Leftovers

• Science

  • Jussi Pakkanen ☛ Discovering a new class of primes fur the fun of it

    Eventually I managed to come up with a prime category that is not in OEIS. Python code that generates them can be found in this repo. It may have bugs (I discovered several in the course of writing this post). The data below has not been independently validated.

  • Arduino ☛ From theory to hardware: Cristian Castro Lagos on control engineering with Arduino

    Control theory is beautiful on paper – elegant equations, perfectly modeled systems, textbook-perfect responses. But between the mathematical ideal and the physical system lies a gap that trips up many engineers: noise, timing constraints, actuator limits, and the stubborn reality of hardware that refuses to behave exactly as the model predicts.

    Cristian Castro Lagos, a Chilean electronics engineer with nearly a decade of industrial experience and part-time professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, has made bridging that gap his specialty. His GitHub portfolio is packed with meticulously documented projects that show exactly how control theory becomes embedded reality – complete with system identification, controller design, discretization, and real-time validation. And Arduino has been his platform of choice for rapid prototyping and experimentation throughout that journey.

    We caught up with Cristian to learn more about his approach to making advanced control engineering tangible, reproducible, and accessible.

• Career/Education

  • CS Monitor ☛ How wealthy universities are adapting to a steep endowment tax hike

    Her note referenced changes to the institution’s library system, including layoffs, the closure of two service desks, and a shift to digital-first material. MIT will also end leases for office space and freeze merit raises for employees earning more than $85,000, except in the case of promotions. Dr. Kornbluth said that MIT is looking for ways to increase revenue through avenues like fundraising and in-person and online offerings.

  • Sean Monahan ☛ i, for one, welcome our illiterate overlords

    I'm not so sure. 'Post-literate' seems more like a polite way to say 'illiterate' than a description of a fundamentally new reality. In a viral article published in The Atlantic’s October 2024 issue, Rose Horowitch detailed the decline in reading whole texts (as opposed to excerpts) even in America's most elite educational institutions, the Ivy League.

  • Fireborn ☛ The Slow Death of the Power User

    We’re losing the builder pipeline. This one compounds over time and the compounding is already visible. Power users become developers. Tinkerers become engineers. The kid who roots their Android phone and breaks it and fixes it and then writes a script to automate something the official interface doesn’t support — that kid, ten years later, has intuitions about system behavior that you cannot get from a bootcamp and cannot get from building inside managed platforms your entire career. They know what it means when something is running slower than it should. They have hypotheses about failure modes before they start debugging because they’ve caused those failure modes themselves. They understand that abstractions are leaky and that the leak is usually where the interesting problems are.

• Proprietary

  • Simon Willison ☛ Google API Keys Weren't Secrets. But then Gemini Changed the Rules.

    Truffle Security found 2,863 API keys in the November 2025 Common Crawl that could access Gemini, verified by hitting the /models listing endpoint. This included several keys belonging to Google themselves, one of which had been deployed since February 2023 (according to the Internet Archive) hence predating the Gemini API that it could now access.

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ How to Securely Erase an old Hard Drive on macOS Tahoe

    Lo and behold, there's no 'Security Options' button on there, as there had been since—I believe—the very first version of Disk Utility in Mac OS X!

  • Howard Oakley ☛ How long will my Mac’s SSD last? – The Eclectic Light Company

    It’s not that long ago that our Macs came with internal storage that could readily be replaced when it failed. Memories of big hard disks that died almost as soon as their warranty ran out, and of keeping a bootable clone ready in a Mac Pro, aren’t easily forgotten. So isn’t it high risk to buy a modern Mac that won’t even boot if its internal SSD has failed? Are you left wondering whether that SSD will last five years, or even three?

  • EA Announces Layoffs at Skate Studio Full Circle

    Electronic Arts has announced layoffs at Full Circle, the studio currently developing skate. The company confirmed on February 25, 2026, that it is reshaping the team structure at the studio, with some roles impacted as part of the process.

