Leftovers

• Cal Newport ☛ Is the Internet Hijacking Our Ambition? - Cal Newport

  If you’re worried about the internet hijacking your ambition (or the ambition of someone you care about), then keep these ideas in mind. It’s not enough to dismiss influencers like Ashton Hall; you need to replace what they’re offering with a more compelling alternative. Stulberg’s writing, in my opinion, points the way to one such alternative.

• Kevin Kelly ☛ The Technium: The March of Nines

  This is called the ”march of nines”, and it has been very common in high tech for many years. The companies making silicon wafers for chips, for example, have been engaged in a long struggle to add nines to the purity of their crystals. Premier web hosting companies brag about their 5 nines of uptime, hoping to reach 6 nines someday.

  This lift is tremendously hard for very mundane reasons. The addition of a nine in the march of nine is not linear. It seems as if we are adding only a tiny amount with each nine, smaller and smaller, but it is the opposite. The difference between having no electricity for 1 hour a year (99.99%) versus missing one whole working day a year (99.9%) is significant, and not just a little more.

• Marcy Wheeler ☛ Closed for Renovations

  We should be back up again by mid-morning your time tomorrow.

• Chris Aldrich ☛ Rest in Peace: Typewriter Repair Legend Duane Jensen (August 21, 1961-January 25, 2026)

  A bunch of us both watch and provide links to his library of typewriter repair videos on a daily basis. Many of us know how to tear down and build up a typewriter because of his tutorials and years of work. Once you attempt to repair a typewriter for yourself, you’ll realize how skilled he was to be able to simultaneously film his work while he did it. (I swear he had six hands….) He also patiently dispensed (and still asked for his own repair advice) on a regular basis on Facebook.

• Ava ☛ issues with my public knowledge base

  So I deleted my GitHub (which I wanted to do anyway, to avoid Microsoft) and moved the notes vault to Bearblog. If I am here all the time anyway, it might make it easier to consistently expand my knowledge base here.

  But I also didn't do that. There was still too much friction involved: [...]

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Crooked Timber ☛ WHO: An anecdote — Crooked Timber

    Most people have only the vaguest idea of what WHO is or what it does. Teal deer, they do a lot of different stuff, most of it pretty good. They were crucial to eliminating smallpox a while back. They come up with cool ideas like a list of essential medicines and health care products that are cheap and easy to produce, along with easy how-to guides on producing them. They do all sorts of research, especially on public health. They were deeply involved in controlling Ebola. (You haven’t heard much about Ebola lately, right? Thank USAID and WHO.)

  • Rlang ☛ Close To Me: finding close parkruns

    I saw Ryan who co-hosts Raley Adventures YouTube channel at a recent running event and he mentioned the cool thing would be to not rely on Haley (his co-host) to drive between the parkruns, but to actually run between them. This got me thinking: where are the closest pairs of parkruns, and which of those are in the Midlands where Raley Adventures are based?

    It was pretty straightforward, given a list of coordinates of all UK parkruns, to figure this out in R. Click here for the answer, or read on for the code.

• Proprietary

  • Naked Capitalism ☛ Oracle Debt and TikTok Transition Troubles Vex the Ellison Media Empire

    Oracle has financial problems that threaten the Ellison media empire, while technical problems at TikTok complicate the transition.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ AI Agents Are Mathematically Incapable of Doing Functional Work, Paper Finds

      A months-old but until now overlooked study recently featured in Wired claims to mathematically prove that large language models “are incapable of carrying out computational and agentic tasks beyond a certain complexity” — that level of complexity being, crucially, pretty low.

    • Futurism ☛ OnlyFans Rival Seemingly Succumbs to AI Psychosis, Which We Dare You to Try Explain to Your Parents

      What’s more, many of the adult content creators on the platform suspect that the cryptic posts are a sign that French is suffering from some kind of delusional episode brought on by her addiction to AI, a phenomenon that psychiatrists are labeling AI psychosis. And it’s leaving them feeling pretty uneasy about the site’s future.

    • Futurism ☛ Meta Just Quietly Admitted a Major Defeat on AI

      “Starting in the coming weeks, teens will no longer be able to access AI characters across our apps until the updated experience is ready,” Meta said in an updated blog post. “This will apply to anyone who has given us a teen birthday, as well as people who claim to be adults but who we suspect are teens based on our age prediction technology.”

    • UNIXdigest ☛ The reasons for the big discrepancy between satisfied vs dissatisfied developers using AI for coding

      To some developers AI seems to be the best thing since sliced bread, while to others, AI is more or less useless. I set out to investigate a little about why there is such a big difference in opinion among developers. This is just some my observations.

