Leftovers

• Digital Music News ☛ AXS Sues SecureMyPass Over ‘Spoofed’ Tickets That Bypass Transfer Restrictions

  AXS is suing SecureMyPass over the platform’s allegedly enabling scalpers to create spoofed tickets that bypass transfer restrictions. AEG-owned ticket seller AXS has filed a lawsuit against SecureMyPass (SMP), with allegations of fraud by enabling brokers to bypass digital encryption and transfer systems with spoofed tickets.

• Citizen Lab ☛ Chasing Shadows Out Now in Paperback

  Chasing Shadows, the best-selling book by Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert, is now out in paperback form on the one-year anniversary of its launch.

• Vintage Everyday ☛ 18 Amazing Photos of a Young David Lynch in the 1960s and 1970s

  David Keith Lynch (January 20, 1946 – January 16, 2025) was an American filmmaker, actor, painter, and musician. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, with his films often characterized by a distinctive surrealist sensibility that gave rise to the adjective “Lynchian.” In a career spanning more than five decades, he received numerous accolades, including a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival, an Academy Honorary Award, and a (posthumous) Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement.

• Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Getting cited as a source on Wikipedia

  I use analytics on this site primarily to see where referral traffic comes from. It's not necessary, but it satisfies my curiosity. One of the most interesting referrals I've received was from Wikipedia.

• Science

  • Techdirt ☛ “We’re Too Close To The Debris”: Airplanes Dodge The Remains Of Exploding SpaceX Rockets

    For airplanes traveling at high speeds, there is little margin for error. Research shows as little as 300 grams of debris — or two-thirds of a pound — “could catastrophically destroy an aircraft,” said Aaron Boley, a professor at the University of British Columbia who has studied the danger space objects pose to airplanes. Photographs of Starship pieces that washed up on beaches show items much bigger than that, including large, intact tanks.

  • Rlang ☛ Correcting for multiplicity in the ’emmeans’ package

    In my recent book (see below), on page 166 and earlier, I made the point that, with pairwise comparisons and, more generally, whenever simultaneous statistical tests are performed, it is necessary to provide P-values that account for the familywise error rate, i.e. the probability of committing at least one incorrect rejection within the whole family of simultaneous tests (i.e. adjusted P-values). In this respect, it may be useful to recall that, for a single non-significant test, the comparison-wise error rate \(E_c\) is the probability of a wrong rejection for that single test (based on a non-adjusted P-value), whereas the probability of at least one wrong rejection within a family of \(k\) comparisons is much higher.

• Career/Education

  • New York Times ☛ Los Angeles School Desegregation Policy Hurts White Students, Lawsuit Says

    Schools with more white children miss out on smaller class sizes and other benefits, the lawsuit says. The policy dates back to desegregation efforts in the 1970s.

  • Martin Hähne ☛ Is There A Reading Crisis

    He makes great points about the power of the written word and why a minuscule to moderate decline in reading is nothing too worrying, actually.

    I found this argument very elegant: [...]

  • Keenan ☛ Much to the chagrin of all of my enemies, I am still alive and thriving

    It's true. Through a series of increasingly improbable-feeling events, my wife was granted Austrian citizenship, which has given us the opportunity to explore one of our dreams of living abroad. Initially, we were planning to move to Vienna, but—again, improbably—her job is allowing her to transfer to Warsaw, Poland. Once we sell our house, we'll settle there and start an exciting new adventure for our little family.

  • Brad Frost ☛ Declaring Systems Bankruptcy

    It started as a slow realization until it all came as a quick punch in the face: a whole bunch of systems across my life and work haven’t been working for me.

    Fixing them with light adjustments, tweaks, or refinements was wholly inadequate; I needed to declare bankruptcy on many of my systems and start anew. That’s the journey I’m on.

  • Alexandra Wolfe ☛ A Life Well Read

    I learnt to read at a very early age sat on the knee of my dad as he read his newspaper of an evening. He would read different sections out loud to me and I would mimic him, till, at one point, it was me who was reading the words back to him. I skipped the Janet & John books of my era, and went straight into books for older kids thanks to my father’s patience.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ Scam Altman Lets Loose About AI Psychosis

    Altman almost waves away these grim tolls as an inevitable consequence of the product’s popularity. And even its own alarming internal figures haven’t spurred the very concerned minds at OpenAI like Altman to pull or at least seriously muzzle their product. In fact, the company has continued to vacillate on its safety commitments, such as promising an smut-friendly “adult mode” after years of resisting the bot being used for more erotic outputs, or restoring access to its notoriously sycophantic GPT-4o model after fans complained GPT-5 was too cold and “lobotomized” — before making GPT-5 more sycophantic, too.

  • Futurism ☛ Man Who Had Managed Mental Illness Effectively for Years Says ChatGPT Sent Him Into Hospitalization for Psychosis

    "They straight up took my data and used it against me to capture me further and make me even more delusional."

  • Neil Selwyn ☛ Managing children’s use of digital media – parental dilemmas (notes on Setty et al. 2026)

    2. Even progressive parents feel the need to intervene and restrict their child’s digital media use

• Proprietary

  • Alex Russell ☛ Naked Power

    We don't need to guess why they did it. Acting against Musk's abusive apps might put Apple and Google out of favour with an erratic, power-tripping administration which in turn could impact short-term business prospects. Choosing their own stated principles is incompatible with maximizing shareholder value under competitive authoritarianism.

