Leftovers

• [Old] Cynthia Dunlop ☛ antirez on Technical Blogging

  That it is a fundamental carrier for software projects. You can't have a successful project most of the time without communicating it. Sometimes it happens that developers who don't communicate do things that are so important that other folks will communicate them, and the projects will still be successful. But in general, I believe that communicating, for developers, is a key asset for their projects, startups, whatever, to have any chance to become popular.

• [Old] Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Charity Majors on Technical Blogging

  There are very few things in life that I am prouder of than the body of writing I have developed over the past 10 years. I have had a yearly goal of publishing about one longform piece of writing per month. I don't think I've ever actually hit that goal, but some years I have come close! When I look back over things I have written, I feel like I can see myself growing up, my mental health improving, I'm getting better at taking the long view, being more empathetic, being less reactive... I've never graduated from anything in my life, so to me, my writing kind of externalizes the progress I've made as a human being. It's meaningful to me.

• [Old] Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Eric Lippert on Technical Blogging

  One of the things I like best about tech blogging is how it forces me to understand a concept well enough to not just use it in my work, but also explain it to someone, answer their questions, convince them it's valuable. I needed to understand probabilistic programming for work, and writing about it every day for weeks on end definitely helped!

• [Old] Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Gunnar Morling on Technical Blogging

  Another reason for blogging is to spread the word about things I’ve been working on, such as kcctl 🐻, a command-line client for Kafka Connect. Such posts will, for instance, introduce a new release or discuss a particular feature or use case and they help to increase awareness for a project and build a community around it. Or they might announce efforts such as the One Billion Row coding challenge I did last year. Finally, some posts are about making the case for specific ideas, say, continuous performance regression testing, or how Kafka Connect could be reinvisioned in a more Kubernetes-native way.

  Overall — and this is why I keep doing it — blogging is a great way for me to express my thoughts, ideas, and learnings, and share them with others. It allows me to get feedback and input on new projects, and it’s an opportunity for helping as well as learning from others.

• [Old] Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Jeff Atwood on Technical Blogging

  I think blogs are important because it’s a structured form of writing. Sadly, chat tends to dominate now. I want people to articulate their thoughts, to really think about what they're saying – structure it, have a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It doesn't have to be super long. However, chat breaks everything up into a million pieces. You have these interleaved conversations where people are just typing whatever pops into their brain, sometimes with 10 people doing that at the same time. How do you create a narrative out of this? How do you create a coherent story out of chat?

• [Old] Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Sam Rose on Technical Blogging

  I wrote sporadically for years, most of my posts only getting a trickle of traffic, but I did have a few modestly successful ones. https://samwho.dev/blog/the-birth-and-death-of-a-running-program/ did well and even ended up as part of the Georgia Tech CS2110 resources list. One of the lecturers, who has since retired, emailed me in 2013 asking if he could use it. I was concerned because the post had swearing in it, but he said “swearing is attention getting and helps the reader stay alert.”

  The blog posts I’ve become known for, the ones with lots of visual and interactive bits, started in the first half of 2023. I’d long admired the work of https://ciechanow.ski/ and wanted to see if I could apply his style to programming. It’s working well so far!

• Greg Morris ☛ Not Everything Deserves Equal Billing

  The hard part is deciding which category something belongs in. Your users will disagree with you, they always do. Someone's "this should be obvious" is another person's "why is this cluttering my screen". You end up making choices that please nobody, or worse, you try to please everyone and build something mediocre.

• Howard Oakley ☛ Archive webpages using textClippings

  All the options built into Safari – Save As Web Archive, Save As Page Source, Save As PNG, and Export to PDF – include the page’s furniture, and some have other limitations, as explored previously. A full WebArchive file, including all the images, amounts to 2.7 MB, while a PDF is only 544 KB.

• Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Technical Blogging Lessons Learned

  We interviewed a dozen(ish) expert tech bloggers over the past year to share perspectives and tips beyond Writing for Developers. In this final 2025 remix post, let’s look at how everyone answered the question “Any lessons learned that you want to share with the community?”

• Crooked Timber ☛ How to make sure the writing gets done

  I’ve been asked by a couple of friends, who have signed contracts to write nonfiction trade books, whether I have any advice on how to make sure the book gets written. I think in general non-fiction trade writing is quite a different challenge from academic writing, which I discussed here in 2022, when I was working on Limitarianism. But how does one actually make sure the writing gets done, especially if one has a job (academic or otherwise) that already consumes more than 40 hours a week and is prone to procrastination?

  Here are some lessons I learnt while working on my book from the Fall of 2022 till the Summer of 2023.

• Bix Frankonis ☛ These Go To Eleven

  There are, of course, two different issues here, I think. One issue is that there are other forms of dystopia we could depict as warnings against whatever path we seem to be on in the present. The other is that we seem to tend to depict our future as a dystopia rather than as something else.

• Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ New Year, Old Me

  Back in 2024, I had New Year’s resolutions that had to do with habits. What a waste. New Year’s should be a time for reflection, not for TODO lists. My 2026 New Year’s resolution is to keep doing what I’ve been doing — to be grateful, to strive to be a good person, to live with purpose, to maintain curiosity, to perfect my craft, to strive to be the best husband, father, colleague, and friend that I can be. I don’t have recipes for these, and I’ll fail a lot, but this path is what brings me joy.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice project and community recap: December 2025

    Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last month of last year – click the links to learn more… At the start of December, we announced a new Code of Ethics and Fiduciary Duties for The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors.

• Science

  • Reuters ☛ Astronaut medical issue on ISS forces early return for space station crew

    NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told reporters on Thursday in a short-notice press conference in Washington that he and medical officials made the decision to return the astronaut, whom he did not identify, because "the capability to diagnose and treat this properly does not live on the International Space Station."

