Leftovers

• Tom's Hardware ☛ American factory worker Robert Williams became the first human to be killed by a robot on this day in 1979 — man crushed by a robot’s mechanical arm at the Ford plant in Flat Rock

  Though killer robots are a favorite subject in science fiction, it is a shocking tragedy when humans are killed by robots in the real-world. Today marks the anniversary of what is widely regarded as the first case of a death of a human caused by a robot. On this day in 1979, Ford Motor Company factory worker Robert Williams was crushed, and killed instantly by a robotic arm, while doing his job.

  Williams was just 25 years old when he became the first human casualty of the robotic advance into factory production environments. The unfortunate incident occurred at Ford’s casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan.

• Shrivu Shankar ☛ Move Faster

  In this post, I wanted to collect some thoughts on why speed matters1 and the second-order consequences of consistent effective automation.

• Nick Heer ☛ Unsung

  I disagree with some of the choices, but one thing you will notice is that there are very few examples from the world’s biggest vendors. Most are indie projects. That says a lot to me about the kinds of software with which people develop a connection.

• Marcin Wichary ☛ Favourite well-made apps and sites – Unsung

  I specifically made it kind of vague, and these are the answers I got. I grouped them into categories and added links. I am excited to dig into these and study them, but wanted to share a raw list as well in case this inspires some of you, too.

• Joshua Blais ☛ The rabbit hole

  You can’t simultaneously believe that “2 + 2 = 4” is objectively true and that “truth is subjective” without intellectual dishonesty. I had been dishonest my whole life until that slap in the face.

• Elliot C Smith ☛ Things I changed my mind about in 2025

  It's still the tail end of January so I am going to use this time as an excuse to sneak in a '2025 reflection' type post. This could easily be just about things I've changed my mind on recently but I figure I'll use the new year as a framework.

• J B Crawford ☛ the essence of frigidity

  The front of the American grocery store contains a strange, liminal space: the transitional area between parking lot and checkstand, along the front exterior and interior of the building, that fills with oddball commodities. Ice is a fixture at nearly every store, filtered water at most, firewood at some. This retail purgatory, both too early and too late in the shopping journey for impulse purchases, is mostly good only for items people know they will need as they check out. One of the standard residents of this space has always struck me as peculiar: dry ice.

• Chris Glass ☛ The far out Honda Dealership design

  The more I think about it, the building feels like an extension of the Memphis Design movement of the 80’s fueled by Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Group. 99Designs has a solid history of the whole shebang (that mostly loads). From there you can learn the name of the style was inspired by a Bob Dylan song.

• Ava ☛ the ‘winning side’ heuristic

  Their focus wasn’t on developing their own arguments and proving or disproving them, it was being on the winning team and on the side of authority, no matter what it said, because only what’s good and right is popular and wins, and the higher up you are, the more true it is. Why think when authority has already released a statement for you to use? Why evaluate something when you can just stick to the winning side?

• Amit Gawande ☛ On Handwriting

  But reading about this day reminded me of my relationship with pen and paper.

  I have terrible handwriting; often, even I can't read the words I scribble. But how I write narrates a lot more than just what those words read. It represents the state of my mind.

• Akseli Lahtinen ☛ Hello from my notes!

  Hello there, I have now made a note system for my blog.

• Christiano Anderson ☛ The IndieWeb and Small web

  As someone who values privacy and the open web, I’ve been fascinated by the growing movement away from centralised platforms toward more personal, user-controlled online experiences. What surprised me recently was discovering just how many people are embracing these concepts without even knowing their names.

• Science

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] ISS crew returns to Earth in first-ever medical evacuation

  • Remy Wang ☛ Join Trees, the "Hard" Way

    Given a conjunctive (datalog) query Q, the hypergraph of Q has a vertex v_x for each variable x, and a hyperedge \{v_x, v_y, v_z, \ldots \} for each atom R(x, y, z, .\ldots). For example, the following hypergraph (credit to Zheng and Wim) represents the query below it.

  • Irish Times ☛ Challenger, 40 years on: the space shuttle disaster watched live by millions of children – The Irish Times

    Adam Higginbotham’s 2024 book Challenger is a much-recommended account of the mistakes and magical thinking that led to tragedy. Challenger: The Final Flight, a Netflix documentary series from 2020, is likewise gut-wrenching, though it omits mention of Roger Boisjoly, the Morton Thiokol engineer who linked the long-known “erosion” of the O-rings to their brittleness in cold weather. In July 1985, days after a radiant McAuliffe assured NBC’s Today that “space flight today really seems safe”, he sent his bosses a memo stating his “honest and very real fear” that the O-rings might not seal and that this would result in the loss of life.

    Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, a member of the commission appointed to investigate, later added his own stinging appendix to its already damning report. “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled,” he wrote.

  • [Old] IChemE ☛ The Challenger Space Shuttle disaster [PDF]

    The underlying causes of the disaster are complex and organisational. These are discussed below. [...]

