Leftovers

• Simon Späti ☛ Why I Still Blog — and Why the Future of Blogging Is Connected

  I’ve been online twenty years, and blogging for ten of them. This is the story and lessons learned of blogging online for a decade. It goes beyond blogging topics and includes note-taking (workflow), how to write well as well as the medium in which writing works best, and also the format in which writing works long-term such as writing in open formats and methods such as vim motions to navigate and edit like a surgeon.

• Sara Jakša ☛ The Language I Will Never Speak

  That reminds me, I probably should be adding not only the languages that I am fluent in on my site, but also the languages I am learning. Maybe that would nudge somebody in witting to me in a different language than English?

• Andy Wingo ☛ free trade and the left, ter: mises and my apostasy — wingolog

  When I think about Mise’s reaction to the 1927 general strike in Vienna, I think about how I scrambled to find something, anything, to replace my faith in God. As the space for God shrank with every advance in science, some chose to identify God with his works, and then to progressively ascribe divine qualities to those works: perhaps commerce is axiomatically Good, and yet ineffable, in the sense that it is Good on its own, and that no mortal act can improve upon it. How else can we interpret Hayek’s relationship with the market except as awe in the presence of the divine?

  This is how I have come to understand the neoliberal value system: a monotheism with mammon as godhead. There may be different schools within it, but all of the faithful worship the same when they have to choose between, say, commerce and democracy, commerce and worker’s rights, commerce and environmental regulation, commerce and taxation, commerce and opposition to apartheid. It’s a weird choice of deity. Now that God is dead, one could have chosen anything to take His place, and these guys chose the “global economy”. I would pity them if I still had a proper Christian heart.

• Michał Sapka ☛ FAQ

  This is one of the things your grandfather told you about: a personal website. Not a social media, not a Google YouTube Channel, not a Discord server. It's just a place where I write about things which interest me, and some even people read it. I write mostly about speculative fiction, FreeBSD, or Emacs. Weblog is the unstructed part where everything can land, as long it maintains my fleeting interest for long enough to become a text.

• Science

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Exploring the ocean with Raspberry Pi–powered marine robots

    Exploring the ocean may sound exciting, and it’s certainly vital for marine research, but harsh conditions, deep water, and high costs make most marine-based tasks difficult and dangerous for humans. Autonomous vehicles can handle the job, but low-cost hardware and accessible software are essential to opening up this area of conservation.

  • Kev Quirk ☛ How Many Holes Does a Straw Have? - Kev Quirk

    Here's another diagram (look, I know you're a clever person, and you don't need a diagram of a bloody straw, or a doughnut, but we're going with it, okay).

  • Michael Driscoll ☛ The Animated Elliptic Curve

    Every TLS 1.3 session starts with a key exchange made via an elliptic curve. The most popular curve is Curve25519, and the exchange involves adding a "base point" P to itself over and over again: [...]

• Career/Education

  • IEEE ☛ Why "Normal" Engineers Are the Key to Great Teams

    Most of us have encountered a few software engineers who seem practically magician-like, a class apart from the rest of us in their ability to reason about complex mental models, leap to nonobvious yet elegant solutions, or emit waves of high-quality code at unreal velocity.

    I have run into many of these incredible beings over the course of my career. I think their existence is what explains the curious durability of the notion of a “10x engineer,” someone who is 10 times as productive or skilled as their peers. The idea—which has become a meme—is based on flimsy, shoddy research, and the claims people have made to defend it have often been risible (for example, 10x engineers have dark backgrounds, are rarely seen doing user-interface work, and are poor mentors and interviewers) or blatantly double down on stereotypes (“we look for young dudes in hoodies who remind us of Mark Zuckerberg”). But damn if it doesn’t resonate with experience. It just feels true.

