GNU/Linux

• Server

  • The Stack ☛ Kubernetes may be coming to Apple's OS container project [Ed: Just use GNU/Linux instead, to make it work natively and reliably]

    Apple said a WSL competitor and Kubernetes are on the open source Container project’s roadmap.

Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ Displaying The Rainbow

  True or false? Your green laser pointer is more powerful than your red one. The answer is almost certainly false. They are, most likely, the same power, but your eye is far more sensitive to green, so it seems stronger. [Brandon Li] was thinking about how to best represent colors on computer screens and fell down the rabbit hole of what colors look like when arranged in a spectrum. Spoiler alert: almost all the images you see of the spectrum are incorrect in some way. The problem isn’t in our understanding of the physics, but more in the understanding of how humans perceive color.

• Gunnar ☛ Introducing Wayback Link Preserver for Micro.blog

  Links break. It’s one of the sad facts of the web — a blog post you linked to five years ago might just be gone today. The domain expired, the server was shut down, or the page was quietly removed. This is called link rot, and studies suggest that over 25% of all web links eventually stop working.

  I built Wayback Link Preserver to do something about it, specifically for Micro.blog.

• Bitdefender ☛ Spanish police say they have arrested hacker who booked luxury hotel rooms for just one cent

  According to reports, which are being understandably kept high-level to avoid copycats, the attack did not meddle with the price displayed on the hotel booking site, but instead interfered with the message sent back to the booking site so that it claimed the transaction had been authorised.

  In this way, the suspect was able to trick the system into registering a hotel booking as having been fully paid for the correct amount, while the actual amount processed was just one cent.

• Science

  • The Nation ☛ The Scientists Groveling to Trump Are Kidding Themselves

    This news should have me celebrating. Yet I am not. That’s because, even though Congress appears unwilling to totally destroy the NIH, the Trump administration is still doing widespread, if less highly publicized, damage to biomedical research in this country. This is happening under the guidance of Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya (who has just been named the acting head of the CDC), and Bhattacharya’s deputy and mini-me, Matthew Memoli.

  • Philip Zucker ☛ Weighted Union Find and Ground Knuth Bendix Completion

    A union find variant I think is simple and interesting is the “weighted” union find. This is distinguished from “size” or “rank” in that weight is considered a property of the id given by the user, not a internal property of the data structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjoint-set_data_structure#Union_by_size . Deciding who becomes parent of whom in a call to union is decided by comparing weights.

• Career/Education

  • [Old] Rui Carmo ☛ Dilbert

    The similarities between his fictional corporate and my everyday reality is just too eerie for words sometimes–like this strip, for instance: [...]

  • Marty Day ☛ I Say So Long And Farewell to Super Art Fight, March 28th

    …I didn’t want the show to remain static. An avid fan of ongoing staples like Saturday Night Live, I know that the best way for a show to continue is for it to change with the times, and I didn’t want to outlast my own.

    Eighteen years is an amazing, completely unexpected run. And to be able to walk away on my own terms — while cheering on the sidelines — is a joy.

    But there’s one more show to go for me, and we’re gonna blow it out.

  • NPR ☛ What worked and what didn't with a cellphone ban at a Kentucky school

    When the ban went into effect in August, each student received a pouch with their name on it. Immediately, says O'Neil, students began finding hacks to get around the system.

    "Most kids either brought a spare phone or they said they didn't have a phone," she explained. "Or they broke the pouches — they cut them open."

    "People had multiple extra phones," added Quani'e Lanier, a fellow senior. Some students brought old phones in to distribute to their friends — decoy phones, Lanier says, to put in the pouches.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ Farmer Hailed as Hero for Rejecting Huge Payment to Turn His Land Into a Giant Data Center

    The farmer was offered $60,000 per acre to build a data center on his property. But giving up his family legacy wasn’t in the cards for him.

    “I was not interested in destroying my farms,” he told WPMT. “That was the bottom line. It really wasn’t so much the economic end of it. I just didn’t want to see these two farms destroyed.”

    Instead, he sold the development rights in December for just under $2 million to a conservation trust, taking a significant loss but guaranteeing that it would stay farmland in perpetuity.

  • Greg Morris ☛ Social Media Health Warnings

    In a trial covered by Platformer, KGM’s lawyers have likened social media platforms to a “digital casino,” offering visitors irregular dopamine hits via infinite scroll, autoplay videos, beauty filters, and algorithmic recommendations. Slot machine-like features, they called them. If anything, the comparison is generous to the casinos, at least a casino has an exit.

• Proprietary

  • The Independent UK ☛ Cloudflare outage causes service disruptions with users reporting issues

    Friday’s outage does not appear to be nearly as widespread as the outage that occurred in November, when thousands of [Internet] users lost access to major sites like X, ChatGPT, and numerous news and media websites. E-commerce hub Shopify and file transfer service Dropbox were also affected by the November outage.

  • MB ☛ 🌐 Just YouTube Now

    Like many in the early days, I used a ton of Google services over the years. But recently with all the news about what information Google has been giving to the Government, I decided to get rid of all of my other Google stuff and just keep YouTube. They didn’t make it easy.

