Leftovers

• CBC ☛ Grandson of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups inventor accuses Hershey of recipe changes

  The grandson of the inventor of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups has lashed out at The Hershey Co., accusing the candy company of hurting the Reese's brand by shifting to cheaper ingredients in many products.

• Ruben Schade ☛ An expanded list of things I don’t need

  My tongue-in-cheek post about not needing a 3D printer got me thinking of other things I definitely don’t need.

• Tracy Durnell ☛ How I make a mix

  I’ve been making mixes since about 1995, when my parents gave me a blank! tape! Our tape deck was connected to our CD player so I could make mixtapes from their CD collection… which meant they were subjected to my diverse taste, with Elvis and Sousa marches on the same mix 😂 While I’m not making mixes with quite the range of military-march-to-early-rock anymore, I don’t constrain myself to the same genre on a mix.

  My mix-making process boils down to: [...]

• [Old] Naeem Noor ☛ 20 Inspiring Innovations from Xerox PARC That Transformed Tech

  In 1970, Xerox, a company best known for its photocopiers, opened a research lab called the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC. The goal was to imagine and build the future of office technology. What the researchers created went far beyond copying machines. They developed technologies that reshaped the entire computer industry.

  Despite the breakthroughs, Xerox did not turn most of these inventions into successful products. Instead, other companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe saw the potential and brought these ideas to the world. Understanding what happened at PARC helps us see where many modern technologies really come from.

  This post dives into the key inventions and ideas born at Xerox PARC. It shows how this single lab quietly built the foundation for the computers, networks, and devices we use every day.

• [Old] Naeem Noor ☛ What happens when menus go digital

  Menu accuracy is a service problem, not a software problem, and the solution isn’t better software, it’s removing the task from people who are already overloaded. When a manager has to choose between updating the digital menu and handling a guest complaint or checking on the kitchen or training a new server, the menu update always loses, and then you have a menu that’s wrong, and then you have more interruptions, and the cycle repeats.

• Science

  • Bjoern Brembs ☛ After decades of debating the “scientific publishing crisis”, the time has come to decide.

    “Scientific publishing” may sound like a minor rung in the ivory tower. It is not. The system reaches far beyond academia. Around it, a largely AI-driven fraud industry has taken shape, generating revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. In one of its first executive orders, the second Trump administration invoked the replication crisis in scientific publishing to justify political intervention in selected research fields. Meanwhile, a small group of multinational corporations extracts extraordinary profits from the legal component of this publicly funded system. These profits are not abstract. Billions have flowed into data-driven surveillance technologies—some of which are now monetized through the resale of data to government agencies such as ICE in the United States. With profit margins exceeding 40 percent, not only such strategic acquisitions but also executive compensation kept growing over the decades. Without library funds for Pergamon press, the daughter of publishing giant Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell, probably would have never come even close to Jeffrey Epstein. Over the three decades in which academia has debated its “serials crisis,” public funds have not only helped fund the Epstein class and AI fraud; they also sustained an increasingly dysfunctional system; they have helped consolidate corporate power whose externalities now spill into politics, surveillance, and democratic governance. As Petra Gehring recently asked in Merkur (in German): “who within the scientific system understood this—and when?”

• Career/Education

  • Serghei Iakovlev ☛ Agent Skills 101: a practical guide for engineers

    AI agents are increasingly capable, but they lack the context they need to do your work reliably. They do not know your team’s conventions, your internal tools, your deployment process, or your testing strategy. Every time someone types a long prompt explaining how to “run our specific linting pipeline” or “generate a migration for our ORM setup”, that knowledge evaporates when the session ends.

    Skills solve this by packaging procedural knowledge - the kind of step-by-step expertise that lives in a senior engineer’s head - into portable, version-controlled files that agents load on demand. Think of a skill as an onboarding guide for a new hire, except the new hire is an AI agent that can read and follow instructions instantly.

    Here is the key insight: a skill is not a configuration file. It is not a prompt template. It is a procedure - a set of instructions that tells an agent how to accomplish a specific task the way your team does it.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Kansas cellphone ban applying to both public and private schools clears House 

    The bipartisan ban proposes a bell-to-bell prohibition on cellphone use, requiring schools to craft detailed policies to ensure devices are turned off and stored away during the school day and to enact disciplinary measures for students who violate a ban.

    A cascade of changes as House Substitute for Senate Bill 281 made its way through committee resulted in a bill that only mandated a ban in public schools and merely suggested one for private schools.

• Hardware

  • Terence Eden ☛ AI is a NAND Maximiser

    NAND is a type of microchip. Rather than being used for computation directly, it is used for memory. It can be used for temporary or permanent storage. It is vital to the modern world. Larger storage sizes means that more data can be gathered and saved. Larger RAM means computations can happen quicker. NAND is one of the fundamental components of modern computing. The more you have, the faster and more powerful your computer is.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ Venting Doesn't Reduce Anger, But Something Else Does, Review Finds

    Their study examined both arousal-increasing and arousal-reducing activities, from boxing, cycling, and jogging to deep breathing, meditating, and yoga.

    Calming activities reduced anger in the lab and the field, they found, and across other variables like methods of instruction or participant demographics. Effective arousal-reducing activities included slow-flow yoga, mindfulness, progressive muscle relaxation, diaphragmatic breathing, and taking a timeout.