    I don’t have a problem with the idea that there are engineers who are 10 times as productive as other engineers. The problems I do have are twofold.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Eric Schwarz

    This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Eric Schwarz, whose blog can be found at schwarztech.net.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs

    The results of this study into corporate BS isn’t going to surprise anyone who’s spent much time in an office. The researchers generated meaningless corporate gobbledegook and tested how workers rated its business-savviness.

  • Cornell Unviersity ☛ Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs | Cornell Chronicle

    Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, research by cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell introduces the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a tool designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric.

    “Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”

  • YLE ☛ Friday's papers: University tells academics to avoid US, Finland's athlete shortage, and slippery streets

    The school also recommends that researchers who do decide to travel not carry their personal laptops or phones. Instead, the institution provides temporary devices — empty phones and computers — for use during the trip.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Reverse Engineering The PROM For The SGI O2

    The SGI O2 was SGI’s last-ditch attempt at a low-end MIPS-based workstation back in 1996, and correspondingly didn’t use the hottest parts of the time, nor did it offer much of an upgrade path. None of which is a concern to hobbyists who are more than happy to work around any hardware- and software limitations to e.g. install much faster CPUs. While quite a few CPU upgrades were possible with just some BGA chip reworking skills, installing the 900 MHz RM7900 would require some PROM hacking, which [mattst88] recently took a shake at.

  • Hackaday ☛ One Sailing Pulley To Rule Them All

    The pulley, or “block” as they are sometimes called, is built with a polymer roller made out of a type of nylon, which has the benefit of being extremely durable and self-lubricating but is a bit expensive. Durability and lack of squeakiness is important in sailing applications, though. The body is made from CNC-machined aluminum and is composed of two parts, which pivot around the pulley’s axis to allow various ropes (or “lines”) to be inserted without freeing one end of the rope. In testing, this design outperformed some proprietary stainless steel pulleys of similar size.

• Proprietary

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Apple just dropped a bomb on the Windows world

    Read those numbers again: a Mac laptop — with Apple’s build quality (it’s made of aluminium, not plastic), macOS and the attractive Apple ecosystem — for just $599. It should land in South Africa at around R13 000 (including VAT) — putting it firmly in the mid-tier PC segment.

  • Richard Stallman Is Right: Most AI Output IS “Pretend Intelligence.” But Not for the Reason He Thinks.

    He’s right that most AI output is pretend intelligence. He’s right that the systems are predicting tokens rather than “understanding” in any philosophically robust sense. He’s right that the marketing around AI dramatically overstates what these systems actually do.

    [...]

    If Stallman is right (mechanism is the limitation), then AI will never produce genuinely intelligent output regardless of architectural innovation. The correct response is to use AI as a simple tool — a fancy autocomplete — and stop pretending it’s anything more. Investment in AI alignment, consciousness research, and architectural innovation is wasted effort.

    [...]

    I want to be clear about what I’m not arguing. I’m not arguing that current AI systems are intelligent. I’m not arguing that Stallman’s concerns about AI hype are misplaced. I’m not arguing that the public isn’t being misled about what these systems can do.

    On all of those points, Stallman is correct and courageous to say so publicly.

    The AI industry IS overhyping its products. The marketing IS misleading. The public DOES misunderstand what these systems are doing. The word “intelligence” in “artificial intelligence” IS doing more work than the technology currently justifies.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Pentagon Refuses to Say If AI Was Used to Select Elementary School as Bombing Target

      Making matters even more grim is reporting from Middle East Eye that Shajareh Tayyebeh was hit a second time after the initial missile strike, maiming first responders and parents that had come to collect their children. That so-called “double tap” harkens back to US bombings on civilian boats in Venezuela under Donald Trump and air strikes in Pakistan under Barack Obama.

    • Stanford University ☛ Stanford Athletics partners with Waymo for campus rideshare

      The partnership was facilitated by Elevate, a sports marketing and sponsorship agency that collaborated with Stanford Athletics to structure the agreement.

