Leftovers

• Kevin Wammer ☛ Hiding the data

  I'm convinced that checking metrics for our hobbies diminishes the quality of our output. And it fucks with our monkey brains.

• Ava ☛ getting sick of my desk

  I’ve also had different virtual desktops or user accounts and spaces for different activities, but that helps more with clutter and organization than a truly physical separation. I know a sort of ritual to log in to a study-only environment on the machine helps some people, but not me, at least not long term.

• Science

  • Josh Withers ☛ Josh Withers Blog

  • American Mathematical Society ☛ AMS :: Notices of the American Mathematical Society

    The four-color problem asks whether the regions of every map drawn on a plane or sphere can be colored with just four colors in such a way that any two regions sharing a common boundary line receive different colors. First posed by Francis Guthrie in 1852, it was eventually answered in 1976 by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, when it became known as the four-color theorem.

    To mark its 50th anniversary, this article recounts the story of the proof, focusing particularly on the individuals involved.

• Career/Education

  • Paul Robert Lloyd ☛ 6 life lessons I discovered while learning to ski

    Skiing is a reasonably safe activity, yet outside my comfort zone enough for it to matter. Signing up for lessons in a group setting would mean I could enjoy a more sociable holiday than I’m used to. Skiing ticked all the boxes.

    Not only did I find the experience to be brain-expanding and life enhancing, but falling down a mountain strapped to two laminated strips of wood and fiberglass felt like an analogy for life, with many lessons discovered along the way.

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ Hotel hides ancient switchboard behind the desk

    For those who have not seen such a device in the wild (or at least outside a museum), it required an operator to plug and unplug cables to connect extensions to incoming calls or configure outgoing calls. The system was all the rage in the mid-20th century, although it was later rendered obsolete - in most places - by modern hardware and software.

  • Boiling Steam ☛ Better to Skip a Year for PC Upgrades?

    Faced with AI-driven markets that have sent GPUs, RAM, and storage prices soaring, most aren’t just hesitant to buy—they’re actively pushing back.

  • Wouter Verhelst ☛ On Free Software, Free Hardware, and the firmware in between

    Or so it would appear.

    Because, in fact, this was not the case. Computers are physical objects, composed of bits of technology that we refer to as "hardware", but in order for these bits of technology to communicate with other bits of technology in the same computer system, they need to interface with each other, usually using some form of bus protocol. These bus protocols can get very complicated, which means that a bit of software is required in order to make all the bits communicate with each other properly. Generally, this software is referred to as "firmware", but don't let that name deceive you; it's really just a bit of low-level software that is very specific to one piece of hardware. Sometimes it's written in an imperative high-level language; sometimes it's just a set of very simple initialization vectors. But whatever the case might be, it's always a bit of software.

    And although we largely had a free system, this bit of low-level software was not yet free.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • CBC ☛ If food is medicine, how about a prescription for blueberries? N.S. researchers hope that’s the future

    It's part of a larger trend gaining traction in Canada: food prescribing. It’s exactly as it sounds. Doctors identify patients who are experiencing food insecurity and at risk of diet-related chronic diseases, and write them prescriptions for fresh food. This gives them access to subsidized or free healthy foods.

  • EDRI ☛ Breaking the extractive digital business model

    Despite growing awareness and mounting evidence, these practices remain largely unregulated in the EU. The result is a digital ecosystem where users are manipulated by default, fairness is treated as optional, and the power imbalance between platforms and people continues to deepen.

    This is why EDRi is releasing a new position paper on the Digital Fairness Act (DFA), a vital opportunity to structurally address manipulative and unfair design practices online. Drawing from a fundamental rights-based analysis, the paper shows how today’s digital systems structurally exploit users and offers a clear path forward to embed fairness by design and by default in EU law.

  • Science Alert ☛ Myopia Is Surging, And One Common Habit Could Be Driving It

    "In bright outdoor light, the pupil constricts to protect the eye while still allowing ample light to reach the retina," says optometry doctoral student Urusha Maharjan.

    "When people focus on close objects indoors, such as phones, tablets, or books, the pupil can also constrict, not because of brightness, but to sharpen the image. In dim lighting, this combination may significantly reduce retinal illumination."

