Leftovers

• 404 Media ☛ Amazon Data Centers on Fire After Iranian Missile Strikes on Dubai

  Some AWS services are down in the Middle East. Recovery is unclear as it requires 'careful assessment to ensure the safety of our operators,' according to Amazon.

• Kevin Kelly ☛ The Technium: Three Modes of Cognition

  In the interim I propose three general classes of cognition that together can make something like a human intelligence. The three modes are: 1) Knowledge reasoning, 2) World sense, and 3) Continuous memory and learning.

• Coyote ☛ osteophage | It Has Come To My Attention That Some of You Have No Idea Where The Term Purity Culture Comes From

  In a recent anniversary post, Cory Doctorow preemptively lambasted the criticism he anticipated for using a large language model as a means of catching typos in his blogposts. That post was brought to my attention by Tante’s post on acting ethically, which gave rise to a lot of responses. Among them are posts by Leon, Bix, Brennan, Mathew, Baldur Bjarnason, Emily Bender, and Zoylander Street, as well as further discussion at the 32-Bit Cafe. At this point, other people have engaged the substance of the debate thoroughly enough that I’m inclined to set the main issues aside as already covered, though if you’re interested in my own outlook, you can glean some of that from what I’ve written before on LLMs and the indie web and LLM output.

  For this post, what I want to focus on is not just what Cory Doctorow was saying but specifically how he chose to say it. Here is a direct quote: [...]

• Science

  • Rlang ☛ rOpenSci Dev Guide 1.0.0: Trilingual and Improved

    rOpenSci Software Peer Review’s guidance is gathered in an online book that keeps improving! This blog post summarises what’s new in our Dev Guide 1.0.0, with all changes listed in the changelog.

• Career/Education

  • Harvard University ☛ Audiobooks don’t really count as reading? Think again.

    More than 40 percent of Americans think that listening to audiobooks is less rigorous and really doesn’t count as reading.

    Cognitive neuroscientist Nadine Gaab disagrees, and she and other education scholars say the view is counterproductive when it comes to learning and development.

  • Bix Frankonis ☛ On Museum Memories: Daniel’s Story

    This month’s IndieWeb Carnival is hosted by James, whose prompt post asks us to think about the “places we can go to learn about the past, think about the present, and consider the future”: museums and galleries. I’ve not generally been a museum or gallery person (although on trips to Boston we did hit the Museum of Science), but one experience did come to mind almost immediately.

• Hardware

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Light-powered soft robot jumps 188 times without electronics

    An insect-scale robot that jumps using only light has completed 188 continuous leaps without a single electronic component.

    The soft machine bends, snaps and resets itself automatically, powered entirely by material physics instead of chips or wires.

  • Hackaday ☛ LED Printers: The Quiet Achievers You May Not Have Heard Of

    Many different types of printers have entered the market over the years. Most of us are intimately familiar with the common inkjet and laser, both of which can be found in homes and offices all over the world. Then there are those old dot matrix printers that were so noisy in use, thermal printers, and even solid ink printers that occupied a weird niche for a time.

    However, very little attention is ever paid to the LED printer. They’re not actually that uncommon, and they work in a very familiar way. It’s just that because these printers are so similar to an existing technology, they largely escaped any real notability in the marketplace. Let’s explore the inner workings of the printer tech that the world forgot.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Mapping my screen resolutions over the years

    This was a fun experiment! I mapped out every major screen resolution I’ve used over the years, and compared them to each other. This doesn’t have every single step, but I think it’s representative. You can click to view unscaled: [...]

  • David L Farquhar ☛ AMD Am386 released March 2, 1991

    There is a popular misconception that AMD wasn’t good at cloning Intel CPUs. This is largely based on the observation that Intel released its 386 CPU in 1985, and AMD didn’t counter with its Am386 clone until March 2, 1991, nearly six years later. In this blog post, we will explore what took AMD so long, and how that delay played into future AMD CPUs.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Tyler Sticka ☛ Now We’re Cooking

    It’s now over a year later, and I can honestly say I like to cook! I’m preparing meals at home the majority of the time, and enjoying them more. And even in the face of rising food costs and inflation, we spent about 20% less on food in 2025 than the year before.

    This isn’t my first attempt to build this habit, but it’s the first to stick for any length of time. I’m no chef or dietitian, but I thought I’d share what seemed to work for me.