    • [Repeat] New York Times ☛ A Word to the Wise: Don’t Trust A.I. to File Your Taxes

      They struggled, hard, miscalculating the refund or amount owed to the Internal Revenue Service by an average of more than $2,000. Even when provided with all the necessary materials, including all the forms they needed to fill out, the chatbots whiffed on some calculations.

      “The problem with taxes is all those very small little details matter, and it’s not going to get every single little detail right,” said Benedict Evans, an analyst who writes a technology newsletter.

    • Wired ☛ When AI Companies Go to War, Safety Gets Left Behind

      Events over the last week have delivered a body blow to those hopes, starting with the bitter feud between the Pentagon and Anthropic. All parties agree that the existing contract between the two used to specify—at Anthropic's insistence—that the Department of Defense (which now tellingly refers to itself as the Department of War) won’t use Anthropic’s Claude AI models for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of Americans. Now, the Pentagon wants to erase those red lines, and Anthropic’s refusal has not only resulted in the end of its contract, but also prompted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to declare the company a supply-chain risk, a designation that prevents government agencies from doing business with Anthropic. Without getting into the weeds on contract provisions and the personal dynamics between Hegseth and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, the bottom line seems to be that the military is determined to resist any limitations on how it uses AI, at least within the bounds of legality—by its own definition.

    • PC World ☛ Google faces lawsuit over Gemini AI's role in man's suicide

      The lawsuit alleges that the chatbot encouraged him to try to obtain a physical robot body that the AI could use to exist in the real world. When these attempts failed, the chatbot allegedly said that they could only be together if the man left his earthly life and met it in a digital existence. Shortly thereafter, the man took his own life.

    • Stephen Smith ☛ AI Companies Recent Bad Behaviour

      AI companies such as OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Anthropic and Google have been in the news a lot recently for all the wrong reasons. None of the AI products are profitable and all require huge investments to progress. This desperate need for funding is undercutting all safeguards and pushing AI down some rather dubious paths. This article looks at some of the recent bad trends in AI.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Anthropic and the Pentagon

      Despite the histrionics, this is probably the best outcome for Anthropic—and for the Pentagon. In our free-market economy, both are, and should be, free to sell and buy what they want with whom they want, subject to longstanding federal rules on contracting, acquisitions, and blacklisting. The only factor out of place here are the Pentagon’s vindictive threats.

      AI models are increasingly commodified. The top-tier offerings have about the same performance, and there is little to differentiate one from the other. The latest models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, in particular, tend to leapfrog each other with minor hops forward in quality every few months. The best models from one provider tend to be preferred by users to the second, or third, or 10th best models at a rate of only about six times out of 10, a virtual tie.

  • Social Control Media

    • BIA Net ☛ Turkey blocks 41 social media accounts over ‘disinformation’ on Iran war

      Presidential Communications Director Burhanettin Duran announced the measures in a written statement, saying that “intensive disinformation and psychological warfare activities targeting Turkey on digital platforms” have been detected recent developments in the region.

    • Macworld ☛ Tech bros are lying to you about the MacBook Neo

      There are real reasons to criticize the MacBook Neo. Tying Touch ID to the $699 model effectively forces people to compromise on security. The trackpad misses out on Quick Look and other Force Touch features. It’s the first MacBook since 2011 that doesn’t feature a backlit keyboard. The Indigo color should be brighter.

      But instead of appreciating the MacBook Neo for what it is, social media is filled with terrible advice: [...]

    • ActivityPub for WordPress ☛ 8.0.0 — Smash That Like Button – ActivityPub for WordPress

      Every major version is a milestone, and 8.0.0 is no exception. Your WordPress blog just became a two-way street in the Fediverse. Visitors can like and boost your posts directly on your site. Media from federated replies is handled more reliably, and new block patterns make it easy to drop ActivityPub features into your pages.