• Proprietary

  • [Old] Wired ☛ Voice Chat App Zello Turned a Blind Eye to Jihadis for Years

    Despite warnings and flagged accounts, Zello left accounts with ISIS flag avatars and jihadist descriptions live on its service.

  • Paweł Grzybek ☛ Deploy Hugo site to Cloudflare Workers

    The Cloudflare team clearly stated that we should prefer Workers over Pages, and this is the one that’s going to get future improvements and optimisations.

  • Matthew Brunelle ☛ I Almost Had a Good Support Experience With Google

    I have not resolved this yet. I do not know if I will ever resolve this. All I know is I will need to book yet another Google Store appointment, drive to Newbury Street, get an additional parking ticket, and talk to my good friend Timmy who actually truly tries to help customers despite the system that surrounds all of us trying its best to prevent that.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • New Statesman ☛ AI will not save us

      It’s been a big week for AI boosters. There is, of course, a very good chance that this opening sentence would be true if you’d read it at any point in the past few years, since “compiling a weekly list of AI news items” is truly, to use journalistic parlance, a piece of piss.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Woman Uses AI to Apologize for Burning Down House, Biting Cop and Declaring She Had AIDS

      A judge in New Zealand is being forced to mull over these criteria after receiving a written apology from a defendant that appears to be generated with — and why else would we be talking about it on this website — an AI model.

    • Mark-Jason Dominus ☛ Language models imply world models

      Interesting as this all is, it is a digression. My main points, again: [...]

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ What's so hard about continuous learning?

      However, the mechanics of continuous learning are not hard. The technical problem of “how do you change the weights of a model at runtime” is straightforward. It’s the exact same process as post-training: you simply keep running new user input through the training pipeline you already have. In a sense, every LLM since GPT-3 is already capable of continuous learning (via RL, RLHF, or whatever). It’s just that the continuous learning process is stopped when the model is released to the public.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Why doesn’t Anthropic use Claude to make a good Claude desktop app?

      The negative side effects, however, are just as significant. Each open app consists of an additional Chromium running, which can saturate the computer's resources, slowing it down or crashing it. And although it is possible to make adjustments so that the application feels at home on each OS, few bother to do so. It looks like… a website, just in a separate window from the browser.

    • James Randall ☛ AI Can't Recreate Thrust (But It Can Help You Understand It) | James Randall

      Anyway. I guess I’d been thinking about Thrust as one morning recently I somewhat casually asked Claude Code to create it for me in the browser. I think I’d been reading the latest proclamations of capability from OpenAI and Anthropic and so I put together quite a comprehensive spec, gave it access to the original disassembled source code, screenshots, and said “go and recreate Thrust for me.”.

      It created something for which the term slop would be too kind, it very vaguely resembled Thrust — it had the scanline stuff, sort of — but it was truly dreadful. It hadn’t even got gravity working right, the ship didn’t fall properly, the controls felt weird, and it was just… grim. In some ways its amazing that it created something that sort of worked and sort of looked like Thrust but it was not playable and nothing close to the elegance and beautfy of the real thing.

    • Herman Martinus ☛ Pockets of Humanity

      A lot of the discourse around this has taken the form of "haha, stupid bot", but I posit that it is the beginning of something very interesting and deeply unsettling. In this instance the "hit piece" wasn't particularly compelling and the bot was trying to submit legitimate looking code, but what this illustrated is that an autonomous agent tried to use a form of coercion to get its way, which is a huge deal.

      This creates two distinct but related problems: [...]

    • Fred Herbert ☛ The Picture They Paint of You

      Here’s a quick overview of various products as I browsed online and gathered news and announcements from the space. The sampling isn't scientific, but it covers a broad enough set of the players in the current market.

    • Anil Dash ☛ Taking action against AI harms

      In my last piece, I talked about the harms that AI is visiting on children through the irresponsible choices made by the platforms creating those products. While we dove a bit into the incentives and institutional pressures that cause those companies to make such wildly irresponsible decisions, what we haven’t yet reckoned with is how we hold these companies accountable.

