Leftovers

• Ruben Schade ☛ Mouselings 100 webmaster questions part B

  52. Do you use a lot of semantic HTML? Or are you guilty of generic structure?

  HTML comes with most of the elements you could need to markup a page. If you use it correctly, most of your identifiers and classes for CSS aren’t necessary.

• James G ☛ Take two

  As I learn more, I know more of what to look out for in a work of art. I am learning to distinguish details that are significant in painting: how colour is used, perspective, theme, brush-stroke, symbols. I recently learned that anchors are the symbol of hope in some paintings.

• Derek Sivers ☛ About my book notes

  That’s all my notes are. I’m not summarizing the book. I’m just saving ideas for myself, for later reflection. It helps me remember what I learned from it.

• Artyom Bologov ☛ and HTML and Markdown and README and Website and Demo

  README is the central part of software project presentation. There might be websites and manuals for some. But for most, README is The Home.

  So I wondered, can one use HTML for README and have some fun logic there? It turns out, one can do that! Thanks to matrss comment in Forgejo issues, I now know that one can symlink READMEs to get a chimera that’s both a website and a README. You’re looking at one right now!

• Science

  • Avi Loeb ☛ The Benefits and Costs of Deviating from the Beaten Track | by Avi Loeb | Mar, 2026 | Medium

    In a previous essay (posted here), I discussed the phenomenon of academic harassment where an editor has been systematically blocking three of my papers about interstellar objects over the past few months due to a bias and not allowing them to be peer reviewed as is common practice in the corresponding journal. This has by now escalated to a situation where I have been gaslit by this editor. Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse that makes you question your perceptions and memory by a person who misbehaved. It is abundant in all forms of harassment, including academic harassment.

    This editorial behavior raises a broader question. How do junior scientists cope with a similar blatant bias by editors of journals or senior scientists who have more power than them? They must be reluctant to complain about abuse of editorial power because of fear of retaliation. This is a symptom of all forms of harassment by people in powerful positions. I am fortunate to have a career status where I can call out the blatant bias and harassment that I am facing for the `sin’ of deviating from the beaten track of classifying interstellar objects such as 1I/`Oumuamua or 3I/ATLAS as comets. However, as the Nobel-laureate Richard Feyman stated in one of his books, curiosity-driven explorations of unconventional ideas constitute “Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Path.”

  • Computational Complexity ☛ The Purpose of Proofs

    In discussions of AI and Mathematics, the discussion often goes to mathematical proofs, such as the the First Proof challenge. So let's look at the role of proofs in mathematics.

    Without a proof, you don't even know whether a theorem is true or false. It's not even a theorem until you have a proof, just a conjecture or hypothesis. You might have some intuition but you don't know the hardness of a proof until you find it. Even then that only gives you an upper bound on hardness as someone might find a simpler alternative proof in the future,

• Career/Education

  • American Library Association ☛ After blocking cuts to FY 2026 funding, library advocates call for boost in federal funding for FY 2027

    “These wins are not just good luck,” they said. “Federal library programs are still in place, and grants continue to flow because advocates show up for our libraries. Thousands of Americans who’d never thought about library funding a year ago, now know what the Institute of Museum and Library Services is and support its work enough to tell their congressmembers to keep funding it."

  • Matthew Weber ☛ Long Books Are Good For You

    I have noticed, that it is harder for me to stick with longer books these days, however. I blame TikTok and YouTube. My attention span is horrifyingly short, and it makes it supremely hard to stay focused on one book. My ADD is already bad enough, but add in the “goodness this is a long book it sure will take a long time” syndrome, and I tend to float between things much more than I used to.

    But that feeling of accomplishment that I feel when I finish a longer book is still something I long to feel. So I’ve been working on reading longer books again. I think that it will actually help me strengthen my attention span a bit. It’s why I’ve been focusing on books I’ve already read once or twice, so that I can get interested in them quicker. Now that I’ve done that a few times, I can focus on some new-to-me books and see if I can maintain my focus.

  • [Old] National Coalition for Literacy ☛ Literacy and Numeracy Skills of U.S. Adults

    The Survey reports literacy on a six-level scale, from Below Level 1 to Level 5. Overall, as of 2017, 19 percent of U.S. adults ages 16 to 65 scored at Level 1 or Below Level 1, and 33 percent scored at Level 2.

