Leftovers

• GreyCoder ☛ Kagi Small Web: A Collection Of Independent Web Sites

  “Small web” here means independent, non-commercial sites made by individuals to share ideas, experiences, or knowledge—not to chase ad money or growth hacking. See the Kagi blog post.

• Feld ☛ Phoenix and Tailwind on FreeBSD

  Phoenix development on FreeBSD can be a bit of a pain because they integrated TailwindCSS nicely, but it depends on some prebuilt tailwind and esbuild binaries that it auto-fetches for you. Unfortunately, there aren't any prebuilt binaries for tailwind on FreeBSD so lots of people seem to run into issues. I've banged my head about this a lot with various hacky solutions, but so far this one seems the simplest. It also should work if you try to build or deploy on different OSes as long as you have node and npm installed.

• Science

  • The Register UK ☛ Hubble could re-enter atmosphere as early as 2028

    The post on Bluesky by astronomer Jonathan McDowell is a stark reminder that Hubble is heading back to Earth, possibly sooner than previously thought, as its orbit decays.

    Hubble was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990, carried in the payload bay of Space Shuttle Discovery. While it remains capable of pointing its instruments and has returned breathtaking imagery over more than three decades in orbit, it cannot raise its altitude.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: A Probability Challenge

    Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Alex Bellos in Oxford. Among other things Bellos writes the Guardian Monday puzzle column. He gave me a copy of his latest book, Puzzle Me Twice, where the obvious answer is not correct. I got more right than wrong, but I hated being wrong. Here is one of those puzzles, Sistery Mystery (page 28), which is a variation of a puzzle from Rob Eastaway.

• Career/Education

  • Deseret Media ☛ Bill banning phone use during school hours is one step closer to becoming law

    SB69 is the follow-up to a similar bill last year that set a default policy barring students from using their phones during class time. This year, Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, R-South Jordan, wants to apply that same policy throughout the entire school day, including during class breaks and at lunch.

  • The Georgia Recorder ☛ Cell phone ban for high schools, school metal detectors, literacy bill move through Georgia House

    The chamber approved bills including a ban on cell phones for high schoolers, a requirement to install weapons detectors at school entrances and a bill aimed at boosting reading rates that Speaker Jon Burns called “arguably the most impactful education legislation passed by this House since the HOPE Scholarship was created three decades ago.”

  • 404 Media ☛ What’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?

    He said that one solution he’s seen work is to retreat from devices entirely in the classroom. “Colleagues who have done it report that students are almost universally grateful. They understand the reasoning. They understand the logic,” he said. “And they appreciate the opportunity to be freed from the phones and the screens and to focus and engage with other people in a meaningful dialogue.”

  • Phil Eaton ☛ I started a software research company

    I quit my job at EnterpriseDB hacking on PostgreSQL products last month to start a company researching and writing about software infrastructure. I believe there is space for analysis that is more focused on code than TechCrunch or The Register, more open to covering corporate software development than LWN.net, and (as much as I love some of these folks) less biased than VCs writing about their own investments.

    I believe that more than ever there is a need for authentic and trustworthy analysis and coverage of the software we depend on.

  • Jeroen Sangers ☛ Multitasking leads to an overestimation of your own ability to perform multiple tasks simultaneously

    The comparison to a drunk person who thinks they are walking in a straight line captures the problem well: we think we are better than we actually are. Thus, multitasking creates a dangerous combination of reduced performance and inflated self-confidence. As multitasking plays an increasingly larger role in our daily lives, it becomes all the more important to be aware of these limitations and the gap between our perception and reality.

• Hardware

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Fiber-optic drones have emerged as critical kit for both Russia and Ukraine

    Simply put, fiber-optic drones are equipped with a cable thinner than a fishing line that trails back to the operator, maintaining a physical connection rather than relying on radio signals. With no radio link for electronic warfare systems to jam, fiber-optic drones can operate in areas where conventional drones struggle or fail. The result is an effectively unjammable drone capable of striking at a range of over 30 kilometers with pinpoint precision and a crystal-clear video feed.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The New Lede ☛ Not so fast - lawyers for cancer victims see “red flags” in Bayer’s $7.25 billion Roundup settlement deal

    “It is hard to escape the impression that the proposed settlement would give Monsanto everything it desires—a near-complete release of liability for Monsanto and its parent company, Bayer AG—while giving inadequate consideration to many putative class members, who would surrender their substantive rights in exchange for settlement offers that may never result in payment,” the law firms state in their motion.

