, fewer conversions. They reverted to the dense original.

• Science

  • Buttondown LLC ☛ The Liskov Substitution Principle does more than you think

    I want to focus on the first rule about preconditions and postconditions. This refers to the method's contract. For a function f, f.Pre is what must be true going into the function, and f.Post is what the function guarantees on execution. A canonical example is square root: [...]

• Career/Education

  • Paul Gross ☛ PostgreSQL Scripting Tips

    I have been working on a double-entry ledger implementation in PostgreSQL called pgledger, and I wanted to write some example scripts. pgledger is written in SQL and meant to be used from any language or platform where you can call SQL functions, so I wanted the examples to be pure SQL.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ How I hire engineers

    It never, ever works like that. And it shouldn’t. While it’s true that product managers are there to be the stewards of the product’s vision, strategy, and roadmap, they are stewards, not dictators. They get there in collaboration with engineering and design, as well as other stakeholders. At no point do they just dictate what other people will do and absolve engineers from doing that work.

    The engineers need to be the technical experts across infrastructure, back-end, front-end, and technical architecture; the designers need to be experts in research, experience, interface, and information architecture. It makes sense that an engineer who finds communication and collaboration hard would just want to be told what to do, but a company that worked that way would be squandering its experts.

  • Jari Komppa ☛ solhsa.com - blog

    Well, I finished reading (most of) dspguide. The first half gave me some insights I had either forgotten, or never learned, including the convolution insight of my previous post.

    Other insights were about how FFT works, what additional steps are needed for iFFT to work (mainly synthesizing the negtive frequencies), zero-padding tricks for FFT, and the significance of windowing. I'll probably revisit some old projects and fix some stuff. Maybe.

• Hardware

  • Michael Tsai ☛ Clicks Communicator and Clicks Power Keyboard

    The Power Keyboard looks great. An easily detached battery pack with a keyboard is way more appealing than a case that makes your phone huge. Unfortunately, my phone is just not a good fit for most of the work I do (code and e-mails/HTML that pull together links and content from multiple places). The software and small screen can’t be overcome by a keyboard, though I guess it does make the useable screen a bit larger. But if I did more pure writing I would definitely try one of these.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Alienware brings OLED to its gaming laptops for the first time in years — anti-glare OLED display boasts 240Hz refresh rate and 0.2ms response time

    Alienware is bringing OLED panels to a significant portion of its gaming laptops for the first time, following in the footsteps of brands like Asus and Lenovo that have introduced OLED displays to gaming laptops over the past 12 months. Alienware was actually a pioneer in this space, offering OLED panels on models here and there, going as far back as 2016. But now the Alienware 16 Area-51 and Alienware 16X Aurora are getting updated with 240Hz anti-glare OLED displays.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Dell revives the XPS laptop brand, just one year after killing it off

    Clarke said the revival of XPS will help Dell to boost its position in the premium laptop segment, where it’s facing rising competition from brands such as HP Inc. and Lenovo Group Ltd. The XPS laptops represent Dell’s higher-end PC lineup, while mainstream and entry-level models will fall under the old “Dell” brand. Gaming PCs will continue to fall under the “Alienware” banner.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deseret News ☛ 2026: The rise of the analog lifestyle

    Starting the new year feels incomplete without a brand new planner and a long list of goals that seem slightly unachievable.

    Even though it’s easy to keep a calendar on a phone, one of my goals is to use my phone less.

    I’m going analog this year to combat my doomscrolling, joining many Gen Z and millennials who are “rebelling” against digital burnout as screens infiltrate every part of life.

  • Josh Bleecher Snyder ☛ Why I leave my webcam off

    If I turn the webcam off, I can stand up and move around.

    The impact of this on my attention is dramatic.

    People sometimes think that I’ve turned off my camera so that I can tune out. This has it exactly backwards. If my camera is on, I’m probably not paying much attention.

• Proprietary

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Register UK ☛ Loss32: An idea for a Linux designed around Win32 apps

      What if, rather than make a Linux distro that can run Windows apps, you built the whole distro around Windows binaries instead?

      Loss32 is the most gleefully deranged idea for how to put together a Linux OS that we think we have ever read about in three and a half decades… but it's not impossible. Not only could it be done, there could be real advantages to doing it this way.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsoft's cloud app that steals then deletes all your files

      As Pargin points out, it's indistinguishable from a ransomware attack. And then you hit the other dark pattern: you can redownload your files, but if you then tell Microsoft to delete their copies of your files, it will delete them again from your computer. At this point, it's all gone; you're screwed.