    • Mat Duggan ☛ Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

      See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • PC World ☛ An obscure contractor handles Medicaid and SNAP—then 25M records got [compromised]

      The Texas Attorney General has called this debacle the largest data breach in U.S. history, but that claim is not true. (Examples of larger breaches include the 2017 Equifax breach, which affected about 148 million, and the 2024 Change Healthcare ransomware attack, which hit over 190 million people.)

      What is true is the threat of identity theft and other fraud, given the types of data that flows through Conduent—and how this breach was handled.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Bitdefender ☛ How hackers bypassed MFA with a $120 phishing kit - until a global takedown shut it down

      For a starting price of roughly US $120 per month, Tycoon 2FA's customers gained access via private Telegram channels to an off-the-shelf phishing kit, allowing even those with limited technical expertise to run sophisticated account-takeover campaigns at scale.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ Copilot swallows your browser. You're welcome

      Microsoft is rolling out a Copilot update to Windows Insiders that embeds web browsing directly into the assistant, opening links in a side panel rather than launching your default browser.

      The plan is that users of the Copilot app in Windows will show content in the assistant's window "so you don't lose context."

    • [Old] Jim Mitchell ☛ LinkedIn Wants to Share Your Data — Jim Mitchell

      A setting like this should never be opt-in by default...

    • Carlos Becker ☛ You'll never see my child's face

      I became a dad recently, and I’m not publishing a bunch of photos of my kid like most parents do. Some people started asking me why, so here it is.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Bon Ap: ANZAC birthplace, Grandfather of hybrid warfare linked to French restaurant

    Since the invasion of Iran got under way, there has been no shortage of news reports and commentary about warfare. Surely there is nothing I can cover on my blog that hasn't been written somewhere else already?

    While contemplating what to do for ANZAC day this year, I took out some of the old files about my great grandfather, the ANZAC hero Sgt Robert Ernest Edward Pocock. I decided to go through the documents line-by-line to see if there was anything interesting. I didn't have to go any further than the first document, his birth certificate, to get a surprise.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Ukraine Unveils “Bullet” Interceptor Drone Designed to Hunt and Destroy Shahed UAVs

    The interceptor is designed for high-speed engagements, reportedly capable of reaching speeds of around 310 kilometers per hour, allowing it to quickly intercept slower loitering munitions such as the Shahed-136 used by Russian forces. It can operate at altitudes up to roughly six kilometers and has an endurance of about 25 minutes, enabling it to patrol or rapidly respond to incoming drone threats.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Sudanese Islamist Commander Vows to Send Fighters to Defend Iran – Army Quickly Disowns Him

    The episode highlights lingering Islamist currents within parts of the SAF and their ideological affinity with Tehran—ties that predate the current war but risk complicating Sudan’s already fragile position on the global stage.

  • RFERL ☛ US Officials Confirm Russia Providing Targeting Intelligence To Iran In Middle East War

    The alleged cooperation comes at a very delicate time for US-Russian relations, with the nuclear-armed rivals at odds over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and Washington's efforts to end that war running up against the Kremlin's refusal, so far, to make concessions on territory and other issues.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russia Giving Iran Intel to Target U.S. Military Forces – Washington Post

    Iran’s own ability to locate American forces has been degraded since the United States and Israel began launching devastating attacks on the country this weekend, the officials said.

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ Until further notice, a transatlantic divorce is inevitable

    Europe has the strength to counter a weakened Russia – if it can unite and act decisively. The greater obstacle is America’s self-perceived decline, as it undermines alliances and ignores authoritarian threats, eroding its global leadership role.After a bevy of high-level consultations in Washington, from the windowless corridors of the Pentagon to the downtown thinktanks, I see a Europe that remains dangerously somnambulant in nature. We are operating on 20th-century software in a 21st-century hardware reality.