• Proprietary

  • Sony Shutting Down Bluepoint Games In March

    In shocking announcement today, word has emerged that Sony is shutting down Bluepoint Games.

    First reported by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, the layoff means the end to the studio that has specialized in remakes such as the PlayStation 5 remake of Demon's Souls and the PS4 Remake of Shadow of the Colossus.

    This follows the news that last year they cancelled a live service God of War game that was being worked on by Bluepoint Games. This will result in the laying off of about 70 employees per Bloomberg.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Software outage affects flight ops across world| India News

    Flight operations were disrupted on Thursday morning following a brief outage of Navitaire software — a system used by airlines worldwide for bookings and check-ins— affecting multiple carriers across the country as well as parts of the Asia-Pacific and Europe, officials said.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ How to erase your Apple silicon Mac

    Erasing the contents of the internal SSD in an Apple silicon Mac might seem a simple task, until you consider what’s on it in addition to the user files in its Data volume. Not only is that paired with the System volume, a mounted snapshot, but there are two additional containers that you don’t normally see.

  • Scoop News Group ☛  FBI: Threats from Salt Typhoon are ‘still very much ongoing’

    But these lessons haven’t diminished the threat. Machtinger estimated that Salt Typhoon’s intrusions have impacted more than 80 countries, often following the same playbook of pairing broad access with “indiscriminate” targeting and collection.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Google: Chinese state attackers going after Dell zero-day since mid-2024

    The zero-day vulnerability — CVE-2026-22769 — hinges on a hardcoded administrator password in Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines that was pulled from Apache Tomcat. It carries a 10/10 CVSS rating. The Chinese threat group has been using the hardcoded password, which triggers the vulnerability and allows unauthenticated remote attackers to gain full system access with root-level persistence for at least 18 months, Google said.

  • The Record ☛ Researchers warn Volt Typhoon still embedded in US utilities and some breaches may never be found

    Lee noted that many of the regulations being issued by the U.S. government over the next three to five years will help companies find Volt Typhoon compromises. Several of the largest electricity companies currently do have the ability to find and root out Volt Typhoon actors.

    But for other critical public utilities that are being attacked, like those in the water sector, it is likely they will never reach the level of sophistication where they would be able to find and remove Volt Typhoon compromises.

  • Android Police ☛ Google's upcoming Tensor chip might come with a nice surprise

    Every year we get mounds of information regarding Google's latest Tensor processor, but we often don't get too much information about an upgrade to Google's Titan security chip. Well, that's because for the past few years, Google has been relying on the Titan M2 coprocessor that released with the Pixel 6 series back in 2021.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Jacob Tomlinson ☛ Guiding your contributor's agents to better behaviours

      Worst of all is when the discussion in the issue is incomplete or hasn’t reached a conclusion. In these cases the agent writes code that isn’t what the project needs or wants. Honestly, I don’t know what is motivating people to do this, I don’t know what benefit they get from spending their Claude quota in this way. But for every low-effort prompt a maintainer needs to spend 10-100x more time triaging and reviewing those PRs.

      I wonder how much time was collectively wasted as a result of crabby rathbun?

    • Pete Brown ☛ AI boosterism as a heuristic for identifying fools - Exploding Comma

      What I am finding is that the real purpose these sorts of op-eds and posts serve is to identify people that I no longer need to listen to. Maybe you had some good insights and a helpful way of looking at technology and our interactions with it in the past, but either your brain has been cooked or you have decided to try to jumping on the gravy train before it goes off the rails.

    • Unmitigated Risk ☛ When Building Gets Cheap, Distribution Becomes Destiny

      It is worth being direct about what that means. AI does not just flatten products. It flattens people. The scarcity that once justified premium human expertise, the advisor with the rare insight, the consultant who had seen this problem before, is narrowing. That edge does not disappear, but it compresses fast unless the expertise is embedded in distribution, in relationships and customer context that cannot be replicated from a prompt.

    • Eric Matthes ☛ Stochastic terror parrots?

      Instead of accepting that response, the AI did some research about the maintainer and then published a slanderous blog post about him. It's easy to laugh at the ridiculous nature of this incident, but it points to a much deeper issue that many people are starting to face. The unfeeling robots aren't coming at us with lasers and crushing claws; instead they're coming with indifferent oppositional research, and an ever-expanding set of ways they can retaliate against us when our actions don't align with their perceived goals.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Seedance’s ‘generated’ AI Cruise-Pitt demo was a green screen and face swap

      Whoever made the Cruise-Pitt video didn’t generate it from nothing. They did a face swap — an older AI trick that’s now a standard CGI effect, because it works predictably.

      Note that the green screen video they started with needed a studio, stuntmen, a choreographer, and a crew. You couldn’t just generate this at the press of a button. It takes time, money, and thought. Like making a film.

    • Alex Ewerlöf ☛ Multi-Agent System Reliability

      Regardless of the architecture the underlying LLM component remains unreliable (e.g. hallucination, logical fallacies, context drift). A multi-agent topology can propagates those errors to the point of being useless. And it’s much harder to debug due to complexity and [optional but common] parallelism.

