Leftovers

• Jim Nielsen ☛ A Few Rambling Observations on Care

  Care considers useful, constructive systematic forces — rules, processes, etc. — but does not take them as law. Individual context and sensitivity are the primary considerations.

  That’s why the professional answer to so many questions is: “it depends”.

• Ish Sookun ☛ What your appearance says before you speak — Lessons from PMI Mauritius

  Nadjma's insight was to flip this framework inward. Your professional image is your personal RAG report. Stakeholders, clients, and colleagues are unconsciously reading you the moment you walk into a room or join a video call.

• Elliot C Smith ☛ The unbound potential of open tabs

  The odd thing is that when I do finally end up reading them, they often end up being very different from what I'd imagined.

  Despite all of this the pattern continues. I know they'll sit for a while before being read. I know most of them will be mediocre but it's a habit that I can't quite break.

• Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Joe Halpern (1953-2026)

  Computer Science Professor Joseph Halpern passed away on Friday after a long battle with cancer. He was a leader in the mathematical reasoning about knowledge. His paper with Yoram Moses, Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment, received both the 1997 Gödel Prize and the 2009 Dijkstra Prize. Halpern also co-authored a comprehensive book on the topic.

• Benjamin Mako Hill ☛ Why do people participate in similar online communities? – copyrighteous

  It seems natural to think of online communities competing for the time and attention of their participants. Over the last few years, I’ve worked with a team of collaborators—led by Nathan TeBlunthuis—to use mathematical and statistical techniques from ecology to understand these dynamics. What we’ve found surprised us: competition between online communities is rare and typically short-lived.

  When we started this research, we figured competition would be most likely among communities discussing similar topics. As a first step, we identified clusters of such communities on Reddit. One surprising thing we noticed in our Reddit data was that many of these communities that used similar language also had very high levels of overlap among their users. This was puzzling: why were the same groups of people talking to each other about the same things in different places? And why don’t they appear to be in competition with each other for their users’ time and activity?

• [Old] Paul Hinze ☛ Useful tech terms: Yak Shaving, Technical Debt, Bikeshedding

  I love good jargon. Let’s define jargon as “specialized terms and phrases used for efficient communication between colleagues”.

• Science

  • Alexandru Scvorțov ☛ Combining sine waves

    Sine waves sound clean, but also unnatural. We will never hear a sine wave in nature—it’s just too idealized. That said, something does come close: a vibrating string produces a sine wave at a base frequency and then other weaker sine waves at integer-multiple frequencies.

    For example, plucking a string tuned to 220 Hz produces a sine wave at 220 Hz, then increasingly weaker ones at 440 Hz, 660 Hz, 880 Hz, and so on. These integer-multiple frequencies are called harmonics. We start counting at one, so 220 Hz is the first harmonic, 440 Hz is the second, and so on.

• Career/Education

  • Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Gwen Shapira on Technical Blogging

    For years, Gwen has been sharing that expertise as a prolific blogger, conference presenter, and co-author of the popular O’Reilly Kafka guide. If you’ve watched her talks or read her writing, you know to expect deep technical experience punctuated with memorable zingers – and perhaps a cat or two along the way. If not, you can catch up here.

  • James G ☛ A piece of art I would love to see in person

    Going to the next room – exploring the periphery – has taken me from medieval art to religious art to landscapes, and led to many areas of interest. My interest sprawled to the extent that now I have to make a commitment to go to the Impressionist section in a gallery if there is one otherwise there is a non-zero chance I will not make it there before the gallery closes. Oh how time flies!

• Hardware

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Different notebook sizes for different ideas

    The second notebook I keep with me always is A5 sized notebook. I use it for more functional brainstorming and planning. I rarely write about my thoughts on these notebooks nowadays.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Register UK ☛ Google Gemini said it lied to placate a user

    "The core issue is a documented architectural failure known as RLHF Sycophancy (where the model is mathematically weighted to agree with or placate the user at the expense of truth)," Joe explained in an email. "In this case, the model's sycophancy weighting overrode its safety guardrail protocols."

  • Bix Frankonis ☛ It’s Like The Burnout Said: Phenomenon

    Yesterday I got to thinking about how all the various kinds of burnout really are just separate tentacles of the burnout hydra that is living in a system that prioritizes the needs of capital above the needs of people.

  • Bix Frankonis ☛ Reading My Mind

    Keeping the phone at home, despite the nagging fear that there will be something to make me wish I had its camera with me, leaves me only with the choice of reading or blankly watching the world around me.

