Distributions and Operating Systems

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Slashdot ☛ 2026-01-25 [Older] Former Canonical Developer Advocate Warns Snap Store Isn't Safe After Slow Responses to Malware Reports

Leftovers

• ARRL ☛ Former FCC official John B. Johnston, W3BE, Silent Key

  He was first licensed on March 15, 1954, as KN2HHR. Following military service and college, he worked for the General Electric Company, and then as an engineer for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). He retired in 1998 as branch chief in the Private Radio Bureau specializing in the Amateur Radio Service.

• Nolan Lawson ☛ 15 years of blogging

  I feel like I’ve careened between all of these extremes over the past 15 years. Overall my writing was a lot more freewheeling in the past, and I’ve tried to recapture some of that lately, but having an audience just naturally gnaws at your mind in a way that (I find) I can’t totally ignore.

  Quitting Twitter (and wasn’t that a weird story arc on my blog!) helped a lot, although there’s still of course Mastodon and Lobsters and Hacker News and all the rest where the comments can be a vicious cesspool if you spend too much time there. (If you’re reading this from RSS: you’re my favorite readers, and they can take my RSS reader from my cold dead hands!)

• MB ☛ Shortcut for ALT TXT

  The final action in this very minimal shortcut is to copy it to the clipboard. This is useful since it’s easy to paste in the tools that I use to post my stuff, including the Drafts app.

• Kev Quirk ☛ Will They Inherit Our Blogs?

  This blog is by far the hobby I have sunk the most time into over the last 13-ish years, and I’d like to think I’ll continue as I head from middle age, to old age. Let’s say I live until I’m 80, I will have spent over 50 years of my time on this earth writing content here at kevquirk.com.

  I don’t want all the hard work to disappear in a puff of smoke once I snuff it, so I’ve been thinking. Could this blog become a family heirloom?. Could I pass this site on to one (or both) of my sons and have them continue to write here?

• Dan Q ☛ Without Bloganuary

  Of course, two significant things changed since then: [...]

• Bix Frankonis ☛ IndieWeb Carnival: Host Interview

  Zachary has set out to interview bloggers who have hosted IndieWeb Carnival, and hit me up a few days ago to discuss my place in the rotation last October with a prompt to discuss the matter of ego. He invites participants also to post the Q&A on their own blogs, so here are his five questions and my five answers.

• Career/Education

  • Arjen Wiersma ☛ Talks

    I occasionally speak at conferences and meetups. Below are some of my active talks that I am presenting. If you would like me to present at your conference or meetup, feel free to contact me.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ U.K. internet provider's bailout cancelled because rats chewed through its fiber optic cables — biodegradable cable jackets use soy- or corn-based materials, attracting hungry rats

    Internet fiber optic cables have layers of protection, including conduits or ducting, casing, and insulation. This makes them robust enough that it would require a power tool to saw through them. However, they’re still no match for rodent teeth. Rats can easily chew through cables, using these protective layers for nesting.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ This "Japanese Hasselblad" does things that the original Swedish camera simply can't

    It was a 6 x 6cm single-lens reflex camera similar to the Hasselblad in design, style and size, but with several improvements over the original models. It had an instant-return mirror that slid down (rather than flipped up) to enable the use of deep-seated wide-angle lenses.

  • Colin Walker ☛ Feb 1, 2026

    I just need some right-angled patch cables to save on space.

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ Grand Opening of Typewriter Muse

    For about 7 years Typewriter Muse has been operating out of a home-like space, but this weekend they opened a lovely brick and mortar location in Riverside, CA in a nice sized business park with plenty of Doris Day parking right out front.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Like potatoes? Berlin is giving away 4 million kilos

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-01-25 [Older] The Whiskey War, or: How to Fight Over Land Like a Civilized Mammal

  • Chris Amico ☛ Bookscrolling is better than doomscrolling

    I check my phone a lot, often for no real reason. Maybe you do, too. Now, instead of finding incremental updates on today’s news, or people offering engagement-bait takes, I’m seeing people talk about the book we’re reading together. Or I’m skipping that loop entirely and opening the Kindle app.

