Leftovers

• Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Polly Cooper, an Oneida woman who helped save Washington’s army, is honored on $1 coin

  Cooper and a delegation of 47 Oneida warriors carried bushels of white corn on the long, cold trek to feed the starving soldiers. According to Oneida oral tradition, Cooper intervened to prevent Washington’s hungry soldiers from eating the white corn raw, which would have made them sick. She taught them how to prepare hulled corn soup.

• Matt Webb ☛ 90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry (Interconnected)

  So when I say that I love laundry I don’t mean that I love clean clothes (everyone loves clean clothes) but I love the sanding. I love the sorting into piles for different washes, I love reading the little labels, especially finding the hidden ones; I love the sequencing so we don’t run out of room on the racks, I love folding, I love the rare peak moments when everything comes together and there are no dirty clothes anywhere in the house nor clean clothes waiting to be returned. (I hate ironing. But fortunately I love my dry cleaner and I feel all neighbourhood-y when I visit and we talk about the cricket.)

• Ankur Sethi ☛ Write quickly, edit lightly, prefer rewrites, publish with flaws — Ankur Sethi's Internet Website

  Over two years of consistent writing and publishing, I’ve internalized a few lessons for producing satisfying—if not necessarily “good”—work: [...]

• Andy Bell ☛ Open Working at Piccalilli and Set Studio

  Andy Bell is completely redesigning his personal site from scratch and breaking down each part to educate and hopefully, inspire you to build your own corner of the internet.

• Career/Education

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ How to evaluate your use of classroom technology with the PICRAT framework - Raspberry Pi Foundation

    It asks two simple questions: “How are students experiencing the technology?” and “How does this impact your practice?”. The answers to these questions form a matrix as pictured below.

  • Robert Reich ☛ FAQs - Robert Reich

    You’re almost 80. Where do you find the energy to write so many Substack posts? I was born 10 days after Trump. If he can create this much mayhem every day, I should be able to do a little bit to counter him every day.

  • Nathan Upchurch ☛ 100 Webmaster Questions

    Beside tinkering with HTML and CSS to customize my MySpace profile, I first started back in, oh, 2004 or 2005.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Frances

    Hello! I’m Frances, I live in the East Midlands in the UK with my wife, back in my hometown to be near my family. I like stories, spending lots of time outside, history, and being an aunt. Right now I’m into zines, playing more ttrpgs, reading lots of biographies, and am going to take some letterpress printing classes. This year I am looking forward to camping, more reading projects, outdoor swimming, and feeding all the neighbourhood slugs with my garden veg. Just generally I’m interested in creativity, learning, fun projects, and trying new things, then blogging about it. I work in the voluntary sector and adult education, and am training to be a mental health counsellor.

  • SusamPal ☛ Stories From 25 Years of Computing

    Last year, I completed 20 years in professional software development. I wanted to write a post to mark the occasion back then, but couldn't find the time. This post is my attempt to make up for that omission. In fact, I have been involved in software development for a little longer than 20 years. Although I had my first taste of computer programming as a child, it was only when I entered university about 25 years ago that I seriously got into software development. So I'll start my stories from there. These stories are less about software and more about people. Unlike many posts of this kind, this one offers no wisdom or lessons. It only offers a collection of stories. I hope you'll like at least a few of them.

• Proprietary

  • The Record ☛ Norwegian intelligence discloses country hit by Salt Typhoon campaign

    The disclosure was made in the Norwegian Police Security Service’s (PST) annual threat assessment for 2026. The agency’s director general, Beate Gangås, said Norway was “facing its most serious security situation since World War II,” citing pressure from multiple foreign intelligence services.

    Salt Typhoon is the name U.S. and allied authorities use for a Chinese cyber espionage campaign that has focused heavily on breaching telecommunications and other critical infrastructure. In its report, PST said the actor has exploited vulnerable network devices in Norway.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Register UK ☛ Memory and CPU shortages to push up PC prices

      Constraints on specific configurations, alongside emerging CPU availability issues, are expected to limit choice and increase pricing pressure from Q2 onward, according to Context.

