Leftovers

• Digital Camera World ☛ I’m a Michigan photographer. This is how I prep to take photos in seriously sub-zero temperatures

  No, I didn’t go out and take photos when forecasters issued extreme cold warnings (Minnesota photojournalists, you are my heroes right now). But, as both a professional photographer and someone who uses photo walks for a mental health boost, staying inside all winter isn’t an option.

  Over the years, I’ve learned a few tricks to making winter photo treks somewhat enjoyable.

• Wouter Groeneveld ☛ Banning Syntax Highlighting Steroids

  And then I read Tonsky’s excellent I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong post. Being Tonsky, he was of course right—again. A lightbulb went on somewhere deep within the airy caverns of my brain: “Hey, perhaps I’m not the only one thinking of Christmas trees when I see a random dark theme”.

• Juan J Martínez ☛ git.usebox.net and bots - usebox.net

  I just had a chat with Alex because I couldn’t reach any of his websites, but I fired Tor browser and they were there.

  Alex has been documenting his fight against the AI-crawlers, so I assumed that my IP range was blocked. He is dealing with a problem much bigger than mine, because he maintains some public wikis in 2026. If I was him I suspect I would have given up long ago, so I have a lot of respect for his efforts, even if it means I need to use Tor to access his site. What a wild world are we living in which I’ve used Tor more in the last 6 months than ever before, and all to access legal websites!

• Chuck Grimmett ☛ Month of January 2026

  I blogged every day this month! I didn’t start the month planning to do so, but after I had blogged for 5 days straight, I wanted to keep it going. After about a week, it got easier and I noticed things throughout the day I could blog about. I had a week-long stretch where I had posts scheduled a day or two ahead of time, then the rest of the month I wrote and posted the same day.

• Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Thomas Edison May Have Discovered Graphene

    Thomas Edison is well known for his inventions (even if you don’t agree he invented all of them). However, he also occasionally invented things he didn’t understand, so they had to be reinvented again later. The latest example comes from researchers at Rice University. While building a replica light bulb, they found that Thomas Edison may have accidentally created graphene while testing the original article.

• Career/Education

  • Digital Camera World ☛ This is why your ‘smart’ camera is actually making you a worse photographer

    "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." This adage is often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but most likely derives from Chinese Confucian philosopher Xun Kuang. Regardless, it couldn't be more relevant in a world where tech does so much for us.

  • Evan Hahn ☛ Notes from January 2026

    I started a new job as a Staff Engineer at Ghost this month. According to our homepage, Ghost is “for professional publishers to create, share, and grow a business around their content.” I’m looking forward to building software for independent journalists.

    This is also the third time in a row I’ve chosen to work for a nonprofit. It’s a pattern now: nonprofits are my default choice of where to work.

  • Wind River Systems Inc ☛ Job Interview Questions for Embedded Systems Developers

    You’re applying for a position as an embedded systems developer. Are you ready for the questions a hiring manager is likely to ask? Check your answers for these 38 questions to prepare for the job interview.

    Job interviews are stressful and awkward at the best of times. It’s hard to relax and talk about your work experience even when you know the subject matter in depth. One common way to prepare for a job interview is to review typical questions for the role and brush up on anything new in the field you might have missed. In addition to generic job-search resources, you can find help in books specific to software development careers, such as Land theTech Job You Love and Cracking the Coding Interview.

    However, few guides to job interview questions are tuned to embedded systems developers. The questions discussed here are tailored for developers who write software for use in robotics, IoT, automotive architecture, and aerospace design. While the questions are primarily meant for people with an #OpenToWork hashtag on their LinkedIn profiles, they’re equally useful for hiring managers.

• Hardware

  • Bunnie Huang ☛ Name that Ware, January 2026

    The Ware for January 2026 is shown below: [...]

  • Bunnie Huang ☛ Winner, Name that Ware December 2025

    The Ware for December 2025 is a Spectral Instruments Series 800 camera. I was pretty shocked at how quickly this was guessed given the very small portion of the instrument that was shown, but, then again – that’s how it goes sometimes. Congrats to johslarsen for nailing this one; email me for your prize.

• Proprietary

  • Pete Brown ☛ Some things I did this morning

    I moved all of my stuff off of AWS over a year (maybe two) ago, mostly by shutting things down, but also a bit of migration. Did I really need all of those backups sitting in S3 buckets? Nope. I had also killed off all of my EC2 and Lightsail instances; when I experiment with new stuff these days, I mostly do it locally on my Raspberry Pi.

