Leftovers

• The New Leaf Journal ☛ Creating NLJ QR Code With QR Code Generator

  I opted for a bitmap (.png) QR code instead of a vector. I shrunk the border and changed the background and QR code colors to make The New Leaf Journal theme. I also set “Error correction” to “high” because I figured “why not?” I did not fiddle with the other options since (A) I do not know what they all do, and (B) I was satisfied with the resulting QR code. I downloaded my new QR code, which you can see below.

• Om Malik ☛ Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why

  The early 1990s Internet, followed by blogging at the turn of the century, and social media a decade later all helped me do that main thing. In the mid-2000s I embraced Dave Winer’s mantra of “sources going direct.” As far back as 2009, I outlined the coming changes in my essays “How Internet Content Distribution and Discovery Are Changing” and “Amplification and the Changing Role of Media.”

  For the past decade and a half, the whole information ecosystem has become much larger, faster and noisier. It is hardly surprising that nothing works. And we feel a collective sense of overwhelming disappointment.

  So, why does nothing work?

• Chuck Grimmett ☛ Tehching Hsieh Exhibition

  At the end, I loved the visualization of the timeline, to scale by the day, of Hsieh’s performance art between 1978 and 1999. It put the galleries in perspective.

• Amit Gawande ☛ The First Thing That Gets Left Behind

  Whatever I say or feel about writing, it remains a hobby for me. I need to find time for it. It does not come naturally to me. I can't get to writing if I am not in the right headspace. Being tired doesn't let me.

• [Old] Michał Sapka ☛ Internet is far from being dead

  But, again: it always was. Finding stuff on the web was always a huge pain in the butt. You had a few sites you knew and frequent, but your best friend could have had an entirely different set. And this is a great thing! If all of the web was at arms reach, it would homogenize and became yet another twttr - full of words which mean nothing, written by people who have nothing to say. Insted we have no center, just galaxies of interesting people geeking in their own unique way. I love it this way.

• Science

  • Deseret Media ☛ NASA is about to send people to the moon — in a spacecraft not everyone thinks is safe to fly

    And while NASA is poised to clear the heat shield for flight, even those who believe the mission is safe acknowledge there is unknown risk involved.

    "This is a deviant heat shield," said Dr. Danny Olivas, a former NASA astronaut who served on a space agency-appointed independent review team that investigated the incident. "There's no doubt about it: This is not the heat shield that NASA would want to give its astronauts."

• Career/Education

  • NDTV ☛ 'Doctor', 'Dr' Not Exclusive To Medical Professionals: Kerala High Court

    The court said that the term doctor originally meant a learned person qualified to teach, but gradually, with the advancement of medical science, university-trained physicians, holders of degrees in medicine, began to be called doctors.

    "Therefore, the contention that the title 'doctor' exclusively belongs to medical professionals is a misconception since even now, like in the olden times, persons with higher educational qualifications like a PhD are entitled to use the title 'doctor'," the court said.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Ryan

    This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Ryan, whose blog can be found at laze.net.

  • Ava ☛ my theme for 2026

    This year, I will send out a lot of applications for both new work and a new apartment. That will undoubtedly result in a lot of no's; the market for both is just incredibly tough right now, and there always seems to be someone better. I have already received one rejection this year just a week after I sent out the application for something I thought for sure I'd at least get an interview from, so there's that.

    Other on-going things that produce rejections: [...]

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Online Talks on Accessible Theorems!

    Bogdan Grechuk has written a book Landscapes of 21st Century Mathematics that came out in 2021. There is a revised version coming out soon. The theme is that he takes theorems whose statements can be understood and describes them in 5–10 pages. No proofs, but lots of context and, most importantly, if you read all 800 pages of it you know about many areas of mathematics and where to look things up. He is organizing a series of online seminars with accessible talks about great recent theorems featuring world-renowned mathematicians: [...]

• Hardware

  • [Old] Michał Sapka ☛ NAS drive failure

    Press F to pay respect. One of my drives stopped spinning and now my raid-0 2-drive media volume is no more. The 6TB WD-Red spun it's last spin yesterday, after 5 years of non stop service. Yes, all of my totally legit movies and series are lost, like tears in rain. Redundancy may not be backup, but it still costs money and this was the risk I was willing to take.

  • [Old] Meltdown and Spectre ☛ Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution [PDF]

    Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance. For example, if the destination of a branch depends on a memory value that is in the process of being read, CPUs will try to guess the destination and attempt to execute ahead. When the memory value finally arrives, the CPU either discards or commits the speculative computation. Speculative logic is unfaithful in how it executes, can access the victim’s memory and registers, and can perform operations with measurable side effects.

    Spectre attacks involve inducing a victim to speculatively perform operations that would not occur during correct program execution and which leak the victim’s confidential information via a side channel to the adversary. This paper describes practical attacks that combine methodology from side channel attacks, fault attacks, and return-oriented programming that can read arbitrary memory from the victim’s process. More broadly, the paper shows that speculative execution implementations violate the security assumptions underpinning numerous software security mechanisms, including operating system process separation, containerization, just-in-time (JIT) compilation, and countermeasures to cache timing and side-channel attacks. These attacks represent a serious threat to actual systems since vulnerable speculative execution capabilities are found in microprocessors from Intel, AMD, and ARM that are used in billions of devices.

