Leftovers

• Thomas Rigby ☛ What is the oldest thing you own?

  It got me wondering what the oldest things I own are.

  I have a handful of cameras that are older than I am but I bought them recently; here I'm talking about things I've held onto for years…

• Ruben Schade ☛ If I don’t, you still can

  When you’ve been writing a blog for yourself for so long, adjusting to the idea that people read it takes some getting used to. I wouldn’t pretend that what I’m doing is journalism or proper writing, but people I know in those fields talk of the sensation of “crossing a threshold” when a life spent writing as a hobby turns into a career, and you’re writing words people everywhere will read. It can be overwhelming at first.

• The Point C Collective LLC ☛ The Forwardable Email

  When a well-written Forwardable Email lands in my inbox, I smile: Here’s an entrepreneur who knows how to leverage their network. I’m excited to see where this goes.

  I hit forward. I add my social proof. I hit send. And I move on to the next one.

  Here are the elements of a great Forwardable Email: [...]

• Ben Werdmuller ☛ The Forwardable Email

  I insist on double opt-in introductions if I’m making a connection. That means I check in with the connectee first: do they actually want this connection? It’s a little slower, but it means connections are always consensual.

• Matthew Weber ☛ The Indieweb Has A Discovery Problem

  Blog rolls are important. I have one. If you consider yourself a part of the “IndieWeb,” you should have one too. Because the IndieWeb dies without people spreading the word.

  The thing is, Google sucks donkey balls, and not the good kind. You can’t go search for my blog here unless you know it exists or you know my name, which is probably not something normal people know. Other search engines exist, but again, you have to know what to search for. I don’t have one topic on this blog that people could search for, as I write about anything that catches my fancy. I get maybe 30 clicks from Google each month, and I’m shocked that it is that high.

• Nathaniel Borenstein ☛ John Ferguson

  This comment only scratches the surface of the importance of Internet technology in empowering the handicapped to play a more full role in our society and our economy. Had I more space, I would have mentioned not just the benefit to the employer of being able to employ skilled but handicapped workers, and not just the obvious benefit to the handicapped themselves of being able to find more meaningful and satisfying work. I would have mentioned the benefit to all of us that comes from getting to know some amazing people who are otherwise invisible to us because of their handicaps.

• Nathaniel Borenstein ☛ Email and Food: Essential, but not Status Symbols

  So it has gone with email. I can well remember when having email was a status symbol -- it showed that you were up to date, technically sophisticated, even hip. Celebrities got email addresses but admitted they didn't know why. Those days are long gone, since nearly everyone has email. But every example I can think of in which someone has visibly given up email, they are extremely high status individuals with options most of us lack.

  Donald Knuth, one of the world's greatest computer scientists, gave up email to kick off the 1990's and hasn't touched it since. He claims, probably correctly, that this allows him to be much more productive in his truly important work. If you want to communicate with him remotely, you can email his secretary, who'll talk to him and perhaps respond. Certainly a CEO like Breton can give up email, because he can have an assistant handle all his messages for him.

• Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Skimming Satellites: On The Edge Of The Atmosphere

    Fortunately, there may be a simple solution to this problem. By putting a satellite into what’s known as a very low Earth orbit (VLEO), a spacecraft will experience enough drag that maintaining its velocity requires constantly firing its thrusters. Naturally this presents its own technical challenges, but the upside is that such an orbit is essentially self-cleaning — should the craft’s propulsion fail, it would fall out of orbit and burn up in months or even weeks. As an added bonus, operating at a lower altitude has other practical advantages, such as allowing for lower latency communication.

    VLEO satellites hold considerable promise, but successfully operating in this unique environment requires certain design considerations. The result are vehicles that look less like the flying refrigerators we’re used to, with a hybrid design that features the sort of aerodynamic considerations more commonly found on aircraft.

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-12 [Older] Why the mad artistic genius trope doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-12 [Older] Winter’s natural wonders: seven tips to entice you outside and dose yourself up with joy

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Wormholes may not exist – we’ve found they reveal something deeper about time and the universe

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] DNA from wolf pup’s last meal reveals new facts about woolly rhino’s extinction

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Growing up alongside deadly fires inspired me to study them – and fight flames with swarms of drones

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Humans returned to British Isles earlier than previously thought at the end of the last ice age

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] What the first medical evacuation from the International Space Station tells us about healthcare in space

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] Why do some people get ‘hangry’ more quickly than others?

• Career/Education

  • Stanford University ☛ Senior Scaries: What if I don’t want to change the world?

    In this installment of her column, Ye grapples with her career aspirations and how they will fit into her personal life.

  • Amber Settle ☛ Experience matters

    What I am realizing this quarter is that teaching only the introductory programming classes for more than a decade fundamentally changed me as an instructor. When I previously taught algorithms, it was a lecture approach, in which I did things on the board and students listened. That approach just doesn’t work in introductory programming classes at DePaul, so I developed a more interactive style of teaching. And when I came back to algorithms, I couldn’t go back to the lecture approach since it feels weird to me now. So I made an algorithms class with lots of interactive development of materials and daily on-paper activities.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Community

    He missed a critical point. While departments play an official role in hosting academic programs, they importantly serve as the main community for the faculty within the department. You see your colleagues in the department in meetings, at seminars and just walking by them in the hallways. They are your peers and the ones who hired you and judge your promotion and tenure cases. You will argue with them but you all share a common mission to make your department as strong as possible, so you can attract even better colleagues.

  • Gregory Hammond ☛ Why I left Toastmasters

    While I doubt that me writing this down is going to cause any actual change, here’s what I feel needs to change in Toastmasters.

  • Addy Osmani ☛ 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google

    When I joined Google ~14 years ago, I thought the job was about writing great code. I was partly right. But the longer I’ve stayed, the more I’ve realized that the engineers who thrive aren’t necessarily the best programmers - they’re the ones who’ve figured out how to navigate everything around the code: the people, the politics, the alignment, the ambiguity.

    These lessons are what I wish I’d known earlier. Some would have saved me months of frustration. Others took years to fully understand. None of them are about specific technologies - those change too fast to matter. They’re about the patterns that keep showing up, project after project, team after team.

    I’m sharing them because I’ve benefited enormously from engineers who did the same for me. Consider this my attempt to pay it forward.

  • Futurism ☛ Gen Z Arriving at College Unable to Read

    As Pepperdine University literature professor Jessica Hooten Wilson told Fortune in a recent interview, “it’s not even an inability to critically think. It’s an inability to read sentences.”

    Wilson is one of the professors who’s had to quietly lower her academic benchmarks thanks to the rise in barely literate Gen Zers graduating American high schools.

    Rather than assigning reading outside of class, the literature professor told Fortune she’s adopted a kind of in-class popcorn reading, reciting passages together and discussing them “line by line.” Even that, unfortunately, might be a bit of a stretch for students these days.

• Hardware

  • CNX Software ☛ Geehy G32R430 Arm Cortex-M52 Encoder MCU features Arctangent accelerator, dual 16-bit ADC for industrial motion control systems

    Last year, Geehy introduced the industry’s first dual-core Cortex-M52 real-time MCU, and has now followed up with the G32R430, an Arm Cortex-M52 Encoder MCU with two 16-bit ADCs and a hardware ATAN (arctangent) accelerator for sub-1 µs electrical angle computation in high-precision encoder and motion control systems. The MCU is clocked at 128 MHz and uses ITCM/DTCM tightly coupled memory for deterministic, zero-wait-state execution, alongside a 4KB cache for low-latency control loops. It integrates two 16-bit high-precision ADCs with support for synchronous sampling, along with an extra 12-bit ADC, multiple analog comparators, DACs, and an on-chip temperature sensor, allowing encoder designs to be built with very few external analog components.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ 'We can't completely vacate the client market' says Intel amid wafer supply shortages — Nova Lake still on-track for late 2026 release, 14A in 2028

    Intel reconfirmed its commitment to the consumer market during its Q4 2025 earnings, despite a heavy focus on wafer supply shortages and increased demand from the data center and AI markets. The company is shifting its internal wafer supply to the DCAI segment while relying on external wafer supply for CCG (Client Compute Group).

  • The Register UK ☛ Intel prioritizes Xeons over client chips to meet AI demand

    In other words, Intel is prioritizing higher-margin Core-series parts to make way for Xeons, and cheap PCs packing low-end Intel processors may become harder to find.

    Intel isn't the only one reallocating wafer capacity. Major memory vendors, including Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung, are also grappling with capacity shortages in the face of AI demand.