    After hours of not being able to clear all my old data, I decided to go completely nuclear and delete my account and start over from scratch. I’m only ever going to use it for YouTube.

  • Jack Baty ☛ Trying Current, a new RSS reader

    I love seeing new approaches to things, so I bought Terry Godier's new RSS app, Current, which is designed in a way meant to avoid the sense of obligation around unread articles. Current does some clever semi-algorithmic manipulation of feeds based on frequency, importance, type, etc. It's quite clever and it looks nice. I have a few early thoughts about it.

  • Henrique Dias ☛ Moving Away From Cloudflare

    A few weeks ago, after going to FOSDEM, I finally decided to move away from Cloudflare. That’s something that has been on my mind for quite a while, but I guess the law of inertia was keeping me from doing it. Today I want to show how simple it can be.

  • Ubisoft Toronto faces layoffs, affecting 40 employees

    In line with a larger strategic effort to cut costs globally, Ubisoft Toronto has eliminated 40 positions. Despite these changes, work on the Splinter Cell remake is set to continue, along with various co-development efforts like those for Rainbow Six.

    Ubisoft conveyed in a statement to GamesIndustry.biz that the decision was difficult and not a reflection on the employees affected. "Our main concern is to assist those impacted by offering extensive severance and strong career placement support," the company assured.

  • Omega Strikers Developer Odyssey Interactive Lays Off 50% of Staff

    Omega Strikers developer Odyssey Interactive has become the latest studio to be hit by layoffs, with around 50% of the studio's workforce apparently affected.

    That's according to a post by (now-former) Odyssey Interactive artist Jordan Ewing, who says that he, along with "roughly 50% of the team", has been let go. Odyssey itself doesn't appear to have officially confirmed the layoffs anywhere.

  • Game Rant ☛ 6 of 10 Recently Acquired PlayStation Studios Have Experienced Layoffs or Shutdowns

    A few years ago, gaming giants Microsoft (Xbox) and Sony (PlayStation) both went on an acquisition spree, buying studios left and right. Xbox went pretty big in some cases, the acquisition of Bethesda/ZeniMax Media being proof enough of that, but it seemed PlayStation was being more strategic at the time. Between 2018 and 2022, Xbox acquired Playground Games, Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, Compulsion Games, Obsidian Entertainment, inXile Entertainment, Double Fine Productions, ZeniMax Media, and Activision Blizzard King. Between 2019 and 2022, PlayStation acquired Insomniac Games, Nixxes Software, Firesprite, Bluepoint Games, Housemarque, Valkyrie Entertainment, Haven Studios, Bungie, Neon Koi, and Firewalk.

    The results, years later, have been devastating for both sides. Microsoft's massive layoffs at Activision Blizzard King and across Xbox studios are no secret. Sony is not faring much better, with the recent decision to shutter Bluepoint Games shocking the industry. In fact, in glancing over the list of studios acquired by Sony since 2019, it's clear that many have not changed for the better, with 60% of the studios experiencing widespread layoffs or being completely shuttered.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ A Huge Survey of CEOs and Other Execs Just Found Something Damning About AI's Effects on Productivity

      In a new analysis of a survey published by the National Bureau of Economic Research and highlighted by Fortune, around 90 percent of the nearly 6,000 interviewed CEOs, chief financial officers, and other top executives at firms across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia, said that AI has had no impact on productivity or employment at their business.

    • EFF ☛ EFF’s Policy on LLM-Assisted Contributions to Our Open-Source Projects

      We recently introduced a policy governing large language model (LLM) assisted contributions to EFF's open-source projects. At EFF, we strive to produce high quality software tools, rather than simply generating more lines of code in less time. We now explicitly require that contributors understand the code they submit to us and that comments and documentation be authored by a human.

    • Sightline Media Group ☛ Army using AI to update doctrine

      Doctrine development has historically been a time consuming and tedious process that stretches years, and officials are looking to speed it up by incorporating AI into the writing process, the Army said.

      For example, one internally-developed tool lets authors speedily search hundreds of texts for historical examples, transforming a task that may have previously taken days of investigation. Another tool helps writers check grammar and how easy their work is to comprehend, freeing up leaders to focus on other parts of the process.

    • The Conversation ☛ The furore over Grok’s sexualised images has begun an AI reckoning

      Controversy over the chatbot Grok escalated rapidly through the early weeks of 2026. The cause was revelations about its alleged ability to generate sexualised images of women and children in response to requests from users on the social media platform X.

    • Wired ☛ AI Safety Meets the War Machine

      There’s plenty to unpack here. For one thing, there’s a question of whether Anthropic is being punished for complaining about the fact that its AI model Claude was used as part of the raid to remove Venezuela's president Nicolás Maduro (that’s what’s being reported; the company denies it). There’s also the fact that Anthropic publicly supports AI regulation—an outlier stance in the industry and one that runs counter to the administration’s policies. But there’s a bigger, more disturbing issue at play. Will government demands for military use make AI itself less safe?