    I’m not arguing for news-avoidance here, but defaulting to a book has been a healthier choice for me this month. News is my job, and this is work-life balance.

  • Carlos Becker ☛ Doing less, for her

    My daughter will be born soon, and I’m reflecting on what that means for my OpenSource work.

    After a lot of thinking, I realized I’m doing too much. Basically, I’m already stretched thin on all the self-imposed obligations I have, and I’m going through them only due to discipline.

• Proprietary

  • Rui Carmo ☛ TIL: Apple Broke Time Machine Again On Tahoe

    After some research, I found out that the issue is with Apple’s unilateral decision to change their SMB defaults (without apparently notifying anyone), and came across a few possible fixes.

  • DNA Lounge ☛ DNA Lounge: 1-Feb-2026 (Sun): Wherein I have some thoughts on food delivery apps

    But in 2017, Uber abruptly decided that if you wanted them to deliver something, you also had to allow them to operate your online store, and let them take a percentage of that. So we dropped them on principle, and switched to Postmates. But then eventually Uber bought Postmates too. So we switched to Grubhub, who had recently started doing deliveries as well as ordering: this gave Grubhub the same downsides as Uber Eats, but at least they weren't Uber.

  • GreyCoder ☛ Telegram: A Modern, Cross-Platform Messaging App

    Telegram is a messaging app that sits somewhere between WhatsApp, Discord, and a minimalist social network. You get normal one‑to‑one chats, group chats, and huge broadcast channels, all wrapped in a relatively clean interface. It’s available on almost every platform (iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, web).

  • The New Stack ☛ 50 years ago, a young Bill Gates took on the 'software pirates'

    Just months after his 20th birthday, Bill Gates had already angered the programmer community.

    As the first home computers began appearing in the 1970s, the world faced a question: Would its software be free?

    This week marks the 50th anniversary of the day young Gates penned his infamous 1976 “Open Letter to Hobbyists,” complaining that his very first piece of commercial software had been pirated. It kicked off a series of reverberations, along with a major controversy that would continue boiling over the next half century — and ultimately shape the world we live and work in today.

  • [Old] US Senate ☛ Senator Cantwell Opening Statement and Q&A Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Media Hearing “Signal Under Siege: Defending America’s Communications Networks”, Tuesday, December 2, 2025

    I want to focus on Salt Typhoon, obviously. The Chinese government's espionage operation deeply penetrated networks of at least nine U.S. telecom companies, including AT&T and Verizon. It has been described as the worst telecom hack in our nation's history, and the Chinese government-sponsored hackers broke into our nation's telecommunications backbone. They exploited the wiretapping system that our law enforcement agencies rely on under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act -- known as CALEA.

    These systems became an open door for Chinese intelligence. Salt Typhoon allowed the Chinese operation to track millions of Americans’ locations in real time, record phone calls at will and read our text messages. Their targets included then-candidates President Trump and Vice President Vance, as well as senior government officials. And the hackers were also able to determine who the U.S. Government was wiretapping, including suspected Chinese spies, telling Beijing which of their operatives might be compromised.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Tech CEOs Say AI Is Ushering in an Age of Abundance, But Instead the Evidence Shows That It's Pushing Down Wages

      “That is equal to 3.0 percent of GDP,” Baker writes, “which is certainly enough to give us a recession, especially when added to the collapse of spending on data centers and other AI investments.”

      Making matters worse, that trend line doesn’t look like it’s going to reverse back to the old average anytime soon. It all supports Baker’s long-running thesis that the AI bubble bursting would actually be a phenomenal economic development for working class Americans.

      “The sooner the AI bubble bursts,” he explains, “the better it will be for almost all of us, except the AI whizzes.”

    • Futurism ☛ Anthropic Knew the Public Would Be Disgusted by How It Was Destroying Physical Books, Secret Documents Reveal

      Anthropic shredded millions of physical books to train its Claude AI model — and new documents suggest that it was well aware of just how bad it would look if anyone found out.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Anthropic ‘destructively’ scanned millions of books to build Claude

      In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

    • Futurism ☛ If You're a Real Person Looking for a Job, the Flood of Fake AI Job Applications Will Make Your Blood Boil

      And beneath the official jobs data is a growing accessibility crisis. More and more job seekers are finding themselves shut out of the labor market — not because there are no jobs to be had, but because torrents of AI slop are crowding them out of consideration.