    • The Verge ☛ No, Microsoft didn’t rebrand Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot

      The confusion comes from Microsoft’s own Office.com domain, which for the past year has acted as a way to push businesses and consumers to use the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. This app is a hub app that provides access to Copilot, as well as all the Office apps. Microsoft used to call this app simply Office, before the company rebranded Office to Microsoft 365 in 2022.

    • Bertrand Meyer ☛ CloudFlare outage: the lesson that will not be drawn - Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

      I might sound like a broken record, but the CloudFlare outage is one more example of the consequences of the software industry making the wrong technical choices.

      Where were the contracts? Rust, by all accounts the language of the code at the source of the problem, is one of the fashionable choices at the moment but does nothing to provide what serious software engineering demands.

    • Futurism ☛ Court System Says AI System Ready to Be Deployed After Disastrous Testing Period

      In a predictable turn of events, instead of streamlining an already headache-inducing process inflicted on people who are probably mourning the loss of a loved one, the AI bungled simple questions and left most users feeling annoyed rather than supported.

      Exhibiting a failing inherent to all large language models, the esteemed virtual assistant kept hallucinating, or making up facts and sharing exaggerated information, according to the people involved in its development.

    • NBC ☛ Alaska's court system built an AI chatbot. It didn’t go smoothly.

      For more than a year, Alaska’s court system has been designing a pioneering generative AI chatbot termed the Alaska Virtual Assistant (AVA) to help residents navigate the tangled web of forms and procedures involved in probate, the judicial process of transferring property away from a deceased person.

      Yet what was meant to be a quick, AI-powered leap forward in increasing access to justice has spiraled into a protracted, yearlong journey plagued by false starts and false answers.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Musician Loses Gig After AI Falsely Names Him A Sex Offender

      According to MacIsaac, the Google summary falsely claimed he had been convicted of sexual assault of a woman, the attempted assault of a minor, and internet luring. Google’s summary also accused him of being listed on the national sex offender registry, which is also false.

      “I could have been at a border and put in jail,” the 50-year-old fiddler added. “So something has to be figured out as far as what the AI companies are responsible for, […] and what they can prevent.”

    • The Register UK ☛ AI chip frenzy to wallop DRAM prices with 70% hike

      Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are reportedly planning to raise server memory prices by up to 70 percent this quarter, according to Korea Economic Daily. Combined with 50 percent increases in 2025, this could nearly double prices by mid-2026.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Channel 9 Australia’s AI TV promo and cartoon

      Nine’s been centralising staff and skills as much as they can — for “efficiency and consistency.” So they fired the local Brisbane promotion staff, so they could half-arse it centrally from Sydney.

      The Sydney team generated this nine-second clip and didn’t check it before broadcast with anyone who knows, say, what Brisbane looks like.

    • Nick Heer ☛ A Viral Reddit Post About Food Delivery Apps Was an A.I. Scam

      I was shocked to see so many people posting a link to this thread credulously. I write that not to scold anyone, only out of genuine surprise that an evidence-free anonymous Reddit post with clear inconsistencies was being spread so widely. There is so much existing evidence that so-called “gig economy” workers are exploited, underpaid, and endangered, and that food delivery platforms specifically are bad for restaurants, that we simply do not need to add questionable Reddit posts to the mix. This scam played into that reputation perfectly. If anything, that is why it makes sense to be even more skeptical. Being too credulous undermines the documented failures of these platforms through the confusion it creates.

    • Futurism ☛ ChatGPT Gave Teen Advice to Get Higher on Drugs Until He Died

      With the mass adoption of AI chatbots comes immense potential for their abuse. These tools which cheer us on endlessly, no matter what we ask it, have already pushed vulnerable people to wild delusions, murder, and suicides.

    • SFGate ☛ A Calif. teen trusted ChatGPT's drug advice. He died from an overdose.

      None of this should have been possible, according to the rules set by OpenAI, the San Francisco company that created ChatGPT. Sam’s chats show how the multibillion-dollar company has lost full control of its blockbuster product.

    • The Hindu ☛ Grok obscene AI content: govt. gives X time till January 7 to submit report

      "Importantly, this is not limited to creation of fake accounts but also targets women who host or publish their images or videos, through prompts, image manipulation and synthetic outputs," the Ministry said, asserting that such conduct reflected a serious failure of platform-level safeguards and enforcement mechanisms, and amounted to gross misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in violation of stipulated laws.