    • Michael Gale ☛ How to find things from the before times

      It's a marketing tool designed to promote DDG's noai subdomain, which to my understanding has been available since their LLM features were first introduced to the site. From my casual browsing on Mastodon, it seems like it brought peoples attention to it - and that's great.

    • Kyle Kingsbury ☛ Blocking Claude

      Claude, a popular Large Language Model (LLM), has a magic string which is used to test the model’s “this conversation violates our policies and has to stop” behavior. You can embed this string into files and web pages, and Claude will terminate conversations where it reads their contents.

      Two quick notes for anyone else experimenting with this behavior: [...]

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ One year on, the DeepSeek shockwave has faded

      Fundraising has not eased either. The maker of ChatGPT has continued to close nine- and even ten-figure funding rounds, as has its rival Anthropic. Startups Thinking Machines and Safe Superintelligence raised billions of dollars only months after being founded. Demand for Nvidia’s GPUs remains strong, helping the Santa Clara group become the first company to cross the $5 trillion market-capitalization mark. And capital expenditures by tech giants keep climbing.

    • David Bushell ☛ AI Policy and The Inevitable

      This post is primarily written towards web and software developers. All em-dashes were written by human.

      The reality is you just don’t care about the harm done by the AI industrial complex. You only care about the perceived harm to your ego and reputation. So you compartmentalise because pulling the one-armed code bandit is a rush.

    • Ava ☛ the on-going AI class divide

      That makes discussions with others around what AI can or can't do unreliable and mostly uninteresting to me at this point. There is too much variation of output between the same prompts, too much difference between different model releases, and the intense advantage of paid tiers. Nothing novel about discussing why a free product is worse than a paid plan.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Insurers don’t want to cover AI

      The list includes almost any way in which a business could touch AI. Berkley’s definition of AI seems to mean machine learning or generative AI: [...]

    • CER ☛ A New Zealand Perspective on the Challenges of Computing Education: What I did on my sabbatical

      We talked with him a good bit about his piece: “Large Language Models, the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ and ‘Terra Nullius’ Declared Again?”. I didn’t know that the European colonists who came to Australia and New Zealand had papal permission. Australia was declared terra nullius — nobody owned the place, so go ahead and take it over. New Zealand was recognized as being run by the Māori, so colonizing there had to be negotiated. Tony asks, “So which of these models gives LLMs the right to consume the Internet?” Do we assume that nobody owns all the content on the Internet (like Australia)? Or should we be negotiating rights? The idea of LLM providers as a colonizing force was a fascinating perspective.

    • Daniel Stenberg ☛ The end of the curl bug-bounty

      Looking back, I think we can say that the downfall of the bug-bounty program started slowly in the second half of 2024 but accelerated badly in 2025.

      We saw an explosion in AI slop reports combined with a lower quality even in the reports that were not obvious slop – presumably because they too were actually misled by AI but with that fact just hidden better.

    • The Register UK ☛ Vibe coding may be hazardous to open source

    • Firstpost ☛ Yann LeCun warns AI industry is “LLM-piled,” explains why he quit Meta

      The former chief Scientist of MetaAI Yann LeCun, also considered “Godfather of AI,” has called on the tech giants, describing the industry as “LLM-piled.” He warned of the tech and talent war between tech giants where they were stealing each other’s AI engineers so that they can afford to do something different.

    • Futurism ☛ Meta Just Quietly Admitted a Major Defeat on AI

      Meta quietly announced that it will cut off teen users' access to its AI character — if only for the time being.

    • Futurism ☛ Tesla Kills Autopilot After Storm of Criticism, Paywalls Basic Features

      In light of plummeting sales and shrinking profits, Tesla has killed its Autopilot suite in the United States and Canada for good.

  • Social Control Media

    • EDRI ☛ EDRi calls for action as EU probes X’s Grok over AI-generated harm

      In recent weeks, Grok has enabled the mass production and circulation of over 3 million non-consensual, sexual images of women and minors in the 11 days before the company finally promised to prevent this from being possible. X’s chatbot has turned the platform into an infrastructure for mass AI-generated sexual abuse.

      [...]

      This is not an isolated incident. Last summer, the European Commission already raised concerns when Grok generated antisemitic and extremist content, including praise for Adolf Hitler, to be distributed on X. The recurrence of harmful outputs points to a pattern of non-compliance and a failure – or refusal – to conduct adequate risk assessments before deploying generative AI systems at scale.

    • The Register UK ☛ European Commission opens new investigation into X's Grok

      The company added: "We take action to remove high-priority violative content, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) and non-consensual nudity, taking appropriate action against accounts that violate our X Rules. We also report accounts seeking Child Sexual Exploitation materials to law enforcement authorities as necessary."