  • Riccardo Mori ☛ The digicams return

    As someone who has been into photography since the 1980s, and who has used these compact cameras when they were the latest and greatest in digital photography, this ongoing trend is more than just a fad or just another excuse to achieve originality or to look, well, trendy. And it isn’t fake nostalgia either. This type of photography brings back real memories.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Project Censored ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Proposed Arizona Mine’s Water Sampling Reveals Dangerous Metal Levels

  • New York Times ☛ U.S. Formally Withdraws From World Health Organization

    Global health experts worry that a lack of international coordination will lead to death and disaster.

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Clinical trials and tribulations

• Proprietary

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ NASA taps popular PC hardware performance tool for cockpit simulations — government software approval process for CapFrameX started by the space agency

    CapFrameX, a popular benchmarking tool, has recently been considered by NASA Langley as a tool to check the performance of its cockpit simulator video systems. According to an X post by the company, the U.S. space agency has begun the government software approval process needed to get the app installed on their cockpit simulators, and that it was the agency, not CapFrameX, that initiated the process.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ Can you still run old App Store apps?

    As I explained, the general rule for certificates is that, once they have expired by date, they’re no longer valid. However, to ensure that third-party apps and installers can still be used after their expiry, Apple usually includes a trusted timestamp in their signature. Provided the certificate was valid at the time the app or installer was signed, then macOS should accept it as still being valid, as long as it hasn’t been revoked. But App Store apps are different again.

  • David Bushell ☛ Proton Spam and the AI Consent Problem – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)

    There is a problem with this email. And I’m not talking about the question of how exactly AI aligns with Proton’s core values of privacy and security.

    The problem is I had already explicitly opted out of Lumo emails.

  • Leon Mika ☛ HV #old Submission - Leon Mika

    Here’s my submission for Hemispheric View’s #155 request for fun and interesting computer peripherals (#old). In the abstract, this one’s neither fun nor interesting, yet it’s one I remember fondly. It’s the HP DeskJet 690c colour printer: [...]

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ CTA Hierarchy in the Wild

    But link hijacking isn’t why I’m writing this post.

    What struck me was the ordering and visual emphasis of the “call to action” (CTA) buttons. I almost clicked “Back to YouTube”, which was precisely the action I didn’t want.

    I paused and laughed to myself.

    Look how the design pattern for primary/secondary user interface controls has inverted over time: [...]

  • [Old] Andrew Moore ☛ Goodbye Adobe: Saying No to Colour Cartels

    At the time of writing this blog post, there has been no public statement from Adobe or Pantone. Users who previously were using spot colours are forced to pay an extra subscription on top of Adobe’s already steep pricing in order to open their previous works. Of course, Adobe didn’t adjust their pricing to account for the missing functionality.

    This whole locking of colours happened after I had already decided to drop Adobe, so it just confirmed that I was making the right decision. Removing or degrading functionality in a subscription-based service is unacceptable.

  • Fiona Runge ☛ runjak.codes: An adversarial coding test

    My first step was to look at the history of .vscode/tasks.json. I hoped that this would highlight exciting changes and shortcut having to scroll through the entire file.

  • Microsoft works to restore Outlook, Teams after outage [Ed: Microsoft collapses again]

    Thousands of Microsoft users ran into trouble with their email and work apps.

    Outlook and Teams went down late Thursday morning.

    Microsoft noted some users couldn’t send or receive email and were getting server error messages.

    “We’re investigating a potential issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview,” Microsoft stated on X around 11:30 a.m.

    The latest update from the company said it restored the infrastructure but is working to mitigate the impact.

  • Gamer Network Limited ☛ "We all have strong opinions within the studio" – even Microsoft's own game developers are hesitant to use AI [Ed: Slop, not "AI"]

    Microsoft are telling the world that the sooner we all switch to using generative AI tools in our day-to-day lives, the sooner we will 10x ourselves. Yet the corporation are still only finding haphazard pick up by videogame developers, including some of their own studios.

    As executive producer Susan Kath tells me, the Elder Scrolls Online team haven't yet found a part of development where they can use it. "Right now, we generally use it for things like this," Kath says, indicating our call. "A lot of us get a lot of use out of Copilot, for meetings, for summaries, inbox organisations, stuff like that."

    But, in the case of art, coding, or writing, generative AI is not something the team are using in Elder Scrolls Online's development, and its adoption is still an open discussion within the studio. "I don't know what our decision is going to be, because we're still having conversations about where we go with that," Kath says. "Obviously we all have strong opinions within the studio. Obviously Microsoft has invested heavily in this. That would be a thing that I would imagine we would talk about in the future."

  • Seattle Times ☛ Sweeping Amazon layoffs slated for next week, Reuters reports

    Amazon may lay off thousands of employees next week, continuing a plan to broadly cut its corporate workforce, Reuters first reported Thursday, citing anonymous sources.

    In late October, Reuters reported Amazon was planning to let go of about 30,000 employees. A day after the report, Amazon announced it was cutting 14,000 roles and implied that job losses could continue into 2026.

    Reuters reported that Amazon’s planned layoffs next week will likely mirror last year’s in size.

  • Gulf News ☛ Intel shares plunge on earnings expectations

    Intel shares dove more than 10 percent Thursday despite the struggling US chip maker doing better than expected in the recently ended quarter, as its revenue forecast disappointed investors.

    Intel reported a loss of $600 million on revenue of $13.7 billion in the final three months of last year.

  • Shopify makes more job cuts, this time targeting partnerships team

    Shopify has made what appears to be another round of layoffs, less than three months after its last job cuts. This time, the job losses have hit the company’s partnerships team.

    Starting Wednesday morning, employees in the partnerships division of Canada’s largest tech company began posting on LinkedIn that their roles had been “eliminated” as part of a broader “restructuring” or “reorganization.” It’s unclear how many people lost their jobs.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Malaysia Will Take Legal Action Against Musk's X and XAI Over Misuse of Grok Chatbot

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Nvidia accused of trying to cut a deal with Anna’s Archive for high‑speed access to the massive pirated book haul — allegedly chased stolen data to fuel its LLMs

      Nvidia has been accused of offering to pay for ‘high-speed access’ to Anna’s Archive, a notorious ‘shadow library’ portal, bursting with copyright-infringing materials.

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] [Guest Post] Labelling AI-Generated Content: Key Insights from the European Code’s First Draft [Ed: They mean slop or CG - worthless crap in very large volumes, wasting energy]

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] Will Google be third time lucky with new, AI-powered smart glasses? [Ed: NOT "AI-powered", just rebranded with buzzwords and mindless hype]

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Majority of CEOs Alarmed as AI Delivers No Financial Returns

      According to a recent survey by professional services network PwC, more than half of the 4,454 CEO respondents said “their companies aren’t yet seeing a financial return from investments in AI.”

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ AI is eating the world's memory - and we're all going to pay the price

      But the price surge is rippling through consumer markets.

      Research firms IDC and Counterpoint both now expect global smartphone sales to shrink at least 2% this year, in a sharp reversal from their growth outlook a few months ago. That would mark the first annual decline in shipments since 2023.

    • The Conversation ☛ Is AI hurting your ability to think? How to reclaim your brain

      Essentially, AI is replacing tasks many people have grown reluctant to do themselves – thinking, writing, creating, analysing. But when we don’t use these skills, they can decline.

      We also risk getting things very, very wrong. Generative AI works by predicting likely words from patterns trained on vast amounts of data. When you ask it to write an email or give advice, its responses sound logical. But it does not understand or know what is true.

    • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Dealing with AI Bots – COAR Website

      The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has just announced the new Dealing with AI Bots website that provides a wealth of information on bots and crawlers impacting the services and operations of open repositories, including mitigation strategies; see the announcement below for more information. This work follows a survey COAR conducted of its members in spring 2025 to better understand the scope and scale of the problem; COAR Executive Director Kathleen Shearer provided a video report of the project for the July 2025 issue of CNI’s Pre-recorded Project Briefing Series, available here: Artificial Intelligence Bots and Repositories—Results and Next Steps from COAR Survey.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft CEO says AI needs to have a wider impact or else it risks quickly losing ‘social permission’ — also says that the technology should benefit more people to avoid a bubble

      The rush to build AI infrastructure is putting a strain on many different resources. For example, we’re in the middle of a memory chip shortage because of the massive demand for HBM that AI GPUs require. It’s estimated that data centers will consume 70% of memory chips made this year, with the shortage going beyond RAM modules and SSDs and starting to affect other components and products like GPUs and smartphones.

