Leftovers

• Yancey Strickler ☛ The 2026 A-Corp Annual Letter

  That was one of many dozens of conversations we had with artists last year that helped shape this project. Those discussions revealed how big the gap is between how the public values creative work and the economic power that lives with the people who make it.

  But that gap isn’t permanent or fated. That gap is structural and changeable.

  Here's what we're doing to change it.

• James G ☛ Nature

  The topic of this month’s IndieWeb Carnival is the meaning of life. I think this is one of these questions that is answered over a lifetime; an answer that builds with the years.

• Austin Kleon ☛ The wheel of the blog

  3 years ago I built a little widget for the sidebar of this blog that displays other posts that were posted “on this date.” I love checking it periodically, and I find that certain times of year I become obsessed with certain topics and certain days in the year are “hot spots” with especially good posts.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Network of Home Computers Detected 100 Potential Alien Signals

    The goal of the project, called SETI@home, was to trawl through data collected by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico for signs of unusual radio signals from the cosmos. It was a powerful example of “distributed computing,” which relies on a huge network of individual computers — but whether the search has borne any fruit remains unclear as scientists continue to analyze the wealth of data.

  • Stephen Smith ☛ Review of Science Under Siege

    I recently finished reading “Science Under Siege” by Michael Mann and Peter Hotez. Michael Mann is a climate scientist who writes extensively about global warming and hence has been attacked ruthlessly by climate deniers. Peter Hotez is a vaccine scientist and has been attacked relentlessly by anti-vaxxers. There is a lot of money and influence behind these attacks, and this book is a thorough analysis of all the forces at work against science and why they are doing it. To some degree the book is depressing in how many people of power have no morals and are in it 100% for personal gain at the expense of everyone else. At the same time reiterating the truth over and over has got to have some effect. The other thing on science’s side is that mother nature doesn’t listen to social media or lunatic podcasters, it follows the laws of nature in quite predictable relentless ways and as things get worse, even those with their heads buried in the sand of fox news will start to notice.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Rational Functions Solved!

    It's not every day that one of my open problems is solved, especially one that I asked about over three decades ago. Matt Kovacs-Deak, Daochen Wang and Rain Zimin Yang just posted a paper showing that if you have a Boolean function \(f\) and two polynomials \(p\) and \(q\) of degree at most \(d\) such that \(f(x)=p(x)/q(x)\) for every \(x\) of length \(n\) then \(f\) has decision tree complexity at most \(2d^4\).

• Career/Education

  • American Library Association ☛ ALA, Leading Education Organizations Highlight Value of Technology for Learning as Senate Committee Examines Kids’ Screen Time

    Following the hearing, organizational leaders reinforced the importance of clearly defining “screen time” and recognizing the distinct, beneficial role that education technology and connectivity play in K-12 learning.

  • Makoism ☛ When It Falls Over

    Dependencies aren't created deliberately. They happen. There's a paradox with people who become "the reliable one," indispensable, with everything routed through you. These don't feel like a problem until things come crashing down on top of you.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Yancey Strickler

    This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Yancey Strickler, whose blog can be found at ystrickler.com.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Catch this!

    And to-do lists, which will totally transform your life, once you realize that the most important to-do list is the one you maintain for everyone else who owes you a response, a package, or money:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo

    Other essential tools languish in neglect, artifacts of the old, good web – the elegant weapons that dominated a more civilized age. First among these? RSS readers: [...]

  • Matthew Weber ☛ Lacking Job, Lacking Motivation

    Turns out that a big factor in my motivation to actually do things relied on me having a paying job to keep me busy. Now that there is less structure in my life, I’m finding that I’m less likely to do the things that aren’t “have tos”. I don’t have to make a video, so I don’t. I don’t have to write a blog post, so I don’t.

    When I had a job, it was actually way easier to do these extra things. The structure provided by the 9-5 (even if I didn’t actually work 9-5), kept me motivated in almost every other area of my life, and now that’s gone.

  • James G ☛ Getting ready for studying

    I start my degree in art history at the Open University in under two weeks. Just after the holidays, I got access to the materials for my first year, which is made up of two modules: “Discovering the arts and humanities” and “Cultures”. In the former module I’ll study a new topic each week in the Humanities, including the reputation of Cleopatra, Vincent Van Gogh’s painting and the blues in music. In the latter I’ll be studying ancient cultures, art and power, literary classics, and cultural journeys.

• Hardware

  • C4ISRNET ☛ US Navy, Marines to get L3Harris robots for bomb disposal missions

    The U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Navy have sealed a deal with L3Harris Technologies for 34 large T7 robots to support the services in explosive ordnance disposal missions.

  • USMC ☛ US Navy, Marines to get L3Harris robots for bomb disposal missions

    The T7 is a robust robotic system with a highly maneuverable arm that can lift payloads weighing up to nearly 300 pounds and be fitted with a variety of interchangeable components that allow it to disarm bombs in diverse environments. Featuring a multicamera view, it can operate in a variety of confined spaces and also climb stairs.

  • Quanta Magazine ☛ Why There’s No Single Best Way To Store Information | Quanta Magazine

    The math of data structures helps us understand how different storage systems come with different trade-offs between time, memory, and other resources.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Wait, a repairable ThinkPad!?

    If you haven’t seen any of the CES keynotes or announcements this year, or indeed any of the commentary, let me summarise it for you with two letters: actually, why bother, you already know what it is.