      The Ministry said the regulatory provisions under the IT Act and rules were being flouted by the platform, particularly in relation to obscene, indecent, vulgar, pornographic, paedophilic, or otherwise unlawful or harmful content.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Hotel staff tricked into installing malware by bogus BSODs

      Russia-linked hackers are sneaking malware into European hotels and other hospitality outfits by tricking staff into installing it themselves through fake Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) crashes.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Lionel Dricot ☛ How Github monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem

    It should be noted that, even if I want to get rid of it, I still have a Github account and I was logged in.

    • We need to talk about your Github addiction (ploum.net)

    The block happened again the day after.

    This gave me pause.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Sightline Media Group ☛ ‘This was surgical’: The tactics behind the Maduro mission

      Adam Taichi Kraft, a former intelligence collection strategist with the Defense Intelligence Agency who now consults on national security issues, speaking generally, said that for missions like this, information gathering never stops.

      “Intelligence collection is going on 24/7, all around the world,” he said in an interview with Military Times. “You cannot hide; we are in a zero-privacy world.”

      He emphasized that watching people’s behavior — whether in person or online — cannot be understated.

    • The Register UK ☛ Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

      At the heart of the cases is the fact that most smart TVs use Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) to send rapid-fire screenshots back to company servers, where they are analyzed to finely detail your TV usage. This sometimes covers not just streaming video, but whatever apps or external devices are displaying, and the allegations are that every other bit of personal data the set can scry is also pulled in. Installed apps can have trackers, data from other devices can be swept up.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Robert Reich ☛ The most shameful day in American history

    The sole reason Donald Trump is not now behind bars is that Smith dropped the case after Trump was elected to a second term, because the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States — written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by five other justices, three of whom were nominated by Trump — prevented the prosecution of a sitting president.

    Let us ponder this for a moment.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Hacktivist Deletes White Supremacist Websites At Conference

    A hacktivist exposed and deleted three white supremacist websites during a presentation at a conference last week.

    The hacker and self-described journalist, who goes by Martha Root, appeared onstage dressed as Pink Ranger from the Power Rangers at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, and was joined by journalists Eva Hoffmann and Christian Fuchs.

    Near the end of the presentation, Root remotely deleted the servers of WhiteDate, WhiteChild and WhiteDeal to cheers from the audience.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Congress, I Seek Redress of a Grievance

    These are not merely abstractions. The U.S. Constitution recognizes international treaties in Article II, Section 2, Clause 2, which grants the President power to make treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided two-thirds of Senators present concur. Once ratified, treaties become the “supreme Law of the Land” under Article VI, the Supremacy Clause. Treaties negotiated by the President and ratified by Congress have the force of law under the U.S. Constitution. The President is brazenly violating said law. This constitutes a High Crime and Misdemeanor under Article II, Section 4.

    Further, he is not acting alone, but in concert with the Vice President and the entire executive cabinet.

    [...]

    I therefore petition this Congress to: [...]

  • The Next Move ☛ 1776, Not January 6

    January 6 was a strategic victory for authoritarianism.

    Yes, the mob was ultimately repulsed. Yes, Mike Pence certified the votes. Yes, Joe Biden was inaugurated.

    But Donald Trump was never held accountable. On the contrary, the fallout from January 6 probably made him more popular. On the fifth anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, Trump, its chief inciter, is back in the White House, less restrained than last time. If not treated quickly and comprehensively, the antidemocratic virus adapts and comes back stronger.

  • The Atlantic ☛ January 6 Was My Fourth Day on the Hill

    Reports began to filter in that insurrectionists, some of whom were believed to be armed and on a mission to kill, had breached the Capitol. My colleagues and I watched footage of the mob smashing windows, ramming down doors, and swarming the rotunda; one man brandished a Confederate flag; another wore a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt. Just that morning, a colleague had hung Pride and Black Lives Matter flags outside our office. We didn’t know whether our building had been invaded, but we knew those flags would make us a target. We momentarily broke the shelter-in-place order to pull them down, then we locked the door and dragged a heavy leather couch in front of it.