      Officials said that since they began discussions with X over how Grok was implemented, the platform had made changes to the system, including turning off the image-generation tool for users who don't pay subscriptions.

    • New York Times ☛ Elon Musk’s X Faces EU Inquiry Over Sexualized AI Images Generated by Grok

      The European authorities said that X was being investigated for possible violation of the Digital Services Act, alleging that the company had not properly addressed the “systemic risks” of integrating the A.I. chatbot Grok into its service. Starting in late December, sexually explicit images generated by Grok, including of children, flooded the service, drawing worldwide criticism from victims and regulators.

    • The Verge ☛ X faces EU investigation over Grok’s sexualized deepfakes | The Verge

      Advocacy groups and lawmakers from around the world have raised the alarm on Grok’s AI image editing feature after it began complying with requests to generate sexualized images of women and minors on the platform. X later paywalled the ability to edit images in public replies to posts, but everyone can still generate images using Grok’s chatbot interface inside X.

    • New York Times ☛ Elon Musk’s X Faces EU Inquiry Over Sexualized AI Images Generated by Grok

      The European authorities have another investigation underway about X’s recommender algorithm and policies for preventing the spread of illicit content.

      “Nonconsensual sexual deepfakes of women and children are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation,” Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission executive vice president who oversees enforcement of the Digital Service Act, said in a statement. “We will determine whether X has met its legal obligations under the D.S.A., or whether it treated rights of European citizens — including those of women and children — as collateral damage of its service.”

    • The Register UK ☛ TikTok’s US joint venture off to a rocky start

      The TikTok USDS (US Data Security) Joint Venture - the entity backed by Trump ally Larry Ellison's Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and Emirati-backed investment firm MGX, with ByteDance retaining a minority stake - took to X on Monday to explain the issues as resulting from a power outage at a US datacenter.

    • The Verge ☛ TikTok is still down, here are all the latest updates

      Starting early Sunday morning, TikTok’s now under new ownership US arm started breaking down just a couple of days after Oracle & Co took the reins. Its For You page algorithm is suddenly unreliable, while features like comments are failing to load or loading slowly, and publishing new videos seems nearly impossible for many people.

    • Wired ☛ TikTok Data Center Outage Triggers Trust Crisis for New US Owners

      TikTok users began reporting on Sunday that they were having trouble uploading videos to the app as well as viewing content that had already been posted on the platform. Others said that while they could upload videos, they were receiving far fewer views and engagement than usual.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Diplomacy by WhatsApp ⁄ Manual do Usuário

      Nicholas Carr, author of the excellent Superbloom, argues that:

      "Texting turns everyone into a semiliterate twelve-year-old, and presidents, prime ministers, and secretaries general are no exception."

      In this article, he opposes the widespread practice of conducting diplomacy via WhatsApp. Which, obviously, does not work.

    • Manton Reece ☛ Open source vs. open platforms

      Open source is great. All of the Micro.blog apps are open source. But for platforms, open APIs have always been more important to me than open source. Mastodon is open source yet has no way to import posts, so it’s not well suited as a place where you can own your content in the way a blog enables.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • [Old] The National Security Archive ☛ APT44: Unearthing Sandworm [PDF]

      APT44 operations are global in scope and mirror Russia's wide ranging national interests and ambitions. In the post-Maidan Revolution era, this has led to cyber operations primarily centered on Ukraine, the epicenter of Russia’s revanchist geopolitical aims over the past decade. However, even with an ongoing war, we have observed the group sustain access and espionage operations across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Latin America. Patterns of activity over time indicate that APT44 is tasked with a range of different strategic priorities and is highly likely seen by the Kremlin as a flexible instrument of power capable of serving both enduring and emerging intelligence requirements.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • ACM ☛ Message from ACM President Yannis Ioannidis

      As of January 1, 2026, ACM completed its transition to full open access: all ACM-published articles and related research artifacts in the DL are freely available worldwide without barriers to reading or reuse. This is a significant step forward for the computing field and reflects years of planning, collaboration, and input from across the community. Few scholarly societies have undertaken a transition of this scale, and we’re all proud to be leading the way and expanding access to computing research globally.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Why chatbots are starting to check your age

      Selfie verifications have issues: They fail more often for people of color and those with certain disabilities. Sameer Hinduja, who co-directs the Cyberbullying Research Center, says the fact that Persona will need to hold millions of government IDs and masses of biometric data is another weak point. “When those get breached, we’ve exposed massive populations all at once,” he says.

      Hinduja instead advocates for device-level verification, where a parent specifies a child’s age when setting up the child’s phone for the first time. This information is then kept on the device and shared securely with apps and websites.