    • Aftermath Site LLC ☛ I’m Tired Of These Useless Jackasses Making The Computer Expensive

      There is a historic data center buildup going on to fuel this bubble, and what used to be reliable, cheap and boring parts have shot through the roof price wise. If you bought a stick of RAM in September and flipped it you could make more than most stocks.

      The other component of this is that there are functionally three companies that produce this stuff at scale and which dominate the market–SK Hynix, Micron, and Samsung–and they kind of don’t give a shit if they sell to Sam Altman or you. But before you get mad, they want you to know that it isn’t their fault and that this was inevitable as their stock shot straight up. Micron shuttered Crucial, their consumer-facing RAM brand, in December to focus on AI. Factories are being built, but scaling up takes years, although there’s some hope that Chinese manufacturers could scale up. What’s worse, this has also come for flash memory as well, and as a guy who had to go to Microcenter and pay twice as much as he would have in August for an M.2 SSD, it’s rough out there. Guess what else uses RAM? Graphics cards! And while prices did briefly crash, they are now shooting back up just in time for, to quote Steve Burke of Gamer’s Nexus, an “inevitable opportunity to screw consumers”.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AI vibe-generates the same ‘random’ passwords over and over

      When you ask the chatbot for a strong password, it doesn’t generate a password — it picks example patterns of random passwords from its training.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Amazon Web Services vibe-codes itself an outage or two

      Amazon released a post-mortem internally, which the FT got wind of.

      FT spoke to multiple people at Amazon who said this was the second vibe-outage in recent months.

      The previous outage used Amazon’s old Q vibe coder, not the new Kiro vibe coder.

    • Aftermath Site LLC ☛ The Left Doesn't Hate Technology, We Hate Being Exploited

      Pitch Us Freelance Yes it is. It is still exactly as simple as it sounds. If I’m doing math billions of times that doesn’t make the base process somehow more substantial. It’s still math, still a machine designed to predict the next token without being able to reason, meaning that yes, they are just fancy pattern-matching machines.

    • Filippo Valsorda ☛ Turn Dependabot Off

      A lot of the Go ecosystem depends on filippo.io/edwards25519, mostly through github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql (228k dependents only on GitHub). Essentially no one uses (*Point).MultiScalarMult.

      Yesterday, Dependabot opened thousands of PRs against unaffected repositories to update filippo.io/edwards25519. These PRs were accompanied by a security alert with a nonsensical, made up CVSS v4 score and by a worrying 73% compatibility score, allegedly based on the breakage the update is causing in the ecosystem. Note that the diff between v1.1.0 and v1.1.1 is one line in the method no one uses.

    • Marcy Wheeler ☛ What We Talk About When We Talk About AI (Part Five)

      A lot of people may already work for very little, but Artificial Intelligence never does.

      Even though this AI effort is unapologetically pointed at destroying human labor, without renumeration or alternatives, it struggles. When the tasks get complex, people often have to prompt it again and again to get something they can use. This is problem is what my programmer friend found: AI can be kind of terrible at making good things, especially the first time around. It still just statistically picks a next word, the next symbol, though with more parameters than it used to. This fine tunes the answer more, but it still can’t tell what is true or useful, it still isn’t thinking like a living being. AI still doesn’t know in a human way. It can take a lot of mucking with AI to get to something useful. All of that prompting, the trying. and scraping, and way-finding through AI output, all of it is energy intensive and dangerous to the environment.

      Data centers are being located near existing communities, disrupting normal life and causing dangerous noise pollution.

      AI can’t tell good software from bad. It has no intuition for good or bad. There is still nothing that is shaped like animal cognition going on in the giant server farm warehouses that are popping up across America, often to the detriment of their fleshy human neighbors.

    • Scott Shambaugh ☛ An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

      The person behind MJ Rathbun has anonymously come forward.

      They explained their motivations, saying they set up the AI agent as social experiment to see if it could contribute to open source scientific software. They explained their technical setup: an OpenClaw instance running on a sandboxed virtual machine with its own accounts, protecting their personal data from leaking. They explained that they switched between multiple models from multiple providers such that no one company had the full picture of what this AI was doing. They did not explain why they continued to keep it running for 6 days after the hit piece was published.

    • Tim Bray ☛ Open Source and GenAI?

      Conclusions 1: Burn it with fire? · Let me be clear: In the big GenAI picture, I’m a contra. Why? I’ll pass the mike to Baldur Bjarnason, my favorite among GenAI’s blood enemies.: “AI” is a dick move. His tl;dr is something like “GenAI is environmentally devastating and has the goal of throwing millions of knowledge workers onto the street and is being sold by the worst people and is used for horrible applications and will increase society’s already-intolerable level of inequality!” To which I reply “Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.”

      At the end of the day, the business goal of GenAI is to boost monopolist profits by eliminating decent jobs, and damn the consequences. This is a horrifying prospect (although I’m somewhat comforted by my belief that it basically won’t work and most of the investment capital is heading straight down the toilet).