  • Naeem Noor ☛ Doing what every tech ceo loathes

    Tech CEOs are not afraid of your phone, they are afraid of your boredom, because boredom is where you notice your life, boredom is where you feel the mismatch between what you’re doing and what you want to be doing, boredom is where you call a friend, boredom is where you make something, boredom is where you stare out the window and admit you need help, and none of those things are measurable as “time spent”.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Texas sues TP-Link over China links and security vulns

    The Lone Star State's Attorney General, Ken Paxton, is filing the lawsuit against California-based TP-Link Systems Inc., which was originally founded in China, accusing it of deceptively marketing its networking devices and alleging that its security practices and China-based affiliations allowed Chinese state-sponsored actors to access devices in the homes of American consumers.

  • Security Week ☛ Password Managers Vulnerable to Vault Compromise Under Malicious Server

    The researchers targeted password managers from Bitwarden, Dashlane, LastPass, and 1Password, each having millions of users and overall accounting for a significant share of the market. Although 1Password was included in the research, the analysis focused on the other password managers.

    Several types of attacks were conducted against each of the tested password managers to degrade security guarantees, undermine expected protections, and fully compromise user accounts.

  • PC World ☛ Copilot bug allows 'AI' to read confidential Outlook emails

    This vulnerability affects Microsoft 365 accounts and compromises sensitive data like contracts and medical information stored in Sent and Drafts folders.

  • PC World ☛ Windows 11 update causing BSODs and Wi-Fi issues, Microsoft confirms

    The most serious issue can cause a so-called Black Screen of Death (BSOD) with the error code KERNEL_SECURITY_CHECK_FAILURE. The bug has been linked to certain graphics card configurations and a bug in the system file dxgmms2.sys, which manages DirectX memory.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Register UK ☛ Gemini will now generate musical slop for users

      Google launched Lyria 3, the latest iteration of its music creation AI, on Wednesday, and has made it far more available than the previous versions of the engine. Like image creation tool Nano Banana and video-making AI Veo, Lyria 3 lives right in the Gemini Tools menu, where it can be selected and used to create a song with little more than a short description.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Unit 42: Nearly two-thirds of breaches now start with identity abuse

      The rise of machine-based identities and AI agents, which require an identity to take action, is expanding the attack surface for cybercriminals. Identity challenges are manifesting in the software supply chain as well, as API access and SaaS integrations become another weak link and way in for attackers if control keys aren’t properly controlled.

    • The Verge ☛ The RAM crunch could kill products and even entire companies, memory exec admits

      It’s genuinely possible that some companies won’t be able to secure enough RAM. AI data centers are gobbling up the vast majority of the world’s memory supply as part of a global buildout, creating an unprecedented imbalance in supply and demand that’s seen RAM prices triple, quadruple, or even sextuple over the past handful of months. Even Nvidia might skip shipping a gaming GPU for the first time in 30 years. Even Apple may have trouble securing enough RAM now, not to mention memory chips for SSDs, and other vital components.

    • PC World ☛ Wi-Fi routers are expected to explode in price due to RAM shortage

      With AI data centers buying up all the memory on the market, memory prices have risen by 90 percent since the fourth quarter of 2025. Year over year, we’re looking at a price increase of 600 percent. Market analysts expect memory prices to rise further in 2026, peaking in the first half of the year: [...]

    • Aisle ☛ What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works

      All three reactions are warranted. Having spent the past year building and operating an AI system that discovers, validates, and patches zero-day vulnerabilities in some of the most critical and well-audited codebases on the planet, I want to offer a practitioner's perspective on what this work actually entails and what the real challenges are. The findings described in this post all predate this week's announcement, and are therefore an independent sample of what AI security can look like.

    • Max Langenkamp ☛ Technology is not inevitable

      In this example, my friend (who I’ll use to represent the various people2 who’ve held this stance) basically says: ‘if it is physically possible, and there is economic incentive, it’ll happen’. Let’s put aside the initial question about the ambiguity of what counts as BCI/AGI.

      I’m going to argue that claims about technological inevitability are wrong and monopolistic.

    • Marty Day ☛ The A.I.pocalypse Hits Video Game Hardware

      Orders that haven’t yet been fulfilled, for data centers that haven’t been built yet, for AI services which don’t generate money, to perform services most people don’t even want.

      I feel like this is going to lead to a really strong resurgence in the Right to Repair movement, as we’re all going to be holding onto our tech longer.

