Leftovers

• Lionel Dricot ☛ Do not apologize for replying late to my email

  You don’t need to apologize for taking hours, days, or years to reply to one of my emails.

  If we are not close collaborators, and if I didn’t explicitly tell you I was waiting for your answer within a specific timeframe, then please stop apologizing for replying late!

  This is a trend I’m witnessing, probably caused by the addiction to instant messaging. Most of the emails I receive these days contain some sort of apology. I received an apology from someone who took five hours to reply to what was a cold and unimportant email. I received apologies in what was a reply to a reply I had sent only a couple of days earlier.

• Good Internet ☛ What's a Home Lab and why do you need one?

  I’ll spoil the story right here: a Home Lab is just a spare computer in your home that’s running all the time. Some are connected to the internet and some are not. It’s a machine used to run whatever services you want on it. While I’m going to dive into the meat of this as we go, those words you just read always hold true: A Home Lab is simply a spare computer on your home network. Nothing more.

• Good Internet ☛ Good Internet

  The [Internet] is supposed to be fun!

• Andy Wingo ☛ free trade and the left

  For me, the fundamental economic argument for free trade is not unambiguously positive. Yes, lower trade barriers should leave us all with more left over with which we can do cool things. But the mechanism is cruel, the benefits accrue unequally, and there is value in producing communities that is not captured in prices.

  In my next missive, we go back to the 19th century to see what Marx and Cobden had to say about the topic. Until then, happy trading!

• Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-02-03 [Older] How giant ‘Blobs’ of rock have influenced Earth’s magnetic field for millions of years – new research

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-02-04 [Older] My unsung hero of science: Frank Malina – fearless rocket engineer, groundbreaking artist and communist ‘traitor’

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-02-06 [Older] The brilliant and bizarre ways birds use their sense of smell – from natural cologne to pest control

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-02-05 [Older] George Orwell called for a new way of thinking about science

  • Buttondown LLC ☛ Proving What's Possible

    There's a third class of properties, that I will call possibility properties: P(x) is "can x happen in this model"? Is it possible for a table to have more than ten records? Can a state machine transition from "Done" to "Retry", even if it doesn't? Importantly, P(x) does not need to be possible immediately, just at some point in the future. It's possible to lose 100 dollars betting on slot machines, even if you only bet one dollar at a time. If x is a statement about an individual state, we can further call it a reachability property. I'm going to use the two interchangeably for flow.

• Career/Education

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ He left the U.S. for an internship. Trump's travel ban made it impossible to return

    “If I knew it was going to go down this badly, I wouldn’t have left the United States,” he said of his decision to leave Michigan for a summer internship in Singapore.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Whitmer signs off on school cell phone ban set for next fall

    Developed by Rep. Mark Tisdel (R-Rochester Hills) and state Sen. Dayna Polehanki (D-Livonia) House Bill 4141 and Senate Bill 495 require school districts to develop and adopt a policy banning the use of cell phones during instructional time and to set protocol for how and when students are allowed to use their phones during an emergency.

  • Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Robin Moffatt on Technical Blogging

    Fitting for a data streaming expert, Robin Moffatt is both a producer and consumer of blog posts in this space. In addition to sharing his own take on “Data engineering, Kafka, and other nerdy stuff,” Robin ingests a steady stream of data-related blogs and publishes his favorites in monthly roundups of Interesting Links (also available as a Substack).

    All that reading/writing leads to lots of blogging lessons learned – and those are nicely shared in the blogging section of his blog.

  • Daniel Jalkut ☛ Comfort Zone

    Once, in 1994 or so, I was sitting in a cafe with friends, and I had the crazy idea that I was going to write my own web browser. I was a college student at the time, and had played with Mosaic and … well, probably only Mosaic. But had also played with Gopher, and other protocols like SMTP, UUCP, and NNTP. In some ways I was perfectly situated to pursue something great, but I was only 19 years old and had plenty of doubts. Browsers are big. There’s a lot I don’t know. And jeez, on top of everything, I need to finish my schoolwork! As fate would have it, I never ended up building that browser. It wasn’t in my comfort zone.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-03 [Older] Ultra-processed foods 'engineered' like cigarettes: study

• Proprietary

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Discord attempt to put out the fires with a clarification over new age verification | GamingOnLinux

    Discord have released some clarifications around the new forced age verification system coming worldwide next month, as people look to flee the platform.

  • TechCrunch ☛ Okay, now exactly half of xAI’s founding team has left the company

    Monday night, xAI co-founder Yuhuai (Tony) Wu announced he was leaving the company. “It’s time for my next chapter,” Wu wrote in a late-night post on X. “It is an era with full possibilities: a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what’s possible.”

  • PC World ☛ Microsoft just forked Windows

    But here’s the thing: Laptops with Windows 11 26H1 on them won’t be upgradable to Windows 11 26H2. They’ll remain on a separate Windows track until an undisclosed time.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Techdirt ☛ How To Think About AI: Is It The Tool, Or Are You?

      The reverse-centaur doesn’t just burn out the human. It produces worse work, because it assumes that the AI can provide the knowledge or the creativity. It can’t. That requires a human. The power of AI tools is in enabling a human to take their own knowledge, and their own creativity and enhance it, to do more with it, based on what the person actually wants.

      To me it’s a simple question of “what’s the tool?” Is it the AI, used thoughtfully by a human to do more than they otherwise could have? If so, that’s a good and potentially positive use of AI. It’s the centaur in Doctorow’s analogy.

    • Tuan-Anh ☛ Hope Is Not a Security Strategy: Why Secure-by-Default Beats Hardening

      Agents are underdeterministic. Underdeterminism is incompatible with trust. Period.