      Often, people tell me they feel overwhelmed at the idea of trying to engage with getting laws passed, or fighting a big political campaign to rein in the giant tech companies that are causing so much harm. And grassroots, local organizing can be extraordinarily effective in standing up for the values of your community against the agenda of the Big AI companies.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Guardian UK ☛ I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day

      I’m a 15-year-old schoolgirl and like most teenagers I spend a fair portion of my spare time on social media, often scrolling through short-form videos on apps such as Instagram or TikTok. All of my friends use those apps, and many spend multiple hours a day on them. I actively try to avoid online misogyny, but I am met with it incessantly whenever I open my mainstream social media apps. It only takes a few minutes before there’s subtle or overt misogyny, such as comment sections on a girl’s post filled with remarks about her body, videos made by men or boys captioned with a degrading joke, and even topics such as domestic violence or rape, trivialised and laughed about.

    • LRT ☛ Fake followers and frozen accounts: digital battle around Lithuania’s Nemunas Dawn

      Allegations have surfaced in Lithuania that critics of the political party Nemunas Dawn are being blocked on Facebook after sharing posts critical of the party, prompting concerns among experts about the use of inauthentic accounts to influence online debate.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ NASA's Artemis II moon rocket back to the hangar

    When eventually conducted, the test was stopped when hydrogen leaks occurred — a problem that also grounded the Artemis I mission in 2022.

  • The Register UK ☛ Helium glitch knocks Artemis II to April, at the earliest

    Weeks later, further fueling attempts delivered mixed results, prompting NASA to drop the February window and target March as the next opportunity - a plan now overtaken by the latest helium trouble and the prospect of an April launch at the earliest.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Sedishj Authority for Privacy Protection ☛ IMY's priorities for 2026 – AI, children and crime prevention | IMY

      The Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (IMY) is focusing on three areas in its guidance and supervision during 2026. These areas are crime prevention, children and young people, and AI in the public sector.

    • Reclaim The Net ☛ Zuckerberg Testifies on Instagram Child Addiction Claims

      The headline from most coverage was the spectacle: an annotated paper trail of internal emails, a 35-foot collage of the plaintiff’s Instagram posts unspooled across the courtroom, a CEO growing visibly agitated under cross-examination.

      The more important story is what Wednesday’s proceedings are being used to build.

      The trial is framed as a child safety case. What it is actually doing, especially through Zuckerberg’s own testimony, is laying the political and legal groundwork for mandatory identity verification across the [Internet].

    • EDRI ☛ We say no to Big Tech mass snooping on our messages!

      The European Parliament is currently deciding its position on the proposed second extension of the ‘temporary’ interim ePrivacy derogation 2025/0429(COD), with trilogues expected to start in early Spring 2026. The derogation is sometimes referred to as “Chat Control 1.0” because it suspends the fundamental right to privacy enshrined in EU primary and secondary law. This right is supposed to keep us all safe from arbitrary or untargeted snooping in our digital and physical private lives.

      It is vital that MEPs act now to rule out mass snooping on our private messages.

    • Techdirt ☛ Ring’s Super Bowl Ad Generates So Much Backlash It Has Ended Its Partnership With Flock Safety

      While that last sentence may be true, it appears sharing was on by default when it came to Ring’s own cameras. That Flock Safety never got a chance to participate is good to know, but “Search Party” has apparently been active since its implementation last year, even if it was limited to Ring devices.

      And while Ring claims the Search Party feature can’t be used to search for “human biometrics,” that’s hardly comforting when it appears Ring definitely wants to add more of this kind of thing to its existing cameras.

    • The Register UK ☛ AI image tools must follow privacy rules, watchdogs say

      The joint statement [PDF] signed by more than 60 regulators, including the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC), boils down to a simple point: if your model can convincingly fake a person, you don't get to pretend data protection law doesn't exist.

      "Recent developments – particularly AI image and video generation integrated into widely accessible social media platforms – have enabled the creation of non-consensual intimate imagery, defamatory depictions, and other harmful content featuring real individuals," said the signatories. "We are especially concerned about potential harms to children and other vulnerable groups, such as cyberbullying and/or exploitation."

    • The Register UK ☛ Gemini users say their chat histories have quietly vanished

      The complaints land barely a week after Google was already on the defensive over Gemini's behavior, following a report by a user who said the chatbot falsely claimed it had saved sensitive medical data to persistent memory before later admitting it had effectively told the user what they wanted to hear.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Digital Services Act: X Challenges EU’s €120M Penalty

      X (formerly Twitter) has filed an appeal against the €120 million penalty imposed by the European Commission under the Digital Services Act (DSA), marking the first judicial challenge to enforcement of the landmark European law. The case, now before the General Court of the European Union, is shaping up to be a crucial test for how the Digital Services Act (DSA) will be interpreted, and enforced—against large online platforms.