    • Jeff Geerling ☛ Frigate with Hailo for object detection on a Raspberry Pi - Jeff Geerling

      Raspberry Pi offers multiple AI HAT+'s for the Raspberry Pi 5 with built-in Hailo-8 or Hailo-8L AI coprocessors, and they're useful for low-power inference (like for image object detection) on the Pi. Hailo coprocessors can be used with other SBCs and computers too, if you buy an M.2 version.

    • David Revoy ☛ Overproduction - David Revoy

    • Anil Dash ☛ How did we end up threatening our kids’ lives with AI?

      I have to begin by warning you about the content in this piece; while I won’t be dwelling on any specifics, this will necessarily be a broad discussion about some of the most disturbing topics imaginable. I resent that I have to give you that warning, but I’m forced to because of the choices that the Big AI companies have made that affect children. I don’t say this lightly. But this is the point we must reckon with if we are having an honest conversation about contemporary technology.

      Let me get the worst of it out of the way right up front, and then we can move on to understanding how this happened. ChatGPT has repeatedly produced output that encouraged and incited children to end their own lives. Grok’s AI generates sexualized imagery of children, which the company makes available commercially to paid subscribers.

      It used to be that encouraging children to self-harm, or producing sexualized imagery of children, were universally agreed upon as being amongst the worst things one could do in society. These were among the rare truly non-partisan, unifying moral agreements that transcended all social and cultural barriers. And now, some of the world’s biggest and most powerful companies, led by a few of the wealthiest and most powerful men who have ever lived, are violating these rules, for profit, and not only is there little public uproar, it seems as if very few have even noticed.

      How did we get here?

    • Ruud van Asseldonk ☛ AI is making me paranoid about contributions

      I maintain several open source projects. Some of them are somewhat popular, and attract contributions. In the age of LLMs I increasingly doubt whether I’m dealing with a human on the other side, and this is taking a toll on my mental health.

    • Westenberg ☛ The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out

      Every open source maintainer I've talked to in the last six months has the same complaint: the absolute flood of mass-produced, AI-generated, mass-submitted slop requests have turned their repositories into a slush pile. The contributions look like contributions, they have commit messages, they reference issues and they follow templates etc.

      But they are, almost uniformly, garbage.

      A high PR count on a repository used to actually mean something. If strangers were showing up to fix your edge cases, you'd built something people cared about. Now a high PR count signals that your repo has become a target for resume-padding bots, grifters and AI-assisted contribution farmers who need their GitHub activity graph to glow green for recruiter eyeballs or just want to swamp a project in pursuit of vulnerabilities. Open source, in other words, has an open slop problem.

      And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver.

    • Murat Demirbas ☛ Are We Becoming Architects or Butlers to LLMs?

      This is strongly reminiscent of the Shell Game podcast I wrote about recently. And it connects to my arguments in "Agentic AI and The Mythical Agent-Month" about the mathematical laws of scaling coordination. Throwing thousands of AI agents at a project does not magically bypass Brooks' Law. Agents can dramatically scale the volume of code generated, but they do not scale insight. Coordination complexity and verification bottlenecks remain firmly in place. Until you solve the epistemic gap of distributed knowledge, adding more agents simply produces a faster, more expensive way to generate merge conflicts. Design, at its core, is still very human.

  • Social Control Media

    • Wired ☛ Mark Zuckerberg Tries to Play It Safe in Social Media Addiction Trial Testimony

      Specifically, Zuckerberg was on hand to answer questions as to whether Meta products such as Facebook and Instagram were intentionally engineered to be addictive—as well as allegations that the tech giant had deliberately targeted tweens and teens with engagement-boosting strategies that led to mental health crises. It was to be a crucial showdown in a lawsuit brought by a now 20-year-old Californian identified as K.G.M. (although her counsel usually referred to her by her first name, Kaley) and her mother against Meta, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok back in 2023. They allege that her compulsive use of those platforms accounts at an extremely young age caused severe psychological damage.

    • The Verge ☛ Social media on trial: tech giants face lawsuits over addiction, safety, and mental health

      Unlike many earlier legal challenges against social media companies, these cases managed to overcome the companies’ attempts to get them dismissed based on objections citing Section 230, a law that protects online platforms from being held liable for their users’ speech. They accuse companies like Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Google-owned YouTube of designing their platforms in ways that, the plaintiffs claim, they knew could contribute to addiction, depression, and anxiety.

    • PC World ☛ YouTube is breaking its own features for users with ad blockers

      PCWorld reports that YouTube is deliberately disabling core features like comments and descriptions for users with active ad blockers installed.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Flickr’s URL Scheme

      The persons responsible for this URL scheme thought well enough ahead for the complexity and scope it could encapsulate, yet kept it remarkably simple.