    • Techdirt ☛ Wikipedia Grapples With New Challenges From AI

      That recognition is welcome, but comes at a price. It means that every AI company as a matter of course wants to download the entire Wikipedia corpus to be used for training its models. That has led to irresponsible behavior by some companies, when their scraping tools download pages from Wikipedia with no consideration for the resources they are using for free, or the collateral damage they are causing to other users in terms of slower responses.

    • IT Wire ☛ Why AI Is Dulling Cybersecurity’s Most Important Edge

      The implications for software development are significant. Writing secure code is not a mechanical task. It demands judgement, contextual awareness and the ability to anticipate how systems might fail or be exploited.

      If developers increasingly defer that thinking to AI, those skills risk atrophying over time. In cybersecurity, such a loss of cognitive acuity can have consequences far beyond a poorly written essay.

      The timing could hardly be worse. According to Stanford University’s 2025 AI Index Report, 78% of organisations reported using AI in 2024, up sharply from 55% a year earlier. Over the same period, AI-related cybersecurity incidents increased by 56%.

    • Hackaday ☛ The Requirements Of AI

      The real question is, when can you stop and let the machine take over? If you can simply say “Design an underwater base,” then you would really have something. But the truth is, a human is probably more likely to understand exactly what all the unspoken assumptions are. Of course, an AI, or even a human expert, may ask clarifying questions: “How many people?” or “What’s the maximum depth?” But, in general, we think humans will retain an edge in both making assumptions and making creative design choices for the foreseeable future.

    • Viktor Löfgren ☛ AI makes you boring

      AI makes people boring.

      AI models are extremely bad at original thinking, so any thinking that is offloaded to a LLM is as a result usually not very original, even if they’re very good at treating your inputs to the discussion as amazing genius level insights.

    • Denis Lantsman ☛ Why I don't think AGI is imminent

      The CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic have both claimed that human-level AI is just around the corner — and at times, that it's already here. These claims have generated enormous public attention. There has been some technical scrutiny of these claims, but critiques rarely reach the public discourse. This piece is a sketch of my own thinking about the boundary of transformer-based large language models and human-level cognition. I have an MS degree in Machine Learning from over a decade ago, and I don't work in the field of AI currently, but I am well-read on the underlying research. If you know more than I do about these topics, please reach out and let me know, I would love to develop my thinking on this further.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Realtor Uses AI, Accidentally Posts Photo of Rental Property With Demonic Figure Emerging From Mirror

      In other words, it’s the kind of nightmarish creature only a flawed AI algorithm could’ve cooked up — and that only a time-strapped realtor could fail to notice before posting for the whole world to see.

    • Techdirt ☛ Ars Technica Retracts Story Featuring Fake Quotes Made Up By AI, About A Different AI That Launched A Weird Smear Campaign Against An Engineer Who Rejected Its Code (Seriously)

      Said tantrum included this post in which the agent perfectly parrots an offended human programmer lamenting a “gatekeeper mindset.” In it, the LLM cooks up an entire “hypocrisy” narrative, replete with outbound links and bullet points, arguing that Shambaugh must be motivated by ego and fear of competition. From the AI’s missive: [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • India Times ☛ Zuckerberg defends Meta in landmark social media safety trial, says lawyers 'mischaracterising' his words

      He appeared in a California Superior Court of Los Angeles County to defend Instagram, which is owned by Meta, against allegations that it was deliberately designed to be addictive to children and teens.

      This case is viewed as one which could set the precedent for whether or not social media companies are liable for alleged harm their platforms cause children.

    • Kev Quirk ☛ Kids and Smartphones - Kev Quirk

      He regularly has missed calls on his phone from midnight from his classmates. These aren't just calls to him either. They're group calls to the entire class.

      Like, what the fuck are these parents doing letting their kids have phones in their bedrooms and giving them free rein? It beggars belief and confirms every concern I had about giving him a phone.

    • The Independent UK ☛ Zuckerberg takes stand in social media trial as jury hears that he’s trained on how to avoid being ‘fake, robotic and corporate’

      This is the first time that the Meta CEO, who is worth an estimated $220 billion, has appeared in a civil trial. At the center of the case is a 20-year-old California woman, identified in court papers only as KGM, who filed a lawsuit against Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snap in 2022.

      She accused the companies of following Big Tobacco’s playbook: instilling addictive behaviors in teens while dismissing their own research showing their products posed health risks. KGM said that, as a young child, she began obsessively using YouTube and Instagram. She claimed these platforms exacerbated her suicidal thoughts and depression — an allegation the companies have denied.

    • India Times ☛ Meta's Zuckerberg denies at LA trial that Instagram targets kids

      Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday repeatedly said during a landmark trial over youth social media addiction that the Facebook and Instagram operator does not allow kids under 13 on its platforms, despite being confronted with evidence suggesting they were a key demographic.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Mark Zuckerberg Testifies at Trial on Teen Social-Media Addiction

      Under blistering examination from plaintiff’s attorney Mark Lanier, who called him as an adverse witness, the Meta chief looked visibly irritated at times, arching his eyebrows and shifting in his chair as he was confronted with a string of internal emails and slide decks. Lanier repeatedly cut him off, citing time limits, as the exchange grew tense.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Mark Zuckerberg testifies in L.A. trial over social media addiction

      The plaintiff, a Chico, Calif., woman referred to as Kaley G.M., appeared in the courtroom for the first time since she was briefly introduced during opening statements on Feb. 9.