    While makeshift processor-specific countermeasures are possible in some cases, sound solutions will require fixes to processor designs as well as updates to instruction set architectures (ISAs) to give hardware architects and software developers a common understanding as to what computation state CPU implementations are (and are not) permitted to leak.

  • [Old] Meltdown and Spectre ☛ Meltdown: Reading Kernel Memory from User Space [PDF]

    The security of computer systems fundamentally relies on memory isolation, e.g., kernel address ranges are marked as non-accessible and are protected from user access. In this paper, we present Meltdown. Meltdown exploits side effects of out-of-order execution on mod- ern processors to read arbitrary kernel-memory locations including personal data and passwords. Out-of-order execution is an indispensable performance feature and present in a wide range of modern processors. The attack is independent of the operating system, and it does not rely on any software vulnerabilities. Meltdown breaks all security guarantees provided by address space isola- tion as well as paravirtualized environments and, thus, every security mechanism building upon this foundation. On affected systems, Meltdown enables an adversary to read memory of other processes or virtual machines in the cloud without any permissions or privileges, affect- ing millions of customers and virtually every user of a personal computer. We show that the KAISER defense mechanism for KASLR has the important (but inadver- tent) side effect of impeding Meltdown. We stress that KAISER must be deployed immediately to prevent large- scale exploitation of this severe information leakage.

  • [Old] ZDNet ☛ Critical flaws revealed to affect most Intel chips since 1995 [iophk: [Some recent issues] may be related to the spectre and meltdown *categories* of hardware bugs in x86. The bugs have not been fixed, but the kernel addons work-arounds each of which slow processing down and the effects are cumulative. Intel was warned against speculative execution in the 1980s by its own engineers, but good luck re-finding that paper. It was public but is now buried in chaff and noise. Here is Bruce Schneier ☛ a recent write-up . Egregiously, the market *completely* ignored both spectre and meltdown and continues to purchase only x86 hardware exclusively. That's mostly, but not entirely, the effect of the Wintel duopoly.]

    The researchers who discovered the vulnerabilities, dubbed "Meltdown" and "Spectre," said that "almost every system," since 1995, including computers and phones, is affected by the bug. The researchers verified their findings on Intel chips dating back to 2011, and released their own proof-of-concept code to allow users to test their machines.

  • [Old] Wired ☛ Critical "Meltdown" and "Spectre" Flaws Break Basic Security for Intel, AMD, ARM Computers

    Although both attacks are based on the same general principle, Meltdown allows malicious programs to gain access to higher-privileged parts of a computer's memory, while Spectre steals data from the memory of other applications running on a machine. And while the researchers say that Meltdown is limited to Intel chips, they say that they've verified Spectre attacks on AMD and ARM processors, as well.

  • [Old] New York Times ☛ Researchers Discover Two Major Flaws in the World’s Computers

    There is no easy fix for Spectre, which could require redesigning the processors, according to researchers. As for Meltdown, the software patch needed to fix the issue could slow down computers by as much as 30 percent — an ugly situation for people used to fast downloads from their favorite online services.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Hackaday ☛ Environmental Monitoring On The Cheap

    If there is one thing we took from [azwankhairul345’s] environmental monitor project, it is this: sensors and computing power for such a project are a solved problem. What’s left is how to package it. The solution, in this case, was using recycled plastic containers, and it looks surprisingly effective.

    A Raspberry Pi Pico W has the processing capability and connectivity for a project like this. A large power bank battery provides the power. Off-the-shelf sensors for magnetic field (to measure anemometer spins), air quality, temperature, and humidity are easy to acquire. The plastic tub that protects everything also has PVC pipe and plastic covers for the sensors. Those covers look suspiciously like the tops of drink bottles.

  • Rlang ☛ pharmaversesdtm 1.4.0 Release

    These datasets are intended to support development, testing, and examples for neurology-specific workflows.

• Proprietary

  • The Verge ☛ Gmail’s spam filter and automatic sorting are broken

    Some Gmail users may have noticed that promotional emails that normally go to their own siloed tab have started flooding their inbox. Reports hit the Google forums and Reddit that messages are bypassing the Updates and Promotional filters and went straight to Gmail inboxes. Some also reported seeing a banner at the top of some messages warning them to “be careful with this message,” explaining that it hasn’t been fully scanned for spam or malware.

  • Seth Godin ☛ Bent incentives

    AT&T certainly has the technology to block calls like this, but they don’t have an incentive to do so.

    At the same time, many subscribers to this blog don’t receive their emails because Google has a clear incentive to move the emails to the promotions folder. Google benefits by forcing marketers and writers to pay them for access to folks’ attention.

