Leftovers

• Deutsche Welle ☛ How Epstein got so rich

  Through connections, Epstein got a job at investment bank Bear Stearns, which gave him insight into high finance. In 1980, he was made a limited partner.

  After five years, he left the bank but used his time there and contacts as a sign of credibility.

• Tedium ☛ Do Companies Really Give Their Layoffs Nicknames?

  Today in Tedium: Recently, Amazon did something kind of annoying in the midst of doing something painful. It laid off a ton of people, but in the midst of doing that, it accidentally dropped an email revealing the layoffs early, before people got laid off. That email revealed that this layoff had an official code name, “Project Dawn,” which presumably speaks to the idea of wiping the grime away, like dish soap. It sounds insane, but companies have been taught to name initiatives after random things for decades, sometimes to celebrate successful initiatives, sometimes to lay off thousands of people. (I’m sure Will Lewis named the recent Washington Post layoff endeavor “Project Zoom Ghosting.”) Why are they such a corporate fixation—even for layoffs? Today’s Tedium ponders why corporate culture is so dominated by code names. — Ernie @ Tedium

• Seth Godin ☛ Mysterious predictability

  Complex systems can be predictable even when any individual node in the system seems unknowable.

• Ruben Schade ☛ “Cassette user? Time to get retirement ready”

  If we’re to assume their newspeak “retirement ready” meant “preparing for one’s retirement”, then I suppose the implication was that if you’re old enough to use cassettes, you must therefore be of a sufficiently ripe age to get “ready” for retirement. That doesn’t make much sense. The best time to save for your retirement is when you’re young, so Einstein’s Ninth Wonder of the World can kick in for longer. Aka, compound interest. It strikes me that if you’re getting “retirement ready” just before you retire, you’ve missed the boat.

• Marty Day ☛ Love It When Someone Voices What I Can’t (Or, Yeah, I Think I’m Tired of Tech Now Too)

  I think it’s that so much of it has become, to use the word the kids love these days, slop. I’m supposed to be the piggy just digging away, buying the new, the next, accepting the 25th installment of a movie franchise, seeing movies because I go “HEY I RECOGNIZE THING” and that’s the only dopamine center worth digging into. And generative AI, well, that’s the perfect example here, a project designed specifically to just redo what’s been done before, again and again, predictably.

  I’m tired of it. And I have to find the fire again. Hence, this.

• Kevin Wammer ☛ I'm tired of tech

  But for a while now, and especially these past 12 months, I've become tired of what the tech world has to offer.

  Tech runs the world now. (The 7 richest people on earth are tech bros entrepreneurs.) It is everywhere. Most everything feels like it's tech now. That, per se, is not something that bothers me, but it's what the tech world deems "interesting" that annoys me.

• David Mead ☛ A shared secret

  I read and re-read a blog post today that made me pause & reflect, a few times actually.

• Science

  • Daniel Holden ☛ Fitting Code Driven Displacement Revisited

    One of Epic's very talented technical animators Maksym Zhuravlov recently came to me with some interesting spring-movement-model-related maths questions.

    Obviously this was right up my street and I thought it could be nice to share my investigations.

    The first question is this: if we have a character's movement driven by a critical spring damper, can we estimate how long it will take the character to stop and start, and can we estimate how far they will travel during those times?

    And, perhaps an even more interesting follow up: if that is possible, then given some measurements for starting and stopping times and distances, can we estimate the spring parameters that best model those movements?

    The answer turns out to be yes under some basic assumptions and with some interesting mathematics involved.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ A Computer That Fits Inside A Camera Lens

    The LCD-as-aperture has a number of interesting uses that would be impossible with a standard iris aperture. Not only can it function as a standard iris aperture, but it can do things like cycle through different areas of the image in sequence, open up arbitrary parts or close off others, and a number of other unique options. It’s worth checking out the video below, as [Ancient] demonstrates many of these effects towards the end. We’ve seen some of these effects before, although those were in lenses that were mechanically controlled instead.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Project Censored ☛ Access Emergency: Reproductive Health Education and Independent Media

    In the first part of the program Eleanor sits down with Martha Dimitratou, founder and Executive Director of Repro Uncensored to talk about the battles to bring reproductive health and sexual education information to the people in a time of escalating digital and indeed analog censorship. Martha talks about how incorrect information is often platformed while science-backed and nuanced information is stifled – and what this means for the physical, mental, and emotional health of those seeking reproductive health information and access. She also outlines tactics to sidestep this censorship, online and off. Next up, Mickey sits down with Norman Stockwell, publisher of The Progressive magazine and indie media veteran to talk about the current state of the media, some history of independent media and why that matters, the importance of becoming the media ourselves, and framing the news outside of the 24/7 extractive cycle. Norm and Mickey also dig into the nuance of attacks on corporate media, and why a truly free press means more, not fewer voices.