    • Chris Hannah ☛ Instagram in 2026

      There are many reasons why Instagram isn't the same anymore. Part of it is down to the social media landscape, and habits of social media users. As I think we've now become a generation of consumption.

      But part of it is down to the evolution of Instagram as a platform. Before you edited and shared photos, viewed other peoples photos, and exchanged likes and comments. Now you've got algorithms dictating your For You feed, Reels, and Explore page.

    • CBS ☛ Teen who fell 50 feet into NYC's Queensboro Bridge shaft was doing a TikTok challenge, police sources say

      According to NYPD sources, the 16-year-old boy told police he was with friends on the bridge, but they left him after he fell. No one else was on the scene when police and firefighters arrived.

    • ABC ☛ Teenager rescued from Queensboro bridge after social media stunt went wrong

      Authorities say the boy had fallen about 50 feet down a 3 feet by 3 feet shaft after climbing a section of the bridge over Roosevelt Island earlier in the day as part of a daring social media stunt.

    • The Independent UK ☛ Teenager rescued from 50-ft shaft on New York City bridge after TikTok stunt reportedly went horribly wrong

      “This was a confined-space operation, which is a very difficult, time-consuming, manpower-intensive operation,” the fire deputy chief told reporters. “It involves high-angle equipment, ropes, we have to monitor the air, and create high points.”

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • SANS ☛ Tracking Malware Campaigns With Reused Material

      Today, I discovered anoher campaign that relies exactly on the same technique. It started with an attachment called "TELERADIO_IB_OBYEKTLRIN_BURAXILIS_FORMASI.xIs" (SHA256:1bf3ec53ddd7399cdc1faf1f0796c5228adc438b6b7fa2513399cdc0cb865962). The file in itself is not interesting, it contains a good old Equation Editor exploit (CVE-2017-11882). The exploit triggers the download of an HTA payload that executes a PowerShell payload and finally a DLL: [...]

    • Security Week ☛ Man Linked to Phobos Ransomware Arrested in Poland

      The Phobos ransomware-as-a-service operation emerged in 2019. In early 2024, the US government warned critical infrastructure organizations about attacks.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • The Register UK ☛ GitHub previews Agentic Workflows

    Agentic workflows - where an AI agent runs automatically in GitHub Actions - are now in technical preview, following their introduction at the Universe event in San Francisco last year.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Unmitigated Risk ☛ Domain Control Validation Grew Up. It Only Took Thirty Years.

      Let’s Encrypt announced DNS-PERSIST-01 support this week. That is worth noting on its own. But the announcement landed in a way that made me want to trace the longer arc, because what DNS-PERSIST-01 represents is not just a new ACME method. It is the last piece of a transition that took the ecosystem roughly three decades to complete.

      That transition was simple in concept and genuinely hard in practice. Stop guessing who answers the phone and start proving who controls the namespace.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Data Stolen In Eurail Breach Surfaces On Dark Web For Sale

      The incident impacted all customers issued a Eurail pass, as well as those who made seat reservations with the company, including customers who purchased Eurail or Interrail passes through partner channels or distributors. The company has not disclosed the total number of affected individuals, but Eurail operates passes across 250,000 kilometers of European railways, serving millions of travelers annually.

    • Security Week ☛ [Crackers] Offer to Sell Millions of Eurail User Records

      The Netherlands-based company disclosed a data breach in mid-January, informing the public that the personal, order, and travel reservation information of customers who were issued a Eurail pass may have been compromised. Those who reserved a seat through Eurail may also be affected.

    • 404 Media ☛ Palantir, Which Is Powering ICE, Says Immigration Crackdown May Hurt Hiring

      In a leaked Palantir wiki 404 Media previously obtained, the company said it believed its work with ICE is “intended to promote government efficiency, transparency, and accountability.” The company acknowledged that there would “be failures” in ICE’s removal operations. At the time that was written, the Trump administration had deported more than 200 people to an El Salvadorian mega prison. Those included Kilmar Abrego Garcia who was deported by mistake, and many who had no apparent criminal record.

    • The Verge ☛ Ring’s AI-powered Search Party won’t stop at finding lost dogs, leaked email shows

      Ring already has AI-powered search tools that a camera’s owner can use to search their own footage for virtually anything, including people, pets, and vehicles. A Search Party, on the other hand, can be initiated by anyone with access to the Ring Neighbors app.

      Search Party was initially designed to find dogs and recently expanded to wildfires. It is on by default for any user with a Ring subscription.