  • Nicolas Magand ☛ Tempted to stick with my old Mac a bit longer

    It turns out that I’m now not so sure about that: My Mac feels fine. Sure, it’s not fast, the battery lasts around 40 minutes on a charge, and I can feel it’s struggling and getting warm when watching videos or visiting “heavy” websites. I remain cautious and very conservative with what I do with it, but for an almost six-year-old computer, it’s surprisingly usable.

  • Rui Carmo ☛ Bugs Apple Loves - Tao of Mac

    “Total time wasted by humanity because Apple won’t fix these” is a wonderfully blunt premise, and the math is… lovely: [...]

  • Michael Tsai ☛ Bugs Apple Loves

  • Matthew Weber ☛ The Quest For The Perfect Notebook

    One thing I’ve discovered, is that notebooks can get pricey. For something that isn’t reusable, they sure do cost a pretty penny. The other thing I’ve learned is that there aren’t a ton of pocket (A6) sized notebooks that meet my requirements. I really want a spiral pocket notebook, but the ones that are out there are all pretty thin on the paper spec. The notebooks that I’ve found that are both spiral bound and have paper thick enough for fountain pen ink, are larger than I’m looking for.

  • Mark Phillips ☛ I am refusing to upgrade to Tahoe or iOS 26

    I don’t mind admitting, I am an unashamed Apple fan. Having bought my first iPod in 2003, followed in early 2004 with my first Mac. I’ve been using macOS as my ‘daily driver’ ever since.

    But with iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, I’ve become quite disillusioned with Apple’s approach to OS ‘improvements’. There was nothing better over iOS 17 nor over Sonoma. Adding nonsense like ‘Image Playground’ and the utter dog’s dinner that is the Photos app are not my idea of improvements. Siri seems to get worse over time, and Apple Intelligence got turned off almost immediately.

    Now they’ve really jumped the shark1.

  • [Old] Michał Sapka ☛ Vacuum boy

    We are proud owners of a Roborock robot vacuum. We love it unconditionally, like every proud owner of a robot should. It may be a Chinese honeypot giving them 24/7 surveillance over our lives, it may require a crappy iOS/Android program to operate, it may get lost all the time and needs babysitting like a dimwit, but we love it. It makes our lives better. It is, however, a computer on wheels with suction added. This means, that according to an unwritten rule, it's my toy and my ownership. You see, anything resembling a computer in our household is (somehow) my problem. Internet is out? Michael! Windows wants to update itself? Not on my watch! Citrix is its usual unreliable self? Husband to the rescue! Some moron broke the server and this site is down? You guessed it! It's only logical for the computer-on-wheels to also fall under my supervision. The Wife hasn't even seen how the horrible mobile control program works, and the ignorance is a bliss.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Facebook AI Slop Has Grown So Dark That You May Not Be Prepared

      It’s already been two years since we came across a picture of “shrimp Jesus” for the first time, an early form of AI-generated junk that foreshadowed an even more nonsensical future, culminating in Merriam-Webster making “slop” its 2025 word of the year last month.

      Now, thanks to the advent of accessible text-to-video generators, which can cough up footage from a simple text prompt, the situation on Facebookand other Meta platforms is turning from dire to disastrous.

    • [Old] The Verge ☛ Hello, you’re here because you compared AI image editing to Photoshop

      It’s easy to make this argument if you’ve never actually gone through the process of manually editing a photo in apps like Adobe Photoshop, but it’s a frustratingly over-simplified comparison. Let’s say some dastardly miscreant wants to manipulate an image to make it look like someone has a drug problem — here are just a few things they’d need to do: [...]

    • Tommy Palmer ☛ Who even asked for this?

      I’ve had a few recruiters hit me up from these AI influencer companies. At no point in the product features on the marketing does it ever mention fraud. As developers and designers our job is to extrapolate out uses for products and plan for those in advance. Have people bought into the hype so much that they don’t see how it’s ruining society?

      You could call it a bubble, a hype cycle, or absolute bollocks, but one thing about generative AI is different - it allows people to reframe their version of reality and spread it to others. It is a tool to will into existance something that didn’t exist before, without thought, skill, or nuance.

      “What about Photoshop?” you may ask? Then you should read this piece from The Verge.

      AI is enabling racists, facists, and Governments to pump out real looking propoganda at an industrial scale and none of them seem to care that it’s unravelling the real world. Tech companies are speedrunning us right into a reality were proof doesn’t mean anything anymore. With a prompt, I can make something that disproves your proof.