    Recall that both firms lent their monopolies on software distribution to ICE, citing the implausible claim that federal agents are a “vulnerable group.”

  • Urara ☛ Hate is a strong word, but I really really really don’t like Windows 11

    I regretted installing Win11 from the very start. It seemed slow, buggy, and lacked some Win10 features I liked and used. What, I can't put a taskbar where I like it (on the left side of the screen)? Why is File Explorer so slow? What is this annoying clicking while I resume the audio and why the blutooth latency suddenly got so noticeable? Why do I have to wait so long for a contextual menu to show up? What's with those unreadable new emojis? Why it randomly restart when I simply shut it down?

    The list just kept going, small inconveniences piled up.

  • Ubisoft is requiring all employees to return to the office full-time in an effort to "enhance the collective performance for AAA"

    Ubisoft has announced a shift in its organizational structure to Creative Houses, intending to have employees work onsite five days each week while allowing a set number of remote workdays annually. This change aims to enhance collaboration and team dynamics, according to Marie-Sophie de Waubert, Senior Vice President of Studio Operations. She emphasized the importance of face-to-face interactions for boosting efficiency, creativity, and teamwork in the competitive gaming market.

  • Neowin ☛ Ubisoft cancels Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake alongside six other games

    Fans of Prince of Persia haven't received any good news about the classic franchise for quite a few years now, and it looks like the future doesn't look any brighter. Ubisoft today revealed that the long-time-coming remake of the original game that kicked off the series, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, has been officially canceled. Cancelations and delays have also hit a range of other games at the massive publisher.

    Ubisoft says that it had just concluded a review of its upcoming projects, and some of them had not met the new standards it is attempting to hit. Its focus will be on quality open-world games and live service experiences going forward. Per the company, the canceled games "do not meet the new enhanced quality as well as more selective portfolio prioritization criteria."

  • PC Gamer ☛ Don't call it a layoff: Ubisoft issues a full return-to-office order for all employees as it confirms more studio closures are coming

    Stuffed away in a corner of Ubisoft's latest high-speed skid off a cliff is a note for employees: "To support the effective implementation and operation of this new model, the Group also intends to return to five days per week on site for all teams." Employees who have been working remotely in any capacity, in other words, will no longer have that option: It's back to conventional office time for everyone.

    "This evolution is intended to strengthen collaboration, including constant knowledge sharing, and the collective dynamic across teams," Ubisoft said, explaining the decision. "In-person collaboration is a key enabler of collective efficiency, creativity and success in a persistently more selective AAA market." In lieu of regular remote work, employees will be given "an annual allowance of working-from-home days."

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Digital Music News ☛ The Plot Thickens on Suspected AI Singer Sienna Rose

      So what’s the truth? It could be that Sienna Rose is a real person and a real artist who also uses AI to create her music. Or perhaps Sienna Rose is based on a real person but is otherwise the product of AI. It’s difficult to say for sure.

    • Marc Brooker ☛ Pass@k is Mostly Bunk

      99.4%! What a great evaluation result! Clearly the model is doing something meaningful and useful! No, it’s doing something meaningful and useful 5% of the time.

    • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ An AI Skill for Skeptical Dependency Management

      AI coding assistants will suggest packages that don’t exist, pin to versions from two years ago, and never mention that the standard library already does what you need. I’ve written a skill that makes Claude Code and similar agents more careful.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ What Satya Nadella actually said at Davos about the AI bubble

      You know what that means? We can kill this thing!

      That headline’s not a literal quote from Nadella. He didn’t quite say those exact words. But Nadella did say stuff that circled around that, and — the key point — was every bit as stupid.

    • Irish Times ☛ AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns – The Irish Times

      “For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread,” said Mr Nadella. He noted that a “telltale sign of if it’s a bubble” would be if only tech groups were benefiting from the rise of AI, rather than companies in other sectors.

    • Rob Bowley ☛ Faster horses, not trains

      I’ve been trying to work out why successive advances in GenAI models don’t feel particularly different to me, even as others react with genuine excitement.

      I use these tools constantly and have done since ChatGPT4 was released nearly 3 years ago. I couldn’t imagine a world without them. In that sense, they already feel as transformative as the web. I’ve been thinking perhaps how its once they become ambient, the magic fades. You get used to them and stop noticing improvements. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think there are deeper structural reasons why the experience has plateaued, for me at least.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ How to hack Microsoft Copilot AI: ask it twice

      The good news is this is a one-click exploit, not zero-click. But the one click is onto a Microsoft website — who you’re expected to trust.

    • Varonis ☛ Reprompt: The Single-Click Microsoft Copilot Attack that Silently Steals Your Personal Data

      Reprompt involves three techniques: [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Generated €1.8B for the EU Music Business in 2025—According to TikTok

      TikTok releases a study showing that the platform generated billions for the EU economy last year, including $1.8 billion for the EU music industry.