  • Derek Thompson ☛ How Metrics Make Us Miserable

    Modern life is awash in statistics. We are surrounded by work metrics, fitness metrics, health metrics, social metrics. At best, these numbers allow us to set better goals: to increase our workplace efficiency, or to reduce our resting heart rate. But very often, the quantification of modern life makes us play the games we can easily measure rather than the games we deeply value.

  • Derek Sivers ☛ Offline 23 hours a day

    Last month, I moved into my new home in the woods. There’s no internet and no phone service here. It’s so productive.

    At first I thought I couldn’t move in without internet. But now I prefer it this way.

    Media silence creates a vacuum, which your own thoughts expand to fill.

• Proprietary

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Register UK ☛ Memory scalpers hunt scarce DRAM with bot blitz

      "By rapidly snapping up the limited DDR5 memory inventory for profitable resale, these bots further deplete the consumer supply, effectively boxing out legitimate customers and driving market prices even higher," the DataDome report says.

      DRAM, specifically DDR5 memory, has been in short supply since last November, as accelerating infrastructure deployment from hyperscalers and AI giants has increased demand for memory.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ From fake nudes to fake quotes: AI deepfakes plagued Olympic athletes

      While competing for medals and glory in Milan, Italy, U.S. Olympic athletes experienced something that is fast becoming a regular feature of modern public life: the widespread use of AI tools by politicians, trolls and sexual harassers to manipulate their images and voices

    • Security Week ☛ Vulnerability Allowed Hijacking Chrome's Gemini Live AI Assistant

      The vulnerability that Palo Alto Networks uncovered, tracked as CVE-2026-0628 and patched in January in Chrome 143, could have allowed malicious browser extensions to inject JavaScript code into the Gemini Live panel.

      The malicious extension, the cybersecurity firm explains, would require access to a permission set through the declarativeNetRequests API, which allows extensions to intercept and alter HTTPS web requests and responses.

    • Niel Madden ☛ Why I don’t use LLMs for programming

      (Ironically, WordPress is now offering to “improve” these quotes with AI…)

    • The Next Move ☛ A Story Bigger Than Iran

      The unfolding chaos in Iran pushed the most important story in American democracy to page two. I’m referring to the drama between the DoD and artificial intelligence giants Anthropic and OpenAI. It revealed the bravery of one man—Anthropic’s Dario Amodei—and the cravenness of another—Sam Altman of OpenAI.

      Anthropic lost its $200 million contract with the Pentagon because its CEO, Dario Amodei, insisted upon responsible limits on military and intelligence applications of AI. More importantly, Anthropic became the first American firm to be labeled a “supply chain risk,” meaning no company doing business with the US military can do business with Anthropic. Just as quickly as the government blacklisted Anthropic, OpenAI’s Sam Altman turned over his technology without real guardrails.

    • Dan Q ☛ Fucking Vibe Coding

      There are no metrics to back up the assumption that these teams are more-productive, or produce fewer regressions, or develop and maintain their skills better. It’s just supposed to be a given. When challenged, senior management falls back on “it’s used at [name of large company], so we need to use it too” arguments.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: No one wants to read your AI slop

      Even the AI companies pitching their products claim that they need human oversight because they are prone to errors (including the errors that the companies dress up by calling them "hallucinations"). If you've read something you disagree with but don't understand well enough to rebut, and you ask an AI to generate a rebuttal for you, you still don't understand it well enough to rebut it.

      You haven't generated a rebuttal: you have generated a blob of plausible sentences that may or may not constitute a valid critique of the work you're upset with – but until a human being who understands the issue goes through the AI output line by line and verifies it, it's just stochastic word-salad.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Get your war on: AI chatbots in the kill chain

      The DoD contract said Claude couldn’t be used for domestic surveillance or in “autonomous lethal operations” — Anthropic did not want the chatbot in the kill chain. The DoD started talking in January about cancelling the whole contract.

      The DoD is upset Anthropic won’t change these provisions. So now the DoD wants to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — so no other company with a defense contract will be allowed to use Anthropic.

    • Athanasia Mo Mowinckel ☛ Dotfiles: Taming Your Dev Environment (and Your AI Coding Agents)

      Before this setup, I had instructions scattered everywhere. Project-specific config files that half-overlapped. Mental notes about “how I like things done” that I’d forget to mention. Inconsistent behavior between tools that I’d only notice when something came out wrong.