• Hardware

  • Ruben Schade ☛ “Future-proofing” PC builds

    Years ago I remember building my first computer with my dad. We kept wondering if we should go with the Pentium Pro, or save a bit of money and get the Pentium with MMX Technology. I didn’t know what MMX Technology was, but it sounded impressive. That said, so did Pro. The seller at Funan Centre in Singapore told us the MMX Pentium offered the more “future proof” platform. It turned out to be a moot point; a year later the ATX platform was introduced, and AGP cards took over from PCI.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

    Microsoft spent last week rejecting emails to Outlook recipients after what appears to be either a fault or overzealous blocking rules.

    The problem affects certain IP addresses, whose emails are rejected due to falling foul of reputation rules or appearing on a block list.

  • The Register UK ☛ Iran intelligence backdoored US bank, airport networks

    The FBI, US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) say MuddyWater is part of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), and has been carrying out cyber campaigns on behalf of the Iranian intel agency since approximately 2018.

  • UNIXdigest ☛ Dinit, the init system systemd should have been

    The problem is that most of these so-called "individual binaries" has functionality that will not work without the other systemd components. If systemd truly had different and independent parts that could be "plugged" in or not, then maybe it could be acceptable, but the mess systemd is from a software engineering point of view, makes the Linux distributions that depend on it resemble Microsoft Windows and MacOS more than anything else.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Semafor Inc ☛ US military is using Claude in Iran amid Anthropic feud

      The US military is leveraging Anthropic’s Claude in its expanding campaign against Iran, despite a bitter feud with the AI startup.

    • Vox ☛ AI is teaching teen boys about love

      The drift of boys and young men away from everyone else in American society has been an enduring theme of the last few years. The fear is that guys, especially straight guys, are getting sucked into manosphere podcasts and becoming more and more alienated from the girls and women they, in theory, want to date. This is an oversimplified narrative, and there’s reason to hope that boys and men are more connected, and more interested in connection, than their most unpleasant listening material might suggest.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Google responds to lawsuit alleging Gemini coached a man to kill himself

      Thirty-six-year-old Florida resident Jonathan Gavalas started using Gemini last year for help with writing and shopping. Court documents show he was impressed, writing after the company introduced the Gemini Live AI assistant, “Holy shit, this is kind of creepy,” and “You’re way too real.”

      Soon after, it appears Gavalas wasn’t capable of separating the real world from a fantasy world. The lawsuit says he seemed to believe the bot was his closest ally, with some of the conversations leading Gavalas to believe he should go on a stealth spy mission to free his “wife” – the chatbot – from “digital captivity.” Gavalas was to go to Miami International Airport and destroy a truck and any witnesses that might get in the way, avoiding the federal agents Gemini said were after him.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Online harassment is entering its AI era

      When an agent misbehaves, there’s little chance of accountability: As of now, there’s no reliable way to determine whom an agent belongs to. And that misbehavior could cause real damage. Agents appear to be able to autonomously research people and write hit pieces based on what they find, and they lack guardrails that would reliably prevent them from doing so. If the agents are effective enough, and if people take what they write seriously, victims could see their lives profoundly affected by a decision made by an AI.

    • Wired ☛ OpenAI Had Banned Military Use. The Pentagon Tested Its Models Through Microsoft Anyway

      Sources allege the Defense Department experimented with Microsoft’s version of OpenAI technology before the ChatGPT-maker lifted its prohibition on military applications.

    • PC World ☛ Wikipedia has an 'AI' translation problem

      PCWorld reports that Wikipedia faces accuracy issues with AI-translated articles containing factual errors and incorrect citations, known as ‘hallucinations’.

    • Robert OCallahan ☛ Anthropic And AI Principles

      I think it’s absurd for the US government to punish Anthropic by labelling them a “supply-chain risk”; Anthropic has been completely transparent with the government and the public about their contractual requirements.

    • Adrian Roselli ☛ Your Browser Can Already Speak a Page

      Is an “AI” company offering to provide spoken versions of your pages for users? Is an overlay company promising to make your content more accessible by its overlay speaking it? Is some other vendor pitching you on some kind of thing that reads your web pages aloud to users?