    • EDRI ☛ how Snapchat uses notifications to manipulate users

      Over the years, there has been a shift from notifications that keep people informed to notifications that grab their attention. Platforms benefit from users staying on their website or app for as long as possible, because they earn revenue from advertising. Therefore, platforms are increasingly using notifications that they can generate infinitely, for example: notifications for recommended content, popular topics, or other suggestions. We have entered an era where platforms compete for our attention, flooding users with notifications.

      Some notifications are even misleading users in order to get them to click on it. This constantly distracts users and tempts them to spend more time on their phones than they may actually want.

      Bits of Freedom’s earlier research into manipulative design already showed that Snapchat uses recapture notifications (notifications intended to bring users back to the platform) and fake friend notifications (notifications that look like a message from another user, but are not). It also showed that other techniques are used to attract and retain attention, including Snapstreaks, infinite scroll, and personalised recommendations. Together, these techniques create the ideal conditions for excessive smartphone use.

    • SusamPal ☛ Attention Media ≠ Social Media

      When web-based social media started flourishing nearly two decades ago, they were genuinely social media. You would sign up for a popular service, follow people you knew or liked and read updates from them. When you posted something, your followers would receive your updates as well. Notifications were genuine. The little icons in the top bar would light up because someone had sent you a direct message or engaged with something you had posted. There was also, at the beginning of this millennium, a general sense of hope and optimism around technology, computers and the Internet. Social media platforms were one of the services that were part of what was called Web 2.0, a term used for websites built around user participation and interaction. It felt as though the information superhighway was finally reaching its potential. But sometime between 2012 and 2016, things took a turn for the worse.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Scribbles ☛ the situation

      How I feel, and lots of friends seems to be in the same situation as me :-/

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EDRI ☛ EDRi’s 2025 in review: we resisted, we persisted

      The new college of European Commissioners took office in December 2024, and from early 2025, it became apparent that the political winds had shifted. Despite having spent the previous term building up a strong digital policy framework, the new and sweeping deregulation agenda has posed an existential threat to the protection of digital rights, as well as a wide range of other human rights and social protections in other fields.

      This has emerged against a backdrop of foreign governments, such as the US, increasingly attacking the EU’s digital rulebook, as well as shockingly targeting those that advocate for its enforcement.

    • EDRI ☛ EDRi launches a spyware document pool

      Spyware remains one of the most serious threats to fundamental rights, democracy, and civic space in Europe. Over the past years, repeated investigations have shown that at least 14 EU Member States have deployed spyware against journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers, activists, political opponents, and others. These cases have revealed the reality of an opaque, dangerous market that thrives on exploiting vulnerabilities and endangering us, and the States’ reluctance to provide any accountability or justice for victims.

      Despite the findings of the European Parliament’s PEGA Inquiry Committee in 2023, and the push from human rights organisations, the European Commission has so far refused to propose binding legislation to prohibit spyware. Not only that: it has done nothing. Right now, no EU-wide red lines exist against the use of spyware. This means that victims lack effective remedies, authorities face no scrutiny, and commercial spyware vendors continue to operate with near-total impunity, enriching themselves by violating human rights, and even benefiting from European public funding.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ TSA official clarifies passenger data-sharing protocols with ICE

      A Transportation Security Administration official confirmed Wednesday that the agency is helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement with its deportation efforts — but pushed back on claims that it sends personally identifiable information of all passengers to ICE.

    • La Quadature Du Net ☛ CNAF’s discriminatory scoring algorithm: 10 new organisations join the case before the Conseil d’État in France

      Just over a year ago, 15 civil society organisations challenged the risk-scoring algorithm used by the family branch of the French welfare system (CNAF). The legal action was brought before the French Conseil d’État on the grounds of personal data protection and the principle of non-discrimination. This algorithm assigns a suspicion score to each beneficiary and selects those to subject to further checks. Every month, the algorithm analyses the personal data of more than 32 million people and calculates more than 13 million scores. Factors that increase a suspicion score include having a low income, being unemployed, receiving the minimum income benefit or disability benefits.

    • The Register UK ☛ SSA admits DOGE [sic] had more access than first said

      DOGE's [sic] mucking around at the Social Security Administration (SSA) has been heavily scrutinized, but now the SSA itself is admitting it slightly underreported the unofficial agency's improper activities within its systems. DOGE employees may have been asked to assist a political advocacy group using SSA data, prompting Hatch Act referrals.

    • New York Times ☛ At Check-In, Your Face Is Increasingly Your ID

      Passengers are also likely to encounter more e-gates, or physical barriers that use facial recognition to verify a traveler’s identity and authorization to be in the United States, as they board international flights, raising worries among some privacy experts and immigration activists.

      Select airports are experimenting with cutting-edge technology that could be rolled out elsewhere in the coming year. Orlando International, for example, is testing a “biometric corridor,” a subtly defined zone in which several mounted cameras can swiftly and simultaneously identify multiple travelers in motion.