    • BoingBoing ☛ California orders xAI to stop generating sexual deepfakes

      The regulatory pile-on continues: the UK's Ofcom launched a formal investigation, the EU ordered X to retain all Grok-related documents until 2027, and Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines banned the chatbot entirely. India opened its own probe after reports that Grok generated child sexual abuse material.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Atlantic ☛ ICE Is Turning Real Conflict Into Viral Content

      It is this situation where it feels like there’s this battle being fought through everyone’s phone. It feels a bit like a hinge point, and it feels like there is a—despite all of the political issues happening here—that there is a technological issue, that this is all a bit of a culmination of things that I’ve been following for a really long time. Somebody else who’s been following that in some cases alongside me is Ryan Broderick. Ryan Broderick writes the Garbage Day newsletter and is the host of the Panic World podcast. Ryan and I worked together at BuzzFeed during the 2010s for quite a while, covering the ways that the internet changes how we behave politically, and the way that it can impact some of these political movements. Ryan was someone whom BuzzFeed sent to cover all kinds of online and offline protests around the world. He’s been to 22 countries, reported from six continents. And he’s been on the ground for close to a dozen referendums and elections. Ryan recently came back from observing all the protesting in Minneapolis, and he joins me today to talk about what happened in Minnesota, what is happening, and the ways in which all of this can be linked and not linked to an extremely online society. He joins me now.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Teenagers Are Pushing Himmler’s Favorite Myth

      One way to read that is as a sign of the integration of Agartha content into mainstream culture, where its noxious antecedents are no longer meaningful. Who knows how many people sharing the word Agartha online are aware of its history? How many would care if they were? This sort of transformation has happened before. Pepe the Frog and Wojak (the bald, numb-looking cartoon character used to express ennui) were incubated in extremist circles on the image board 4chan. They eventually became ubiquitous on the wider internet, with little indication of their origins.

    • Luis Quintanilla ☛ HTTP Signature Verification and Migration Planning

      My main priority at the moment is to maintain a presence in the Fediverse without having to maintain my own instance. I know technically I could just join someone else's instance, but I don't want to create yet another account nor become a maintenance burden for someone else.

    • [Old] Aethrvmn ☛ the drawbacks of federating

      What I found out is that in order to use a decentralised or federated social media platform you need to make data public, or you need to find a clean way to transfer data between different servers. In a proprietary, centralised system, such as Twitter/X, you can do this in an obfuscated way, since you control the entire stack, so the frontend and the backend are tightly knit so that no API endpoints come out and God forbid people use them to interact with each other.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ On ICE, Verification, and Presence As Harm

      I’m going to pause here and state, for the record, that not only am I not a fan of ICE, I believe they are committing crimes and following a terrifyingly fascist playbook. People are being both kidnapped and murdered on the streets.

      That’s important context for this next discussion: [...]

    • BoingBoing ☛ W is a European clone of X for the Davos set

      Second, the "W" apparently stands for "We", "Values," and "Verified." Welcome to the Digital Compliance and Safety Luncheon. A place for politicians and brands, announced at Davos, completely aligned with digital IDs, pervasive surveillance, and the professional-managerial myth that authentication makes you authentic.

    • Manton Reece ☛ Velocity and authenticity

      Om doesn’t focus on ad-based platforms, but I think the incentives are similar. Meta is fine with rushing us through an algorithmic feed because there is no end. The more engaged we are, the more ads we see.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Cyberattack disrupts digital systems at renowned Dresden museum network

      The Dresden State Art Collections, known as SKD, said it is unclear when all affected systems will be fully restored. As of Friday, the institution was still operating under restrictions, with no new updates on the incident, local media reported, citing an SKD spokesperson.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Hackaday ☛ Tamper Detection With Time-Domain Reflectometry

      For certain high-security devices, such as card readers, ATMs, and hardware security modules, normal physical security isn’t enough – they need to wipe out their sensitive data if someone starts drilling through the case. Such devices, therefore, often integrate circuit meshes into their cases and regularly monitor them for changes that could indicate damage. To improve the sensitivity and accuracy of such countermeasures, [Jan Sebastian Götte] and [Björn Scheuermann] recently designed a time-domain reflectometer to monitor meshes (pre-print paper).

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Wired ☛ DOGE [sic] May Have Misused Social Security Data, DOJ Admits

      Such is the news coming out of Minneapolis this week, where protesters and the federal government continued their standoff—even as ICE plans to build out a deportation network spanning Minnesota and four other states. And despite the Department of Homeland Security’s claims that merely naming an ICE agent publicly is akin to “doxing,” a WIRED review of LinkedIn found that agents are frequently doxing themselves. Of course, having access to someone’s personal information can have consequences: A report this week found that people are less likely to seek medical care due to ad-tech surveillance and ICE enforcement activities.

    • Wired ☛ ICE Asks Companies About ‘Ad Tech and Big Data’ Tools It Could Use in Investigations

      In addition, the entry says “the Government is seeking to understand the current state of Ad Tech compliant and location data services available to federal investigative and operational entities, considering regulatory constraints and privacy expectations of support investigations activities.” The filing offers little detail beyond that broad description: It does not spell out which regulations or privacy standards would apply, nor does it name any specific “Big Data and Ad Tech” services or vendors ICE is interested in.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Now That TikTok USA Is Finally Here, What Comes Next?

      At the same time, many on Reddit are expressing concerns about the sensitive user information that TikTok USA may utilize – including about one’s “racial or ethnic origin, national origin, religious beliefs, mental or physical health diagnosis, sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information.”