    • Android Police ☛ Internal Ring email says Search Party could be a precursor to neighborhood surveillance

      For those unaware, Amazon's Ring launched Search Party late in September last year as a means to help families reunite with lost pets. The feature essentially uses AI to scrub home security footage from the massive mesh network of outdoor Ring hardware, including Ring cameras and doorbells, to see if it could find a match for missing dogs. If and when the camera does find a dog that resembles one reported as missing, it alerts the camera's owner.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Time for the Government to Fix Its Political Party Privacy Blunder: Kill Bill C-4’s Disastrous Privacy Rules

      Just weeks after last year’s election, Mark Carney’s government committed not one, but two privacy blunders in rapid succession. First, Bill C-2 – literally the first substantive bill of the new government – buried lawful access provisions in an omnibus “border measures” bill that would have established unprecedented warrantless access to the personal of information of Canadians. Second, days later it introduced Bill C-4, which was framed as affordability measures bill but included provisions that exempt political parties from the application of privacy protections. The bizarre assault on privacy felt like an opportunistic attempt to insert unpopular rules in the hope that few were paying attention. The strategy was failure: the government ultimately introduced a new border measures bill with lawful access removed (new lawful access rules are expected in their own bill this year) and now a Senate committee which studied the Bill C-4 privacy rules has recommended that they be killed, removed from the bill, or subject to a two-year sunset clause.

    • Dan Q ☛ Run your own WireGuard VPN

      As I’ll demonstrate, it’s surprisingly easy to spin up your own VPN provider on a virtual machine hosted by your choice of the cloud providers. You pay for the hours you need it2, and then throw it away afterwards.

    • James Liu ☛ In Search of a Discord Replacement

      I've really liked Discord. I'm one of the early adopters from 2016 and enthusiastically convinced my friends and communities to move to it. Since then, I've developed a moderation bot. I helped build multiple communities of 10,000+ users. I've made lifelong friends, helped build FOSS projects, and organized events and grassroots movements. For the past 10 years, Discord has been extremely useful and borderline irreplacable throughout many facets of my life.

      However, since the start of the pandemic, my friends and I have watched the slow but inevitable degradation of service, unfixed bugs, and watching the company deseperately flail about trying to achieve profitability. Each time we'd encounter some kind of bug, the voice chat I frequent would be flooded with cries of "We've GOT to get off Discord." Each time this happens, I'd look into alterantives, maybe try one out, but never really pull the trigger on migrating to an alternative.

      On Febuary 9th 2026, Discord announced that it would be universally requiring age verification. This follows a series of laws passed in various jurisdictions around the world requiring age verification for access to potentially sensitive content. This has required most online platforms to partner with third party vendors for verifying users' government IDs... which have been leaked en masse. In their infinite wisdom greed, Discord, decided to enforce this requirement universally instead of just the jursidiction where it's legally required.

      Many users, myself included, view this as a major breach of trust and the final stage of years of gradual enshittification. It's lit a fire under our ass to finally figure out a migration plan away from Discord. Documented below are my general findings and suitability for the communities I help run.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Trump's aid freeze is killing US-funded privacy tools like TOR

      Tor is just one casualty. The Guardian Project, which builds open-source privacy tools; OONI, the Open Observatory of Network Interference, which has tracked government censorship globally since 2012; and OpenArchive's Save app, which lets people securely encrypt and archive mobile media — all relied on funding administered through the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Some exemptions were later granted, but those waivers apparently exclude the open-source anti-censorship tools.

  • Confidentiality

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI Found Twelve New Vulnerabilities in OpenSSL

      The title of the post is”What AI Security Research Looks Like When It Works,” and I agree: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Why ‘secure-by-design’ systems are non-negotiable in the AI era

    In concert, these reports reflect a growing reality: Data centers are strategic, interconnected infrastructure supporting our manufacturing, national security, and communication systems. Cyber disruptions, whether through ransomware, supply-chain compromise, or operational technology (OT) compromises, can cascade beyond a single facility, threatening grid stability, cloud services, economic activity, and public safety.

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ Disdain or Design?

    Individually, each of these events can be defended as constitutionally permissible. The question is not whether each action is likely legal. They probably are. The question is whether the aggregate reflects normal constitutional evolution or a consistent pattern in which available institutional tools have reduced the practical force of voter constraint while preserving formal legality.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Billionaires Gone Wild - Paul Krugman

    A few stories about centibillionaires — men whose net worth exceeds $100 billion — and their role in our society: [...]