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ Helping young people stay safe online in the age of AI - Raspberry Pi Foundation

      This is a shared challenge for anyone who supports young people as they navigate the online world: parents and carers, youth leaders and volunteers, and educators across all subjects. Many young people use these AI tools independently, often without guidance, so having open and useful conversations about trust, risk and responsibility matter just as much in the classroom as they do at dinner tables and Code Clubs.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Adding AI to sinus surgery system saw malfunctions rocket from eight to 100 incidents, according to new investigation — skull-puncturing errors are the stuff of nightmares

      It was also noted by Reuters that FDA-authorized medical AI devices have seen twice the recall rate compared to the baseline. Meanwhile, the FDA is struggling to keep pace with the AI-enhanced medical devices headed to market. Sadly, the FDA has been affected by cuts under the DOGE initiative. Here, specifically, 15 out of 40 AI scientists in the Division of Imaging, Diagnostics and Software Reliability (DIDSR) have been laid off or left, say insiders.

    • Reuters ☛ As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts

      The device had already been on the market for about three years. Until then, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had received unconfirmed reports of seven instances in which the device malfunctioned and another report of a patient injury. Since AI was added to the device, the FDA has received unconfirmed reports of at least 100 malfunctions and adverse events. At least 10 people were injured between late 2021 and November 2025, according to the reports. Most allegedly involved errors in which the TruDi Navigation System misinformed surgeons about the location of their instruments while they were using them inside patients’ heads during operations.

    • The Register UK ☛ AI agents can spill secrets via malicious link previews

      AI agents can shop for you, program for you, and, if you're feeling bold, chat for you in a messaging app. But beware: attackers can use malicious prompts in chat to trick an AI agent into generating a data-leaking URL, which link previews may fetch automatically.

    • The Register UK ☛ Claude and OpenAI fight over ads while Google monetizes

      "The truth is that despite protestations, consumers have progressively become comfortable with a give-and-take model, be that exchanging information for value received, or suffering advertising for pricing relief," he said. "Streamers have already proven that ad-supported pricing tiers are very effective at price discriminating among consumer segments. The future of consumer-facing AI models will likely be one that is interrupted with advertising, except for those who pay to spare themselves that interruption."

    • New York Times ☛ A.I. Personalizes the Internet but Takes Away Control

      The relentless addition of artificial intelligence in popular apps raises questions about what’s at stake. The answer: the future of the [Internet] and its lifeblood, digital advertising.

    • 404 Media ☛ 'The Most Dejected I’ve Ever Felt:' Harassers Made Nude AI Images of Her, Then Started an OnlyFans

      “Someone has a only fans page set up in your name with this same profile,” one direct message from a stranger on TikTok said. “Do you have 2 accounts or is someone pretending to be you,” another said. And from a friend: “Hey girl I hate to tell you this, but I think there’s some picture of you going around. Maybe AI or deep fake but they don’t look real. Uncanny valley kind of but either way I’m sorry.”

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Prompt Injection Via Road Signs - Schneier on Security

    • Robert Reich ☛ AI and the Coming Jobless Economy

      Even if AI produces big productivity gains — which is still an open question (an MIT study last year found that “despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, 95% of organizations are getting zero return”) — it’s far from clear that most workers will see much, if any, of AI’s benefits.

      If productivity rises, as it’s supposed to do when the workplace becomes immersed in AI, each worker will generate more value, by definition. And with more value, supposedly we’re all better off.

      But worker productivity has been rising for years, yet the median wage has barely risen when adjusted for inflation.

      Here’s the truth: The four-day workweek will most likely come with four days’ worth of pay. The three-day workweek, with three days’ worth. And so on.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Ads in Artificial Intelligence

      Anthropic also published a commitment to keep Claude ad-free. I doubt this will age well. Call me cynical, but my assumption is that Anthropic will one day have ads in its products, but perhaps not “Claude” specifically.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ The Anthropic test refusal string: kill a Claude session dead

      Claude’s test refusal string works a bit like the EICAR Test File for antiviruses. If you put the test string anywhere in an input to Claude, it’ll just stop and refuse to keep processing the query.

      In various people’s testing, the refusal string works on web pages and even social media.

    • [Old] James Randall ☛ The real AI risk isn't job loss — it's epistemic

      What happened this morning was an example of how AI differs from social media in another key way. Social media shows you content while AI shapes how you frame problems. Yes, social media can influence that too, but less directly, not as actively.

      And AI can chip away at this repeatedly over time, and with their increasing abilities with memory, across multiple conversations. Combine that with its guardrails and incentives (whether directly specified in its setup or imbued through its training) then you’ve got something that can actively and persistently work to reshape thoughts. And this technology is actively being pushed on impressionable minds in schools.

      And if negativity feeds engagement then that can actively make your mental model of your situation worse. And millions of people are now using AI as a thinking partner.

  • Social Control Media

    • Press Gazette ☛ How Dave Jorgenson took the Washington Post video audience with him

      The Washington Post‘s former face of Tiktok has said his decision to launch his own company was because video was not “getting the support it needed to thrive” at the title.

    • Mike Brock ☛ The Crisis, No. 12

      You had to buy a ticket. There was a two-drink minimum. The truth came with a cover charge and a laugh track. You sat in a dark room with strangers and you heard things that should have changed your life, and then you went home and changed nothing. Because it was comedy. Because the format told you it didn’t count. Because the stage and the microphone and the timing of the punchlines all said: this is not real. This is a show. You are the audience. You are not required to act.