    Even so, I still had my AWS account, and have kept getting a $1.02 bill each month. Turns out it was two snapshot I had missed, which turned up when I close my account.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Security Week ☛ 175,000 Exposed Ollama Hosts Could Enable LLM Abuse

      Over 293 days of research, the security firms made 7.23 million observations distributed across 130 countries and 4,032 autonomous system numbers (ASNs), with 23,000 hosts accounting for most of the activity.

      Roughly half of the identified hosts could execute code, access APIs, and interact with external systems, SentinelOne says.

    • Coyote ☛ osteophage | How LLMs & Chatbots Are Bad For the Indie Web

      Large language models and their associated bots are bad for the indie web in at least three ways: 1) their logistical consequences are bad for bandwidth, 2) their social consequences are bad for guides, and 3) their citational consequences are bad for surfability. These consequences are worth highlighting in light of how LLM-based chatbots have been used and endorsed on the indie web. The indie web may mean different things to different people, but if we’re thinking of it at all in terms of favoring small sites over corporate exploitation, then the indie web as a concept and a practice is fundamentally at odds with what LLMs are doing to the web.

    • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Will AI Make Package Managers Redundant?

      A recent post by Marcelo Emmerich proposes replacing package managers with a “prompt registry.” Instead of publishing code, library authors would publish AI prompts. Developers paste the prompt into their AI tool, which generates a self-contained implementation on the spot. No transitive dependencies, no supply chain attacks, no version conflicts. The code is generated fresh each time, tailored to your language and project.

      It’s a naive vision, but it points at real problems. Supply chain attacks are serious. Transitive dependency trees are genuinely hard to reason about. The appeal of generating exactly what you need, with nothing extra, is obvious.

      The generated code still has to implement TLS, parse JSON, handle Unicode. The complexity doesn’t vanish because you stopped calling it a dependency; it just moves elsewhere. But I love going down a rabbit hole, so let’s see where this leads.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AI sends tourists to Tasmanian hot springs that don’t exist

      Tasmania Tours outsources its marketing posts, and usually they check them — but Hennessey was out of the country at the time. The post went up in July last year. By September, Probert was getting calls about hot springs: [...]

    • ABC ☛ Weldborough Hotel baffled by tour company advertising hot springs that don't exist

      The Weldborough Hotel in Tasmania's north-east has had an influx of enquiries about a hot springs that doesn't exist.

    • Peloton cuts 11% of staff months after AI hardware launch

      Fitness company slashes engineering teams despite recent Peloton IQ rollout

  • Social Control Media

    • [Old] Vanity Fair ☛ “I Was Devastated”: Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some Regrets

      “We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places,” he told me. The increasing centralization of the Web, he says, has “ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.”

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, thinks it can still be saved — despite some parts being 'optimized for nastiness'

      It wasn't until the polarization of the 2016 U.S. election that he had enough with the Web's toxicity, something that reportedly left him "devastated." He acknowledges that social media does not represent the entire web, but that "the problem is that people spend a lot of time on [social media websites] because they’re addictive," having later described them as "optimized for nastiness".

    • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘It’s not too late to fix it’: web inventor Tim Berners-Lee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul’ of the [Internet]

      For 35 years, Berners-Lee has written what he considers to be the world’s first blog. One post, published in June 2024, is dominated by a crowded map of “everything on the [Internet]”. It is a reminder of the web’s overall beneficence – from email and Zoom to health, podcasts, collaboration, creativity and digital sovereignty, the diagram shows the web is, for the most part, good.

      But to the left of the diagram is a cluster of red, including X, Snapchat, YouTube, “feed manipulation for engagement”, addiction, polarisation, disinformation and mental illness. This corner of the web, its creator says, has been “optimised for nastiness”. It is extractive and surveillance-heavy.

      “It’s only a small part of the whole [Internet] … but the problem is that people spend a lot of time on [social media websites] because they’re addictive,” he says.