  • Futurism ☛ Woman Hacks "Tinder for Nazis," Tricks the Racist Users Into Falling in Love With AI Chatbots

    A hacker who goes by the pseudonym Martha Root made a big splash during the annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, last month, as Hackread reports. While dressed as the Pink Ranger from the Power Rangers, Root unceremoniously deleted the servers of WhiteDate, a site described by writer Eva Hoffman as a “Tinder for Nazis.” While she was at it, she also wiped WhiteChild, a service that connected white supremacist sperm and egg donors, and WhiteDeal, a blatantly racist marketplace for freelance labor, at the end of her 44-minute speech.

    In an even more unusual twist, Root also trained an AI chatbot to engage with WhiteDate’s users to extract as much information from them as possible, demonstrating how the tech can be used to root out fascists on the [Internet].

  • US News And World Report ☛ Teens' Smartphone Use At School Exceeds An Hour Daily, Tracking App Reveals

    Teenagers average more than 70 minutes a day on their smartphones during school hours, researchers reported Jan. 5 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

    “We found that teens spent more than an hour on their phones during the school day on average, largely on social media, video and gaming apps,” said lead researcher Dr. Jason Nagata, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California-San Francisco.

  • US Navy Times ☛ Hegseth aims to cut Kelly’s retirement pay over lawful orders video

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on X the expanding punishments for Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., who participated in a Nov. 18 video that pleaded with service members to refuse illegal orders.

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Cybersecurity Bill: ORG calls on MPs to reduce UK reliance on US tech companies

    Open Rights Group has called on MPs to implement a digital sovereignty strategy to reduce the UK’s reliance on US tech companies, such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Palantir, for its digital infrastructure. The digital rights campaigners have urged parliamentarians to make the strategy a requirement in the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill, which has its second reading in the House of Commons today Tuesday 6 January 2026.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Why governments need to treat fraud like cyberwarfare, not customer service

    For too long, fraud – an illicit economy rivaling the GDP of G20 nations – has been seen as a cost of doing business, a nuisance to be absorbed by banks and consumers. That perception is a dangerous relic.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Day of Infamy

    Five years ago Donald Trump tried to overthrow an election he lost. He failed, and I assumed that the threat was over. Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine that he would make a comeback and return to the White House. But there he is. And he’s every bit as bad as his opponents and critics warned he would be.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Pentagon cuts Kelly's pension over "seditious" video

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Monday that the Pentagon is demoting Senator Mark Kelly from his retired Navy rank of captain and cutting his military retirement pay. The reason: a video Kelly posted in November telling service members they can refuse illegal orders.

  • Pete Brown ☛ Playing army men

    The risk is not so much that the US is going to launch some full-scale regime-change operation like Iraq or Afghanistan, but rather that their fumbling about will destabilize the country and eventually the entire region.

  • Politico LLC ☛ Trump suggests US used cyberattacks to turn off lights in Venezuela during strikes

    If true, it would mark one of the most public uses of U.S. cyber power against another nation in recent memory. These operations are typically highly classified, and the U.S. is considered one of the most advanced nations in cyberspace operations globally.

  • Robert Reich ☛ This is the Real Danger Posed by Trump

    They threaten what we mean by civilization.

    The moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.

  • Nevada Current ☛ The Nevadans who made January 6 possible

    And yet the plot to steal the election, and the January 6 insurrection that ensued, rested on the existence of fake electors from Nevada and six other states. That’s why Team Trump instructed Nevada’s fake electors to put on their pathetic little show and then send fake electoral certifications to Congress.

  • ADF ☛ Analyst: al-Shabaab Seizure of Mogadishu May Be a ‘Matter of Time’

    “Al Shabaab’s seizure of Mogadishu may already be simply a matter of time — whether through military action or negotiations,” Bryden wrote. “If so, a new cycle of armed conflict between a further empowered al Shabaab in control of Mogadishu and its 4 million inhabitants, and their sworn enemies in other parts of the country will be all but inevitable. Neighboring countries would similarly face the heightened prospect of renewed terrorist attacks across their borders. The time for hopeful half-measures is past. Only urgent, decisive, and concerted intervention can prevent Somalia from becoming a jihadist state.”