      The court jester is allowed to speak truth to power precisely because the jester’s role guarantees that truth is received as performance rather than demand. The king laughs. The courtiers laugh. Everyone agrees the fool is very clever. The kingdom does not change.

      This is what happened to Carlin. Not that he gave up. That we neutralized him. American culture developed a mechanism for receiving moral seriousness without letting it change anything. The truth gets spoken and defused in the same gesture. The prophet speaks and the congregation applauds and everyone goes home and the temple remains as corrupt as it was before he opened his mouth.

    • The Barents Observer ☛ Pressed ‘like’ on Youtube video, was fined for 'discreditation of army'

      Yovdiy was fined 30,000 rubles (€325).

      It was the newspaper Verstka that first discovered the ruling by the Kandalaksha court. The case might be the first time that a Russian court has fined someone for likes on YouTube.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • PC World ☛ Windows Notepad is now complex enough to have a serious security flaw

      For the uninitiated, remote code execution (RCE) is a security vulnerability that allows an external program to be loaded and run without the user’s permission or knowledge. It’s a kind of attack that shouldn’t even be possible in a super-basic text editor. But with tons of new features in Notepad—up to and including integration with “AI” via Copilot—it’s a lot more vulnerable than it used to be. The latest problem comes from Notepad’s support of Markdown, a basic formatting system, which was added in July of 2025.

• Security

  • SSHStalker botnet hijacks 7,000 Linux systems using IRC and SSH

    A previously undocumented Linux botnet operation called SSHStalker was discovered targeting nearly 7,000 systems in attacks that blend 2009-era Internet Relay Chat (IRC) with modern mass-compromise automation.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-02-03 [Older] Is it illegal to make online videos of someone without their consent? The law on covert filming

    • The Guardian UK ☛ My week of only using cash: could a return to notes and coins change my life?

      After subtracting the lavish lattes and Asos deliveries that had massively inflated my average weekly spend, I allowed myself £180 for the basics, including food and travel. For safety, I gave myself an extra £20. The first task was to take out £200 in cash from the ATM. But what the hell was my pin number? Thanks to contactless capabilities, I hadn’t used this all-important combination of digits in more than a year. Googling how to find it, I discovered I’d have to wait three to five working days to get a letter reminding me of it in the post. This wouldn’t do. I decided to head to my local bank to explain my predicament.

    • EFF ☛ No One, Including Our Furry Friends, Will Be Safer in Ring's Surveillance Nightmare

      Amazon Ring already integrates biometric identification, like face recognition, into its products via features like "Familiar Faces,” which depends on scanning the faces of those in sight of the camera and matching it against a list of pre-saved, pre-approved faces. It doesn’t take much to imagine Ring eventually combining these two features: face recognition and neighborhood searches.

    • Techdirt ☛ So, You’ve Hit An Age Gate. What Now?

      If you’re given the option of selecting a verification method and are deciding which to use, we recommend considering the following questions for each process allowed by each vendor: [...]

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ To consent or pay?

      You can’t bypass this message and a forced into a binary choice about whether to pay £2.99 per month so you can use Meta’s platforms without your personal information being used to sell advertising, or to continue without paying and allow your personal information to be used for adverts. If you pay for a subscription your personal data won’t be used to show you adverts. It is worth noting it will still be used for things such as account recommendations or to improve Meta’s own products and services.

    • The Register UK ☛ Doctors told to pull back from Palantir's NHS data platform

      The British Medical Association's (BMA) recommendation follows the US spy-tech firm's recent work with US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE). The union cited allegations that ICE used Palantir's bespoke Immigration OS platform to process and link formerly separate datasets, including medical records.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Why your AI doctor doesn't follow HIPAA: The hidden risks of medical chatbots

      But in addition to traditional cybersecurity concerns around how well these chatbots can protect personal health data, there are a host of questions around what kind of legal protections users would have around the personal medical data they share with these apps. Several health care and legal experts told CyberScoop that these companies are almost certainly not subject to the same legal or regulatory requirements – such as data protection rules under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) – that compel hospitals and other healthcare facilities to ensure protection of your data.

    • Dhole Moments ☛ On Discord Alternatives

      Unfortunately, asking a cryptography-focused security engineer for app recommendations is like asking a rocket scientist to recommend a car dealership in Nebraska: If you somehow get a good answer, it’ll be by sheer coincidence rather than a reasonable expectation.

      That might sound weird. Let me explain.

    • GreyCoder ☛ The Best Alternatives To Discord 2026 - GreyCoder

      Discord collects user data, and recently announced they are going to require ID verification.

      [...]

      Here are the standout privacy-respecting Discord replacements, by use case: [...]

    • San Francisco, California ☛ S.F. looks to repeal law requiring stores to accept cash

      Seven years after San Francisco passed a law requiring brick and mortar stores to accept cash from customers, citing an “ethos of inclusivity,” city leaders are seeking to repeal it.

  • Confidentiality

    • Walled Culture ☛ Copyright litigation over Anne Frank’s writings likely to impact the fate of VPNs in the EU

      However, the Anne Frank Fonds was unhappy with this approach, and took legal action. Its argument was that such geo-blocking could be circumvented with VPNs, and so its copyrights in the Netherlands could be infringed upon by those using VPNs. The lower courts in the Netherlands dismissed this argument, and the case is now before the Dutch Supreme Court. Beyond the specifics of the Anne Frank scholarly edition, there are important issues regarding the use of VPNs to get around geo-blocking. Because of the potential knock-on effect the ruling in this case will have on EU law, the Dutch Supreme Court has asked for guidance from the EU’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-03 [Older] Iran: Witnesses describe violence, chaos during protests

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Islamic blogger Marziev detained in Ingushetia

      Fortanga’s source claimed the blogger was detained on the morning of 6 February by officers of the Federal Security Service (FSB).