  • [Old] Priceonomics ☛ The Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion and the O-ring - Priceonomics

    NASA management used the data behind this first graph (among many other pieces of information) to justify their view the night before launch that there was no temperature effect on O-ring performance (despite the objections of the most knowledgeable engineers who had run many other experiments). In this graph specifically, it’s hard to find any consistent relationship between temperature and failure rate in the provided data.

    But NASA management made one catastrophic mistake: this was not that chart they should have been looking at.

    NASA looked at the times when the O-rings failed, but excluded looking at the times when the O-rings were successful. If there were many successful launches at a certain temperature range but none in another range, they’d quickly show the danger.

• Career/Education

  • University of Michigan ☛ Let’s reclaim our intellectual inheritance 

    That’s because nobody else is reading either. A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans are reading less than ever before, with recreational reading down 40% over the last two decades. Furthermore, 41% of Americans did not read a single book last year. We’re in a crisis of literacy. Reversing this crisis is going to require more than social media scolding, and certainly something different than what Alice Deal Middle School has planned. If we want to start reading again, we must reclaim our intellectual inheritance, doubling down on the canonical thinkers of Western civilization.

  • Lorin Hochstein ☛ Because coordination is expensive

    The answer to all of these questions is the same: because coordination is expensive. It requires significant effort for a group of people to work together to achieve a task that is too large for them to accomplish individually. And the more people that are involved, the higher that coordination effort grows. This is both “effort” in terms of difficulty (effortful as hard), and in terms of time (engineering effort, as measured in person-hours). This is why you see siloed work and multiple systems that seem to do the same thing. It’s because it requires less effort to work within your organization then to coordinate across organization, the incentive is to do localized work whenever possible, in order to reduce those costs.

  • Hugh Rundle ☛ I accidentally became a FOSS maintainer and all I got was this lousy new perspective on librarianship

    I've been working as a librarian for 25 years. I lead a team at La Trobe University that maintains library technology systems with a focus on metadata, collection discovery and maintaining interoperability between many internal and external systems. My work in relation to library metadata is only on the discovery side. I'm not a trained cataloguer and I am not involved in the creation of library metadata.

    My hobbies include doing things on computers, and reading books, which is basically what this talk is about.

• Hardware

  • Ruben Schade ☛ I think FreeBSD fixed our scanner?

    That was a welcome start. It was also more than anything else displayed. I subsequently plugged it into my other machines, and it worked again!?

  • Boiling Steam ☛ Box64 Expands into Risc-V and LoongArch territory

    Box64 is still alive and well, as one of the key piece of software that can enable the translation of X86 and X86_64 code to other hardware architectures in real time. We have covered it many times, and it is often used out there to run Steam and GOG games on ARM64 devices. But this is not only about ARM architecture. RISC-V is also supported, and very recently there is a lot of progress on the LoongArch architecture.

  • Old VCR ☛ Hands-on with two Apple Network Server prototype ROMs

    Here's why I need to do inventory more often.

    This is an Apple prototype ROM I am ashamed to admit I found in my own box of junk from various Apple Network Server parts someone at Apple Austin sent me in 2003. The 1996 Apple Network Server is one of Apple's more noteworthy white elephants and, to date, the last non-Macintosh computer (iOS devices notwithstanding) to come from Cupertino. Best known for being about the size of a generous dorm fridge and officially only running AIX 4.1, IBM's proprietary Unix for Power ISA, its complicated history is a microcosm of some of Apple's strangest days during the mid-1990s. At $10,000+ a pop (in 2026 dollars over $20,700), not counting the AIX license, they sold poorly and were among the first products on the chopping block when Steve Jobs returned in 1997.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ Strange Mushroom Makes You See Tiny People Chilling on Every Surface

    Magic mushrooms, an informal group of fungi that contain the naturally occurring psychedelic substance psilocybin, are known for inducing powerful hallucinations. They can induce feelings of euphoria, a sense of belonging in the world, and distort reality by messing with the brain’s visual cortex, turning the world into a trippy, shimmering pocket dimension full of pulsating geometric patterns.

  • BBC ☛ 'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans

    "At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, 'Don't eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,'" says Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica. "It seems like very common knowledge in the culture there."

  • Michigan Advance ☛ On Michigan cherry farms, small falcons are improving food safety

    The study, published in November in the Journal of Applied Ecology, suggests the kestrels help keep harmful pathogens off of fruit headed to consumers by eating and scaring off small birds that carry those pathogens. Orchards housing the birds in nest boxes saw fewer cherry-eating birds than orchards without kestrels on site. This translated to an 81 percent reduction in crop damage—such as bite marks or missing fruit—and a 66 percent decrease in branches contaminated with bird feces.

    “Kestrels are not very expensive to bring into orchards, but they work pretty well” at deterring unwanted bird species, said Olivia Smith, lead study author and assistant professor of horticulture at Michigan State University. “And people just like kestrels a lot, so I think it’s an attractive strategy.”

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Coming up with a list of spacer tasks

    I’m increasingly of the opinion in my personal life that time isn’t something “to be filled”, but rather a precious commodity one should treasure. If I have time to “kill” outside office hours now, I try and spend it being more mindful of my surroundings than getting the distraction device out of my pocket. It’s done wonders for my mood and view of the world, even if by “side hustle” culture standards I’m not being as productive as I could be.