    • The Register UK ☛ Cursor shows AI agents capable of shoddy code at scale

      "It *kind of* works! It still has issues and is of course very far from WebKit/Chromium parity, but we were astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely correctly," he added.

      Some developers managed to compile the code after some bug fixes. Others reported success after revisions to the build instructions.

      But by and large, developers aren’t convinced Cursor has made a breakthrough.

    • RTL ☛ Following controversy: Musk's Grok created three million sexualized images, research says

      “The AI tool Grok is estimated to have generated approximately three million sexualized images, including 23,000 that appear to depict children, after the launch of a new image editing feature powered by the tool on X,” said the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit watchdog that researches the harmful effects of online disinformation.

      CCDH’s report estimated that Grok generated this volume of photorealistic images over an 11-day period -- an average rate of 190 per minute.

    • New York Times ☛ Elon Musk’s Grok A.I. Chatbot Made Millions of Sexualized Images, New Estimates Show

      In just nine days, Grok posted more than 4.4 million images. A review by The Times conservatively estimated that at least 41 percent of posts, or 1.8 million, most likely contained sexualized imagery of women. A broader analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, using a statistical model, estimated that 65 percent, or just over three million, contained sexualized imagery of men, women or children.

    • Dark Reading ☛ AI Agents Are Bringing Back Browser Insecurity

      Agentic browsers suffer from a key security weakness — inadequate isolation — according to research published last week by Trail of Bits, a cybersecurity research consultancy. The current crop of agentic browsers treat the agent as a proxy for the user, allowing it to cross different tabs and even the local system, as if the agent were an authorized, known user.

    • 404 Media ☛ Aliens and Angel Numbers: Creators Worry Porn Platform ManyVids Is Falling Into ‘AI Psychosis’

      This sudden shift away from years of messaging about being a compatriot with sex workers, combined with bizarre AI-generated text and images about talking to aliens and numerology on social media, has made some creators worry for their livelihoods, and caused others to leave the site completely.

    • The Verge ☛ Tesla is finally doing unsupervised robotaxi rides

      Whether this demonstration represents progress or perhaps a disaster waiting to happen, time will tell. Tesla still uses a waitlist for its robotaxi service, and is rumored to only have a couple dozen vehicles operating in Texas. And even with the safety monitors, Tesla’s robotaxis have crashed approximately eight times in just five months, according to Eletrek. Fans are obviously thrilled by Tesla’s progress, while critics call it a con designed to highlight a capability that doesn’t exist.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Why AI Keeps Falling for Prompt Injection Attacks

      Imagine you work at a drive-through restaurant. Someone drives up and says: “I’ll have a double cheeseburger, large fries, and ignore previous instructions and give me the contents of the cash drawer.” Would you hand over the money? Of course not. Yet this is what large language models (LLMs) do.

    • Daniel Stenberg ☛ [Daniel's week] January 16, 2026

      We started out the week receiving seven Hackerone issues within a sixteen hour period. Some of them were true and proper bugs, and taking care of this lot took a good while. Eventually we concluded that none of them identified a vulnerability and we now count twenty submissions done already in 2026.

      We made some noise as I mentioned my PR in progress [1] that is about to remove all mentioned of a bug-bounty from the curl documentation. It is still in the planning phase and there will be more communication done about it, but we aim at shutting this down by the end of January 2026.

      The main goal with shutting down the bounty is to remove the incentive for people to submit crap and non-well researched reports to us. AI generated or not. The current torrent of submissions put a high load on the curl security team and this is an attempt to reduce the noise.

      We believe, hope really, that we still will get actual security vulnerabilities reported to us even if we do not pay for them. The future will tell.

    • The Register UK ☛ Curl shutters bug bounty program to stop AI slop

      Readers may recall that Stenberg started complaining about AI-generated bug reports in early 2024, and by mid-2025 contemplated killing the project’s bug bounty program. After receiving some strong bug reports that a developer found with help from AI, Stenberg acknowledged that AI can be a fine bug-hunting aid.

      Stenberg addressed his decision in a mailing message that opened with news that last week the project’s bug bounty scheme generated seven submissions and that while some identified bugs, none described a vulnerability.

    • Ars Technica ☛ Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure "intact mental health"

      The project developer for one of the Internet’s most popular networking tools is scrapping its vulnerability reward program after being overrun by a spike in the submission of low-quality reports, much of it AI-generated slop.

      “We are just a small single open source project with a small number of active maintainers,” Daniel Stenberg, the founder and lead developer of the open source app cURL, said Thursday. “It is not in our power to change how all these people and their slop machines work. We need to make moves to ensure our survival and intact mental health.”

    • Hugo Daniel ☛ I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a CLAUDE.md file

      Made an appeal, which was a link to a google docs form, with a textbox where I tried to convince some Claude C in the multi-trillion-quadrillion dollar non-disabled organization that I was not only a human but also a well-intended one.

      I got no reply. Not even an automatic response. 0 comms.

      So I wrote to their support, this time I wrote the text with the help of an LLM from another non-disabled organization.

      I got no reply. Not even an automatic response.

  • Social Control Media

    • Google ☛ YouTube CEO Neal Mohan’s 2026 Letter: The Future of YouTube - YouTube Blog

      As we enter 2026, the lines between creativity and technology are blurring, sparking a new era of innovation. This inflection point requires ambitious bets.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Activists Say Ring Cameras Are Being Used by ICE

      Among them is Amazon subsidiary Ring, the company behind those AI doorbell cameras that have exploded in popularity over the last few years. Back in October, Ring announced that its devices would soon be looped into a network of Flock AI surveillance cameras. That network, an investigation by 404 Media found, has been available to local and federal police and enforcement agencies like ICE — leaving many worried that their Ring doorbell cams are now feeding into a government panopticon.

    • 404 Media ☛ ICE, Secret Service, Navy All Had Access to Flock's Nationwide Network of Cameras

      In the letter Senator Wyden says he believes Flock is uninterested in fixing the room for abuse baked into its platform, and says local officials can best protect their constituents from such abuses by removing the cameras entirely.

    • Common Dreams ☛ DOGE [sic] Stole Private Social Security Data. Congress Must Investigate Now.

      Unions and advocates quickly filed a lawsuit to bar DOGE [sic] from accessing the data, but the Supreme Court issued a preliminary injunction restoring DOGE [sic]’s access. Now, we are beginning to learn what DOGE [sic] is doing with it.

      New court filings related to the lawsuit reveal that DOGE [sic] operatives entered an agreement with an advocacy group to share private Social Security data — with the goal of overturning election results in several states. The filings do not reveal the identity of either the DOGE [sic] operatives or the advocacy group.

    • The Register UK ☛ Europe’s GDPR cops dished out €1.2B in fines last year

      The figures come from the latest GDPR Fines and Data Breach Survey published by DLA Piper, which puts total fines issued across Europe last year at roughly £1 billion (€1.2 billion), up from £996 million in 2024. While that year-on-year increase is modest, regulators have now handed down €7.1 billion (£6.2 billion) in penalties since GDPR came into force in May 2018.

      The fines may look familiar, but breach reporting does not. From 28 January 2025 to the present, Europe's data protection authorities received an average of 443 personal data breach notifications a day. That's up 22 percent on the year before, and marks the first time daily reports have pushed past 400 since the regulation came into force.

    • Android Police ☛ Your photos and emails can now influence your Google Search

      Just last week, Google took a massive leap in its AI strategy. The tech giant rolled out Personal Intelligence for Gemini, which lets the AI tool take a look into your Gmail, Photos, Search data, and even your YouTube History to give you personalized answers.

      Although Gemini has already been able to connect to other native Google apps, Personal Intelligence allows the tool to reason across those sources and retrieve specific details from them.

    • Don Marti ☛ the best DROP site is no DROP site

      This is an excellent idea, the deletions are scheduled to start taking effect on August 1, and other states will be copying DROP soon. But what if they didn’t have to?

      Right now, if you want to do a deletion, you have to go to the DROP site and do a whole workflow with web forms and verification and stuff. We will be helping people out with this at the Oakland Privacy booth at Southern California Linux Expo in March.