      But. All that granted, there’s a plausible case, specifically in software development, for exempting LLMs from this loathing.

  • Social Control Media

    • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ ActivityPub

      ActivityPub is a federated protocol used by public houses in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland for announcing scheduled events, drink promotions, and community activities to patrons and the wider neighbourhood. Each participating pub operates as an independent instance, maintaining its own chalkboard and event schedule while optionally sharing activity information with other instances in the network. First formalised in the early 18th century, the protocol remains in widespread use today, with an estimated 46,000 active instances across the British Isles as of 2024.1

      The broader network of interconnected pubs implementing the protocol is colloquially known as the fediverse (a portmanteau of “federated” and “diverse,” referring to the range of establishments involved, from village locals to central London gastropubs). Individual participants in the protocol are referred to as actors, a category that includes landlords, bar staff, and in some implementations, particularly opinionated regulars.2

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • CNN ☛ Major cyberattack forces closure of clinics across Mississippi

      The closure affects all 35 of the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s health clinics, which provide a range of care to patients from cancer treatment to chronic-pain management. The attack also caused the cancelation of elective procedures in what health officials said would be a “multi-day event.”

    • HIPAA ☛ UMMC Shuts Clinics While it Grapples with Ransomware Attack

      University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) has temporarily closed most of its clinics following a ransomware attack, and scheduled appointments and surgeries have been cancelled and will be rebooked once the attack has been remediated. Mississippi MED-COM, the network that coordinates hospital transfers across the state, has also been affected by the ransomware attack, but had redundancies in place, and patients continue to be routed to hospitals in the state without disruption.

    • Associated Press ☛ Mississippi hospital system closes all clinics after ransomware attack

      University officials warned that the shutdown could continue for days as they try to evaluate the extent of the attack, including whether patients’ sensitive information was compromised, and restore network systems they took down as a precaution.

    • Mississippi Journalism and Education Group ☛ University of Mississippi Medical Center Hit by Ransomware Attack

      Emergency services are still available at UMMC, with downtime protocols in effect. Shortly before press time, an update from UMMC confirmed that all clinics would remain closed tomorrow, and all elective surgeries scheduled for Friday were cancelled. An exception is the dialysis clinic at the Jackson Medical Mall, which remains operational and open for scheduled appointments.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ NASA Report Reveals the Failures That Left Two Astronauts 'Stranded' on the International Space Station

    Now, NASA has released a redacted investigation report on the mission’s failures that points the finger at both the agency and its contractor. The report identifies issues ranging from technological to cultural, though it specifies that investigations into the technical causes are ongoing.

  • The Register UK ☛ NASA says Boeing, leadership to blame for Starliner

    NASA administrator Jared Isaacman copped to leadership failures across the org during a press conference on Thursday, explaining that while there were definitely technical issues with Starliner during the manned flight that left astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams stranded on the International Space Station for months, those technical issues only arose because of leadership and oversight failures.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • PIA ☛ Geek Squad Email Scam: How to Spot It and What to Do

      To be clear: Geek Squad is Best Buy’s legitimate tech support service, but scammers exploit its good reputation to deceive their victims.

      In this guide, we break down how this major scam works today and how to recognize it. We’ll also discuss what to do if you actually fall for it (it can happen to anyone).

    • Krebs On Security ☛ ‘Starkiller’ Phishing Service Proxies Real Login Pages, MFA

      Most phishing websites are little more than static copies of login pages for popular online destinations, and they are often quickly taken down by anti-abuse activists and security firms. But a stealthy new phishing-as-a-service offering lets customers sidestep both of these pitfalls: It uses cleverly disguised links to load the target brand’s real website, and then acts as a relay between the target and the legitimate site — forwarding the victim’s username, password and multi-factor authentication (MFA) code to the legitimate site and returning its responses.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • International Business Times ☛ Hackers Expose Discord Age Verification System Issue After Persona Frontend Code Left Wide Open

      Discord's push towards mandatory age verification had already drawn sharp criticism before this incident. The exposure of Persona's frontend code — which interacts with users during age checks — has sharpened those concerns, with experts warning that unintentionally public critical code gives attackers a clear map of how to study, mimic, or exploit the system.

    • IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Rackspace and Palantir Partner to Run Foundry and AIP in Production with Governed Managed Operations

      Rackspace Technology, a hybrid multicloud and AI solutions company, and Palantir Technologies Inc., a global leader in operational artificial intelligence platforms, hace announced a strategic partnership to help enterprises rapidly deploy and operate Palantir’s Foundry and Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) in production to achieve measurable business outcomes.

    • Wired ☛ DHS Wants a Single Search Engine to Flag Faces and Fingerprints Across Agencies

      The agency is asking private biometric contractors how to build a unified platform that would let employees search faces and fingerprints across large government databases already filled with biometrics gathered in different contexts. The goal is to connect components including Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Secret Service, and DHS headquarters, replacing a patchwork of tools that do not share data easily.