  • Rlang ☛ CDCPLACES 1.2.0

    I’m happy to announce the release of CDCPLACES 1.2.0. This package lets you query the CDC’s Population Level Analysis and Community Estimates (PLACES) API directly from R, returning health measure estimates for counties, census tracts, ZCTAs, and—new in this release—places (cities, towns, and census-designated places).

• Proprietary

  • Ish Sookun ☛ How to Bring Your Own IP to Google Cloud Platform?

    Learn how to bring your AFRINIC-allocated IP addresses to Google Cloud Platform using BYOIP. This guide covers the process from ROA configuration to deploying addresses on Compute Engine, with practical insights for organizations in Mauritius and Africa using the South Africa (Johannesburg) region.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ UK targets all AI chatbots after Grok uproar

      The UK government on Monday said providers of AI chatbots will be held responsible for preventing their technology from generating illegal or harmful content.

      The move follows international backlash against Grok, after the chatbot was found to allow users to create and share sexualized fake images of women and children.

    • Futurism ☛ Large Area of Chicago Bans Delivery Robots After Resident Outcry

      Late in 2025, a whole fleet of delivery robots descended on Chicago, where they clogged sidewalks, injured residents, and prompted a community campaign to ban them from the streets. In at least one major Chicago neighborhood, residents succeeded.

    • Block Club Chicago ☛ Logan Square, Wicker Park Neighbors Say No To More Delivery Robots

      Since then, almost 500 1st Ward residents replied to an online survey distributed by La Spata’s office, with almost all of the respondents opposing the expansion. More than 83 percent said they “strongly disagreed” that the robots should be allowed to operate across the ward, according to numbers provided by La Spata.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ US Government Deploys Elon Musk's Grok as Nutrition Bot, Where It Immediately Gives Advice for Rectal Use of Vegetables

      But alas: the site’s message now says to “use AI” and dropped mentioning Grok by name, after NextGov contacted the administration about the bot’s placement. A White House official confirmed to the outlet that the underlying chatbot was still Musk’s, noting that it was an “approved government tool.”

    • Numeric Citizen ☛ We're Making a Big Mistake

      I believe that IT workers who are also passionate about gen AI are making a major misjudgment. We wrongly assume that the advances we observe in our field, such as the autonomous or semi-autonomous development of applications, also translate to sectors like medicine or law. This is a false generalization.

    • Martin Alderson ☛ Anthropic's 500 vulns are the tip of the iceberg - Martin Alderson

      It was clear to me that you could run an agent to find vulnerabilities like this automatically in a VM. Clone a git repo (based on some heuristics of popularity and last commit), ask it to set it up, find exploits, save them, discard VM and continue ad infinitum.

      I suspect within days you could get dozens if not hundreds of RCE exploits. You could then have another agent scan and exploit as many servers as possible.

      This flip in economics changes how we think about information security. When it used to "cost" time to find these bugs it simply wasn't worth infosec (either white, grey or blackhat) people spending time and effort to find vulnerabilities in the long tail, for the most part.

    • Karl Bode ☛ The Problem With AI Is Shitty Human Beings

      The problem with AI isn't going to be Skynet. It's going to be amoral extraction class assholes applying half-cooked automation at scale onto deeply broken sectors in exploitative ways in a country too corrupt to have functioning regulators.

    • Johan Halse ☛ The Sideprocalypse

      There's a wonderful Swedish proverb called "elda för kråkorna" (building a fire for the crows) that evokes the futility of someone lighting a nice warm fire indoors and then throwing the doors wide open, inviting the snow and sleet. Are you one of the thousands of developers with dreams of building a little SaaS on the side? Something you've been thinking about for a while, hacking away at on evenings and weekends, dreaming of the day you can have a couple of hundred paying customers giving you $19.99 a month?