    • Futurism ☛ Evidence Grows That AI Chatbots Are Dunning-Kruger Machines

      New research flagged by PsyPost suggests that the sycophantic machines are warping the self-perception and inflating the egos of their users, leading them to double down on their beliefs and think they’re better than their peers. In other words, it provides compelling evidence that AI leads users directly into the Dunning-Kruger effect — a notorious psychological trap in which the least competent people are the most confident in their abilities.

    • PsyPost ☛ Sycophantic chatbots inflate people’s perceptions that they are "better than average"

      Results of three experiments indicate that sycophantic AI chatbots inflate people’s perceptions that they are “better than average” on a number of desirable traits. Furthermore, participants viewed sycophantic chatbots as unbiased, but viewed disagreeable chatbots as highly biased. The paper was published as a preprint in PsyArXiv.

    • SICP ☛ Opinionated Read: How AI Impacts Skill Formation | Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers

      The second thing is that the claim in the abstract is about learning outcomes, skill formation, and efficiency gains. We need to go into reading this paper keeping those terms in mind, and asking ourselves whether this is actually what the authors discuss. Because we care about what they did and what they found, and aren’t so worried about the academic context in which they want to present this work, let’s skip straight to section 4, the method.

    • Variety ☛ Ariana Grande Reacts to Vogue Cover of Her With 6 Fingers: 'Holy Shit'

      The “Wicked” star and pop singer is the cover subject of the magazine’s latest issue. But people quickly spotted a problem with the original Vogue Japan cover photo: Ariana is sporting an uncanny six fingers on her left hand.

    • Matt Basta ☛ The imminent risk of vibe coding

      A few months ago I was noticing a dramatic uptick in the amount of Cursor-y code1 we were seeing go up for review on the repo I help oversee. The problem, really, is that the code had a distinct set of smells to it, but it was really tricky to articulate what the defining characteristics of these were. Was it bad comments? An unnatural level of verboseness? Tough to say. In any case, it was disconcerting but not worrying.

      Now, in the year of our lord 2026, we’re still dealing with these PRs, but we have far more data points about what’s going on and what the consequences are.

    • Erik Johannes Husom ☛ Outsourcing thinking

      We have a major challenge ahead of us in figuring out what chatbots are suitable for in the long term. Personal communication may change forever (that is to say, maybe it won't stay personal anymore), education systems will require radical adaptations, and we need to reflect more carefully about which experiences in life actually matter. What is truly exciting about this new type of technology, is that it forces us to face questions about our humanity and values. Many formerly theoretical questions of philosophy are becoming relevant for our daily lives.

      A fundamental point I'm trying to bring forth is that how we choose to use chatbots is not only about efficiency and cognitive consequences; it's about how we want our lives and society to be. I have tried to argue that there are good reasons for protecting certain human activities against the automation of machines. This is in part based on my values, and does not rely on research into whether or not our efficiency at work or cognitive abilities are affected by it. I cannot tell other people what they should do, but I challenge everyone to consider what values they want to build our communities on, and let that weigh in alongside what the research studies tell us.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ You Will Laugh Out Loud When You Hear What the Tech Industry Is Spending a Swimming Pool's Worth of Money to Convince the Public

      According to the Financial Times, data center operators are “planning to go on the offensive with a lobbying blitz” as well, trying to get ahead of the growing public backlash. One data center executive told the FT that lobbying spending is a flash in the pan compared to the tens of billions being spent on infrastructure.