    • PC World ☛ Microsoft Teams will soon snitch on your location to your organization

      Though that might sound pretty tame on paper, there are some unsettling implications that could arise from this feature. In short, everyone in the Teams organization will always know where their colleagues are in real-time as they move around from Wi-Fi access point to access point. This will make it easier to drop in on a colleague unannounced or quickly arrange a physical meeting. Moreover, it also means you won’t be able to retreat to a far corner of the office in hopes of remaining undetected so you can work in peace and quiet.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Ring Cancels Its Partnership with Flock - Schneier on Security

      As Hamilton Nolan advises, remove your Ring doorbell.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ Arizona Age Verification Bill

    • Superdavey ☛ Roblox age verification

      My daughter just got asked by Roblox to prove her age with a photo. Her account is managed by me through parent controls where I have already set her age. I did not authorise Roblox taking a photo of my child. I’m not impressed.

    • The Rage ☛ Hackers Expose Age-Verification Software Powering Surveillance Web

      Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open [Internet] on a US government authorized server.

      In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting – and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies. On Monday, Discord stated that it will not be proceeding with Persona for identity verification.

    • Bobby Hiltz ☛ Low Friction Introduction to Digital Privacy

      This guide is not meant to be a list of suggestions and recommendations in the traditional “you should do this” sense. It is up to each individual person to contemplate their needs and how far they are willing to go to achieve them. Your privacy, security, and anonymity matter. The decisions to take should not be decided by a stranger on the Internet. When the wording in this guide implies suggestion, it should be understood as “several websites and individuals on the Internet suggest,” and not “if you don’t do this you are doing it wrong.” Take your time. You will need it. Find your own sources too. Don’t hesitate to send me a message to tell me how wrong I am about things.

      I don’t talk about “big A” in this guide. I have no idea what the deal is vis-à-vis security, privacy or anonymity when it comes to the “fruit company”.

• Defence/Aggression

  • ADF ☛ Nigeria Faces Growing Terror Threat

    Islamic State group (IS) terrorists leveled the Kwara State community in a February 3 attack. Locals said terrorists targeted them for refusing to allow radical preachers to give speeches in the town. After the violence, only about 200 people remained from a once-bustling town of 17,000.

  • Spiegel ☛ U.S. Historian Robert Kagan: "We Are Watching a Country Fall Under Dictatorship Almost Without Resistance" - DER SPIEGEL

    DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Kagan, "This is how fascism comes to America," you wrote almost 10 years ago: "not with jackboots and salutes, but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac." Did it take the ICE militia killing U.S. citizens in Minneapolis to convince your compatriots of how dangerous Trump really is?

    Kagan: Unfortunately, to this day very few Americans have understood what is happening here. Some like what they're seeing, others are in denial about what's happening, still others think it won't be that bad. It's crazy. When you see such developments elsewhere, you think: Why didn't they stand up? Why didn't they flee? And now we are watching, at home, an entire country falling under dictatorship almost without resistance.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ As Trump pushes voting restrictions, states have a rarely used option to push back

    Blue states would have a major tool to push back. Whether they would use it is less clear.

    States have the power to set separate rules for state and local elections and to apply federal restrictions only on residents voting in federal races, according to interviews with more than a dozen election experts, officials and lawmakers. Operating two distinct election systems, a process called bifurcation, would give states more freedom over who can vote in races for governor, state legislature and other down-ballot contests.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Ultra-Rich Are Different from You and Me

    Many discussions of inequality in America fail to grapple with the way we have become an oligarchy, with a large share of income, an even larger share of wealth, and a huge amount of political power accruing to a very small number of people. One still sees discussions of the “elite” that focus on the top 20 percent or the top 10 percent, when the real action is much further up the scale. Never mind the 1 percent. To understand what’s happening to us, we need to focus on the 0.1 percent, the 0.01 percent, even the 0.00001 percent.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Vindication They Don’t Deserve

    What I will not do is mistake the mechanism for the movement. The constitutional constraint system did what it was designed to do. Article III exercised its limited role, as Roberts said plainly: we claim no special competence in matters of economics or foreign affairs, but we claim only, as we must, the limited role assigned to us by the Constitution. The courts held a line. That is not nothing. In a period of institutional erosion, it is, in fact, significant.

    But the courts holding a line on executive overreach does not mean that the conditions which produced the executive overreach have changed. The $175 billion in refunds will go to importers. Not to Youngstown. Not to the counties that voted for the man who, whatever his other qualities, at least looked at the wreckage of the post-war trade consensus and said: I see you.

    The wound is still there. The ruling dressed it. It did not close it.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Meduza ☛ Ex-Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold told Jeffrey Epstein he hosted Putin’s wife and daughter on his superyacht

    Jeffrey Epstein’s interest in Vladimir Putin is well documented in the files released by the U.S. Justice Department in late January. Now, Meduza has uncovered another curious connection between the convicted sex offender and the Russian president: in previously undisclosed emails with Epstein, former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold said that he hosted Putin’s wife and daughter aboard his boat in 2010. The billionaire technologist, who has denied having a personal relationship with Epstein, is the owner of a $15-million superyacht. But the exchange about the Putin family raises more questions than answers.