  • PC Mag ☛ I Tried the Slick New ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14. It's Lenovo’s Most Repairable Ultraportable Yet

    It all comes down to Lenovo’s new “Space Frame” interior design, which overhauls the X1's internals to create more room for improved thermal performance, along with more user-replaceable parts than we've ever seen in an ultraportable ThinkPad laptop. Lenovo gave me a sneak preview of the laptop ahead of CES 2026, and I came away deeply impressed with the company’s commitment to using the blue-chip ThinkPad X1 Carbon as a platform for innovation—and, to my surprise, sustainability.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ The Dyson Supersonic Hair Dryer

    Located on the purple ring at the rear of the device are two silver buttons. One controls the airflow speed, and the other its temperature. As you press each one, another LED above it lights up to indicate the chosen setting, and the device reacts immediately to your new input. Straight forward right? Well, not quite. Say you want to increase the temperature, what would you do? Simple, you press the button. But what about decreasing the temperature? Simple, you press the… oh.

    This design falls into the trap of thinking you can eschew (gesundheit) two buttons for one, and give it double duty. This means you go from having two clear, unambiguous buttons, into one unclear, ambiguous button. When you understand how it works, that ambiguity is translated into frustration.

  • Jamie Montgomerie ☛ Rescuing the makerspace's vintage microcontrollers

    I recently joined my local makerspace, and one of the exciting things there is this shelf of electronic components, available for all members to use: [...]

  • [Repeat] Daniel Lemire ☛ How stagnant is CPU technology?

    Sometimes, people tell me that there is no more progress in CPU performance.

    Consider these three processors which had comparable prices at release time.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Overpopulation ☛ Overpopulation is a major factor in global mortality

    The media love a crisis but ignore systemic problems. Storms and fires get much attention yet kill relatively few people, whereas neglected overpopulation kills many more, through diseases, malnutrition and other causes.

  • TruthOut ☛ House GOP Bill Would Roll Back Key Protections in US Chemical Safety Law

    A CAL FIRE S-2T firefighting tanker releases retardant while battling the Palisades Fire in the Mandeville Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, on January 11, 2025. A new bill prohibits the EPA from restricting any chemicals used in aerospace fire suppression that have been certified by the Federal Aviation Administration or the Department of Defense. Such firefighting foams were previously a major source of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

  • Doc Searls ☛ How to Be Old, Lesson 1

    Works every time for me, and I am now certifiably weak. (But not too weak to type this.)

• Proprietary

  • Threat Source ☛ UAT-8837 targets critical infrastructure sectors in North America

    After obtaining initial access — either by successful exploitation of vulnerable servers or by using compromised credentials — UAT-8837 predominantly deploys open-source tools to harvest sensitive information such as credentials, security configurations, and domain and Active Directory (AD) information to create multiple channels of access to their victims. The threat actor uses a combination of tools in their post-compromise hands-on-keyboard operations, including Earthworm, Sharphound, DWAgent, and Certipy. The TTPs, tooling, and remote infrastructure associated with UAT-8837 were also seen in the recent exploitation of CVE-2025-53690, a ViewState Deserialization zero-day vulnerability in SiteCore products, indicating that UAT-8837 may have access to zero-day exploits.

  • Leon Mika ☛ On Apple's Icons for Their Creator Studio Bundle - Leon Mika

    It’s been said before, but the “icons” of Apple’s Creator Studio apps are not doing their job as icons. By Apple’s own definition, an app icon is meant to express the purpose or personality of an app, and help people “recognize it at a glance.” But I’ve been starting at these new icons for several minutes now and I’m struggling to work out what each one is.

  • Undeadly ☛ OpenBSD-current now runs as guest under Apple Hypervisor

    Following a recent series of commits by Helg Bredow (helg@) and Stefan Fritsch (sf@), OpenBSD/arm64 now works as a guest operating system under the Apple Hypervisor.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Google Gemini to Provide Foundation for Some Apple Intelligence Features

    Or, to put it another way, Gemini is worth to Apple roughly what a few months of default search placement in Safari are to Google, assuming these figures are in the right ballpark.

  • Eaton Works ☛ I’m The Captain Now: Hijacking a global ocean supply chain network

    There’s a good chance you have never heard of BLUVOYIX or Bluspark Global, and that’s ok! Not every company that powers global commerce is a household name. Despite their low profile, companies like these have an important role to play in keeping the global supply chain running in the background. Breaches at companies you haven’t heard of can often have the worst impacts.

    BLUVOYIX is a SaaS platform that powers the cargo and ocean shipping/logistics industry. It is best described by this block of text from their website: A cloud-based solution that helps shippers manage their supply chain data in a frictionless, neutral environment supported by a best-in-class tech stack

  • International Business Times ☛ Big Tech to Offshore More Jobs to India in 2026 — US Layoffs Push Workers to Brink

    In the US, a number of firms have admitted to replacing their workforce with AI, according to a report by tech.co. The report named Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, Atlassian, Amazon, Ikea, Best Buy, Duolingo, Fiverr, Indeed, UPS, MSN, BlueFocus, IBM, and BT among the companies that have replaced their staff and are preparing for broader AI deployment.

  • Quartz ☛ Guess who gets more severance in the era of endless layoffs

    A new analysis of severance packages finds that women continue to receive smaller payouts than men after layoffs, underscoring another dimension of workplace inequality as job cuts ripple through the economy.

  • The Register UK ☛ Bankrupt scooter startup's single key controlled everything • The Register

  • Ubisoft Sees Waves Of Layoffs In 'The Division' Studio, Halifax, Abu Dhai and More Already In 2026

    Just in the first few weeks of 2026, and some of the tail end of 2025, Ubisoft has seen a number of layoffs across its global studios.