  • Chuck Grimmett ☛ Christmas Lima bean, fennel, and sausage stew

    On the blizzard: Just before eating this, I measured 11 inches of snow. We have at least 3 more inches forecast. Charlie and I shoveled three times today and we’ll need to shovel again tomorrow.

  • Brandon Rozek ☛ Tales of Christmas Trees

    Now I find this very cool, but some trees have different fates. Ton writes on his blog that they have the same tree every year. Instead of sawing their tree down, the tree gets delivered to their place with the root ball intact. Once the holidays are over, the growers come back and pick it up.

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Alberta health officials to deliver update on hospital capacity as doctors declare crisis

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] McDonald's Canada to freeze price of small coffee, drop cost of value meals for one year

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] Germany's farms are failing despite high food prices [iophk: The food prices have *nothing* to do with the money the farmers actually receive. Here while the prices at the market have shot through the roof, the income which the farmers get from the middle men has plummeted. Because there is no oversight from the central government, they get squeezed until they go under and then someone else (not the farmer) makes a killing by destroying irreplaceable topsoil with houses or business parks.]

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] Why do childhood vaccine recommendations differ across Canada — and around the world?

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] 'I don't trust that water plant': Hundreds evacuated so far from First Nation in northern Ontario

• Proprietary

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] Women's, Advocacy Groups Call on Apple, Google to Drop X and Grok From App Stores

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft gave customers' BitLocker encryption keys to the FBI — Redmond confirms that it provides recovery keys to government agencies with valid legal orders

    Although there have been many requests through the years, with one Microsoft engineer even claiming that the U.S. government approached him way back in 2013 to install a backdoor in the encryption system (which he declined), this is the first recorded instance where the tech company complied and resulted in a breakthrough for the government.

  • Mike Swanson ☛ Backseat Software

    What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks: [...]

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Trump invited his friends over and you’ll never guess who happily showed up (with movie snacks, I can only assume)

    If Donald Trump is the main character of the Epstein files, Tim Cook is the main character of the Trump files. Millions in gifts, a golden trophy, unvarying public support of his policies, and apparently he clears his calendar any time the fascist in chief comes calling.

  • [Old] Mark Seeman ☛ Git integration is ten years away

    I'm not even exaggerating. Git support for Visual Studio was announced in 2013. It has, indeed, been around for a long time, and I've been blissfully ignoring it throughout. Even so, it struck me when reading release notes in 2025, that the product in question had improved Git integration.

    Is it not done yet?

    Apparently not.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Cyber Show ☛ Rorschach Computing

      This is where we're heading with the project of language models as computing utilities.

      You provide an a priori set of biases, assumptions, cultural norms, prejudices, hidden desires and hopes to prime the machine. It mixes them with another set of biases, "guardrails" and political agendas, invisibly baked in by it's owner/creator, and it spurts out what it "thinks you need to hear".

      That's not computing. That's not even close to computing. Impressive as language model inference may be, it's some strange instrument that functions on the border between propaganda, influence, advertising, perception management, reinforcement of orthodoxy and dogma, dressed up as an objective oracle. Deployed widely its a perfect psyops weapon. But only if people can be tricked into taking it seriously. Like the lie behind the lie detector it's a great bit of pseudoscience that works so long as people believe in it.

    • Daniel Lemire ☛ Optimizing Python scripts with AI

      For the amalgamation, I got a 20% performance gain for ‘free’ thanks to the file caching. The link checker is going to be faster now that it is multithreaded. Both optimizations are valid and useful, and will make my life marginally better.

      In neither case I was able to discern benefits due to the profiler data. I was initially hoping to get the AI busy optimizing the code in a loop, continuously running the profiler, but it did not happen in these simple cases. The AI optimized code segments that contributed little to the running time as per the profiler data.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Hiring in an era of fake candidates, real scams and AI slop

      The good news, as he points out, is that right now there are some really strong tells. One of the most important parts of any application I run is the “why are you excited about this job?” question, which is really a question about mission fit. The AI-generated answers are extremely generic, heavily reference the job description itself, and start looking very samey in a sample size of hundreds.

  • Social Control Media

    • CBC ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Sexual deepfakes on X show need for Canadian online regulator, advocates say

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] X outages affect thousands of users primarily in US

    • Android Police ☛ Threads is finally beating X, but it's not for the reason you think

      While this initially seemed to be no different from existing AI image editors, a lack of safeguards meant Grok could generate sexualized deepfakes of people without their consent.

      This update prompted political leaders worldwide to take a stance on the platform and led to a surge of backlash from users.