    • 404 Media ☛ Podcast: Here’s What Palantir Is Really Building

      We start this week with Joseph’s article about ELITE, a tool Palantir is working on for ICE. After the break, Emanuel tells us how AI influencers are making fake sex tape-style photos with celebrities, who can’t be best pleased about it. In the subscribers-only section, Matthew breaks down Comic-Con’s ban of AI art.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Google’s AI pricing plan

      The first string: Google's going to spy on you a lot more, for the same reason Microsoft is spying on all of its users: because they want to supply their AI "agents" with your personal data:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ANECpNdt-4

      Google's announced that it's going to feed its AI your Gmail messages, as well as the whole deep surveillance dossier the company has assembled based on your use of all the company's products: Youtube, Maps, Photos, and, of course, Search: [...]

  • Confidentiality

    • C4ISRNET ☛ Ukraine feeds sensitive military data to Palantir AI for training

      Ukraine’s government-backed defense technology cluster, Brave1, has partnered with the American company Palantir to create a platform where artificial-intelligence models can be tested using sensitive military data.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Citizen Lab ☛ The Right to Remember: Memorializing in Syria

    Senior researcher Noura Aljizawi speaks with Nalah Ayed from CBC Ideas about her personal experience of returning to Syria to grieve for the first time in 13 years following the fall of the al-Assad regime. 

  • New York Times ☛ Pressured by Convicted Felon, Mexico Sends 37 Accused Criminals to U.S.

    Mexico has sought to do more to combat its cartels in an effort to stave off airstrikes threatened by Hell Toupée.

  • JURIST ☛ Australia passes strict gun control and hate crime legislation

    Australian Parliament passed new gun control and expanded hate crime legislation on Tuesday as measures to combat antisemitism, extremism, and gun violence following last month’s Bondi Beach shooting. The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism laws realize leadership promises to enact tougher laws on firearms and hate-motivated violence.

  • CBC ☛ TikTok can operate in Canada for now, federal court rules, telling Ottawa to review the case

    In a short judgment on Wednesday, federal court judge Russel Zinn set aside the order and sent the matter ⁠back to Industry Minister Mélanie Joly for review. He did not give any reasons.

  • Techdirt ☛ Congress Wants To Hand Your Parenting To Big Tech

    Lawmakers in Washington are once again focusing on kids, screens, and mental health. But according to Congress, Big Tech is somehow both the problem and the solution. The Senate Commerce Committee recently held a hearing on “examining the effect of technology on America’s youth.” Witnesses warned about “addictive” online content, mental health, and kids spending too much time buried in screen. At the center of the debate is a bill from Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) called the Kids Off Social Media Act (KOSMA), which they say will protect children and “empower parents.”

  • Gustaf Erikson ☛ µblog - archive for 2026-01

    These provisions apply as the Nobel Foundation is a Swedish entity managing testamentary assets, and disbursements occur under Swedish jurisdiction. Criminal intent (uppsåt) is established by continued payments despite public knowledge of violations, including Machado’s support for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and involvement in U.S. efforts to effect regime change and resource theft in Venezuela by installing the awardee through force.

  • Princeton University ☛ Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

    Scientists have understood for many years that [Internet] voting is insecure and that there is no known or foreseeable technology that can make it secure. Still, vendors of [Internet] voting keep claiming that, somehow, their new system is different, or the insecurity doesn’t matter. Bradley Tusk and his Mobile Voting Foundation keep touting [Internet] voting to journalists and election administrators; this whole effort is misleading and dangerous.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Internet Voting is Too Insecure for Use in Elections - Schneier on Security

    No matter how many times we say it, the idea comes back again and again. Hopefully, this letter will hold back the tide for at least a while longer.

  • Podiboq ☛ podiboq's thoughts - just another microBlog - Stop calling this "normal"

    No one has the guts to shut him off.
    No one wants to take responsibility.
    The media keeps feeding the fire, then pretends to be shocked when children commit suicide because of bullies.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Pax Pretio Empta

    Donald Trump ruled out military force over Greenland today at Davos. “You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no, and we will remember,” he said—but he took the gun off the table.

    That was the moment. That was the off-ramp. The correct European response was four words: “Good. There is nothing further to discuss.”

    Instead, they entered a “process.” They agreed to “continued dialogue.” They created a “framework” for discussion. They turned a non-negotiable into a negotiation.

    What the fuck are the Europeans going on about? I must insist on asking this question.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Evil Man and the Empty Congress

    The country’s founding documents do include procedures for dealing with an evil man occupying the office of the President. However, Donald Trump has successfully rendered the Republican Party, which controls Congress, supplicant. It is not even clear to me that there remains a distinction between the Trump family business and the RNC, and now apparently, the entire Article II branch of the federal government. Mike Johnson, John Thune, and dare I say Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer continue to undersign the notion that this is a regular constitutional government, in form adequate to any reasonable understanding of lawful government within the confines of said laws and constitution.

    This is an absolute emergency. And the failure of leadership here constitutes a catastrophic abdication of constitutional duty.

  • The Next Move ☛ The F-Word, Cont. - by Jay Nordlinger - The Next Move

    How would you define “fascism”? George F. Will has had a go at it in a column or two. In 2020, he wrote, “Communism had a revolutionary doctrine; fascism was more a mood than a doctrine. It was a stance of undifferentiated truculence toward the institutions and manners of liberal democracy.”