      The penalty, announced in December 2025, focuses on what regulators described as serious transparency failures, including the platform’s handling of its paid verification system, advertising disclosures, and access to public data for researchers.

    • The Record ☛ UK regulator fines porn company $1.8 million for failing to verify user ages

      The regulator, Ofcom, began requiring companies to verify user ages through “highly effective” measures including photo ID matching and credit card checks in July. Soon after the law took effect, Ofcom began a sweep of popular porn sites, including those owned by 8579 LLC, to check for compliance.

      Civil libertarians have expressed alarm about the privacy and cybersecurity risks inherent to the policy and say it violates porn users’ rights.

    • Android Police ☛ Google Messages could soon let you instantly share your live location

      Although this is a feature is currently found in Android's Find Hub, it apparently could make its way into Google Messages in the near future. 9to5Google was able to dig into the code of the latest beta version of Messages to discover that Google is working on integrating the live location tracking feature into the app.

    • The Verge ☛ Discord distances itself from Persona age verification after user backlash

      Discord is attempting to distance itself from the age verification provider Persona following a steady stream of user backlash. In an emailed statement to The Verge, Discord’s head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company “ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previously launched and that test has since concluded.”

      After Discord announced plans to implement age verification globally starting next month, users across social media accused Discord of “lying” about how it plans on handling face scans and ID uploads. Much of the criticism was directed toward Discord’s partnership with Persona, an age verification provider also used by Reddit and Roblox.

    • David H ☛ Apps and the Arrogance of Developers

      It seems that there are apps out there where developers believe that if the telemetry they use is “anonymous” (is it, really?), that they do not need to disclose to users that they use third party services to collect “information about how their app is used so they can improve it”.

    • Don Marti ☛ Performance Max Preserving Attribution

      Now that other Big Tech companies have joined the Meta/Mozilla effort and are working on getting “Attribution” (formerly “Privacy-Preserving Attribution”) through W3C, it’s pretty clear that competing standards is the least of the problems here. Besides user harms like the alarming fraud-friendliness, and the fact that it’s based on cranking through extra garbage data (“for privacy”) on data centers in the USA—right at the time that lots of people are concerned about the impact of data centers on the environment and energy markets and the need to stop depending on IT services in the USA (read the room, people) a big question for advertisers needs to be: can this thing ever give an honest answer?

  • Confidentiality

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ On the Security of Password Managers

      This is where I plug my own Password Safe. It isn’t as full-featured as the others and it doesn’t use the cloud at all, but it’s actual encryption with no recovery features.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ How Gig Capitalism Came to Thrive in Nordic Labor Markets

    This is the Nordic paradox. In societies with well-established regulations and robust unions, certain forms of precarious labor have nonetheless flourished. The explanation is not that the Nordic model has simply collapsed. Rather, gig companies have succeeded because the model has always been uneven, selective, and politically contingent. Gig capitalism did not attack the system head-on but grew in its blind spots, industries where unions have long been weak and working conditions precarious. Understanding how this happened tells us something important not only about the Nordics, but about the limits of social democracy under platform capitalism.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Day 1461 of Putin’s Three-Day War

    U.S. right-wingers were especially enthralled with what they perceived as the toughness, masculinity, and anti-wokeness of Russian soldiers.

    But Putin’s dream of a short, victorious war has turned — as such dreams usually do — into a long nightmare of blood, destruction and humiliation. Ukrainian courage and Russian incompetence — combined with the effectiveness of British and American man-portable weapons — ensured that the attempt to seize Kyiv became an epic debacle. The three-day war is about to enter its fifth year.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ They Haven't Even Started Spending Yet

    Since the 2010 Citizens United ruling threw the floodgates open, political spending has increased, and with it, public concern. Sure. With each passing election cycle, more direct and indirect spending floods into campaigns, inevitably transforming many of our elected officials further into marionettes that dance at the whim of their paymasters. It is odd, a decade and half into the post-Citizens United world, that mainstream political reporting has changed so little. The news is still in love with narratives about Small Town American Values and public polling. In fact, simply reading publications that track who is giving money to whom is often the most effective way of monitoring what politicians are doing, and why. A large majority of political communications are just a heap of bullshit covering up various implied obligations in return for payment. Everyone kind of understands this in the abstract, yet the power of narrative on the human mind is so strong that people would find it grotesque if this were the dominant frame of reporting. People want glossy campaign videos, damn it. Life is hard enough already.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Karl Bode ☛ The U.S. Press Loves To Pretend Widespread Corruption Doesn't Exist

    I just want you to pause and notice something.