      Now: [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • Michigan News ☛ False social-media posts threaten ex-Grand Rapids officer Schurr, family, attorney says

      “Of course, this is untrue as Chris is no longer a police officer and had nothing to do with this incident. As a result of this false statement, Chris and his family have received threats and fear harm,” Borgula said.

    • Court House News ☛ Twitter investors claim Elon Musk ‘cheated’ in $44 billion takeover of social media platform

      Investors, including lead plaintiffs Steve Garrett, Nancy Price, John Garrett and Brian Belgrave, accuse Musk of deliberately making misleading statements about the presence of spam bot accounts on Twitter to drive down the company’s stock, in hopes of backing out of the acquisition deal or renegotiating more favorably for himself.

      “We are here today because Elon Musk cheated investors to save himself billions of dollars,” Plaintiffs’ attorney Aaron P. Arnzen of Bottini & Bottini told the eight-person jury.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Security Week ☛ Madison Square Garden Data Breach Confirmed Months After Hacker Attack

      In the Oracle EBS hacking campaign, the Cl0p ransomware and extortion group exploited zero-day vulnerabilities to gain access to data stored by more than 100 organizations in the enterprise management software.

      Madison Square Garden (MSG), the world-famous arena located in New York City, was named by the hackers as a victim of the campaign in November 2025.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Cryptography Engineering ☛ Anonymous credentials: an illustrated primer

      This post has been on my back burner for well over a year. This has bothered me, because every month that goes by I become more convinced that anonymous authentication the most important topic we could be talking about as cryptographers. This is because I’m very worried that we’re headed into a bit of a privacy dystopia, driven largely by bad legislation and the proliferation of AI.

      But this is too much for a beginning. Let’s start from the basics.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Techdirt ☛ OpenAI’s ‘Red Lines’ Are Written In The NSA’s Dictionary—Where Words Mean What The NSA Wants Them To Mean

      If you’ve spent any time studying how the NSA actually operates, that reference to Executive Order 12333 should make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Because EO 12333 is, in practice, one of the largest loopholes for surveilling Americans’ communications that the intelligence community possesses. And by defining its “red lines” as compliance with these authorities, OpenAI has effectively adopted the intelligence community’s dictionary—a dictionary in which common English words have been carefully redefined over decades to permit the very things they appear to prohibit.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Ring Camera Doorbells Stir US Privacy Concerns

      The company is best known for its Ring camera doorbells that double as security cameras, used its Super Bowl advertisement to introduce a new feature designed to help users locate lost pets. Rather than receiving praise or indifference, the company faced overwhelmingly negative reactions. Critics described the feature as intrusive, with some labeling it “Orwellian surveillance.” Lawmakers voiced concern, lawsuits were threatened, and reports surfaced that thousands of customers canceled their subscriptions.

      The outcry became significant enough that Ring ended a partnership with Flock, a company specializing in automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). The partnership would have allowed Ring to access video databases tied to its security cameras.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ LLM-Assisted Deanonymization - Schneier on Security

      Turns out that LLMs are good at de-anonymization: [...]

    • Simon Lermen ☛ Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs

      TL;DR: We show that LLM agents can figure out who you are from your anonymous online posts. Across Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, and anonymized interview transcripts, our method identifies users with high precision – and scales to tens of thousands of candidates.

    • Nicholas Tietz-Sokolsky ☛ You can't always fix it

      And ultimately, she was right. I was getting myself worked up about it, but it's not my responsibility to fix. Sometimes there will be things like this that are bad, that I cannot fix, and that I have to accept.

      So, where do I go from here? I could probably publicly name-and-shame the couriers, but it would not do anything productive. It would not get their attention to fix it, and it wouldn't be seen by the folks who need to know (pharmacists and prescribers). So I'm not going to disclose the specific company, because the main thing it would do is risk me getting in legal trouble, for dubious benefit. I've already notified the pharmacists and prescribers that I know; it's on them, if they want to let anyone else know.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Sen. Mark Kelly lawsuit in illegal orders case set for May arguments in appeals court

    “In light of the public’s unusual interest in prompt disposition of this appeal, the government respectfully requests that this Court set an expedited briefing schedule that will allow the Court to hear oral argument this Term, before the Court’s summer recess,” Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate wrote in a filing submitted Friday.