    • AboutSignal ☛ Signal popularity soars, number one in Finland

      Signal is being downloaded in large numbers across several European countries this month. After previously topping the charts in Denmark, Signal is now number one on Finland’s Google Play. Interest in Signal has also clearly increased in other countries.

      In Finland, Signal currently leads the free communication apps category on Google Play: [...]

    • Privacy International ☛ The Trump Administration wants your DNA and social media | Privacy International

      • Trump Administration is expanding its systems so that visitors to the US must submit social media, email identifiers, and even DNA data for entry.

      • The US Government wants to require five years of social media data, ten years of email addresses, including business accounts.

      • Accumulating this most intimate personal data will create an unprecedented immigration system.

      • Analysing this data will likely require AI tools to summarise our lives.

      • Companies and governments must push back now, lest they enable and copy these practices.

    • [Old] US Government Publishing Office ☛ Federal Register / Vol. 90, No. 235 / Wednesday, December 10, 2025 / Notices: Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection [OMB Control Number 1651–0111] Agency Information Collection Activities; Revision; Arrival and Departure Record (Form I–94) and Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA [PDF]

      4. High Value Data Elements: To comply with the January 2025 E.O. (14161), and the April 4, 2025, Memorandum Updating All Forms to Collect Baseline Biographic Data, CBP will add several ‘‘high value data fields’’ to the ESTA application, when feasible. This is in addition to the information already collected in the ESTA application.

      The high value data fields include:

      a. Telephone numbers used in the last five years;

      b. Email addresses used in the last ten years;

      c. IP addresses and metadata from electronically submitted photos;

      d. Family member names (parents,spouse, siblings, children);

      e. Family number telephone numbers used in the last five years;

      f. Family member dates of birth;

      g. Family member places of birth;

      h. Family member residencies;

      i. Biometrics—face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris;

      j. Business telephone numbers used in the last five years;

      k. Business email addresses used in the last ten years.

      CBP invites the public to comment on both the previously approved emergency changes and the newly proposed changes.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ UK Age Verification for VPNs

      It’s not yet law.

    • Reclaim The Net ☛ UK House of Lords Votes to Extend Age Verification to VPNs

      The decision deepens the reach of the already-controversial Online Safety Act, linking child safety goals to mechanisms that could have severe effects on private communication and digital autonomy.

      Under the existing Online Safety Act framework, “user-to-user services” include almost any online platform that enables individuals to post, share, or interact with content from others.

  • Confidentiality

    • Dan Q ☛ Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

      Keystroke timing obfuscation: I could’ve told you that! Although I wouldn’t necessarily have leapt to the possibility of mitigating it server-side by patching-out support for (or at least: the telegraphing of support for!) it; that’s pretty clever.

• Defence/Aggression

  • NPR ☛ Meta, TikTok and YouTube are on trial over whether their apps hurt children

    The suits accuse Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok of engineering features that make their apps nearly impossible for kids to put down, like infinite scroll, auto-play videos, frequent notifications and recommendation algorithms, leading in some cases to depression, eating disorders, self-harm and even suicide. (Snapchat is also named as a defendant in these lawsuits, but it settled with the plaintiff in the case going to trial on Tuesday.)

  • The Atlantic ☛ Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong

    The man who had been shot—fatally, we later learned—was Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who had been recording agents outside a donut shop. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security claimed that he had threatened agents with a gun; videos of the shooting show him holding only his phone when he is pushed down by masked federal agents and beaten, his licensed sidearm removed from its holster by one agent before another unloads several shots into his back. Pretti’s death was a reminder—if anyone in Minnesota still needed one—that people had reason to be hiding, and that those trying to help them, protect them, or protest on their behalf had reason to be scared.

  • Techdirt ☛ Ten Shots

    Alex Jeffrey Pretti was an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. He spent his days caring for American veterans—the men and women who served this country and came home broken in body or mind. He wanted to make a difference in this world. That is what his parents said, in a statement released hours after federal agents killed him on an American street.

    Ten shots.

    His phone was in his right hand. His left hand was raised above his head. He was being pepper-sprayed. He was trying to protect a woman that ICE had just pushed to the ground.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Yes, It’s Fascism

    When the facts change, I change my mind. Recent events have brought Trump’s governing style into sharper focus. Fascist best describes it, and reluctance to use the term has now become perverse. That is not because of any one or two things he and his administration have done but because of the totality. Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.

  • Techdirt ☛ Judge Blocks DHS From Destroying Evidence From Alex Pretti’s Execution By Federal Officers

    Federal officers have done it again. They’ve executed another protester who posed no threat, shooting Alex Pretti 10 times while he lay face down in the street. Again, the administration led with lies that were soon exposed by multiple recordings of the shooting. And again, the feds are locking local law enforcement out to prevent an independent investigation of the shooting.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Marine Corps offers reenlistment bonuses up to $60k to switch jobs

    Some of the most enticing bonuses will be offered to Marines who make lateral moves with a seven-year reenlistment. The highest bonuses will go to those willing to be counterintelligence/human intelligence specialists, cyberspace warfare operators, criminal investigators, MQ-9 Reaper drone mechanics, drone technicians, influence operations specialists, and low altitude air defense gunners.