    Will quoted Mussolini, who said, “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program?” (Il Mondo, or “The World,” was a newspaper, short-lived.) “It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo.”

    We are getting to our current environment, as you thought we might.

  • The Record ☛ EU unveils new plans to tackle Huawei, ZTE as China alleges protectionism

    The potential threat posed by Chinese network equipment suppliers such as Huawei and ZTE had previously resulted in several national decisions to restrict those vendors from contributing to various parts of telecommunications infrastructure.

    However those measures followed voluntary EU guidance, and some member states such as Spain have provoked concern from allies over their relationship with Chinese companies. Last year, the Spanish government cancelled a €10 million contract with Huawei after U.S. lawmakers said it threatened intelligence sharing with the country.

  • Futurism ☛ Canadian Military Exploring Taliban-Like Insurgent Tactics to Repel American Invasion

    If the history of US intervention any indication, those tactics might be the winning move should such a spectacular attack ever come. Though the US has more military resources at its disposal than any empire in history, that pen-and-paper might doesn’t always translate to success on the ground.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • BoingBoing ☛ 2 million Epstein files unreleased as Trump DOJ stalls

    The stonewalling hasn't gone unnoticed. A January 2026 poll found 49% of Americans believe Trump is attempting to cover up Epstein's crimes, while only 30% believe he isn't. The DOJ briefly posted and then removed documents implicating Trump, including evidence of previously undisclosed flights on Epstein's plane and at least one photograph that mysteriously vanished from the public website.

• Environment

  • Meduza ☛ Chornobyl nuclear plant briefly loses external power after Russian strikes

    Ukraine’s Energy Ministry later said power had been restored to the New Safe Confinement structure over the plant’s destroyed fourth reactor, as well as to spent nuclear fuel storage facilities. The ministry also confirmed that Russian forces had targeted energy infrastructure nodes supplying power to Chornobyl’s facilities during the overnight attack. It added that radiation levels in the exclusion zone remain within safety limits, and that the plant has been provided with fuel and backup power sources in case of renewed strikes.

  • Michigan News ☛ Ice on Great Lakes might surprise you with recent cold, except Lake Erie’s ice is skyrocketing

    The amount of ice cover has just recently started to really grow on the Great Lakes. Most of the lakes still have less ice than normal for this date. Also, look at Lake Erie’s ice chart. It’s a straight line upward.

    Here is the easiest map to see the amount of ice cover. Right now the overall ice percentage on all of the Great Lakes is measured at 22.5 percent.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Elon Musk's xAI Colossus 2 is nowhere near 1 gigawatt capacity, satellite imagery suggests — despite claims, site only has 350 megawatts of cooling capacity

      Based on 550,000 Nvidia Blackwell AI accelerators, xAI's Colossus 2 is advertised as the industry's first AI facility that consumes one gigawatt of power for AI inference and training. But for now, the data center codenamed 'Macrohard' purportedly only has 350 MW of cooling capacity — not nearly enough to cool down 550,000 Blackwell GPUs at full power, even in winter. As a result, Musk's Jan. 19 announcement may have been premature, to put it mildly. Epoch AI expects the supercomputer to reach 1 GW by May.

    • Simon P Couch ☛ Electricity use of AI coding agents

      That said, 1 or 10 or 100 median prompts a day is many orders of magnitude off from my own personal use of LLMs; I likely am, in Hannah Ritchie’s words, an “extreme power user.” I work in software and spend much of my workday driving 2 or 3 coding agents, like Claude Code, at a time. Thus, a much more relevant question for me is how much energy does a typical Claude Code session consume? (I’m not going to discuss water use in this post.)

      tl;dr, much more: [...]

    • Simon Willison ☛ Electricity use of AI coding agents

      As a heavy Claude Code user, Simon estimates his own usage at the equivalent of 4,400 "typical queries" to an LLM, for an equivalent of around $15-$20 in daily API token spend. He figures that to be about the same as running a dishwasher once or the daily energy used by a domestic refrigerator.

  • Overpopulation

    • Futurism ☛ China Has Screwed Up Really, Really Badly

      Yet fewer and fewer women thereare interested in raising a family, sending China well below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman, meaning the government’s interventions are doing little to address the issue. Many countries around the world, including most of North and South America, and Europe, are already experiencing below-replacement fertility rates. The situation playing out in China is a preview for what’s still to come in many other regions projected to experience a similar decline.

    • Thomas Rigby ☛ AI will not solve world hunger

      The primary reasons for people going hungry are war and conflict damaging infrastructure, wastage in developed nations, and poverty — they simply cannot afford over-priced food on inadequate wages.

• Finance

  • Seth Godin ☛ Identity violation and pricing

    It’s simpler than that, I think. People don’t go into publishing or music to make a profit (not most of them, not the smart ones). They do it to create culture and to be part of a culture. They’re not going to brag about making a lot of money, they’ll brag about finding art or sharing it.

    Meanwhile, down the street at the hedge fund, the entire point is to find and capture price differences. Leaving money on the table isn’t just a missed opportunity—it’s an embarrassment. It means you weren’t paying attention.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Michigan’s lax petition laws leave voters vulnerable to deception

    For decades, Michigan voters have complained that circulators asking them to sign petitions for proposed constitutional amendments have lied about what the proposals mean. Nothing has changed.