    The circuit court now expects the Trump administration to file a brief by March 20 explaining why it appealed the district court’s ruling and for Kelly’s legal team to file its reply brief by April 27. Attorneys for both sides would then present their oral arguments May 7.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Demand for Impeachment

    While you read this, an unconstitutional war is being waged in your name. Three American service members are dead. At least 115 children — girls, at an elementary school in southern Iran — were killed in a strike on Saturday. The head of Iran’s Red Crescent said he had not seen anything like it even during the Iran-Iraq War. The president, asked about the fallen Americans as he returned to Washington Sunday night, walked past the press corps to admire newly installed statues of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and called them “unbelievable.”

    He is correct. They are unbelievable to him. He has no idea what they built or what it cost them or what they would think of what is being done in their name tonight.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Putin’s next move? Five Russian attack scenarios Europe must prepare for

      If Vladimir Putin can’t win a clear victory in Ukraine, he will seek one elsewhere; a clear victory in Ukraine would embolden Moscow to further aggression. Europe must prepare to meet these threats with less American support. The lowest risk option for Moscow—and therefore most likely—is Russian forces occupying Norway’s Svalbard archipelago.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • New York Times ☛ The U.S. Released the Epstein Files. The Arrests Are Overseas.

    The Epstein files, released by the United States Department of Justice, have yielded legal action in several countries as the police and prosecutors examine whether the files reveal that criminal laws have been broken.

  • TMZ ☛ Hillary Clinton Says Ghislaine Maxwell Was a 'Plus-One' at Chelsea's Wedding

    In a deposition with the House Oversight Committee last week, Hillary said, "She was there as a guest of Ted Waitt -- someone we had known for 30 years I believe -- who was a strong supporter of my husband, and became a friend."

• Environment

  • Hackaday ☛ Accidental Climate Engineering With Disintegrating Satellites

    For many decades humankind has entertained the notion that we can maybe tweak the Earth’s atmosphere or biosphere in such a way that we can for example undo the harms of climate change, or otherwise affect the climate for our own benefit. This often involves spreading certain substances in parts of the atmosphere in order to reflect or retain thermal solar radiation or induce rain.

    Yet despite how limited in scope these attempts at such intentional experiments have been so far – with most proposals dying somewhere before being implemented – we have already embarked on a potentially planet-wide atmospheric reconfiguration that could affect life on Earth for centuries to come. This accidental experiment comes in the form of rocket stages, discarded satellites, and other human-made space litter that burn up in the atmosphere at ever increasing rates.

    Rather than burning up cleanly into harmless components, this actually introduces metals and other compounds into the upper parts of the atmosphere. What the long-term effects of this will be is still uncertain, but with the most dire scenarios involving significant climate change and ozone layer degradation, we ought to figure this one out sooner rather than later.

  • Neritam ☛ Agriculture drives more than 90% of tropical deforestation

    A new study published today in leading journal, Science, finds that between 90 and 99 percent of all deforestation in the tropics is driven directly or indirectly by agriculture. Yet only half to two-thirds of this results in the expansion of active agricultural production on the deforested land.

  • [Old] Cision News ☛ Agriculture drives more than 90 percent of tropical deforestation - Chalmers

    A new study published today in leading journal, Science, finds that between 90 and 99 percent of all deforestation in the tropics is driven directly or indirectly by agriculture. Yet only half to two-thirds of this results in the expansion of active agricultural production on the deforested land.

    The study is a collaboration between many of the world’s leading deforestation experts and provides a new synthesis of the complex connections between deforestation and agriculture, and what this means for current efforts to drive down forest loss.

    Following a review of the best available data, the new study shows that the amount of tropical deforestation driven by agriculture is higher than 80 percent, the most commonly cited number for the past decade.

  • Overpopulation

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Low fertility may not be an economic threat, researchers argue

      A central motivation for the paper was the widespread belief based on earlier studies that fertility would recover as human development continues. However, using the most recent data up to 2023, the authors demonstrate that this pattern has reversed. Today, the global cross-sectional relationship is clearly negative: the higher a country's Human Development Index, the lower its fertility tends to be.

      "This finding came as a surprise to much of the demographic community," says Marois. "Even countries once considered models for balancing work and family life, such as the Nordics, have experienced unexpectedly steep fertility declines. The idea that development alone will bring fertility back up simply doesn't hold anymore."