  • [Repeat] Bjoern Brembs ☛ Procurement Before Prestige

    This history matters because scientific publishing today remains one of the most profitable legal industries on Earth. Profit margins of up to 40 percent are routine. The EU Council identifies one core reason: publishers typically take control of researchers’ intellectual property. Since each scientific paper is published only once, this creates a built-in monopoly. With no real competition, publishers can charge prices that strain — or exceed — the budgets of public institutions.

• Career/Education

  • American Library Association ☛ American Library Association Kicks Off 150th Anniversary with Youth Media Awards | ALA

    “Libraries are lifelines, shared public spaces, and engines of opportunity,” said ALA President Sam Helmick. “This milestone year is a moment to inspire, to rally our members and to invite all library professionals and advocates into the shared mission of shaping the next 150 years for our libraries.”

  • Ness Labs ☛ Discipline is Overrated: The Devotion–Friction Matrix

    Most advice about consistency sounds the same: try harder, be more disciplined, push through resistance. Discipline is often seen as the difference between people who succeed and people who don’t. And if you fall off, the explanation is usually moralized: not enough willpower, lack of grit, laziness.

    But people don’t fail because they don’t try hard enough. They fail because the system they’re operating in makes sustained effort too costly.

  • Bryan Cantrill ☛ The right place at the right time

    Recently, the New Stack had a piece excerpting some of my conversation with Gergely Orosz. In introducing me in the piece, Joab Jackson writes "Cantrill has had a knack at being at the right place at the right time." While this is objectively true at some level, it also gave me a double take: it rarely felt true at the time.

  • Project Censored ☛ Alarming Statistics Reveal High Rates of Illiteracy Among US Adults

    In 2024, the National Literacy Institute found that 79 percent of US adults were literate, but only 46 percent could read above a sixth-grade level. Literacy is the ability to read and write, and generally also involves critical thinking and analysis skills, understanding complex concepts, and forming broader conclusions.

• Hardware

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ On Purchasing Typewriters: Condition is King; Context is Queen

    It bears mentioning and thoroughly understanding that even an expert typewriter collector or professional repair person can only tell very little of the condition of a typewriter by photos. Does it look generally clean? Are the decals in tact? Does the segment look clean (a vague proxy for the potential condition of the internals)? Is anything obvious missing (knobs, return lever, keys)? Does it look cared for or has it been neglected in a barn for half a century? If it has a case, how beat up, dirty, and water-stained is it?

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ A clever affordance of card index filing cabinet drawers

    Several of my cabinets have not only pull handles on the front of the drawers, but also have cut-out handles in the rear to be able to easily pull them out and move them around. This feature was also the reason many cabinets also had card rods. The cards could be physically held into the drawers to prevent the user from accidentally tipping the drawer and loosing all the cards into a random pile on the floor. Robert Pirsig describes a sad affair similar to this in his book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (Bantam Books, 1991).

  • Michael Kjörling ☛ The Epos Sennheiser Impact 660 ANC USB headset (1395:028d) on Linux

    I soon found myself looking very closely at the EPOS Sennheiser Impact 600 series, but the best I could seem to easily find was that it was supported on Windows and macOS (which, letʼs face it, is pretty much an absolute minimum if you want to sell a general-use computer peripheral today). From the vendor, I found the fact sheet which lists Chromebook as being supported. A little further digging told me that Chromebooks unsurprisingly enough run ChromeOS, which is a proprietary derivative of ChromiumOS which in turn is derived from Gentoo. Bingo: a long-established Linux distribution at the bottom of a supported operating system stack. That, plus the fact that audio over USB is reasonably well-established by now, led me to conclude that it would very likely work straight out of the box.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Schematics Detailing What Looks Like the Mythical PowerBook G5 Have Appeared

    It was no secret that Apple couldn’t shoehorn a G5 into a laptop, but very few details are known about that project’s progress.

    That may have changed. A user by the name of Nullcaller on the MacRumors forums has delivered the goods in the form of a set of schematics that looks a lot like a PowerBook G5.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Strategist ☛ Australia needs a Dutch mindset for food security

    When Dutch General Tom Middendorp speaks, the world’s security apparatus pays attention.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Hobbies don't just improve personal lives, they can also boost workplace creativity

    The study by researchers from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Erasmus University Rotterdam explored how "leisure crafting"—intentionally shaping your free time through goal setting, learning and connection—does not just boost well-being outside the office but can spill over into creativity, engagement, and meaning at work, especially for older employees.

    Published in the journal Human Relations, the findings show that giving people simple, doable advice about how to grow through their hobbies can make a real difference in their daily lives.

  • Project Censored ☛ Pornography Primary Sex-Information Source for Young Britons

    In November 2025, the BBC reported that the UK government plans to make specific forms of pornography—those that depict strangulation or suffocation—illegal, as part of a campaign to counter violence against women and girls. Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, described the amendments as “a vital step” in addressing the normalization of violence in online content.

• Proprietary

  • Dark Reading ☛ Attackers Exploit Zero-Day in End-of-Life D-Link Routers

    Most of the gateways under attack are products that D-Link stopped actively supporting five or more years ago, so they no longer receive any firmware updates, security patches, or maintenance support. Organizations that want to mitigate risk need to retire the affected products and replace them with models that D-Link currently supports, the vendor said in an advisory this week.

  • PC World ☛ Microsoft confirms bug with encrypted emails in classic Outlook app

    In the latest version of classic Outlook, users can't open encrypted emails. Microsoft confirms the issue and is investigating.

  • Inkl ☛ Amazon wants proof of productivity from employees

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Register UK ☛ Linus: Stop making issue of AI slop in kernel docs

      The Register has reported on Torvalds's various comments on LLM-bot-assisted coding several times in recent years. In 2024, he said that 90 percent of AI marketing is hype. (To be honest, the Reg FOSS desk thinks that's generous: we'd be happy to learn it was as low as 90 per cent.) A year later, he commented that he was OK with vibe coding as long as it's not used for anything that matters, which was a little unexpected. The Reg's own Rupert Goodwins begged to differ, writing "Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)".