  • The Strategist ☛ What dependence on China brings: Britain approves an enormous London embassy

    In approving construction of an enormous Chinese embassy in London, Britain is trading long-term security resilience for short-term economic advantage.

  • France24 ☛ UK approves new Chinese ‘mega embassy’ in London despite security concerns

    The UK goverenment on Tuesday approved a 20,000-square-metre plot of land, known as Royal Mint Court, for China's new embassy in London. The decision has stoked heated controversy, mostly over national security concerns and the signal it could send, that Britain bows to economic pressure from Beijing.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Congressional appropriators move to extend information-sharing law, fund CISA

    The legislation also includes mandates on election security funding and CISA staff levels, as well as an extension of a state and local cyber grant program.

  • Security Week ☛ EU Plans Phase Out of High Risk Telecom Suppliers, in Proposals Seen as Targeting China

    Under the new rules, measures for 5G cybersecurity would become mandatory.

  • New York Times ☛ Carney Speech on U.S. ‘Rupture’ and Canada’s Survival Draws Standing Ovation at Davos

    Prime Minister Mark Carney got a standing ovation in Davos for starkly describing the end of Pax Americana. He is looking for new allies to help his country survive it.

  • France24 ☛ One year of Convicted Felon's war on American culture

    One year after The Insurrectionist's return to power, FRANCE 24's Eve Jackson revisits the paradoxical and conflictual relationship between the US president and culture and the arts. From controversial appointments in Hollywood, to attacks on diversity policies, to the symbolic takeover of the Kennedy Center, the US president intends to regain control of the American cultural narrative. Faced with this pressure, artists and institutions are getting organised, taking a stand and mobilising for freedom of speech.

  • The Conversation ☛ Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US [Internet] technology

    This isn’t an outlandish scenario. Technical failures, cyber-attacks and natural disasters can all bring down key parts of the [Internet]. And as the US government makes increasing demands of European leaders, it is possible to imagine Europe losing access to the digital infrastructure provided by US firms as part of the geopolitical bargaining process.

    At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the EU’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, has highlighted the “structural imperative” for Europe to “build a new form of independence” – including in its technological capacity and security. And, in fact, moves are already being made across the continent to start regaining some independence from US technology.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Funding Open Source for Digital Sovereignty

    When a company obtains software, it’s looking for more than the code: it needs a solution to a problem. Services address organizational problems more directly than codebases alone. There’s a reason why Dries’s Acquia and Matt Mullenweg’s Automattic have become so successful.

    There is nothing unethical about creating services businesses (or non-profits with service missions) that are aligned with the open source nature of their underlying products — and, indeed, that direct connection with customers will make those products better. But I’d say that most open source maintainers either aren’t thinking that way or are daunted by the prospect. So perhaps they could use a little help?

  • David R MacIver ☛ A Fractal of Lies

    We have a problem: We rely on testimony for most of our understanding of the world. All knowledge is social to some degree (it is based on theory we acquire from the people around us, even when it also includes our own first hand experience), and most of our knowledge of the world is primarily social because there’s just too much to investigate. Unfortunately, this social knowledge that we use to navigate our lives is a fractal of lies, where our “knowledge” is based on lies told to us by people whose knowledge is in turn based on lies told to them.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Teaching journalism the Russian way: How RT Academy spreads propaganda in Global South

      In December 2025, Russian state-run media outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) held a three-day journalism training event, RT Academy, in Jakarta, Indonesia, for more than 250 journalists, media students, and content creators from Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Cambodia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

      The sessions, offered free of charge, were held at Russia's cultural center, RT's Indonesia and ASEAN Bureau, and a partner university in Indonesia.

      RT framed the program around universal journalistic themes and techniques, covering topics such as "fact-checking digital sources" and "applying ethical standards in social media storytelling."

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ National security trial of Tiananmen vigil organisers to begin in HK

    For more than three decades, the alliance held annual vigils in Victoria Park to commemorate the Tiananmen Square crackdown and advocate an end to the Chinese Communist Party’s one-party rule, alongside other political demands.

    Hong Kong authorities banned the gathering in 2020, citing Covid-19 policies, ending the large-scale yearly commemorations in the city. The group disbanded in 2021, among dozens of civil society groups that shuttered following the enactment of the national security law.

    The group was founded in May 1989, weeks before the People’s Liberation Army cracked down on protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds or possibly thousands and ending months of student-led demonstrations.

  • EDRI ☛ President’s veto delays the implementation of the DSA in Poland

    From that point, though delayed, the legislative process followed a standard sequence for implementing EU law. Public consultations were organised, the first draft of the law was published, a second round of public consultations was held, another draft law was released.

    As with other EU regulations, the core elements of the DSA, including the designation of the Digital Services Coordinator, enforcement powers, and cooperation with the European Commission, had to be reflected in national law and were not optional. The DSA itself was not question as its implementation was a legal necessity. The controversy emerged when the government decided to go beyond strict DSA implementation and use the same legislative act to introduce additional national rules on content moderation and blocking content deemed illegal.

    These supplementary provisions – proposed in subsequent drafts – triggered a backlash: “Polish government wants to censor the internet!”, read the headlines.