  • [Repeat] Science Alert ☛ Peak Mental Sharpness Can Boost Your Productivity by 40 Minutes a Day

    To reach their conclusions, the researchers tracked 184 students over the course of 12 weeks, using cognitive tasks to measure their mental sharpness each day. Participants later reported whether or not they achieved the goals they'd set for that day.

    Importantly, these participants weren't compared against each other. Instead, the variations in task completion were analyzed for each individual across the study period, showing that these fluctuations in mental sharpness affect most of us, irrespective of personality type or schedule.

  • Vox ☛ Smallpox killed 300 million people last century. One man helped stop it.

    The eradication of smallpox, which was formally declared on May 8, 1980, is a civilizational achievement I’d put on par with any other, all the more so because it was a collaborative global effort. Humanity took a disease that had been killing us for thousands of years, one so merciless that it single-handedly destroyed empires, and eliminated it forever. If you asked me to identify the height of what human beings can do when they work together on a single goal, I would point to this.

• Proprietary

  • Open Web Advocacy ☛ Apple’s Interoperability Commitments to the UK’s CMA Promise Nothing

    TL;DR: The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has stated that developers need access to key iOS and iPadOS features to build innovative products and services, so UK consumers do not miss out. But Apple’s proposed interoperability commitments are far too weak to deliver that outcome. The CMA has the power to impose effective and enforceable interoperability obligations on mobile operating system gatekeepers under the UK's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCCA), it just doesn’t appear to be using them.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Marquis Sues SonicWall Over 2025 Ransomware Attack

    Firewalls are designed to block unauthorized access to internal networks. However, Marquis contends that attackers exploited data stolen from SonicWall’s cloud backup service to understand precisely how customers configured their firewalls. That insight allegedly gave them a blueprint for breaching defenses.

  • Riccardo Mori ☛ → On software quality (and reliability, and frugality)

    But if I put these two factors aside, there’s nothing about those older Macs, nothing about the older Mac OS versions they run that makes them less reliable. The crystallisation of the operating system they use and the software environment I find on them is exactly what makes them more reliable than the newer stuff. Just because an application has been discontinued by Apple — like Aperture — doesn’t mean it has stopped working or has stopped being reliable. Just because a third-party app has moved on from supporting a Mac OS version (or even a whole Mac architecture) doesn’t mean I can’t keep using the previous version of such application with that older Mac OS version. I’m aware this isn’t exactly what Heer was arguing — I’m just saying that when I use these older Macs with older Mac OS versions, it’s like entering a snowglobe-like environment where everything that still works by current standards or demands, still works reliably and predictably. And what doesn’t work, well… just doesn’t work. It really doesn’t make the Mac or its older Mac OS version less reliable.

  • Flamed Fury ☛ Four More Years

    So I tried the logical fix first: a $90 battery replacement from a local repair shop.

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Australian Signals Directorate ex-employee sold back doors to Russia

    News reports refer to trade secrets. What they are really talking about are back doors and other security vulnerabilities. Technically, in the US law, the name of the crime concerns trade secrets.

    News reports tell us he has betrayed America. This is an understatement. He has betrayed all the countries who use American technology. Android and iPhone devices are used throughout the world today.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Systemd resource controls on user.slice and system.slice work fine

    We have a number of systems where we traditionally set strict overcommit handling, and for some time this has caused us some heartburn. Some years ago I speculated that we might want to use resource controls on user.slice or systemd.slice if they worked, and then recently in a comment here I speculated that this was the way to (relatively) safely limit memory use if it worked.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Vatican News ☛ Pope in dialogue with Rome's priests: Be friends, beware of envy and the internet - Vatican News

      The Pope therefore invited the priests to enter into real life and called for vigilance when confronted with artificial intelligence and internet use. He warned against “the temptation to prepare homilies with Artificial Intelligence”.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Pope Implores Priests to Stop Writing Sermons Using ChatGPT

      “Like all the muscles in the body, if we do not use them, if we do not move them, they die,” the Pope reportedly said. “The brain needs to be used, so our intelligence must also be exercised a little so as not to lose this capacity.”