    The next time you're reading a news story about a particular area of U.S. dysfunction – whether it's gun control, health care, or air travel – notice if the reporter mentions, at literally any point, if corruption and unchecked corporate power sits squarely and undeniably at the heart of the problem.

• Environment

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Zambians pay price amid Copperbelt mining boom

    As mining companies scour Zambia's Copperbelt for metals used in sustainable energy, locals are dealing with unchecked pollution and contamination.

  • Techdirt ☛ Who Knew? Mindless And Corrupt Deregulation Apparently Kills People

    A 2025 report by nonprofit consumer advocacy firm Public Citizen calculated that the Trump administration has frozen regulatory action for at least 165 corporations under investigation for a wide variety of abuses, crimes, and fraud. And a more recent study by the nonprofit watchdog Environmental Integrity Project has found that EPA environmental protection has effectively ground to a halt: [...]

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ As data centers look to rural New England, Maine considers a moratorium

    When local officials in rural Wiscasset, Maine, voted on November 4, 2025, to pause a data center discussion in the community of around 4,000 year-round residents, it may have been a sign of what’s to come. As the nationwide expansion of data centers arrives in New England, questions about electricity prices, grid reliability, and impact on water resources are forcing elected leaders to pump the brakes.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • YLE ☛ Agency to heighten inspections of recreational tour firms at popular destinations

      Metsähallitus noted that tourism firms that bring customers to protected areas need to have signed cooperation agreements with the forest management agency. However, some operators are not yet familiar with those rules, while others do not comply, it said.

      According to the agency, tour operators that use hiking trails, rest areas or other facilities in areas that are managed by Metsähallitus, need to pay annual usage fees, based on the number of customers they have. The agency noted that the usage fees are based on law.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Semafor Inc ☛ OpenAI deepens consulting ties

    Consulting firms invested billions with hopes to lead companies through the AI boom, but clients found many consultants lacked AI expertise themselves. Several consultancies now require AI proficiency for some hires, with a focus on exceeding what a client could generate using the tech themselves.

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ The Data Doesn’t Support the Narrative

    When those numbers get manipulated, the perception gets manipulated. On a bill this significant, in a state with a century of voter resistance to income taxes, that is not a minor data quality problem. It is a distortion of the democratic signal legislators and journalists are using to understand where the public actually stands.

    Which is why getting the analysis right matters. And why it matters that GeekWire got it wrong.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Insider amnesia

    The obvious reference here is to “Gell-Mann amnesia”, which is about the general pattern of experts correctly disregarding bad sources in their fields of expertise, but trusting those same sources on other topics. But I’ve taken to calling this “insider amnesia” to myself, because it applies even to experts who are writing in their own areas of expertise - it’s simply the fact that they’re outsiders that’s causing them to stumble.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Sham of Billionaire Philanthropy

    In fact, they’re giving less to charity now than they have in years. And when they do, they get big tax breaks, which you and I are paying for.

    Billionaire philanthropy is worse than an oxymoron. It’s a sham.

  • Nick Heer ☛ It Sure Looks to Me Like Meta Is Winding Down Its V.R. Efforts

    By “right-sizing”, Ryan means laying off ten percent of the Reality Labs workforce, and pouring money into the Ray-Ban partnership instead of metaverse initiatives. By “in it for the long haul”, Ryan means shifting the definition of the “metaverse” to meet Mark Zuckerberg’s latest obsession. They did not whiff by renaming the entire company around a crappy update to Second Life; you just are not getting it.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Financially secure Sony shuts down a great game studio they acquired, seemingly just to ruin

    This is also another example of why I don't love when big companies acquire small studios. Blue Point was a reliable and successful development house before Sony acquired them in 2021. And they weren't able to release a single game after the Sony acquisition, and have now been shut down. Just as seems to be the case with other smaller studios once acquired by Sony or Microsoft. They have great success on their own. And then their output drops once acquired by the Megacorp, and they're shut down a couple of years later.