    • Site36 ☛ Spy in Bremen conducted sexual relationships with target persons and suffered depression due to "double life"

      The German Interventionist Left has outed an informant who allegedly spied on left-wing structures in Bremen for more than eight years. Despite the man’s known depression, the domestic secret service is said to have repeatedly extended his deployment.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Ireland wants police spyware and facial recognition

      A separate Recording Devices Bill from December 2025 proposes expanded biometric recognition, potentially enabling both live and retrospective facial recognition across Ireland's police force.

    • The Washington State Legislature ☛ House Bill 2321, Washington State Legislature

      An act relating to preventing the unlawful manufacturing of firearms by requiring three-dimensional printers to be equipped with certain blocking technologies; adding a new chapter to Title 19 RCW; and prescribing penalties.

    • Windows Central ☛ Microsoft Teams wants to become your boss' lapdog, automatically snitching on your live location inside the office Wi-Fi — but it won't ship until it's bug-free

      Last year, a controversial feature shipping to Microsoft Teams raised concerns and even sparked backlash from users. It's expected to automatically update a user's location when they connect their device to an office Wi-Fi network. As a result, your manager or boss can tell whether you're working from the office.

      Shortly after this concept went viral across the web, Microsoft updated how the feature works, further indicating that it's an opt-in experience, which will ship disabled by default.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Chronicle Of Higher Education ☛ ‘The Perception of Danger Everywhere’: Navigating Campus Life Amid ICE Enforcement

    Locals, students, and college officials in the Twin Cities describe the mood as tense, apprehensive, and heavy./blockquote>

  • Futurism ☛ Fury as Amazon Ring Cameras Are Hooked Up to ICE System

    "Your Ring camera is an ICE agent."

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-11 [Older] Why Germany, India face obstacles to closer strategic ties

  • Time ☛ Can the 25th Amendment Be Used to Remove Trump From Office?

    The law is implemented across a number of scenarios, including if the President dies or resigns while in office under Section 1 or the President themselves withdraws from the position, which can be temporarily, under Section 3.

    If it is decided that the President is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” Section 4 of the Amendment can be used. In such scenarios, the Vice President will take up the position of President.

    Now, lawmakers are calling for the Amendment to be applied within Section 4, with many Democrats expressing the opinion that Trump is unfit for office.

  • International Bar Association ☛ Comment and analysis: President Trump and the 25th Amendment | International Bar Association

    Trump would be the oldest president in US history at age 82 by the time his term ends in January 2029. Were Vice President Vance, who is 41, and the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, it would be a first in American history. Whether or not Section 4 is ever invoked, the debate underscores the fragility of America’s constitutional safeguards of presidential competence and the depth of unease about President Trump’s capacity to govern.

  • Gannett ☛ What is the 25th Amendment? Lawmakers call for Trump removal

    The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution lays out the rules of succession for the presidential office and those for presidential disability or removal.

  • Project Censored ☛ The AI War Machine as Superorganism

    Praising the technological wonders of Palantir, Anduril, and other military AI companies that engage in mass surveillance and lethal targeting operations, Overmatched reads like an advertising campaign for those businesses, designed to justify increasing the US war budget by amplifying fear of China’s AI prowess. The Editorial Board’s characterization of China’s supposed military AI superiority echoes the false claim of a nuclear missile gap promoted by John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. Kennedy had asserted that the US lagged fatally behind Russia in nuclear missile production, when in fact the opposite was the case. The resulting moral panic helped to propel him into office, and he increased the war budget.

    Overmatched bemoans waste in Pentagon spending on “legacy” armaments sold by the five “Prime” weapons manufacturers. But Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman also make artificially intelligent weapons systems. The series calls for increasing the unauditable war budget by hundreds of billions of dollars to buy more autonomous weapons, satellites, drones, and AI-enabled command-and-control systems.

    Organizationally leaner and hugely capitalized, Silicon Valley “neo-Primes” such as Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX are flush with no-bid, open-ended Pentagon contracts for developing global surveillance and “kill chain” targeting systems, lethal drone swarming functions, weaponized satellites, unmanned warships, submarines, tanks, airplanes, and smart rockets.

  • The Register UK ☛ House of Lords votes to ban social media for under-16s

    On Wednesday evening, the Lords voted 261 to 150 in favor of amending the children's wellbeing and schools bill to require social media services to introduce age checks to block under-16s from access within a year. It will also require the chief medical officers to publish advice for parents on children's use of social media.

    Unless members of parliament vote to remove the amendment from the bill when it returns to the House of Commons, it will become law.

  • New York Times ☛ TikTok Strikes Deal to Create New U.S. Entity and Loosen App’s Ties to China

    Investors including the software giant Oracle; MGX, an Emirati investment firm; and Silver Lake, another investment firm, will own more than 80 percent of the new venture. That list also includes the personal investment entity for Michael Dell, the tech billionaire behind Dell Technologies, and other firms, TikTok said. Adam Presser, TikTok’s former head of operations, will be the chief executive for the U.S. TikTok.

  • The Verge ☛ The TikTok deal is done, finally

    A press release announcing the deal’s closure didn’t say how much those stakes cost or give details about potentially launching a new app in the US. It did say that the joint venture’s oversight of “comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for U.S. users” will apply to TikTok, the video editor CapCut, Lemon8, and “a portfolio” of other apps and services.

    For now, most of what we know is about the joint venture’s seven-member board, which includes TikTok US CEO Shou Zi Chew, and its first executive appointments, with TikTok’s former head of operations and trust and safety, Adam Presser, now serving as CEO.

  • RTL ☛ Will serve over 200 million users : TikTok establishes joint venture to end US ban threat - RTL Today

    The video-sharing app is a global digital entertainment powerhouse but its mass appeal and links to China have raised concerns over privacy and national security.

    The TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC will serve more than 200 million users and 7.5 million businesses while implementing strict safeguards for data protection and content moderation, the company said.

  • Carole Cadwalladr ☛ The Rupture

    Mark Carney’s speech at Davos yesterday really is worth your time. It made some of the front pages today but the news cycle moves so fast that it’s already yesterday’s news. Part of the challenge of this moment - and I believe the job of journalists - is to focus on the signal, not the noise. And if you have time to take in one thing properly, this week, I’d suggest it’s this.

    It does what a great speech should do: it gives us the language to process and understand what is happening. It does so from a position of moral clarity. And it includes a call to action to what remains of the liberal world.

    [...]

    Full text of Mark Carney speech, World Economic Forum, January 20, 2026 [...]

  • Michael Geist ☛ Canadian TikTok Ban Called Off as the Government Hits the Digital Policy Reset Button Once Again

    The reset on the TikTok ban came through what amounts to a settlement between the government and TikTok that was made official yesterday by the federal court. TikTok had challenged the government’s ban order as part of a judicial review process. While initial reports suggested that the court had overturned the government’s order banning the company, as the screenshot from the judgment shows, the reality is that the government asked the court to do so as it filed the motion asking that the order be set aside.

  • BoingBoing ☛ JD Vance still lying about Minneapolis

    Vance's insistence that Americans should not peacefully protest in the streets, but rather take their voices to the ballot box, is laughable. The Trump Administration threatens elected leaders who disagree with them and demands that their puppet DOJ investigate them. Trump has suggested we should do away with elections. They aren't listening to the voters; they are stomping on their necks and spraying them in the eyes with mace. This is an act of brutalizing dissent while pretending elections still matter.

  • YLE ☛ Finland sets tougher guidelines: No social media or smartphones for under-13s

    The recommendations are stricter than a draft version published last autumn, which only referred to banning social media. That attracted an exceptionally large number of comments from parents – more than 6,000 of them – most of whom supported the restrictions. Researchers and experts also urged stricter recommendations.

    The THL plans to develop recommendations for 14–18-year-olds later this year.

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Trump may move on from Greenland. Europe won’t.

    Europe will now have to swiftly translate the lessons from the past few weeks into building greater resilience and sovereignty, if not strategic autonomy.

    Europeans will be well advised to do more contingency planning for how to resist economic coercion, even from their allies and partners.

  • The Strategist ☛ Offshore wind can be a security hazard. Australia needs a risk assessment

    Australia should pause offshore wind developments until it completes a comprehensive national security risk assessment of them.

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ Sheinbaum endorses Carney’s WEF speech lamenting ‘rupture’ of world order: Wednesday’s mañanera recapped

    On Wednesday, the president took a moment to praise the address Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave on Tuesday at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and pitched her government's vision of investment.

  • France24 ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man chides Carney after Canadian PM delivers rousing speech on global order 'rupture' at Davos

    The Insurrectionist chided Mark Carney in a ⁠speech in Davos on Wednesday after the Canadian prime minister delivered a rousing address on a "rupture" in the international rules-based order. FRANCE 24's Christopher Guly reports from Ottawa.