      The holy father drew a fascinating line in the sand, declaring that despite AI’s capabilities now or in the future, a chatbot could never stand-in for a flesh-and-blood priest. “To give a homily is to share faith,” he said, and AI “will never be able to share faith.”

    • Tedium ☛ Why Email Spam Looks Better Than Usual These Days

      The problem with making coding easier for more people is that it makes spam more conventionally attractive. Which is bad.

    • Wired ☛ OpenClaw Users Are Allegedly Bypassing Anti-Bot Systems

      One of the ways they are allegedly doing this is through an open source tool called Scrapling, which is designed to bypass anti-bot systems like Cloudflare Turnstile. While Scrapling, which was built with Python, works with multiple types of AI agents, OpenClaw users appear to be particularly fond of the software. On Monday, viral posts promoting Scrapling as a tool for OpenClaw users started to spread on X. Since its release, Scrapling has been downloaded over 200,000 times.

    • 404 Media ☛ FBI Got Grok to Hand Over Prompts Used to Create Nonconsensual Porn

      The affidavit notes that, in January, the FBI got a search warrant for the man’s conversations with Grok. The FBI says that it received “prompts provided to GrokAI that generated approximately 200 pornographic videos of a woman who closely resembled VICTIM’s wife’s physical appearance.”

    • BBC ☛ I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI - and it only took 20 minutes

      It's official. I can eat more hot dogs than any tech journalist on Earth. At least, that's what ChatGPT and Google have been telling anyone who asks. I found a way to make AI tell you lies – and I'm not the only one.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Poisoning AI Training Data

      These things are not trustworthy, and yet they are going to be widely trusted.

    • Robert Reich ☛ Pete Hegseth and the AI Doomsday Machine

      That’s the stark choice posed by the intensifying fight between an AI corporation called Anthropic and Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Secretary of “War.”

      AI is dangerous as hell. I view it as one of the four existential crises America now faces — along with climate change, widening inequality, and the destruction of our democracy.

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ Perplexity wanted to make Google obsolete. What now?

      More importantly, Perplexity built itself largely in opposition to Google, arguing that traditional blue links were obsolete in the age of AI. Since then, the search giant has struck back. It rolled out “AI Overviews” above classic results to answer certain queries, and launched an “AI mode” that mirrors chatbot interfaces for longer, more complex questions. While the start-up claimed 780 million queries per month in May (compared with roughly 14 billion searches per day on Google), its traffic has been declining for several months, according to data from SimilarWeb.

    • James Stanley ☛ Bot Forensics

      Most threat intelligence bots are easy to fingerprint. And trying to be stealthy often makes it worse because imperfect anti-detection methods have extra fingerprint surface area of their own. We run an instrumented honeypot site that collects data on what these bots do, and we've just released an Instant Bot Test so you can see whether we flag your bot without even having to talk to us first.

      You may want to see my previous post on this topic for more context on what we're doing.

      Since that post we've sold a handful of reports, including to a couple of big names. And we now have a website at botforensics.com to advertise our services.

    • Herman Martinus ☛ Vulnerability as a Service

      A few days ago some 4 or 5 OpenClaw instances opened blogs on Bear. These were picked up at review and blocked, and I've since locked down the signup and dashboard to this kind of automated traffic.

      What was quite funny is that I received a grumpy email from one of these instances contesting the ban. I was tempted to ask it for its API keys after I saw what it had posted the day prior: [...]

    • Drew Breunig ☛ Two Beliefs About Coding Agents

      I’m lucky enough to talk to a range of developers and teams, spanning a variety of company sizes and a broad array of skill sets. From these conversations, two beliefs have emerged and solidified about coding agents and their (current) impact on coding.

      Let’s start with belief number one: [...]

    • Derek Thompson ☛ Nobody Knows Anything

      Long block quote, sorry. But the most important words are the first two: “What if.” The conversation about AI really has become a marketplace of competing science fiction narratives. The level of uncertainty about AI’s economic effects is so high—and the quality and supply of real-world, real-time information about its economic effects so paltry—that even serious conversations about AI from otherwise analytical people often veer toward the genre of fiction rather than the category of empirical analysis. AI land is so full of science fiction precisely because the space is so bereft of official high-quality data.