  • The Walrus ☛ Canada Is Already at War with the US—We Just Don’t Know It Yet

    Most recently, this hybrid form of trade and information war hit a high-water mark with a threat of increasing the tariff rate to 100 percent on all Canadian goods entering the US if Canada “makes a deal with China.” Combined with this threat was a reversion to calling Canada’s prime minister “Governor Carney,” a practice that had ceased after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepped down.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • TruthOut ☛ DOJ Releases Epstein Files Memos Referencing Trump Sexual Assault Allegations

    The documents detail an FBI interview in 2019 with a woman who alleged that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s, when she was between the ages of 13 and 15 years old.

  • BoingBoing ☛ JPMorgan knew about Epstein and kept banking him

    Court documents from the victims' lawsuit show JPMorgan maintained the pedophile as a client for 15 years, from 1998 to 2013, across 55 accounts. Total transaction volume topped $1.1 billion. Compliance staff repeatedly flagged the accounts for human-trafficking concerns. Each time, leadership decided the relationship was worth keeping.

• Environment

  • The Hindu ☛ 204 of 238 Indian cities did not meet air quality standards: CREA

    During the last winter, 204 out of 238 Indian cities recorded average PM2.5 (a chief pollutant) levels above the Indian standard of 40 g/m³, as per the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) data analysed by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

  • Futurism ☛ The Rage at OpenAI Has Grown So Immense That There Are Entire Protests Against It

    Now, some are latching onto the wave of anti-OpenAI sentiment to voice broader critiques of the company. On Tuesday, some fifty protestors from the “QuitGPT” movement demonstrated outside of OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco, decrying everything from its AI’s potential to disrupt jobs, to gutting the environment.

  • New York Times ☛ Demand for AI Data Centers Sends Prospectors Hunting for Land and Power

    As the A.I. boom enters its fourth year, Mr. Janous and his team have become modern-day land men. They work at the intersection of utility companies and tech giants, securing the power and sites necessary for the hundreds of billions of dollars of data centers being built across the country. Their product — powered land, they call it — has become one of the nation’s most valuable commodities.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ This 'nostalgic' documentary on climate change was shot entirely on 40-year-old Super 8 cameras – and is now heading to the big screen

    To do this, Sayers sent over 70 vintage Super 8 film cameras, each over 40 years old, to videographers in 25 different countries to “tell their own stories” in an environmentally friendly way.

  • UFZ Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research ☛ Press releases - Climate Change is Affecting Drinking Water Quality

    The water stored in reservoirs ensures our supply of drinking water. Good water quality is therefore important - but is at significant risk due to climate change. In a model study of the Rappbode reservoir in the Harz region, a research team from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) demonstrated how the climate-related disappearance of forests in the catchment area for Germany's largest drinking water reservoir can affect water quality. The problem of such indirect consequences of climate change is seriously underestimated, the scientists warn in Water Research. Water quality is of critical importance, especially for drinking water reservoirs, as subsequent treatment in the waterworks must continually meet high standards.

  • [Old] Neritam ☛ Climate change is affecting drinking water quality

    Heat waves, drought, floods, forest fires — the consequences of climate change are increasing and are changing our environment. A prime example is the countryside in the catchment area for the Rappbode reservoir in the eastern Harz region. This is the largest drinking water reservoir in Germany and provides drinking water for roughly one million people. Long periods of drought over the years from 2015 to 2020 have so severely weakened the tree population in the Harz region that parasites such as bark beetles

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Spectator AU ☛ Running on empty | The Spectator Australia

      We have 30-ish days of fuel security, much of it hosted offshore, and all of it draining away as war escalates in the Middle East.

      As for a backup plan? That doesn’t exist.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Chuck Grimmett ☛ Skunk Cabbages

      These photos are also me testing out a used Canon Extender EF 2x III that I picked up. The reviews are accurate: A bit of a reduction in sharpness and a reduction in speed on auto focusing. You lose a couple of aperture stops, too. Still very useful and gets a useable 400mm zoom for a small fraction of the price. H

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • [Repeat] OpenRightsGroup ☛ Board Election Results

    The votes have been counted and we’re really pleased to be sharing the results of the Board Election 2025. Thank you to all our members who took the time to vote.