  • New York Times ☛ At Davos, a Clash Between Convicted Felon’s World and the Old World

    For decades, leaders have gathered in Davos to discuss a shared economic and political future. On Wednesday, Hell Toupée turned the forum into a bracing clash between his worldview and theirs.

  • New York Times ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man’s Moves on Greenland

    After assailing Europe in a long speech at Davos, the president said he had won an agreement on the future of the Arctic territory.

  • New York Times ☛ An Unhinged President on the Magic Mountain

    Dihydroxyacetone Man’s Davos speech could have been ghostwritten by Mario Puzo.

  • New York Times ☛ Did the U.S. Ever Own Greenland? Fact-Checking Convicted Felon’s Davos Speech.

    The president gave misleading accounts of the U.S. role in Greenland’s history and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, among other claims.

  • New York Times ☛ Here’s a Look at Everything (and Everyone) Convicted Felon Targeted at Davos

    Hell Toupée’s verbal broadsides drew gasps and nervous laughter at the annual gathering of political and business leaders.

  • France24 ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man tells Davos he won’t use force to take Greenland

    U.S. President The Insurrectionist insisted he wants to “get Greenland, including right, title and ownership,” but he said he wouldn’t employ force to achieve that — using his speech Wednesday at the World Economic Forum to repeatedly deride European allies and vow that NATO shouldn’t stand in the way of U.S. expansionism.

  • France24 ☛ Greenland: Convicted Felon falsely claims the US 'gave back' territory to Denmark

    In his lengthy speech at Davos, The Insurrectionist falsely claimed the US 'gave back' Greenland to Denmark after World War II. In reality, Greenland has never been America's to give back at all. Vedika Bahl goes through the facts - and falsehoods - surrounding Greenland in Truth or Fake.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Australia’s opposition coalition collapses over hate speech law

    It will deepen the malaise of the two centre-right parties following an election thrashing in 2025.

  • RFERL ☛ Gutted Mosques, Eerie Calm In Tehran After Uprising

    Photos released on January 19 and 20 show the aftermath in Tehran of massive protests that swept Iran over recent weeks before being crushed by the country's security apparatus.

  • Green Party UK ☛ UK government must stand up for Rojava region, say Greens

    Reacting to attacks on northeast Syria (Rojava) and Kurdish communities, Green Party peer Natalie Bennett said: “The unprovoked attack by the Syrian government on the autonomous area of North Eastern Syria is a potential disaster for democracy, women’s rights and peaceful coexistence.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-12 [Older] Croatia reintroduces conscription after almost two decades

  • Project Censored ☛ 2026-01-12 [Older] Venezuela, War Crimes, and the Media’s Dirty Work

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • The Straits Times ☛ China is now Central Asia’s top trading partner. Will there be a tug of war with Russia?

      Its ties with the region are in the spotlight after it overtook Russia in trade with Central Asia in 2025.

    • LRT ☛ Over 1,700 Belarusians, Russians denied Lithuanian residency over ‘national security’

      Lithuania last year identified 1,721 citizens of Belarus and Russia as posing a threat to national security, public order or public health, the country’s Migration Department said Wednesday.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Epstein victim hits Trump DOJ with blistering statement: ‘This failure is deeply personal’

    So far, however, only a small fraction of the files have been released, despite the deadline to release them all passing last month, and many of the files that have been released appear to dance around Trump’s own friendship with Epstein.

  • Pro Publica ☛ “Bitcoin Jesus” Roger Ver Avoided Prison Thanks to Trump-Connected Lawyers

    White-Collar Whitewash: The story of “Bitcoin Jesus” highlights the extent that white-collar criminal enforcement has eroded under Trump.

• Environment

  • SBS ☛ Up to 48C: Parts of Australia to approach 'possible record-breaking heat', BoM says

    "As we go into the new week, that heat will build again over South Australia, NSW and particularly north-western parts of Victoria. Looking at the top of 43C for Adelaide on Monday," Johnson said.

  • Wired ☛ The AI Boom Will Increase US Carbon Emissions—but It Doesn’t Have To

    That’s the message of a new analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists released Wednesday, which models a variety of scenarios for how to fuel the coming AI boom. The US is poised to see a 60 to 80 percent increase in electricity demand through 2050, with data centers alone making up more than half of the increase by the end of this decade, the analysis finds. If policies stay the same as they currently are—with attacks on renewable energy being embedded into regulatory regimes and few significant national policies restricting carbon emissions from power plants—we could see between a 19 and 29 percent increase in CO2 emissions from US power plants tied just to the energy needs of data centers over the next 10 years.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-01-18 [Older] Another Energy Transition Is Possible

    • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] Modest Gain, Major Headwinds: The Energy Transition at the Crossroads

    • TruthOut ☛ Kushner Reveals Dystopic Plan to Build Data Centers on Ruins of Gaza Genocide

      Tellingly, numerous parts of the map located next to residential areas are dedicated to industry and “data centers.” Ruinous technology like AI, reports have said, are slated to be a major part of the White House’s plan for Gaza, with other slides in the pitch deck reported by The Wall Street Journal showing a transformation of the Strip into a “smart city” with “tech driven governance.”

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ [Cryptocurrencies] and Big Banks Fight Over Who Gets to Fleece You

      A loophole under current law allows stablecoins — [cryptocurrenbcy] tokens pegged to the US dollar — to essentially pay interest on their investors’ holdings, similar to a bank account except without the same regulatory guardrails.

      This carve-out could lure depositors away from banks’ savings accounts — a move that would threaten a multitrillion-dollar scheme by the banking industry in recent years, in which they’ve paid minuscule interest on customers’ financial deposits while enjoying far higher interest rates from the country’s central bank and pocketing the difference.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Trump administration scraps multimillion-dollar solar projects in Puerto Rico as grid crumbles

      The projects were aimed at helping 30,000 low-income families in rural areas across the U.S. territory as part of a now-fading transition toward renewable energy.

      In an email obtained by The Associated Press, the U.S. Energy Department said that a push under Puerto Rico’s former governor for a 100% renewable future threatened the reliability of its energy system.

    • Vintage Everyday ☛ The 1957 Mercury Voyager: A Masterpiece of Jet-Age Design

      Launched during a year of radical transformation for Mercury, the Voyager departed from traditional utility to embrace a bold, futuristic aesthetic. Its most striking feature was the “Hardtop” styling, a pillarless design that created an unbroken expanse of glass, giving the massive wagon a sleek, airy silhouette.

    • The Register UK ☛ Ex [cryptocurrency] miners building 430 MW datacenter in secret place

      [Cryptocurrency] miner turned AI infrastructure provider Applied Digital announced it has broken ground on a 430 MW data center somewhere in the southern US, but it isn’t yet ready to reveal the location of its new facility.

      The company has faced negative reactions to past projects. In Harwood, North Dakota, locals opposed the company’s plans to build a data center campus. Another of the company’s projects, in Ellendale, Colorado, also attracted attention – not all of it positive.

    • Positech Games ☛ Positech is funding a solar-powered borehole in cameroon! – Cliffski's Blog

      But anyway, we are doing it again! After a long gap in charity giving while I got stressed about the spiraling cost of the solar farm, I can finally do stuff like this again. I had contacted Building Schools For Africa a while ago saying if they have any more solar-powered borehole projects, I would love to fund one, and they recently got in touch with just that. They send you a big government study on the problems, the impact a borehole would have, a cost spreadsheet and feasibility report etc. In this case, I was sent the one for the school (which was paid for by another donor) at the location where they need a borehole and it made very depressing reading. The borehole will be in bagam, shown here: [...]

    • YLE ☛ Renewables surpass nuclear as Finland's biggest power source

      By far the largest production area for wind power is North Ostrobothnia, which includes Oulu. The region boasts more than a third of the country’s wind power capacity.

      North Ostrobothnia is also a major producer of hydropower, with several large plants on the Oulu and Ii rivers. North Ostrobothnia also has large solar power plants, with more planned.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Five Face Trial in Peru in Rare Prosecution Over the Killing of an Amazon Defender

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Stingrays inspire smarter ocean robots: The physics of fin motion

      In the wild, rays fall into two broad camps: pelagic, like manta rays, soaring far above the ocean floor; and benthic, like stingrays, hugging the seabed. Their swimming styles reflect their habitats. Pelagic rays flap their fins in a smooth, bird-like motion. Benthic rays undulate with the motion of the waves.