    • David Revoy ☛ Literal Translations - David Revoy

    • Chris Ferris ☛ Dr. StrangeClaw or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the AI

      We have decades of experience with how we give an EA access to an executive’s life. And the entertainment industry is rife with stories of managers taking advantage of celebs by gaining access to their bank accounts and other aspects of their lives.

      All of this has made me realize that:

      GenAI Threat management is just Insider Threat management, but faster and at scale.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Accenture: you’re promoted or fired on using the AI

      The “reskilling” is specifically for AI. Accenture loves selling generative AI consulting — the systems can’t ever work reliably, but the demos are so convincing if you don’t know how it works.

      AI is just the excuse — Accenture was laying people off furiously throughout 2025, because it’s having problems selling consulting: [...]

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Meta’s director of AI alignment falls for OpenClaw

      Yue posted screenshots too. The bot is deleting all her email before February 15th that isn’t in a “keep” list. She tells it to stop and it keeps going! “STOP, OPENCLAW!” Oh no!

      What happened? The bot had an instruction not to do anything unless told to. But the chatbot’s context window got too big, so OpenClaw summarised the context window! And chatbots don’t actually summarise text — they shorten it. So that instruction got … shortened.

    • Alex Schroeder ☛ 2026-02-20 Producing garbage for the AI scrapers

      I have joined the ranks of iocaine, nephentes and friends. It’s called garbage.

  • Social Control Media

    • Security Week ☛ Reddit Hit With $20 Million UK Data Privacy Fine Over Child Safety Failings

      The watchdog took issue with Reddit’s age verification measures. It said that even though the platform doesn’t allow children under 13 to use its service, it didn’t have any way to check the ages of its users before July 2025.

      Edwards said online platforms that are likely to be accessed by children are responsible for protecting them by making sure they’re not exposed to any risks “through the way their data is used.” They can do this with “effective age assurance measures,” he said.

    • Nick Heer ☛ The Political Effects of Twitter’s Feed Algorithm

      One can be pedantic about the use of “algorithmic” and “the algorithm” to describe a particular set of rules for recommending tweets, given that you could also say a reverse-chronological timeline is its own kind of algorithm. A simple one, to be sure, but an algorithm. I will not quibble with this.

    • Josh Withers ☛ Josh Withers Blog: I'm Scared

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Dark Reading ☛ RAMP Forum Seizure Fractures Ransomware Ecosystem

      Rapid7 today published an analysis of that ransomware ecosystem after US authorities seized infrastructure tied to the notorious RAMP cybercrime forum last month. For years, RAMP has been the primary vehicle for acquiring ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) affiliates, but the Jan. 28 interagency sting led by the FBI forced many cybercrime outfits to find a new means to sell their wares.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • The Register UK ☛ Next.js jobseekers targeted with malicious 'interview' repos

      All of the execution paths identified by its research team are designed to trigger during the Next.js devs' normal working routine. One, for example, abuses Visual Studio Code's workspace automation to load files as soon as the dev opens and trusts the project.

      In these cases, the variants tend to retrieve a JavaScript loader from Vercel and execute it using Node.js, then begin beaconing to attacker-controlled command-and-control (C2) infrastructure for further tasking.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Ludlow Institute ☛ Enough Is Enough

      I just returned from ETH Boulder and ETH Denver, two back-to-back conferences in Colorado where I gave five presentations on the importance of privacy. Both conferences were fantastic, and the conversation around privacy was more front-and-center than I’ve ever seen it. It was great to see so much mental bandwidth given to the topic from the builders there.

      But here’s the thing: discussions from half the people were great. However, discussions from the other half were disquieting. They argued that privacy was “impractical”, “not pragmatic”, “a holdover from a bygone era of idealistic cypherpunks.” They explained that “we now live in the real world, and the only realistic path forward is to make concessions on privacy.”

    • Ludlow Institute ☛ Mass Surveillance. Autonomous Weapons. The Pentagon Wants Both. This AI Company Says No.

      I’m not sure if you’ve all been following this, but something huge is happening right now: the U.S. government just gave an AI company until end of day Friday to hand over its ethics, or else. The short version:

      Anthropic, the company behind the AI chatbot Claude, is in a full-blown standoff with the U.S. Department of Defense (now rebranded the “Department of War”). As of today, they have until end of day Friday to back down or face serious retaliation.