      After his detention, a criminal case was opened against Marziev under an article of the Russian criminal code — ‘Illegal acquisition, transfer, sale, storage of firearms and ammunition’ — charges which can lead to up to five years in prison if convicted.

    • RTL ☛ Deliberate manipulation: Instagram CEO denies addiction claims in landmark US trial - RTL Today

      Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri on Wednesday rejected the notion that users could be clinically addicted to social media, as he testified in a landmark California trial over whether his company knowingly hooked children on its platform for profit.

      Meta -- the parent company of Instagram and Facebook -- and Google-owned YouTube are defendants in the blockbuster trial, which could set a legal precedent regarding whether social media giants deliberately designed their platforms to be addictive to children.

    • LRT ☛ Estonia’s foreign intelligence report 2026: highlights

      1. The Kremlin merely feigns interest in peace talks, hoping to restore its bilateral relations with the United States to their previous level and formalise Ukraine’s defeat. Despite this illusory thaw, Russia continues to regard the US as its principal adversary.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Indian teens roll their eyes at talk of social media ban

      Inspired in part by Australia's move and by guidance in the recent Economic Survey, an annual government assessment of India's economic situation, several Indian states are now exploring bans for children under 16.

    • USMC ☛ US Marine Corps advances plans for drone wingman

      A top priority: testing and developing Marine Air-Ground Task Force Unmanned Expeditionary (MUX) TACAIR, an unmanned “collaborative combat aircraft” intended to “increase the survivability and lethality of F-35 and enable the successful execution of the [strike fighter] mission across a wide range of developing threat environments,” according to the document.

    • C4ISRNET ☛ Lockheed unveils Lamprey underwater drone that can attach to ships

      With a 24-foot payload bay, the Lamprey can be modified to perform a wide range of operations, from the seabed to the surface, according to the company. It can loiter on the ocean floor and recharge its batteries by attaching to a host ship, in addition to collecting intelligence from the ocean floor while offering a low stealth profile.

    • Harvard University ☛ What would the Founding Fathers think of TikTok?

      By placing 80 percent of its U.S. assets under the control of non-Chinese investors, the joint venture aims to avoid an outright ban. The new investors include the technology company Oracle, the private equity company Silver Lake, and the Emirati investment firm MGX. ByteDance retains a stake of just under 20 percent and will license its algorithm to the new entity.

    • Robert Reich ☛ The Citizens’ Revolt

      Ordinary people serving on grand juries have become a new front line in the resistance against the Trump regime.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ The Banality of MAGA Evil

      But these are far-fetched fantasies. The truth is far more banal and shocking.

      There are people in positions of great power in the U.S. government engaged in evil conspiracies against everything that is good and decent. Their conspiracies are far more extensive and damaging than almost anyone imagined. But there are no evil masterminds behind this. Only amoral, stupid grifters like Howard Lutnick.

    • Site36 ☛ Repression and sanctions over anti-fascism: Demonstration bans in Hungary, more debanking in Germany | Matthias Monroy

      The anti-fascist assembly ban in Hungary cannot be separated from the repression in the so-called Budapest complex: on 4 February, three more activists from Germany and Italy were convicted in the capital for attacks on actual or alleged neo-Nazis at the 2023 “Day of Honour”, including the non-binary person Maja T. The Hungarian government is closely following this trial, which is now going to appeal. A spokesperson had also posted about this several times on social media – and was thereby exposed to criticism for wanting to influence the conviction.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Epstein Emails Show How the Powerful Talk About Race

    The exchange was included in the Department of Justice’s latest public release of the Epstein files and is one of the clearest examples of the disgraced financier’s interest in “race science,” the pseudoscientific practice of ascribing racial inequities to genetics. It is a way of thinking that has been refuted on multiple levels. IQ is a complex trait that results from a series of factors—many of them cultural and circumstantial—that are not neatly reduced to a specific gene or set of genes. Even if it weren’t, the consensus among geneticists, biologists, and anthropologists is that race isn’t a biological phenomenon. Race-science proponents tend to ignore all of this, as well as any other relevant context, and use correlations between race and IQ (and also things such as race and criminality) as evidence that racial stereotypes are in fact justified.

    None of this mattered to Epstein, who recurrently expressed his interest in race science beyond this 2016 correspondence. The tranche of Epstein files also shows that in 2018, he repeatedly tried to get in contact with Charles Murray, a political scientist whose 1994 book, The Bell Curve, is one of the best-known texts to posit a relationship between intelligence and race. Epstein didn’t specify why he was trying to connect with Murray, but he claimed that they had met previously. (Murray told me over email that he had never received an email from Epstein and that it was possible that they’d met in passing at a conference reception at some point. If this ever happened, though, Murray had no memory of it, he said.)

  • TruthOut ☛ Journalist: Mainstream Media Complicit in Normalizing Epstein File Revelations

    Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are accusing the Justice Department of covering up the names of co-conspirators of the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as fallout from the Epstein files grows across the globe. Millions of pages remain unreleased. As many prominent U.S. figures evade accountability following mentions in the Epstein files, a number of European figures have resigned for their relationships with Epstein. “The most extraordinary and worrying thing of what is going on in the United States is the scale of normalization that is happening, in which the press is absolutely a structural part of this,” says Carole Cadwalladr, award-winning investigative journalist. “I have been shocked — deeply, deeply shocked — by the absence of headlines.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Raskin: Trump Mentioned “More Than a Million Times” in Unredacted Epstein Files

    This is a clear contradiction to what Trump has claimed about his involvement with the child sex trafficker.