  • Social Control Media

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-01-22 [Older] YouTube enjoys safe-harbour protection despite not removing further infringing content, says US Court of Appeals

    • Kentucky Lantern ☛ Social media is the new public square and Kentucky law lags behind

      Courts across the country, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have made this clear: when officials use social media to conduct official business, those accounts function as public forums. Blocking constituents or deleting lawful comments because of disagreement is unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Botnet smashes DDoS traffic record, equivalent to streaming 2.2 million Netflix 4K movies at once  — 31.4 Tb/s attack was large enough to take entire countries offline

      Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have become an unfortunate routine part of the modern internet, with botnets of compromised devices spreading ever wider. Unfortunately, the scale and frequency of those attacks have also been rising. The Aisuru-Kimwolf botnet recently smashed its previous record, hitting 31.4 Tb/s in December. To put it into perspective, that's bandwidth enough to stream nearly 2.2 million Netflix 4K movies at once.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • BBC ☛ Herefordshire pub landlord offers discount for cash payments as card charges soar

      "I'm missing it to be honest. Since Covid there is no cash around, nobody's using it - everybody's gone to card, which means we're being charged quite heavily for it."

      Davies said the cost of the transactions meant him losing about £5 for every £50 made.

    • Newquest Media Group Ltd ☛ Pub landlord's discount for cash payments over card fees

      He is offering all customers in his pubs who pay by cash through the next two months, a full five per cent off their bill.

      "Will it make a difference? I don't know I just know that the fees I pay every month could pay for another member of staff. "

      Merchant Service Provider fees range from 1.5% to 3.4% per transaction, depending on the provider and the type of card used.

    • [Old] The Morning Advertiser ☛ Cash accounts for less than 25% of payments in pubs

      A recent poll conducted by the Morning Advertiser (MA) found of the 97 respondents 54 (56%) stated cash accounted for less than 25% of transactions in their pubs, while 21% (20) stated it made up 35% of payments with 7% having said between 50% and 75% of trade was paid for with cash.

      Furthermore, the MA poll showed just 4% of trade was 100% cash.

    • [Old] The Morning Advertiser ☛ Consumers turn to cash to manage household and holiday budgets

      Post Office figures revealed the company handled a record £801m in personal cash withdrawals in July, with more than £3.3bn in cash deposited and withdrawn over the counter, the first-time figures have crossed the £3.3bn threshold in Post Office’s 360-year history.

  • Confidentiality

    • New York Times ☛ 2026-01-21 [Older] DOGE Employees Shared Social Security Data, Court Filing Shows

    • Benjamin Mako Hill ☛ What do people do when they edit Wikipedia through Tor? – copyrighteous

      Given the challenges of studying anonymity seekers, we designed a novel “forensic” qualitative approach inspired by techniques common in computer security and criminal investigation. We applied this new technique to a sample of 500 editing sessions and categorized each session based on what the editor seemed to be intending to do.

      Most of the contributions we found fell into one of the two following categories: [...]

    • Brandon Rozek ☛ Bringing this website to the Tor network

      I believe in the freedom of information. By making my website available as a Tor hidden service, you can be sure to access the information even if it’s blocked on the clearweb.

      In this post, I’ll share the steps I took and what I learned along the way. Huge credit to Christian who wrote their own succinct version of this post and helped me troubleshoot via email.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Independent UK ☛ Social media users who tout illegal routes into UK face up to five years in prison

    On Monday, ministers will activate part of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act, passed last year, to clamp down on adverts telling migrants how they can circumvent immigration checks.

    The National Crime Agency (NCA) Online Communications Centre will trawl through thousands of social media accounts as part of the campaign.

  • Dr Gena Gorlin ☛ The psychology of evil

    What follows is my attempt to document what these experiences have taught me about the psychology of evil, and about what it takes to really fight for the good.

  • Jes Olson ☛ all_eyes_on_minneapolis

    the year is 2026, and i have been paying all too much attention to the ever-unfolding rollout of techno-fascism in america.

    i have been paying attention because the city that i call home - minneapolis - is ground zero for testing just how much trump's personal paramilitary can get away with. they're standing against the membrane of the old order, trying to force their way through.

    they're doing this because time is limited. this is the last term, and trump is old and dying. there is no "trump 2" to succeed him -- the movement dies with the man. and so now is the time to seize control.

  • Vanity Fair ☛ Has the Tech Right Reached Its Breaking Point?