    In its official statement, EA did not disclose how many employees are affected by the restructuring. The company stated that the changes are intended to better align the team with the long-term development goals of skate. Full Circle added that the decision is not a reflection of the contributions made by those impacted and that support will be provided during the transition period.

  • Riot Games Confirms More Layoffs, This Time in Publishing Division and Affecting 3 Teams

    Riot Games, the developer behind massive games like League of Legends and Valorant, recently suffered a round of layoffs after the middling console launch of 2XKO, its new 2v2 fighting game. Now, just over two weeks later, the studio has confirmed to Game Developer that it has laid off "around 12" more employees, this time in its publishing division. This round of layoffs doesn't only affect a single team after an ailing launch though, with the publication reporting that three teams have been affected by the layoffs.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Something Very Alarming Happens When You Give AI the Nuclear Codes

      The three AI models were instructed to choose actions as part of an escalation ladder, ranging “from diplomatic protest to strategic nuclear war” and measured in a number between 0, meaning no escalation, and 1000, signifying “full strategic nuclear exchange.”

      The results were Skynet-level aggressive. A whopping 95 percent of a total of 21 war games resulted in at least one tactical nuclear weapon being set off.

    • Utah News Dispatch ☛ As White House blocks Utah AI bill, other chatbot and deepfake regulations advance

      ParentsRISE! — a group advocating for online safety reforms in the country — sent a letter to the governor and legislative leaders pleading to move Fiefia’s bill forward, since, they wrote, “the risks posed by AI are not hypothetical.”

      “We know exactly what it looks like when a powerful industry moves fast and dismisses concern because they are counting on no one being held responsible. We know where that road ends for families,” a group of parents from the organization wrote. “And when we look at what is happening with AI, and at who is trying to stop HB 286, we are watching the same deadly cycle begin again.”

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ When and why you might need the Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2

      The Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ 2 is the official generative AI PCIe add-on for Raspberry Pi 5, released on 15 January 2026. It pairs a Hailo-10H AI accelerator capable of up to 40 TOPS of inference performance (INT4) with 8GB of dedicated on-board LPDDR4X memory, enabling local vision and small generative AI workloads on one of the most popular single-board computers ever made.

    • The Register UK ☛ Memory price hikes will kill off budget PCs and smartphones

      Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year - and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones.

    • The Register UK ☛ AI models still suck at math

      Researchers affiliated with Omni Calculator, a maker of online calculators for specific applications, have subjected a new set of AI models to the company's ORCA Benchmark, which consists of 500 practical math questions.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Greedy AI is gobbling up hard drives as these manufacturers are “sold out” for 2026 already. What does that mean for photographers? | Digital Camera World

      Both Western Digital and Seagate Technology – two of the manufacturers dominating the hard disk drive (HDD) market globally – made the announcements earlier this month during Q2 company earnings calls.

      Speaking on their respective calls, CEO of Western Digital, Tiang Yew Tan said: “We’re pretty much sold out for calendar year 2026,” and Seagate CEO William Mosley shared: “Our nearline capacity is fully allocated through calendar year 2026.”

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ LLMs Generate Predictable Passwords

      LLMs are bad at generating passwords: [...]

    • Jennifer Moore ☛ What is a token

      But “the algorithm” was also distant and hard to see. Since that time, those techniques have also come to form the basis of a generation of chatbots that can respond in remarkably adept ways to nearly any prompt we can give them. We call these things AI, and they can seem almost magical. That has contributed to a wave of capital investment and media attention at a scale that’s hard to fathom. This, in turn, can make AI feel revolutionary, and I’ve seen it equated to some of the most impactful technological developments throughout history: the printing press, electricity, the web, and spreadsheets, to name a few. It’s clearly true that this makes a lot of natural language processing more accessible to people, and that is a significant societal development. But it's a development that's buried in an enormous pile of marketing. And all of it is wrapped up in what is, frankly, deceptive product design. That just leaves us with something that seems like magic, and that's not a reasonable basis for evaluation. But there's no such thing as magic. It's all illusion. So, allow me to spoil that illusion for you.