    The biggest hits are a full shutdown of Ubisoft’s Halifax studio, which was best known for its mobile adaptations, as well as 55 to be done in the Swedish studio, with unknown distribution between general operations and Massive Entertainment, the latter of which is responsible for The Tom’s Clancy: The Division franchise.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Eight ways AI will shape geopolitics in 2026

      And the strategy is working. Last year, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) and CheckFirst demonstrated how mass-produced Pravda articles were cited in Wikipedia, X Community Notes, and responses from major chatbots. Parallel research by Anthropic and the United Kingdom’s AI Safety Institute has shown how trace amounts of faulty data can effectively “poison” even very large models. People increasingly turn to AI systems to understand current events. If an AI model’s knowledge has been altered by sources intended to deceive, then the users’ will be, too.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Renee Nicole Good, Grok, and the Punishing of Women

      Every time I’ve found myself lost for words over something in the news this past year—which has happened disconcertingly often—I’ve returned to the same book for guidance, the philosopher Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, published in 2017, largely in response to the election of Donald Trump. Misogyny, Manne argues, is often less about hating women outright than about policing and punishing their behavior.

    • The Atlantic ☛ A Tipping Point in Online Child Abuse

      This is concerning in and of itself. It means that the overall volume of child porn detected on the internet grew by 7 percent since 2024, when the previous record had been set. But also alarming is the tremendous increase in child porn, and in particular videos, generated by AI. At first blush, the proliferation of AI-generated depictions of child sexual abuse may leave the misimpression that no children were harmed. This is not the case. AI-generated, abusive images and videos feature and victimize real children—either because models were trained on existing child porn, or because AI was used to manipulate real photos and videos.

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Wikipedia moves to monetise AI giants' reliance on its content

      Wikipedia content is crucial to training AI models – its 65 million articles across over 300 languages are a key part of training data for generative AI chatbots and assistants developed by tech majors.

      However, companies scraping high volumes of freely available Wikipedia knowledge for AI training has driven up server demand and, subsequently, costs at the non-profit, whose primary source of income is small donations from the public.

    • Manton Reece ☛ AI and Wikipedia

      Wikipedia is an incredible resource. Even though I use AI chatbots all the time, I still find myself reading Wikipedia pages fairly often. There’s always going to be value in reading something longer that was researched and written by humans.

    • Jason Velazquez ☛ Slop is Everywhere For Those With Eyes to See

      We are over consuming content on the FYP. The sudden surge of low-quality, AI-generated content, i.e. “AI slop,” is a byproduct of that overconsumption. We don't see it because, well, we're conditioned not to, but slop always arrives on time. Slop is inevitable. Slop is quintessential. Slop is everywhere for those with eyes to see.

      Olive oil, wasabi, saffron, vanilla, Wagyu, honey, champagne, and truffle,...reality TV, all hold examples of what happens when demand exceeds supply— companies fill the gap with slop. The free market loves a good filler. So, why should the digital realm be any different?

    • Cassidy Williams ☛ Do not give up your brain

      It’s really tempting to say that you’re just “using the resources you have” when you use a simple query here and there, but your brain is the best resource you’ll have for the rest of your life, and you should keep it sharp.

      Anyway, I might be saying the obvious, so let me leave you with this quote: [...]

    • Pivot to AI ☛ If AI coding is so good … where are the performance numbers?

      And you know. It turns out I can deny it — if they can’t give numbers to back up their claims. Because we can and have measured AI coding effectiveness. We have a methodology. The AI bros just don’t want to measure. Wonder why that is.

    • The Register UK ☛ Campaigners demand Apple, Google remove Grok from stores

      A coalition of 28 digital rights organizations, led by UltraViolet, delivered nearly-identical letters to Apple's Tim Cook and Google's Sundar Pichai on Wednesday.

      The missives, part of a campaign dubbed "Get Grok Gone," accuse both companies of profiting from the proliferation of non-consensual intimate images (NCII) and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) generated on X using the Grok AI chatbot. The groups argue that allowing the apps to remain available violates Apple's and Google's own app store policies against facilitating or profiting from abusive content.

    • Futurism ☛ Furious Protestor Tears AI-Generated Art Off Wall of Exhibit, Chews It Up Into Tiny Shreds Using His Teeth

      The use of generative AI for creative purposes has spawned a major countermovement. From game developers reeling from a wave of criticism for using the tech to artists staging mass protests against AI, the backlash against what’s being hailed as a technological revolution grew massively last year.

    • University of Alaska ☛ Student arrested for eating AI art in UAF gallery protest — The Sun Star - UAF's Student Voice

      On Tuesday, January 13, University of Alaska Fairbanks undergraduate student Graham Granger was detained after he had been found “ripping artwork off the walls and eating it in a reported protest,” according to the UAF police department. Granger was chewing and spitting out images pinned to the wall; this artwork was made by Masters of Fine Arts student Nick Dwyer in collaboration with artificial intelligence. Granger claimed that he destroyed the artwork because it was AI generated, according to the report by university police. Police estimated that at least 57 of the 160 images up on the wall were ruined. Granger was arrested for criminal mischief in the 5th degree and booked at the Fairbanks Correctional Center.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Silence of the Left on Iran

      This framework has ideological, if not factual, consistency. In the (admittedly) simplified version of the hard left’s worldview, the Iranian regime represents an anti-imperialist force that should be defended against America and Israel, two countries they view as agents of oppression. I can’t help but think of the way some intellectuals in the 1950s ignored Stalin’s Gulags because the Soviet Union was the side they wanted to support in the Cold War. From this Manichaean perspective, what is happening in Iran right now as the bodies pile up is possibly exaggerated, possibly the work of the Mossad or the CIA, or at the very least a disruption openly desired by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu (and therefore evil).

    • The Verge ☛ Fortnite blocks creators from selling prize wheel spins

      Epic Games is making a big change to the rules for Fortnite creators just days after allowing them to publish experiences with in-game transactions. Beginning January 20th, experiences — which Epic Games calls “islands” — will not be able to offer in-island transactions as “a ‘spin’ or ‘increased luck’ for a prize wheel,” according to an Epic staffer on Reddit.