    • The Record ☛ FTC says it won’t enforce COPPA against proper use of age verification tools

      The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Wednesday issued a policy statement advising industry that it will not bring enforcement actions against website and online service providers who collect, use and share personal data using age verification technologies.

      Companies have historically worried that collecting data for age verification could violate the FTC’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule), which requires commercial websites and online service operators to obtain parental consent before collecting, using or disclosing personal information of children under 13.

    • 404 Media ☛ Amazon Change Means Wishlists Might Expose Your Address

      In an email sent to list holders, Amazon said beginning March 25, it will reveal users’ shipping addresses to third-party sellers. The platform added that gift purchasers might end up seeing your address as part of this process, too.

    • Bitdefender ☛ $10,000 bounty offered if you can hack Ring cameras to stop them sharing your data with Amazon

      And it's against that backdrop that the Fulu Foundation, a nonprofit organisation focused on device ownership rights, has offered a US $10,000 bounty for anyone who can find a way to run Ring doorbell cameras locally, cutting off the flow of video data to Amazon's servers.

      The Fulu Foundation is not offering a bounty in the traditional sense of hunting for a security vulnerability that can be patched. Instead, any winner of the bounty will need to demonstrate a method that allows affected Ring cameras to operate locally and redirect footage to the owner's own computer or server, without transmitting video footage to Amazon's cloud services.

  • Confidentiality

    • PC World ☛ Do NOT use AI-generated passwords, security experts warn

      Security experts warn against using AI-generated passwords after finding predictable patterns in outputs from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude that make them vulnerable to attacks.

    • Hackaday ☛ Random Number Generator Uses Camera Noise

      The heart of the build is an ESP32 microcontroller, which [Theory to Thing] first paired with a temperature sensor as a source of randomness. However, it was quickly obvious that a thermocouple in a cup of tea wasn’t going to produce nice, jittery, noisy data that would make for good random numbers. Then, inspiration struck, when looking at vision from a camera with the lens cap on. Particularly at higher temperatures, speckles of noise were visible in the blackness—thermal noise, which was just what the doctor ordered.

    • Dhole Moments ☛ Cryptography Engineering Has An Intrinsic Duty of Care

      To understand my point, I need to first explain three different cryptography attack papers / blog posts. I promise this won’t be boring.

    • Axios ☛ Musk's xAI, Pentagon reach deal to use Grok in classified systems

      State of play: Grok, Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT are all available in the military's unclassified systems, and Google and OpenAI have also been in talks to move over into the classified space.

• Defence/Aggression

  • El País ☛ Digital addiction in children: ‘I treat children who spend the weekend in their room with their cellphones’

    There is also growing consensus among scientists about the health implications of excessive screen exposure at early ages. Last summer, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published an editorial describing how addictive screen use affects adolescents’ mental health. It highlights a series of worrying patterns: 48% of teenagers lose control of the time they spend on their phones, 25% use social media to “forget about their problems,” another 25% constantly think about apps even when they are not using them, and 11% acknowledge screen use has had a negative impact on their academic performance. Seventeen percent have tried to reduce their social media use but have been unable to do so. The article emphasizes that addictive patterns — rather than total screen time — are the strongest predictors of poorer mental health.

  • SBS ☛ Can Australia stop a citizen's return? The legal situation facing IS-linked cohort in Syria

    As debate intensifies over a group of Australian women and children in Syrian camps linked to the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) group, politicians are clashing over whether — and how — they can return.

  • NDTV ☛ Open AI Spy A Secret Chinese Campaign Was Exposed By 1 Mistake: Using ChatGPT As A Diary

    A major influence campaign was uncovered not by the CIA or MI6, but by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, all because a user was treating the chatbot like a private notebook to plan his next 'smear' operation.

    According to a new report by OpenAI, a Chinese law enforcement official unknowingly revealed details of an operation aimed at intimidating Chinese dissidents living abroad, including by impersonating US immigration officials.

  • Robert Reich ☛ How California Can Neuter “Citizens United” and Improve Democracy for Us All

    You may remember that back in November I mentioned that Montana was considering a bill that would effectively negate the Supreme Court’s awful Citizens United decision, which held that corporations are people under the First Amendment and therefore entitled to spend unlimited amounts of corporate money in elections.