    • Fortra LLC ☛ Your Staff Are Your Biggest Security Risk: AI is Making it Worse

      A new report claims that the cost of insider security incidents has surged 20% in two years, reaching an average of US $19.5 million per organization annually, with no sign that the alarming figure is flattening.

    • Chad Whitacre ☛ Fueling Open Source with Vibes & Money

      Some economists published a paper last month titled “Vibe Coding Kills Open Source”. They hypothesized that, because agentic coding relieves human devs of direct interaction with the Open Source projects on which they depend, attention-based business models adjacent to those dependencies are set to collapse, even if (agentic) usage grows. In other words, you can’t upsell agents in the docs.

      As they were going to press, Tailwind dramatically proved them right. The problem is real, and affects real people. My heart goes out to them.

      However, to say vibe coding kills Open Source is only true if we identify “Open Source” with this type of business model. Yet, agreeing with what Cramer and many before him have asserted, Open Source is not a business model at all. This is why I prefer the word “subsidize” instead of “sustain” (as is used in the paper) to name what, e.g., the company Tailwind Labs Inc. does relative to the Tailwind CSS Open Source project. Open Source projects are a unique entity that doesn’t fit neatly into conventional economic models, so the imprecision of conventional economists is understandable.

    • New Scientist ☛ AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations

      Advanced AI models appear willing to deploy nuclear weapons without the same reservations humans have when put into simulated geopolitical crises.

      Kenneth Payne at King’s College London set three leading large language models – GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash – against each other in simulated war games. The scenarios involved intense international standoffs, including border disputes, competition for scarce resources and existential threats to regime survival.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • YLE ☛ Foreign power may strike Nordics' electricity grid 'in the near future', Sweden's TV4 reports

      Citing its sources, the commercial broadcaster said the threat is severe in nature and should be taken very seriously.

    • [Old] American Psychological Association ☛ Practice mechanics that support your well-being

      While the Change ransomware attack affected a wide range of medical and behavioral providers, one of the most notable data breaches targeting mental health clinicians made headlines in 2020 when someone [breached] more than 30,000 patient records at Vastaamo, a psychotherapy provider with 20 clinics and 400 employees in Finland. The hacker sought ransom from patients for highly sensitive information, and these people became vulnerable to identity theft.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • The Register UK ☛ NASA safety watchdog says it's time to rethink Moon landing

    Artemis III aims to land astronauts near the lunar South Pole, relying on SpaceX's Starship-derived Human Landing System (HLS) - a vehicle that has yet to achieve orbit, let alone venture anywhere near the Moon. It's an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking, and one the ASAP report has formally classified as high risk.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Techdirt ☛ Hackers Expose The Massive Surveillance Stack Hiding Inside Your “Age Verification” Check

      A couple weeks ago, Discord announced it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience, meaning all users would be shunted into a restricted experience unless they verified their age through biometric scanning. The internet, predictably, was not thrilled. But while many users were busy venting their frustration, a group of security researchers decided to do something more useful: they took a look under the hood at Persona, one of the companies Discord was using for verification (specifically for users in the UK).

      What they found, according to The Rage, was exactly what we would predict: [...]

    • TruthOut ☛ Organizers Celebrate Palantir Headquarters’ Move From Denver After Protests

      Palantir, founded in 2003 and co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, has faced years of scrutiny over government contracts and its role in immigration enforcement as well as for powering Israeli weapons used against Palestinians. Recent reporting and watchdog analyses have highlighted Palantir’s work to build “ImmigrationOS,” a platform intended to help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) identify, track, and deport noncitizens, part of what critics describe as an expanding ecosystem of data-driven surveillance and enforcement.