      Sorry to be the bringer of bad news, but that dream's dead. Doornail. Dodo. Parrot.

      Every minute you put into that thing, be it your own time or your LLM agent's, is a minute for the crows. Imagine that beautiful but fragile little idea of yours curled up in a freshly-dug pit in your backyard, Claude and Gemini standing over it, chuckling and high-fiving each other.

    • Jeff Geerling ☛ AI is destroying Open Source, and it's not even good yet

      Over the weekend Ars Technica retracted an article because the AI a writer used hallucinated quotes from an open source library maintainer.

      The irony here is the maintainer in question, Scott Shambaugh, was harassed by someone's AI agent over not merging it's AI slop code.

      It's likely the bot was running through someone's local 'agentic AI' instance (likely using OpenClaw). The guy who built OpenClaw was just hired by OpenAI to "work on bringing agents to everyone." You'll have to forgive me if I'm not enthusastic about that.

    • Facundo Olano ☛ -​-dangerously-skip-reading-code

      If there’s an organizational mandate to leverage LLMs to minimize the time spent coding, then that’s a new constraint we can work with. We can figure out what good engineering looks like in that context. We can stop reading LLM-generated code just like we don’t read assembly, or bytecode, or transpiled JavaScript; our high-level language source would now be another form of machine code.

    • Third Door Media LLC ☛ Google Ads no longer runs on keywords. It runs on intent.

      But Google’s auction no longer works that way.

      Search now behaves more like a conversation than a lookup. In AI Mode, users ask follow-up questions and refine what they’re trying to solve. AI Overviews reason through an answer first, then determine which ads support that answer.

      In Google Ads, the auction isn’t triggered by a keyword anymore – it’s triggered by inferred intent.

    • Dan MacKinlay ☛ Evolution strategies for neural nets

      A nature-inspired ensemble strategy for training neural nets that uses evolution-like approaches to training NNs, even though we usually assume that scale can only be achieved via backprop.

    • Chuck Grimmett ☛ On using AI in blogging

      AI might be an extension of that. I don’t see AI composition as fundamentally different from ghostwriting. There is an awful lot of handwringing about AI-generated writing, but ghostwriting is not controversial in the same way, and the end result is the same: someone else wrote it.

    • SusamPal ☛ Deep Blue: Chess vs Programming

      So I think the big adjustment software developers have to make is this: The craft will still exist and we will still enjoy doing it but the credit and value will increasingly go to those who define problems well, connect systems, make good product decisions and make technology useful in messy real-world situations. It has already been this way for a while and will only become more so as time goes by.

    • Ars Technica ☛ Editor’s Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations - Ars Technica

      On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards. Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said.

  • Social Control Media

    • BIA Net ☛ Turkey remands 17 adult content creators for 'laundering OnlyFans income'

      While distriburiting explicit material is illegal in Turkey, this investigation marks the first time authorities have deemed income from adult content illicit and treated investments made with that income as money laundering.

    • Manton Reece ☛ FediForum position paper

      On March 2nd, FediForum is hosting a special Growing the Open Social Web workshop. As part of registration, attendees are encouraged to submit a position paper with ideas for growing the social web.

      I have a very specific proposal: we should move away from email-like user handles on the fediverse. This style of user identity has three problems: [...]

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ Social media’s tobacco moment

      “These companies didn’t want users, they wanted addicts.” The plaintiffs’ attorney set the tone from the outset. Last week, a series of landmark trials, expected to set legal precedent in the United States, opened in a Los Angeles courtroom. In the dock: Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat. The four social platforms are being sued by around a dozen plaintiffs who accuse them of deliberately designing their products to be addictive, at the expense of children’s mental health.

      For these companies, the stakes go far beyond the potentially massive damages they could be ordered to pay. A loss would set a precedent, opening the door to similar rulings in thousands of other pending cases and encouraging new lawsuits. It would also weaken their position ahead of a major legal showdown scheduled for this summer, when several U.S. states plan to seek sweeping changes to how these apps operate.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The United Kingdom ☛ PM: “No platform gets a free pass”: Government takes action to keep children safe online - GOV.UK

      The consultation will also confront the full range of risks children face online. This includes examining restrictions on children’s use of AI chatbots, as well as options to age restrict or limit children’s VPN use where it undermines safety protections and changing the age of digital consent. We will also strengthen protections for families facing the most devastating circumstances, by ensuring that vital data following a child’s death is preserved before it can be deleted, except in cases where online activity is clearly not relevant to the death.