  • Vox ☛ ICE in Minneapolis: Trump’s plan to extort Minnesota, briefly explained

    Minnesota’s secretary of state said over the weekend that the Trump administration is trying to “ransom” Minneapolis’s freedom from an increasingly violent federal presence.

  • Court House News ☛ TikTok, YouTube and Meta likely headed to trial over schools' social media addiction claims | Courthouse News Service

    U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers didn’t seem convinced Monday by YouTube, Snap Inc., TikTok and Meta’s claims that school districts in Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey and South Carolina didn’t provide specific evidence of compulsive use of social media by adolescent students.

    The social media giants are fighting against letting negligence, failure to warn about the social media’s addictive features, and public nuisance claims by four of six named school district plaintiffs go to a jury trial.

  • New York Times ☛ The Social Media Addiction Trials: What to Know

    In a series of trials, the first of which will begin with jury selection Tuesday in a state court in Los Angeles, the plaintiffs’ lawyers are testing a novel legal theory claiming that the companies caused personal injury through defective products.

    Thousands of individuals, school districts and state attorneys general have filed similar lawsuits. Just one win could open the door to an avalanche of similar claims.

    Here’s what to know.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Social media addiction lawsuits head to trial

    Parent lawsuits alleging that social media’s design is addictive and has fueled the teen mental health crisis are heading to trial. Their case might be hard to prove.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Mourning in America

    But there is much more to do than mourn. As the labor leader Joe Hill asked in 1915 just before he was executed: “Don’t mourn … Organize.” The best way to honor the memories of Alex Pretti and Renee Good is to take action against the forces that executed both of them.

    Obviously, your energies are needed in organizing your congressional district and your state for the midterm elections, and getting out the vote. (I’ll be back in coming months with detailed suggestions for how.)

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Was This a Murder Too Far?

    But the MAGA faithful closed ranks, echoing the party line that she was a militant terrorist, albeit one with a dog in the back of the car, who smiled and said soothing words to her killer. Per usual, business remained silent as Good’s character was slandered. And so it looked as if the Trumpists would just bull through with impunity as they had many times before.

    But this time, after the killing of Alex Pretti, feels different. Media coverage has been much clearer than the coverage after Good’s death. As I was writing this, the Wall Street Journal headline read “Videos Contradict U.S. Account of Minneapolis Shooting”. After some initial equivocation, the New York Times is calling out administration lies and featuring a chilling moment-by-moment analysis of videos showing what really happened.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Crisis, No. 2

    I want to tell you about the architects. The theorists. The men who decided, decades ago, that democracy was an obstacle to be overcome, and who have spent the intervening years building the infrastructure to overcome it.

    This is a story about ideology. About money. About the deliberate construction of a parallel power structure designed to compete with—and ultimately replace—constitutional government. It is a story about people you may have heard of, and others you have not, and what they have been doing while the rest of us were distracted.

    It is a story about the cynical and the craven. And it ends with blood on their hands.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Crisis, No. 3

    I say this plainly because I am tired of pretending otherwise. The republic is in crisis. The people who brought us to this crisis must be held accountable. And the conditions that allowed this crisis to occur must be changed, fundamentally and permanently, so that it never happens again.

    This will not be comfortable. It will not be polite. It will not satisfy those who believe that politics is a matter of splitting differences and finding common ground with people who have demonstrated, beyond any reasonable doubt, that they do not share our commitment to constitutional democracy.

  • YLE ☛ Survey finds more support in Finland for social media ban for under-15s

    The poll, commissioned by price-tracking website firm Hintaopas in December, found 66.5 percent of respondents supporting a social media ban for under-15s. It said a survey about the topic last summer found 57.3 percent of respondents holding such an opinion, according to the company.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Star Tribune ☛ Alex Pretti shooting: Fact checking Bovino's, Noem's claims

    A review of over half a dozen videos taken from different angles — including footage recorded by bystanders, video from inside nearby businesses and clips captured from across the street — along with eyewitness accounts and statements from local officials, complicates that narrative and leaves several assertions unsupported by publicly released evidence.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Tennessee Lookout ☛ Thousands remain without power in Tennessee with single-digit temperatures expected

      Roughly 200,000 Tennesseans remain without power Monday in frigid temperatures after a major winter storm froze trees, power lines and roadways and coated them with ice.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Underwater cameras could help unlock America’s tidal energy industry

      An analysis of 1,044 unique interactions between marine life and this small-scale tidal turbine found zero collisions for seals or seabirds, and a 98 percent safety rate for fish, according to a study by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, whose facility overlooks the high-flow test site.