    • Hackaday ☛ Playing YouTube From The Command Line

      Shellbeats is primarily intended for playing music from YouTube, and is well equipped for this task. It allows searching YouTube directly from the terminal, as well as streaming tracks or entire playlists from the command line interface. You can also make and edit playlists from within the tool, and even download the whole lot as MP3s if so desired. It’s all keyboard-operated and nicely lightweight. The overall experience isn’t dissimilar from operating a simple LCD-based MP3 player from 20 years ago.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Bitdefender ☛ FBI takes notorious RAMP ransomware forum offline

      A seizure like this is not going to eliminate ransomware overnight, but it does represent a meaningful disruption of cybercriminal infrastructure, as hackers will be forced to migrate their activities, and will be presented with new challenges related to their operational security and who they can trust.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Washington Post ☛ ICE farms immigrant-tracking to outside companies. One now has doubts.

      A subsidiary of the French company Capgemini signed a contract for some of the work, but after pressure from French officials, Capgemini now says it is no longer executing the contract.

    • Rlang ☛ Do Loyalty Programs Actually Create Loyalty?

      Loyalty programs don’t create “excess loyalty”: The core finding – that loyalty programs don’t generate significant loyalty beyond what’s expected for a brand’s market share – remains empirically supported. You can’t “buy” loyalty through points alone.

  • Confidentiality

    • CyberInsider ☛ Signal president warns AI agents are making encryption irrelevant

      Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker said artificial intelligence agents embedded within operating systems are eroding the practical security guarantees of end-to-end encryption (E2EE).

      The remarks were made during an interview with Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos. While encryption remains mathematically sound, Whittaker argued that its real-world protections are increasingly bypassed by the privileged position AI systems occupy inside modern user environments.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Pro Publica ☛ What Our Photojournalists Saw in Minneapolis

    Over the past month, the Trump administration has deployed thousands of federal immigration agents to the Minneapolis area. On Saturday, Jan. 24, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Pretti was the third person shot by federal agents in the area in January.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Russia's ‘Penguin’ camouflage test on Ukraine frontline fails: Reports

    Identified by the 120th Territorial Defense Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Russian soldiers appear to be testing the new gear under real combat conditions. However, it appears the experiment is not going very well.

  • Pete Warden ☛ De-ICE Disco at the Googleplex

    After the podcast, I realized I wanted to bring some of the energy from the Tesla protests to a tech event. I thought about setting up a meetup, but that felt too boring. Then I remembered how many of my former colleagues at Google have talked to me about wanting to show their support, but are struggling to find ways to have their voice heard without being targeted. Instead of a traditional protest with speeches, slogans, and signups, maybe we could find another way to be visible. I decided to get a few friends together in Charleston Park, a public park next to the Googleplex in Mountain View, and hold a popup dance party. De-ICE Disco sounded good to me, and so after TGIF, between 5pm and 5:30pm on Thursday (February 5th) we’ll be bopping around in inflatable costumes to disco classics. Join us, costume or not, to show ICE we won’t be intimidated, that we’ll protect our neighbors and colleagues when they come, and that we stand with Minneapolis.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Crisis, No. 10

    What is under attack in America right now is not a party. Not a set of policies. Not even a set of norms.

    What is under attack is popular sovereignty itself.

    They have seized the ballots in Georgia. The physical record of how the People voted. The Director of National Intelligence stood in a parking lot. Watched the boxes loaded onto trucks. Five years after the election. The evidence of the People’s will is gone. They seek to rewrite history, so that they may steal the future.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Unrecognized pain: Most Halabja Massacre survivors have PTSD

• Environment

  • Pro Publica ☛ 2026-01-24 [Older] Documenting an Alaska Village, Before and After the Storm That Destroyed It

  • Vox ☛ 2026-01-23 [Older] The tricky science of forecasting extreme winter storms

  • Vox ☛ 2026-01-22 [Older] An exclusive look inside the largest effort ever mounted to keep the Great Barrier Reef alive

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ 2026-01-21 [Older] At Davos, Mexico’s environment minister stresses urgent climate action

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Climate change: Migratory birds are starting to abandon the state of Jalisco

  • TruthOut ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Big Oil’s Priority in 2026 Is Shielding the Industry From Climate Lawsuits

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Penguins break records by moving breeding season in warming climate

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] There's been a quiet exodus of Canada's net-zero climate advisors

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-01-25 [Older] The SA miracle: How one Australian state leads the world on renewables