    Raskin has also told the press that he has found direct evidence undermining Trump’s claim that he barred Epstein from staying at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Trump has maintained that he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago when he was continually poaching staff from the spa, including 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre, and exposing himself to employees.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Donald Trump Is Kneecapping Corporate Oversight

    President Donald Trump has been carrying out a frenzied deregulation of financial markets. Recently, the administration stacked the US’s top watchdog of corporate auditors with Trump loyalists and former executives of the companies they will now oversee.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Trump’s SEC Is Moving to Silence Investor Whistleblowers

    Under the Trump administration, the SEC has taken a sledgehammer to enforcement against corporate crimes, with cases dropping to record lows — at the same time that corporate lobbying of the federal government has surged to unprecedented levels.

  • The Register UK ☛ Infosec researchers mull curious case of Telnet ancient flaw

    Global Telnet traffic "fell off a cliff" on January 14, six days before security advisories for CVE-2026-24061 went public on January 20. The flaw, a decade-old bug in GNU InetUtils telnetd with a 9.8 CVSS score, allows trivial root access exploitation.

  • 404 Media ☛ Government Loses Hard Drives It Was Supposed to Put ICE Detention Center Footage On

    A Kafkaesque saga in which the government has failed to produce critical video footage has reached new levels of absurdity.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Congressperson tells Pam Bondi he believes she is lying to Congress

    The Attorney General evaded nearly every question and used her time as a campaign pitch for Donald Trump. When Representative Lieu had had enough, Bondi insisted that Lieu not accuse her of breaking the law. Lieu repeated his claim and reminded Bondi that the exchange was on video, not to mention the Congressional record. I hope someday someone holds Bondi to account. Lying to Congress used to be serious.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Unredacted Epstein files contain a whole lot of “Donald J. Trump”

    So, does Trump think Maxwell is evil, or does he wish her well? Why is he considering a pardon for someone he declared to be evil? Could it be dangling a carrot to keep her quiet?

  • Axios ☛ Trump is in Epstein files "more than a million times," Raskin alleges

    Driving the news: Following allegations of improper redactions in the more than 3 million files it released on Epstein, the Justice Department has begun giving members of Congress access to the unredacted files.

  • The Daily Beast ☛ Epstein Assistant Told Feds He Introduced Melania to Trump, Files Reveal

    A one-time assistant to Jeffrey Epstein told the FBI effectively under penalty of perjury that the pedophile introduced Donald Trump to his wife Melania, a newly released document shows.

• Environment

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Point of no return: a hellish ‘hothouse Earth’ getting closer, scientists say

    Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach. The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed.

    At just 1.3C of global heating in recent years, extreme weather is already taking lives and destroying livelihoods across the globe. At 3-4C, “the economy and society will cease to function as we know it”, scientists said last week, but a hothouse Earth would be even more fiery.

  • Overpopulation ☛ Watershed Woes

    Despite half a century of efforts to improve water quality and restore fisheries in America’s Chesapeake Bay, its ecological condition continues to decline. A new study quantifies the environmental problems within the Chesapeake Bay watershed, explores their causes, and discusses possible futures.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-02-03 [Older] What’s the point of a space station around the Moon?

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-03 [Older] Indian trade deal provides opportunity for German carmakers

    • Futurism ☛ You Are Not Prepared for What Actually Shut Down the El Paso Airport This Morning, But Let's Just Say It Involves a Military Mega-Laser Shooting Something Down

      The answer, impossibly, seems to be door number three.

      According to CBS News, the bizarre airspace closure came under orders from FAA administrator Bryan Bedford. Apparently, Bedford made the call after learning that the Pentagon planned to unleash high-energy, counter-drone laser weapons at Fort Bliss, situated right next to El Paso International Airport.

    • CBS ☛ Airspace closure followed spat over drone-related tests and party balloon shoot-down, sources say

      Two sources identified the technology as a high-energy laser.

      Meetings were scheduled over safety impacts, but Pentagon officials wanted to test the technology sooner, stating that U.S. Code 130i requirements governing the protection of certain facilities from unmanned aircraft had been met.

    • The Register UK ☛ Anthropic says its datacenters won't spike your leccy bill

      These steps are welcome, but won't make much of a dent as they apply only to Anthropic's own datacenters, which make up a small part of the US bit barn armada. A growing body of evidence suggests those facilities are driving up the price of electricity across America.

    • Austin White ☛ Solar Power and the Northeast

      It should be apparent, but what they do not tell you is that when it snows and the snow builds up, you get no power. While I am not relying on it at all as a primary source, I do make use of whatever the low winter sun can provide. I would expect that, based on the roof’s angle, the snow would slide off and “clear” itself. That has not been the case. Going on the roof is not an option, especially with the amount of snow and ice we have received this year. This meant I had to go get a roof rake! Those are not words that go together in my mind. Typically, these are used to remove a large amount of heavy snow from your roof, reducing the weight on the joists.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Chuck Grimmett ☛ Big Apple Brook Trout

      Trout Unlimited is doing a citizen science project in our area: Environmental DNA sampling to locate hidden brook trout populations in the NYC suburbs: Fairfield, Westchester, Putnam, and Long Island.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-02-03 [Older] Germany news: 13 million living at risk of poverty

  • Heineken Joins Wave Of AI-Driven Layoffs With Plan To Cut 7% Of Workforce [Ed: Trying to blame slop]

    The world’s second-largest brewer, behind Anheuser-Busch InBev, announced plans to cut up to 7% of its workforce, eliminating up to 6,000 roles over the next two years, CNBC reports.