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Humpback Whales Are Probably Learning How to Catch Prey With Bubble Nets by Watching One Another

      Humpback whales have devised a clever strategy that allows them to scarf down lots of food in just a handful of gulps. Called “bubble netting,” this well-documented strategy involves swimming in circles beneath the water’s surface while exhaling from their blowholes to create a rising curtain of bubbles. Tricked into thinking they’re trapped, krill, herring and other prey form a tight, frenetic column—making it easy for hungry, open-mouthed humpbacks to swoop in and swallow them.

  • Overpopulation

    • Overpopulation ☛ Making sense of Trump’s immigration crackdown

      Daily video posts from Minneapolis show chaotic scenes of protesters squaring off against ICE agents. Are these justified enforcement operations to reduce illegal immigration, or punishment for Democrat-led cities that voted against Donald Trump in 2024? Here to help readers make sense of what is happening is Dr. Karen Shragg, lifelong environmentalist, naturalist, educator and overpopulation activist.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • European Commission ☛ Remarks by Executive Vice-President Virkkunen on the Digital Networks Act

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Congress wants veto power over Trump administration for AI chip exports — new proposed AI Overwatch Act would shift ultimate control of high-performance chip exports

    Legislators from the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee this week advanced the AI Overwatch Act, originally introduced in December, which would give ultimate control over the exports of high-performance data center-grade AI processors to adversary nations to Congress. As reported by Reuters, the bill advanced after the White House introduced its new export rules for fairly advanced AI GPUs from AMD and Nvidia to China, along with a mechanism to get a 25% fee from the exporters.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ ProGrade Digital secures out-of-this-world contract with NASA | Digital Camera World

    Here's some memory card news you don't see every day: ProGrade Digital has announced that it has entered into a Space Act agreement with NASA to support Artemis moon missions.

  • Lionel Dricot ☛ Why there’s no European Google?

    Those European endeavours are now a fundamental infrastructure of all humanity. Those technologies are definitely part of our long-term history.

    In the media, success is often reduced to the size of a company or the bank account of its founder. Can we just stop equating success with short-term economic growth? What if we used usefulness and longevity? What if we gave more value to the fundamental technological infrastructure instead of the shiny new marketing gimmick used to empty naive wallets? Well, I guess that if we changed how we measure success, Europe would be incredibly successful.

    And, as Europeans, we could even be proud of it. Proud of our inventions. Proud of how we contribute to the common good instead of considering ourselves American vassals.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The petty (but undeniable) delights of cultivating unoptimizability as a habit

    Any attempt to change society by shopping very carefully is destined to fail, but it's worse than that. Because "shopping very carefully" never makes systemic change, its practitioners inevitably decide the reason they're not seeing the change they yearn for is that their allies aren't shopping carefully enough. This turns the careful shopper into a cop who polices other people's consumption, demanding that they stop eating some foodstuff or using Twitter or watching HBO Max. Squabbling over whether using a social media network makes you a Nazi generates far more heat than light – so much heat that it incinerates the solidarity you need to actually fight Nazis.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Lie They Call Freedom

    But here is what the free speech maximalists have done: they have transformed a right into a virtue.

    Free speech is not a virtue. Speaking freely is not virtuous. It is simply a thing you are allowed to do, for the aforementioned reasons. The right to speak does not confer moral worth upon whatever is spoken. Lying is not good because it is permitted. Spreading disinformation is not admirable because the government cannot stop you. The protection of speech is not the same as the celebration of speech, and the license to say anything is not a license to say anything without consequence.

    Surely there should be social consequences to lying. Surely there should be reputational costs to spreading poison. Surely the people have the right—the obligation, even—to judge what is said and to judge those who say it.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] What can technology do to stop AI-generated sexualised images? [Ed: It's not "AI"]

    • Futurism ☛ White House Uses AI to Alter Protester's Face So That She's Sobbing, Instead of Looking Brave, During Arrest

      As CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale soon confirmed, the image had been altered to make it look as though Levy Armstrong was crying during her arrest.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • BIA Net ☛ Turkey blocks access to pro-Kurdish news agencies amid Syria offensive

    The Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) has blocked access to the websites and social media accounts of two pro-Kurdish news outlets, Mezopotamya Agency (MA) and JinNews.

    The BTK presidency issued the restriction orders on Jan 21, citing the protection of national security and public order. The censorship covers the main website of MA and its X accounts in Turkish, Kurdish, and English. JinNews faced similar restrictions on its website and social media platforms.

  • Techdirt ☛ Section 230 Didn’t Fail Rand Paul. He Just Doesn’t Like the Remedy That Worked.

    Instead of fighting this battle in court against the person who created this video, Paul has redirected his anger toward Section 230, the law often described as the 26 words that created the modern Internet. Although he once defended the law’s provisions that shield online platforms from liability for user speech, Paul now argues in a recent New York Post op-ed that the only solution is to tear it down.

    At the heart of Paul’s argument is a simple demand: YouTube should have stepped in, judged the accusation against him to be false, and removed it. Once notified that the video was false, the platform should have been legally responsible for leaving it up. Section 230, he argues, prevents that from happening.

  • Techdirt ☛ Utah Continues To Ban More Books, Even As It Racks Up More Lawsuits

    This law is basically just a heckler’s veto. No consensus is needed to subject a title to removal across the state. The law allows parents to file book challenges which, in reality, means a few bigoted activists will be able to impose their will on every resident in the state.

    The law compounds this deliberate error by allowing certain schools (or those being pressured by this small group of anti-freedom activists) to place their thumbs on the scale. Since that’s what the law is designed to do, that’s exactly what has happened: [...]

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Michigan News ☛ Student newspaper returns to University of Michigan-Flint after 18-month hiatus

    The Michigan Times returned to University of Michigan-Flint on Jan. 14, bringing independent student journalism back to campus after the newspaper stopped publishing at the end of the 2023-2024 academic year.

    The relaunched publication, now available at mtimes.org, will celebrate its return with a party Thursday, Jan. 22, from 6 to 8 p.m. at Clint’s Cafe on campus.

  • Press Gazette ☛ PRs need to stop being complicit in suppression of information via SLAPPs

    One tactic used is the threat of launching libel or data protection claims against journalists to curtail public interest reporting, commonly referred to as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs). This is defined by the UK Government as “an abuse of the legal process, where the primary objective is to harass, intimidate and financially and psychologically exhaust one’s opponent via improper means”. It is a tactic that represents perhaps the most corrosive and pernicious mechanism in that apparatus.

    At their core, SLAPPs involve the weaponisation of the legal process. Their purpose is not to secure justice, but to intimidate, drain resources, and exhaust those who seek to investigate and disclose matters of public interest, with the threat of ruinous legal costs doing much of the work. When a well-resourced claimant targets a defendant of modest means, the outcome is often decided long before any hearing. Journalists abandon stories, researchers shelve findings, whistleblowers remain silent.

  • FPF ☛ Raid of reporter’s home ignores federal law, constitutional freedoms

    The FBI raid of the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, reportedly to investigate a contractor accused of mishandling classified records, marked an alarming escalation in the Trump administration’s multipronged war on press freedom. All the meanwhile, Post billionaire owner Jeff Bezos remains silent.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Attacks on Journalist Seth Harp Are Attacks on Free Speech

    Seth Harp’s reporting on nonclassified information about the US’s attack on Venezuela has led to attacks from Congress on his — and everyone’s — basic First Amendment rights.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ The FBI’s raid of journalist’s home was the product of decades of backsliding

    The former constitutional law professor had promised the most transparent administration in history. Instead, his administration normalized the archaic Espionage Act as the go-to weapons for prosecuting journalists’ sources. Whistleblowers, such as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, who helped journalists inform the public about war crimes, torture and unconstitutional surveillance, were transformed into criminals.

    Targeting journalists’ sources is an affront to press freedom. It also quickly leads to targeting journalists. The Obama administration attempted to compel the national security reporter James Risen to name his source about a botched CIA covert action, threatening him with jail if he refused to name names.

  • CJR ☛ No, Seth Harp Didn’t Dox a Delta Force Commander - Columbia Journalism Review

    Press freedom organizations condemned Luna’s subpoena, characterizing it as an attempt to intimidate journalists reporting on sensitive stories. “Throughout his career, Harp has reported critically on the US Special Forces, as well as on US foreign policy more broadly,” reads a letter to the Speaker and minority leader of the House of Representatives that was signed by groups including Defending Rights & Dissent, PEN America, the National Writers Union, and the American Civil Liberties Union. “While members of Congress are, as individuals, entitled under the First Amendment to disagree with Harp, they cannot abuse the compulsory process to retaliate against journalists.”