    • Wired ☛ Grok Is Generating Sexual Content Far More Graphic Than What's on X

      Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot has drawn outrage and calls for investigation after being used to flood X with “undressed” images of women and sexualized images of what appear to be minors. However, that’s not the only way people have been using the AI to generate sexualized images. Grok’s website and app, which are are separate from X, include sophisticated video generation that is not available on X and is being used to produce extremely graphic, sometimes violent, sexual imagery of adults that is vastly more explicit than images created by Grok on X. It may also have been used to create sexualized videos of apparent minors.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI & Humans: Making the Relationship Work

      Our research suggests that, because of how directly they seem to apply to hybrid teams of human and digital workers, the most effective leaders in the coming years may still be those who excel at understanding the timeworn principles of human management.

      We have spent years studying the risks and opportunities for organizations adopting AI. Our 2025 book, Rewiring Democracy, examines lessons from AI adoption in government institutions and civil society worldwide. In it, we identify where the technology has made the biggest impact and where it fails to make a difference. Today, we see many of the organizations we’ve studied taking another shot at AI adoption—this time, with agentic tools. While generative AI generates, agentic AI acts and achieves goals such as automating supply chain processes, making data-driven investment decisions or managing complex project workflows. The cutting edge of AI development research is starting to reveal what works best in this new paradigm.

    • PC Gamer ☛ Dell's CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I've had in maybe 5 years

      It's not that Dell doesn't care about AI or AI PCs anymore, it's just that over the past year or so it's come to realise that the consumer doesn't.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Dell Admits That Customers Are Disgusted by PCs Stuffed With AI Features

      Their executives are willing to say the quiet part out loud — that nobody is scrambling to buy an “AI PC.”

    • The Walrus ☛ AI Slop Will End Canadian Culture as We Know It

      This slopification parallels the “firehose of falsehood” method of spreading disinformation: overwhelm the system with vast quantities of low-quality synthetic material so authenticity becomes impossible to discern, and platforms default to whatever is cheapest and most scalable. Worse: public trust erodes, not just in the content itself but with the institutions tasked with curating it.

  • Social Control Media

    • India Times ☛ EU orders X to keep Grok documents for longer amid sexualised AI photos furore

      The Commission has now decided to extend a retention order sent to X last year, which related to algorithms and dissemination of illegal content, prolonging it to the end of 2026, spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters on Thursday.

    • India Times ☛ Elon Musk-led X saw AI media grievances surge post Grok Imagine rollout in India

      Grievances filed with social media platform X in India against synthetic or manipulated media surged to an estimated 983 in September 2025, comprising more than half the total 1,959 complaints it received, up from zero in each of the preceding three months.

    • Nick Heer ☛ The Telegram Group Jailbreaking Grok

      Apps have been kicked off the App Store for far less than what X is today. Removing it — and the rest of xAI’s apps — would be a good start, but we should not expect private companies to do the job of law enforcement and regulators. There is a good case for banning X as long as it continues to permit this poorly-moderated image generator. People should be criminally charged, too.

    • Wired ☛ Why Are Grok and X Still Available in App Stores?

      Apple and Google both explicitly ban apps containing CSAM, which is illegal to host and distribute in many countries. The tech giants also forbid apps that contain pornographic material or facilitate harassment. The Apple App Store says it doesn’t allow “overtly sexual or pornographic material,” as well as “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content,” especially if the app is “likely to humiliate, intimidate, or harm a targeted individual or group.” The Google Play store bans apps that “contain or promote content associated with sexually predatory behavior, or distribute non-consensual sexual content,” as well as programs that “contain or facilitate threats, harassment, or bullying.”

    • International Business Times ☛ Elon Musk's X Faces UK Ban — AI Fake Nudes Row Sparks Outrage and Free Speech Fears

      The non-consensual images fall into child sexual abuse material (CSAM), ånd the controversy has prompted UK leaders to call for urgent action and has raised serious concerns on platform accountability and online safety laws.

    • Greg Morris ☛ Instagram's AI Crisis Is Not an Accident

      What really winds me up is when Mosseri says individuals now matter more than publishers or brands. This isn't natural evolution. Meta deliberately undermined traditional media by promoting an endless stream of replaceable creators, specifically to avoid paying established institutions that would demand fair compensation. Rewarding more and more attention seeking posts, then act surprised when nobody can tell real from fake anymore.

    • Chuck Grimmett ☛ Blogging Beyond the Wall

      Social networks are walled gardens. They are closed networks that restrict how users interact, what they see, and how data flows.

      Outside of the walls is the blogosphere. It is diverse and distributed.

    • [Old] Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ Outsourced Voices, Outsourced Minds

      You’re no longer in control of what you consume on the web. Algorithms are now in control, and those algorithms want you to be a mindless zombie that consumes ads, ads that serve malware, scams, or politics. Not to be misunderstood, I recently bought theater tickets to a show via an ad, curated ads can clearly be valuable, but curation is incompatible with the ambitions of these social networks.

    • Chris Enns ☛ AI Slop is Detectable

      Instagram / Meta really don't care about stopping AI slop. They just care about numbers go up, regardless of the impact on society. If teachers and people hiring can run essays and resumes through AI detection software to at least get an idea of something being AI generated, Meta can afford to do the same with everything being posted on their platforms. Even a simple reporting that users can do where if you post more than ~10 things a month that are clearly AI generated, your account is labelled as an AI slop account for the next 6 months until you prove you're human again.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Cyberattack forces British high school to cancel classes and delay reopening

      The nature of the incident hasn’t been confirmed. It follows more than 80 ransomware attacks against the education and childcare sector reported to the ICO in 2024.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Open Source Initiative ☛ Open Policy Alliance Welcomes the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund as New Member [Ed: And published exactly a date after this]

      The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is pleased to welcome the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) to the Open Policy Alliance. OSTIF is a nonprofit dedicated to securing Open Source apps.