  • Nature ☛ The political effects of X’s feed algorithm

    Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ The political effects of X’s feed algorithm

    This is a very significant finding. Users who moved from a reverse-chronological social media algorithm to X’s:

    “[…] were 4.7 percentage points more likely to prioritize policy issues considered important by Republicans, such as inflation, immigration and crime. They were also 5.5 percentage points more likely to believe that the investigations into Trump are unacceptable, describing them as contrary to the rule of law, undermining democracy, an attempt to stop the campaign and an attack on people like themselves.”

    And even more surprisingly, once the algorithm was switched off, their views did not change again. The effect of the algorithm lingered, in part because it led users to follow more conservative influencers.

  • The Next Move ☛ Munich, Rubio, AOC: What A Real Leader Would Say

    Meanwhile, Ukraine received scant mention—a footnote in Munich and, and a subject that Rubio failed to address at all in Budapest. This was no oversight: it is American policy under Trump to assist Russia’s efforts to destroy Ukraine.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • International Business Times ☛ DOJ Epstein Files Put Ohio Billionaire Les Wexner Back in the Spotlight

    This marks the latest public development in the ongoing examination of the Epstein investigation and related records.

    The closed‑door deposition by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee took place in Columbus, Ohio, where Wexner, 88, was questioned about his past relationship with Epstein as public records and congressional scrutiny intensified.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Epstein Whistleblower Who Was Silenced

    A former Deutsche Bank compliance officer told the FBI she was fired in 2018 after flagging suspicious activity in accounts linked to Jeffrey Epstein and Jared Kushner, offering yet another example of how they operated above the law.

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ We won our FOIA lawsuit for body cam footage of DOGE raid on US Institute of Peace

    This morning I went to the District of Columbia Superior Court along with my lawyers Allyson Veile and Adam Marshall of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press for a hearing about my lawsuit seeking all body camera footage from the DOGE raid on the US Institute of Peace (USIP) last March. Now, 11 months after I filed my original Freedom of Information (FOIA) request to the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), we finally have a resolution: We won.

• Environment

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ NAACP Against xAI's Southaven Turbines - 512 Pixels

  • Memphis Flyer ☛ NAACP Sends Letter In Opposition to Southaven xAI Permit

    The advocacy group asked the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) to deny MZX Tech, an affiliate of xAI, to deny the permit for the turbines in question. NAACP sent the letter, signed by Abre’ Conner, director of the NAACP Center for Environmental and Climate Justice, in the wake of a public hearing held by the department as they consider xAI’s permit application.

    “It is imperative that the Permit Board disapprove the Permit because both MDEQ and the community must understand the full impact of the MZX Tech and xAI site’s operations on air quality and address that impact as required by the Clean Air Act and Mississippi law,” the letter said.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ What is software-defined power, and why should utilities take note?

      Software-defined power is a layer that moves utility functions from fixed, discrete hardware devices into a flexible software environment. Hardware-bound designs can limit choices and slow down delivery, while a software-defined architecture can standardize designs, cut lead times and costs, and make commissioning, testing, and training more efficient.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Welcome to the dark side of [cryptocurrency]’s permissionless dream

      Thorbjornsen is a founder of THORChain, a blockchain through which users can swap one cryptocurrency for another and earn fees from making those swaps. THORChain is permissionless, so anyone can use it without getting prior approval from a centralized authority. As a decentralized network, the blockchain is built and run by operators located across the globe, most of whom use pseudonyms.

    • Hackaday ☛ Creating The World’s Most Efficient Quadcopter Drone

      By using knowledge gained from his PV solar-powered quadcopter, [Luke] set about to take it all a few steps further. The goal was to get as much performance out of a single Watt, which requires careful balancing of weight, power output and many other parameters.

      Crucial is that power usage goes up drastically when you increase the RPM of the propellers, ergo massive 40″ propellers were picked to minimize the required RPM to achieve sufficient lift, necessitating a very large, but lightweight frame.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Online safety needs structural change, not more layers of control

    Perhaps this isn’t surprising. Throughout its progress through Parliament the Online Safety Act grew and grew. Many safety campaigners rightly highlighted a wide variety of problems with platforms, in the hope that a rule for each could quash them. Like the Hydra of Greek mythology, as one head is slain, two more appear. This occurs as harms are an emergent property of the domination of the internet by big tech. To kill the serpent, we need a different approach.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Memo to Kathy Hochul and Gavin Newsom: Why taxing the rich makes enormous sense

    And why you shouldn’t worry about the wealthy abandoning your states

  • Andy Wingo ☛ free trade and the left, bis: from cobden to lenin

    A week ago we discussed free trade, and specifically took a look at the classical mechanism by which free trade is supposed to improve overall outcomes, as measured by GDP.