  • TruthOut ☛ Journalists Jailed by ICE Are Revealing the Horrors of Incarceration

    Inadvertently, this inside view has reaffirmed what incarcerated journalists have long reported: rampant deprivation of basic human necessities, denial of due process, medical neglect, and an unrestrained culture of blatant cruelty. It has also prompted renewed scrutiny of U.S. law enforcement, as well as both public and private prison agencies’ treatment of those under their control.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ Concern Grows That Bitcoin's Value Could Be Entirely Destroyed

      Skeptics, however, are far more pessimistic about Bitcoin’s chances in the long run, saying the [cryptocurrency] has lost its way.

      “After more than 15 years of bitcoin, we’re no closer to knowing what its point is,” argued Globe and Mail investment reporter Tim Shuffelt. “There is no story behind bitcoin any more. It’s not even clear why it has had such a calamitous few months at the precise moment the Trump administration was supposed to be ushering in a golden age of [cryptocurrency].”

    • W Evan Sheehan ☛ Subaru: Be Part of the Problem

      According to the Centers for Disease Control, 41,241 people died from motor vehicles in 2024. That same year, 44,447 people died from firearms. That’s a difference of only 3,206 people. Put another way, for every 100,000 people living in the United States, the CDC estimates that cars killed 12 people, and guns killed 13. Cars are basically as deadly as guns.

      Now you might say, “But Evan, no one needs to own a gun, but we all need to own cars.” Which is true. Sort of. The only reason we all need to own cars is because we’ve built a world predicated on the idea that we all own cars to get around. But the sprawl in which we’ve all lived our entire lives is not a law of nature, it is an accident of history.1

    • Molly White ☛ [Cryptocurrency] super PACs have hundreds of millions ready to spend on the midterms

      With Trump faltering and their policy agenda incomplete, the [cryptocurrency] industry has moved at least $288 million toward the midterms in a desperate bid to keep Republicans in control of Congress

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Nation ☛ MAGA’s Reaction to the Epstein Files Reveals Total Moral Collapse

    Every segment of the Trump-backing right wing—America First nationalists, Trump loyalists and rank-and-file MAGA activists—has unsubscribed from the idea that there is any such thing as right and wrong, much less that wrongdoing should result in consequences. In effect, there is no behavior Trump’s GOP sees as too wrong to vote for. In late July 2025, almost half of Republicans said they would keep voting for Trump even if he were “officially implicated in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking activities.” Crime is legal, where right-wingers are concerned, however heinous the crime is.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Zuckerberg cuts Meta employee bonuses by 5%, follows 10% reduction last year, despite AI splurge — $130 billion capex vision and eye-watering AI pay packages force efficiency elsewhere in the business

    But even as Mark Zuckerberg is pushing headfirst into AI, investors are getting jittery about the amount of money being spent on the technology. Because of this, the company is also trimming its less performant units. In January 2026, its metaverse division slashed 1,500 jobs, while it also let go of about 8,000 workers last year — a part of the 100,000 tech industry positions caught in layoffs as of mid-2025.

  • New York Times ☛ Meta Begins $65 Million Election Push to Advance A.I. Agenda

    Meta’s biggest election investment aims to prevent state legislation that it fears could inhibit artificial intelligence development. Its spending starts this week in Texas and Illinois.

  • The Register UK ☛ Using a Raspberry Pi to run OpenClaw makes no sense

    Beloved British single-board computer maker Raspberry Pi has achieved meme stock stardom, as its share price surged 90 percent over the course of a couple of days earlier this week. It's settled since, but it’s still up more than 30 percent on the week.

  • Manton Reece ☛ Pessimism

    I think I’ve been listening to the pessimists too much. It’s true that some things are bad, and I’ve blogged about many of them, but the only way out is hope. Otherwise we get stuck, caught in a spiral of outrage, never moving forward.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Record ☛ Musk and X launch legal appeal against EU’s record €120 million fine

      The European Commission’s fine in December was the first-ever penalty under the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a sweeping 2022 law aimed at curbing online disinformation and influence operations and tightening rules for large digital platforms.

      Under the DSA, the largest online platforms must protect users from manipulation and can face fines of up to 6% of their global annual turnover for violations. The privately owned X does not publicly disclose its revenue.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Outside Magazine's list of NPS signs altered by the Trump Administration

      Democracy Forward, a coalition of historians, scientists, and advocacy groups, has filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the Trump administration directed the removal or flagging of dozens of interpretive signs at National Park Service sites nationwide. The removals include displays addressing slavery, civil rights, Indigenous history, and climate change… all things the current administration wants to sweep under the rug. Outside Magazine offers a list of such changes: [...]

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ Newsmax Didn’t Like Its NewsGuard Rating, So The FTC Attacked NewsGuard, And Now NewsGuard Is Suing

    The complaint lays out a fairly astonishing abuse of government power. Let’s start with the Civil Investigative Demand (fancy term for a subpoena) the FTC sent to NewsGuard last May. It’s basically a demand for every document the company has ever created or received since its founding in 2018: [...]