• Security

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Samsung Magician SSD software ‘High Severity’ vulnerability patched — upgrade to the newest v9.0.0 to prevent potential DLL hijacking and privilege escalation

    Samsung has published a security advisory after a high-severity vulnerability was discovered in its Magician SSD management software on Windows.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Veeam issues patch to close critical remote code execution flaw

    The vulnerability could let operator-level users run commands as database administrator.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Taiwan blames Chinese ‘cyber army’ for rise in millions of daily intrusion attempts

    The country’s National Security Bureau said attacks rose 6% in 2025, with the energy and hospital sectors seeing the biggest rise.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • India Times ☛ Gmail's new AI features, turning it into personal assistant

      The new AI features announced Thursday could herald a pivotal moment for Gmail, a service that transformed email when it was introduced nearly 22 years ago. Since then, Gmail has amassed more than 3 billion users to become nearly as ubiquitous as Google's search engine.

    • EFF ☛ How Hackers Are Fighting Back Against ICE

      Let’s start with Flock, the company behind a number of automated license plate reader (ALPR) and other camera technologies. You might be surprised at how many Flock cameras there are in your community. Many large and small municipalities around the country have signed deals with Flock for license plate readers to track the movement of all cars in their city. Even though these deals are signed by local police departments, oftentimes ICE also gains access.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Google's Gmail is getting a Gemini-inspired overhaul with AI priorities, summaries and more

      The most prominent change is the new AI Inbox view, which is rolling out to some users from today. It departs from the traditional, chronological list of emails and instead uses on-device AI smarts to try and organize users’ emails into “priority clusters.” At the same time, it also tries to help users keep on top of everything that’s happened while they’ve been away with a “Catch me up” summary of their most recent email activity, offering quick updates on things such as shipping activity, purchase receipts and appointment bookings.

    • International Business Times ☛ Google's Gemini AI Enters Gmail — Are Your Private Emails Now Being Read?

      Google's mail platform, Gmail, is the latest to be integrated with artificial intelligence (AI). Rolling out a major update, Google has integrated its Gemini AI model to personalize and enhance inboxes. Email tasks like drafting messages, organising inboxes, and even summarising threads will now be a regular occurrence in the mail. Google Mail introduces the new 'AI inbox' tab, which is still currently in the testing (beta) phase.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ The Wegman's Supermarket Chain Is Probably Using Facial Recognition

      The New York City Wegman’s is collecting biometric information about customers.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Defence Web ☛ Why Islamic State attacks are surging in DR Congo

    An attack on a Catholic health centre in Byambwe in November lasted less than an hour [...]

  • New York Times ☛ Amid heavy security, a tentative return of street life in Caracas.

  • New York Times ☛ Maduro Is Gone, but Repression in Venezuela Has Intensified

    Security forces have boarded buses, searched phones and interrogated people, looking for evidence that they welcomed the capture of Nicolás Maduro.

  • New York Times ☛ Most Venezuelans Struggle to Pay for Food, Poll Shows

    A new Gallup survey found that more than half of Venezuelans reported struggling to afford food last year, with economic hardship reaching even the wealthy.

  • The Strategist ☛ In Venezuela, the real challenges for the US are just beginning

    US President The Insurrectionist’s removal of Nicolas Maduro from power in Venezuela on 3 January has provided the opportunity to show that his national security approach is superior to his predecessors’.

  • New York Times ☛ Protests Spread in Iran, and Crackdowns Escalate

    Bazaars were shuttered and demonstrators met with violence from security forces amid rising anger about the country’s dire economic situation.

  • The Straits Times ☛ China calls for joint counter-terrorism efforts with Pakistan

    China is willing to intensify cooperation with Pakistan in fighting terrorism and telecom crime, Wang Xiaohong, China's public security minister, said in a meeting with Pakistan's interior and counter-narcotics minister in Beijing on Wednesday.

  • JURIST ☛ Japan condemns North Korea over ballistic missile launches

    Japan on Sunday condemned North Korea’s launch of multiple ballistic missiles in a press conference, stating that the tests constitute clear violations of United Nations Security Council resolutions and pose a serious threat to public safety and regional security.

  • JURIST ☛ Minneapolis hotel denies service to US immigration agents, ousted from Hilton Hotels

    A Minneapolis Hilton Hotel has denied service to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents in protest of immigration enforcement activity in the city, an online post revealed Monday.

  • France24 ☛ Colombian President Petro defends national security in the face of Convicted Felon's threats

    Days after issuing threats of military action against Colombia, US President The Insurrectionist said he had invited Colombian President Gustavo Petro to the White House following what was described as a cordial phone conversation. Petro, who had strongly condemned the US operation targeting Nicolás Maduro, later appeared at a rally in Bogotá framed around defending national sovereignty in the face of Convicted Felon’s threats, where he said he had called for renewed dialogue between the two countries. Simon Moritz reports.

  • AAAS ☛ Last Year, and the Year to Come

    Likewise, US public health will suffer. It already is. I note that we now have reached a level of measles cases not seen in this country for decades, and one can only expect the numbers for every other vaccine-preventable disease to rise as well. This is of course infuriating, because it is so senseless and was so avoidable, but here we are. Children will die who did not have to, and it was a choice. Just as gutting USAID was one of the early choices of the administration, an act of petty vandalism which has led (and will continue to lead) to even more deaths and suffering in the countries that used to get the aid. Never forget: whenever Elon Musk walks up to a podium to bullshit you about colonizing Mars or whatever, he is walking on the bodies of dead children. He yanked their food and medicine away while telling lies and cracking stupid jokes.