      "Manufacturers are prioritizing production for AI datacenter infrastructure, redirecting capacity away from consumer-grade memory and storage towards high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and advanced storage required for large-scale AI workloads," said senior retail analyst James Bates.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Boston Dynamics: building robots to do the jobs humans shouldn’t

      “The whole value of having a humanoid is that you can drop the technology into existing environments,” she said. Factories, warehouses, and industrial sites have been designed around human bodies for decades. Retrofitting them for fixed automation is costly and slow, and any change in product mix or volume often requires expensive redesigns.

      “One of the value propositions of a humanoid is that you don’t need physical infrastructure set up to use the technology,” she added.

    • Threat Source ☛ All gas, no brakes: Time to come to AI church

      As disciples of security, we understand installing first and asking questions later is practically asking to get pwnt. It has never panned out well for the end user, but usually quite well for attackers who very much understand the threat landscape. Clawdbot is no exception. 

      I need you to be highly skeptical of any AI tool rush. Do not be consumed by The Hype. Much like OpenAI’s Atlas, AI tools are being aggressively released to the market and installed, often with security vulnerabilities everywhere. Resist the urge to throw yourself upon tools or platforms that have rushed to address a market need — they usually had no forethought about security, or just push an unreasonable assumption of risk on the end user.

    • Rob Bowley ☛ GenAI is amplifying the skills gap in software engineering

      However, genuinely good, experienced software engineers are already scarce across the industry. It is difficult to put a precise figure on this, but studies on the impact of AI in software engineering suggest that only a minority of engineers and teams currently have the skills and experience needed to realise sustained benefits from GenAI-assisted software development, likely somewhere in the region of 10–30%.

      That raises an obvious question about where the next generation of experienced engineers will come from.

    • Neil Macy ☛ Coding Agents and Software Development

      I hate the fact that all these LLMs are trained on stolen data.

      I hate how much energy is used to train these models.

      I hate that computer hardware like RAM is getting so much more expensive because it’s being bought in bulk for data centres to power LLMs.

      Morally, I think this is terrible technology, and I don’t want it to be a part of my career, or even the world in general, frankly.

      And there are other reasons to be skeptical about LLMs. The business model is a big question for all of these companies. They don’t make a profit, even when they charge people £200 a month. But I can’t see that being anything other than a short term problem as economies of scale, and the progress of time, bring costs down.

      Another problem often raised is: what happens to the next generation of software developers? If having an agent is like having a junior developer, and you’re the senior developer, where do the new senior developers come from? I suspect the answer to that is: where did the new assembly developers come from?

    • Mathieu ☛ Issues with AI: toxic dependencies

      This is the first part of a series of essays on so-called "AI", because I cannot manage to have the split focus on all the issues for a single blog post. This one has a focus on the relationship with our tools and production, particularly in the context of coding, since that is one of my areas of interest that allows me to eat.

    • Futurism ☛ It Turns Out That When Waymos Are Stumped, They Get Intervention From Workers in the Philippines

      After being pressed for a breakdown on where these overseas operators operate, Peña said he didn’t have those stats, explaining that some operators live in the US, but others live much further away, including in the Philippines.

    • CARBA ☛ Waymo Exec Admits Remote Operators in Philippines Help Guide US Robotaxis

      Waymo‘s Chief Safety Officer disclosed Wednesday that some of the remote operators who assist its self-driving vehicles in navigating difficult scenarios are based in the Philippines.

      Mauricio Peña, the company’s Chief Safety Officer, confirmed under questioning that the Alphabet subsidiary employs human operators abroad to provide guidance to its robotaxis when they encounter challenging driving situations.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Waymo Exec Admits Remote Drivers in Philippines

      Mechanical Turk, meet Mechanical Filipino: [...]

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ Study Finds Obvious Truth Everybody Knows

      Wait, what? Let me read that again:

      "using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery"

      Ouch.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AI coding makes you worse at learning — and not even any faster

      Afterwards, the researchers tested the subjects on coding skills — debugging, code reading, code writing, and the concepts of Trio.

      The coders in the AI group were slightly faster, but it was not statistically significant. The main thing was that the AI group were 17% worse in their understanding: [...]