  • FAIR ☛ Editorial Boards Cheer Trump Doctrine in Venezuela

    “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain allegedly quipped. On January 3, 1990, Panamanian Commander Manuel Noriega surrendered to US forces, who carried him off to face drug charges. Thirty-six years to the day later, US forces swooped into Venezuela, abducting President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, following decades of hostility between the oil-rich socialist country and the United States. The pretext offered: Maduro had to be taken to the US to face drug charges.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Polymarket Bets on Maduro Are a Warning

    Traditional financial markets have clear-cut rules around insider trading: Capitalizing on nonpublic information is plainly illegal. Polymarket seems to have no such policies in its terms of use (although it does ban activity that violates “applicable laws”). The company’s CEO, Shayne Coplan, has also explicitly said that Polymarket creates a “financial incentive for people to go and divulge” new information. The thinking is that, if the function of these tools is to predict the future, then rewarding people for leaking information could be seen as a positive. When insiders push markets toward what’s actually going to happen, they can hypothetically turn prediction markets into a source of real-time unfiltered news. There are legal ways to find and divulge new information—say, in scraping publicly available data for an edge over other traders—but Coplan did not draw that distinction. (Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.)

• Environment

  • Greece ☛ Epiphany events marking Christ’s baptism highlight concerns about water scarcity

    “This is the third consecutive year of a significant drop in reservoir levels. This means that the problem is right in front of us,” George Stergiou, chairman of the greater Athens water utility, EYDAP, told The Associated Press after attending the Marathon ceremony.

    Stergiou warned that prolonged droughts are becoming more frequent and are often followed by intense rainfall that does little to replenish supplies.

  • Chris ☛ Disaster Costs, 1900–2024

    On this plot, it looks like humans are generally better than nature at not causing expensive disasters, but when we do mess up, we do it badly; recall that the last point on the green line is partially man-made.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump's Assault on Environment Has Set Back Climate Change Fight

    The administration has meanwhile been canceling major renewable energy projects in numerous states, which has set up various court battles. It plans to lower fuel efficiency standards for motor vehicles, which are one of the primary sources of carbon emissions, and the historic climate investments contained in the Inflation Reduction Act were largely dismantled — even though much of the money that was invested went to conservative states.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ RI, CT attorneys general move to join forces with Revolution Wind developers in case against feds

      Both lawsuits were initially filed in the wake of an Aug. 22 stop work order from federal regulators on the 65-turbine project, then 80% complete south of Rhode Island’s coastline. Both complaints sought court intervention — the developers in D.C. and the AGs in Rhode Island — to bar the Trump administration from what plaintiffs argued was an unconstitutional overreach of federal authority on the 704-megawatt wind project.

    • Maine Morning Star ☛ How Trump dismantled a promising energy industry — and what America lost

      The demolition of the offshore wind sector in 2025 will reverberate for decades, resulting in lost jobs, higher utility bills, and less reliable power grids.

• Finance

  • GNU Taler ☛ 2025-06: P15 CoNetworkingSpace accepts GNU Taler payments in eCHF

    We of course hope that it is just the first of many, and thus will start to track Swiss shops accepting GNU Taler on our map. Please contact us once your shop is also taler-able!

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ Brave refurbishes Rust adblock engine for memory gain

    Brave Software has reworked its browser's Rust-based adblock engine to make it significantly more memory efficient and perhaps more secure. So you get fewer ads now with fewer MB of RAM.

  • The Record ☛ UK government admits years of cyber policy have failed, announces reset

    In an unusually candid admission on Tuesday, the British government acknowledged that its years-long approach to its own cybersecurity was flawed and warned it will be impossible to meet a previous target of securing all government organizations from known cyber vulnerabilities and attack methods by 2030.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Is DJI banned in the US? Yes, but there’s some fine print. This is what the DJI "ban" really means

    Future DJI drone launches won't be legal to sell in the US, but American pilots can still buy – and fly – existing models

  • Financial Times ☛ Who’s who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter

  • Anil Dash ☛ 500,000 tech workers have been laid off since ChatGPT was released

    One of the key points I repeated when talking about the state of the tech industry yesterday was the salient fact that half a million tech workers have been laid off since ChatGPT was released in late 2022. Now, to be clear, those workers haven’t been laid off because their jobs are now being done by AI, and they’ve been replaced by bots. Instead, they’ve been laid off by execs who now have AI to use as an excuse for going after workers they’ve wanted to cut all along.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • NDTV ☛ AI Deepfakes, Old Images Fuel Misinformation After Maduro's Capture

      Collectively racking up millions of views, the fake or misleading posts underscore a new digital reality in which hyper-realistic misinformation competes for attention with –- and often drowns out -- authentic images and videos following major news events.

      Soon after Maduro's capture, AFP's fact-checkers uncovered posts on platforms such as X and Facebook purporting to show the first image of the Venezuelan in US custody, flanked by American forces near an aircraft.