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Wired ☛ A Former Top Trump Official Is Going After Prediction Markets

    Mulvaney, who was President Trump’s acting White House chief of staff from 2019 to 2020, is now leading a new advocacy coalition called Gambling Is Not Investing, which will lobby for prediction markets to be regulated by state gambling laws. He joins a number of other prominent Republicans calling for similar rules. Earlier this month, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and current Utah governor Spencer Cox both spoke out against the current federal approach to regulating prediction markets. (Christie also used the “quack like a duck” line.)

  • 404 Media ☛ With Iran War, Kalshi and Polymarket Bet That the Depravity Economy Has No Bottom

    Gambling markets have conveniently found a stance that allows them to continue to profit from death and war.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Greatest Story of the West Ever Told

    Because what actually happened in Athens in 399 BC was not a philosophical footnote. It was the founding act of everything we call Western civilization. And the man who performed it was not merely a great thinker. He was, by any serious application of Aristotelian virtue ethics — courage measured against cost, principle measured against consequence, commitment measured against the available alternatives — the greatest hero in the history of the human species.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Some parents said they’d break my knees’: the teacher who exposed Putin’s primary school propaganda

      “I hope it will help these children in the future to understand that they were the victims of all this,” Talankin says. “This film is primarily aimed at Russians, showing them what is happening inside their schools now.”

      Talankin, whose role at the school was to coordinate and film school events and extracurricular activities, spent two-and-a-half years documenting the mass indoctrination drive. Footage of the classes had to be uploaded regularly to a government website as evidence that staff were fulfilling the education ministry’s required quota of patriotic teaching.

      He was also, at great risk to himself, sending the footage out of the country to US director David Borenstein, who began working on editing it into a film.

    • RTL ☛ First since deadly protests: AI disinformation turns Nepal polls into 'digital battleground'

      Now parties across the political divide are tapping social media to push their agendas and woo voters, especially the young, including a surge of people registering to cast their ballot for the first time.

      But some of the content is manipulated or outright fake, experts and fact-checkers say.

      “In a country where digital literacy is low, people believe what they see,” said Deepak Adhikari, editor of the independent NepalCheck team.

    • Karl Bode ☛ Oligarchs Are Building The World's Biggest Propaganda Machine. Their Success Isn't Guaranteed.

      America's wealthiest, shittiest people are trying to hoover up the entirety of new and old media companies in a bid to pummel the plebs with propaganda. But what they want, and what they actually get, may not be the same thing.

    • Dame Media LLC ☛ America’s Right-Wing Propaganda Problem Might Be Terminal

      Stanford researchers have shown that this dearth of quality local news has resulted in a less informed and more divided electorate, empowered local corruption, and measurably shifted electoral outcomes. A recent study out of Northwestern University found that Trump won 91 percent of “news desert” counties by an average of 54 percentage points.

      A healthy media ecosystem and diverse, well-funded independent journalism is the bulwark against right-wing propaganda. Instead of addressing the problem head on, policy leaders rubber-stamped problematic mergers, treated media policy as an afterthought, paid empty lip service to quality journalism, and normalized Republican propaganda.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Court House News ☛ White news anchor fired for quoting Snoop Dogg claims racial discrimination

    A white news anchor who was fired for quoting rapper Snoop Dogg’s catchphrase “fo shizzle, my nizzle” on air asked a Fifth Circuit panel Monday to revive her racial discrimination lawsuit against her former employer.

  • The Dissenter ☛ Military Censorship While Israel And The US Wage War On Iran

    According to 972 Magazine, an online magazine run by Palestinian and Israeli journalists, the Israeli military censor “completely banned the publication of 1,635 articles and partially censored another 6,265” in 2024. “On average, the censor intervened in about 21 news reports per day.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Press Gazette ☛ Paul Conroy: 'A decent man who ran toward the truth when others ran from it'

    In December 2025, Conroy posted on Bluesky: “In Syria under Assad, I had a one million dollar bounty, dead or alive, on my head. I’m on an official Russian sanctions list. I’ve been banned from America since 2011 for associating with known terrorists in Libya (I didn’t). Very happy to get my US ban ahead of the crowd!!”

  • CPJ ☛ Independent photographer among 30 more arrested, charged in connection with Minnesota ICE protest following Lemon and Fort cases

    Bollmann’s electronic devices, including his phone, camera, and laptop were confiscated at the time of his arrest. The devices were not returned to Bollmann upon his release, and he had not received a search warrant for the devices, according to a source who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation.