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Luxury Kafka

      As of a couple years ago, Americans' ignorance of their own immigration system was merely frustrating, as I encountered both squishy liberals and xenophobic conservatives talking about undocumented immigrants and insisting that they should "just follow the rules." But today, as murderous ICE squads patrol our streets kidnapping people and sending them to concentration camps where they are beaten to death or deported to offshore slave labor prisons, the issue has gone from frustrating to terrifying and enraging.

      Let's be clear: I played the US immigration game on the easiest level. I am relatively affluent – rich enough to afford fancy immigration lawyers with offices on four continents – and I am a native English speaker. This made the immigration system ten thousand times (at a minimum) easier for me than it is for most US immigrants.

    • Frank Delporte ☛ JavaFX In Action #25 with Lidiany Cerqueira about CERCA, a tool to detect hallucinated references in scientific papers

      CERCA is an open-source research tool that supports the verification of bibliographic references in scientific manuscripts. It extracts references from PDF files and checks their existence and consistency against authoritative metadata sources, producing explainable diagnostics, audit logs, and reproducible reports.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Trump’s toxic, racist video surpasses previous levels of debasement

      That rare climbdown and the attempts to pin the blame on an anonymous White House staffer are unlikely to prevent the episode from illuminating a topic that much of the media has seemed reluctant to confront head on; that Trump’s behavior, online and in public, has been growing more reckless and raises serious questions about his mental acuity and his fitness for office.

      On social media, whisperings that Trump is displaying signs of cognitive decline have increased in recent weeks.

    • France24 ☛ Trump video showing Obamas as monkeys sparks outrage over 'vile' racist depiction

      The video repeats false allegations that ballot-counting company Dominion Voting Systems helped steal the 2020 election from Trump.

      As of early Friday morning, the video had been liked several thousand times on the president's social media platform.

    • The Georgia Recorder ☛ White House takes down racist meme of Obamas posted on Trump social media

      The White House press office also shared via email the full video, which was published in October. Trump shared a clip of the video on his social media account on Thursday at 11:44 p.m. Eastern within another video about allegations of 2020 election fraud in Michigan.

      The decision to delete Trump’s social media post followed hours of pushback from lawmakers.

    • SFGate ☛ Yosemite ranger IDs illegal BASE jump through Instagram video

      The charge comes amid ongoing concerns about illegal and dangerous activity in Yosemite during the federal government shutdown last fall, a period when reduced staffing and enforcement coincided with an uptick in risky behavior inside the park. Park officials said in October that they were investigating additional reports of BASE jumping from the same period, and Propeck’s case follows the October convictions of three other BASE jumpers who reportedly made illegal Yosemite jumps in 2024 or earlier.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Epstein met 4chan's founder the day before /pol/ launched

      On October 24, 2011, venture capitalist and Bill Gates advisor Boris Nikolic emailed Jeffrey Epstein about a meeting with 4chan founder Christopher Poole. "How did you like moot?" he asked, using Poole's username. "I liked him a lot. I drove him home, he is very bright," Epstein replied. Nikolic wrote back: "he will be one of the greatest hackers."

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ DDoS deluge: Brit biz battered by record botnet blitz

      The Q4 stats confirm it was a lively year for traffic floods, with Cloudflare claiming it had to swat away 47.1 million DDoS attacks, more than double 2024's count. Momentum picked up toward the end of the year, as Q4 volumes jumped 31 percent from the prior quarter and 58 percent over 2024.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Chris Enns ☛ Google Ad Scam Alert on Foreca

      Any Apple nerd will recognize it as not an official pop up screen. It's nothing I've ever seen iOS pop up. Plus it has the big "X" in the top right corner to get rid of it. Very obviously a pop up and not a system notification.

      But most people using an iPhone aren't Apple nerds. And of course, as you might assume, if you tap anywhere on the ad regardless of whether it's "Not Now" or "Check Security", it takes you to a page with a URL that looks like this: [...]

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Techdirt ☛ Facial Recognition Tech Used To Hunt Migrants Was Deployed Without Required Privacy Paperwork

      The app federal officers are using is made by NEC, a tech company that’s been around since long before ICE and CBP become the mobile atrocities they are. Prior to this revelation, NEC had only been associated with developing biometric software with an eye on crafting something that could be swiftly deployed and just as quickly scaled to meet the government’s needs. This particular app was never made public prior to this.