    • Deadline ☛ BBC Close To Agreeing Landmark Deal To Produce Shows For YouTube

      The BBC is preparing to make original shows for YouTube, which could then later switch to iPlayer or BBC Sounds. The hope is that this will ensure the BBC meets young audiences where they consume content, helping the corporation maintain its relevance for a future generation of licence fee payers.

      The YouTube deal was first reported by the Financial Times, but was confirmed to Deadline by a person briefed on the plans, which could be announced as early as next week. The BBC declined to comment.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Nick Heer ☛ The Exact Same Things Were Said About Smart Glasses Ten Years Ago

      But there are problems with today’s smart glasses that remain unchanged from those that affected Google Glass. Most obviously, they are still a privacy nightmare for yourself and for others. Meta says the externally-visible recording LED must not be obstructed to record video, but people are modifying the glasses to remove that restriction. They must effectively be treated like spy glasses because they could be recording anywhere — in a public area running facial recognition software, to the apparent privacy of a massage room.

  • Confidentiality

    • Dramforever ☛ Cryptography 30 years apart: Ascon on an HP-16C

      Ascon (NIST, Wikipedia) is a set of lightweight cryptographic algorithms intended for resource constrained applications that nevertheless is intended to produce modern security. It was originally developed in 2014, and was finalized as a standard in August of 2025 as NIST SP 800-232 “Ascon-Based Lightweight Cryptography Standards for Constrained Devices: Authenticated Encryption, Hash, and Extendable Output Functions”.

      How resource constrained? How about an HP-16C (Wikipedia), a programmable programmer’s calculator from over 30 years earlier? ~200 bytes total of program and storage should be enough.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Federal courts deny Trump request for private voter data in 2 states | Alabama Reflector

    Democratic election officials have criticized the data requests, calling them an unwarranted attempt by the Trump administration to exercise federal power over elections. Under the U.S. Constitution, states administer elections, though Congress can regulate them.

  • Oregon ☛ Oregon not required to give feds voter data, judge rules • Oregon Capital Chronicle

    “The federal government tried to abuse their power to force me to break my oath of office and hand over your private data,” he said. “I stood up to them and said no. Now, the court sided with us. Tonight, we proved, once again, we have the power to push back and win.”

    The U.S. Department of Justice demanded last summer that Oregon and other states hand over a wide range of information, including the full name, date of birth, residential address and driver’s license number or partial Social Security number for every registered voter.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Debbie Dingell talks policy, higher education in CSG town hall

    “I think we’re at a crisis point in this country, and our democracy is being tested, and we have issues that we have to work on,” Dingell said. “What I’m most worried about is that we are normalizing attacking each other, we are normalizing the lack of civility and we are normalizing political violence — and that is unacceptable.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Billionaires’ Dreams of a Cryptostate Undergird Trump’s Push for Greenland

    That company, KoBold Metals, uses artificial intelligence to locate and extract rare earth minerals. Their proprietary algorithm parses government-funded geological surveys and other data to locate significant deposits. The program pinpointed southwest Greenland’s rugged coastline, where the company now has a 51 percent stake in the Disko-Nuussuaq project, searching for minerals like copper.

  • Forbes ☛ Greenland’s Billionaire Investors: Bezos, Gates, Altman And More Followed Trump’s Lead

    According to a May 2025 regulatory filing by Kobold’s former Greenland exploration partner 80 Mile Plc, Kobold no longer owns equity in the firms’ joint venture to hunt for battery minerals in western Greenland, but will receive any royalties “over future production from the project.” Kobold “conducted approximately $13.4 million of high-quality exploration activities” in 2022, according to the same filing, but did not advance with drilling.

  • India Times ☛ From Jeff Bezos to Bill Gates: Billionaires bet on Greenland as Trump hints at taking it ‘the hard way’ - The Times of India

    The backing came through Breakthrough Energy, a fund led by Gates that aims “to accelerate green energy innovation and build the industries of the future.” Forbes reported that Breakthrough Energy participated in KoBold’s Series C funding round in December 2024, which valued the company at just under $3 billion following a $537 million capital raise. Earlier, in 2022, Sam Altman invested through his venture fund Apollo Projects during KoBold’s Series B round, which totaled $192.5 million. An SEC filing cited by Forbes shows the company is now in the process of raising more funds, potentially returning to its billionaire backers as Greenland draws fresh attention.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Tech Billionaires Behind Trump’s Greenland Push

    Silicon Valley oligarchs like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen have much to gain from Donald Trump’s seizure of Greenland, both as a source of rare earth minerals to feed the AI boom and as a site for a libertarian “crypto state.”

  • [Old] Reuters ☛ KoBold Metals, backed by Bezos and Gates, secures deal for disputed Congo lithium deposit

    KoBold Metals, the mining company backed by U.S. billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, has signed an agreement with the Democratic Republic of Congo that positions the U.S. firm to acquire the contested Manono lithium deposit and launch large-scale critical mineral exploration, it said on Friday.

  • Robert Reich ☛ America’s Gestapo - Robert Reich

    Let’s be clear. The problem is not the protesters. It’s the armed thugs who are shooting and murdering them. (Trump seems capable of seeing a similar dynamic playing out in Iran and vows to protect the protesters there, but not in America.)

    A friend who knows a lot more than I do about America’s armed forces recently wrote:

    “There are four kinds of people who join the armed forces: those from a traditional military family, true patriots who want to serve their country, those with no other prospects who need a job, and psychotics who just want to kill people.

    The armed services do a pretty decent job of screening out the fourth group, but that group is now the prime recruitment pool for ICE. Racists, haters, gun nuts, and cage fighting fans who want to shoot anyone the least bit different from them. They are becoming America’s Gestapo. That is no exaggeration. We’re slipping into Nazi Germany.”