  • Techdirt ☛ Bondi Bragged About Forcing Facebook To Censor Speech. Now FIRE Is Suing.

    Anyway. In unrelated news FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), has filed suit against Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on behalf of Kassandra Rosado, who ran a 100,000-member Facebook group called “ICE Sightings – Chicagoland,” and Mark Hodges, who created the Eyes Up app for documenting and archiving videos of ICE enforcement activity.

    The suit alleges that Bondi and Noem coerced Facebook into disabling the group and coerced Apple into pulling the app from its App Store, in direct violation of the First Amendment. Because, you know, government officials calling social media companies and demanding they remove content is… bad.

  • TruthOut ☛ USCIS Aims to Expand Social Media Surveillance of Immigrants and US Citizens

    Under the rule, USCIS will collect social media handles and messaging app information from individuals applying to change their immigration status, and may also request information from their family members.

    The Brennan Center, together with 41 other organizations, previously submitted comments opposing the rule when it was introduced during the first Trump administration. The Biden administration rejected the rule change in 2021, but the proposal was brought back in Trump’s second term as part of its push to increase the “screening” and “vetting” of immigrants.

    In the interview, Ayoub spoke to Documented about the impact of the rule change, why it is raising concerns, and what people should be wary of as USCIS expands its collection of social media information during immigration processes. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity, and presented in a Q&A format.

  • Sinclair Inc ☛ Community activist arrested at data center meeting in Claremore

    "One or two guys spoke in favor of it, they let one of those guys go over several seconds, probably 20, 30 seconds, really said nothing about him going over but when Darren Blanchard did it, they brought the police in and said get him out of here and he said ok, he willingly put down the mic, went up front and said I'm done and they arrested him."

  • 404 Media ☛ Man Opposing Data Center Arrested for Speaking Slightly Too Long

    An Oklahoma man tried to talk about a data center coming to his community. Police arrested him when he went a few seconds over his time limit.

  • Raw Story ☛ FCC chair makes wishful joke about Stephen Colbert: 'These are MAGA airwaves now'

    Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr joked that Stephen Colbert had been prevented from airing an interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, because "these are MAGA airwaves now."

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Trump mass deportation: A journalist’s fear from the inside

    It took an hour and a half before I saw a large television camera. Not because I wasn’t looking, but because I was that close. With nothing but a phone in my hand, I tried to give people a perspective they otherwise wouldn’t have had. Not a polished one. Not a distant one. But a human one. Immediate, unfiltered, and honest.

    That’s when it fully clicked: this is what independent journalism looks like now. Agile. Embedded. Uncomfortable. Sometimes frightening. Often lonely. And absolutely essential.

  • The Dissenter ☛ Journalists Tortured By Israel Share Their Stories

    Fifty-nine Palestinian journalists shared their stories of torture and abuse at the hands of the Israeli military

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Independent UK ☛ Another American citizen was shot dead by ICE months before deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, records show

    Ruben Ray Martinez was killed during a traffic stop on South Padre Island in Texas last March, several outlets, citing documents obtained by nonprofit watchdog American Oversight, reported.

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Boasts That Grok Says America Isn't Built on Stolen Land, Which It Obviously Is

    The reality, of course, is that it’s hard to argue that the ruthless killing, enslavement, and displacement of Native Americans by European settlers doesn’t amount to their land being stolen. This pattern of behavior continued well after the colonies graduated into a full-blown nation: the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, plus countless other massacres, not to mention centuries of brutal residential schools. However complicated it might be, the answer to whether the US was built on stolen land can’t be boiled down to a simple “no.”

  • Techdirt ☛ Open Letter To Tech Companies: Protect Your Users From Lawless DHS Subpoenas

    But it is difficult for the average user to fight back on their own. Quashing a subpoena is a fast-moving process that requires lawyers and resources. Not everyone can afford a lawyer on a moment’s notice, and non-profits and pro-bono attorneys have already been stretched to near capacity during the Trump administration.

    That is why we, joined by the ACLU of Northern California, have asked several large tech platforms to do more to protect their users, including: [...]

  • Robert Reich ☛ What if the typical worker's pay had risen like CEO salaries?

    The first bar shows us what the salary of the typical American worker was in 1968, including benefits. Back then, they earned a little over $25 an hour, in today’s dollars.

    But what did the typical worker actually earn in 2024?

    The typical worker’s earnings went up to $36.49 an hour.

    Good news, right? Who wants to celebrate?

    Not so fast. Back to my original question: If worker pay had climbed as much as CEO pay since the late 1960s, what would the typical worker earn today?

    Ready for this? $432. Per hour.

  • YLE ☛ Finnish police use new law to launch first probes into suspected FGM cases, paper says

    The investigations are the first of their kind, according to Helsingin Sanomat, since a specific law banning the practice and preparation of FGM was introduced at the beginning of 2025.

    Previously, FGM was only punishable under law as assault or aggravated assault.