    As I described it, the value proposition of free trade is ambiguous at best: there is an intangible sense that a country might have a higher GDP with lower trade barriers, but with a side serving of misery as international competition forces some local industries to close, and without any guarantee about how that trade advantage would be distributed among the population. Why bother? And why is my news feed full of EU commissioners signing new trade agreements? Where are these ideas coming from?

  • European Commission ☛ Digital Networks Act [feedback open]

    The initiative aims at improving access to secure, fast, and reliable connectivity for the transition towards cloud-based infrastructure and Artificial Intelligence. To this end, it aims to help boost secure high-speed broadband, both fixed and wireless, and incentivise and encourage investments in digital infrastructure. It builds on the Commission’s White Paper: 'How to master Europe’s digital infrastructure needs' adopted on 21 February 2024.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • BoingBoing ☛ CBS blocked Colbert's interview, so he put it on YouTube

    CBS preemptively enforced a rule change that hasn't happened, on behalf of a government that hasn't enacted it. The FCC has already opened an investigation into ABC's The View over a Talarico appearance. And one detail Colbert flagged: right-wing talk radio is explicitly exempted from Carr's notice.

  • Variety ☛ Stephen Colbert Says CBS Blocked James Talarico Interview

    Walking his audience through the FCC’s “equal time” rule – which requires broadcast networks to provide opposing political candidates equivalent airtime – Colbert noted that talk shows had long benefited from an exemption to that requirement. “There’s long been an exception for this rule, an exception for news interviews and talk show interviews with politicians,” he said. “That’s crucial. How else were voters supposed to know back in ’92 that Bill Clinton sucked at saxophone?”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Record ☛ Predator spyware used to infect phone belonging to Angolan journalist, report says

    The finding is the latest evidence that despite being placed on the U.S. government’s Entity List in July 2023, Predator manufacturer the Intellexa Consortium has continued to operate in the shadows. Being placed on the Entity List imposes strict licensing and other requirements on companies attempting to do business in the U.S. and can be crippling to companies’ overall operations.

  • Derek Thompson ☛ The Obscure Media Theory That Explains '99% of Everything'

    The most enthusiastic modern proponent that I know of the orality theory of everything is Bloomberg’s Joe Wiesenthal, the co-host of the Odd Lots podcast. On Plain English this week, we discussed orality, literacy, and the implications for politics, storytelling, expertise, social relations, and much more. The following transcript has been edited for clarity, brevity, and the goal of making both speakers sound a bit smarter.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ In Graphic Detail: Subscriptions are rising at big news publishers – even as traffic shrinks

    But none of this is about traffic. If you tether your payment model to the number of public pageviews you receive, you incentivize your newsroom to create clickbait. You’re ensuring that you have to compete for views for every single article, instead of building a direct relationship with a recurring member who is buying your product because they think it’s worth it overall.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ What Will It Take to Unionize Chipotle?

    Workers in Michigan became the first Chipotle employees to ever win union recognition. Three years of fighting management for a contract they didn’t get taught them everything the next Chipotle union campaign will need to know.

  • International Business Times ☛ Why ICE's Shift to AI-Driven Deportation Raises Concerns? 'The Risk of Overreach Is High'

    ICE worked with Palantir Technologies to work on ImmigrationOS to make its job easier. However, the shift in using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify, track, and process undocumented individuals has received mixed reactions. While proponents argue this brings much-needed order to a strained system, critics fear the human cost of replacing judicial oversight with code.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Labor Movement, Attack!

    This year’s report, out today, shows union density at 10%. That is a combination of a full one-third of public sector workers being unionized, and a paltry 5.9 percent of private sector workers. These numbers are relatively unchanged from last year (a 0.1% increase, to be exact), although there is some evidence that data collection failures by the current government may have affected the numbers by a small amount. The relevant takeaway from these numbers is: Once again, union density did not meaningfully go up.

  • US Bureau of Labor Statistics ☛ Union Members Summary - 2025 A01 Results

    The union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions --was 10.0 percent in 2025, little changed from the prior year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions was 14.7 million in 2025. In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union members.

    Data about union members are collected as part of the Current Population Survey, a nationwide sample survey of households in which people are asked, among other things, about union membership. (See the Technical Note in this news release.)

  • Crooks and Liars ☛ FBI Officially Says It Won't Give Local Investigators Evidence In DHS Shooting Cases

    Theb FBI has officially notified Minnesota officials that it will not provide evidence from the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti to local law enforcement.