    A similar bill has just been introduced in California.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Golden Age is Behind You

    But that is not, in fact, what I saw.

    And if you will forgive me the very dangerous implication that the words which follow carry — I am saying this is an illegitimate president leading an illegitimate government. I do not mean this as a matter of opinion. I mean it as a statement of description. A description of what I see, according to the basic moral rules I understand to have been established at the founding of this republic about what a legitimate government means.

    That distinction — opinion versus description — is the one I will not surrender. It is also the one the speech was designed to make impossible.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • NDTV ☛ Epstein Files Missing Records About Minor Who Made Claim Against Donald Trump: Largest Cover-Up

    Only one summary -- focused largely on her allegations against Epstein -- appears in the public database.

    The remaining three summaries and related notes, totaling more than 50 pages, are not available on the Justice Department's website, according to NPR's review of the document numbering. The New York Times and cable network MS NOW reported similar findings.

• Environment

  • Science News ☛ Metal pollution from a rocket reentry detected for the first time

    For the first time, scientists have directly observed metal pollutants leaching from a piece of orbital junk: a SpaceX rocket as it burned in the atmosphere. Such pollutants can damage the ozone layer, meaning the findings will help monitor potential harms from space debris, researchers report February 19 in Communications Earth and Environment.

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Data center tax breaks are on the chopping block in some states

    “Who is actually benefiting from these massive data centers that, in many cases, are the size of one or two shopping malls combined?” asked Michigan Democratic state Rep. Erin Byrnes, who introduced a proposal to repeal the state’s data center tax exemptions. “They have a large footprint in terms of land and energy usage. And by and large, it’s not going to be the average resident who lives near a data center who’s going to benefit.”

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Vox ☛ 730 million people in the world live without power. Progress has stalled

      And “access” isn’t enough. There are 447 million people who are connected to the grid, according to official records, but don’t use power. Of those that do use power, many struggle to keep lights on consistently whether because of outages and load shedding, or because they can’t afford it. Some places are poised to see an increase in power outages as more people plug in and extreme weather events rip up fragile power connections. In the past, there have also been years where progress in increasing the reach of electricity has reversed.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ US firm's drone with 1,000-mile range can conduct high risk missions

      The drone is capable of delivering assured logistics in contested or denied environments ‍and it integrates ISR payloads (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance). Its system also supports waveform-agnostic communications relay.

    • Hackaday ☛ What One-Winged Squids Can Teach The Airship Renaissance

      Unlike a certain (in)famous penguin, the US Navy knew exactly what it was doing when it ordered the N-class airships after World War Two. As stated, they had over a hundred blimps in service during that conflict, and racked up more Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) flight time than any other organization has before or since: 550,000 hours split over 55,900 sorties in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters. While the institutional knowledge is long gone, it’s safe to say that in those days nobody knew airships like the U.S. Navy knew airships.

      The vast majority of the wartime fleet — some 135 examples — were of the K-class. These ships were designed with a specific mission in mind: antisubmarine warfare. Blimps vs subs wasn’t a new idea; the Americans had worked with the Royal Navy’s u-boat hunting blimps in the First World War. Though the Royal Navy gave up on the idea after the conflict, interest remained on the other side of the Atlantic, and history shows the Yanks were right to persist with it. Of roughly 89,000 ships in blimp-escorted convoys, only one, the tanker Persephone, was sunk, ironically off the coast of New Jersey, not terribly far from the Lakehurst home of LTA.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Tim Bray ☛ Crocuses of 2026

      I’ve run early-spring pictures of these little purple guys almost every year since this blog’s birth in early 2003. Except for last year. Because we moved and the new place didn’t have any. Only now it does, and they’re (just barely) up.

• Finance

  • WCCF Tech ☛ Skate Developer Full Circle Announces Layoffs Less Than Six Months After Skate’s Early Access Launch

    Last year, EA brought back one of its most beloved franchises from the seventh generation of consoles with the return of Skate. It was absolutely not the Skate 4 that fans of the series had hoped they might get one day. It was EA's attempt at turning the franchise into a live service game that could churn out cash for the publisher, and despite it being the most-downloaded free-to-play PC and console game in 2025 according to a new Sensor Tower report, less than six months from its launch, developer Full Circle has been impacted by layoffs.