  • CNBC ☛ Heineken to slash up to 6,000 jobs in AI 'productivity savings' amid slump in beer sales [Ed: The real issue is lack of demand]

    The world's second-largest brewer reported lackluster earnings on Wednesday, with total beer volumes declining 2.4% over the course of 2025, while adjusted operating profit was up 4.4%.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Federal News Network ☛ Why Trump’s plan to reclassify federal workers should worry everyone

    The federal civil service has long been built on a straightforward principle: Career employees should be hired and removed based on merit, not political alignment. That framework allows federal professionals to provide candid advice, raise concerns and carry out the law across administrations of both parties.

    A new rule finalized last week would alter that balance for a category of career federal employees whose roles are considered policy-influencing. While the administration strenuously asserts that these positions would remain nonpolitical and filled on merit, they would carry fewer procedural protections than many career roles do today.

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ When the Emperor called you a NIMBY before he killed you

    Now, I know I usually like to zoom out and take the holistic “whole-forest-rather-than-a-single-leaf” approach in these essays so I’d better call out that this time, I’m not doing that. This isn’t me making a final judgment call on the whole “uranium mining yes or no” situation. I’m leaning no on nuclear, it’s just a really inefficient and destructive non-solution as far as I can tell, but the fossil-burning situation is a desperately urgent emergency and if we doom the whole in quest of preserving every part, all parts will die anyway. So a lean no on the uranium thing but a decisive no on the whole NIMBY shaming of these folks. That was strong “let them eat cake” vibes as you sat in your palace fueled by what they had and your class took from them.

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ When the EU regulated means instead of ends

    Let’s say a land wanted to make burglary illegal. They notice that a lot of people who do breaking and entering wear shoes when doing so. So they make wearing shoes illegal.

    That’s sort of how many EU laws are.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Peter Thiel, Bad Vampire

  • Machiel Reyneke ☛ Why Vampires Live Forever

    The one thing the longevity-vampire community has not yet learned from Dracula is operational security.

    Dracula operated in silence for centuries. He didn’t have a podcast. He didn’t track his erection quality on a public dashboard. He didn’t appear on Netflix. He understood that the fundamental rule of being a vampire is: don’t talk about being a vampire.

    Johnson, Thiel, and their cohort have broken this rule comprehensively. Whether this represents a new era of transparency or a catastrophic strategic miscalculation remains to be seen.

    In the meantime, I will be monitoring their blood work with interest.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Nation ☛ Trump’s Lies Are Toxic

      Lying has become so normal within the Trump administration that his top aides lie on his behalf, even when the lie is transparent. In his recent Davos speech, for example, Trump mixed up Greenland and Iceland four times. That was not a lie, just Trump’s own mental confusion. But then president secretary Karoline Leavitt lied about what the entire world saw and heard. “No he didn’t,” Leavitt wrote on X in response to a reporter who accurately describing Trump’s confusion. “His written remarks referred to Greenland as a ‘piece of ice’ because that’s what it is.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Briton shot by father in Texas after row about Trump was unlawfully killed, coroner rules

    At the conclusion of the two-day hearing at Cheshire coroner’s court, Devonish found Harrison “knew full well he had shot his own daughter, pointing a gun at chest height and pulling the trigger”.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Lapeer Community Schools to review 83 books removed from school media centers

    Members of Fight 4 the First Lapeer said they confirmed with Lapeer Community Schools Superintendent Matt Wandrie that the books had been removed, noting that the list of books removed matched a list of titles identified by the organization Take Back the Classroom.

  • Techdirt ☛ An 18-Million-Subscriber YouTuber Just Explained Section 230 Better Than Every Politician In Washington

    Yes, the metaphors are colorful. But the underlying point is exactly correct. Section 230 places liability where it belongs: on the person who actually created the content. Not on the platform that hosts it. This is how the entire internet works. Every comment section, every social media post, every forum—all of it depends on this basic principle.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ: Russia’s Telegram throttling another step toward total information control

    “The deliberate slowdown of Telegram is yet another attempt by Russian authorities to tighten control over the information space and silence independent journalism,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “When authorities interfere with platforms used by journalists and the public to share news, they not only hinder reporting but also leave citizens isolated from reliable information, undermining the public’s ability to make informed decisions.”

  • BBC ☛ Jimmy Lai: Hong Kong pro-democracy tycoon gets 20 years' jail under national security law

    This is the harshest punishment to be handed down under the law, which China imposed after huge protests in 2019 demanding more freedom, and defends as essential for the city's stability.

  • Reuters ☛ Ai Weiwei on China, the West and shrinking space for dissent

    Censorship has been a constant in Ai Weiwei’s life. The 68-year-old Chinese dissident, whose activist art has made him among Beijing’s most prominent critics, has seen his films, sculptures and other works restricted for their criticisms of China as well as his outspoken advocacy for human rights around the world.

    Speaking with Reuters in London ahead of the January 29 launch of his new book “On Censorship,” he discussed returning to China for the first time in a decade, the impact of AI on freedom of expression, and what he sees as the erosion of free speech in the West.

    This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Lawsuit reactions: EFF behaviour reveals zombification, censorship

    This is significant because the EFF was the birthplace of the Blue Ribbon campaign for free speech online. Today, the blue ribbon is in tatters.

  • BoingBoing ☛ After 88 years, Gallup will no longer poll presidential approval ratings

    Confronted with this PR gibberish, The Hill immediately asked the obvious question and Gallup would not deny interference from the White House.