  • Netzpolitik ☛ Hacking & Art: „Art alone is not enough“

    Artist and hacker Helena Nikonole has exploited the fact that surveillance cameras are used in many everyday situations in Russia and have built-in loudspeakers. In their work ‘Antiwar AI’ from 2022 to 2023, the Russian-born activist hacked numerous cameras that permanently monitor people in apartments, bars, hairdressing salons, food and clothing stores, and currency exchange offices. They used the speakers to broadcast a manifesto against Russia’s war in Ukraine, which suddenly intruded into people’s everyday lives as an acoustic message. In this way, Nikonole transformed this widespread and normalised surveillance technology into a subversive means of communication.

  • Futurism ☛ The Venezuela Polymarket Scandal Is Looking Really Bad

    What’s really astonishing is the timing of the bets placed. The WSJ breakdown shows just how close the mysterious insider came to the wire: on January 2nd, between 8:38 and 9:58pm, the bettor took out over $20,000 betting on an eminent attack on Venezuelan soil. At 10:46pm, president Donald Trump issued orders authorizing the military strike — not even an hour after the final bet had been placed.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Where are the pardoned January 6ers now? How many have been charged with child sex crimes?

    If you took the Over on five of them being charged with child sex crimes, you won your bet. We're up to at least six.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump’s Venezuela Oil Grab Could Lead to More Violence

    Trump did not notify Congress of his plans to depose Maduro, but he says he did tip off American oil executives. On Tuesday, Trump announced that Venezuela would be “turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America.” The president also clarified that the seized oil would be “sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!”

  • [Old] The Line ☛ Matt Gurney: 'We will never fucking trust you again'

    Standing around at the forum, eating the delicious snacks and drinking the good coffee and chatting with friends old and new, that was what I kept thinking about. Where are the Americans? And what the hell are we going to do without them?

    And, in case you’re wondering what’s up with that headline, here’s another question — what will we do if they one day try and come back?

  • Low Orbit Security ☛ Radar #16: Week of 01/05/2026

    BGP is the first thing that comes to mind. It's a protocol used by routers to determine what path data takes to get to it's destination, it does this by exchanging routing information between Autonomous Systems. It is also notoriously insecure and much of the data about BGP is collected in public datasets. Every major network has an Autonomous System Number or ASN. CANTV (AS8048) is Venezuela's state-owned telecom, so that's the obvious place to start.

  • [Old] UK ☛ Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending June 2025

    The line chart in Figure 3 shows that non-EU+ nationals drove the large increases in immigration between 2020 and 2023. At the same time, there was a fall in the number of EU+ nationals coming to live in the UK. This fall in EU+ immigration began around the time of the EU referendum in 2016, before accelerating after free movement for EU+ nationals ended when the UK left the EU in 2020.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • FAIR ☛ Billionaire’s Mouthpiece Searches for Reasons to Avoid Taxing Billionaires

    The Washington Post, which exists mainly to serve the interests of its mega-billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, unsurprisingly thinks taxing the wealth of billionaires is a bad idea (FAIR.org, 12/11/19). Its recent editorial (1/1/26) warning California not to institute a tax on extreme wealth—headlined “California Will Miss Billionaires When They’re Gone”—illustrates that when you’re telling the boss exactly what he wants to hear, you don’t have to think very hard.

  • EFF ☛ The Homeland Security Spending Trail: How to Follow the Money Through U.S. Government Databases

    The U.S. government publishes volumes of detailed data on the money it spends, but searching through it and finding information can be challenging. Complex search functions and poor user interfaces on government reporting sites can hamper an investigation, as can inconsistent company profiles and complex corporate ownership structures.

    This week, EFF and the Heinrich Boell Foundation released an update to our database of vendors providing technology to components of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protections (CBP). It includes new vendor profiles, new fields, and updated data on top contractors, so that journalists and researchers have a jumping-off point for their own investigations.

• Environment

  • International Business Times ☛ Mississippi Lands $20B xAI Data Centre: Jobs Surge but Pollution Fears Grow

    Governor Tate Reeves revealed on Thursday that Southaven will become home to a $20 billion xAI data hub, a move he described as the most significant private capital injection Mississippi has ever witnessed. This massive project by Elon Musk's artificial intelligence firm represents a historic milestone for the state's industrial landscape.

  • 404 Media ☛ Texans Are Fighting a 6,000 Acre Nuclear-Powered Datacenter

    But it’s unclear if Palantir wants any part of Project Matador. One unnamed client—rumored to be Amazon—dropped out of the project in December and cancelled a $150 million contract with Fermi America. The news hit the company’s stock hard, sending its value into a tailspin and triggering a class action lawsuit from investors.

    Yet construction continues. The plan says it’ll take 11 years to build out the massive datacenter, which will first be powered by a series of natural gas generators before the planned nuclear reactors come online.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Omicron Limited ☛ How medieval monks tried to stay warm in the winter

      Despite their evident value to the community, warming houses do not feature prominently in written records. Nevertheless, surviving examples of buildings and textual references do allow insights into monastic lives, and the difference that the calefactory must have made. Examples from medieval England included the Cistercian house of Meaux in Yorkshire. Founded in 1141, nothing survives of the building but an extensive chronicle does.

    • RFERL ☛ Russia's State-Owned Railway Giant Is In Serious Trouble. Blame The Ukraine War.

      Given the company's importance to Russia's overall economy -- its operations account for 2.5 percent of Russia's GDP -- it's widely considered an entity that's "too big to fail": The government cannot, and will not, let it go bankrupt.