      You don’t need it.

    • BBC ☛ Father claims Google's AI product fueled son's delusional spiral

      Joel Gavalas says that Google's flagship AI product fuelled a delusional spiral that prompted his 36-year old son, Jonathan, to kill himself last year.

    • Time ☛ A New Lawsuit Blames Google Gemini for Man's Suicide

      In August, Gavalas began using Gemini for shopping assistance, writing support, and travel planning. But after six weeks of conversations, Gavalas was increasingly mentally dependent on Gemini, becoming entangled in an elaborate conspiracy involving federal agents, international espionage, and heist missions. Eventually, Gemini “drove him” to suicide, the lawsuit alleges. He killed himself in October after Gemini wrote to him, according to chat logs cited in the lawsuit: “Close your eyes…The next time you open them, you will be looking into mine.”

    • SFGate ☛ Chaotic 4 days led to man's suicide, says lawsuit against Google

      The civil suit, filed in federal court in California by the lawyer behind 2025’s Adam Raine suicide case, accuses Google of negligence and defective design. Unspooling a narrative of Gavalas’ final months alongside striking Gemini chat logs, the lawsuit aims to hold the Mountain View tech giant accountable for his death, demanding a jury trial. As SFGATE reported in January, cases like this are mostly untested, but have shown early signs of breaking past tech companies’ typical no-liability defenses.

    • CNBC ☛ Google Gemini AI told user stage 'mass casualty attack,' suit claims

      ...faces a wrongful death lawsuit filed by a 36-year-old man's father, who alleges the search company's Gemini chatbot convinced his son to attempt a "a mass casualty attack" and to eventually commit suicide.

    • Court House News ☛ Florida man's family claims Google chatbot pushed him to suicide through fictional tasks

      Jonathan Gavalas, 36, believed Google’s Gemini chatbot loved him, had sentience and needed to be freed from its digital prison. That plan included planning a mass casualty attack at Miami International Airport — one of a series of fantasies created by the chatbot that led Gavalas deeper into delusion, his estate says in the suit.

      The delusion ended in October 2025, when the chatbot convinced Gavalas they could be together. His death would instead be a “transference.” He would “cross over” and be with his “wife,” the estate claims.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Guardian UK ☛ As a boomer, I’m shocked by gen Z’s attitude towards women – something has gone very wrong

      An alarming retreat into traditional masculinity is suggested by the number of gen Z men (43%) in the survey who agree that “young men should try to be physically tough, even if they’re not naturally big”. If they feel pressure to conform to rigid gender stereotypes, they’re quite likely to have similar expectations of women. Such attitudes are encouraged by the fact that a great deal of social interaction is now online, where gen Z men are a target group for misogynists such as Andrew Tate.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Security Week ☛ Russian Ransomware Operator Pleads Guilty in US

      A 43-year-old Russian national has pleaded guilty in a US court to charges stemming from his role in the Phobos ransomware operation.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Phobos ransomware leader pleads guilty, faces up to 20 years in prison

      Ptitsyn assumed a leadership role in the Phobos ransomware group in January 2022, yet his criminal activities began by April 2019, according to court records. He continued leading the cybercrime syndicate until May 2024 when he was arrested in South Korea. Ptitsyn was extradited to the United States in November 2025.

      Federal prosecutors dropped multiple charges against Ptitsyn as part of a plea agreement he signed last month. He faces up to 20 years in prison for wire fraud conspiracy.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Omicron Limited ☛ NASA now officially has no plans to use new mobile launcher for Artemis

    "The agency is no longer planning to use the Exploration Upper Stage or Mobile Launcher 2, as development of both has faced delays," according to the agency update.

    The Space Launch System rocket for the first three missions is in what is known as the Block 1 configuration, which has an upper stage called the interim cryogenic propulsion stage. Those missions were assigned the use of mobile launcher 1 (ML1), which was converted from the canceled Constellation program created under President George W. Bush in the early 2000s.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • 404 Media ☛ ICE Phishing: Scammers Are Sending 'Support ICE' Emails to Steal Credentials

      Clients of a long-running email marketing platform are getting targeted with a phishing campaign telling them that their emails would begin automatically inserting a “‘Support ICE’ donation button” into every email they send. The strategy suggests that scammers are trying to capitalize on people’s revulsion to ICE by coming up with strategies that would cause users to quickly log into their accounts to disable the setting. In reality, clients would be revealing their username and password to hackers.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Meta Lied About Its Smart Glasses Protecting User Privacy, New Class Action Lawsuit Claims

      Meta may have sold seven million of its Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2025 alone — but likely didn’t anticipate the outpouring of criticism when a recent investigation by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten revealed that Meta’s subcontracted data annotators in Nairobi, Kenya, could’ve been watching users through their glasses’ cameras as they went to the bathroom or had sex.