      However, the disconcerting text has actually been part of TikTok’s privacy policy for years now. Among TikTok USA’s fine-print pivots is a bit more of an emphasis on parental controls (including deletion requests) over minors’ accounts; a “minimum age” section has made its way into the terms.

    • Wired ☛ TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes

      According to its new privacy policy, TikTok now collects more data on its users, including their precise location, after majority ownership officially switched to a group based in the US.

    • Ava ☛ privacy is a value we can lose

      Sometimes, I think about the fact that society at large could just stop caring about data protection and privacy, and there goes everything that I worked towards and am passionate about. Humbling.

      These laws are young. Not that people didn’t want privacy before, it’s just that as more data was collected, recorded and then processed via the earliest information processing systems (card punch systems and early computers), more needed to be protected. The more is written down and stored, the more this need arises.

  • Confidentiality

    • The Register UK ☛ Surrender as a service: Microsoft unlocks BitLocker for feds

      But customers are encouraged to entrust keys to Microsoft because as long as they have access to the account online, they can recover the keys, effectively making Redmond their digital doorman. However, in such circumstances, customers no longer have total control over access to their data.

    • The Verge ☛ Microsoft handed the government encryption keys for customer data | The Verge

      The FBI went to Microsoft last year with a warrant, asking them to hand over keys to unlock encrypted data stored on three laptops as part of an investigation into potential fraud involving the COVID unemployment assistance program in Guam — and Microsoft complied.

    • Wired ☛ 149 Million Usernames and Passwords Exposed by Unsecured Database

      While attempting to contact the hosting service over the course of about a month, Fowler says the database continued to grow, accumulating additional logins for an array of services. He is not naming the provider, because the company is a global host that contracts with independent regional companies to expand its reach. The database was hosted by one of these affiliates in Canada.

    • ExpressVPN ☛ 149M Logins and Passwords Exposed Online Including Financial Accounts, Instagram, Facebook, Roblox, Dating Sites, and More.

      One serious concern was the presence of credentials associated with .gov domains from numerous countries. While not every government-linked account grants access to sensitive systems, even limited access could have serious implications depending on the role and permissions of the compromised user. Exposed government credentials could be potentially used for targeted spear-phishing, impersonation, or as an entry point into government networks. This increases the potential of .gov credentials posing national security and public safety risks.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Wired ☛ The Instant Smear Campaign Against Border Patrol Shooting Victim Alex Pretti

    Pretti, 37, was killed during a confrontation with multiple federal immigration agents. Pretti was an American citizen and a registered nurse who worked in the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to a colleague who spoke to the Guardian. Video from a bystander shows Pretti was attempting to help a woman who had been pepper sprayed by an immigration agent when officers tackled him.

  • Carole Cadwalladr ☛ Death Squads Execute Second Dissident

    Because the killing of an unarmed civilian by masked paramilitary gunman on the streets of Minneapolis is murder. This was an execution.

    An extrajudicial killing in cold blood of a registered nurse, Alex Pretti. I dearly hope that’s how it’ll be reported but I’m posting now, even in the noise of this moment because the shock value is the point of it. That’s what political violence is. It’s violence for political ends.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Another murder in Minneapolis - Robert Reich

    This morning, they murdered a 37-year-old man, an American citizen named Alex Pretti. Pretti was a registered nurse who lived in an apartment in Minneapolis a short drive away from where he was murdered. He had no criminal record. He had a firearms permit, required by state law in Minnesota to carry a handgun.

    At least 10 shots appear to have been fired within five seconds. The video appears to show a group of masked agents mobbing someone, pushing him to the ground, then shooting him multiple times, even as he lies motionless.

    The Department of Homeland Security says Pretti threatened agents with a gun, but footage shows the man was holding a phone in his hand, not a gun, when federal agents took him to the ground and shot him.

  • Bix Frankonis ☛ It’s Happening Here

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Minneapolis Chief Judge Attacks Pam Bondi's False Claims about Don Lemon

    As we await more details about CBP’s latest murder in Minneapolis, I wanted to point to an attempt by DOJ to get a writ of mandamus because Magistrate Judge Douglas Micko denied five of eight arrest affidavits they asked for, targeting Nekima Levy Armstrong and Chauntyll Allen and others who protested at a church led by the local ICE commander.

  • Techdirt ☛ White House Push AI-Altered Images Of Arrested ICE Protesters To Manufacture Cruelty

    There was no attack. There was no violence. There were words and chants being voiced in a place of worship. You can find that repugnant, if you like. It’s still not an attack.

    The law being cited for the arrest makes Armstrong’s detention dubious at best.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Democrats Condemn ICE For Murdering Without Proper Warrants

    Demo

  • The Verge ☛ On the ground in Minneapolis after the killing of Alex Pretti

    I think because of George Floyd in 2020, people knew how to respond. Gregory Bovino, the head of the US Border Patrol who has been here the whole time, has said community members in Minneapolis are really prepared. A lot of people I’ve talked to have said, “I had my respirator ready from 2020,” and they just restocked on safety supplies, decon wipes, and first aid kits. Even if they weren’t immediately prepared, they could rapidly respond to these kinds of events. At all the events I’ve been to, people will set a table to hand out food and water and hand warmers. It was especially cold today — it wasn’t supposed to get above 0 degrees.