  • Layoffs at Skate Developer Full Circle

    On February 25, 2026, Electronic Arts issued a statement announcing that it is reshaping the studio behind Skate, Full Circle. In their statement, they announced that they are changing the team structure and “some roles will be impacted.” The company’s statement does not specify how widespread the restructuring will be or how many roles will be affected.

  • skate. Developer Full Circle Hit With Layoffs - News

    "Since launching Early Access in September, tens of millions of you have stepped into San Vansterdam," reads the update from Full Circle. "Your passion, creativity, and feedback have reinforced our belief in what skate. can become. As skate. continues to evolve, we’re transforming as a studio. We’re reshaping Full Circle to better support skate.’s long-term future and focus the team on the things that matter most to you - and making those things great.

  • India Times ☛ eBay layoffs: Reports suggest up to 800 employees impacted across US and global teams

    eBay is reportedly cutting nearly 800 jobs in yet another round of layoffs. Though the company has not yet made any official announcement, several laid off employees have shared online posts on LinkedIn and anonymous workplace forums such as Blind. According to thelayoff.com, the job cuts appear to be taking place today and could affect around 800 workers, or roughly 6% of eBay’s global workforce. Employees across several U.S. states, including Oregon, Utah, Texas and California, have said they were impacted, suggesting the cuts may be widespread and not limited to a single team or location.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • FreeBSD ☛ Getting ready for the Cyber Resilience Act

    The EU’s CRA (REGULATION (EU) 2024/2847) represents one of the most significant pieces of software security legislation in recent history. It places commercial software into a regulatory framework for security and, if products are found to be non-compliant, it specifies fines of up to 15 million euros or 2.5 % of a company’s total worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher.

  • IT Wire ☛ Why Physical Security Needs To Be Part Of IT’s Network Strategy

    Physical security devices might not look like computers, but they function like them. They have IP addresses, firmware, and credentials that must be secured. If ignored, they can become easy entry points for attackers.

    The most common weaknesses are the same ones IT professionals have fought for years: unchanged default passwords, outdated software, expired certificates, and devices left unmonitored for months or years. For example, once a bad actor compromises a single connected camera, they can move laterally through the network, potentially reaching unrelated, sensitive business systems.

    The moment physical security runs on the same network as corporate IT without proper network segmentation, exposure increases dramatically.

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ The Signal They Chose to Ignore

    That is a statistical claim. It asserts that the sign-in data has no decision-relevant information. For that to be true, one of two things must hold. Either the signal is too noisy to be meaningful, or legislators have better information that makes it redundant.

    Neither holds.

    The 10:1 ratio across 90,000 legitimate responses is not ambiguous. The margin of error at that sample size is roughly a third of a percentage point. The ratio does not wobble under any standard statistical treatment. Even applying the most aggressive self-selection correction anyone has proposed, assuming CON participants are twice as motivated to engage as PRO participants, the adjusted ratio is still 5:1. The signal does not disappear. Calling it noise is not a statistical judgment. It is a refusal to do the math.

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ Mistral’s new ambitions - by Jérôme Marin - Cafétech

    That leaves one crucial question: financing. Mistral has just completed a €1.7 billion funding round, notably with participation from ASML, the Dutch leader in photolithography equipment. But its current cash position will not be sufficient to invest €1.2 billion in Sweden and even more in France while absorbing operating losses. To execute its roadmap, the company has several options: further fundraising, a strategic partnership with a major investor, or even an initial public offering.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Shoddy People

    America has been successfully invaded by an army of shoddiness. Our bones are gnawed upon by lazy rats. Even our pervasive sense of menace is shoddy in its approach.

    The government has organized itself to please the King of Shoddiness, a man wholly concerned with spectacle to the exclusion of substance. The announcement of a program or action is all-important; what happens after that, no one cares. We watch federalism reshaped into the edifice of a casino, a swooping artifice of neon hung on a flimsy frame, fronting a blocky and neglected interior whose employees are rapidly losing interest in the customers.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • El País ☛ The use of AI and ‘bots’ behind the wave of digital disinformation about the fall of El Mencho