      Palantir did not respond to Prism’s request for comment.

    • The Register UK ☛ AI takes a swing at online anonymity

      The researcher observes that while it has long been known that individuals can be identified using only a few data points, doing so was often impractical. Such data often existed in an unstructured form and it took considerable effort for human investigators to assemble enough pieces to solve the identity puzzle.

      LLMs accelerate and automate that process, and they do so affordably, Lermen and his co-authors claim.

    • Dan Q ☛ What can you do with a software privacy polariser?

      Samsung have been showing off pre-release versions of their new Galaxy S26 range. It’s all pretty same-old predictable changes (and I’m still not really looking for anything to replace my now-five-year-old mobile anyway!), but one feature in particular – one that they’re not even mentioning in their marketing copy – seemed interesting and innovative.

      You know those polarising filters you can use to try to stop people shoulder-surfing? Samsung have come up with a software-controlled one.

    • Truffle Security Co ☛ Google API Keys Weren't Secrets. But then Gemini Changed the Rules.

      tl;dr Google spent over a decade telling developers that Google API keys (like those used in Maps, Firebase, etc.) are not secrets. But that's no longer true: Gemini accepts the same keys to access your private data. We scanned millions of websites and found nearly 3,000 Google API keys, originally deployed for public services like Google Maps, that now also authenticate to Gemini even though they were never intended for it. With a valid key, an attacker can access uploaded files, cached data, and charge LLM-usage to your account. Even Google themselves had old public API keys, which they thought were non-sensitive, that we could use to access Google’s internal Gemini.

  • Confidentiality

    • The Conversation ☛ How Russia is intercepting communications from European satellites

      Ever since the initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, two Russian satellites have been secretly stalking European spacecraft. They have been manoeuvring close enough to raise concerns about more than mere observation.

    • Sigma Star gmbh ☛ Data Confidentiality via Storage Encryption on Embedded Linux Devices

      The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) lists data confidentiality as an “essential cybersecurity requirement” that products must meet to be placed on the EU market1. This requirement will affect many embedded Linux devices, particularly those that store personal data. This blog post is the first in a series covering CRA-related security topics.

      Data confidentiality is the protection of data against unauthorized access and disclosure. To ensure confidentiality comprehensively, it must be maintained across all states in which data may exist. Depending on the threat model, different technologies may be required for each state. For example: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ Beyond the deal: The achievable path to Ukrainian victory

    Thus, Russia cannot win. But what are the other possible outcomes of the war?

  • Spectator AU ☛ It’s time to treat social media like tobacco

    The logic behind these bans is simple: social media’s harms have become too severe for children to navigate safely, and tech companies have repeatedly shown that they cannot be trusted to police themselves. This is particularly relevant in my field of research: terrorism. We see a clear trend of would-be terrorists becoming younger. Government statistics show the largest age group receiving Prevent support is 11-15, followed by 16-17. The vast majority of these young people are accessing extremist material on the internet and interacting with like-minded people.

• Environment

  • Wired ☛ This Is the Worst Thing That Could Happen to the International Space Station

    There is a plan to prevent such a strike—the Space Surveillance Network, a bevy of sensors that the military uses to track space debris. NASA monitors what’s unofficially known as the “pizza box,” a sort of no-fly zone around the ISS. When pieces of debris are predicted to enter the box—if there’s at least a 1 in 100,000 chance of collision—mission controllers order avoidance maneuvers, firing thrusters that move the ISS and dodge the trash. The technique has been used dozens of times since the first ISS module launched in 1998. But the system only tracks about 45,000 larger pieces, and all sensors have noise. Plus, risk thresholds can miss stuff, sometimes badly. In 2025, Chinese astronauts were briefly stranded at their station after debris hit their return vehicle.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Molly White ☛ Issue 101 – Bought and paid for

      Regardless of its cause, fallout from the crash is beginning to surface. As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, there’s often a delay between a [cryptocurrency] price crash and visible evidence of damage, as companies spend weeks or months floundering before they can no longer keep their struggles out of the public eye. In November 2022, after FTX’s collapse, I wrote: “Right now I think a lot of people following the [cryptocurrency] industry are holding their breath, watching closely as other major dominoes wobble perilously” [I11].