      This marks a clear shift in how the UK approaches child online safety, meaning the UK can continue to be a world leader in keeping children safe online.

    • Deseret Media ☛ Lawyer on doorbell cams: 'We are participating in our own surveillance'

      "We are participating in our own surveillance, through convenience, through security," Clayton Simms said during an interview with KSL. "There's good purposes, but there could also be bad purposes, and you lose your privacy, you lose your, sort of, freedom, and you feel like you're always being monitored."

    • La Quadature Du Net ☛ Censorship and surveillance : a legislative overload in the french parliament.

      Contrary to the main narrative, french parliamentarians are not only talking about the budget. Every year, they also revisit a familiar theme: an authoritarian drift, marked by increased security, surveillance, and censorship. After several months of relative inactivity, and with upcoming municipal elections in which these issues may carry political weight, the number of debated security-oriented bills is rising. This provides an opportunity to take stock of the issues currently under discussion in the French Parliament.

      It is no secret that decisions taken in the French Parliament can have a global impact, particularly within the EU, where countries often look to one another for precedent when justifying controversial legislation.

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Online harms: Millions could be forced to use unregulated age verification

      Going through an age verification process often involves sending irreversible biometric identifiers into global commercial data ecosystems. There are already examples of platforms using the additional data gained from these processes to target people with harmful online advertising.

      The measures announced, including age gating VPNs, AI Chat bots, or features such as infinitive scrolling, would compel millions more people to hand their sensitive bio-metric data over to big tech.

      It is platforms, not users, that decide which age verification providers are use. Many users may be unaware of the investors and financial networks behind the identity infrastructure now being embedded into everyday internet use, and the links some of those networks have to wider surveillance, defence, and intelligence ecosystems.

    • The Gray Zone ☛ Apple buys Israeli ‘pre-speech’ tech firm implicated in Gaza genocide - The Grayzone

      Tech giant Apple has quietly paid nearly $2 billion for a “pre-speech” tech company whose employees helped Israel commit genocide in Gaza.

      In the second-biggest deal in its history, Apple paid this money for a company that doesn’t have a product, doesn’t have any revenues and whose website is a single page containing 15 words.

    • Hackaday ☛ What The FDA’s 2026 Wellness Device Update Means For Wearables

      Another major aspect with these general wellness devices is what happens to the data that they generate. While not medical information, it does provide health information about a person that e.g. a marketing company would kill for to obtain. This privacy issue is unresolved in the US market, while other countries prescribe strict requirements about such data handling.

      Effectively, this leaves the designers of wearables relatively free to do whatever they want, as long as they do not claim that the medical data being produced from any sensors is medical information. How this data is being handled is strictly regulated in most markets, except for the US, which is quite worrying and something you should definitely be aware of.

    • Ava ☛ the tech-enabled surveillance of children

      This is nuts! This is not normal. This is not how I grew up and this is not how those parents have grown up either. They know it is absolutely possible to do without, just like it has always been pre-2015, but they choose this. Parents' paranoia is allowed to completely overrule the child's own right to privacy, completely unchecked. Emotions run high with anything child-related, so anything goes that could potentially even help the safety of a child a little. The trade-offs are ignored.

  • Confidentiality

    • Feld ☛ WolfSSL Doesn't Suck

      WolfSSL is extremely configurable. Maybe even too configurable for its own good. That is probably the nature of things when you are also targeting very tiny embedded environments and want them to have a modern crypto library. I've already run into other things before, like needing WOLFSSL_GETRANDOM so it works in a chroot where there is no /dev. WolfSSL might very well be the Lego of TLS libraries, and clearly I'm just not old enough (or smart enough) to play with a set that has this many pieces.

      Perhaps WolfSSL really is the OpenSSL replacement we need. Just be aware that it's not as "drop-in" of a replacement as you'd think. You still need to know how to hold it right.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Spectator AU ☛ Why Shahid Butt might win in Birmingham | The Spectator Australia

    Two British-Indian friends, who refuse to give their name for fear of backlash, are confident he’ll win. ‘Just look at the demographics,’ says one. ‘People will listen to him because he’s Muslim and they’ll just vote for him regardless of which party he belongs to.’