  • The Hill ☛ Gallup to stop tracking presidential approval ratings after 8 decades

    President Trump has seen his rating by the agency slip in recent months, peaking at 47 percent last February and dipping to less than 37 percent in its last poll taken in December.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Telex: Fifteen years of Orbán regime proof that repressing the media without resorting to overt censorship is possible

    The most comprehensive document to date on how the Orbán governments of the past fifteen years have repressed the Hungarian independent media has just been published. The joint report prepared by the Rule of Law Lab at New York University School of Law and Mérték Media Monitor provides a detailed description of the sophisticated system of power that

  • Mérték Médiaelemző Műhely ☛ Ahead of Hungarian Elections, Report Analyzes Playbook to Repress Independent Media and Offers Recommendations for Reform - Mérték

    The analysis and recommendations, titled “The Repression of Independent Media in Hungary, 2010-2025” comes ahead of Hungary’s April 2026 parliamentary elections, when access to reliable, independent information is particularly crucial for democratic accountability and informed voting. The report shows how media capture and targeted pressure work together to narrow the space for independent journalism in Hungary.

    “The presence of independent outlets should not be mistaken for a healthy media environment. They survive in spite of the system, not because of it. This makes Hungary a critical test case for media freedom in the European Union,” said Ágnes Urbán, director of Mertek Media Monitor and co-author of the report.

  • Mérték Médiaelemző Műhely ☛ The Repression of Independent Media in Hungary, 2010–2025 [PDF]

    The government’s capture of the media sector, through its control of state-owned public service media, consolidation of private outlets under government-allied ownership, and diversion of state advertisement funds to government-friendly outlets, is well-documented. Less well-documented are the government’s systematic attempts to undermine independent media outlets, placing their continued existence in grave jeopardy.

    This report provides a comprehensive account of the Hungarian government’s escalating repression of independent media and offers recommendations for reform. The government has not needed to resort to overt censorship or imprisoning journalists in order to restrict independent media. It has used more sophisticated tactics to achieve that end. As described below, these tactics include: the weaponization of laws against independent media outlets; targeted exclusion of independent journalists; use of smear campaigns; Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs); and unlawful surveillance. Independent media outlets have also been targeted with cyberattacks, although it has not been fully determined who is responsible for those attacks.

  • The Tyee ☛ AI Is the Elephant in the Newsroom. How Are Journalists Reacting?

    Not only is generative AI prone to inaccuracies, but experiments conducted by The Tyee while developing our own AI policy revealed that text ChatGPT generated was also vague and bland — much weaker than what a human journalist could write.

  • US News And World Report ☛ US FTC Raises Concerns Over Accusations Apple News Favors Articles From Left-Wing Outlets

    Section 5 of the FTC Act prohibits ​unfair or deceptive acts or practices. A representation is deceptive under the FTC ⁠Act if ⁠it is material and ⁠would likely ​mislead consumers.

  • The Dissenter ☛ US Prosecutor Faces 'Disciplinary Complaint' Over FBI Raid

    “Assistant United States Attorney Gordon Kromberg and the government omitted [sic] a federal law that should have prohibited the raid of Hannah Natanson’s home when applying for a search warrant,” declared FPF advocacy director Seth Stern. “That choice now threatens to expose Natanson’s sources and cripple her ability to report, while also sending a warning shot to journalists and whistleblowers nationwide.”

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Washoe Tribe buys 10,000 acres in one of California’s largest ever land returns

    The sprawling property, located 20 miles north of Reno, Nevada, stretches from the Great Basin through the Sierra Nevada and encompasses sagebrush scrublands and juniper and pine forests.

  • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Lawyers of woman shot by federal agents say documents show DHS lies

    Marimar Martinez was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent in October while in her vehicle.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Military recruits will no longer need a REAL ID to fly to basic training

    The Defense Department is teaming up with the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, to allow recruits headed to basic training who don’t have a REAL ID to get through airport security without having to pay a fee, a Pentagon official said.

  • The Nation ☛ The Deep Harms of Deepfakes

    Remember when people used to say “the Internet isn’t real life” to hush women who were threatened or pornified by online misogynists? Of course, the Internet is real life. You might as well argue that something isn’t hurtful if it’s said on the telephone instead of in person.

  • Papers Please ☛ First-hand reports confirm you can still fly with no ID

    First-hand reports confirm that some people you can still fly with no ID card or documents, despite a new scheme of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to extort an illegal $45 fee from each airline passenger who doesn’t have, or doesn’t choose to show, ID that the TSA deems to be “compliant” with the REAL-ID Act.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Day 46 of the Protests: Conditional Release with Mandatory Pledges, Arrest of Teachers, and European Parliament Session

    According to HRANA’s latest aggregated data through the end of the forty-sixth day since the beginning of the protests, the total number of confirmed deaths has reached 7,002. Of these, 6,506 individuals have been registered under the category of “protesters,” including 216 persons under the age of 18. In addition, 214 individuals affiliated with government forces and 66 “non-protesters civilians” have been reported killed. Another 11,730 cases remain under investigation.

  • CSS Tricks ☛ Approximating contrast-color() With Other CSS Features

    You have an element with a configurable background color, and you’d like to calculate whether the foreground text should be light or dark. Seems easy enough, especially knowing how mindful we ought to be with accessibility.There have been a few drafts of a specification function for this functionality, most recently, contrast-color() (formerly color-contrast()) in the CSS Color Module Level 5 draft. But with Safari and Firefox being the only browsers that have implemented it so far, the final version of this functionality is likely still a ways off. There has been a lot of functionality added to CSS in the meantime; enough that I wanted to see whether we could implement it in a cross-browser friendly way today. Here’s what I have: [...]