• Finance

  • Gold hits record high above $5,100 as stocks rise, dollar falls

    U.S. stock indexes are ticking higher on Monday, while other markets make louder moves, including another record-breaking rush for the price of gold.

    The action was strong in the gold market, where the metal’s price rallied another 2.2% and briefly topped $5,100 per ounce to set another record. Silver surged even more, nearly 16%.

    Prices for precious metals have been soaring as investors look for safer places to keep their money amid threats of tariffs, still-high inflation, political strife, and mountains of debt for governments worldwide.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Citizen Lab ☛ People’s Consultation on AI Now Accepting Submissions

    The independent consultation is now accepting submissions until March 15, 2026. Deibert says, “It is entirely unacceptable to allow tech platforms to experiment on billions of people for private gain with no meaningful restraint.” Senior fellow Cynthia Khoo notes, “If we have learned one thing repeatedly from the cascading and discriminatory harms of so many cycles of tech hype…it’s that those hardest hit often see the future first, but are the last to be heard.”

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Trump and the unmighty dollar

    The best summary of Trump's trade "philosophy" comes from Trashfuture's November Kelly, who said that Trump is flipping over the table in a poker game that's rigged in his favor because he resents having to pretend to play the game at all.

    After all, the global system of trade was designed and enforced by American officials, especially the US Trade Representative. The US created a world whose most important commodities (food, oil, etc) were priced in dollars, meaning that anyone who wanted to buy these things from any country would first have to get US dollars, which they could only get by shipping their valuable stuff to the US, which sends them dollars in return.

  • Anil Dash ☛ Why We Speak

    I have been around the technology industry, and the larger business world, long enough to have watched the practice of speaking up about moral issues go from completely unthinkable to briefly being given lip service to actively being persecuted both professionally and politically. The campaigns to stamp out issues of conscience amongst working people have vilified caring for others with names ranging from "political correctness" to "radicalism" to "virtue signaling" to "woke" and I'm sure I'm missing many more. This, despite the fact that there have always been thoughtful people in every organization who try to do the right thing; it's impossible to have a group of people of any significant size and not have some who have a shred of decency and humanity within them.

    But the technology industry has an incredibly short memory, by design. We're always at the beginning of history, and so many people working in it have never encountered a time before this moment when there's been this kind of brutal backlash from their leaders against common decency. Many have never felt such pressure to tamp down their own impulses to be good to their colleagues, coworkers, collaborators and customers.

    I want to encourage everyone who is afraid in this moment to find some comfort and some solace in the fact that we have been here before. Not in exactly this place, but in analogous ones. And also to know that there are many people who are also feeling the same combination of fear or trepidation about speaking up, but a compelling and irrepressible desire to do so. We've shifted the Overton window on what's acceptable multiple times before.

    I am, plainly, exhorting you do to speak up about the current political moment and to call for action. There is some risk to this. There is less risk for everyone when more of us speak up.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Melania Trump Documentary From Amazon: Behind the Scenes

      The irony is thick: A little over a year ago, Melania sparked a bidding war among Hollywood studios eager to curry favor with the incoming Trump administration. Amazon MGM Studios ended up beating out both Disney (which had just donated $15 million to Trump’s future presidential library to settle a dubious defamation claim the soon-to-be president had levied against its subsidiary ABC) and Paramount, which was seeking good relations with the White House ahead of a blockbuster merger that would be subject to FCC approval.

    • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Stephen Miller, Not (Just) Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino, Must Be Held Accountable

      Importantly, the lies Melugin told were the maximal lies that adjudged liar Greg Bovino would himself tell. Fox News’ Chief Deportation propagandist immediately aired the claims of Greg Bovino, even though Melugin has to be aware of the many times Bovino has been proven a liar in court proceedings, including this two page passage from Judge Sara Ellis’ 233-page memorandum enjoining DHS from further abusive methods (which the Seventh Circuit overturned): [...]

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • US News And World Report ☛ USA Today Co., Owner of the Detroit Free Press, Says It Will Purchase the Detroit News

    According to a statement from USA Today Co., the newspaper publisher formerly named Gannett, both newspapers will continue to publish separately. The company provided little other information on the planned operation of the daily newspapers.

    The statement also did not disclose a price of the sale.