    • Techdirt ☛ Right Wing Media Companies Begin Bickering At The FCC Over Who Gets To Dominate The Exploding Right Wing Propaganda Market

      Newsmax, a right wing propaganda organization pretending to be a cable news company, is upset at the fact that Nexstar Media Group and TEGNA, two right wing propaganda companies pretending to be “local broadcast news” operations, are going to see too many benefits from the Trump administration’s quest to destroy what’s left of U.S. media consolidation limits.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ Iranian Protester Recounts Security Forces 'Shooting Directly' At Crowds

    As demonstrators chanted antiestablishment slogans and threw stones at the building on January 3, IRGC members climbed on the roof and opened fire on the crowd.

  • The Independent UK ☛ At least 36 dead in Iran protests as security forces fire tear gas at demonstrators in Tehran’s grand bazaar

    At least 36 protesters have died during protests in Iran as security forces fired tear gas at demonstrators in Tehran’s grand bazaar on Tuesday.

  • BIA Net ☛ Demirtaş sentenced to prison for ‘insulting the president’

    Following the verdict, Tuncer Bakırhan, co-chair of the Peoples' Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party, successor of the HDP, made a statement on social media condemning the ruling. “We reject the prison sentence handed down to our valued comrade Selahattin Demirtaş on the pretext of insulting the president. We do not recognize this decision.

  • Techdirt ☛ Why Isn’t Online Age Verification Just Like Showing Your ID In Person?

    Online age restrictions are imposed on many, many more users than in-person ID checks. Because of the sheer scale of the internet, regulations affecting online content sweep in an enormous number of adults and youth alike, forcing them to disclose sensitive personal data just to access lawful speech, information, and services.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Where the hell are America’s leaders?

    While Trump and his henchmen are stripping Americans of our constitutional rights and illegally taking over other nations, America’s supposed leadership class is silent. Or worse, they’re helping Trump.

    Too many university presidents are silent or caving to Trump’s demands. Too many senior managers of law firms have surrendered to his tyranny. Too many directors of large nonprofits are remaining silent. Almost all Republican leaders are rubber stamping his authoritarianism. Too many Democratic leaders are barely putting up a fight.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Television at 50 | The broadcast that changed everything

    Over the past five decades, it has informed, entertained and connected South Africans through rapid technological change. As the country marks the 50th anniversary since the first official national broadcast, TechCentral looks back to those early days of TV.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Successfully Murders U.S. Public Media

    Donald Trump and his authoritarian friends have successfully destroyed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the closest this country has gotten to having a useful and effective publicly-funded media. The CPB this week voted to officially shut down, just months after Republicans passed a massive billionaire tax cut plan that stripped the organization of more than $1 billion in funding.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Corporation for Public Broadcasting Shuts Down Post-Funding Cut

    “For more than half a century,” Harrison said of the dissolution, “CPB existed to ensure that all Americans—regardless of geography, income, or background—had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Corporation for Public Broadcasting shuts down after funding cuts

    The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit corporation established by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, will dissolve after a vote by its board of directors. Its funding was eliminated by congressional Republicans in party-line House and Senate votes after President Trump asked them to do so by executive order, ending 58 years of support for public broadcasting in the U.S. PBS and NPR stations remain, but without the federal support (and financing) provided by the corporation.

  • BoingBoing ☛ CBS rewards Hegseth's press blackout with a microphone

    CBS News is responding to Pete Hegseth freezing out the press by ensuring he still gets his message out. This is journalism at its finest.

    Defense Secretary "Whiskey" Pete Hegseth blocked reporters from doing their jobs, so CBS News rewarded him with a microphone. The network gave Hegseth three uninterrupted segments without meaningful challenge. What should have been a red flag for press freedom became a compliant state media segment. When access to "journalism" becomes this easy, it stops being "access" and becomes mere "collaboration."

  • Mediaite ☛ OPINION: CBS Gave Hegseth the Mic After He Shut Out Press

    CBS News gave Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth three uninterrupted segments on its flagship evening broadcast days after he effectively expelled the Pentagon press corps, a decision that raises serious questions about why one of the country’s most powerful news organizations chose access at a moment when press freedom inside the Defense Department is under direct attack.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Jérôme Marin ☛ Nvidia’s subterfuge to acquire Groq

  This is a tactic popularized last year by Microsoft that Nvidia has now adopted. In late December, the S graphics-card giant announced a “non-exclusive licensing agreement” with Groq, an US startup specializing in chips designed for inference in generative artificial intelligence models. Behind this wording lies what is effectively a disguised acquisition, aimed at securing key technologies and engineering teams while sidestepping a potential veto from competition authorities.