      ICE claims it’s not a direct customer. It’s only a beneficiary of the CBP’s existing contract with NEC. That’s a meaningless distinction when multiple federal agencies have been co-opted into the administration’s bigoted push to rid the nation of brown people.

      As is always the case (and this precedes Trump 2.0), CBP and ICE are rolling out tech far ahead of the privacy impact paperwork that’s supposed to filed before anything goes live.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ DHS privacy probe will focus on biometric tracking by ICE, OBIM

      The Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog office has launched an audit of the agency’s privacy practices amid allegations that DHS and its components have used facial recognition tools and other technologies to collect data broadly and violate civil liberties.

      The audit, according to a Feb. 5 letter from DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari and published by Virginia Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, started the previous day, and is titled “DHS’ Security of Biometric Data and Personally Identifiable Information (PII).”

    • PC World ☛ If you're a Substack user, your data might've been leaked

      PCWorld reports that Substack experienced a data breach in October 2025, exposing email addresses and phone numbers of approximately 697,000 users.

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ Sippel Draft on Chat Control – Mass Surveillance Set to Continue, Sparking Renewed Protests

      Following our previous press release regarding the potential extension of “Chat Control 1.0”, there is a significant development:

      The European Parliament’s Rapporteur, Birgit Sippel (S&D), has presented her draft report (Original, unofficial consolidated version). In it, she proposes extending the authorization for warrantless Chat Control, albeit with new restrictions: the most unreliable technologies—scanning text messages and automatically assessing unknown visuals—are to be excluded.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Court Ordered Social Media Site Blocking Coming to Canada?: Trojan Horse Online Harms Bill Clears Senate Committee Review

      After watching the hearing, it has become apparent that Bill S-209 is not a bill primarily focused on pornography sites. If it was, the bill could be drafted with those directly in mind. Rather, it is a trojan horse online harms bill with two regulatory tools at its disposal: (i) mandated age verification or age estimation technologies that a government could apply to a wide range of social media, search, and AI services and (ii) court-ordered blocking of those services for failure to comply. At its best, online harms legislation seeks to balance freedom of expression with tools to address online harms by requiring platforms to act responsibly under threat of penalty. The Bill S-209 approach is online harms at its worst. It simply wants to stop the availability of common Internet services to anyone under 18 (far older than any social media regulation in the world), make it harder for adults to access those services, and ensure that the government has the power to seek blocking orders for failure to age-gate their users.

    • Don Marti ☛ thinking small

      It turns out that as of now, there are two oligarch taxes that you can still evade. The ad duopoly makes more money from ads that they can represent as “personalized.”

      So one small act is to do what John Oliver suggests in Make yourself less valuable to Meta. Turn off the Facebook and Instagram features that enable cross-context ad personalization.

      Then do a similar task for the Google ads: Click this to buy better stuff and be happier.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Pro-War Bloggers Report Starlink Outage on Ukrainian Front Line

    Russian military bloggers on Thursday reported a sweeping outage of Starlink internet terminals across the front line in Ukraine after network owner Elon Musk shut them down following a plea from Kyiv.

  • Meduza ☛ Russia was never supposed to have Starlink, so why did SpaceX wait so long to cut it off?

    Frontline Russian troops obtained contraband Starlink terminals, smuggled into Russia through Central Asia and the Persian Gulf, as early as 2023. Though the Defense Ministry never formally approved their use, “volunteers” have helped equip an increasing number of Russian units with these satellite Internet devices.

  • NL Times ☛ EU says TikTok encourages compulsive use, orders review of app design

    TikTok’s addictive feature violates the European Union’s digital rules, the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, has concluded. Features such as infinite scrolling, auto-play videos, push notifications, and hyper-personalized recommendations make the app highly addictive. This comes a week after the newly elected D66–CDA–VVD coalition announced plans for a European minimum age of 15 for social media, effectively banning children under 15 from using such platforms.

    The European Commission also found that the Chinese social media giant did not sufficiently assess the impact of these addictive features on users' physical and mental health, particularly among minors and vulnerable adults.