    • Pedro ☛ Feeling bored

      Officially over a month without any social network! Thrilled with this! I have not missed and for the first time, I did one thing that I think was fundamental to avoid going back. I didn’t try to fill the time with other things. Because when doing something failed or was not going the way I wanted, I would end up returning to the old habits. Well, not this time.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • 2026-01-16 [Older] Former Conti member, now known as “Devman,” added to Interpol’s wanted list (updated)

• Security

  • Reuters ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Massive cyberattack on Polish power system in December failed, minister says

  • The Record ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Armenia probes alleged sale of 8 million government records on hacker forum

  • 2026-01-13 [Older] Antwerp’s AZ Monica hospital hit by cyber attack

  • Bleeping Computer ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] Victorian Department of Education says hackers stole students’ data

  • The Register UK ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] Eurail passengers taken for a ride as data breach spills passports, bank details

  • BBC ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] A faceless hacker stole my therapy notes – now my deepest secrets are online forever

  • TechCrunch ☛ 2026-01-18 [Older] How a hacking campaign targeted high-profile Gmail and WhatsApp users across the Middle East

  • The Record ☛ 2026-01-18 [Older] Anchorage police department takes servers offline after cyberattack on service provider

  • Dallas News ☛ 2026-01-18 [Older] 4 in 5 small businesses had cyberscams last year, almost half were slop powered

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Android Police ☛ Google could become an 'everything app'

      Everything apps aren't really a concept we have in the West, so you might need a little introduction to the idea before we start.

    • University of Toronto ☛ Scraping the FreeBSD 'mpd5' daemon to obtain L2TP VPN usage data

      We have a collection of VPN servers, some OpenVPN based and some L2TP based. They used to be based on OpenBSD, but we're moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD and the VPN servers recently moved too. We also have a system for collecting Prometheus metrics on VPN usage, which worked by parsing the output of things. For OpenVPN, our scripts just kept working when we switched to FreeBSD because the two OSes use basically the same OpenVPN setup. This was not the case for our L2TP VPN server.

  • Confidentiality

    • Japan ☛ 2026-01-18 [Older] Japanese nuclear regulator employee loses phone containing sensitive info in China

    • 2026-01-14 [Older] Data protection agency tells Coupang to stop publishing unconfirmed information about data breach

    • The Daily Beast ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] Personal Details of Thousands of Border Patrol and ICE Agents Allegedly Leaked in Huge Data Breach

    • The Independent UK ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Website that leaked thousands of ICE agents’ personal information is down after DDoS attack

    • 2026-01-15 [Older] JPMorgan Claims Ex-Advisor In Fla. Stole Trade Secrets To Poach Clients For LPL

    • USDOJ ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] Jordanian Man Admits Selling Unauthorized Access to Computer Networks of 50 Companies

    • CBC ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Staples Canada did not fully wipe personal information from resold laptops, says privacy watchdog

    • TechCrunch ☛ Microsoft gave FBI a set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops: Reports

      Many modern Windows computers rely on full-disk encryption, called BitLocker, which is enabled by default. This type of technology should prevent anyone except the device owner from accessing the data if the computer is locked and powered off.

      But, by default, BitLocker recovery keys are uploaded to Microsoft’s cloud, allowing the tech giant — and by extension law enforcement — to access them and use them to decrypt drives encrypted with BitLocker, as with the case reported by Forbes.

• Defence/Aggression

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Winnipeg police culture 'made it easier to do certain things,' disgraced officer says in psych report

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Germany: The harsh reality of cutting development aid

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Why Myanmar election won't change Europe's mind on junta

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini writes Norway's PM, ties Greenland to peace prize snub

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Germany-US rift is looming after a year of Cheeto Mussolini

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Greenland: Europe to counter Cheeto Mussolini 'blackmail', Berlin says

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-18 [Older] Greenland row: German military ends short deployment

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Guatemala declares state of siege after gang violence

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Turkey Sees Deal Between Syria, Kurdish Forces as 'Historic Turning Point', Sources Say

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-18 [Older] Libya's Security Authorities Free More Than 200 Migrants From 'Secret Prison', Two Security Sources Say

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-18 [Older] Syrian Forces Seize Major Oil, Gas Fields in Eastern Syria, Security Sources Say

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] Hundreds gather to mourn Trevor Dubois who died after fight with Sask. hospital security

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] National Security Advisers to Discuss Greenland in Davos

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Analysis-Cheeto Mussolini's Greenland Push Prompts NATO Scramble for Arctic Security Ideas - and Survival

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] At Least 21 Migrant Bodies Found in Libya Mass Grave, Security Sources Say

  • New York Times ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] US Cyberattack Blacks Out Venezuela, Leads to Maduro’s Capture in 2026

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] South Africa Probes Iran's Role in BRICS+ Naval Drills

  • Defence Web ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] Defusing the IED threat

  • Defence Web ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] The Côte d’Ivoire model for countering violent extremism

  • Defence Web ☛ 2026-01-12 [Older] BRICS Plus navies commence exercise off South African coast amid controversy

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-18 [Older] Port Assab becomes flashpoint for Ethiopia–Eritrea relations

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-18 [Older] US: Anti-ICE protesters clash with far-right group in Minneapolis

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] Iran enters uneasy calm after deadly anti-regime protests

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] Iran: Khamenei holds Cheeto Mussolini 'guilty' for deaths in protests

  • CS Monitor ☛ Iran’s narrative on protest deaths blames US, Israeli ‘agents’

    There is a “long-standing pattern of airing false statements and forced, torture-tainted confessions to blame killings and injuries on non-state actors,” says Raha Bahreini, a human rights lawyer and Iran researcher for Amnesty International, contacted in Geneva.