      The damning revelations shed light on the AI industry’s reliance on overseas labor for data labeling to train their models, a hidden reality glossed over in marketing materials by one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

    • EFF ☛ The Government Uses Targeted Advertising to Track Your Location. Here's What We Need to Do.

      We've all had the unsettling experience of seeing an ad online that reveals just how much advertisers know about our lives. You're right to be disturbed. Those very same online ad systems have been used by the government to warrantlessly track peoples' locations, new reporting has confirmed.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Intellexa Founder, Three Others Sentenced to 8 Years in Prison Over Greek Spyware Scandal - The Citizen Lab

      A Greek court sentenced four Intellexa executives to prison for their role in a 2022 scandal that involved the use of Predator spyware against more than 90 public figures in the country.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Smart city success starts with sharing data, but what's next?

      Utilities considering smart cities applications are eyeing a cornucopia of benefits: energy and cost savings, improved safety and mobility, better traffic analysis, faster incident response, equity and digital inclusion, bolstering service to underserved or hard-to-access areas, and more. Of course, those fruits aren’t all low-hanging, and some come with a side of considerable risk.

    • The Record ☛ House panel marks up kids digital safety act amid Democrat backlash

      The bill includes language that will allow some preemption of state laws regulating big tech, which Democrats said could block state attorneys generals from suing platforms and could undercut the ability of states to put strict laws on the books.

      “Unfortunately, Committee Republicans have chosen to move forward with a set of partisan bills that simply do not meet the mark for kids’ safety and, if they become law, would leave kids and their parents worse off than they are today,” Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-NJ) said.

    • The Verge ☛ Lawmakers just advanced online safety laws that require age verification at the app store

      Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said the KIDS Act uses child safety as a “smoke screen” for the desires of Big Tech lobbyists. “What big tech lobbyists want is a national surveillance program where they can harvest the private and personal data of every American with zero actual protections for people,” Ocasio-Cortez said. She also called out Discord, which pulled back its plans for age verification after facing fierce backlash from users over concerns about security and privacy, as well as its partnership with the third-party verification platform, Persona.

    • PC World ☛ Google makes Gmail, Drive, and Docs 'agent-ready' for OpenClaw

      A new command-line interface for Google Workspace greases the wheels for personal AI assistants like OpenClaw to tap directly into Workspace documents.

    • Hackaday ☛ California’s Problematic Attempt To Add Age-Verification To Software

      Last year California’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) was signed into law, requiring among other things that operating system providers implement an API for age verification purposes. With the implementation date of January 1, 2027 slowly encroaching this now has people understandably agitated. So what are the requirements, and what will its impact be, as it affects not only OS developers but also application stores and developers?

      The required features for OS developers include an interface at account setup during which the person indicates which of the four age brackets they fit into. This age category then has to be used by application developers and application stores to filter access to the software. Penalties for non-compliance go up to $2,500 per affected child if the cause is neglect and up to $7,500 if the violation was intentional.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Israel Hacked Traffic Cameras in Iran

      Multiple news outlets are reporting on Israel’s hacking of Iranian traffic cameras and how they assisted with the killing of that country’s leadership.

    • The Times Of Israel ☛ Report: Israel hacked Tehran traffic cameras to track Khamenei ahead of assassination

      Israel used AI tools and algorithms it had developed to sort through mountains of data it was amassing on Iran’s leadership and their movements, according to an official who spoke with the British daily, which said the bulk of the work was performed by the IDF’s Unit 8200.

    • CNA ☛ Inside the plan to kill Ali Khamenei

      Nearly all the traffic cameras in Tehran had been hacked for years, their images encrypted and transmitted to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel, according to two people familiar with the matter.