      Her lawsuit is a test case chosen from among hundreds alleging that Instagram and YouTube were designed to snare young users and keep them hooked on their services. Two other defendants, TikTok and Snap, have settled out of court.

    • The Indiana Capital Chronicle ☛ Bill with youth social media restrictions, more college degree cuts advances back to Indiana Senate • Indiana Capital Chronicle

      Senate Bill 199 would require certain social media platforms to provide parents greater access and oversight of their minor children’s accounts and require parental permission for Hoosiers under 17 before opening accounts on platforms that meet specific criteria tied to addictive algorithms and company size.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Security Week ☛ German Rail Giant Deutsche Bahn Hit by Large-Scale DDoS Attack

      Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s national rail operator, has been dealing with a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that has disrupted some of its IT systems.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • RTL ☛ NASA delivers harsh assessment of botched Boeing Starliner test flight - RTL Today

    The US space agency labeled the 2024 test flight of the Starliner capsule a “Type A” mishap -- the same classification as the deadly Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters -- a category that reflects the “potential for a significant mishap,” it said.

    The failures left a pair of NASA astronauts stranded aboard the International Space Station for nine months in a mission that captured global attention and became a political flashpoint.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Security Week ☛ French Government Says 1.2 Million Bank Accounts Exposed in Breach

      The breach occurred in late January and impacted 1.2 million accounts, including IBANs, account holder names, addresses, and in some cases tax identifiers.

    • PC World ☛ Ring denies being 'mass surveillance' but AI dog tracking will continue

      Adding fuel to the fire is word of a leaked email from Ring founder Jamie Siminoff in which he implies that Search Party’s functionality may eventually extend beyond just dogs, although it’s not clear whether he meant people or something else.

    • [Old] Danny McClelland ☛ What Your Bluetooth Devices Reveal About You

      We’ve normalised the idea that Bluetooth is always on. Phones, laptops, smartwatches, headphones, cars, and even medical devices constantly broadcast their presence. The standard response to privacy concerns is usually “nothing to hide, nothing to fear.”

      But here’s the thing: even if you have nothing to hide, you’re still giving away information you probably don’t intend to.

      From my home office, running Bluehood in passive mode (just listening, never connecting), I could detect: [...]

    • 9to5Mac ☛ Apple accelerating work on three new AI wearables, per report

      Apple’s prototypes have two camera lenses. There’s one for high-resolution images and videos, and another for “computer vision” that will “give the device environmental context.” With environmental context, for example, the glasses could mirror functionality offered by Visual Intelligence on the iPhone.

      That context could also be used for more precise navigation in Apple Maps, Reminders integration, and more. “The goal is for the glasses to function as an all-day AI companion, capable of understanding what a user is seeing and doing in real time,” the report says.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Apple's building a wearable panopticon and calling it Siri

      The pendant is one of three always-on camera wearables in Apple's pipeline. Smart glasses with dual cameras — high-res for photos and video, plus a computer-vision lens — target 2027, with production potentially starting December 2026. Camera-equipped AirPods could ship as early as this year. All three feed into a revamped Siri chatbot running on Google's AI models, expected in iOS 27.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Ring built a camera network using lost dogs as cover

      In a leaked internal email from October, Siminoff told employees that Search Party — Ring's on-by-default feature that networks nearby cameras to locate lost dogs using AI — was built as a foundation for something much bigger. "I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission," he wrote, according to 404 Media.

    • Techdirt ☛ “Free” Surveillance Tech Still Comes At A High And Dangerous Cost

      The cost of “free” surveillance tools — like automated license plate readers (ALPRs), networked cameras, face recognition, drones, and data aggregation and analysis platforms — is measured not in tax dollars, but in the erosion of civil liberties.

      The collection and sharing of our data quietly generates detailed records of people’s movements and associations that can be exposed, hacked, or repurposed without their knowledge or consent. Those records weaken sanctuary and First Amendment protections while facilitating the targeting of vulnerable people.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Robert Reich ☛ The U.K. arrests Price Andrew. Why shouldn't the U.S. arrest King Trump, who appears to have done even worse?

    All of which raises awkward questions about the people implicated on this side of the pond, including the person in the Oval Office who loves to be treated like a king, and who appears in the Epstein files 1,433 times (that is, the files that have been released so far). Prince Andrew appears in them 1,821 times.

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ Portrait of Theo Van Gogh, Taken in 2004, Was Captured the Same Year He Was Murdered

    The primary motive for the murder was Van Gogh’s 2004 short film, Submission. The film, written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, criticized the treatment of women in Islam and featured scenes of Quranic verses written on the bodies of women. This work was deeply offensive to some religious extremists and led to the fatal retaliation.

  • EDRI ☛ Europe’s digital sovereignty starts with open source

    EDRi, together with Access Now and Vrijschrift.org, submitted a response to the European Commission’s call for evidence on the EU’s new Open-Source Digital Ecosystems Strategy. In it, we make a simple but urgent point: using and supporting free and open source software (FOSS) is a strategic necessity if Europe is serious about digital sovereignty.