  • Android Police ☛ Stop ignoring the social media ban: Why it's more than just a headline this time

    Since 10 December 2025, anyone under 16 in Australia has not been able to create or maintain accounts on social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

  • Absurd Pirate ☛ is gen alpha screwed?

    However, I do think there is a STARK contrast between a curated show from the 90s-00s and a show like Cocomelon that is designed to be like heroin for babies. I walked in on my MIL and daughter watching Cocomelon together one time, and it was jarring seeing how, for one, low effort the animation and songs are, and two, how stimulating this show is, between the incredibly saturated colors to the jump cuts every second. What I learned was that this show uses focus groups of children to make it so there is not a break in the concentration. If a kid shifts his eyes away from the screen, the scene gets edited to address that.

    Companies are literally designing everything for addiction these days. Trying to get you hooked on whatever they can profit off of as early in your development as possible.

  • Andre Franca ☛ 🔗 is gen alpha screwed?

    Reading this as a father of a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old brings up a lot of reflections. The original post hits on something most people - and parents - often ignore: the difference between being "tech-native" and actually being tech-literate. We see kids who can navigate a locked iPhone at age two, but as the author points out, they’re lost when it comes to how things actually work.

  • YLE ☛ Greenland issue must not lead to end of Nato, former Finnish president says

    "Let’s take Nato into European hands, or try to buy time in the hope that something will change in the United States," he told MTV.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Starmer poised to ban under-16S from social media

    But he has now dropped his opposition to the proposal and is open to legislation that would force the social media companies to bar under-16s from their platforms.

    On Thursday, Sir Keir said: “We need to better protect children from social media. We’re looking at what’s happening in Australia, but all options are on the table in relation to what further protections we can put in place, whether that’s under-16s on social media, all options on the table.”

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Atlantic ☛ What’s Going on With the Epstein Files?

    But what actually arrived on December 19, the Friday before Christmas, was a relatively small (and sloppily redacted) tranche of files that raised far more questions than it answered. Nearly a month later, not a whole lot has changed. Despite having published a second batch, the DOJ has still released less than 1 percent of the millions of documents now under review.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ "Epstein Is Dead:" Pam Bondi Is Neglecting Live Sex Trafficking Prosecutions to Criminalize Democrats

    But there’s another staffing choice that became public in recent weeks.

    As multiple outlets have covered and as Jay Clayton detailed in two letters (January 5; January 15) to Judges Richard Berman (who presided over the Epstein case) and Paul Engelmayer (who picked up the Ghislaine Maxwell case after Alison Nathan moved to the 2nd Circuit) — DOJ has dedicated up to 580 people (the 500 reported last week, plus another 80 added this week) to replicating the review that over a thousand FBI personnel did a year ago, this time accounting for victim privacy and “independent privileges” not permitted under the act.

  • Click On Detroit ☛ Over $440,000 raised for Ford worker suspended for calling Trump ‘pedophile protector’

    While Trump was at the Ford Rouge plant, a worker yelled something at him that included the phrase “pedophile protector,” according to a video obtained by TMZ.

    Trump appeared to give the worker the middle finger and respond with “f--- you.”

• Environment

  • TechCrunch ☛ EPA rules that xAI’s natural gas generators were illegally used

    The power plants drew the ire of local communities and legal organizations. The company was facing a lawsuit for contributing more ozone and particulate emissions in an already polluted region. The company was operating as many as 35 turbines, and only 15 were ultimately permitted. Today, xAI has 12 turbines providing power to its data centers there.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ EPA Rules Against xAI in Memphis Natural Gas Turbine Case as Residents Push Back Over Their Use in Southaven, Mississippi

    I’m surprised that 1) we still have an EPA and 2) that it ruled against xAI in this case. Time will tell if the company runs into similar legal issues in the state of Mississippi, where the company is currently operating 18 natural gas turbines just south of the state line, on Stanton Road. That power is then piped a few miles north to xAI’s second site in Memphis: [...]

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Big solar and energy storage projects going live across South Africa

      This additional capacity is expected to contribute to improved energy security, reduce reliance on fossil-fuel-based generation and support increased private-sector participation in electricity supply.

      They projects are: [...]

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Visa moves to plug stablecoins into the global payments system

      Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies typically pegged to the US dollar, allow funds to be moved outside traditional banking systems. While their circulation has surged, led by El Salvador-based Tether’s USDT with around US$187-billion tokens in circulation, mainstream merchant acceptance remains limited.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ This tech could keep EVs from stressing the grid — and save everyone money

      If you’re a typical American, you get home from work and start flipping switches and turning knobs — doing laundry, cooking dinner, watching TV. With so many other folks doing the same, the strain on the electrical grid in residential areas is highest at this time. That demand will only grow as the world moves away from fossil fuels, with more people buying induction stoves, heat pumps, and electric vehicles.

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ Crypto grifters are recruiting open-source AI developers

      From reading Huntley and Yegge’s posts, it seems like what happened was this: [...]

    • Doc Searls ☛ Everwhat

      "Microsoft's CEO admitted GPUs are sitting in warehouses unplugged.

      Not demand. Not defects. Power.

      Transformer lead times: 4 years

      Grid interconnection queues: 8 years

      NVIDIA backlog assumes: 18 months…

      $4.5 trillion valuation depends on infrastructure that does not exist.

    • University of Michigan ☛ Ann Arbor completes Miller Avenue Improvements Project, adds two-way bikeways

      The city added multiple two-way protected bike lanes in the past seven years, the first being on William Street. However, all prior two-way lane additions were built through the Downtown Development Authority, which is a unit of the city government. The new bike lanes are located outside the downtown area.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • International Business Times ☛ Meet The Man Training An 'Army Of Crows' To Snatch MAGA Hats — And He Says Anyone Can Do It

      According to his own description, once the birds mastered lifting and flipping objects to receive food, he affixed key rings to a red hat to simulate the same action, and within weeks, the crows began removing the hat in under two minutes.