  • Techdirt ☛ The FBI Raided A Reporter’s Home, Ignoring Laws Designed To Prevent Exactly That

    The raid was ostensibly connected to an investigation into Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a government contractor with top-secret clearance who was arrested and charged with illegally retaining classified documents—not leaking them. Again, because this seems to have gotten lost in much of the coverage: Perez-Lugones hasn’t been charged with leaking anything to anyone. Just retaining documents. The government isn’t even alleging—at least not yet—that he gave anything to Natanson or any other journalist. But the DOJ apparently decided that the best way to investigate this guy was to ransack a journalist’s home and vacuum up everything she’s ever worked on.

    There’s a law that’s supposed to prevent this. It’s called the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, and it was passed specifically because Congress recognized that letting law enforcement raid journalists to fish for evidence of other people’s crimes has a catastrophic chilling effect on the press. The law bars searches and seizures of journalists’ work product when the journalist isn’t suspected of a crime, with very narrow exceptions that don’t appear to apply here.

  • Press Gazette ☛ California Post launching into 'news desert', boss Keith Poole says

    The California Post is a new localised print edition and online destination for the New York Post. Post group editor-in-chief Keith Poole and California Post editor-in-chief Nick Papps explained the thinking behind launching a newspaper against a backdrop of declining print and digital audience numbers.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • MinnPost ☛ Operation Metro Surge politics, slow moves toward bipartisanship

    In an interview on Monday, Abeler made points that Gov. Tim Walz and other DFLers would heartily agree on: that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension must have the chance to investigate why agents fired multiple shots at Pretti and Good. That the presence of thousands of immigration agents in Minnesota is excessive. And that lawful citizens should not be apprehended.

  • Michigan News ☛ Hundreds rally in Kalamazoo to protest ICE actions in Minnesota

    The protest came amid rising tensions in U.S. cities following the Saturday, Jan. 24 killing of Alex Pretti by immigration agents in Minneapolis.

    Protesters chanted “Rise up, shut it down, no ICE in our town,” among other chants. Some brought hand warmers, food and water to distribute.

  • JURIST ☛ HRW reports Georgia authorities arbitrarily detaining and harassing peaceful demonstrators

    Authorities in the Republic of Georgia are increasingly using newly adopted restrictions on public assembly to arbitrarily detain and harass peaceful demonstrators, effectively undermining the right to protest and freedom of assembly in the country. The findings underscore mounting concerns over restrictive legislation and enforcement practices that place disproportionate constraints on dissenting voices.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Why Labor Unions Can’t Ignore ICE

    National labor leaders echoed the point. After the killing of Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse and member of the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler called for ICE to leave Minnesota “before anyone else is hurt or killed,” explicitly linking immigration enforcement to danger for workers.

    It’s about time organized labor took a clear stand against ICE. Rather than being adjacent to work, immigration enforcement is one of the key ways work is governed, and not in a way that benefits working-class people, US-born or otherwise. ICE is not simply a border agency that occasionally intrudes into the economy. It is a labor-market institution: an apparatus that disciplines workers, structures whole industries, and makes organizing riskier.

  • The Register UK ☛ Tech employees demand their leaders take a stand against ICE

    The tech industry's C-suite has yet to publicly speak out against these recent fatal shootings involving federal agents - or the larger dismantling of democracy and the international order under the Trump administration - but their employees are, with hundreds of workers from Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Salesforce, and many, many other companies demanding ICE leave American cities.

  • JURIST ☛ EU launches probe into sexual deepfakes on X

    The investigation will determine if the AI tool violates the Digital Services Act (DSA) and whether X failed its obligation to properly assess and mitigate the risks of deploying Grok into the EU. The platform’s after-image editing capabilities allow users to enter a prompt under any photo and have the AI create realistic changes to the original, referred to as deepfakes.

    X is classified as a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) under EU law and thus bears the responsibility of ensuring that its services do not infringe on the rights of EU citizens and does not disseminate illegal content, as per articles 34 and 35 of the DSA.

  • Wired ☛ Deepfake ‘Nudify’ Technology Is Getting Darker—and More Dangerous

    Grok, the chatbot created by Elon Musk’s companies, has been used to created thousands of nonconsensual “undressing” or “nudify” bikini images—further industrializing and normalizing the process of digital sexual harassment. But it’s only the most visible—and far from the most explicit. For years, a deepfake ecosystem, comprising dozens of websites, bots, and apps, has been growing, making it easier than ever before to automate image-based sexual abuse, including the creation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This “nudify” ecosystem, and the harm it causes to women and girls, is likely more sophisticated than many people understand.

    “It’s no longer a very crude synthetic strip,” says Henry Ajder, a deepfake expert who has tracked the technology for more than half a decade. “We’re talking about a much higher degree of realism of what's actually generated, but also a much broader range of functionality.” Combined, the services are likely making millions of dollars per year. “It's a societal scourge, and it’s one of the worst, darkest parts of this AI revolution and synthetic media revolution that we're seeing,” he says.