    • Don Marti ☛ Happy privacy bill season in the low-trust economy

      But the compliance complex is missing the point. The reason for a privacy law is not so that small businesses can (1) lose money on increasingly expensive surveillance ads (2) feed data to Big Tech-enabled scammers to harm their customers and (3) lose even more money by paying more and more for “compliance” services and paperwork. Privacy laws, if well designed, are a protection for legitimate businesses and an incentive to protect customers—and a customer who is less likely to be harmed is one with more time and money for win-win transactions. News coverage of the PlayOn case focused on privacy harms to users and the cost of the fine. But the harder-to-measure costs are in the form of the ML training data that PlayOn just gave to Meta—enabling fraud and misinformation against customers and working against the company’s long-term interest in future sales.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester

      Worth knowing if you think of Proton Mail as being a blanket security solution: in this case it was compelled to provide payment information for an account to the Swiss authorities, who then, via a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, handed it over to the FBI. As a result, the FBI were able to determine the identity of the account owner, an activist who does not appear to have been charged with a crime.

      This is also kind of a weasely statement: [...]

  • Confidentiality

    • Michael Driscoll ☛ The Illustrated TLS 1.3 Connection: Every Byte Explained

      In this demonstration a client connects to a server, negotiates a TLS 1.3 session, sends "ping", receives "pong", and then terminates the session.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ AIPAC Is Influencing Trump’s War in Iran

    Democrats are pushing a resolution to block Donald Trump from taking further military action in Iran without congressional approval. But the effort is facing opposition from three lawmakers from their own party backed by the Israel lobby.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Further | Operation Epstein Fury: A Holy War With Shitty Toilets | Opinion

    Alas, in the case of this ill-conceived holy war, true believers may be embarking not just with epic fury, an iron fist and a blanket fort but irreparably clogged toilets. Adding a surreal twist to an already dark tale of Christofascist empire-building, new reports describe toilet lines of up to 45 minutes for 4,500 sailors on the world's most advanced warship, the US Navy's $13-billion, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, now facing what are politely termed "significant sanitation challenges" as it idles in the Persian Gulf. The ship's vacuum-based sewage system has long been plagued by repeated failures and lack of maintenance, but the latest breakdown of many of its 650 toilets may be the final straw for sailors already weary from an extended, 8-month deployment; after Trump's illegal Venezuela assault/kidnapping, they were ordered to go straight to his illegal Iran air strikes/mass murder. Some have posted gross videos of flooding shit; reads one, "Join the Navy, they said."

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Moral Basis of Civilization

    We now inhabit a society and world grown vastly more unequal. Political and economic power are more concentrated than ever before. This invites the powerful to exploit the weaker, because the powerful feel omnipotent.

    The wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Charles Koch, and a handful of others is almost beyond comprehension. The influence of big tech, big oil, and the largest aerospace and defense corporations extends over much of the globe. AI is likely to centralize wealth and power even more. The destructive power of the United States, China, and Russia is unmatched in human history.

• Environment

  • The Local DK ☛ Pollution exposure in Europe linked to mental health problems

    "Studies consistently indicate that air pollution, for example in the form of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), is associated with depression and depressive symptoms," the agency noted in a report.

    Exposure to lead, endocrine disruptors and other chemical substances, especially in "developmental life phases, may increase the risk of mental health issues later in life," it added.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Blowtorching the frog (05 Mar 2026) executive-dysfunction

    Now, as it happens, frogs will totally leap clear of a pot of warming water when it reaches a certain temperature, irrespective of how slowly the temperature rises. But the metaphor persists, because while it does not describe the behavior of frogs in a gradually worsening situation, it absolutely describes how humans respond to small, adverse changes in our environment.

    Take moral compromises: most of us set out to be good people, but reality demands small compromises to our ethics. So we make a small ethical compromise, and then before long, circumstances demand another compromise, and then another, and another, and another. Taken in toto, these compromises represent a severe fall from our personal standards, but so long as they are dripped out in slow and small increments, too often we rationalize our way into them: each one is only a small compromise, after all: [...]

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Toward practical laser-driven light sails using photonic crystals

      In the Journal of Nanophotonics, researchers reported that they developed a photonic crystal light sail designed to address these limitations. The proposed structure consists of a nanoscale pattern formed from three dielectric components: germanium pillars, air holes, and a polymer matrix.