    “This is completely contradictory to a mountain of evidence including eyewitness accounts, and dozens of verified videos, geolocated and chronolocated, that show security forces were the only forces bearing firearms, shooting into crowds, and relentlessly firing at unarmed protesters and bystanders,” says Ms. Bahreini.

  • The Washington Post ☛ U.K. lawsuit seeks ban on smartphones in schools to protect children

    The risks of children’s smartphone use, including sexual exploitation and bullying, are mounting in Britain where some say the government has a responsibility to do more.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Crisis, No. 1

    I am not Thomas Paine. I am a former technology executive who writes a newsletter. I claim no special authority, no military experience, no credentials beyond citizenship itself. But Paine was a corset-maker before he was a pamphleteer. The revolution was not saved by credentialed men. It was saved by people who decided to speak when speaking was dangerous, and to stay when staying was hard.

    I take his title because someone must. And because the times demand it.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ By Lying about Alex Pretti's Murder, Kristi Noem Makes Herself a Co-Conspirator In It

    Here there are none. CBP goons assaulted Alex Pretti, beat him, and then — when they discovered his lawfully registered weapon — murdered him.

  • The Next Move ☛ Why Wouldn’t They Shoot Somebody?

    The administration grew ICE’s ranks by 120% over the past year. The majority of its agents entered service in this hyper-nationalistic, lawless milieu.

    Taken together, this is what makes tragedy inevitable. When ICE shows up, misfortune seems to follow. It is that way by design.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Outrage spreads wide after federal agents kill man in Minneapolis

    A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from “destroying or altering evidence” related to the shooting.

  • New York Times ☛ Opinion | The Trump Administration Is Lying to Our Faces. Congress Must Act.

    These unfounded and inflammatory judgments pre-empt the outcome of an investigation, which the Department of Homeland Security has promised. They also appear wholly inconsistent with several videos recorded at the scene.

    Those videos showed that Mr. Pretti had nothing but a phone in his hands when he was tackled by Border Patrol agents, and that he never drew the gun he was carrying (and reportedly had a license to carry). Indeed, the videos seem to show that one federal agent took the gun from Mr. Pretti moments before a different agent shot him from behind. Separate analyses by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, CBS News and other organizations all concluded that the videos contradict the Trump administration’s description of the killing.

  • Barry Hess ☛ Make This Make Sense

    We each contain a universe within us. How can we allow a universe to be snuffed out so blithely?

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Democrats Need to Take On ICE

    As the Trump administration and its ICE thugs continue their violent frenzy in cities, establishment Democratic politicians still refuse to meet the moment.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Germany urged to pull €164B in gold from U.S. vaults

    Germany holds the world's second-largest national gold reserves, with approximately €164 billion worth stored in New York. The practice dates back to the 1950s and 1960s, during the German economic miracle. Currently, half the reserves are held domestically at the Bundesbank, with the rest in New York and London. Between 2013 and 2017, Germany already repatriated part of its reserves from New York and Paris.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Monsters

    What I do believe in is the courage and decency of millions of ordinary Americans, which have been so dramatically on display in Minneapolis. We can only hope that this courage and decency get us through this nightmare — and we must do all we can to make it happen.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Sunday thought: Enough

    Europeans and much of the rest of the world have lived under dictatorships. Until now — until Trump — Americans had not.

    Yet the “greatest generation” of Americans — including many of our parents and grandparents — risked their lives fighting dictators so that this country would remain free and democratic.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Strike drones with lethal firepower set to be delivered to US Marines

    The U.S. Marine Corps awarded Anduril a $23.9 million contract to deliver these systems.

    The company revealed that the Bolt-M will be fielded into the first operational Marine units beginning in the summer of 2026, where end users will train and employ organic, loitering, precision strike capabilities in tactical formations.

  • Vox ☛ The killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis is a grim turning point

    So it’s not only that federal agents kill an American citizen like authoritarian thugs, but their superiors in Washington justified that killing with the kind of bald-faced lie that recalls Tehran and Moscow.

    These resonances suggest America is at a grim tipping point. The Trump administration’s actions augur an increasingly violent crackdown, one in which they attempt to secure power less by legal manipulation than by application of brutal force.

  • Vox ☛ Minneapolis shooting: What to know about the death of Alex Pretti

    Pretti, 37, was a US citizen and reportedly in the area to observe agents’ actions. He was also a registered nurse and a legal gun owner with a permit to carry a weapon — one that he was no longer in possession of when he was shot to death.

    Pretti’s death is at least the third shooting by immigration agents in the Minneapolis area this year, and the second where the person who was shot died.