  • The Conversation ☛ Is social media addictive? How it keeps you clicking and the harms it can cause

    But the social media sands may slowly be shifting. A test-case jury trial in Los Angeles is accusing big tech companies of creating “addiction machines”. While TikTok and Snapchat have already settled with the 20-year-old plaintiff, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is due to give evidence in the courtroom this week.

    The European Commission recently issued a preliminary ruling against TikTok, stating that the app’s design – with features such as infinite scroll and autoplay – breaches the EU Digital Services Act. One industry expert told the BBC that the problem is “no longer just about toxic content, it’s about toxic design”.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Turning Our Back on Clean Energy

    It has been a brutal winter in much of the United States. Weather is a chaotic system in which extreme events are always happening somewhere. But as I am sure you have noticed, extreme weather events — catastrophic storms and flooding, punishing droughts, and yes, extreme cold snaps — are becoming more common as a result of climate change.

    For climate change is not just continuing: it’s accelerating. Multiple estimates find that 2025 was one of the warmest years on record for the planet, exceeded only by 2024 and 2023. Indeed, Berkeley Earth reports that “The warming spike observed in 2023 to 2025 has been extreme and suggests an acceleration in the rate of Earth’s warming.”

  • Neritam ☛ 500 Richest People Gained Record $2.2 Trillion in 2025

    The richest 500 individuals in the world added a record $2.2tn to their wealth in 2025, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with just eight billionaires accounting for a quarter of the gains.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Day One - by Mike Brock - Notes From The Circus

    And now it is Day One. Not because the crisis is over. The crisis is not over. But because the diagnostic work is complete, and what remains cannot be accomplished with a blade. What remains requires a compass. What remains requires building. And building begins the way it always begins: by standing somewhere, looking toward what does not yet exist, and taking the first step.

  • Site36 ☛ Again many neo-Nazis at "Day of Honour": Budapest police suppress anti-fascist protest and record personal details

    The march was officially declared non-political. Nevertheless, participants posed with banners, Hitler salutes and deactivated firearms. Wreaths were laid at the graves of deceased fascists. The police also took no action against a “hiking pass” in which participants receive a stamp bearing Nazi symbols.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Grand jury refuses to indict lawmakers Trump wanted dead

    Grand juries almost never refuse to indict — federal prosecutors got indictments in 99.997% of cases in the most recent data — making the rejection a stinging rebuke of the entire effort, reports The Washington Post.

  • NPR ☛ An Islamist party becomes Bangladesh's main opposition for the first time

    Jamaat-e-Islami's 11-party alliance won 77 of 300 seats in last week's polls, according to final results announced by the country's election commission on Sunday. Of those, Jamaat won 68, a record high. It had never before won more than 18 seats. The student-led National Citizen Party (NCP) won six and the remainder went to minor parties.

  • The Business Standard ☛ From marginal force to opposition party: The rise of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami | The Business Standard

    In the 13th national parliamentary elections, Jamaat polled around 30-35% of the vote in roughly 225 constituencies it contested – a dramatic leap from its long-standing 5-10% vote share

  • The Hindu ☛ Bangladesh election: BNP accuses Jamaat-e-Islami of trying to buy votes hours before polling

    Hours before polling, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party on Wednesday (February 11, 2026) accused the largest Islamist Party Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) of attempting to sabotage the election process by using money power.

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ "But Russians are resisting" – Meet Putin’s exiled opponents in Europe

    In Europe there is a vast, diverse and fragmented galaxy of Russians who oppose Putin’s policies and the war in Ukraine. From Paris to Berlin, from Vienna to Munich, a panorama of those keeping Russian civil society alive.

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • YLE ☛ 'Drawing lessons from Ukraine', Finland's 112 app could get airborne threat alerts

      The app's development project, which is scheduled to continue until the end of 2027, has received funding from the EU's 'Technical Assistance for Disaster Risk Management' funding instrument.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Squalor of the Epstein Class

    The Epstein Class. Not just the people who cavorted with Jeffrey Epstein or the subset who abused young girls. It’s an interconnected world of hugely rich, prominent, entitled, smug, powerful, self-important (mostly) men. Trump is honorary chairman.

    Trump is still sitting on two and a half million files that he and Pam Bondi won’t release. Why? Presumably because they implicate Trump and even more of the Epstein class.