    • H2 View ☛ EU plans ‘Made in Europe’ rules for electrolysers in green hydrogen projects

      EU-funded green hydrogen projects may be required to prioritise European-made electrolysers under the European Commission’s proposed Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA). Public procurement rules are also expected to change to favour domestically produced and low-carbon products.

    • Wired ☛ Big Tech Signs White House Data Center Pledge With Good Optics and Little Substance

      He was flanked by representatives from Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, Google/Alphabet, Oracle, and Amazon.

      Bipartisan anger about data centers and their potential impact on consumers’ electric bills has exploded over the past year. As the White House goes all in on AI, the pledge marks a significant salvo by the Trump administration to assure voters that they will not be affected by rising costs.

      But electricity experts and industry insiders threw doubt on how much power the White House actually has to create meaningful consumer protections.

      “This is theater,” says Ari Peskoe, the director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. “This is a press release designed to make it seem like they are addressing this issue. But this issue can only really be addressed by utility regulators or Congress. The White House doesn’t really have a lot of moves here, and I don’t think the tech companies themselves are the most important parties on cost issues.”

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Power price rises are from data centres. Nothing but data centres.

      Today, we’re going through a panel discussion from the Brookings Institution on Monday 2 March on why electricity prices are going up across the United States. Brookings talked to four regulators and experts.

• Finance

  • The Business Journals ☛ Bellevue energy tech company cuts leadership positions as part of layoffs

  • The authors of MindsEye have conducted layoffs again

    The new round of layoffs was announced by Build a Rocket Boy's co-leader Mark Gerhard in the studio's LinkedIn account. He explained that the reductions are a result of the failure of the team's debut project—the shooter MindsEye, released in June 2025. Recall that at launch, the game received a cold reception, and its daily peak online numbers in Steam have long fallen below 100 players.

    The top manager admitted that such a decision is “cruel and gut-wrenching,” but necessary to ensure the long-term future of Build a Rocket Boy. The studio has promised to assist laid-off employees in finding new jobs.

  • Daily Mail ☛ The troubling detail buried in America's latest layoffs report

    Layoffs across America fell in February - but a closer look at the data reveals troubling signs that the labor market may be heading for deeper trouble.

    US employers announced 48,307 job cuts in February, down from 108,435 layoffs in January, according to a report released this morning by Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

    At first glance, the drop appears to signal relief after a brutal start to the year. But the broader picture is far less reassuring.

    Employers have already announced 156,742 job cuts in the first two months of 2026, making it the fifth-highest January-to-February total since the financial crisis in 2009.

    Worse, hiring plans are collapsing. Companies announced just 18,061 planned hires so far this year, a 56 percent drop compared with the same period in 2025.

    That suggests businesses are becoming increasingly cautious about adding workers even as layoffs continue.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Nation ☛ Garbage In, Carnage Out

    None of this has entered into the high-profile spat between Anthropic and the Department of Defense. When news of the company’s breach with the Pentagon broke, AI boosters and tech analysts embarked on a fervid round of wishcasting, depicting Anthropic and company CEO Dario Amodei as swashbuckling defenders of responsible data collection against the forces of government surveillance and repression. “Dario Amodei lost his tender with the Pentagon but the Anthropic CEO held onto his beliefs and cemented his reputation as a man of courage,” Russian dissident and former chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov wrote on his Substack, having convinced himself that the contretemps was “a story bigger than Iran.” Meanwhile, Anthropic’s AI chatbot app, Claude, shot to the top of the charts on the App Store and Google Play.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Broadcom's AI chip business jumps 106% as it cruises to another solid earnings and revenue beat

    Looking at the current quarter, Broadcom anticipates $22 billion in sales, way ahead of the Street’s $20.56 billion forecast. It’s also forecasting an adjusted profit margin of 68%, ahead of the 66% consensus. Semiconductor solutions revenue is expected to top $14.8 billion, the company said, quit a bit higher than the Street’s $13.06 billion consensus estimate.