• Finance

  • The Local DK ☛ Denmark introduces new system for travelling to country with cash

    The Danish Customs Agency has launched a new digital system for declaring large sums of cash and other items with values of over 10,000 euros (around 75,000 kroner), it said in a statement on Friday.

    The new system replaces a form which travellers had to print and hand in at airports. From now on, information can be submitted electronically on the Toldstyrelsen website.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Drone Girl ☛ DHS launches new drone office with $115 million counter-drone investment

    The new “DHS Program Executive Office for Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems” will oversee strategic investments in both drone technology and systems to counter unauthorized drones. The office is already operational and will finalize a $115 million investment in counter-drone technologies this week, specifically targeting security for America250 celebrations and 2026 FIFA World Cup venues.

  • Seth Godin ☛ The squeeze

    Once a company hits a plateau in its market share, the pressure begins to mount.

  • The New Stack ☛ Cloudflare Acquires Team Behind Open Source Framework Astro

    Cloudflare announced Friday it will acquire the Astro Technology Company team, which is responsible for the open source JavaScript web framework Astro.

    Astro is used by major brands like IKEA, Unilever, Visa and OpenAI to build fast, content-driven websites.

  • The New Stack ☛ Experts Hail Anthropic's $1.5M Python Security Commitment

    The investment will support the foundation overall, with a particular focus on Python ecosystem security.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Vox ☛ Why it feels like right-wing ICE narratives are dominating social media

      And that reveals a deeper imbalance in American politics and media in 2026: While witness video, mainstream and traditional news, and liberal commentators have shaped part of the debate over ICE and Trump’s domestic immigration agenda, these critical voices and activists lack the same kind of distribution machine to push their narrative that those on the right have used to some effect.

      In that sense, the Minneapolis shooting’s disjointed online realities fit into a familiar problem for liberals, the American left, and the broader anti-Trump coalition since 2020 — just as they lacked their own version of a Joe Rogan or Charlie Kirk to reach the masses or compete for hearts and minds, they also lack the influencer and social media infrastructure that has been churning out ICE-friendly content since at least the summer of 2025.

      There are several reasons why.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ The quiet way AI normalizes foreign influence

      In December, the White House announced new guidance to ensure that AI tools procured for government use are “truthful” and “ideologically neutral,” including transparency around citation practices. But even with this new oversight there is a structural issue that the memo can’t fix; authoritarian states are optimizing their propaganda for AI consumption while America’s most credible news sources are actively blocking AI tools. This means that even ideologically neutral AI directs users towards state-aligned propaganda — simply because that is what is freely available.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ Thousands Killed As Iran's Security Forces Maintain Control And Internet Blackout

    Rights groups report thousands killed and more than 19,000 detained, with an ongoing Internet blackout limiting the flow of information out of the country.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump’s ‘Free Speech’ Presidency Racked Up 200 Censorship Attempts In Its First Year

    Nora Benavidez at Free Press (not the Bari Weiss publication, but the civil society group that has been around for years) has done the tedious but essential work of actually counting the censorship attempts from the Trump administration over the administration’s first year. Writing in the New York Times, she puts the number at around 200 documented instances: [...]

  • BoingBoing ☛ Ford worker who called Trump "pedophile protector" raises $440K after suspension

    The United Auto Workers union threw its support behind Sabula. "Workers should never be subjected to vulgar language or behavior by anyone — including the President of the United States," said the director of the UAW Ford Department. Rep. Rashida Tlaib confirmed Ford suspended Sabula without pay after Trump pointed at him and said, "You're fired."

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ Trump Officials Proudly Defend Raiding Reporter's Home

    Natanson had “posted her secure phone number to an online forum for government workers and amassed more than 1,000 sources, with federal workers frequently reaching out to her to share frustrations and accounts from their offices,” something that undoubtedly must have enraged Trump officials.

    FBI agents, according to the Post, “searched her home and her devices, seizing her phone, two laptops and a Garmin watch. One of the laptops was her personal computer, the other a Washington Post-issued laptop.”

  • EFF ☛ EFF Condemns FBI Search of Washington Post Reporter’s Home

    Yet, that’s what happened on Wednesday morning to Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, when the FBI searched her Virginia home and took her phone, two laptops, and a Garmin watch.

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation has joined 30 other press freedom and civil liberties organizations in condemning the FBI’s actions against Natanson. The First Amendment exists precisely to prevent the government from using its powers to punish or deter reporting on matters of public interest—including coverage of leaked or sensitive information. Searches like this threaten not only journalists, but the public’s right to know what its government is doing.

  • Free Press ☛ Joint Statement of Press Freedom and Civil Liberties Groups Condemning Government Invasion of Washington Post Reporter’s Home [PDF]

    Hannah Natanson’s reporting focused on exposing what is happening inside our federal government — a topic of immense public interest. Such coverage raises questions about the pretext for the FBI’s targeting and invasion of Natanson’s home as well as the seizure of her journalistic materials outside the bounds of the Privacy Protection Act.

  • CS Monitor ☛ A newspaper based on unshakable ideals

    As we begin our 118th year of publication, our new leadership team is working to both articulate these ideals and enable the sort of journalism that best encapsulates our mission in today’s news ecosystem. To do this, we’ve been going back to our founding documents from 1908, when Mary Baker Eddy established The Christian Science Monitor.

    Our founder wrote that she established The Christian Science Monitor “to spread undivided the Science that operates unspent.” What does that mean? Many of us over the years have grappled with this.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Journalism job cuts in 2026 tracked: Rolling updates

    They are the first entries in Press Gazette’s new page for rolling updates on journalism industry redundancies and layoffs in 2026.

    This page will be kept updated throughout the year.