    After the officers cleared the scene, everyone convened at the intersection of 26th and Nicolette, just a couple hundred feet from where Alex Pretti was shot. Some community members started a makeshift vigil for him at the location where he was killed. People were spelling his name out with pinecones and starting to leave flowers.

  • TruthOut ☛ Federal Immigration Agents Shoot and Kill Another Person in Minneapolis

    Video taken by bystanders shows agents wrestling the man to the ground and beating him before firing multiple shots.

  • TruthOut ☛ Thousands of Minnesotans Are Taking Part in General Strike Against ICE

    “It is time to suspend the normal order of business to demand immediate cessation of ICE actions in MN, accountability for federal agents who have caused loss of life and abuse to Minnesota residents and call for Congress to immediately intervene,” the website ICEOutNowMN.com states.

  • Michigan News ☛ Man is shot and killed during Minneapolis immigration crackdown, National Guard activated

    Several bystander videos of the shooting emerged soon after. Pretti is seen with a phone in his hand but none appears to show him with a visible weapon.

  • NDTV ☛ "What Did You Do?" Videos Show Chilling Moments During Minneapolis Shooting US immigration Officers Shoot Alex Jeffrey Pretti

    A second video shows another angle. In this, Pretti is seen holding his phone while trying to help a woman who had been pushed to the ground by an immigration officer. The officer sprays both of them with tear gas.

    A group of federal agents then pull Pretti away from the woman and push him down. He struggles on his hands and knees before an agent in a gray jacket appears to seize his gun. Seconds later, the fatal shots are heard.

  • Nick Heer ☛ TikTok U.S. Prompts Users to Allow More Permissive Tracking, Advertising

    Whether this represents an actual change in the data collected or merely a difference in description is something it seems Rogers cannot answer. However, it is a good reminder that lawmakers’ opposition to TikTok’s data collection was never based on a principled stance on user privacy.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump's Greenland Takeover Could Be Tech's Libertarian Dream Come True

    Meanwhile, some of Trump’s most influential allies — the Silicon Valley oligarchs who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help him retake the White House in 2024 — might see a different potential in turning Greenland into a satellite colony. For decades, libertarian-minded tech executives have dreamed of creating a sovereign territory free of regulatory oversight and tax structures, envisioning a free-market, stateless utopia where they can pursue their wildest ambitions and accrue even greater wealth. A MAGA-led takeover of Greenland could be exactly what they’re after, since it offers a vast, mostly untouched environment for all kinds of harebrained experiments they can’t carry out on U.S. soil. Everything is on the table, from the testing of new AI networks and cryptocurrency-based economies to unchecked industrial transformation of the landscape and simulations of what it would take to support human life on other planets. To our tech overlords, it could be a playground without rules.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Independent Variable ☛ 🔫 Videos of Shooting Appear to Contradict Federal Officials

    “Appear to Contradict” really?! The videos flat out prove the government is lying. You can clearly see him holding a phone before he’s taken to the ground by a group of gestapo. Then one of the thugs pulls the gun away from Alex Jeffrey Pretti’s holster and runs away with it while he continues to be beaten on by the others, moments before they murder him—while he’s on the ground, defenseless— in cold blood.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Hackaday ☛ Isolated AC/DC Power Supply And Testing Station For 230 V Devices

      The core is formed by the isolated variable transformer, to which a configurable DC output section, a current limiter and digital voltage and current read-outs were added. This enables a variable AC output of 0 – 330 VAC and 0 – 450 VDC on their respective terminals, with the incandescent light bulb providing an optional current limiter.

    • W Evan Sheehan ☛ Good Weather Causes Traffic Deaths

      And let’s consider for a moment that if good weather can increase traffic deaths significantly enough to be newsworthy because of increased traffic, why is CDOT not putting more effort into creating alternative forms of transportation to reduce traffic year round? After all multi-modal transportation is part of their mission. But no, instead they are still trying to address traffic by [checks notes] creating more traffic. Good job, everyone.

    • [Old] Forbes ☛ Car Blindness Normalizes Dangers Of Motoring, Reveals Study

      A British study has discovered that humans have an in-built acceptance of the risks and harms from motorists that they would not accept in other parts of life.

      Calling this car blindness “motonormativity,” the researchers from Swansea University and the University of the West of England believe these unconscious biases have policy implications.

    • Aethrvmn ☛ monero

      Since it is an actual good replacement for cash (both being fungible and anonymous) it has gained the favour of the privacy oriented as the coin of choice; it is the only coin to have an actual circular economy, wherein people can trade in monero exclusively for goods and services, in a private and decentralised way.