  • Chris Enns ☛ A Brief Review of Narco Mennonites

    My mind is still boggled at the idea that you can get drugs across the border when the rest of us are paranoid about taking too large a container of eye contact solution across.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Apple ‘Honours’ Martin Luther King While Working Against His Legacy

    Guy posted this on 20 January, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States, and just days before Alex Pretti was murdered and Tim Cook attended a screening of ‘Melania’. I had been meaning to link to it since then, and last week’s events made it all the more pressing. Guy quotes King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, though I have chosen some additional context: [...]

  • Nick Heer ☛ Tim Cook Attends Screening of Propaganda for Authoritarian’s Wife

    Cook, though? He was there because he wanted to be. This was on the same day that, as Stuart writes, agents of the U.S. government murdered a second citizen in Minneapolis in three weeks, and then lied about it. Renée Good and Alex Pretti both embodied courage. Cook chose fealty and, ultimately, cowardice.

  • Nevada Current ☛ As counties prepare to count unhoused population, HUD guidelines assure an undercount • Nevada Current

    Other often overlooked unhoused populations that won’t be reflected in the final numbers include those experiencing homelessness who were incarcerated at the time of the count and unhoused people in emergency rooms and hospitals.

    “There’s an even larger number of people who are in precarious or kind of less than optimal living situations that are not included in the PIT count,” said Catrina Peters, the Homeless Services Coordinator with Washoe County.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • BoingBoing ☛ Congress wants a remote kill switch in every car

    If you own a car made in the past decade, it's a fair bet your vehicle is already under some form of surveillance. Internet- and GPS-connected services like OnStar or MySubaru can't do their thing without knowing who you are and where you are. LoJack and similar hardware can locate your vehicle. Many modern cars contain a black box with an accelerometer and digital storage to record driving data for review after an accident. And every time you take your ride in for a tune-up, scads of information about your driving habits — even whether you listen to SiriusXM or Spotify — gets shared.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Nick Heer ☛ FTC Says It Will Appeal Ruling in Meta Monopolization Case – Pixel Envy

  I wonder if Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the Chamber of Progress, will continue referring to it as “one of Lina Khan’s most prominent anti-big tech cases”, despite its origins in the first Trump administration and this appeal landing in the second one.

• Federal Trade Commission ☛ FTC Appeals Ruling in Meta Monopolization Case | Federal Trade Commission

  Today, the Federal Trade Commission filed a notice that it will appeal the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia’s November 2025 ruling in favor of Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”) in the FTC’s monopolization case against Meta. The appeal will be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

  The FTC continues to allege, and robust evidence at trial demonstrated, that for over a decade Meta has illegally maintained a monopoly in personal social networking services through anticompetitive conduct – by buying the significant competitive threats it identified in Instagram and WhatsApp.

  FTC Bureau of Competition Director Daniel Guarnera issued the following statement regarding the FTC’s notice of appeal: [...]

• Copyrights

  • JURIST ☛ US Supreme Court to decide if 1988 video tape privacy law applies to [Internet] uses

    The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a case which asks whether the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) applies to users who sign up for newsletters from websites that use Meta’s tracking technology.

    The lawsuit accuses Paramount Global of violating the VPPA by disclosing digital subscribers’ identities and video media information, without proper consent, to Facebook through for targeted advertising purposes. Paramount Global runs 247Sports.com, through which plaintiff Micheal Salazar had subscribed to a free email newsletter and viewed video clips. The website utilized Meta Pixel, which allegedly sent Salazar’s Facebook ID and browsing data to Facebook after his engagement with the site.

  • Stallman was asked what he thought about piracy

    On Friday, the 72-year-old Richard Stallman made an appearance two hours and 20 minutes at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He talked about just about everything from Artificial Intelligence and connected cars to smartphones, age verification laws, and his favorite Linux distribution.

  • Richard Stallman Was Asked: Is Software Piracy Wrong?

    Friday 72-year-old Richard Stallman made a two-hour-and-20-minutes appearance at the Georgia Institute of Technology, talking about everything from AI and connected cars to smartphones, age verfication laws, and his favorite Linux distro. But early on, Stallman also told the audience how "I despise DRM...I don't want any copy of anything with DRM. Whatever it is, I never want it so badly that I would bow down to DRM." (So he doesn't use Spotify or Netflix...)

    This led to an interesting moment when someone asked him later if we have an ethical obligation to avoid piracy.. First Stallman swapped in his preferred phrase, "forbidden sharing"...

    "I won't use the word piracy to refer to sharing. Sharing is good and it should be lawful. Those laws are wrong. Copyright as it is now is an injustice."