  • New York Times ☛ Europe Accuses TikTok of ‘Addictive Design’ and Pushes for Change

    On Friday, the regulators released a preliminary decision that TikTok’s infinite scroll, auto-play features and recommendation algorithm amount to an “addictive design” that violates European Union laws for online safety. The service poses potential harm to the “physical and mental well-being” of users, including minors and vulnerable adults, the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive branch, said in a statement.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Morality Is The Issue

    I started this series with the idea that we could learn from one of the best minds that lived through WWII. With the proto-fascist Trump Regime fully operational, I thought those who experienced totalitarianism might have something useful to tell us about the moral demands facing us. Then I discussed more recent descriptions of our current situation and its origins. I’m cutting this series off with this post.

  • BoingBoing ☛ ICE at the Olympics: America brings fascism back to Italy

    The decision to send anyone from ICE to the Olympics to provide security is a baffling diplomatic misstep unless it is done to demonstrate the United States dedication to fascism. Watching the United States export that theater back to its birthplace is less ironic than it is instructive, and no amount of Olympic pageantry or pleading can make it look normal.

  • Norway ☛ [Norwegian] National Threat Assessment 2026 [PDF]

    Cyber threat actors operating in Norway employ methods that exploit both technical and human vulnerabilities. This is particularly evident with Russia and China, which in 2025 exploited weaknesses in network devices, such as routers, to gain access to Norwegian digital infrastructure. The same methods are also employed for intelligence collection. [...]

  • BBC ☛ Pakistan mosque explosion: More than 30 dead and 169 injured, officials say

    Islamic State group later claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement that included the name and picture of the alleged attacker.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Mosque bombing in Pakistan capital kills at least 31 people

    Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack on its Telegram channel. It has been blamed for previous attacks on Shia worshippers, who are a minority in the country. Militants often target security forces and civilians across Pakistan.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • US Navy Times ☛ Navy Secretary John Phelan reportedly listed in Epstein flight manifest

    According to a flight manifest, Navy Secretary John Phelan traveled from London to New York City on March 3, 2006, on the disgraced financier’s private jet, CNN reported Friday.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ What the Epstein Files Tell Us – And Don't Tell Us — About His Ties to Russia - The Moscow Times

    Russia appears 5,553 times in the documents. Mentions of Russian officials, oligarchs and young women have fueled unproven speculation online that the Kremlin may have played a role in Epstein’s crimes or that Epstein worked for Russian intelligence.

    As speculation swirls, here is what we know for certain about Russia and the Epstein files — and how Moscow has reacted to the news: [...]

  • The Nation ☛ From Epstein to Bezos, the Ruling Class Is Rotten to the Core

    The release last Friday by the Department of Justice of roughly 3 million documents relating to the investigation of the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has created a bizarre blame game among billionaires. Epstein was able to commit unspeakable crimes on a mass scale for decades with only a slap-on-the-wrist punishment because he was rich and well-connected. The new files help flesh out our sense of his social world, which was top-heavy with plutocrats such as the current commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick (who had earlier lied about the extent of his relationship with Epstein), Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates (whose marriage to his former wife Melinda was destroyed in large part by his relationship with Epstein), PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (who, like Lutnick, had been deceptive about how often he interacted with Epstein).

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Stellantis takes €22bn hit after ‘overestimating’ pace of shift to EVs

      Shares in the European-based carmaker, which owns marques including Peugeot, Fiat, Jeep and Citroën, plunged after it said that the move was part of a reset of its business as it also admitted “poor operational execution”.

  • Overpopulation

    • Mexico News Daily ☛ Mexico commits to Rio Grande yearly water deliveries to US

      Mexico has agreed to avoid incurring new deficits in water delivery to the U.S. as part of a new commitment to adhere to the terms of the 1944 Water Treaty.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Big Tech stocks take a $1 trillion tumble as projected AI spending continues to outweigh revenue — investors are antsy about long-term planning becoming never-ending spending

    Big spending in AI-related investments has become the new normal to the point that it's now background noise. Even still, occasionally there's a sonic boom. Just yesterday, Amazon announced that it would be spending $200 billion in 2026, or $50 billion more than predicted. Investors didn't like that, and the company's shares took a steep 9% nosedive, taking some of its friends along for the ride for a combined sell-off approaching $1 trillion.