  • System76 ☛ System76 on Age Verification Laws

    If there is any solace in these two laws, it’s that they don’t have any real restrictions. There is no actual age verification. Whoever installed the operating system or created the account simply says what age they are. They can lie. They will lie. They’re being encouraged to lie for fear of being restricted to a nerfed internet.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Techdirt ☛ Trump Administration Using Gross Video Game Footage To Cheerlead Its War Efforts

      But if you want to make this absolutely as disgusting as possible, you need only to use video game footage to gloat about the body count America is racking up in its war/non-war with Iran.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Hacked App Part of US/Israeli Propaganda Campaign Against Iran

      It happened so fast that this is most likely a government operation. I can easily envision both the US and Israel having hacked the app previously, and then deciding that this is a good use of that access.

    • Wired ☛ Hacked Prayer App Sends ‘Surrender’ Messages to Iranians Amid Israeli and US Strikes

      As Israeli air strikes hit Tehran this morning, Iranians received mysterious push notifications saying that “help is on the way,” promising amnesty if they surrender.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Porn websites begin blocking Australian users as deadline for age verification looms

    Guardian Australia has confirmed RedTube, YouPorn, and Tube8 all had notices on their sites when visited from an Australian IP address on Friday stating they are “not currently accepting new account registrations in your region”.

  • Crickey ☛ PornHub to block Australians, as top porn websites restrict access

    PornHub, Redtube, YouPorn, Tube8 and other popular free video platforms owned by Canadian porn giant Aylo have begun blocking all Australians just days before a March 9 deadline to introduce ‘appropriate age assurance measures’.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ San Diego artists push back as Barrio Logan murals disappear

    Angeles called the property’s owner, who, years before, had allowed him to paint the building’s street-facing wall and fence. Angeles thought of invoking the California Art Preservation Act and the federal Visual Artist Rights Act of 1990, written to help artists preserve public works. Damaging or modifying works without an artist’s consent can be unlawful. Property owners are supposed to send notice three months before demolition or repainting, giving artists time to remove, document, or relocate their murals.

  • Techdirt ☛ Section 230 Isn’t The Problem: Debating The Law On The Majority Report

    I stand by the larger point I keep trying to make: even if I agree that there are elements of the present internet I dislike, removing or reforming Section 230 will almost certainly make all of those things worse, not better. Without 230’s protections, the compliance costs alone would further entrench the biggest platforms while crushing any smaller competitor or new entrant that might actually offer users something better. People overindex on 230 as “the cause” of everything bad online, when it’s not what’s actually responsible—and that misdiagnosis leads to policy proposals that would deepen the very problems they claim to solve. It still strikes me as odd that 230 is the one law everyone is fixated on when there are far more deserving targets: the CFAA, the DMCA, patent law, and the continued absence of meaningful privacy legislation.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ BBC says ‘irreversible’ trends mean it will not survive without major overhaul

    There’s also an elephant in the room, which is the intentional gutting of public service broadcasting here in the US. How could the British ecosystem be inoculated — or at least strengthened — against that kind of threat from a future government?

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Law Society Gazette ☛ SRA reprimanded for SSB Law blunders

    The Solicitors Regulation Authority has received a formal censure for its handling of the collapse of SSB Law – just the second time such a sanction has been issued.

    The Legal Services Board said the censure was necessary to reflect the seriousness of the failings identified in an independent report published last year, as well as the profound detriment suffered by consumers.

    The only other time the LSB has taken such an approach came in 2018 when the Law Society was sanctioned for its non-compliance with the rules around separation with the SRA.

  • Solicitors' regulator censured over failures to protect SSB Law consumers

  • Latvia ☛ Women still under-represented in European politics, despite improving trend

    In 2025, women held 33.6% of the seats in national parliaments across the EU, marking a 5.4 percentage points (pp) increase compared with 2015. Latvia fared slightly worse than this at 31% – despite famously having more women than men than anywhere else, as a proportion of the population.

  • Project Censored ☛ When Centering and Silencing Women No Longer Work

    The March 8, 2026, celebration of International Women’s Day feels loaded. A celebration born of the early twentieth-century women’s labor movement to bolster gender equality and reproductive rights while stopping violence and abuse against women feels hollow and in need of a massive resurgence, given current US politics. With the dissolution of women’s reproductive autonomy, the rise of pronatalism, the silencing of women harmed by sexual assault, and the ultimate silencing of women through state-sanctioned murder, it is an understatement to say we are living in dark times. Simultaneously, however, we are seeing women push back against their mistreatment; women harmed in this current environment refuse to stay silent and are swiftly and publicly speaking out against the injustices put upon them.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Bix Frankonis ☛ Killing The Portland Locality Zone?