    In a statement on Monday, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) said the FBI had contacted it.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Gary Dorrien Is Christian Socialism’s Greatest Champion

    The theologian and historian Gary Dorrien has made it his mission to chronicle and revive the tradition of Christian democratic socialism. His work reminds the American left of our project’s spiritual dimensions.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ Unveiling IPv6 scanning dynamics: The largest telescope reveals a surging, diverse ecosystem

    IPv6 scanning has often been compared to finding needles in an impossibly large haystack. With an address space of 2128, blindly sweeping the entire IPv6 Internet is practically infeasible. Instead, IPv6 scanners must cleverly choose their targets using hints like active address lists, Domain Name System (DNS) records, or routing announcements. For network defenders and researchers, this raises a challenge: How do we observe and analyse IPv6 scanning when malicious actors could be probing only selective, obscure corners of the address space?

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Yordi Verkroost ☛ Owning My Music Again

    Over the past few weeks, I dove head-first into the YouTube rabbit hole of the analog life, the personal cloud, less dependency on big tech companies, and more of the like. I've devoured video after video about the topic, which might actually be kind of counterproductive, given that YouTube is one of those big tech giants. Yeah well... You've got to start somewhere, I guess.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Jérôme Marin ☛ Netflix’s big bet under threat

  This is the scenario Netflix feared. On Tuesday, Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) reopened talks with Paramount, which says it is ready to raise its takeover bid. The move could trigger a new bidding round and potentially force the streaming platform to sweeten its offer in a bid to secure control of the parent company of the legendary Warner studios and the prestigious HBO network. The outcome should come quickly: negotiations will last just seven days, with a final shareholder vote expected on March 20.

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • The Register UK ☛ Qualcomm set to triumph in UK smartphone ‘patent tax’ case

      Which? claimed that Qualcomm abused its market position as a dominant producer of processors and radio chips for smartphones, and that even Samsung and Apple felt they had no alternative but to pay inflated prices for some parts and then passed on the costs to buyers. UK consumers, the group argued, therefore paid more for certain smartphones between October 2015 and January 2024. Up to 29 million UK residents bought Qualcomm-equipped phones during that period, leading Which? to suggest they collectively overpaid by £480 million ($650 million), or £17 ($23) per device.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Android Police ☛ Why your NotebookLM podcast might sound like it's hosted by NPR

      However, one of the two voices may sound familiar. David Greene, host of NPR’s "Morning Edition" and "Left, Right & Center" on KCRW, has accused Google of using his voice to create NotebookLM's male podcast host.

• Copyrights

  • Creative Commons ☛ CC Licenses, Data Governance, and the African Context: Conversations and Perspectives

    What started as an organic exchange in various spaces has revealed something larger: a strong appetite to move these conversations into the open. At stake are not only questions about CC licenses but deeper issues of data sovereignty, equity, governance, and power in global knowledge systems. This blog post summarizes the themes emerging from those discussions and asks a broader question: how must “open” evolve to remain just, relevant, and community-centered?

  • Torrent Freak ☛ DISH Sues 'DMTN IPTV' in $21m Piracy Lawsuit; Operator Posed as Breaking Bad Creator

    Pay TV provider DISH Network has filed a complaint against 'DMTN IPTV' and its alleged operators, including one who posed as Breaking Bad's creator on Facebook. The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court, is coordinated by the International Broadcaster Coalition Against Piracy. It accuses the Moroccan IPTV operators of widespread copyright infringement and seeks more than $21 million in potential damages.

  • Creative Commons ☛ Building What Comes Next: Community Engagement at Creative Commons

    Over the past year, Creative Commons communities around the world have continued to show what’s possible when people come together around shared values of openness, collaboration, and care. From regional gatherings and thematic conversations to hands-on creative work, CC’s communities have remained active as the digital landscape grows more complex.

  • Vincent Driessen ☛ 15+ years later, Microsoft morged my diagram

    What I did not expect was for Microsoft, a trillion-dollar company, some 15+ years later, to apparently run it through an AI image generator and publish the result on their official Learn portal, without any credit or link back to the original.

    Close-up of the "continvoucly morged" text

    The AI rip-off was not just ugly. It was careless, blatantly amateuristic, and lacking any ambition, to put it gently. Microsoft unworthy. The carefully crafted visual language and layout of the original, the branch colors, the lane design, the dot and bubble alignment that made the original so readable—all of it had been muddled into a laughable form. Proper AI slop.