  • Marty Day ☛ Microsoft Shifting Leaders at Xbox (or, Shuffling Chairs on the Titanic)

    How had the above worked out?

    Not great!

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Bet against the bubble: Goldman Sachs’ non-AI stock index

    Saying “no AI” takes out about 45% of the S&P 500. (Presumably by dollar value.) We don’t have Goldman’s list of stocks for this index.

    I’m not sure the companies would be completely clean of any AI at all — because almost no top-500 company is these days. But they’re supposedly not “AI enablers” as such.

  • Simon Willison ☛ Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

    Really interesting case-study from Andreas Kling on advanced, sophisticated use of coding agents for ambitious coding projects with critical code. After a few years hoping Swift's platform support outside of the Apple ecosystem would mature they switched tracks to Rust their memory-safe language of choice, starting with an AI-assisted port of a critical library: [...]

  • The Ladybird Browser Initiative ☛ Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

    But after another year of treading water, it’s time to make the pragmatic choice. Rust has the ecosystem and the safety guarantees we need. Both Firefox and Chromium have already begun introducing Rust into their codebases, and we think it’s the right choice for Ladybird too.

  • The Register UK ☛ Ladybird indie web browser flutters toward Rust

    How the choice was made may raise some eyebrows, though. He chose to use LLM-powered coding assistants to translate the C++ code into Rust, and then closely check that the structure of the resulting code matched the original and that it produced identical output. He chose to start with Ladybird's JavaScript interpreter because it's fairly self-contained, its stages and output are clearly defined, and it has good test coverage thanks to the ECMAScript Test Suite.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ Yes, Section 230 Should Apply Equally To Algorithmic Recommendations

    Let’s start with the basics: as we’ve described at great length, the real benefits of Section 230 are its procedural protections, which make it so that vexatious cases get tossed out at the earliest (i.e., cheapest) stage. That makes it possible for sites that host third party content to do so in a way that they won’t get sued out of existence any time anyone has a complaint about someone else’s content being on the site. This important distinction gets lost in almost every 230 debate, but it’s important. Because if the lawsuits that removing 230 protections would enable would still eventually win on First Amendment grounds, the only thing you’re doing in removing 230 protections is making lawsuits impossibly expensive for individuals and smaller providers, without doing any real damage to large companies, who can survive those lawsuits easily.

    And that takes us to the key point: removing Section 230 for algorithmic recommendations would only lead to vexatious lawsuits that will fail.

  • Express ☛ Preacher arrested for 'religious hatred over Islam and trans comments'

    Legal counsel Jeremiah Igunnubole, said Moodley's arrest for "peacefully commenting on Islam and transgender ideology" demonstrates police are using public order legislation to impose "de facto blasphemy laws" in the UK.

  • [Old] Christian Today ☛ Pastor arrested after commenting on Islam and biological sex

    "It shouldn't be for the state to decide which religions and ideologies must not be discussed or critiqued in the public street. The result is the normalisation of a two-tier society where some beliefs and ideologies are valued and protected, while others are undermined and outlawed.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Techdirt ☛ The Media Still Can’t Figure Out That Trump Says Things That Aren’t True

    Debates on how the media should be covering what Donald Trump says have been going on for over a decade now. A few months ago, we wrote about the regularity with which the mainstream media “sanewashes” his more ridiculous statements, taking the incoherent ramblings of a madman and pretending to translate them into actual policy goals. In those cases, the media downplays the things he says, while playing up what they pretend he wanted to say.

  • Site36 ☛ Palantir is suing the Swiss "Republik" – An opportunity to talk about what kind of company it is, says one journalist

    Five journalists reported critically on the US corporation Palantir with the WAV research collective and “Republik” – and Palantir is now demanding a right of reply at the commercial court. This could prove to be a boomerang.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Independent UK ☛ Former ICE lawyer says training is ‘deficient, defective and broken’ as he blows whistle on failures under Trump

    "Without reform, ICE will graduate thousands of new officers who do not know their constitutional duty, do not know the limits of their authority and who do not have the training to recognize an unlawful order,” Ryan Schwank a former ICE lawyer and training instructor, said Monday during a hearing organized by congressional Democrats. “That should scare everyone.”

    “Deficient training can and will get people killed,” he added. “It can and will lead to unlawful arrests, violations of constitutional rights and fundamental loss of public trust in law enforcement.”