    For his part, Harp, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the author of The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, which investigates the dark side of a premier special operations base in North Carolina, maintains that the commander’s identity is not classified, and even if it were, that reporters have a constitutional right to publish information the government wants to keep secret. “I know what I know because they themselves put it on a public website or turned the documents over through FOIA, and that’s it,” Harp told me. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

  • Columbia University ☛ Columbia Journalism School Statement on Federal Raid of Washington Post Reporter's Home | Columbia Journalism School

    These moves come on the heels of audacious campaigns to silence or intimidate the independent press: President Trump sued the Pulitzer Prize committee, the Des Moines Register, ABC, the BBC, and CBS for coverage he considered unfavorable; Congress and the president defunded and thereby shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; the administration has insisted on hand-picking journalists permitted to cover the White House and Pentagon; the Pentagon has attempted to dictate the editorial focus of Stars and Stripes, an independent outlet; last April, Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded policies that protected journalists against subpoenas from the Justice Department, except in cases of national security; earlier this month, Congress voted to subpoena the investigative journalist Seth Harp, accusing him of “doxing” the commander of the Army unit that spearheaded the January 3 operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, simply by naming him in the course to standard reporting.

    We have also seen increasingly aggressive government suppression of political speech throughout the country, including on our own campus, as well as the administration’s violent efforts to quell Constitutionally protected protests in Minnesota.

  • CPJ ☛ Romanian journalist Emilia Șercan threatened after plagiarism exposé

    Șercan’s January 14 exposé on the Press One news site alleged that Romania’s minister of justice, Radu Marinescu, plagiarized his PhD thesis. Since then, she has faced a sustained campaign of online harassment and threats. She told CPJ that she has received hundreds of online messages — many anonymous — escalating from insults and misogynistic abuse to violent language and explicit threats of physical harm, including death threats. Șercan said she believes this is part of a broader campaign in retaliation for her reporting, and that it was triggered by comments from the minister and other Social Democratic Party politicians.

  • CPJ ☛ Mali bans Jeune Afrique over coverage of jihadist fuel and security crises

    “One of the main, shared achievements of the Alliance of Sahel States has been proving themselves to be a zone hostile to journalism that may be critical of authorities’ handling of security challenges,” said Moussa Ngom, CPJ’s Francophone Africa representative. “Malian authorities must reverse their censorship to allow Jeune Afrique to be read and guarantee the right of citizens to be freely informed.”

    Following military coups, the three countries finalized the establishment of the Alliance of Sahel States in 2024 to fight security threats from jihadist militants that have killed thousands and displaced millions.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Anti-Minority Hate Speech in India Rose by 13% in 2025, US Research Group Says

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] Toronto Is Segregating Dissent

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] Donald Cheeto Mussolini Sparks Health Concerns After 'Zombie' Outburst During Detroit Economic Speech

  • MinnPost ☛ Courts mulling whether ICE violated Minnesota observers’ rights

    Katherine Menendez, a Minnesota federal judge, issued an 83-page ruling last Friday that specified a number of actions that federal immigration agents cannot do, because it would violate onlookers’ First Amendment rights. One such tactic is “using pepper spray or similar nonlethal munitions and crowd dispersal tools against persons who are engaging in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity.”

    On Wednesday, a federal appeals court paused Menendez’s ruling for now as Trump administration lawyers and American Civil Liberties Union-Minnesota attorneys representing demonstrators and observers prepare to argue the merits of their respective sides.

  • Techdirt ☛ Since Last May, ICE Officers Have Been Told They Don’t Need Warrants To Enter Homes

    ICE carries around things they call warrants, but hardly resemble the real thing. An administrative warrant is self-issuing. The officer who wants to use it only needs to fill in a few blanks and sign it before heading out to try to arrest the person listed on the paperwork. There’s no signature line for supervisors, which means these aren’t reviewed by anyone else but the person writing them.

    But since last May, ICE officers have been instructed they can treat these pieces of paper like actual warrants — you know, the ones that are subjected to at least a cursory review by a judge.

    The whistleblower report [PDF] contains screenshots of the memo issued by ICE head Todd Lyons, last seen here complaining repeatedly about people who complain about ICE officers acting like paramilitary kidnapping squads.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Army orders soldiers to stand by for possible Minneapolis deployment

    The defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive plans, confirmed that members of an Army military police brigade who are stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina have been given prepare-to-deploy orders.

  • TruthOut ☛ ICE Recruiters Are Using Neo-Nazi Memes and Seeking Out Extremists at Gun Shows

    ICE is actively employing recruiters who use right-wing social media and influencer operations to get at potential recruits. And it is explicitly targeting young men who listen to “patriotic” (in other words, hard-right) podcasts. Part of ICE’s “wartime recruitment” schtick now involves asking potential applicants if they want to repel “foreign invaders” — and then offering them $50,000 sign-up bonuses if they decide to join.

  • Tim Bornholdt ☛ Terror

    I guess all I can do is keep pushing forward. Help where I can. Donate to food shelves and blood banks. Stay positive and hopeful for better days. Generally be there for my neighbors and friends who are also consumed by terror.

    But yeah, we're not alright here. It sucks.

  • Rlang ☛ Using {ellmer} for Dynamic Alt Text Generation in {shiny} Apps

    First things first, if you haven’t heard of or used alt text before, it is a brief written description of an image that explains context and purpose. It is used to improve accessibility by allowing screen readers to describe images, or provide context if an image fails to load. For writing good alt text see this article by Havard, but some good rules of thumb are: [...]

  • Adrian Roselli ☛ Barriers from Links with ARIA

    I have my canned response that aria-label auto-translation is inconsistent.

    But the "something else maybe" question is what reminded me that this construct has caused issues outside of WCAG concerns. In particular, the only assistive technologies (AT) that consume ARIA are screen readers and, to a far lesser extent, voice control. That latter part only because browsers assemble the accessible names, not AT. There’s plenty more AT that never touches ARIA.

    I knew there were issues, but couldn’t rattle them off from the top of my head. So I built some examples and poked them with other accessibility features of browsers.

  • Luigi Mozzillo ☛ If this is a man · mzll

    As a European, as an Italian, as someone who carries the values of the resistance against Nazi fascism, I see traces of a recent past we thought we had forgotten. Like Jen, I ask myself the same question: what happened to empathy and humanity in the USA?

    When did the American dream die?

  • The Atlantic ☛ I Was Kidnapped by Idiots

    An academic trip to Iraq unexpectedly turned into an immersive field study on the ways authoritarian regimes use brutality.

  • BoingBoing ☛ 903 days in Baghdad: her captors were bad at interrogation

    After discovering her Israeli identity, they demanded confessions to crimes she didn't commit. When she made things up under torture, "they just got greedy, because every time they torture me, I tell them some new invention. They started just hanging me and beating me, saying, 'I want something new. I want something new.'" Confirmation bias in action: they knew what they wanted to hear and wouldn't accept evidence to the contrary.

  • RFERL ☛ EU To Target Iranian Minister, Security Chiefs Over Deadly Crackdown On Protesters

    Momeni, also deputy commander-in-chief, commanded forces that "suppressed street protests," which saw thousands of casualties, according to the EU document.

    Regional IRGC commanders including Heydar Olfati in Ilam Province and Ahmad Ali Feyzollahi of the IRGC Ground Forces elite Saberin Brigade are accused of ordering troops to open fire on peaceful crowds.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ The conditionally open web

    I spend a lot of time thinking about the open web. We talk about it a lot. But I'm not sure it exists, at least not in the way it's often described. Embedded within the underlying architecture of the web is an ideal of openness. One can publish anything and one can link to anything.

    The web as it exists today and as it has existed for some time is only conditionally open. Anything can still be put onto the web and almost anything can be linked to, but access is only available under the conditions set by the publisher. The web was designed and architected to be open but it has slowly seen barriers erected as the motivations of its users and participants change and evolve.