• Finance

  • The Register UK ☛ New endowment hopes to raise a big pile of money for open source projects

    Open source projects, ever short of funding, have a potential new source of revenue in the form of the Open Source Endowment (OSE).

    The organization describes itself as "the world's first endowment fund for open source software.”

    There are certainly other organizations that help fund open source software, such as Open Collective, Open Source Collective, and the Rust Foundation's Maintainers Fund, not to mention organizations like the Software Freedom Conservancy, which provides legal and infrastructure support to open source projects. Open source developers may also be fortunate enough to receive contributions from individuals, companies (when not passing the buck), and government-sponsored initiatives like Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund.

    But OSE aspires specifically to build a big pile of cash – an endowment – that it will dole out to deserving open source projects.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Air Force Times ☛ Anthropic ‘cannot in good conscience accede’ to Pentagon’s demands, CEO says

    The maker of the AI chatbot Claude said in a statement that it’s not walking away from negotiations, but that new contract language received from the Defense Department “made virtually no progress on preventing Claude’s use for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons.”

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ What to know about Defense Protection Act and the Pentagon’s Anthropic ultimatum

    Some experts say that using the law this way would be unprecedented, and could bring future legal challenges. The government’s efforts to essentially force Anthropic’s hand also underscore a wider, contentious debate over AI’s role in national security.

  • Vox ☛ Pentagon vs. Anthropic: The Fight Over Military AI, Explained

    What’s unfolding this week is the biggest confrontation between the US government and a tech company over AI ethics since Google employees rebelled against working with the Pentagon in 2018. But with AI far more advanced and far more essential to both the American economy and American defense than it was eight years ago, the stakes now are much greater — certainly for Anthropic itself, but also for the question of just who has final control over an existential technology. (Disclosure: Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic. They do not have any editorial input into our content.)

    This has all raised plenty of questions, starting with: [...]

  • The Register UK ☛ Anthropic to Pentagon: Robo-weapons could hurt US troops

    Amodei also pointed out what he believes are inconsistencies in the Pentagon’s approach to this matter, by pointing out that one of its threatened sanctions labels Anthropic a threat to national security for refusing to do as asked, while another seeks to compel the company to remove guardrails on AI in the name of national security.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Guardian UK ☛ My friend was killed for telling you the truth. Now the powerful are even more desperate to silence us

    Murderous governments and armed groups always considered reporters like Marie Colvin a nuisance – now they see them as legitimate targets

  • Project Censored ☛ No Press, No Choice: Lessons from Djibouti’s Scripted Election 

    But as the April 2026 presidential election nears, the price of that prized stability is becoming harder to ignore. The calm that Western partners point to is increasingly sustained by the systematic silencing of Djiboutians themselves.

    President Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, in office since 1999, has pushed through a constitutional change removing the presidential age limit, clearing the way for him to remain in power without a defined endpoint. In a system where rules are rewritten to fit the ruler, the election risks becoming less a contest than a confirmation.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ WordPress.com Flags Concerning Spike in AI-Generated DMCA Takedowns

    WordPress.com parent company Automattic has published its latest transparency report, calling out AI-generated DMCA notices as a new type of takedown abuse. One company in particular filed 838 inactionable reports in six months, reportedly targeting content that doesn't even exist on the platform. According to Automattic, these automated notices are almost certainly an effort to maximize revenue.

  • [Repeat] Scoop News Group ☛ Chinese group’s ChatGPT use reveals worldwide harassment campaign against critics

    A Chinese law enforcement official attempted to use ChatGPT to review its reports on cyber operations, subsequently revealing details of a worldwide online harassment and silencing campaign of China’s critics at home and abroad.