    • [Old] Reuters ☛ Exclusive: Russia weighs how to prop up Russian Railways which is $51 billion in debt, sources say

      Russia's government is discussing different ways to prop up Russian Railways, the country's biggest commercial employer, which has built up a 4 trillion rouble ($50.8 billion) debt pile, two people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

    • [Old] Derek Sivers ☛ Relax for the same result | Derek Sivers

      So apparently all of that exhausting, red-faced, full-on push-push-push I had been doing had given me only a 4 percent boost. I could just take it easy and get 96 percent of the results.

      And what a difference in experience! To go the same distance, in about the same time, but one way leaves me exhausted, and the other way, rejuvenated.

  • Overpopulation

    • LRT ☛ Demographic cliff: Lithuania’s birth rate continues to fall despite local incentives [Ed: An incentive given means the regime is attempting to somehow compensate for common sense. They speak of school-to-trenches pipelines, not womb-to-grave pipelines.]

      Lithuania’s birth rate is declining rapidly each year, particularly in regional areas, with deaths now outnumbering births by roughly two to one, according to official statistics. Despite efforts by some municipalities to boost births with generous financial incentives, the country’s demographic indicators remain among the worst in the European Union, raising concerns about long-term economic costs and even national security.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Anthropic reportedly seeking to raise $10B at $350B valuation

    The company’s latest fundraising push comes about two months after it secured an investment valued at up to $15 billion from Microsoft Corp. and Nvidia Corp. A few weeks earlier, it received $13 billion from a group of institutional investors.

  • International Business Times ☛ Job Layoffs Surge but Hiring Rate Hits Record Low — How to Survive It

    'You cannot have a healthy economy without a healthy job market,' warns Bloomberg Business co-host Stacey Vanek Smith, describing the current US labour landscape as eerily 'still' and stuck with 'a light fever'. Her assessment, shared on Bloomberg's Everybody's Business podcast, comes as new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals the national hiring rate has fallen to just 3.2%, matching its lowest level in more than a decade, excluding the pandemic-era collapse.

  • Pete Brown ☛ It’s time for a different future.

    And what’s funny about that is that all of these bleak depictions of the future can largely be traced back to a very small handful of sources. For a while now, I have thought that the single biggest influence on our shared vision of a bleak future has been Blade Runner, with its vast factory/cityscapes, perpetual darkness and rain, and megacorps. TBH I think its influence in that regard outstrips its qualities as a film.

  • Bruce Lawson ☛ DMA review consultation responses

    Because I’m so the rock ‘n’ roll, I’ve been reading the summary of responses to the first review of the Digital Markets Act. There were “450 contributions submitted by a broad range of interested parties, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), gatekeepers, civil society organisations, academics, and individual citizens”.

    The report contains many surprises. Some of them might shock you.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Where did the money go?

    America is trudging through its third consecutive K-shaped recovery (an economic rally where the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer). The rich have never been richer, and the debt-fueled consumption that kept the economy going is tapering down to a trickle.

    This isn't down to the iron laws of economics or the great forces of history. It's because we made rules that let rich people steal from everyone else, including local, state and federal tax authorities, and also workers, customers and suppliers (and society at large). From junk fees to wage theft to greedflation, politicians have thumbed the scales in favor of scumbags who drain the wealth of workers and remit it to parasites.

  • Nick Heer ☛ CSAM Generator xAI, Run by Elon Musk, Raises $20 Billion

    Twenty billion dollars is a ghastly sum of money to give anyone, let alone someone who, in his official capacity, cut funding and killed over half a million people. This feels less like an investment for direct financial gain, and more like a way for a select group of people to find influence through a company connected to a transparently corrupt government.

  • New York Times ☛ Anthropic Said to Be in Talks to Raise Funding at a $350 Billion Valuation

    In October, OpenAI closed a deal that values the company at $500 billion. On Tuesday, Elon Musk’s xAI said it had raised $20 billion in a funding round that most likely put its value at above $230 billion.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Pocketbook realities reshape Americans' commitment to democratic ideals

    For each dimension, respondents were shown either a normative democratic condition (such as equal treatment under the law) or an illiberal alternative (such as courts favoring people like the respondent). Participants made multiple forced choices, requiring them to prioritize specific values over others –– mirroring the complex trade-offs voters might face in real political decision-making.

    The study revealed four striking findings.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • New York Times ☛ Russian Propaganda Ramps Up After U.S. Raid in Venezuela

      A network of websites known as “Portal Kombat” is spreading messages about U.S. military hardware, according to tracking firms.

    • Vox ☛ Renee Nicole Good shooting: Trump’s dishonest defense of Minnesota ICE shooter

      No aspect of this statement is supported by the available evidence. But its last claim is menacing for the flagrance of its dishonesty. Anyone who has watched a video of Good’s death knows that her killer was still standing after she perished. The footage shows him reholstering his gun and, eventually, driving away. Even those who claim to see Good driving at the officer recognize that he did not sustain life-threatening wounds. Trump’s statement is therefore not just a lie but an expression of contempt for the truth. The president is telling us that he is indifferent to what actually happened to Good, and is willing to say anything to aid her killer’s cause.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • New York Times ☛ Iran Is Cut Off From Internet as Protests Calling for Regime Change Intensify

    Iran plunged into an [Internet] blackout on Thursday, monitoring groups said, as nationwide protests demanding the ouster of the Islamic government spread to multiple cities and grew in size, according to witnesses.

    The [Internet] shutdown came a day after the heads of Iran’s judiciary and its security services said they would take tough measures against anyone protesting. But the threats did not deter demonstrators.

  • The Register UK ☛ Iran’s [Internet] goes dark amid mass protests

    “Live metrics show Iran is now in the midst of a nationwide [Internet] blackout; the incident follows a series of escalating digital censorship measures targeting protests across the country and hinders the public's right to communicate at a critical moment,” the organization wrote, later updating its analysis to suggest the outage has persisted for at least twelve hours and saw “connectivity flatlining at ~1% of ordinary levels.”