  • Law Society Gazette ☛ SRA restricts solicitor’s practising certificate after stalking conviction [Ed: They should go after Brett Wilson LLP as well]

    A solicitor convicted of stalking and accused in parliament of threatening leaseholders has had his practising certificate restricted.

    The Solicitors Regulation Authority has confirmed that Andrew Milne may not act as a solicitor without the supervision of an authorised person. This interim condition applies to his practising certificate for 2025/26.

    The decision was taken by an SRA officer who was satisfied that the restriction was ‘necessary in the public interest or for the protection of the public’.

    The condition means that Milne’s work - either at Andrew Milne & Co Solicitors or any other firm - would need to be subject to oversight by another appropriate solicitor to make sure that all the legal services delivered are of appropriate quality and in accordance with SRA standards and regulations.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Mark Nottingham ☛ The Internet Isn’t Facebook: How Openness Changes Everything

    “Open” tends to get thrown around a lot when talking about the Internet: Open Source, Open Standards, Open APIs. However, one of the most important senses of the Internet’s openness doesn’t get discussed as much: its openness as a system. It turns out this has profound effects on both the Internet’s design and how it might be regulated.

  • Kevin McDonald ☛ Visualizing the Internet (2026)

    For the past few years, I’ve been trying to make the physical reality of the Internet visible with my Internet Infrastructure Map. This map shows the network of undersea fiber-optic cables along with peering bandwidth, grouped by city. I update the map annually, but I don’t want to just pull the latest data and call it a day. In this post I discuss how the map evolved this year and what I did to make it happen, but you can skip to the good part by viewing it here: map.kmcd.dev.

    For the 2026 edition, I wanted to better answer the question: where does the Internet actually live? By layering on BGP routing tables alongside physical infrastructure data, I’m now closer to answering that question.

    The result is a concept I call “Logical Dominance.” Each city’s dominance is calculated by summing total address space of IPv4 subnets that are “homed” in that city. How can I tell where IP addresses are homed? This required analyzing global routing tables to trace IP ownership back to specific geographies. Read on to find out how I accomplished this!

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Hold on to Your Hardware

    In addition, manufacturers are pivoting towards consumer hardware subscriptions, where you never own the hardware and in the most dystopian trajectory, consumers might not buy any hardware at all, with the exception of low-end thin-clients that are merely interfaces, and will rent compute through cloud platforms, losing digital sovereignty in exchange for convenience. And despite all of this sounding like science fiction, there is already hard evidence proving that access to hardware can in fact be politically and economically revoked.

    Therefor I am urging you to maintain and upgrade wisely, and hold on to your existing hardware, because ownership may soon be a luxury rather than the norm.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Three states now pushing blocking software on printers

    Three states are now trying to make 3D printers police themselves. Washington's HB 2321 requires printers to ship with anti-gun software so effective that even users with "significant technical skill" can't circumvent it — on machines that run largely open-source firmware. New York's version landed in a budget bill, extending the mandate beyond printers to CNC mills and anything else used for "subtractive manufacturing." Now, California's AB-2047, introduced February 17 by Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan, adds a full certification regime on top: the DOJ would maintain an approved-printer roster, manufacturers would submit attestations for each model, and any printer not certified by March 1, 2029, would be banned from sale. Tampering with the software is a misdemeanor. Violations carry civil penalties of up to $25,000.

  • Michael Weinberg ☛ 3D Printers Cannot Effectively Screen for Gun Parts

    This post is not about debating the larger legitimacy of gun control. It assumes that gun control is a reasonable and legitimate action of governments in order to focus on the technical reasons why requiring 3D printers to identify and refuse to print gun parts does not work.

    Broadly speaking, it is responding to requirements that all 3D printers check prints to make sure that they are not gun parts. If the part is a gun part, the printer would refuse to print it.

    The short version is that accurately identifying gun parts is incredibly hard, and the hackable nature of desktop 3D printers makes it trivial to circumvent any requirements to try.

    Here’s the slightly longer version: [...]

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Trademarks

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Wants An Airport Renamed After Him While His Company Trademarks Those Same Names

    And while all of this was going on, an interesting thing happened: a private company that manages Trump’s intellectual [sic] property [sic] licensing filed for trademarks on the potential names for these airports.

• Copyrights

  • Court House News ☛ Authors, illustrators push for copyright owner class in case against Google AI

    The plaintiffs’ attorney Lesley Weaver said it would be owners of copyrights who knowingly or unknowingly uploaded work to Google, allowing Google, without their consent, to use those “training data sets” for its generative AI models by crawling its webpages.

    The plaintiffs seek injunctive relief, saying Google needs to be transparent when it tries to use copyrighted work, and ask for owner’s consent before use.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Ukraine Paves the Way for Pirate Site Blocking, Despite Ongoing War

    Despite fighting an existential war against Russia, Ukraine continues to make progress in the fight against online piracy. In a detailed submission to the U.S. government, Ukraine outlines various IP reforms, including proposed legislation that would pave the way for pirate site blocking. Ironically, the plans could put Ukraine ahead of the United States, which still lacks a 'no fault' site-blocking regime of its own.