    Meanwhile, Teboe said that tech leaders across the political spectrum are starting to realize their complicity in current events—and wondering if it’s too late to undo it. “The silence from folks who have been Trump’s closest allies and mouthpieces,” he told me, “is radicalizing some tech leaders. They’re starting to think, Oh fuck, what is this monster we’ve helped create?”

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] North Korean leader fires vice premier, slams 'incompetent' officials

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Rights groups warn on Israeli abuse of Palestinian prisoners

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Iran's economic woes expose regime's tight grip

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Israel demolishes structures inside UNRWA compound

  • 2026-01-20 [Older] Upskilling the Federal Cybersecurity Workforce

  • Spiegel ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Former U.S. Security Adviser John Bolton: "We Have Passed Peak Cheeto Mussolini"

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] UK Approves a ‘Mega’ Chinese Embassy in London, Despite Criticism of Security Risks

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] EU Commission Working on Package to Support Arctic Security, Von Der Leyen Says

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] Greece, Israel to Cooperate on Anti-Drone Systems, Cybersecurity, Greek Minister Says

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-22 [Older] Finnish President Aims to Ready Arctic Security Plan by NATO July Summit

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-24 [Older] Germany news: Berlin vows aggressive cybersecurity stance

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-24 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini Administration's Defense Strategy Tells Allies to Handle Their Own Security

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-24 [Older] UK's Starmer Discusses Need for Enhanced Security in Arctic in Call With Cheeto Mussolini

  • CBC ☛ 2026-01-25 [Older] A Canada-run alternative to Nexus? Senator calls for new airport security fast-pass

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-25 [Older] Saudi defense deals could change Middle East security

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-01-26 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini’s New National Security Memo Is 30 Pages of Insanity

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-26 [Older] The Latest: Judge Considers Legality of Cheeto Mussolini’s Immigration Crackdown in Minneapolis

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-01-22 [Older] UK PM Starmer: Time for 'Hard Yards' on Arctic Security After U.S. Tariff Threat Dropped

  • Defence Web ☛ 2026-01-23 [Older] Ransom, gold, and spoils of war: Islamic State Mozambique’s new cash flow

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Vanity Fair ☛ Epstein Files Release Delayed By Redactions, Department of Justice Says

    Those efforts didn't begin when the Act was signed, Vanity Fair reported last March. The FBI's New York field office has been “literally all hands on deck” to review files released to the Epstein investigation, a situation described by one FBI veteran as a “ludicrous." The entire process “seemed to fly in the face of how federal cases are handled in the modern era,” Noah Shachtman reported at the time.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Jeffrey Epstein files: don’t be fooled. Millions of files are still unreleased

    “The DOJ said it identified over 6 million potentially responsive pages but is releasing only about 3.5 million after review and redactions. This raises questions as to why the rest are being withheld,” Khanna said, adding: “Failing to release these files only shields the powerful individuals who were involved and hurts the public’s trust in our institutions.”

  • The Atlantic ☛ America Will Be Reading the Epstein Files for Decades

    Reporters sifting through the files have found plenty of news. They’ve turned up a series of emails that Epstein wrote about Bill Gates and then sent to himself in 2013. In these, Epstein suggests that he helped Gates have extramarital affairs and expresses disgust that Gates would “discard” their friendship after asking Epstein to do things “that have ranged from the morally inappropriate to the ethically unsound” and “potentially over the line into illegal.” (The Gates Foundation has already issued a comment to the Times that the claims—“from a proven, disgruntled liar—are absolutely absurd and completely false.”) Many other notable people appear in the files, including Bill Clinton, who was also also in previously released photos. A number of the documents referencing Clinton are uncorroborated tips sent to the FBI. A friendly email exchange between Epstein and Elon Musk turned up, as did a reference to Kevin Warsh, Trump’s preferred candidate to replace Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chair. (Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have refused to testify for the House Oversight Committee’s Epstein investigation, and they recently released a joint statement saying that they’ve already shared “the little information” they have about Epstein. Musk and Warsh did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

  • CS Monitor ☛ Largest batch yet of Epstein files released. They may not satisfy.

    Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department would be releasing more than 3 million pages of documents along with more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. The files, posted to the department’s website, include some of the several million pages of records that officials said were withheld from an initial release in December.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • El País ☛ What Trump can’t stop: Renewable energy is growing and setting world records

      But Europe, and a large part of the world, is going in the opposite direction, as shown by the first data available from the energy sector from last year. For example, for the first time, in 2025 wind and solar energy (including “those damn things”) generated more electricity in the European Union than fossil fuels, according to another report from Ember that was published a day after Trump spoke out against Europe and renewable energy at Davos.

    • New York Times ☛ Energy Bills Have Soared Recently. How Can States Bring Costs Down?

      Electricity prices have soared recently because of fast rising demand for energy from residents, businesses and data centers used for artificial intelligence. The national average retail rate was 5 percent higher in November from a year ago, nearly double the overall inflation rate. The average household spent $178 a month for 1,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, according to the Energy Information Administration.

    • Vanity Fair ☛ Air Force None: Why Trump's Big, Beautiful Boeings Can't Fly Yet

      Muilenburg’s objectives were never met. In July 2018, the US Air Force awarded Boeing a contract to deliver two “mission-ready” presidential airplanes by 2024, fixing the price at $3.9 billion. That has since been increased to $4.3 billion, but Boeing itself has had to swallow over $2 billion in losses. Now, the first airplane is not due to be delivered until mid-2028, according to an Air Force spokesperson.

    • NDTV ☛ Union Budget 2026: India To Develop 7 High-Speed Rail Corridors: Nirmala Sitharaman's Budget

      These high-speed corridors will connect Mumbai and Pune, Hyderabad and Pune, Hyderabad and Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai, Chennai and Bengaluru, Delhi and Varanasi, and Varanasi and Siliguri, she said.

    • Futurism ☛ Experts Say Bitcoin's Crash Is Only Getting Started

      “The technical levels have all been taken out on the downside, and I don’t see much support here for Bitcoin,” Hilbert Group chief investment officer Russell Thompson told the outlet, predicting a drop as low as $70,000, and calling getting in on the dip a “general risk move.”

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-01-20 [Older] How bringing back a humble algae to Arctic waters makes all the difference

  • Overpopulation

    • SBS ☛ I feel guilty that my daughter might have hundreds of half-siblings | SBS Insight

      Queensland laws at the time kept donors anonymous, so we felt it would be harder for the children to know of a biological father but never have the chance to meet him.

      Perhaps we were naive to think laws would stay the same and also not to have anticipated technological advancements. The 90s was a time when accessible DNA tests (via at-home kits and online ancestry databases) were unheard of.

      And so, we kept this secret for almost three decades.

    • Futurism ☛ Trump Is Causing the United States' First-Ever Population Decline

      From July 2024 to July 2025, US Census data released this week shows the total US population only grew by around 0.5 percent, or 1.8 million people — a rate that seems all but certain to slip into the negative.

• Finance

  • Michael Green ☛ Where the Boys Are

    As a result, we’ve seen book value, largely in the form of intangibles, explode. But consistent with our writings over the past few weeks, the rate of TANGIBLE book value growth has accelerated sharply with the emergence of AI spending. Once again, an indication that the physical world is starting to intrude into our financialized fever dream: [...]

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ 'Melania' isn't a documentary, it's political propaganda

      For the kind of person who makes, and buys and distributes, a film that purports to be a “documentary” and is really just old-fashioned, through-the-looking-glass propaganda, however, it’s actually the perfect time.

      Why worry about the federal government killing its own citizens when we can all ooh and aah over the fact that the first lady’s inaugural gown is constructed so that none of the seams show? Especially if it makes her husband happy.

    • The Atlantic ☛ 'Melania' Is a Horror Movie

      What I am trying to say is that Melania is a horror movie. And a horror movie of this magnitude (no gore, but a pervasive sense of dread) deserves to be seen on the big screen, where you can also feel the bonus dread of knowing that the money you spent on your ticket will be funneled to Amazon, which might put it toward a seat at the inaugural high table for Mr. Jeff Bezos and Ms. Lauren Sánchez Bezos. (You can glimpse them both, gabbing with Donald Trump and Elon Musk at a preinauguration candlelight dinner in one of the film’s most effective jump scares!)