    • James Stanley ☛ James Stanley

      Building the tractor has been fun for both me and Lucy. On many occasions she has asked "can we go and work on the tractor? right now?" and the two of us would go out to the garage and tinker with whatever was in progress at the time. Often she would get bored and go back in the house quite quickly, but that's par for the course for a 3-year-old. With any luck some of the philosophy of creation will rub off.

  • Overpopulation

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ United Nations Declares That the World Has Entered an Era of 'Global Water Bankruptcy'

      “This report tells an uncomfortable truth: Many regions are living beyond their hydrological means, and many critical water systems are already bankrupt,” says Kaveh Madani, the report’s lead author and director of the U.N. University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health, in a statement.

    • Ethan Zuckerman ☛ "Where Should We Live" - a new class on cities, migration and climate change

      The second one is brand new: it’s a seminar about housing in the US, with a focus on climate change. It’s called “Where Should We Live?” and it’s a chance for me to try and combine some threads I’ve been working on for the past several years. I’m interested in how Americans have been moving South and West for decades, towards cheaper housing and job opportunities, but also towards heat, water shortages, hurricanes and wildfires. Some of America’s most popular cities are becoming transformed by climate change – will we see a reverse migration to the Great Lakes and a repopulation of the Rust Belt? Or will how we live change more than where we live?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Rise of the Tech Hamiltonians

    That has changed. Trump’s second inauguration featured tech lords like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook laughing and shaking hands with the Trump inner circle inside the Capitol Rotunda. “In the first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump joked in late 2024. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.” With figures like Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, Palantir’s Alex Karp and Joe Lonsdale, Marc Andreessen, David Marcus, and Mark Pincus jumping aboard the Trump train, Silicon Valley has shifted from a bastion of anti-Trumpers to one of the polarizing president’s chief sources of support.

  • Dark Reading ☛ 2025 Was a Wake-Up Call to Protect Human Decisions

    As 2026 begins, I keep coming back to one uncomfortable realization about 2025. We did not misunderstand attackers. We misunderstood failure.

    Most of last year’s damage did not come from sophisticated techniques or unexpected adversaries. It came from ordinary systems breaking in ways that quietly altered how people made decisions. Systems stayed online. Dashboards stayed green. Confidence eroded, judgment shifted, and humans were forced to act without reliable truth. That is where the real harm happened.

    Looking back, 2025 was the year cyber risk stopped looking like a technical problem and revealed itself as a decision problem.

  • Luigi Mozzillo ☛ On Made in EU digital

    There are many efforts to promote European digital products1, and I have the utmost respect for all of them. However, no one in particular has managed to convince me to abandon a made-in-USA solution just because it is made in the USA. I am not someone who promotes European – albeit less Italian – patriotism and pride as a yardstick for my choices.

  • David L Farquhar ☛ Nvidia's IPO on January 22, 1999

    The biggest company in the AI era held its IPO during the dotcom era, on January 22, 1999. That company was Nvidia, who offered 3.5 million shares priced at $12 each. It had been founded April 5, 1993.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ A short post about heroin voice

    TLDR: long-term heroin use can permanently damage your voice. It doesn’t always happen, but it’s definitely a real and well-known risk. Long-term junkies and ex-junkies often have a distinctive hoarse, raspy voice. In rare, severe cases the user may need speech rehabilitation. More often, they just have a weird voice. And they may keep that weird voice for the rest of their life, because in most cases the damage seems to be irreversible.

  • European Commission ☛ Artificial Intelligence Act – detailed arrangements on evaluations and proceedings

    Draft act. Feedback: Upcoming

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Paul Allen, radio voice of the Vikings, mocks Minnesota protestors

      The moment was saved by awfulannouncing.com and can be heard here.

    • Matt Birchler ☛ The White House is creating their own reality

      It's worth recognizing that in addition to this, the administration has also posted AI images of things around taking over Greenland, and full on lied about the killings of 2 US citizens (although human beings of any sort being murdered is…checks morals…bad), even though there is public video disputing everything they said.

    • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ White House Admits to Sharing a Fake Photo of Minnesota Activist After Her Arrest

      The image is highly realistic, bearing no watermark or other indicator that the image has been doctored. The change is only apparent when compared to a different version of the same image posted by the Department of Homeland Security earlier in the day.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ Iran's Internet Blackout Continues Amid Reports Of Rising Death Toll

    The Fars news agency, which is close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), on January 24 quoted the chief of Iran's telecoms company as saying Internet service would be restored in the coming hours -- an action, it added, that was approved by the Supreme National Security Council.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Online World Where Iranians Were Free

    This communication void has left Iranians paralyzed, in and outside Iran. For more than two decades, Iranians have used the [Internet], social media, and satellite-TV technology to build a vibrant public sphere beyond the strict regulatory parameters of the state. In everyday acts of posting and circulating non-state-aligned content, Iranians have normalized all that the regime forbids, including dissident poetry readings, impromptu street concerts, and images of parents mourning children killed in protests. Although the state has blocked most foreign social-media apps, platforms, and news websites; introduced more censorship and surveillance; and raised fees to access the [Internet], Iranians have managed to use this alternative media sphere to push the boundaries of permissible public speech. Now there are fears that even if [Internet] services return, they will likely be under stricter state control.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Kentucky Lantern ☛ Lantern honored at annual Kentucky Press Association conference

    Kentucky Lantern reporters and freelancers won six awards during the Kentucky Press Association Winter Convention awards dinner in Louisville on Friday.