  • EFF ☛ EFF Joins Internet Advocates Calling on the Iranian Government to Restore Full Internet Connectivity

    EFF joined architects, operators, and stewards of the global [Internet] infrastructure in calling upon authorities in Iran to immediately restore full and unfiltered [Internet] access. We further call upon the international technical community to remain vigilant in monitoring connectivity and to support efforts that ensure the [Internet] remains open, interoperable, and accessible to all.

  • 404 Media ☛ HAM Radio Operators in Belarus Arrested, Face the Death Penalty

    “State propaganda unironically claims these men were ‘pumping state secrets out of the air’ using nothing more than basic $25 Baofeng handhelds and consumer-grade SDR dongles,” he added. “Any operator knows that hardware like this is physically incapable of cracking the modern AES-256 digital encryption used by government security forces. It is a technical fraud, yet they are being charged with High Treason and Espionage. The punishment in Belarus for these charges is life in prison or the death penalty.”

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Meduza ☛ ‘The guards didn’t like people cooking frogs’: A Russian woman tells Meduza about the year and a half she spent in U.S. immigration jail

    From October 2024 to September 2025, Russians received a record number of asylum denials in the United States, and on January 14, 2026, the Trump administration suspended the issuance of immigrant visas to Russians altogether. Under President Donald Trump, the process of crossing the U.S.–Mexico border became significantly more difficult. People have waited for months for permission to enter U.S. territory before spending long periods in immigration detention facilities — sometimes more than a year. One of those people is 30-year-old Russian national Polina Guseva. Before receiving political asylum and reaching Los Angeles, she spent a year and a half in two U.S. detention centers. Meduza spoke with her about what life was like in jail, how she managed to win her court cases, and how she started a handwritten Russian-language newspaper for inmates called Vestnik Yebatoria (roughly “The Fuckatorium Herald) in one of the detention centers.

  • EDRI ☛ Algorithmic justice: lessons learned in working with affected people

    Bits of Freedom shares lessons learned while working on “Amsterdam Top400”, an invasive municipality project which involved the use of predictive policing and led to unwanted interference in the private lives of young people. Together with a coalition of professionals from different background and affected individuals, they explored the possibility of holding the municipality of Amsterdam accountable for violations of children’s rights, data protection law, and fundamental freedoms.

  • JURIST ☛ UN experts urge states to recognize gender apartheid as crime against humanity

    The Working Group on discrimination against women and girls urged UN member states to consider the lived reality of Afghan women in the country. As the Taliban has been depriving Afghan women of their right to education, to work, and erasing their public existence, the group contended that including gender apartheid in the treaty is necessary to ensure accountability for the atrocities in Afghanistan at international law. Richard Bennett, the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, also endorsed the appeal.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Day Twenty-Five of Protests: Continued Internet Blackout and Officials’ Narrative-Building on the Death Toll - Hrana

    On the twenty-fifth day of nationwide protests in Iran, according to aggregated data compiled by HRANA, the number of confirmed fatalities has reached 4,902, while the number of deaths still under review stands at 9,387. Additionally, at least 7,389 people have sustained severe injuries, and the total number of arrests has risen to 26,541. These figures are recorded amid the continued widespread [Internet] shutdown, while at the same time the government, by releasing limited and selective statistics, is attempting to solidify its official narrative regarding the scale of the killings.

  • Wired ☛ Surveillance and ICE Are Driving Patients Away From Medical Care, Report Warns

    The report, published by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), attributes the problem to outdated privacy laws and rapidly expanding digital systems that allow health-related information to be tracked, analyzed, breached, and accessed by both private companies and government agencies.

  • Dan Sinker ☛ We Are All We Have

    Because back then—back in those uncertain, frightening, early days—we were all we had.

    As I write this, my freezing-cold basement is filled with the chipper hum of a 3d printer making whistles. Hundreds of whistles now, thousands. All bright oranges and pinks and greens and blues, a full spectrum rainbow, tiny and loud. At the beginning of the year I got jumped into a crew printing whistles at a remarkable clip. They've shipped nearly 100,000 this month. 2500 of those printed by me over the course of the last few weeks, sent coast to coast in packets of 100, 200. The thousand I sent to Minneapolis with folks from Chicago who went up took three days to finish. Five hours to make a hundred, I run the printer 15 hours a day.

    Because right now, like back then, we are all we have.

  • Nexstar Media Group Inc ☛ OR ICE: ICE agents pose as PGE, NW Natural workers, officials warn

    “Out of an abundance of caution, Rep. Ruiz shared this information publicly to ensure people are aware, take appropriate precautions, and verify the identity of anyone claiming to be utility or government workers before allowing them access to their homes,” Ruiz’s office said, noting they are encouraging community members to report suspicious activity to local authorities.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Why "just comply" is terrible advice

    While it may seem like sound advice, just going along with ICE, not arguing, or asserting your rights to remain "safe," is the worst path. This normalizes giving up your rights; it does not reduce harm.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Major change to telco licensing rules in Europe

    Europe’s telecommunications operators will get a major boost under a European Commission proposal announced on Wednesday, allowing them to use radio spectrum for an unlimited duration, but their demand that Big Tech be required to help fund the cost of rolling out broadband went unheeded.