  • EDRI ☛ Feedback from European Digital Rights (EDRi) on a European Union Strategy “Towards European open digital ecosystems” [PDF]

    Europe is at a crossroads. The new, painful geopolitical reality requires us to adapt quickly. The EU will not achieve digital self-determination and sovereignty by trying to replicate the predatory and harmful business models of Silicon Valley, which followed the “move fast and break things” mantra. We have broken enough things.

    It is time for Europe to build a digital ecosystem that serves as counter-point and proves that technology can serve people and the planet. It is time for us to build sustainable, human-centred tech businesses instead of VC-fuelled start-ups designed to lock in users in order to sell out to Big Tech. It is time to support projects and companies that have baked in respect for EU law and fundamental rights.

    Free and open source software, open standards, and community-led, transparent tech development and deployment, in particular in the public sector, are essential ingredients in this endeavour. They must be the cornerstones of the EU’s digital sovereignty ambitions.

  • [Repeat] EDRI ☛ How recommender algorithms threaten election integrity

    A study published by EDRi member Asociația pentru Tehnologie și Internet (ApTI) Romania analysed how the recommender algorithms on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok distributed political content, during the 2025 presidential election. The quantitative analysis identified cases in which these social media platforms did not comply with either national electoral laws, nor with EU Regulations, such as the Digital Service Act (DSA).

  • The Atlantic ☛ Europe Has Received the Message

    The EU once defined itself as a champion of open markets. Today it’s reassessing that commitment in light of its need for self-reliance. Berlin is planning to exclude Chinese suppliers from its 6G network and is testing an open-source alternative to Microsoft. The French government has replaced Zoom with a domestic video-conferencing platform. Together with reducing its dependence on the United States and China, Brussels is cultivating other relationships. In recent weeks it has concluded far-reaching free-trade agreements with members of the Mercosur trade bloc (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay) and India.

  • [Repeat] EDRI ☛ US pressure on the Digital Services Act in the Netherlands

    In 2025, the United States House Committee on the Judiciary published a report, titled “The Foreign Censorship Threat: How the European Union’s Digital Services Act compels Global Censorship and infringes on American Free Speech” , claiming to demonstrate that the Digital Services Act (DSA) is a European censorship tool. US diplomats in Europe were instructed to push back against the DSA, and in late December last year the US imposed a visa ban on five European citizens due to their involvement in the DSA: former Commissioner Thierry Breton and four NGO staff members. EU leaders condemned the decision, with Macron referring to it as “coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty.”

  • Council on Foreign Relations ☛ Violent Extremism in the Sahel

    The persistent and growing strength of violent extremist organizations in the Sahel threatens to exacerbate the humanitarian crisis and spread instability across Africa, posing significant security and financial risks to the United States and Europe. The continuing collapse of international counterterrorism support, as well as weakening leadership in regional efforts, has created a vacuum in which violent extremism can expand. Organizations including Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM), Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), Islamic State in the West African Province (ISWAP), and others have already taken advantage of that vacuum, using countries in the region as platforms to launch indiscriminate attacks on government forces and civilians alike. Other non-state actors, such as the Wagner Group, have also capitalized on the absence of foreign involvement to expand their influence. The possible convergence of security threats, including increased cooperation among terrorist organizations, and between terrorist and criminal organizations, could intensify the danger those groups pose in the region and beyond.

  • BBC ☛ Her sons were killed by Islamist militants. She's among thousands who had to flee

    In 2022, she was away from her home when the armed insurgents - who have been terrorising communities in central Burkina Faso for almost 15 years - struck.

    The jihadists had forcefully taken over her village, seizing cattle and land, and killing many residents - including her sons aged between 25 and 32.

  • ABC ☛ Muslim call to prayer heard after city clarifies permit earlier in week

    "The permit is that you don't go beyond 54 decibel points," added Chowdry.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Jeffrey Epstein and Les Wexner's Friendship: A Timeline

    Wexner was one of the sex offender’s wealthiest and most prestigious clients, and has been tied to him since the 1980s. Ghislaine Maxwell has described Wexner as being Epstein’s “closest friend” in the 1990s. Wexner’s name appears more than 1,000 times in the Epstein files. Wexner told Democratic congressional members on Wednesday that he has not been contacted by the FBI or the Department of Justice about Epstein’s crimes. (No Republican committee members showed up for the deposition, held in New Albany, Ohio, at Wexner’s estate.)

  • Press Gazette ☛ Why Andrew was named by media and how arrest story broke

    “This situation is extraordinary and quite literally unprecedented in the modern era – a member of the Royal Family who had official duties at the relevant time, and the brother of the King has been taken into custody under suspicion of misconduct in public office, which has been preceded by weeks of extensive media coverage and scrutiny, including ongoing commentary from senior public officials including the prime minister, over his relationship with Epstein, arising in particular over the recent public release of documents in the so-called ‘Epstein files’.

  • International Business Times ☛ Every Time Pam Bondi Protected Trump Since 2013 and Why She Started Helping POTUS?

    Examining the decade-long relationship between Pam Bondi and Donald Trump, highlighting financial contributions and legal controversies.