  • The Nation ☛ Alex Pretti Was a Good Man at a Time of Great Evil

    On Saturday morning in Minneapolis, federal agents murdered 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse at a local Veterans Authority hospital. Pretti was trying to help a woman whom federal agents shoved violently to the ground. A fellow ICE observer, the woman flew a few feet through the air and landed hard; it had to hurt. “Are you OK?” Pretti asked her, according to bystanders. Those were his last known words. He kept trying to help the woman, and the agents kept trying to stop him, finally shooting him in the head at close range, execution-style, and then at least nine more times. (You can see videos, and a still photo of his execution I wish I hadn’t seen, all over social media.) Pretti died on the scene.

  • The Nation ☛ Feds Kill Again in Minneapolis. Minnesotans Are Fighting Back.

    The shooting, which took place on the immediate heels of a citywide strike, has further solidified Minneapolis as ground zero for the Trump administration’s war on immigrants and the growing resistance to it. The afternoon prior, tens of thousands descended upon downtown Minneapolis, armed with cardboard signs and snow goggles, as part of the nation’s first general strike in eight decades. Since January 7, when ICE officer Jonathan Ross was filmed shooting 37-year-old Renee Good in the face, residents have called for ICE to leave the city. Ross has not been arrested or charged.

  • New Statesman ☛ The ICE killers are Donald Trump's secret police

    As with Good, Trump and his people fell back on their by-now familiar strategy, dating back to Germany in the 1930s, of repeating a lie until people accept it as truth. Pretti, said Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, “committed an act of domestic terrorism”. Gregory Bovino, the ICE “commander-at-large” – who likes to pronounce “Gestapo” on TV, with an echt “-shtapo”; as in, “we are not the Geshtapo” – claimed that Pretti wanted to “massacre law enforcement”. It is possible to imagine Steve Bannon, Trump’s de facto Minister of Public Engagement and Propaganda – he is a darling of the liberal media, always ready with metric-popping copy – making index cards for Trump on how to slowly bend democracy to his demented will: demonise, enrage, frighten, lie, inure to violence. That last seems to be what is happening in Minnesota now.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Blankets, batteries, fires: How Kyiv is surviving icy winter

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Rlang ☛ When AdTech Misrepresent Their Own A/B Tests

    Preamble: I had a roughly 8 year break from blogging and focussed on kids plus related duties. This year, I will try to start again. My goal is to write about (advertising-related) research and how practitioners can apply the insights.

    Todays paper is from the “International Journal of Research in Marketing” and decribing how big Ad Tech companies (Google / Meta) are miscommunicating their methods and potentially inflating the results of advertising A/B-tests.

• Environment

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Vanishing birds across Norway's agricultural landscape may signal deeper changes

    Since the 3Q monitoring began in 2000, this year serves as the reference point (index value = 100). Since then, the results show a steady and clear decline throughout the period. In 2023, the bird index had fallen to around 75—a reduction of approximately 25% since monitoring began.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Davos 2026 updates: Spanish PM cancels trip amid train crash

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Spain train crash: PM Sanchez vows to 'find out the truth'

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Germany updates: Berlin brings back EV subsidies

    • CBC ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] Ontario man reaches settlement with Boeing over family's death in 2019 Ethiopia plane crash

    • CBC ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] Air Canada ordered to compensate Ottawa man $15K after losing appeal

    • CBC ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] WestJet reversing move to install tight seating layout

    • CBC ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] ArcelorMittal Dofasco quietly extends 'green' steel timeline from 2028 to 2050, gets $50M more from Ottawa

    • CBC ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] Chinese EVs are coming to Canada. How soon will they be here? How much will they cost?

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] US Says Canada Will Regret Decision to Allow Chinese EVs Into Their Market

    • CBC ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] Ontario premier slams Canada’s 'lopsided' new EV deal with China

    • CBC ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Canada reaches tariff-quota deal with China on EVs, canola

    • CBC ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Can Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa's LRTs withstand Canadian winters?

    • Deseret Media ☛ Too many cars don't stop on flashing reds, says school bus driver

      "I've seen drivers pass me from behind," Burch said. "I have been in multiple days where we've had five, six, seven, eight people just not paying attention and they're running these things."

      He recalled one time when his red lights were on and a car passed on the right side.

      "I actually grabbed a hold of the young man, held him back as a car drove right by me," Burch said.

    • Doc Searls ☛ Flying Fckery

      Go now to FlightAware’s MiseryMap. Cick on the blue Play button and watch The Great Storm of January 25-26 move across the land and cause massive delays at airports in its path.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • CBC ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Rescue dog found after 54 days in wilderness on Vancouver's North Shore

    • CBC ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] Big, barking, bellowing sea lions back in B.C.'s Howe Sound

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Human cost of wildlife conservation in Tanzania

  • Overpopulation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] China: Population sinks for fourth year in a row

    • Virginia Tech ☛ Major river deltas are sinking faster than sea-level rise

      The major causes are groundwater withdrawal, reduced river sediment supply, and urban expansion.