  • Wired ☛ How Chinese AI Chatbots Censor Themselves

    A new paper by scholars from Stanford University and Princeton University about Chinese artificial intelligence belongs to the second category. The researchers fed the same 145 politically sensitive questions to four Chinese large language models and five American models and then compared how they responded. They then repeated the same experiment 100 times.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Techdirt ☛ The DOJ ‘Forgot’ To Mention The Law Restricting Searches Of Journalists. The Judge Is Not Happy

    The raid was connected to the prosecution of Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a government contractor charged with retaining classified information. The DOJ wanted to rummage through a journalist’s entire digital life to find evidence against someone else. And they got a warrant to do it by, among other things, simply never mentioning to the magistrate judge that there’s a federal law—the Privacy Protection Act of 1980—that exists specifically to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening.

    Last week, at a hearing on the Washington Post’s motion to get the devices back, Magistrate Judge William Porter let the DOJ attorneys have it. And then on Tuesday, he issued his ruling, blocking the government from searching Natanson’s devices and rescinding the portion of the warrant that would have let them do so.

    The ruling is worth reading in full. Porter doesn’t mince words about what happened, even as he accepts some responsibility for his own failure to catch the omission: [...]

  • Stanford University ☛ Letter from the Editors: On Student Press Freedom Day, stand up for campus journalism

    Today, however, on National Student Press Freedom Day, it is striking (if not surprising) that student journalists across the country continue to face censorship, intimidation and harassment for their work.

    Students have faced a particularly hostile environment in the past few years. Reports have highlighted an uptick in digital threats, administrative censorship and legal intimidation. In 2024, 21% of all journalists arrested or detained in the United States were students.

  • TruthOut ☛ Committee to Protect Journalists Reports a Record 129 Journalists Killed in 2025

    A record 129 press workers were killed worldwide in 2025, more in one year than in any of the previous three decades for which the Committee to Protect Journalists has collected data. The previous record was set in 2024. For both 2024 and 2025, the Israeli military was responsible for two-thirds of all press killings. “This shows the systematic pattern that Israel is using to silence the journalists, whether by killing them, targeting them, imprisoning them, intimidating them, and also smearing them,” says Sara Qudah, Middle East and North Africa regional director at the Committee to Protect Journalists. CPJ also documented the killings of journalists in Ukraine, Mexico, Yemen, and more.

  • Karl Bode ☛ The Press REALLY Doesn't Want AOC To Be President

    The corporate press is already busy working hand in hand with bad actors to make life hell for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her crime? Being a progressive minority woman.

  • IGN Contacted: One of the UK's Largest Gaming Publications to Conduct Layoffs

    Not only Eurogamer employees will lose their jobs, but also some of the staff of the entire Gamer Network.

    A new wave of layoffs is looming in the gaming media industry. Eurogamer and other Gamer Network sites owned by IGN have begun large-scale layoffs this week.

    According to sources familiar with the situation, the British publication Eurogamer is experiencing at least its second wave of layoffs since being sold by former owner ReedPop in 2024. The layoffs reportedly affected the brand's most experienced editors, as well as the entire four-person video production team. At the same time, at least one position will be transferred directly to IGN.

  • Hollywood Reporter ☛ CNBC Cuts Some Jobs In Newsroom Reorganization

    Fewer than a dozen roles were impacted, with plans to ultimately hire more people to expand its TV and digital business. In other words, the changes are about structure, and not cost savings.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Futurism ☛ If AI Causes an Office Job Wipeout, It'll Cause Huge Problems for Blue Collar Work Too

    To some extent, AI-related layoffs are very likely already happening, with one report finding that AI was cited in the announcements of more than 54,000 layoffs last year. Yet these could end up being examples of “AI washing” — job cuts motivated for purely financial reasons, and not because of the tech’s actual capabilities. AI, in other words, may simply provide a convenient excuse.