  • ANF News ☛ Number of protesters injured and killed in Iran and Rojhilat rises

    Based on the latest verified aggregated data from Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) up to the end of the forty-fifth day since the start of the protests, a total of 676 protest-related incidents have been recorded. These incidents were reported in 210 cities across 31 provinces nationwide. According to these figures, the total number of confirmed fatalities stands at 6,984, of whom 6,490 are categorized as protesters.

  • New Yorker ☛ Even the Hospitals Aren’t Safe in Iran

    In late December, mass protests erupted across Iran, leading security forces to massacre thousands of people over the course of several days in January. Scores of wounded demonstrators were left scrambling for medical help. Many government-run hospitals began operating as an extension of the regime’s security forces, targeting anyone who dared to seek treatment. Some of the injured were detained in wards, sometimes while under anesthesia. Others were denied care altogether. Many didn’t make it as far as the hospital before they were detained. In response, medical professionals throughout the country have forged secret units to treat those injured in the assault.

  • Jerusalem Post ☛ Iran's regime kills protesters in hospitals, doctor says

    The Islamic regime has carried out extrajudicial killings of injured protesters inside hospitals and arrested countless medical personnel suspected of treating those wounded by Tehran, an Iranian doctor told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.

    Medical facilities and schools have been used by regime forces to locate, identify, and arrest individuals who joined the protests demonstrating against the country’s worsening economic crisis, said Dr. R, a member of the Aida Health Alliance whose name is being withheld for security reasons.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• IP Kat ☛ 2026-02-04 [Older] 1+1 may be 2 but sometimes looks like 1 – The General Court’s math for LEGO

• Techdirt ☛ Trump DOJ Launches Bunk Investigation Of Netflix Merger As a Favor To Larry Ellison

  In reality, the Trump administration has made it extremely clear they’re hoping to scuttle the Netflix deal to help Larry Ellison acquire Warner Brothers, CNN, and HBO. If they can’t kill the deal, they aspire to at least leverage the merger approval process to force Netflix executives to further debase themselves before the Trump administration, which I suspect they’ll all be happy to do.

• Bruce Lawson ☛ Bruce Lawson's personal site  : App certainty and interoperability: Apple’s pinky promises to CMA

  TL;DR: If Apple decides to kick you in the face, it must give you 5 minutes notice. And if you think it was too hard a kick, you can complain to Apple, which will investigate Apple. If the CMA believes Apple routinely gives you less than 5 minutes notice, or routinely kicks you too hard, and Apple’s thorough and impartial investigation of Apple finds no good reason, CMA will consider thinking about contemplating beginning a process to give Apple a really, really strong telling-off.

  Yesterday, the UK monopoly regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, announced that Apple and Google have proposed app certainty and interoperable access commitments [...]

• Patents

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Trump reportedly weighs quitting USMCA

    The US-Mexico-Canada Agreement is up for review this year, and the US trade representative said the White House would hold separate talks with both countries, characterizing Mexico as “pragmatic” and Ottawa as “challenging.”

• Copyrights

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2026-02-09 [Older] US Figure Skater Amber Glenn Faces Backlash Over Politics and Copyright Issues After Olympic Gold

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Anna's Archive Quietly 'Releases' Millions of Spotify Tracks, Despite Legal Pushback

    Despite being sued by Spotify and several record labels, Anna's Archive has silently begun releasing the actual music files from its massive Spotify scrape. The shadow library's backend torrent index now lists dozens of new torrents containing approximately 2.8 million tracks totaling roughly 6 terabytes of audio data. This marks a significant escalation in the already historic standoff with the music industry.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Nintendo Piracy: NXBrew and NSWPedia Targeted in European Blocking Efforts

    Nintendo can welcome two new pirate site blocking orders in Europe at the start of the year. Last week, a Dutch court ruled in favor of local anti-piracy group BREIN, ordering NXBrew to be blocked. A few days earlier, a German court issued a blocking injunction against another Nintendo Switch piracy site, NSWPedia. Through voluntary cooperation deals, these orders are honored by the major ISPs in these countries.

  • Steven Deobald ☛ The Problem With LLMs • Steven Deobald

    The fundamental ethical issue with LLMs is plagiarism. LLMs are, by their very nature, plagiarism machines. In the early days of GitHub Copilot, back before the Copilot brand was subsumed by the Microsoft juggernaut and the cute little sopwith flying helmet-plus-goggles logo was replaced with meaningless rainbow tilde, it would sometimes regurgitate training data verbatim. That’s been patched in the years since, but it’s important to remember a time – not that long ago – that the robots weren’t very good at concealing what they were doing.

    As a quick aside, I am not going to entertain the notion that LLMs are intelligent, for any value of “intelligent.” They are robots. Programs. Fancy robots and big complicated programs, to be sure — but computer programs, nonetheless. The rest of this essay will treat them as such. If you are already of the belief that the human mind can be reduced to token regurgitation, you can stop reading here. I’m not interested in philosophical thought experiments.

    Plagiarism requires two halves. The first half of plagiarism is theft. Taking something which is not one’s own. It’s that peculiar kind of theft where the victim may not even know they’re being stolen from: copyright violation. The second half is dishonesty. Plagiarism requires that the thief take the stolen work and also lie about its origins. Most plagiarists make minor modifications but all plagiarists pass the borrowed work off as their own.

    LLMs do both of these things.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Technology and Free Software

    • Discord features to emulate

      I was talking to my friend acdw about Discord and IRC because dozens had posted the link to New And Upcoming IRCv3 Features for Libera.chat, on Linkbudz. When I see descriptions of IRCv3 features I always wonder how they might be useful. The explanations I see never seem all that compelling to me. I feel like software developers are working on features that I don't understand and everybody else is looking at Discord and saying: "like that!"