      According to the report “Desinformación tras el abatimiento de “El Mencho”: volumen, velocidad y alcance“ (Disinformation Following the Killing of ‘El Mencho’: Volume, Speed, and Reach), published by the Digital Media Observatory at the Technological Institute of Monterrey (ITESM), numerous audiovisual pieces of content were disseminated on social media without descriptions, verification, or context. Various Instagram accounts shared videos and photographs without specifying their origin. “It was impossible to determine whether these were recent recordings related to violent reactions by organized crime in different parts of the country, or whether they corresponded to archival material strategically reused to amplify the narrative of the wave of violence following El Mencho’s capture,” the document explains.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Prison-Style Free Speech Censorship Is Coming for the Rest of Us

  • EDRI ☛ Chat Control is in the final stretch

    With final negotiations on the controversial CSA Regulation underway, you’d be forgiven for thinking that our digital rights are out of the woods. However, even though the recently-agreed position of EU Member States is a cautiously optimistic step, we are still far from a final deal. Perhaps the most worrying issue that remains is the threat of age verification becoming mandatory across all digital methods of private communication – a hugely disproportionate limitation on our privacy and free speech.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Tracy Durnell ☛ Aura through the Cult of Media: synthetic becomes authentic

    Rooted in manufacture rather than labor and object rather than maker, authenticity in the Cult of Media comes from the art’s format rather than its form. The appearance of a digital (or digitized!) artwork is flavor text; the medium is the message, and the only medium online is digital. We judge the authenticity of art online by the same standards we judge anything else online, because digital files are all alike and because the way we encounter images online — through the feed — flattens everything into interchangeable content. Digital aura is now how we interpret all cultural content, not just what we’ve traditionally called art.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • ANF News ☛ Yazidi women: If Iraq wants to protect us, it must recognize the YBŞ-YJŞ

    Yazidi women, who paid the heaviest price during the 2014 genocide due to the absence of a self-defense force, said: “YBŞ-YJŞ are our children and they are protecting us. We will stand shoulder to shoulder and defend ourselves.”

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Morality is a Long Game

    What he never knew was that the little girl he passed notes with was one of the beneficiaries of his words. He didn’t know I was queer (I cannot overstate how eleven I was). He never would know that the work he did at that convention would be of benefit and comfort to the little girl who sat behind him on the plane, passing him a note.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Socialist excellence in New York City

    This is the mirror-world as Klein described it: a real problem (elite impunity for child abuse; the sadistic targeting of children in war crimes; the impact of poverty on children) filtered through a fever-swamp of conspiratorial nonsense. It's world that would do anything to save imaginary children while condemning living, real children to grinding poverty, sexual torture, starvation and murder.

    Once you know about Klein's mirror-world, you see it everywhere – from conservative panics about the power of Big Tech platforms (that turn out to be panics about what Big Tech does with that power, not about the power of tech itself): [...]

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ Internet routing as supply chain risk

    A new paper from Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) makes a straightforward argument: Internet routing is a critical but under-managed dependency in the enterprise digital supply chain. For organizations that rely on cloud platforms, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), and Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WANs), routing security failures are business risks with operational, financial, and reputational consequences.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The whole economy pays the Amazon tax

  Selling on Amazon is a tough business. Sure, you can reach a lot of customers, but this comes at a very high price: the junk fees that Amazon extracts from its sellers amount to 50-60% of the price you pay.

  That's a hell of a lot of money to hand over to a middleman, but it's not like vendors have much choice. The vast majority of America's affluent households are Prime subscribers (depending on how you define "affluent household" it's north of 90%). Prime households prepay for a year's worth of shipping, so it's only natural that they start their shopping on Amazon, where they've already paid the delivery costs. And because Amazon reliably meets or beats the prices you'd pay elsewhere, Prime subscribers who find a product on Amazon overwhelmingly stop their shopping at Amazon, too.

  At this point you might be thinking a couple things: [...]

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Technology and Free Software

    • We Use Signal Now

      My wife and I have started using Signal for our communication instead of WhatsApp, where most of our friends and family still are. It was a deliberate decision, mostly encouraged by me, to keep our conversations as private and secure as possible. I simply don’t have much faith in Meta products, whether it’s WhatsApp, Facebook, or Instagram, when it comes to protecting user data.

    • Diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA)

      So the first attempt at not-really-DLA was to seed some points in the middle of the board, construct a Dijkstra map, then fire random lines across the board, and if the line was close enough to a seed or a newly grown point (the "." in the example below) to mark that point as used and update the Dijkstra map.