• Doc Searls ☛ On Customer Captivity

  I think that entrapment system needs a name, because we need to position it. Make it a character in stories about business.

  Here are a few I’ve come up with: [...]

• Trademarks

  • Futurism ☛ Tesla Loses Trademark to "Cybercab" Due to Its Own Staggering Incompetence

    The Cybercab, for the uninformed, is Tesla’s purpose-built vehicle for giving driverless rides. Right now, its capital-R Robotaxi service, which operates as a comically tiny fleet exclusively in Austin, Texas, uses existing Tesla Model Ys, not specialized cars (and its trademark is itself under peril due to yet more incompetence, as we’ll explain later.) A prototype of the two-passenger, no-steering wheel Cybercab was unveiled at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event over a year ago, and Musk claims it’ll enter production in Q2 this year.

  • Right of Publicity

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

      It is extraordinary yet, sadly, predictable to me that xAI is not treating this as a problem. Setting aside the fundamentally offensive capability that any user can tell Grok to generate photorealistic images based on someone else’s likeness — something it should be prohibited from doing — there appears to be no rush to fix this high-res misogyny on demand. A basic corporate response would be to turn off image generation capabilities until better safeguards are in place. Yet I just opened the Grok account on X, switched to the Replies tab, and it took almost no scrolling at all to find it generating images like these mere seconds ago.

    • Wired ☛ Grok Is Pushing AI ‘Undressing’ Mainstream

      While harmful AI image generation technology has been used to digitally harass and abuse women for years—these outputs are often called deepfakes and are created by “nudify” software—the ongoing use of Grok to create vast numbers of nonconsensual images marks seemingly the most mainstream and widespread abuse instance to date. Unlike specific harmful nudify or “undress” software, Grok doesn’t charge the user money to generate images, produces results in seconds, and is available to millions of people on X—all of which may help to normalize the creation of nonconsensual intimate imagery.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Grok Is Creating Sexualized Deepfakes of Celebrities and Children

      Over the holiday break, a critical mass of X users came to realize that Grok will readily “undress” women — manipulating existing photos of them in order to create deepfakes in which they are shown wearing skimpy bikinis or underwear — and this sort of exchange soon became alarmingly common. Some of the first to try such prompts appeared to be adult creators looking to draw potential customers to their social pages by rendering racier versions of their thirst-trap material. But the bulk of Grok’s recent deepfakes have been churned out without consent: the bot has disrobed everyone from celebrities like Carpenter to non-famous individuals who happened to share an innocent selfie on the [Internet].

    • Cyble Inc ☛ European Commission Probes Grok AI Over Explicit Images

      The scrutiny follows widespread outrage linked to a paid feature known as “Spicy Mode,” introduced last summer, which critics say enabled the generation and manipulation of sexualised imagery.

      Speaking to journalists in Brussels on Monday, a spokesperson for the European Commission said the matter was being treated with urgency.

    • Futurism ☛ Live Coverage: Is Grok Still Being Used to Create Nonconsensual Sexual Images of Women and Girls?

      Because Grok is integrated into X, this growing pile of nonconsensual and seemingly illegal images are automatically published directly to the social media platform — and thus are disseminated to the open web, in plain view, visible to pretty much anyone. As it stands, X and xAI have yet to take any meaningful action to stem the tide.

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ Spotify ‘Shadow Library’ Loses .Org Address

    But Anna’s Archive operators have publicly stated that, despite the timing, they do not believe the .org suspension is related to the Spotify backup. Instead, they believe the suspension stems from broader, ongoing copyright and database disputes.

  • The Register UK ☛ Researchers poison stolen data to make AI results wrong

    In a preprint paper titled Making Theft Useless: Adulteration-Based Protection of Proprietary Knowledge Graphs in GraphRAG Systems, authors Weijie Wang, Peizhuo Lv, et al. observe that enterprise KGs can cost a considerable amount to build, citing a figure of $5.71 per factual statement [PDF] in the KG encompassing 21 million assertions available in Cyc.

  • James G ☛ Publishing my citation preferences

    Below, I’ll talk a bit about how I now publish my citation preferences on my website, touching on both design and content considerations.