    • Nature ☛ Global subsidence of river deltas

      The initial multilinear regression (MLR) model, which included interaction terms between the different anthropogenic factors, poorly captured subsidence dynamics on the deltas (R2 = 0.2 ± 0.1), as it failed to account for nonlinear interactions between the different processes (Fig. 3a). For instance, urban expansion not only directly increases infrastructure loading but also indirectly elevates groundwater demand, thereby compounding aquifer depletion and extraction-induced subsidence, which are synergistic effects that linear models cannot resolve.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Germany news: Economy narrowly avoids 3rd year of recession

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] What's in store for Canada's housing market in 2026?

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-12 [Older] Average asking rents fell to just over $2K in December — their lowest in more than 2 years

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-18 [Older] Greenland row: EU to hold emergency summit on Cheeto Mussolini tariffs

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Central bank heads, including Canada's, defend U.S. Fed chair Powell

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] China Urges Canada to Break From US Influence as PM Carney Visits Beijing

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Seoul, Tokyo watch US foreign policy twists with rising fear

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Central African Republic Court Validates Touadera's Re-Election

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] The key elections in Africa in 2026

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] What can new polling tell us about the health of Canadian democracy?

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Long lineups in central Alberta to sign petition for province to leave Canada

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] How are ICE agents recruited, and who are they?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] Hungary: Orban gives asylum to EU politicians accused of corruption

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Manitoba civil servants won't be ordered to office full-time like their Ontario, Alberta counterparts

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-13 [Older] Why Alberta and Montana are in a charged argument over electricity

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] Japan: Popular Prime Minister Takaichi calls early election

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] Tense Uganda goes to vote amid internet blackout

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] Uganda election: Museveni takes early lead

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] Uganda's election ends with another term for Museveni

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] Can South Korea turn the page with Yoon Suk Yeol in prison?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] Cyprus: Small and divided but with grand plans for the EU

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • New York Times ☛ Trump Blames Democrats for ‘Tragic’ Deaths as Agents Clash With Protesters

      Top administration officials had earlier, and without evidence, accused each of the shooting victims in Minneapolis of “domestic terrorism.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-15 [Older] 'Charlie Hebdo' cartoon on Swiss fire tragedy sparks outrage

  • RFERL ☛ Iran's Internet Blackout Persists As Reported Death Toll Continues To Rise

    Iran's nationwide Internet blackout remained largely in place as the reported death toll from recent protests continued to rise, with one account saying the number of fatalities may exceed 30,000.

    The digital rights watchdog NetBlocks said on January 25 that Iran’s Internet shutdown has now passed 400 hours, adding that "brief connectivity spikes" may give a false impression of wider restoration. It said circumvention tools such as VPNs have allowed limited online communication.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Day Twenty-Nine of the Protests: Threats of Property Confiscation and the Continuation of Blocking and Intimidation Policies

    On the twenty-ninth day of the protests, Iran’s government continues to disrupt and restrict [Internet] access in order to maintain repression and control the flow of information. Available reports indicate that these limitations have not only failed to end but have continued in the form of “short and unstable connections”, a pattern that at times leads users to believe the [Internet] has returned, while in practice stable quality and access are not restored. As a result, some sources report that the restrictions have persisted for more than 17 consecutive days; limitations that, in many parts of the country, have reduced [Internet] access to a minimal level and disrupted access to vital services.

    Alongside widespread shutdowns or severe bandwidth reductions, there is evidence of the implementation of a policy of “selective access,” whereby only certain pre-approved or limited services remain available to some users, effectively turning the online space into a controlled environment. This policy has posed serious obstacles to the dissemination of news and the documentation of violence and arrests, while simultaneously targeting civil coordination and the capacity to organize protests.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-18 [Older] Hong Kong: Life sentence looms for media tycoon Jimmy Lai

  • The Dissenter ☛ They Executed Him For Wielding A Camera

    The war on the right to record, which extends beyond professional journalists, is crucial to President Donald Trump and his administration’s agenda to cleanse parts of the country of ethnic populations through racial profiling and warrantless arrests of undocumented immigrants, lawful permanent residents, and U.S. citizens.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • TruthOut ☛ Hotels Should Deploy the 3rd Amendment and Refuse to House ICE Agents | Truthout

    It’s easy to dismiss the backlash as ideological, performative, or just another episode of internet outrage. But underneath it is a much older and much more serious question — one that sounds dusty until you think about how modern law enforcement actually works: What are the limits on the government’s ability to force private space into service for coercive state power?

    That question sits at the heart of the Third Amendment — the one most people have forgotten about if they ever knew what it was at all.

  • The Verge ☛ Why won’t anyone stop ICE from masking?

    Americans do not like masked secret police. There is really no other way to put it. The reasons why are manifold: accountability, trust in law enforcement, and just plain overall vibes. More concretely, not being able to tell who’s a cop and who’s not is dangerous. An assassin masquerading as law enforcement killed Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband last year. How is anyone supposed to tell whether they’re being dragged out of their home in their underwear by ICE or by mere amateur thugs?