    The files that have been released so far don’t paint a pretty picture.

  • New York Times ☛ Epstein’s Ties With Academics Show the Seedy Side of College Fund-Raising

    Some schools have spent years trying to distance themselves from Mr. Epstein, donating his contributions and condemning his crimes. But recent document releases from the Justice Department have prompted new recriminations and regrets.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump's Government Blows Off Epstein Scandal. Other Nations Aren't

    It should be one of the most consequential sex and crime scandals in the history of the United States, but many of those tied to Epstein are skating by with little in the way of consequence. President Donald Trump — a longtime friend of Epstein’s whose name allegedly appears in the files over a million times — and other figures working within or tied to his administration seem to not only hang above the fray, but enjoy the protection of the American justice system.

• Environment

  • Futurism ☛ Site of Elementary School Was Sprayed With Radioactive Fracking Waste, Worker Warns

    Nearly 500 elementary school children in Texas play on fields where a whistleblower says he once spread tons of radioactive fracking waste — a noxious hell-brew he believes melted the bones in his own jaw.

    Lee Oldham is a 52-year-old former waste disposal worker from Cleburne, Texas, on the southern outskirts of Dallas-Fort Worth. In an interview with Texas-based publication the Barbed Wire, Oldham detailed how he went from waste handler to corporate whistleblower, and the horrifying apathy of state politicians that led him there.

  • Tennessee Lookout ☛ 'A different set of rules': Thermal drone footage shows Musk's AI power plant flouts clean air rules

    However, thermal images captured by Floodlight — and analyzed by multiple experts — show more than a dozen unpermitted turbines still spewing pollutants at the plant nearly two weeks after the EPA’s recent ruling.

    “That is a violation of the law,” said Bruce Buckheit, a former EPA air enforcement chief, after reviewing Floodlight’s images and EPA regulations.

  • Overpopulation

    • Omicron Limited ☛ As a Colorado River deadline passes, reservoirs keep declining

      The river provides for about 35 million people and 5 million acres of farmland, from the Rocky Mountains to northern Mexico. California uses more water than any other state but has cut back substantially in recent years.

      Since 2000, relentless drought intensified by climate change has sapped the river's flow and left reservoirs depleted. This winter's record warmth and lack of storms has left the Rockies with very little snow.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Michael Tsai ☛ OpenClaw Developer Joins OpenAI

    Steinberger discusses OpenClaw and acquisition offers from OpenAI and Meta in an interview with Lex Fridman. See also: Marcus Schuler.

  • Kevin McDonald ☛ Shell Log: Namaste

    We had a critical hotfix to deploy. The bug was losing the company $10k a minute. I just needed to run the deployment script. Unfortunately, the Sysadmin team had just rolled out the new mandatory “Mental Health & Wellness” kernel module.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Michigan News ☛ See which books in Ann Arbor schools are flagged as ‘inappropriate’ by out-of-state group

    The California-based organization has compiled a master list of 1,200 books it’s calling on school districts to remove, searching for 300 of those titles so far. They’re not trying to universally ban the impacted books from sale, England said previously, but rather trying to keep material they believe sexualizes its subject matter out of kids’ hands.

  • Morning Star News ☛ Muslim Extremists Beat Two Pastors in Eastern Uganda

    Pastor John Michael Okoel and Assistant Pastor Abraham Omoding of New Life Church in Pallisa, about 200 kilometers (120 miles) northeast of Kampala, were returning home from an all-night prayer meeting at 4 a.m. on Jan. 30 when five masked men dressed in Islamic attire stopped them at Osupa Swamp along the Pallisa-Mbale Highway, Pastor Okoel said.

    The attackers were armed with sticks and knives when they confronted the pastors, accusing them of blasphemy and attempting to convert Muslims, he said.

  • IranWire ☛ Iranian Teachers Union: More Than 160 Children Were Killed During The Protests

    The Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations is one of Iran’s most organized and influential civil society groups. With direct links to schools and families across the country, it is often a more reliable source on student casualties than official government channels, which frequently withhold or obscure such information.