  • BoingBoing ☛ FBI's raid on reporter is first of its kind in leak case

    It's not a crime in the United States for journalists to obtain or publish leaked documents. "Journalists are legally permitted to publish government secrets and the courts have again and again reaffirmed that First Amendment right," said Clayton Weimers of Reporters Without Borders USA. The DOJ claims Natanson isn't a target — but raiding her home, seizing her devices, and potentially accessing her sources sends a clear message to every federal worker who might consider talking to a reporter.

  • CNN ☛ FBI search of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home has newsrooms bracing

    Because the records are currently sealed, the public has no way “to understand the government’s basis for seeking (and a federal court’s basis for approving) a search with dramatic implications for a free press and the constitutional rights of journalists,” the Reporters Committee’s lawyers wrote in their filing late Wednesday.

    Under more ordinary circumstances, federal investigators investigating a leak of government secrets might seek a subpoena for reporters’ records. Past subpoenas have triggered lengthy legal fights.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Problem Is So Much Bigger Than Grok

    Warzel is then joined by The Atlantic’s Sophie Gilbert, the author of Girl on Girl, for a conversation about how misogyny has been a constant throughline in the history of [Internet] innovation, from Facebook to YouTube. Warzel and Gilbert discuss today’s AI-powered exploitation and explore how new technologies repeatedly repackage old abuses at greater scale and speed. They discuss why this wave of hostility feels so intense right now, how backlash politics and platform design reinforce one another, and what is at stake if lawmakers, companies, and the public fail to draw a red line with Elon Musk’s Grok.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ After Weeks of Violence, the Iranian State Hobbles On

    After the bloodiest domestic crackdown in the history of the Islamic Republic, protests have died down since their peak last Thursday evening, the beginning of the Iranian weekend. Over January 8–9, violence erupted across the nation. Reuters reported on January 13 that two thousand protesters have been killed by Iranian security services, a number that is “close to reality” according to a senior Iranian political source, quoted by Amwaj.media. Iranians are currently in a state of shock. They are stuck between two fears: fear of life under the ruling order, and fear of the void that might replace it.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ ICE Won’t Stop Shoving Guns in People’s Faces

    But Good’s murder was not the first incident in which ICE and other deportation agents have aimed firearms at or threatened lethal force against US citizens and other unarmed people. In fact, it is not even the tenth or twentieth.

    Jacobin has identified more than two dozen instances over the past year in which ICE agents have drawn or pointed their guns at people, almost all of them US citizens. This count doesn’t include the more than half-dozen shootings of noncitizens that have happened over the past few months, including the fatal September shooting of an undocumented immigrant in Chicago, which experts told the Washington Post was the result of agents serially violating their own training and guidelines to put themselves in danger.

  • TruthOut ☛ Fed Agent Shoots Second Person, Days After Miller Claims Agents Have “Immunity”

    In a Fox News segment shared by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on X, Miller falsely said that it was a “felony” to obstruct or even so much as touch an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer while they’re on duty. He repeated claims like Vice President JD Vance’s assertion that officers are “protected by absolute immunity” that have been roundly debunked by legal experts.

  • Common Dreams ☛ 'ICE Kills': Guards Reportedly Choked Man to Death at El Paso Detention Center

    As the Washington Post reported Friday, "An employee of El Paso County’s Office of the Medical Examiner told Lunas Campos’ daughter this week that, subject to results of a toxicology report, the office is likely to classify the death as a homicide, according to a recording of the conversation."

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ A Minneapolis Mom on the ICE Violence She’s Witnessed

    Tackling teachers and spraying chemical agents on school property, ICE’s rampage through Minnesota is only getting more violent. Jacobin spoke with a Minneapolis parent about what she’s seen so far.

  • International Business Times ☛ FED Agent Shoots Anti-ICE Protester in Face at Point-Blank Range, Leaving 21-Year-Old Permanently Blind

    Rummler had joined demonstrators outside the federal building to protest deportations and demand justice for Renee Good, who was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis just days before. Video shows him trying to help another protester when federal officers moved in to make arrests. That's when an agent fired a less-lethal projectile directly at his face from close range. The impact was immediate and brutal. Rummler collapsed, his hands covering his bloodied face. An officer then dragged him across the ground by his hoodie as other protesters screamed for help.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Try to guess how low the tips are for food delivery workers

    A minimum wage law increased pay for food delivery couriers but people tipped less. Is that a win or a loss for workers?

  • Pete Brown ☛ Tech workers need a union, part eleventy-billion - Exploding Comma

    Anyone in the tech industry has been subjected to decades’ worth of libertarian myth-making about software eating the world and meritocracy and how software development exists on some entirely different level of reality.

  • Gazetteer, San Francisco, California ☛ ‘They’ve pickled each others’ brains’

    Anil Dash is not surprised by the dark turn the industry has taken. As a seasoned entrepreneur, prolific early blogger, and proponent for civil liberties in the digital world (he sits on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Dash has kept a close eye on tech leaders and chronicled the impacts on the workforce in his blog, including a recent post with the howling headline How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?.

    To usher our tech-minded (and anti-tech-minded) readers into 2026, Gazetteer SF got Dash on the phone for a chat about AI, labor, why the MAGA ethos has taken hold of the industry, and a grand VC conspiracy.

    The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Remarks on the Federal Government’s Ongoing Presence in Minnesota

    If we look beyond the obvious shock that this is where we are now, there’s an interesting infrastructure problem here. It’s worth asking: if you were designing a system to gather footage of ICE brutality from Minnesotans, while protecting their safety and ensuring the sanctity of the dataset, how would you do it? Knowing that there will be people who want to make the database unusable, or prevent people from submitting, either directly or through intimidation?