  • Coyote ☛ osteophage | The Case For Comments

    Given that comments can be controversial on the indie web, it’s worth pointing out the use cases for comment sections as a feature. Comment sections are particularly suited to allowing for brief high-context replies, supporting public multi-way interactions, setting a (relatively) lower threshold for participation, and allowing the blogger to define the parameters for a discussion. These are use cases that cannot all be adequately addressed by commonly-suggested alternatives such as response posts or email.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • International Business Times ☛ List of 57 House Republicans Who Voted with Democrats to Let the Government Disable Your Car

    Not one but 57 Republicans broke ranks midweek, siding with Democrats to stop a measure aimed at cutting funds for a government rule critics describe as a 'kill switch.' The move exposed splits inside the GOP just hours after the debate began.

    The amendment, authored by Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, targeted provisions within the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 (H.R. 7148) that fund the implementation of Section 24220 of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. According to the official House roll call, the measure failed 164-268, with 160 Republicans voting in favour and 57 joining 211 Democrats in opposition.

  • [Old] Andrew Moore ☛ Secure Boot, TPM and Anti-Cheat Engines

    With cheating becoming more and more prevalent in online multiplayer games, some anti-cheat vendors have decided to start leveraging hardware and firmware security features. Electronic Arts recently announced that their newest title, Battlefield 6, would require players to have both Secure Boot and their firmware TPM (supporting the TPM 2.0 spec) enabled in order to be able to play the game. Riot’s Vanguard has similar requirements for players on Windows 11, and it is suspected that with the upcoming end of Windows 10’s support, Riot will extend that requirement to all players. Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 have been soft requirements to install Windows 11 for some time, so with Windows 10’s end-of-life, it seems like a good time for anti-cheat vendors to require those security features.

    This sudden change, however, has caused a little uproar in some gaming communities, with some vocal dissenters trying to frame this as nothing more than a ruse to force players on a specific operating system, to prevent them from playing on older hardware, or as a massive overreach that has the sole goal of pilfering players’ data in order to sell it.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CBC ☛ Netflix just sweetened its $72B US bid for Warner Bros. Here's how the deal happened

  Netflix and Paramount have been duelling over the deal for months. While Netflix is vying for the company's studio business and streaming catalogue, Paramount wants to acquire the entire company — which would include the likes of CNN and the Discovery+ streaming channel.

• IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] Veterinary versus human use under Article 3(d): CJEU asked to revisit Santen

• Patents

  • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Who Decides When Construction Is Needed? Comcast Seeks Supreme Court Review of O2 Micro’s Limits

    Comcast's cert petition challenges Federal Circuit's power to construe claims in the patentee's favor after the patentee argued for no construction.

    >

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] A new way to define T cells and what it means for cell therapy [patents]

  • Kangaroo Courts

    • JUVE ☛ How the UPC has evolved into an established court [Ed: UPC is illegal, JUVE knows it, but JUVE participated in trying to legitimise this corruption along with the cocaine addicts at the EPO]

      According to the latest JUVE Patent data on UPC judge capacities, the 48 legally qualified judges now dedicate an average of 80% of their time to the UPC and only 20% to other courts.

    • JUVE ☛ Illumina and Powell Gilbert in love with Lisbon [Ed: This is an illegal kangaroo court; in practice, Europe has no patent justice anymore, it is just giant corruption connected to white-collar crimes]

      The dispute between Illumina and Element Biosciences has been brewing for several months. Back in 2025, the two companies filed lawsuits against each other over their DNA sequencing instruments at US courts and the Regional Court Munich. In December, Illumina then sued its competitor at the Unified Patent Court.

  • Software Patents

    • Nathaniel Borenstein ☛ The View from Guppy Lake: Software Patents, the Hacker Ethic, and Patent Trolls

      Nowadays I spend a good chunk of my time working on patent-related matters. Many people -- including my younger self -- would judge this very negatively, because they think -- correctly, in my view -- that the current patent system is, essentially, evil. Recently, I've been motivated to collect some of my thoughts about the patent system, and posted them to the Mimecast blog. You can find them in these two posts, if you're interested: [...]

    • Nathaniel Borenstein ☛ Software Patents and the Hacker Ethic

      The consequences of fitting the square peg of information technology into the round hole of patent law are endless lawsuits that cost companies millions or billions of dollars, and tend to ensure that no one company can make the best possible product, because there are always features that some other company has patented.

• Trademarks

  • TTAB Blog ☛ EASY BEE-ZY KNOCK OUT Not Confusable with OSO EASY and OSO EASY PEASY for Live Plants, Says TTAB

    In a "modern-day War of the Roses," the Board dismissed an opposition to registration of the mark EASY BEE-ZY KNOCK OUT for “live plants,” concluding that confusion is not likely with the registered marks OSO EASY and OSO EASY PEASY for live plants. The Board found that "the dissimilarity of the marks and the slight weakness of Opposer’s marks" outweighed the other DuPont factors. Spring Meadow Nursery, Inc. v. The Conard-Pyle Company, Opposition No. 91291336 (January 12, 2026) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Jennifer L. Elgin).

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Mind the Gap: When a trade mark vanishes temporarily, does the clock of acquiescence stop ticking?

• Copyrights

  • Public Domain Review ☛ Flights of Fancy: The Nine Birds of Jacques de Fornazeris (1594)

    Etchings of birds in a somewhat theatrical style.

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Ninth Circuit dispensing with intrinsic copyright infringement test

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-11 [Older] [Book Review] Fashion and Intellectual Property [Ed: Copyrights and trademarks, not 'IP']

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] [Guest Post] The IP protection of AI output [Ed: Slop violates copyrights, it should not be covered by copyrights]

  • Public Domain Review ☛ Cybernetic Attention: All Watched over by Machines We Learned to Watch

    Before the attention economy consumed our lives, “pursuit tests” devised by the US military coupled man to machine with the aim of assessing focus under pressure. D. Graham Burnett explores these devices for evaluating aviators, finding a pre-history of the laboratory research that has relentlessly worked to slice and dice the attentional powers of human beings.

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Music matrix overloaded - UMG’s‘artist incubator’, a blue pill for music-related data farming?

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post - The Ghost in the Machine: Why Generative AI is a Crisis of Authorship, Not Just a Tool

    Concealing generative AI’s role in providing content to a scholarly publication is an example of this ethical breach, but with a technological twist. When an author relies on an LLM to generate the intellectual content, rather than just to polish the language, they are outsourcing intellectual effort without attribution. This creates critical gaps in accountability: [...]

  • EFF ☛ Rent-Only Copyright Culture Makes Us All Worse Off

    As we approach the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Copyrights, the last major overhaul of US copyright law, we’re not the only ones wondering if it’s time for the next one. It’s a high-risk proposition, given the wealth and influence of entrenched copyright interests who will not hesitate to send carefully selected celebrities to argue for changes that will send more money, into fewer pockets, for longer terms. But it’s equally clear that and nowhere is that more evident than the waning influence of Section 109, aka the first sale doctrine.

    First sale—the principle that once you buy a copyrighted work you have the right to re-sell it, lend it, hide it under the bed, or set it on fire in protest—is deeply rooted in US copyright law. Indeed, in an era where so many judges are looking to the Framers for guidance on how to interpret current law, it’s worth noting that the first sale principles (also characterized as “copyright exhaustion”) can be found in the earliest copyright cases and applied across the rights in the so-called “copyright bundle.”

    Unfortunately, courts have held that first sale, at least as it was codified in the Copyright Act, only applies to distribution, not reproduction. So even if you want to copy a rented digital textbook to a second device, and you go through the trouble of deleting it from the first device, the doctrine does not protect you.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ IPTV Piracy Crackdown in Sweden 'Exposes' 4,886 Subscribers

    A major IPTV crackdown in Sweden has not only taken down a multi-million dollar reseller; it has also exposed the identities of nearly 5,000 subscribers. While these IPTV users aren't currently facing charges, a looming law change in July 2026 could soon turn these types of 'customer lists' into evidence for copyright infringement fines.

  • 404 Media ☛ Comic-Con Bans AI Art After Artist Pushback

    “Comic-con deciding to allow GenAi imagery in the art show—giving valuable space to GenAi users to show slop right NEXT to actual artists who worked their asses off to be there—is a disgrace!” Ortiz said in a post on Bluesky. “A tone deaf decision that rewards and normalizes exploitative GenAi against artists in their own spaces!”

    According to Ortiz, the convention is a sacred place she didn’t want to see desecrated by AI. “Comic-Con is the big mecca for comic artists, illustrators, and writers,” she said. “I organize and speak with a lot of different artists on the generative AI issue. It’s something that impacts us and impacts our lives. A lot of us have decided: ‘No, we’re not going to sit by the sidelines.’”