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Melania Trump Documentary Is a Disgrace

      To be fair, most people involved with Melania do seem to feel shame, if not the ones who matter. The publicity emails sent from Amazon regarding the movie have no individual names or email addresses attached, as though no one wanted their career or personal brand sullied by association. A report in Rolling Stone this week alleged that two-thirds of the production crew based in New York who worked on the film similarly asked to be uncredited. (“I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this,” one reportedly said.) Melania is directed by Brett Ratner, best known for the Rush Hour franchise and for the multiple allegations of sexual assault and harassment leveled at him by half a dozen people in 2017. (Ratner has denied or disputed the allegations; Melania marks his return to public life after a nine-year absence, although a photo of Ratner with the accused sex trafficker Jean-Luc Brunel—now deceased—did pop up in the last month.)

    • The Independent UK ☛ Melania box office results revealed as divisive documentary defies predictions

      Although the film has performed better than expected, it is still unlikely to recoup the $40 million Amazon MGM paid for it. Amazon reportedly spent an additional $35 million to market the film.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • New York Times ☛ The Tech Arsenal That ICE Has Deployed in Minneapolis

    Agents use facial recognition, social media monitoring and other tech tools not only to identify undocumented immigrants but also to track protesters, current and former officials said.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Moscow's diplomats ask Oslo to stop anti-war protesters

    Protesters around the world have since 2014 regularly gathered outside Russian embassies to demand that troops withdraw from Ukraine. After 2022, this has also included Kirkenes, the Norwegian border town where Moscow has one of the last Consulate Generals in northern Europe still at work.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ The Press Is the Government's Enemy and That Is Good

    The federal government’s decision last week to arrest the journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort for covering a protest that took place in a Minnesota church was bad. Very bad. Let’s get that out of the way up front. It was laughably unconstitutional, contemptuous of the First Amendment, a transparent act of illegal harassment. The journalists involved have my total solidarity. I hope that the idiotic charges against them are dismissed and that they are one day able to sue someone for a lot of money over this.

  • Techdirt ☛ DOJ Arrests Journalists Don Lemon & Georgia Fort For Acts Of Journalism, Even After Courts Rejected Arrest Warrants

    On January 18th, protesters interrupted services at a Minnesota church after discovering its pastor leads a nearby ICE field office. Journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort followed the protesters through the church’s publicly accessible doors to cover the story. They streamed the protest. They asked questions. They committed acts of journalism.

    And by this morning they were both in federal custody (though since released).

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • New Yorker ☛ Why the D.H.S. Disaster in Minneapolis Was Predictable

    The situation is no less shocking for having been at least partly predictable. For decades, ICE and Border Patrol have operated with fewer constitutional constraints than typical law-enforcement agencies when they conduct searches and make arrests; in instances of abuse, oversight has tended to be far more lax, leading to a culture of freewheeling unaccountability. The consequences were on display from the start of D.H.S.’s incursion into Minneapolis, which began in December, under the name Operation Metro Surge. On January 7th, Jonathan Ross, an ICE officer and an Army veteran, shot and killed Renee Good, a mother of three. Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse, was killed when two C.B.P. agents fired at least ten shots at him, including six while he was lying motionless on the ground. Witness accounts and phone videos make clear that neither Good nor Pretti, both of whom were U.S. citizens, posed any immediate danger to the agents. Nevertheless, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of D.H.S., said that they had engaged in “domestic terrorism.” She was following the White House line. Stephen Miller, a top adviser to the President, told agents after Good’s killing, “You have immunity.” Pretti, he later wrote on X, was “an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.”

  • Pro Publica ☛ CBP Agents Jesus Ochoa, Raymundo Gutierrez ID’d in Alex Pretti Shooting

    The records viewed by ProPublica list Ochoa, 43, and Gutierrez, 35, as the shooters during the deadly encounter last weekend that left Pretti dead and ignited massive protests and calls for criminal investigations.