    It is rare for journalists to be arrested in connection with their work in the U.S. In 2025, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, of which CPJ is a founding member, documented at least 34 arrests or detentions of journalists, in which 12 were charged, frequently around protests, rather than through a served warrant later on. Federal charges — especially felonies — against journalists are extremely rare.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • RTL ☛ Inside stories: Rituals of resilience: how Afghan women stay sane in their 'cage'

    Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada insists women have been rescued from oppression since the Taliban authorities returned to power in 2021, enforcing their strict interpretation of Islamic law.

    The United Nations says women are facing “gender apartheid”.

  • The Conversation ☛ Will AI tools make better police officers?

    This reflects a wider global trend: police forces are integrating AI into everyday policing. These AI-enabled tools draw on large volumes of data and patterns that would be impossible for any single officer to analyse in real time. The aim is straightforward: to help ensure decisions are based on strong evidence and reliable data, rather than relying solely on instinct or experience.

    Many people appear to accept the use of AI technology by police forces – so long as there are clear guidelines in place first.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ Measuring the use of DNS over IPv6

    In theory, the design of IPv6 was such that the upper-level end-to-end transport protocols, namely TCP and UDP, need not be aware of the IP layer protocol being used. We should be able to use IPv4 and IPv6 interchangeably in the DNS, right?

    This topic was the subject of an Internet Best Common Practice published in 2004, RFC 3091, ‘DNS IPv6 Transport Operational Guidelines’. This document had two major recommendations: [...]

  • Inside Towers ☛ State of Washington Cleared to Receive $1B+ for Broadband Expansion

    The funding comes through the $42 billion BEAD program. Of the total, $736 million is federal money, matched by $112 million from the state and $163 million in private investment. Washington could receive an additional $464 million this spring, bringing total federal support to about $1.2 billion.

  • Kevin Boone ☛ Kevin Boone: Small web, IndieWeb, Gemini… A guide to the retro-web

    I’m old enough to remember the earliest days of the world-wide web. HTTP and HTML weren’t radical technologies – they just offered a new, more user-friendly way to use the Internet. Still, the web’s potential was clear right from the those early days: it opened up the Internet to people who weren’t necessarily computer scientists. As an academic, I vaguely realized that the web would have a huge, positive impact on communication between researchers and, indeed, it did.

    Our vision, back in the mid-90s, was that the web would become, essentially, a decentralized library. Websites would be run by universities, health agencies, libraries, governmental departments, and even private individuals, all sharing knowledge for the common good.

    What I didn’t predict – what I don’t think anybody predicted – was how the web would eventually come to dominate communication. And once it did, it became ripe for commercial exploitation.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Apple Music is Now On Chocolate Bars in Germany

    Apple Music teams up with a German confectionery brand to offer chocolate bars with QR codes linking to an album and a free Apple Music trial.

  • GreyCoder ☛ Bandcamp: An Artist‑Friendly Music Platform

    Bandcamp is an online record store and music community where fans buy music directly from artists as downloads, vinyl records and cassettes. Unlike most streaming platforms, you actually own the files you buy and can download formats like FLAC and WAV for offline listening.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • The New Stack ☛ Cloudflare’s new Markdown support shows how the web is evolving for AI agents

    The web has required quite a lot of work to turn it into a shop with financial actions (which it wasn’t built for) or to check user identities (again, that it wasn’t really built for). As actual web use has veered away sharply from the original vision, the average web page has got increasingly complicated.

    The point is that a modern web page is designed as a visual experience with plenty of competing tensions; it is not just text content with a fixed, irrelevant visual framing that can be skipped past. If it were trivial to “suck out the contents,” then the ad model would be much easier to suborn than it is.

  • EFF ☛ EFF to Court: Don’t Make Embedding Illegal

    Who should be directly liable for online infringement – the entity that serves it up or a user who embeds a link to it? For almost two decades, most U.S. courts have held that the former is responsible, applying a rule called the server test. Under the server test, whomever controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work—and therefore determines who has access to what and how—can be directly liable if that content turns out to be infringing. Anyone else who merely links to it can be secondarily liable in some circumstances (for example, if that third party promotes the infringement), but isn’t on the hook under most circumstances.