    The Kentucky Lantern won first place in the best website design category.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Atlantic ☛ Can We Just Let Teens Exist in Public?

    In some places, minors are also subject to new curfews. Last year, for example, both Cincinnati and Washington, D.C., instituted curfew zones in busy neighborhoods, beginning at 6 p.m. in D.C. and 9 p.m. in Cincinnati. Chicago began banning youth from downtown Millennium Park after 6 p.m. on weekends in 2022. According to the Marshall Project, “more than a dozen cities and counties” established or started enforcing curfew laws in 2023. Adolescents are the obvious target of such policies, because they are far more likely than younger kids to be out unaccompanied.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Truth About ICE’s Recruiting Push

    ICE veterans I’ve spoken with have concerns about the qualifications and aptitude of their new colleagues, especially those with little or no previous law-enforcement experience. Some academy classes have had dropout rates near 50 percent because so many failed the physical-fitness requirements. The Trump administration slashed the length of the training course from about five months to 47 days last summer—because Trump is the 47th president, three officials told me at the time—then cut it further. Now it’s 42 days.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Gun rights groups criticize top L.A. federal prosecutor for response to Minneapolis shooting

    In response to Essayli’s tweet, the NRA posted on X: “This sentiment from the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California is dangerous and wrong.”

    The post continued: “Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Mainers ‘refuse to look away’ with thousands rallying against ICE operation

    Hundreds in force, Mainers rallied this weekend against the Trump administration’s immigration operation in the state, decrying the arrests of their neighbors and recognizing those afraid to leave their homes who couldn’t join in protest.

    Since U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement heightened its presence in Maine on Tuesday, the agency said it has arrested at least 100 people but provided few specifics, as public officials have called for transparency, to no avail. Community organizers, faith leaders, business owners, political officials and candidates at protests in Portland and Lewiston demanded accountability, pointing to the known detentions of at least several people with permission to work in the U.S. and no criminal records.

  • Court House News ☛ Scale of Iran's nationwide protests and bloody crackdown come into focus even as [Internet] is out

    “The vast majority of protesters were peaceful. The video footage shows crowds of people — including children and families — chanting, dancing around bonfires, marching on their streets,” said Raha Bahreini, of Amnesty International. “The authorities have opened fire unlawfully.”

    The killing of peaceful protesters — as well as the threat of mass executions — have been a red line for military action for U.S. President Donald Trump. An American aircraft carrier and warships are approaching the Mideast, possibly allowing Trump to launch another attack on Iran after bombing its nuclear enrichment sites last year. That risks igniting a new Mideast war.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Iran’s Protests Are a Turning Point for the Islamic Republic

    The Islamic Republic fashioned itself through its existential face-off with the United States, turning into a rampart state whose main pillars were intelligence and military institutions. It would brutally crush domestic opposition, attributing it to conspiracies hatched in Washington and Tel Aviv, whose relentless covert and overt war on Iran helped justify the regime’s paranoid narrative. The Islamic Republic’s identification of dissent with treason took a terrible toll on Iranian society, with thousands being executed or killed in street clashes and tens of thousands languishing and tortured in prison during the revolution’s first decade.

  • Wired ☛ US Judge Rules ICE Raids Require Judicial Warrants, Contradicting Secret ICE Memo

    The ruling, issued by US District Court judge Jeffrey Bryan in response to a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on January 17, did not assess the legality of ICE’s internal guidance itself. But it squarely holds that federal agents violated the United States Constitution when they entered a residence without consent and without a judge-signed warrant—the same conditions ICE leadership has privately told officers is sufficient for home arrests, according to a complaint filed by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal group representing whistleblowers from the public and private sector.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ ‘Around 100’ members of clergy arrested at Minneapolis anti-ICE protest

    Around 100 members of the clergy have reportedly been arrested at Minneapolis St Paul Airport as protests against Immigrations Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minnesota intensify.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Police and ICE Agents Are on a Collision Course

    It is rare for law-enforcement officers to turn on each other so publicly, and Minneapolis may represent the beginning of a broader rupture between local police—many of whom have years of experience dealing with the public—and federal officers bolstered by a corps of hastily trained recruits.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• [Repeat] Digital Music News ☛ Kid Rock to Testify Before the US Senate on Concert Ticket Sales

  The panel will include artist and noted Trump ally Kid Rock, Live Nation’s antitrust head Dan Wall, the Ticket Policy Forum’s Brian Berry, and concert promoter David Weingarten representing the Colorado Independent Venue Association. This group will address “unfair ticketing issues” and related areas such as “all-in pricing” and federal enforcement actions that remain ongoing.