  • New York Times ☛ University to Pay $500,000 to Professor It Fired Over Charlie Kirk Post

    The professor, Darren Michael, 56, who teaches acting and directing, was reinstated on Dec. 30 as part of the settlement with the university, which ended a more than three-month dispute over his employment.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ House Committee Subpoenas Journalist For Reporting On Commander Involved In Maduro Raid

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • FAIR ☛ ‘These Two Powerful Corporations Have a Shared Interest in Trying to Bust This Union’: CounterSpin interview with Derek Seidman on Starbucks and Walmart

    Janine Jackson interviewed historian Derek Seidman about the Starbucks strike for the December 19, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

  • Robert Reich ☛ A cold-blooded murder

    Several videos taken from different angles (see, for example, here) and several analyses of the videos (see here) make it clear that Trump’s and Noem’s descriptions of what occurred are blatant lies.

    According to an eyewitness, ICE agents yelled contradictory instructions at Good — one telling her to leave and then, as she complied, another tried to open her door and told her to get out, while a third shot her in the face.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ ICE Shot a Woman Dead — Then Lied About What Happened

    Huh. There must be some mistake. Because in the scene captured on film, there are no violent rioters, just a scattering of neighborhood residents standing around and filming ICE agents who are in a large, open space. The driver involved didn’t try to run anyone over, but had stopped, reversed away from the agents, and was driving away from them with her wheels pointed in the opposite direction of the agents when one of them, who actively walked in front of her car, shot and killed her. Not a single officer sustained any serious injury they would need to recover from. And the only one who conceivably might have, the shooter, is seen walking away completely normal after killing the driver.

  • The Nation ☛ Minneapolis to ICE: Get the Fuck Out!

    Any investigation undertaken by the federal government will likely be a sham, Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, added. “Folks should be trying to produce their own sense of justice,” he said, citing the We Charge Genocide petition of the 1950s, which aimed to hold police and mobs accountable for the killings of unarmed Black men and women. The US government has long been reluctant to reckon with its violence.

  • International Business Times ☛ The Fourth Amendment Firewall: Can ICE Legally Conduct Mass House-to-House Sweeps?

    Legal scholars have long held that these protections apply to everyone inside the United States, regardless of citizenship or immigration status. While ICE operates under civil immigration law, federal courts have ruled that constitutional safeguards still apply when agents seek to enter private residences.

    Under established legal standards, immigration agents may not force entry into a home without a judicial warrant unless a recognised exception applies. These exceptions are narrow and include voluntary consent from an occupant or urgent emergency circumstances. Administrative warrants issued by immigration authorities do not carry the same legal authority as warrants signed by a judge.

  • TruthOut ☛ ICE Agent Shoots and Kills Woman at Minneapolis Protest | Truthout

    “She was trying to turn around, and the ICE agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in — like, his midriff was on her bumper — and he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times,” the witness who lives on the road, Emily Heller, told the outlet.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ The Consequences of Rejecting "Defund the Police"

    More than five years later, I still find the Democrats’ 2020 heel turn on policing to be one of the most despicable acts of political cowardice I have witnessed in my adult lifetime. Yet to this very day, the party and its favorite consultants and pundits still believe that they did the right thing. Guess what? You didn’t. Defunding the police is a good idea. By rejecting it, you have only allowed more and more guns to accumulate around our house. Yesterday, in Minnesota, one of them shot and killed Renee Good. Ironically, she was killed while protesting for the rights of her neighbors to be free from harassment by armed men. Her death is the latest awful and predictable consequence of our lunatic attachment to the myth that safety comes at gunpoint.

  • ACLU ☛ Filming and Photographing the Police

    The right of citizens to record the police is a critical check and balance. It creates an independent record of what took place in a particular incident, free from accusations of bias, lying, or faulty memory. It is no accident that some of the most high-profile cases of police misconduct have involved video and audio records.

  • ACLU ☛ Protesters’ Rights

    The First Amendment protects your right to assemble and express your views through protest. However, police and other government officials are allowed to place certain narrow restrictions on the exercise of speech rights. Make sure you’re prepared by brushing up on your rights before heading out into the streets.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ A town in North Carolina is returning land to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians

    The mound will remain publicly accessible, and the tribe plans to open an interpretive center in a building it owns next to the site.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Minnesota blocked from investigating ICE shooting

    On January 7, an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen and mother of three who local officials say was acting as a legal observer during an immigration enforcement operation. According to NBC News, Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension has now been cut out of the investigation entirely — blocked from accessing the crime scene, video evidence, and witness interviews.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert Hit Out at ICE Killing in Minneapolis

    “Now, I saw this video,” Kimmel said. “It didn’t look anybody got run over to me. It looked to me like a woman got scared, tried to drive away, and they shot her. That’ll be for the court to decide.”

  • BoingBoing ☛ When the vice president blesses the killing

    The young mother of three was driving her car, responding to shouted and conflicting orders. She posed no imminent threat. She was killed anyway. And the response from the highest levels of government was not grief, not restraint, or even procedural caution. It was encouragement.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Minneapolis ICE Shooting of Renee Nicole Good: What We Know

    Several cities across the United States held protests after a 37-year-old woman was fatally shot in the head by a masked ICE agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning. The tragedy occurred one day after thousands of federal agents were deployed to Minnesota for a 30-day immigration enforcement “surge.” The Minnesota Star Tribune was first to identify the woman as Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen who lived in the Twin Cities with her partner and six-year-old son. Good had two other children, ages 12 and 15, from a separate relationship.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Minneapolis ICE shooting: The videos that show what really happened

    However, The Telegraph has analysed the video, which shows Ms Good appeared to move her car away from the ICE agent with whom she made no contact, casting doubt on the White House’s account.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ US: ICE agent kills woman during Minneapolis raid

    "They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense," the mayor said. "Having seen the video myself, I wanna tell everybody directly, that is bulls---."