    According to the Financial Times, the Big Tech players are set to spend a $660 billion on AI investments, an amount larger than the GDP of Israel. Investors who were once very bullish on the AI race, not wanting to be left out, are reportedly starting to get cold feet.

  • Stephen Smith ☛ The Generative AI Race

    Over the past couple of days Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta have seen their stocks plummet when they released generally good earnings, but gigantic plans to each spend about $200 billion over the next year building out new data centres and compute capacity to power their AI ambitions. All these companies already possess a huge number of data centres and gigantic compute resources. Why do they need so much more? And will these huge investments ever pay off? Let’s look at what these companies are doing with all these billions of dollars of servers.

  • Matt Gemmell ☛ Liberty as Resistance

    Now brace yourself, my many American friends, for this next part — you surely knew it was coming.

    Because of the present US administration and its politics and actions, no American company is trustworthy. Regardless of intent or principle, you cannot trust any manufacturer, or software maker, or service provider in the United States at this time, because they’re all at the mercy of an unstable, vindictive, petulant, puerile, narcissistic authoritarian, and it seems that the new normal is to act first and consider the law later (if ever).

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • University of Michigan ☛ UMich community discusses free speech in academia

    In his introduction, Kas-Mikha said he helped create this event because of his experience seeing peers reluctant to speak freely in an increasingly polarized academic climate.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ In Search of Russia’s Lost Opposition

    The Russian state has forced many antiwar leftists into exile, cutting them off from ordinary Russians. But activists are well aware that change in Russia must come from within, mobilizing ordinary people around their own interests.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Thirty Years after Section 230 - Platforms hit Buffers

    Service sector work platforms derived from the search and social media platforms that flourished under the protection of Section 230 (c) (1) have proved highly lucrative in the age of digital paper-pushing. Markets however seem to think that “AI” might be about to eat their lunch, as at 5th February 2026: [...]

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Guardian UK ☛ If you are reading this it is because I’m dead: here’s what I want to tell you about how to live

    I decided to become a journalist because I truly believed that by reporting rigorously and honestly, we could improve this world. I still believe it now. I know that in my professional career I have made mistakes, I have put up with things (I hope only a few) that I should have rejected, and I have not, by any means, been a perfect journalist. Despite all that, I can look back and what I see doesn’t trouble me. I can say I have never, ever lied, manipulated, or concealed information. In all my reporting, whether from Madrid, Bilbao, Seville, Kabul, Jerusalem or Baghdad, I have tried to hold those in power to account, I have tried to relate what was happening, and I have tried to give a voice to those who lacked one. Voices for the victims; criticism for the perpetrators. No neutrality. No ambiguity. And that’s why I’m especially proud of not having risen as high as I could have. I was even fired for trying to remain true to my principles.

  • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ Washington Post Scales Back Climate Team as Bezos Caves to Trump

    Decades ago, the Post’s investigative reporting brought down a U.S. president who was at the time uniquely corrupt, inspiring a new generation of journalists to follow the paper’s lead. In his account of the layoff, former LA Times climate columnist Sammy Roth recalls how Bezos rose to the challenge during Trump’s first term, defending the Post’s independence and embracing its new tagline, Democracy Dies In Darkness. In the second term, he has folded.

  • CPJ ☛ Malian journalist in prison awaiting trial for offending Niger's military leader

    On February 5, a prosecutor with Mali’s cybercrime unit charged Sissoko, publishing director of the privately owned weekly L’Alternance, with spreading false news, undermining the state’s credibility, and offending a foreign head of state. He is due to stand trial on March 9, according to The Association of Private Press Publishers of Mali (ASSEP) and news reports.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ DOJ Over-Seized Hannah Natanson's Garmin Device and Other Reporting Materials

    There have been two strands of important reporting on the materials.

    First, on security, Runa Sundvik wrote up what security features that Natanson used succeeded and what failed. Then 404 Media described that the FBI had thus far failed to get into Natanson’s personal phone because she had it in lockdown mode (they got her Signal texts, instead, by using her finger to access her work laptop).