  • Mike Brock ☛ Ten Shots

    The video shows a man with a phone in his hand and his other hand raised. His parents say he was trying to protect a woman. He was a nurse. He cared for veterans. He died in the street outside a donut shop.

    This is the pattern. Kill first. Lie second. Let the Community Notes and the spokespeople and the Fox News chyrons do the work of making the murder disappear.

  • New York Times ☛ Read Bondi’s Letter to Minnesota’s Governor

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Intolerable Things

    When we met the line of state police who had the street blocked off, I cut through a parking lot to try to go around the block and get closer. When I reached the next street over, another round of tear gas got fired. It sounds like gunfire coming out, and then you see the big white clouds billowing up, and everyone moves quick in the opposite direction. I had a papery N95 mask on, which mostly offers just psychological support against the gas— the better-prepared people had actual respirator masks, which actually work. The cloud came over us and there were a couple of people standing at the open basement entry door of an adjacent apartment building, calling people inside. We all trooped in and up a flight of stairs and people who lived there had a tray of glasses of water out, and a couple of them were standing there with their doors open, welcoming people in to wash their eyes out. Several of us went into a woman named Elizabeth’s studio apartment to drink water. Thank you, Elizabeth.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Doctor who attended to shot protester says agents were counting bullet holes rather than administering CPR

    “As I approached, I saw that the victim was lying on his side and was surrounded by several ICE agents. I was confused as to why the victim was on his side, because that is not standard practice when a victim has been shot,” the unnamed doctor wrote in a declaration added to a lawsuit challenging ICE’s use of force in Minnesota.

  • New York Times ☛ Read a Witness Statement on the Pretti Shooting

  • Rolling Stone ☛ What We Know About the Second ICE Shooting In Minnesota

    “I’m done being told that our community members are responsible for the vitriol in our streets,” he added. “I’m done being told that our local elected officials are solely responsible for turning down the temperature. Just yesterday, we saw 15,000 people peacefully protesting in the streets, speaking out, standing up for their neighbors. Not a single broken window, not a single injury.”

  • Star Tribune ☛ Alex Pretti identified as man fatally shot by federal officers

    Walz rejected that as a false narrative.

    “Thank God we have video,” Walz said. “It’s nonsense, people. It’s nonsense, and it’s lies.”

    He rejected the rush to judgment by federal officials and said, just like the shooting of Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on Jan. 7, that a full state investigation into the killing was needed and would be done.

    “They already will slander this individual,” Walz said. “They already have made this the case. But you will all start to see it, some of you probably have, there are multiple angles [of this shooting]. And I’ll go back to what we talked about before. They’re telling you not to trust your eyes and ears. Not to trust the facts that you’re seeing.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Adviser of EU’s Highest Court Backs VPN Neutrality in Anne Frank Copyright Battle

    A landmark copyright battle involving digital copies of the iconic Anne Frank diary is helping to answer key questions about geo-blocking and a copyright enforcement tool. According to a new opinion from EU Advocate General Rantos, publishers who use 'state-of-the-art' blocks are not liable for copyright infringement, even if users bypass them with a VPN. Crucially, the opinion also shields VPN providers, labeling them neutral intermediaries who aren't responsible for their users' digital trespassing.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • [Old] Reflow ☛ Precision Agriculture Has Its Cassandra. His Name Is Kevin.

    The transformative technology now? Precision agriculture, which is a catch-all term that describes a constellation of technologies that are transforming how farming is done and how farmers and ranchers tend both crops and livestock. Among the critical components of precision agriculture: Internet- and GPS connected agricultural equipment, highly accurate remote sensors, “big data” analytics and cloud computing.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Don Marti ☛ A marketing moment to remember

  Yes, this is the kind of story that might have gotten a lot more attention in the past, but the advertising business has gotten remarkably hollowed out as the Meta+Google advertising duopoly has grown to take up about half—maybe a majority by now—of global ad budgets. If everyone on the agency side is in hardcore mode, playing the layoffs reality show for high stakes, and pretending to be good at AI, there’s not a lot of time left in the day for digging into corporate crimes.

• Dave Rupert ☛ I'm swearing off APIs entirely

  All three of those have ended unceremoniously at the same dead end: no API access. USTA denied my application for tennis rankings. The aptly named Historical Marker Database site doesn’t have a public API. And you have to be an MLS® Realtor® or Broker to get access to the MLS® listings. Womp womp.

• Copyrights

  • Ars Technica ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] Judge orders Anna’s Archive to delete scraped data; no one thinks it will comply

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Scarlett Johansson, Chaka Khan Sign Campaign Against AI 'Theft'

    Scarlett Johansson, Chaka Khan, and Questlove are among more than 700 signees to the new “Stealing Isn’t Innovation” campaign against AI exploitation in the U.S.

    On Thursday, “Stealing Isn’t Innovation” was launched by the larger Human Artistry Campaign, which calls itself “a global coalition of more than 180 groups around the world supporting responsible, ethical AI.” In a press release, the organization denounced “Big Tech’s illegal mass harvesting of copyrighted works to build and power their Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) platforms.”

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] How European cinema is stealing Hollywood's spotlight