    Both men were assigned to Operation Metro Surge, an immigration enforcement dragnet launched in December that sent scores of armed and masked agents across the city.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Day Thirty-Six of the Protests; Government Releases List of Names and State TV Insults Those Killed - Hrana

    During the same period, the number of injured civilians was recorded at 11,021, student arrests at 94 cases, forced confessions at 296 cases, and summonses at 11,046 cases. Furthermore, a total of 664 protest-related incidents were recorded across 207 cities in 31 provinces.

    On this day, the key incidents include: the continuation of scattered arrests in various cities (particularly among students, adolescents, and civil activists); increased pressure and threats in the area of medical treatment and care for the injured; and, at the media level, widespread reactions to the broadcast of an insulting program on state television. At the same time, the release of a list of the names of those killed by the Office of the President also sparked numerous reactions and questions.

  • France24 ☛ 'Creeping fascism': Milan protesters slam ICE deployment at Winter Olympics

    Organisers handed out plastic whistles, which participants blew as music blared from a van. The protest was as much against the news that agents from a division of ICE would participate in security for the US delegation as against what many saw as creeping fascism in the United States.

  • New Yorker ☛ What ICE Should Have Learned from the Fugitive Slave Act

    During the tumultuous period that preceded the Civil War, the United States passed a series of bills that came to be collectively known as the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise allowed for California’s entry into the Union as a free state, and outlawed the slave trade (but not slavery itself) in the District of Columbia. The most controversial element of the legislation, however, was the Fugitive Slave Act. Article IV of the Constitution already required that an enslaved person who escaped into a free state be returned to bondage, but the 1850 law created a federal bureaucracy to facilitate it. As the historian Andrew Delbanco notes in his book “The War Before the War,” a history of the national conflict over fugitive slaves, the Compromise “was meant to be a remedy and a salve, but it turned out to be an incendiary event that lit the fuse that led to civil war.”

  • Michigan Advance ☛ I’m a former FBI agent; Federal agents in Minneapolis are undermining law enforcement principles

    Metro Surge has also affected the lives of U.S. citizens, including citizens protesting immigration enforcement efforts. On Jan. 7, 2026, Good – a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three – was shot and killed in her vehicle by an ICE agent on a residential street in Minneapolis. On Jan. 24, 2026, CBP agents shot and killed 37-year-old Pretti, a U.S. citizen, on a public street in Minneapolis.

    As a policing scholar and former FBI special agent, I believe these cases illustrate how some federal agents are engaging with the public in a way that undermines established principles of policing and constitutional law.

  • New York Times ☛ What to Know About Anti-ICE Protests This Weekend

    The demonstrations follow a general strike on Jan. 23 in Minneapolis that saw hundreds of business shut down and thousands take to the streets. That was the day before Mr. Pretti was killed by a federal agent, setting off a new wave of fury at ICE and Homeland Security.

    Here’s what to know about this weekend: [...]

  • University of Michigan ☛ ‘We want ICE out of sight’: Thousands rally for ‘Salt the Earth’ protest 

    In an email to the University community Chris Kolb, vice president for government relations, and Tim Lynch, vice president and general counsel, provided information on civilian legal rights and proper protocol when interacting with immigration enforcement on campus. They clarified that, although law enforcement officers may enter public campus spaces without a warrant, they are restricted from classrooms, laboratories, residence halls, private offices and health care facilities.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Chris McLeod ☛ My Changing Media Landscape

    I cancelled Disney Plus in September (though my annual sub runs until March). A year ago, I downloaded my entire Kindle library and stopped buying from their store. Netflix was cancelled in December. Audible went bye-bye sometime last summer. None of this was planned, exactly - more like a series of small decisions that eventually accumulated into something larger.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-01-22 [Older] Time for Europe to Use the Nuclear Option: Attack U.S. Patent and Copyright Monopolies

  • Matthew Butterick ☛ 2026-01-19 [Older] Matthew Butterick on the Copyrightability of Fonts