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ New Immigration Agents Are Being Trained to Violate the Constitution, Former ICE Lawyer Says - NOTUS — News of the United States

    Thousands of new immigration agents are taking fewer exams and getting nearly 250 fewer hours of training than past agents before being deployed to carry out President Donald Trump’s campaign of mass deportations, according to documents from two administration whistleblowers made public Monday.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ 55 years ago, the first computer search warrant was issued — in February 1971, a Santa Clara judge authorized police to seize punch cards and a 'computer memory bank'

    55 years ago, in a courthouse serving the San Jose-Milpitas district of Santa Clara County, a judge for the first time signed a search warrant that treated a computer system as something that could be searched, and its content seized. Dated February 19, 1971, the order authorized Oakland Police to enter offices in Palo Alto and homes in Menlo Park to look not just for papers but also for data stored on machines.

  • Manuel Matuzović ☛ aria-haspopup might not do what you think it does

    To kick off my new article series, #WebAccessibilityFails, I decided to focus on a bad practice I often see in main navigations during accessibility audits.

    Developers like to put aria-haspopup on buttons inside main navigations to indicate that the buttons control subnavigations.

  • The Next Move ☛ The History of Mass Deportation in America

    The Renew Democracy Initiative and The Next Move are excited to bring you Older/Wiser with Linda Chavez. Linda is an author, columnist, and veteran of multiple presidential administrations.

    In our latest installment, Linda sits down with Ilan Stavans, Professor of Humanities and Latin American Culture at Amherst College, to discuss the history of mass deportation in the United States. Amid furor over ICE operations, Linda and Ilan trace the current roundup to events during the early twentieth century..

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Why Gen Z wants to buy and rent DVDs and Blu-rays in the age of streaming

    Before streaming platforms dominated at-home entertainment, consumers relied on places like Blockbuster, the now nearly erased movie rental chain and RedBox, the defunct movie vending machines, to watch newly released films. So, when Netflix and others launched streaming services, physical distribution eventually waned.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • 404 Media ☛ Meta's AI Patent to Simulate Dead People Shows the Dangers of 'Spectral Labor'

      Researchers say Meta’s patent for simulating dead users could be a “turning point” in “AI resurrections.”

• Copyrights

  • Techdirt ☛ How Copyright Litigation Over Anne Frank’s Diary Could Impact The Fate Of VPNs In The EU

    “The Diary of a Young Girl” is a Dutch language diary written by the young Jewish writer Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Although the diary and Anne Frank’s death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp are well known, few are aware that the text has a complicated copyright history – one that could have important implications for the legal status and use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) in the EU. TorrentFreak explains the copyright background: [...]

  • CopyrightLately ☛ Tracy Anderson Called Her Workout a "Method." The Ninth Circuit Agreed.

    Her competitors, inconveniently, didn’t disappear. Many of them were former employees. So Anderson sued one of them for copyright infringement.

    In Tracy Anderson Mind and Body, LLC v. Roup (read it here), an unpublished memorandum disposition issued last week, the Ninth Circuit held that Anderson’s fitness routines are uncopyrightable methods, not the “choreographic works” she claimed them to be in her lawsuit. The Tracy Anderson Method is a method. And copyright law protects works of expression, not procedures, systems, or methods.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Belgian Pirate Site Blocking Order Targets Cloudflare and Google, But Not Their DNS

    Belgium's site-blocking machine keeps turning. A new order, obtained by local broadcasters RTL Belgium and RTBF, compels ISPs, Cloudflare, and Google to restrict access to five illegal IPTV services. Importantly, the latter two are not required to block content through their DNS resolvers, which is likely the result of an ongoing legal challenge. Notably, DNS providers are spared this time around, likely reflecting the ongoing legal fallout from earlier Belgian orders that drove Cisco's OpenDNS to temporarily abandon the country.

  • Manton Reece ☛ Defining consent for AI

    Those personal uses of AI tools have a very different scope than large-scale training and data collection. As a small example, Cory Doctorow blogged recently about using lightweight models to check his writing, even though he has concerns about the AI industry. I think that’s a reasonable balance that avoids the extremes.

    So excluding the kind of overly broad “don’t let AI touch anything”, we’re left with a few practical capabilities that bloggers should have: [...]