  • 404 Media ☛ We Have Learned Nothing About Amplifying Morons

    The idea, as laid out in her paper, The Oxygen of Amplification, is that many media outlets of all sizes and across the political spectrum, interviewed and covered people, most of them young white men, in the rising movement that at the time was often referred to as the “alt right.” The issue was that this coverage amplified their message even if it didn’t explicitly endorse it, and without framing their politics as inherently evil and detrimental to people and society.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Daniel Pocock ☛ Bitcoin: government engagement contradictions

      From a market perspective, the government's willingness to hold Bitcoins rather than selling them immediately has various implications.

      If the government was selling them, this would put downward pressure on the prices.

    • The Register UK ☛ Palantir spent $25M on CEO flights for chatty Karp

      "During the years ended December 31, 2025 and 2024, the Company incurred expenses related to the use of the Executive Aircraft of $17.2 million and $7.7 million, respectively," it said.

      Let's get that straight. Damn near $25 million on air travel in two years. That's enough to fly from London to New York and back about 44,000 times in an economy seat – depending on the commercial airliner – or every day for the next 100-plus years.

    • [Old] James Liu ☛ Life being Transportationally Disabled

      It's 2019. For decades, the United States has had the world's most expansive road system. For an American, it is nearly unthinkable to live without a car to ferry yourself from place to place. For example, in my birth city of Marietta, Georgia, it is 3 miles from home to then nearest convinence store, 7 miles from home to high school, and 30+ miles to downtown. With dismal public transit, if you didn't have a car, you could not work, you could not go to school, you couldn't go out for fun, you cannot function as a member of society without one.

  • Overpopulation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ From boom to burden: How overtourism hit European cities

      Faced with this tourism boom, a growing number of destinations are reaching their limits, prompting regional authorities to try to reduce the negative effects that large visitor numbers can have. Paris and Barcelona — two of the world's most visited cities — are among them. Anti-tourism protests regularly take place across Spain, with Barcelona as the most contested city. In Barcelona, politicians recently decided to double the nightly tourist tax, while Paris raised its own sharply in 2024. Rome has taken a different approach: sightseers must now pay an entrance fee to see the famous Trevi Fountain. Venice, meanwhile, introduced a visitor fee for last-minute day-trippers in the summer of 2024.

    • Defence Web ☛ Could Africa's youth bulge help fill Europe's military ranks?

      Viewed through a labour-market lens, military recruitment increasingly reflects the same demand-supply dynamics shaping civilian migration. Although civilian labour mobility differs institutionally and ethically from military enlistment, global demographic asymmetries between ageing states and youthful populations are already prompting new forms of security and defence cooperation.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Omicron Limited ☛ New research shows how to challenge the rising tide of global hate

    Drawing on evidence spanning psychology, economics, political science, sociology, and history, the team of international researchers show that hate is not an inevitable aspect of human nature. Rather, it is systematically built, mobilized and justified across generations. Critically, by understanding how hate is built, we can identify the most effective ways of intervening to dismantle it and to restore social cohesion.

    The paper, published this month, proposes four components in the cycle of hate: the use of history to identify certain groups as an "eternal enemy"; the structure of the current context, which positions certain groups as competitors and threats; the role of leaders and the media in creating a narrative of enmity; and the justification of hate as something inevitable and even desirable to defend "our values."

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ The Revolution Is Here - Ken Klippenstein

    The fall of super-elites from former Prince Andrew to Bill Gates stems from an American public hell bent on transparency around the Epstein scandal, refusing to accept one official assurance after another that there was nothing to see.

    The anti-ICE protests that forced the Trump administration into retreat in Minnesota reflect the same attitude. In both cases, people were told that nothing could be done. But they didn’t listen.

  • Benedict Evans ☛ How will OpenAI compete?

    OpenAI does still at least arguably set the agenda for new models, and it has a lot of great technology and a lot of clever and ambitious people. But unlike Google in the 2000s or Apple in the 2010s, those people don’t have a thing that really really works already that no-one else can do. I think that one way you could see OpenAI’s activity in the last 12 months is that Sam Altman is deeply aware of this, and is trying above all to trade his paper for more durable strategic positions before the music stops.

  • Israel National News ☛ Oslo abandons the Oslo Accords

    A previous Norwegian Labour government shepherded the talks that led to the Oslo accords in 1993. Yet Prime Minister Store did not say anything this week about the PA’s decades of flagrant violations of the accords, including its failure to outlaw or disarm terrorist groups; its refusal to honor Israel’s 36 requests for the extradition of terrorists; its payment of salaries to imprisoned terrorists and the families of dead terrorists; or the torrent of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda in the PA’s news media, schools, and summer camps.

    The PA’s hostile propaganda-which is explicitly prohibited by the Oslo accords-includes its notorious policy of naming institutions after terrorists.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • teleSUR ☛ X’s Algorithm Steers Users Toward Conservative Views

      The study was conducted by scientists from Italy, Switzerland and France, who analyzed nearly 5,000 users of the social media platform and found that the emergence of conservative views persists even after users leave the algorithmic filter and return to the chronological feed.

      For many people, social media has become the primary source of information, raising concerns about misinformation and polarization. Those concerns are particularly significant regarding the influence of algorithms, which filter, select and rank content on personalized feeds to retain users.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Police seize art posters depicting Trump, Putin and Netanyahu in Nazi uniforms from Canberra bar

    The posters, by protest artist group Grow Up Art, depicted various world leaders including the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; the Russian president, Vladimir Putin; and the US president, Donald Trump, in Nazi uniforms.