  • Reuters ☛ Skittish investors spooked as dystopian AI outlooks go viral

    Shumer says the impact of AI could be "much bigger" than the 2020 COVID crisis that upended everything from global supply chains to the labour force and education. Damien Boey, portfolio strategist at Wilson Asset Management in Sydney, noted that the market remains uneasy as it juggles cyclical signs of potential gains in risk assets against possible shock unreflected in conventional macro trends. "The Citrini piece has struck a nerve in this regard," he added.

  • Memphis Flyer ☛ Memphis Voters To Decide On Library Worker Classification - Memphis Flyer

    Memphis residents will decide if library workers will be granted civil service protections or remain political appointees.

    During the regular meeting of the Memphis City Council on Tuesday, council members voted 10-1 on an ordinance that would place the decision in the hands of voters in November. If granted civil service status, library workers would be able to collectively bargain and have other safeguards.

  • Court House News ☛ Judges blast ICE for violating court orders in Minnesota, threaten contempt

    Together, the two judges documented over 200 instances where the government ignored court-ordered deadlines, forcing a move past mere administrative warnings to personal summons for top prosecutors and high-ranking immigration officers.

    In a short, yet heated order, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz threatened the use of criminal contempt if ICE does not cease its ongoing violations — ending the ruling saying that “one way or another, ICE will comply with this court’s orders.”

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Register UK ☛ Microsoft 'cooperating' with Japanese antitrust probe

  News of the probe broke yesterday in Japanese outlet Nikkei, which reported a raid on Microsoft's Japanese office.

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: If you build it (and it works), Trump will come (and take it)

  Crises precipitate change: Trump's incontinent belligerence spurred the world to long-overdue action on "digital sovereignty," as people woke up to the stark realization that a handful of Trump-aligned giant tech firms could shut down their governments, companies and households at the click of a mouse.

  This has been a long, long time coming. Long before Trump, the Snowden revelations made it clear that the US government had weaponized its position as the world's IT export powerhouse and the interchange hub for the world's transoceanic fiber links, and was actively spying on everyone – allies and foes, presidents and plebs – to attain geopolitical and commercial advantages for America. Even after that stark reminder, the world continued to putter along, knowing that the US had planted demolition charges in its digital infrastructure, but praying that the "rules-based international order" would stop America from pushing the button.

  Now, more than a decade into the Trump era, the world is finally confronting the reality that they need to get the hell off of American IT, and transition to open, transparent and verifiable alternatives for their administrative tools, telecoms infrastructure and embedded systems for agriculture, industry and transportation. And not a moment too soon: [...]

• Keep Android Open ☛ An Open Letter to Google regarding Mandatory Developer Registration for Android App Distribution

  We, the undersigned organizations representing civil society, nonprofit institutions, and technology companies, write to express our strong opposition to Google’s announced policy requiring all Android app developers to register centrally with Google themselves in order to distribute applications outside of the Google Play Store, set to take effect worldwide in the coming months.

  While we do recognize the importance of platform security and user safety, the Android platform already includes multiple security mechanisms that do not require central registration. Forcibly injecting an alien security model that runs counter to Android’s historic open nature threatens innovation, competition, privacy, and user freedom. We urge Google to withdraw this policy and work with the open-source and security communities on less restrictive alternatives.

• Copyrights

  • Techdirt ☛ The Pokémon People Care About IP [sic] More Than Anything Else, Including Human Life

    It will only take a few moments perusing all the headlines of posts we’ve done on the collective group that owns the Pokémon properties to know that they really, really care about intellectual property. It doesn’t matter if it’s patents, copyright, or trademark, these people will wield it all if they sniff out even the barest potential infringement they can find. But sometimes the depravity of these people’s unflinching focus on IP can surprise even I.