    To those security concerns I will note that my concerns about Natanson’s description of how she (attempted) to protect her sources proved prescient.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Walrus ☛ What Stops ICE from Snatching People Off Canadian Streets? Very Little | The Walrus

    Later the same day, Holt clarified her remarks, distancing herself from claims that ICE was operating near the Canada–US line. But the episode tapped into broader anxiety about the unrestrained and often brutal tactics the agency has used against immigrant communities in blue states—an unease sharpened by reports that ICE maintains field offices in five Canadian cities. ICE’s presence in Canada is limited to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents based at US embassies and consulates. ICE told the CBC that agents investigate transnational crime with Canadian partners but carry no firearms and have no authority to arrest, raid, or enforce US immigration law here.

    To better understand how Canadians should think about this relationship, given what ICE has become in the US, I decided to reach out to Kent Roach, a leading Canadian constitutional law scholar at the University of Toronto, known for his work on national security, policing, and Charter rights.

    The following interview, conducted over Zoom, has been condensed and edited.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Column: Trump keeps reminding us why people support him. It's the racism

    Back in 1971, the president of the United States laughed when the governor of California referred to the African delegates at the United Nations as monkeys. Less than 10 years later, that governor became the president of the United States. And here we are, half a century later, and yet another president has amplified that racist trope.

    Meaning white supremacy is still on the ballot.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Obama Meme on Trump’s Truth Social Was Exactly What It Looked Like

    In the interim, hundreds if not thousands of people responded to the clip with enthusiasm. Immediately after the video was first posted on Truth Social, the memecoin $APEBAMA was minted. Within 12 hours, more than $4 million worth of $APEBAMA had been traded back and forth. In an X group with the same name that now has hundreds of members, the pinned tweet implies that the meme stock will succeed because of how outrageous the video is: “this is pretty much on par with him calling Obama a nigga.” Some members posted their own depictions of Obama as a monkey or ape. The ape video’s apparent creator, the X user @xerias_x, reposted the full video to their X account early this morning. Besides the Obamas, the video shows a menagerie of Democratic politicians as animals, bowing down to Trump, who appears as a lion. It now has more than 1 million views. (@xerias_x also seems to be the originator of an AI-generated video Trump reposted in October that shows the president raining down what appears to be excrement on protesters from the sky.)

  • Techdirt ☛ Former Federal Judge: ICE’s Home Raiding Policy Violates A Basic Constitutional Right

    Okay, I’m going to read the Fourth Amendment – and then you’re going to explain it to us, please! Here goes:

    “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Can you help us understand what that means?

  • Manuel Matuzović ☛ A new meta tag for respecting text scaling on mobile

    When you open the accessibility settings on your smartphone and increase the font size, you will immediately notice that the system font size increases. On Android, as a Firefox user, you will also notice that websites scale. As a Chrome user, you won't see any difference because Chrome doesn't respect the font size settings for web content. As an iOS user, it's the same.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ March for Billionaires

    AI-poisoned Y-Combinator pick-me lickspittle throws parade: [...]

  • Paul Krugman ☛ American Decency Still Lives - Paul Krugman

    While the Democratic strategy was an understandable response to a shattering electoral defeat, it rested on a cynical and nihilistic view of American voters: that they couldn’t be trusted to vote against a party that reveled in inflicting cruelty and injustice as long as the price of gasoline fell.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ MAGA Zealots Are Waging War On Affordable Broadband

    The Trump administration keeps demonstrating that it really hates affordable broadband. It particularly hates it when the government tries to make broadband affordable to poor people or rural school kids.

    In just the last year the Trump administration has: [...]

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Six Colors ☛ Spotify comes up with a clever way to sync audio and print books

    It works in reverse too, apparently. Point your camera at your physical book and it’ll tell you whether to flip back or forth to reach the spot you left off in your audiobook. (Spotify also today announced that it will partner with Bookshop.org to sell physical copies of its audiobooks.)

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Adblocking ≠ Piracy

    I told Kevin I was going to write this post since we were discussing this topic the other day. This is my half of the argument; maybe he’ll write an “Adblocking = Piracy” post on his site if he finds the time between one meeting and the other.

    I am not the first person to write this post; I am sure I won’t be the last. Plenty of people have expressed their opinion on this subject, and so far, no consensus has been reached (and I suspect never will).