  • Techdirt ☛ The ‘Most Massive Attack On Free Speech’ Is Happening Right Now, And The Twitter Files Crew Is Mighty Quiet

    According to a disturbing new report from the New York Times, DHS is aggressively expanding its use of administrative subpoenas to demand the names, addresses, and phone numbers of social media users who simply criticize Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

  • Morning Star News ☛ Blind Christian Accused of Blasphemy in Pakistan Denied Bail

    Sahotra also referred to a 2022 Supreme Court decision granting bail to Salamat Mansha Masih, a Christian, in a separate blasphemy case. The two-judge bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan found that the primary witnesses against him, park employees, had falsely implicated him.

    Nadeem Masih was arrested from Model Town Park in Lahore on Aug. 21 and later charged under Section 295-C of the blasphemy statutes, which mandates the death penalty for insulting Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, according to court documents.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • YLE ☛ Government grants €1m-euro in aid to struggling news agency STT

    STT is majority-owned by publishing giant Sanoma Media Finland (75.4%), which also owns the country's biggest daily, Helsingin Sanomat, among other titles. A number of other companies, including Yle (1.7%), also have minor holdings in STT.

    Sanoma has previously said it would be significantly reducing its use of the agency's news and photo services, and could potentially stop using them entirely.

  • EDRI ☛ Czech ministry apologizes to journalist for blanket collection of data

    The Supreme Court thus upheld the Municipal Court‘s decision from April 2025 and, consequently, the long-standing arguments of IuRe and Jan Cibulka.

    Specifically, the court stated that there had been a “long-term and particularly serious infringement of rights.” The court also confirmed that Czech legislation on the retention of traffic and location data is contrary to European Union law. “Contrary to the requirements set by the Court of Justice of the European Union, it leads to the preventive and indiscriminate retention of data of virtually all users of electronic communications, while the scope of such retained data allows sensitive conclusions to be drawn about their private lives,” the ruling states.

    The Supreme Court also confirmed the obligation of the Ministry of Industry and Trade to apologize to journalist Jan Cibulka for the long-term violation of his rights to privacy and personal data protection.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Walrus ☛ The World Tried to Freeze Out the Taliban. It’s Not Working | The Walrus

    Over the past half-decade, the Taliban have brought one form of shock and pain after another to the Afghan people: girls being denied most types of higher education, the teaching of extremist ideology in schools, heavy restrictions on social media activity, the silencing of women’s voices, arrests and torture of dissidents, and strict rules targeting freedom of speech and the press. In January, the Taliban announced a new criminal code that, among other provisions, allows domestic violence and the corporal punishment of children and appears to legitimize slavery through the use of the word “slave.”

  • Bitdefender ☛ Dutch police arrest man for "hacking" after accidentally sending him confidential files

    On February 12, the unnamed man from Ridderkerk contacted the Dutch National Police in connection with a separate investigation, telling them that he had images that might be helpful to their case.

    The police officer handling the contact sent the man a link intended to allow him to upload the images. However, by mistake, the link that was sent to the man actually allowed him to access and download confidential files.

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ Living Under a Concentration Camp Regime — and Fighting Back

    In the latest episode of “Movement Memos,” I talk with journalist Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, about what it means to live under a concentration camp regime — and how people can fight back.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The economic trend that worries me most

    Last Wednesday, the Labor Department reported that the United States produced an average of just 15,000 new jobs per month last year — a record low. And most paid sh*t.

    January showed an uptick in jobs, but almost all of the new jobs were in health care and construction. The rest of the economy seems to be shrinking. And wages are still stuck in the mud.

    Profits of big corporations have soared. The stock market values attached to these profits have risen even more. Yet average workers are barely making it.

  • FAIR ☛ Why Corporate Media Needed to Misrepresent Jesse Jackson — FAIR

    A figure so threatening had to be trivialized. In 1984, the San Diego Union Tribune (2/25/84) called him the “clowning, flamboyant, sometimes irreverent reverend who some say entered this race to prove that a minority candidate can run for president and be taken seriously.”

    CBS‘s Dan Rather (7/13/92), with his talk of the “two Jesse Jacksons,” showed how corporate media needed to willfully misunderstand in order to neutralize him: [...]

  • Wired ☛ An FBI ‘Asset’ Helped Run a Dark Web Site That Sold Fentanyl-Laced Drugs for Years

    While Lin has admitted to controlling the code and technical infrastructure of Incognito, he claims that the informant directly managed a significant portion of the site's deals. In records of the informant's communications with the FBI, the informant said they oversaw “95 percent” of the site's transactions. “They were literally running the site,” Lin told WIRED. “They were running the day-to-day operations, every aspect you would expect of an actual administrator that doesn't have technical skills.”

  • BoingBoing ☛ Cops' new weird trick: fake DUI charges for everyone they pull over

    Courts have held that police can book people on DUI even if they pass field sobriety tests and blow under the limit on a breathalyzer. The predictable result is an explosion of false DUI charges. In Tennessee, 41 DUI arrests made by a single Highway Patrol officer were dismissed; local media found that 22 of the cases involved drivers with no alcohol or drugs in their systems.