    It’s essentially a whistleblower (or journalism tips) use case. Rinse and repeat for the whole country. Some newsrooms have built their own forms, and Letitia James released a portal for submitting ICE footage in New York, but there’s a strong case to be made for a central repository for all ICE abuse, for which sifting through all that video is a problem in itself. There will be a lot of it.

    And what if there doesn’t remain a strong government entity at the State level to bring about a case?

  • Adrian Roselli ☛ Live Region Support

    I’m not a daily screen reader user and I used the Braille viewers built into each screen reader, so they may not reflect actual hardware exposure to users.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump FCC Helps Verizon Make It Harder For You To Switch Wireless Carriers

    The Trump FCC says it is eliminating rules requiring that Verizon unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network. As part of its lobbying efforts, Verizon has falsely claimed that adhering to the 60 day unlocking requirements is somehow a huge boon to criminals, something Brendan Carr’s industry-coddling FCC parrots in the agency’s announcement: [...]

  • Inside Towers ☛ Verizon to Offer $20 Credit to Outage Impacted Customers - Inside Towers

    UPDATE To compensate customers who were impacted by Wednesday’s hours-long widespread wireless outage, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) is providing a $20 account credit that can be redeemed by logging into the myVerizon app to accept. “On average, this covers multiple days of service,” the carrier said in a statement. It intends to contact business customers directly about their credits.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Fabian Sanglard ☛ Is QSpy still cool? Let's play QuakeWorld!

    To run properly, QuakeWorld Client must be started with parameters on the command-line pointing to a QuakeWorld Server (e.g.: -connect 192.168.01.). To make it easy to find them, each QuakeWorld Server registers itself with QuakeWorld MasterServer when it starts. The most convenient way to play QuakeWorld is to use a tool that has a list of master servers, retrieve all the servers available, let you pick one, and start the QuakeWorld client with the proper command-line parameters.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ New York State takes steps to ban 3D-printed guns — proposal requires 3D printer manufacturers to prevent weapon printing

    The State government made this proposed legislation after a string of high-profile incidents involving 3D printed guns, including the 2024 shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg conceded that this requirement to stop 3D printers from printing firearms and making the sharing of 3D files for guns and their components illegal will not solve the problem of ghost guns.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Patents

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ USCMA negotiations and Plan Mexico: Thursday mañanera recap

    Economy Minister Marcelo Ebrard attended President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Thursday morning press conference and responded to questions on a range of topics including investment in Mexico and the USMCA review.

  • [Old] European Commission ☛ A General Overview of the Mexican Intellectual [sic] Property [sic] Landscape in 2025 - IP Helpdesk

    Substantive changes in patents, trade marks, and designs

    Some of the most remarkable changes that the LFPPI introduced in 2020 are the following: [...]

  • [Old] US Congress ☛ USMCA: Intellectual [sic] Property [sic] Rights (IPR) | Congress.gov | Library of Congress

    Patents protect new and useful inventions (e.g., medicines, chemical processes, business technologies, and computer software). USMCA defines patentable subject matter as new products and processes. Unlike some U.S. FTAs, USMCA does not provide patent protection for new uses, methods, or processes of existing inventions.

    Under TRIPS, patented inventions must receive a minimum of 20 years of protection. As patents are usually filed before regulatory approval is granted, the effective term may be less than 20 years. USMCA requires adjustments of patent terms for "unreasonable" delays in patent examination or regulatory approvals to restore some of the patent term. "Unreasonable delays" include a delay of more than five years from the date of filing or three years after a request for examination of an application, whichever is later.

    USMCA has a notification system and procedures (e.g., judicial or administrative) to assert patent rights or to challenge a patent's validity. USMCA lacks the "patent linkage" required in some U.S. FTAs, whereby regulatory authorities (e.g., the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, FDA) cannot grant marketing approval to a generic drug without the patent holder's permission.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Stanford University ☛ Elon Musk's X to block AI chatbot Grok from making explicit images of real people

      Elon Musk's social media company X says it will block its AI chatbot Grok from creating explicit images of real people after governments around the world launched investigations into the feature.

• Copyrights

  • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ After Being Pillaged By AI Companies, Wikipedia Signs Deal With Them

    Wikipedia has signed training deals with a host of major AI companies, helping it recoup some of the exorbitant costs it accrued from being relentlessly pillaged by data scrapers.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ U.S. Court Order Against Anna's Archive Spells More Trouble for the Site

    Anna’s Archive is having a rough month. Following mysterious .org and .se domain suspensions, the shadow library is now facing a permanent injunction from a federal court. After dropping a multi-million damages claim, OCLC won a default judgment and permanent injunction against Anna's Archive, which it plans to enforce against hosting companies.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI and the Corporate Capture of Knowledge

    More than a decade after Aaron Swartz’s death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him.

    Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible. Acting on that, he downloaded thousands of academic articles from the JSTOR archive with the intention of making them publicly available. For this, the federal government charged him with a felony and threatened decades in prison. After two years of prosecutorial pressure, Swartz died by suicide on Jan. 11, 2013.

    The still-unresolved questions raised by his case have resurfaced in today’s debates over artificial intelligence, copyright and the ultimate control of knowledg.

  • San Fancisco ☛ We can’t let big tech control access to information

    Today’s AI arms race involves a far more expansive, profit-driven form of information appropriation. The tech giants ingest vast amounts of copyrighted material: books, journalism, academic papers, art, music and personal writing. This data is scraped at industrial scale, often without consent, compensation or transparency, and then used to train large AI models.

    AI companies then sell their proprietary systems, built on public and private knowledge, back to the people who funded it. But this time, the government’s response has been markedly different. There are no criminal prosecutions, no threats of decades-long prison sentences. Lawsuits proceed slowly, enforcement remains uncertain and policymakers signal caution, given AI’s perceived economic and strategic importance. Copyright infringement is reframed as an unfortunate but necessary step toward “innovation.”