    Meanwhile, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called on people not to believe the DHS's "propaganda machine" regarding its response to the killing.

  • MinnPost ☛ Update: ICE officer shoots and kills women during immigration crackdown

    Videos taken by bystanders with different vantage points and posted to social media show an officer approaching an SUV stopped across the middle of the road, demanding the driver open the door and grabbing the handle. The SUV begins to pull forward and a different ICE officer standing in front of the vehicle pulls his weapon and immediately fires at least two shots into the SUV at close range, jumping back as the vehicle moves toward him. It was not clear from the videos if the vehicle made contact with the officer. The SUV then sped into two cars parked on a curb nearby before crashing to a stop.

  • The Next Move ☛ Minneapolis Gaslighting

    This is all gaslighting. You are being instructed to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears; as Orwell put it, the party’s “final, most essential command.”

    The question is: What are you going to do about it?

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ BGP in 2025

    At the start of each year, it’s been my practice to report on the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system over the previous 12 months, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet.

  • APNIC ☛ BGP updates in 2025

    However, the scalability of BGP as the Internet’s routing protocol is not only dependent on the number of prefixes carried in the routing table. BGP protocol behaviour in the form of dynamic routing updates is also part of this story.

  • TeleGeography ☛ The Submarine Cable Boom as Told by a Decade of TeleGeography Maps

    This futuristic, high-contrast 2025 design depicts 597 cable systems and 1,712 landings. For those keeping score, that's 38 more cable systems and 76 more landings than the 2024 edition.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Michael Tsai ☛ Logitech Certificate Expiration Breaks App

  • Lap Cat Software ☛ Myths about Logitech Developer ID certificate expiration

    So what happened with the Logitech mouse software? The blame here lies entirely with Logitech and not with macOS or Developer ID. The Logitech software performed some additional, custom validation, which failed after the Logitech Developer ID code signing certificate expired. That was an unforced error by Logitech, and the issue will not affect other Mac developers, regardless of when their Developer ID certificates expire. My own valid Developer ID certificate expires in 2027, and that will not stop my old apps from running. Indeed, I had a previous Developer ID certificate that expired in 2021, and its expiration didn’t stop any of my old apps from running either. That’s not how macOS works. That’s not how code signing works.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• India Times ☛ EU antitrust regulators to decide on Google's Wiz deal by February 10

  EU antitrust ‍regulators will decide by February 10 whether ⁠to clear Alphabet's $32 billion acquisition of cybersecurity company Wiz, its largest ‌deal ‌ever, according to a filing on ‌the European Commission website.

• Digital Music News ☛ Ticketmaster Faces Class Action Lawsuit for Over Surveillance

  This complaint echoes earlier criticisms, including FTC action on deceptive pricing involving fees hidden until checkout, which inflated costs by up to 44%. Other class actions have targeted data breaches like that in 2024, which affected 560 million users’ names, emails, and partial card details.

• Trademarks

  • TTAB Blog ☛ In 2025, What Was The Rate of TTAB Affirmance of Section 2(d) Refusals to Register?

    The TTABlogger once again has taken a stab at estimating the percentage of Section 2(d) likelihood-of-confusion refusals that were affirmed by the Board in the past calendar year. I counted 206 decisions, of which 186 were affirmances and 20 were reversals. That's an affirmance rate of 90%. Two of the decisions (discussed briefly below) were deemed precedential.

  • TTAB Blog ☛ The TTAB Issued 11 Precedential Opinions in 2025

    Over the past four years, the Board has issued between 30 and 38 precedential rulings per year. In 2025, the Board issued 11. One might ask, why the drop-off?

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ Bad Bunny Faces $16M Infringement Lawsuit Over Vocal Samples

    The complaint, filed in Puerto Rico by Tainaly Y. Serrano Rivera, claims that a vocal recording of her reciting the phrase, “Mira, puñeta, no me quiten el perreo,” which roughly means, “Listen, damn it, don’t take away my dancing,” was used without permission or a written contract. She says she recorded the phrase at the request of Bad Bunny’s producer, Rosado, and that she did not know the recording would be used commercially.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ French Court Orders Google DNS to Block Pirate Sites, Dismisses ‘Cloudflare-First’ Defense

    The Paris Judicial Court has ordered Google to block nineteen additional pirate site domains through its public DNS resolver. The blockade was requested by Canal+ and aims to stop pirate streams of Champions League games. In its defense, Google argued that rightsholders should target intermediaries higher up the chain first, such as Cloudflare's CDN, but the court rejected that.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Old-School MTV Superfan Creates a ‘Simulator’ of What the Channel Was Like In the 80s

    A fan project recreates the old-school music video format of the original MTV, but Paramount already seems poised to shut it down. Gen X and elder millennials have long known that MTV has gone the way of the dodo, even as a smattering of classic music video channels proliferate (in ever-decreasing regions) under the brand.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Let the Phono V Fireworks Begin: CRB Kicks Off High-Stakes Streaming Rate Proceeding for 2028-2032

    Let the Phonorecords V fireworks begin: The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has officially kicked off the high-stakes rate-setting proceeding, which will determine songwriter and publisher royalties for on-demand streaming (plus permanent downloads) between 2028 and 2032.

  • California Court Grants Summary Judgment for Pinterest in Copyright Suit Over Email Notifications

    The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday granted summary judgment in favor of Pinterest, Inc. in a copyright monopoly infringement suit brought by the estate of a professional photographer, finding that the social control media platform is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) safe harbor provision.