    • Bitcoin crashes to $77,000, altcoins plunge by double digits in many cases

      Is this a harbinger of an even tougher week ahead? The Bitcoin price collapsed massively over the weekend, falling temporarily to nearly $75,000 – the lowest level since April 2025. Within a few hours, the cryptocurrency lost more than ten percent of its value as strong selling pressure gripped the markets. The price slid from a 24-hour high of $84,356 to a low of $75,644. The low liquidity during the weekend significantly amplified volatility and accelerated the downtrend. Buyers became active again only in the mid-$70,000 range after several key support levels had been broken.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ 2026-01-26 [Older] Gator Country’s Climate Guardians

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] A cow has learned to use sticks to scratch herself — a scientific first

    • HRW ☛ 2026-01-26 [Older] Delay on Tracing Cattle Endangers Brazil’s Amazon

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-22 [Older] Interpol-Backed Police Make Nearly 200 Arrests in Amazon Region Gold Mining Sweep

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Deep in the Amazon, I discovered this monkey’s ingenious survival tactic

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Why is Slovakia the EU's 'central hub' for VAT fraud?

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-26 [Older] Fed Meeting Likely to Be Overshadowed by Threats to Central Bank's Independence

  • TruthOut ☛ 2026-01-23 [Older] Striking Spanish Workers Just Showed That Amazon Is Not Invincible

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Press Gazette ☛ Former agency boss Richard Sexton joins William Reed as COO

    Family-owned UK B2B media business William Reed has appointed Richard Sexton as chief operating officer.

  • The Register UK ☛ Oracle seeks to build bridges with MySQL developers

    Oracle's presentation leaned heavily on promises, including moving features previously limited to the commercial edition into the community version of the application. Key features on their way to the Community Edition include vector functions, which are considered critical for AI workloads.

  • Victor Kropp ☛ Startup Camp

    They say that only 1 out of 50 startups survives and is profitable. Well, I need to try just 49 more times.

  • Birmingham Live ☛ Convicted terrorist standing in Birmingham election 'to unite Sparkhill'

    He has openly encouraged the city's Muslim youth to 'work out at the gym and learn to fight' in readiness for potential attacks, and urged Muslims to stand together and hold their ground against people of other faiths, who he describes as 'disbelievers'.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Vox ☛ Alex Pretti video: The dismaying response to new footage of clash with ICE

      From the moment he entered our politics, Trump has been waging a war of attrition against objective reality.

      All politicians play games with the truth. But Trump’s lies have long been exceptional in their volume and audacity. In his first term alone, the president made more than 30,000 false or misleading statements – from petty whoppers about the size of his inauguration crowd to grave fictions about the 2020 election’s legitimacy.

    • The Verge ☛ ChatGPT isn’t the only chatbot pulling answers from Elon Musk’s Grokipedia

      ChatGPT is using Grokipedia as a source, and it’s not the only AI tool to do so. Citations to Elon Musk’s AI-generated encyclopedia are starting to appear in answers from Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini, too. Data suggests that’s on the rise, heightening concerns about accuracy and misinformation as Musk seeks to reshape reality in his image.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Melania Trump Documentary Isn't Even Good Propaganda [Ed: Sad to make a disclosure a relative of mine directed this]

      Amazon poured tens of millions of dollars into the Brett Ratner-directed documentary. It fails on virtually every level

    • Variety ☛ 'Melania' Review: A Cheeseball Infomercial of Straggering Inertia

      “Melania” is a documentary that never comes to life. It’s a “portrait” of the First Lady of the United States, but it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial. Is it cheesy? At moments, but mostly it’s inert. It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called “Day of the Living Tradwife.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Amazon Edits Out Timothy Busfield from 'You Deserve Each Other' After Child Sexual Abuse Allegations

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Turkey arrests exiled Iranian journalist Kaveh Taheri sparking deportations fears

    He said authorities issued a deportation order on January 28, citing “national security” grounds, which she said was a “standard justification often used against journalists and those the authorities disfavor.”

    Efe noted that previous court rulings had blocked past deportation attempts, and that Taheri remains “trapped in a cycle of administrative harassment.”

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ "Demonic," "Godless," "Un-American:" Harmeet Dhillon's Own Misconduct Will Be an Issue in Don Lemon Case

    That was the culmination of almost two weeks of an intense, wildly inappropriate media campaign led by Harmeet.