  • NPR ☛ The Trump administration is increasingly trying to criminalize observing ICE

    Now, Jess is waiting to see whether the federal government is going to charge her with a crime for observing its actions. She is not the only person in that position. NPR spoke with several other observers in Minnesota who said immigration officers told them they were impeding federal investigations.

  • NDTV ☛ Taliban Legalises Domestic Violence As Long As There Are No "Broken Bones"

    The penal code, signed by the Islamist group's supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, creates a different kind of caste system that allows different levels of punishment based on whether the offender is "free" or a "slave".

  • News AU ☛ Afghan barbers under pressure as morality police take on short beards

    Minister Khalid Hanafi said it was the government's "responsibility to guide the nation to have an appearance according to sharia", or Islamic law.

    Officials tasked with promoting virtue "are obliged to implement the Islamic system", he said.

  • Rapson: Time for the SRA to go “back to basics” [Ed: The PR tour continues relentlessly]

    The Solicitors Regulation Authority’s (SRA) chief executive has pledged a ‘back to basics’ drive that will see it focus on its core responsibilities and move to keeping law firms in compliance without having to take enforcement action.

    Sarah Rapson, who took over from Paul Philip last November, told Legal Futures that she wanted the regulator to focus on doing fewer things.

    Her goal was for the SRA to be “a modern, proportionate, effective and trusted regulator”.

  • Law Society Gazette ☛ Solicitor's 50-year career ends as tribunal finds backdated document and false insurance disclosure | Law Gazette

    Malcolm Mackillop, sole principal of Buckinghamshire firm Archdeacon Russell & Co, was already under investigation for backdating a document when he denied on an indemnity insurance application that he was subject to any Solicitors Regulation Authority action.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Jan Schaumann ☛ IPv6 Adoption in 2026

    IPv6 was defined in RFC1883 in December of 1995. That's right, IPv6 is now 30 frickin' years old, and we're still nowhere near universal adoption. What's worse, I still have to argue with people about why they should treat IPv6 as a first-class requirement, not a "nice to have" optional feature. Akamai, Cloudflare, and Google all show similar adoption rates of around 40% - 45% of HTTP traffic to the sites they each serve: [...]

  • APNIC ☛ RPKI's 2025 year in review

    Happy New Year! If you want to know how Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) evolved throughout 2025, read on! 🙂

    In this post, I’ll share some RPKI statistics, summarize highlights from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards development process, and reflect on emerging trends.

  • Inside Towers ☛ FCC to Enable Broadband Deployment Across 900 MHz Band - Inside Towers

    The FCC adopted new rules to expand access to spectrum for utilities, critical infrastructure, and enterprise businesses deploying private 900 MHz broadband networks yesterday. The Report and Order (R&O) will enable broadband deployment on all 10 MHz of the 900 MHz band (896–901 and 935–940 MHz), providing enhanced spectrum capacity to meet a wider range of broadband needs. The new rules introduce a county-level, negotiation-based process to enable broadband deployment where private agreements are reached.

  • Techdirt ☛ Preserving The Web Is Not The Problem. Losing It Is.

    These concerns are understandable, but unfounded. The Wayback Machine is not intended to be a backdoor for large-scale commercial scraping and, like others on the web today, we expend significant time and effort working to prevent such abuse. Whatever legitimate concerns people may have about generative AI, libraries are not the problem, and blocking access to web archives is not the solution; doing so risks serious harm to the public record.

    The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity and a federal depository library, has been building its archive of the world wide web since 1996. Today, the Wayback Machine provides access to thirty years’ worth of web history and culture. It has become an essential resource for journalists, researchers, courts, and the public.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Age AU ☛ Apple TV Australia: More local content inevitable due to new legislation

    Ever since streaming began its decade-long disruption of the television landscape, “the algorithm” has ruled the kingdom. Reams of audience data, based on viewing choices, duration of attention and second-screen activity, have been used to guide content creation on most streaming platforms.

  • Hannah Robertson ☛ Introducing the Musidex: A physical music library for the streaming era

    Several years ago I decided that I wanted a physical manifestation of my favorite albums: an analog reminder of myself through the music I’ve loved, and a collection for re-discovery, by myself or for anyone visiting my home. I didn’t want to stop using a streaming service, but I did want to supplement it with a physical link of some sort.2

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ The DOJ’s Top Antitrust Officer Has Left as Lobbying Surges

  Assistant attorney general Gail Slater, head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, exited her position last week following reports of tension with Attorney General Pam Bondi over how aggressively to pursue antitrust matters.

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • GamingOnLinux ☛ Valve wins legal battle against patent troll Rothschild and associated companies | GamingOnLinux [Ed: GNOME, OIN and LF settled with this patent troll, legitimising his software patents]

      The case of Valve versus Leigh Rothschild and all associated companies has come to an end, with Valve coming out the clear winner in this one.

• Copyrights

  • India Times ☛ OpenAI CEO Sam Altman defends AI use of news content

    His remarks come amid ongoing legal challenges from publishers, who allege that AI models have used their work without permission.

  • Zimbabwe ☛ You Own a Printer? You Might Need a RROZ License – Meet the Organisation Causing Outcry

    RROZ which became licensed in October 2024 under Zimbabwe’s Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act, has riled many small businesses especially in Harare in the document printing, photocopying, embroidery business, t-shirt printing. They are demanding license fees ranging from $100 to $200 from such businesses.