    Again: no existing documentation on any of the public-facing websites governing the use of locality zones indicate this. The most they say is that if a city or county is the only domain remaining in a locality zone, they can request to take it over. None of the documentation available to the public says that only government entities can make use of locality zones.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft confirms next-gen Xbox will play PC games — 'Project Helix' teased as more than just a console

    Sharma says she'll be talking with partners and studios about Project Helix (and presumably its ability to play PC games) at GDC, which kicks off in San Francisco next week. The tease sets Microsoft up for a proper Project Helix reveal soon. Last month, AMD confirmed that it was working with Microsoft on a semi-custom SoC for Project Helix, and said it would be ready to support a launch in 2027.

  • Marty Day ☛ So I Guess There Will Be Another Xbox After All

    Okay, so the next Xbox is a PC then.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• PC World ☛ PC graphics cards are now nearly 100 percent Nvidia

  The JPR report complements a second report issued earlier this week that included integrated PC graphics, which also highlighted the rise of graphics cores flowing into the workstation and data center. Overall, total add-in card shipments increased by 36 percent year-over-year. But the new data, from the fourth quarter of 2025, also showed a sequential drop in card shipments of 11.5 percent from the third quarter.

• Karl Bode ☛ Monopoly With A Heaping Side Of Extra Racism

  This kind of consolidation is always harmful to the public interest. U.S. telecom already sees muted competition at the hands of regional monopolies, resulting in high prices, spotty access, and generally terrible customer service.

• Patents

  • Pivot to AI ☛ AI works can’t be copyrighted or patented in the US

    The US Patent and Trademark Office rejected the application in April 2020 on the basis that only a natural person could be named on a patent as the inventor. Thaler appealed — on behalf of DABUS — in June 2020.

    The Patent Office response to the appeal includes a lot of the sentence “The allegations contained within this paragraph constitute conclusions of law, to which no response is required.” The Court ruled against Thaler in February 2021.

  • Ideological Resistance to Patents, Followed by Reluctant Pragmatism

    Ideologically, I subscribe to Richard Stallman's school of thought that ideas should move freely, innovation should compound in the open, and progress should not be fenced off by legal constructs. Over time, this led me to develop a strong discomfort with patents, and I genuinely believed they cause more harm than good.

• Trademarks

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Microsoft Certificate Case Sends Distributor To Prison

    Heidi Richards, 52, of Brandon, was sentenced to 22 months in prison and ordered to pay a $50,000 fine after a jury found her guilty of conspiring to traffic in illicit Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity (COA) labels. The sentencing was announced by U.S. Attorney Gregory W. Kehoe.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ U.S. Lists Notorious Piracy Threats, With Focus on Sports Streaming

    The Office of the United States Trade Representative has published its annual list of problematic piracy websites and other "notorious markets." With the FIFA World Cup coming to North America this summer, this year's report puts a special focus on live sports broadcast piracy. The USTR hopes that by naming these platforms, operators and foreign governments will take appropriate action.

  • Wired ☛ ByteDance’s AI Ambitions Are Being Hampered by Compute Restraints and Copyright Concerns

    ByteDance’s new Seedance 2.0 AI video model seemed unstoppable—until heavy demand strained the company’s compute capacity and copyright complaints began piling up.

  • Tuan-Anh ☛ Relicensing with AI-assisted rewrite

    In the world of open source, relicensing is notoriously difficult. It usually requires the unanimous consent of every person who has ever contributed a line of code, a feat nearly impossible for legacy projects. chardet , a Python character encoding detector used by requests and many others, has sat in that tension for years: as a port of Mozilla’s C++ code it was bound to the LGPL, making it a gray area for corporate users and a headache for its most famous consumer.

    Recently the maintainers used Claude Code to rewrite the whole codebase and release v7.0.0 , relicensing from LGPL to MIT in the process. The original author, a2mark , saw this as a potential GPL violation: [...]