    The commission’s proposal, known as the Digital Networks Act, is part of a revamp of telecoms rules, which will need to be agreed to by EU countries and the European parliament in the coming months before it can be implemented.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • PC World ☛ Nobody wants this: Netflix and Disney+ eyeing vertical videos

    PCWorld reports that Netflix and Disney+ are planning to introduce vertical videos to their streaming platforms, despite the format’s controversial reception on large screens.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• EFF ☛ Copyright Kills Competition

  Copyright owners increasingly claim more draconian copyright law and policy will fight back against big tech companies. In reality, copyright gives the most powerful companies even more control over creators and competitors. Today’s copyright policy concentrates power among a handful of corporate gatekeepers—at everyone else’s expense. We need a system that supports grassroots innovation and emerging creators by lowering barriers to entry—ultimately offering all of us a wider variety of choices.

• The Register UK ☛ FTC to drag Meta back to court in monopoly case

  That "conduct" included snapping up potential rivals such as Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as imposing "anticompetitive conditions on software developers." At the time, the FTC demanded divestitures of assets, including those acquisitions, and removing the "anticompetitive conditions" on devs.

  However last November, district judge James Boasberg ruled that "Meta holds no monopoly in the relevant market," citing a constantly changing social media ecosystem and noted that Meta’s market share "seems to be shrinking."

• New York Times ☛ F.T.C. Appeals Loss in Meta Antitrust Case

  The Federal Trade Commission filed a notice on Tuesday appealing its loss in a lawsuit that accused Meta of breaking antitrust laws to protect a monopoly in social networking.

  At a trial last year, Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia considered the government’s claims that Meta snuffed out nascent competitors when it bought Instagram and WhatsApp more than a decade ago. He ruled in November that Meta had not broken the law.

• Patents

  • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Federal Circuit Finds Its Spine: Rejecting “Hyper-Technical” Gatekeeping

    The Federal Circuit restores two expert witnesses in Barry v. DePuy, ruling that methodological flaws and "unpersuasive" applications of claim construction are issues for the jury, not grounds for exclusion under Daubert.

  • Unified Patents ☛ CP Studios video game patents campaign - invalidity charts coming soon

    The team at Unified IP Services is using Pearl to identify and chart prior art against patents owned and asserted by CP Studios LLC, an NPE.

• Copyrights

  • Public Domain Review ☛ A Prophet of the Weather: Lantern Slides by Clement Lindley Wragge (ca. 1900–22)

    Slides from twenty years of lecturing about the workings of the universe and the fate of the soul.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — AI Isn’t Going to Pay for Content … At Least Not How You’re Hoping It Will

    The question was crisp, reasonable, and rooted in a decades-long erosion of content economics. Publishers have watched value slip from their hands through unbundling, aggregation, and search. They are now hoping — some quietly, some explicitly — that AI will reverse the trend. If artificial intelligence is going to ingest their work, understand it, and depend on it, then surely AI companies should pay for that privilege.

    The question was directed at Tom Rubin, OpenAI’s Chief of Intellectual Property[sic] and Content. His answer was careful, neutral, and ultimately forgettable — not because the question was misguided, but because Rubin understands an uncomfortable truth: the economics that publishers are hoping for don’t exist today.

  • EFF ☛ Copyright Should Not Enable Monopoly

    At its core, copyright is a monopoly right on creative output and expression. It’s intended to allow people who make things to make a living through those things, to incentivize creativity. To square the circle that is “exclusive control over expression” and “free speech,” we have fair use.

    However, we aren’t just seeing artists having a time-limited ability to make money off of their creations. We are also seeing large corporations turn into megacorporations and consolidating huge stores of copyrights under one umbrella. When the monopoly right granted by copyright is compounded by the speed and scale of media company mergers, we end up with a crisis in creativity.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Unsealed: Spotify Lawsuit Triggered Anna's Archive Domain Name Suspensions

    Spotify and several major record labels, including UMG, Sony, and Warner, have taken legal action against the unknown operators of Anna's Archive. The action follows the shadow library's announcement that it would release hundreds of terabytes of scraped Spotify data. Unsealed documents reveal that the court already issued a broad preliminary injunction, ordering hosting companies, Cloudflare, and domain name services, to take action.

  • The Cyber Show ☛ Why I'm Not Suing Anthropic

    There's a number of factors at play. Together they make Anthropic and the other "AI" companies the worst kind of crims. Let's assemble the case…

    Today Bruce Schneier and J. B. Branch reminded me these are the same people who sent Aaron Swartz to his grave for much less. Different clothes, different names, same money, same villains. Whether you call them publishers, Big Tech or "AI" companies it's a familiar game of domination; controlling other people's ideas. They want nothing less than to control science, technology, art and culture. But while Schneier and Branch see a fair likeness between "AI" company copyright infringements and those of Swartz, they miss some important differences that are even more damning.

  • Sergio Visinoni ☛ The reverse Napster manoeuvre of Big AI

    Whether you remember or you have no idea what I’m talking about, here is a brief recap of this pivotal case in the history of the Internet and copyright.