    And that’s a problem, because Harmeet’s media blitz targeting the church protest generally and Don Lemon personally happened during the same period when her own office, after two judicial rulings that there was not probable cause to charge most defendants and without any local career prosecutor included, indicted the defendants.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Don Lemon Released Without Bond: 'I Will Not Be Silenced'

    Don Lemon was released from federal custody on his own recognizance Tuesday after a U.S. Magistrate judge, with a tinge of impatience in her voice, summarily rejected a list of pre-trial conditions that the government wanted placed on the former CNN anchor.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Bob Ross paintings sell for $1.2 million as Trump guts public TV

    Public media creates things that belong to everyone, which makes it intolerable to those who believe value exists only when it can be owned, priced, and withheld.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Bob Ross Paintings Fetch $1.2 Million for Public TV After Trump Cuts

    Auction house Bonhams Skinner announced the news on Jan. 28 and detailed that Ross’ 1990 oil painting “Change of Seasons” surpassed its estimate of $60,000 and brought in $787,900, leading the sales. The painting, created during the TV series’ 20th season, depicts autumn trees framing snowy mountains in the background, and was described by Ross himself as “just a beautiful little painting’.”

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Wired ☛ How to Film ICE

    “Unfortunately, there is no way to film ‘safely’ right now—I think everybody may be taking a risk because of how aggressive and brazen and outright illegal ICE’s conduct has been,” says Trevor Timm, cofounder and executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation. (Disclosure: WIRED’s global editorial director sits on Freedom of the Press Foundation’s board.) “Alex Pretti was killed in part because he was filming ICE, which is an absolute travesty. But we saw that shooting from half a dozen angles because there were other people there who were filming as well. And because they were filming, we saw the egregious lies that the Trump administration was spreading almost immediately.”

  • Rolling Stone ☛ ICE Is Using AI to Find Targets. Do They Care If It Makes Mistakes?

    “They’ve initiated a lot of contracts with data providers and providers of AI solutions,” says Damon McCoy, a professor of computer science and engineering who serves as the co-director of the New York University Center for Cybersecurity. “So you can see what contracts they’ve established, and that gives you some insight into likely capabilities that they either have or that they’re building out.”

    Among the tech companies with ICE contracts are Palantir, the data analytics firm whose co-founders include Silicon Valley Trump supporters Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale and is led by CEO Alex Karp, who donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. ICE uses Palantir’s tools to process and summarize tips sent to the department, as well as a Palantir system called ELITE that sources and collates information from government agencies to create neighborhood maps that lead them to probable deportation targets. There’s also Clearview AI, which provides algorithm-driven facial recognition software. “They seem to be trying to build some platform,” McCoy says, that would integrate these various systems.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Nick Heer ☛ Amazon, Google, Meta, and SpaceX Want to Be Africa’s Internet Providers – Pixel Envy

    It is extraordinary to think that companies like Google and Meta, already dominant in much of the software infrastructure used in African countries, are also angling to assert control over the physical realm, too. Worth noting Meta has repeatedly claimed it is developing novel infrastructure only to bail after the public relations sheen had faded.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-26 [Older] Inherent anticipation of second medical use claims in New Zealand and Australia [Ed: Locking things behind paywalls]

• IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-23 [Older] Motion Denied: General Court slams the window shut on motion mark for window movement

• Patents

  • 2026-01-22 [Older] To Require an Inventor ID, or Not to Require an Inventor ID – That Is the Question

  • 2026-01-21 [Older] Federal Circuit Refuses to Switch District Court’s Finding for Nintendo

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Recipe for success: patenting cultivated meat technology

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Mexico leads LatAm in AI patents after IP office reports record year [Ed: Software patents disguised as "hey hi"]

  • 2026-01-20 [Older] Supreme Court to Resolve Dispute Over Marketing of “Skinny Labeled” Generics

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Piracy Crackdown in Italy Shuts Down IPTV Services Ahead of Winter Olympics

    milano cortinaNo other country in Europe generates as much noise around physical anti-piracy crackdowns as Italy, where ‘boots-on-the-ground’ operations have become a regular occurrence.

    While the number of affected users doesn’t always seem to add up, it is clear that Italy can and is willing to take action, where other countries do not see IPTV as a priority.

  • The Record ☛ Department of Justice seizes domains for Bulgarian piracy sites

    The operation targeted online services that offered copyrighted TV shows, video games, movies and other content, the Justice Department said Friday. Much of the copyrighted material belongs to American companies, the agency said.