  • Richard Brežák ☛ disko-zfs: Declaratively Managing ZFS Datasets

    If you're at least somewhat like me, then you use ZFS almost religiously. Every server, every laptop, every appliance (excluding those that really could not run ZFS due to memory constraints or fragile flash storage) runs ZFS. You run ZFS even if you don't use mirrors, stripes, or any kind of special vdevs. You run ZFS because you want to, because having snapshots, datasets and compression makes the device feel familiar and welcoming. If that's at least somewhat you, you will appreciate the tool I have for you in store today.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russia Jails Journalist Kotrikadze, Businessman Chichvarkin in Absentia Over ‘War Fakes’ - The Moscow Times

    Prosecutors accused Kotrikadze, news director and anchor of the exiled broadcaster TV Rain, of posting about alleged war crimes committed by Russian troops in Ukraine on her personal Telegram channel in the spring of 2022.

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ Journalism Is Dead. Long Live Journalism

    Local news has withered. As a 2020 editorial put it, "In the last 15 years...more than a quarter of the country’s newspapers have closed and 1,800 communities that had a local news outlet in 2004 were left without any at the beginning of 2020. Without local newsrooms, the basic work of reporting — gathering accurate information and demanding transparency and accountability from local governments and powerful business interests — vanishes. This loss directly imperils a functioning democracy, which requires an informed citizenry." When no one reports on local corruption, there's no public pressure to stop it.

  • Chris Amico ☛ What if a news organization optimized for social capital?

    Journalism is great at creating learned helplessness. We are great at telling you what went wrong, and that’s an important part of what we do, but it doesn’t have to all of what we do.

    This isn’t just a news problem. Putnam describes how civic organizations have largely reshaped and professionalized themselves to turn members into subscribers who send money to lobbyists. Finding solutions is someone else’s problem: “We remain, in short, reasonably well-informed spectators of public affairs, but many fewer of us actually partake in the game.”

    What can news organizations do? The first step, I think, is acknowledging that giving our audience something to do is part of our job.

  • Bix Frankonis ☛ Writing Is Not Optional For Journalism

    Anyone who thinks they want to be a reporter but doesn‘t want the satisfaction of knowing they wrote a thing themselves should go fuck themselves instead. Any editor who encourages reporters to eschew the actual act of writing should be fired and never let back in the door of any news outlet ever again.

    Look, it’s absolutely true that the act of writing can truly, deeply, aggravatingly, dysregulatingly suck but there is simply no substitute for turning your reporting notes and experiences into a single, structured thing that helps other people know something about their world. That’s something that you have to do, and doing so not only is an intrinsic value but literally is part of how you get better, over time, at many (if not all) of the other steps involved in reporting.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Local DK ☛ Uber confirms expansion of food delivery platform to Denmark

    Uber Eats is to begin operating in Denmark this year after the company announced an expansion to seven countries in Europe on Monday.

  • New York Times ☛ Judge Orders Trump Administration to Restore Displays About Slavery at Washington’s House

    In a 40-page opinion, Judge Cynthia M. Rufe granted a preliminary injunction to the City of Philadelphia, which had sued the Interior Department and the National Park Service over their decision to remove the displays. The order means the government must put the materials back up while the underlying lawsuit proceeds in court.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Who Wants to Rent a Human?

    Selling and buying labor. There’s plenty to worry about in this arrangement as such, but what makes this particular case exceptional? How is this problem different from, say, contract work organized through a pinup board or a newspaper advertisement? The loudest five-bell alarm seems to be that the robot overlords are at the gate. This is, to be sure, at least worth considering and worrying about in the long run. And insofar as this is another step down the sullied primrose path toward synthetic Leviathan, it is a risk. But that’s, at worst, a long-future problem. The robot uprising isn’t at hand. The effects within and upon the current dynamic of labor and capital, however? That’s a different matter.

    Platforms that facilitate the hiring of cheapened human labor — the sort that feeds and sustains the “gig economy” and the culture of the side hustle — are a force multiplier on existing forms of exploitation and a bridge to continue the dynamic as technologies evolve. AI has been billed at once as a great liberator and a risk to employment, blue and white collar alike. What platforms like Rent A Human make clear is that there will always, however astonishing each new tech iteration, be space for those who own and control the means of production and capital, and those who are moved around the board by them like chess pieces — pawns, specifically.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ At NYC’s Richest Hospital, 4,200 Nurses Are Still on Strike

    About 10,500 other nurses are starting to return to work today, ending the strike at three Manhattan hospitals run by Mt Sinai and at Montefiore Medical Center facilities in the Bronx. Those nurses overwhelmingly voted to approve contracts that maintained staffing ratio language, beat back additional health care costs, and added some protection from workplace violence and misuse of artificial intelligence.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Goodbye and Good luck, David Brooks - Robert Reich

    When the gains from growth go to the top — as they’ve increasingly been doing over the last 40 years — the middle class loses the purchasing power necessary to keep the economy moving forward. Hence the sputtering stagflation we’ve endured for decades.

    Few jobs and slow growth hit the poor especially hard, because they’re the first to be fired, last to be hired, and most likely to bear the brunt of stagnant wages and declining benefits.

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ Nick Fuentes Wants Women in “Gulags.” Here’s Why That Matters.

    While we are not facing the imminent mass detention of women, this escalating language feels dangerous in our increasingly volatile political climate. So how seriously should we take Fuentes right now? And what does rhetoric like this reveal about the broader trajectory of the movement he’s trying to shape?

    To think through these dynamics, I spoke with my friend Shane Burley, author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It and Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism.

  • The Next Move ☛ Board of Peace, Global Grift?

    For instance, governments like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are both listed as charter members of the new Board of Peace. It’s difficult to overstate just how dedicated both nations have been to laundering their own reputations in recent years, from hiring legions of Western consultants and public relations specialists to bankrolling think tanks and universities. The Gulf monarchies have even transformed the broader sports industry into their own personal playthings, hosting major tournaments to cover for atrocious human rights records.

    The UAE and Saudi Arabia have been at the center of numerous clandestine payment schemes bankrolling Trump and his allies—setting up new Trump resorts and real estate investments and pioneering the use of crypto to directly benefit the sitting American president. All of this, while Saudi Arabia’s Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) oversees one of the most tyrannical regimes in the world. The UAE’s Muhammad bin Zayed (MBZ), for his part, is helping Sudanese forces commit genocide.

  • Dhaka Tribune ☛ 'Jamaat bars women from top post on Islamic principles'

    Speaking to journalists at the Election Commission (EC) premises, Siddika said Jamaat-e-Islami is an organisation guided by Islamic ideals and therefore abides by what it interprets as Quranic directives.

  • Trinity Mirror North East ☛ Brave members of the public stopped man's frenzied attack on ex wife in Newcastle street

    The victim, who has since returned to Saudi Arabia, was left with cuts to her hand and injuries to her head. She was left feeling unsafe and fearing he will kill her.

  • Morning Star News ☛ Legislation to Combat Child Marriages Signed in Punjab, Pakistan

    Gov. Saleem Haider Khan signed the Punjab Child Marriage Restraint Ordinance 2026 into effect under Article 128(1) of the Constitution, as the provincial assembly is not currently in session. The ordinance takes immediate effect across the country’s most populous province, home to more than 120 million people, including a significant Christian minority.

  • Afghanistan International ☛ Taliban Flog Nine, Including Three Women, In Parwan & Uruzgan

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ Sony Develops AI Detection Tool for Music, Film, Gaming, & More

    Per the mentioned report, the as-yet-unnamed technology can determine the contribution percentages of human creators’ works within AI generations. However – and this is where questions arise – if an “AI developer agrees to cooperate,” the program will make its training-percentage calculations based on the underlying data.

    What if a developer refuses to cooperate? Well, as described by Nikkei, the tool would then settle for estimating “the original work by comparing AI-generated music with existing music.”

  • Press Gazette ☛ Google promises 'more focused deals' as FT joins AI pilot

    Allowing publishers to opt out of AI Overviews without affecting search is a “huge engineering project”, a Google boss told publishers last week. [Wednesday 11th]

    Sulina Connal, Google’s managing director leading news and books partnerships in Europe, also set out how the tech giant is responding to publisher feedback and said it is planning to do “more focused deals” following its first AI-related news provider payments announced in December.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Amazon Wins $6 Million in Damages Against Pirated DVD Stores, Plus Domain Takeovers

    More than two years ago, Amazon sued a network of websites that sold pirated DVDs of Prime Video exclusives such as The Rings of Power and The Boys. The defendants, believed to be based in China, never showed up in court. This week, a California federal judge awarded Amazon $6 million in damages and granted a broad domain transfer request, targeting registrars and registries.