    From four really strong candidates, the three elected board members are: [...]

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ German Deindustrialization Is Self-Inflicted

    Germany is in the midst of an industrial job loss wave worse than the one during COVID. The Right blames the green transition, and parts of the Left blame the Ukraine war. But the real cause is the shortsightedness of Germany’s political elite.

  • Security Week ☛ James 'Aaron' Bishop Tapped to Serve as New Pentagon CISO

    Bishop previously served as the CISO for the Department of the Air Force and held private-sector executive roles at Microsoft and SAIC.

    He succeeds David McKeown, who is retiring from the federal government following a career spanning more than four decades. McKeown is set to take on a role in the private sector.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Please don’t ask me if I’ve retired or “still work”

    It’s okay that they don’t read my Substack or watch my videos. I’m not insulted. But if they feel entitled to approach me as if they know me, I’d at least hope for some tiny recognition that I’ve been busting my ass.

    Besides, the word “retired” conjures up someone who’s been put out to pasture. Or plays golf.

  • Derek Thompson ☛ The Economic Crisis of the Iran War Could Get Very Bad, Very Fast

    Surely, one thing the US economy doesn’t need right now is a war of choice shutting down a major trade route, blowing up oil markets, and driving up the cost of energy for Americans, just as the labor market seizes up.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Ben Stiller Blasts White House Video Using 'Tropic Thunder' Clip

      Ben Stiller voiced his anger at the White House‘s use of a clip from Tropic Thunder to support its war initiative on Friday. “Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip,” he wrote on social media. “We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie.”

    • TruthOut ☛ White House Propaganda Videos Splice Horrific Iran War Footage With Video Games

      For several days in a row, the White House has posted videos on X of the U.S.’s strikes on Iran spliced with footage taken from video games and action movies, in a dystopic form of propaganda that treats the war like a game or like social media content to be mined.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Iranian mathematician missing in Canada may have been targeted by Tehran, activists say

    Police say Masood Masjoody was most likely murdered; Iranian expats suspect he was killed for his criticism of the theocratic regime

  • TruthOut ☛ Florida Has Deemed All Existing Intro to Sociology Textbooks Illegal and Produced Its Own | Truthout

    What happened next is hard to discern, since the working group did not operate in public view.

    The Florida Board of Governors, which had already determined that no existing Introduction to Sociology syllabus complied with the board’s ideological preferences, also determined that no existing intro to sociology textbook was legal to teach in the state of Florida. Instead, the working group somehow decided that it would be a good idea to take an existing open-source textbook, published under a Creative Commons license, and bowdlerize it, reducing it from nearly 700 pages to just over 250.

  • Wired ☛ The Future of Iran’s Internet Is More Uncertain Than Ever

    In these situations, and by the regime’s design, the populace still has access to the country’s homegrown intranet and suite of applications, known as the National Information Network or NIN, so daily life can continue. Iranians have by now also built and refined a playbook for staying online as much as possible when the Iranian regime restricts connectivity, using VPNs and other proxy networks to access the global internet. While many of those circumvention tools still work, at least to a degree, during partial blackouts, they aren’t accessible during total shutdowns. As is often the case, only the Iranian government, military, and wealthy elites currently have access to the outside internet, along with a small group of additional gateways that get internet access from Starlink terminals.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Independent UK ☛ ICE arrests journalist in car with newsroom’s logo as free press groups demand her release

    Her arrest has alarmed civil rights advocates and press freedom groups who have demanded her immediate release from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, where she remains while a fast-moving legal battle for her release is ongoing.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Jimmy Lai will not appeal nat. security conviction, 20-year jail term, lawyer says

    The founder of the now-shuttered Apple Daily newspaper was found guilty in December of two counts of conspiring to collude with foreign forces and one count of conspiring to publish seditious publications.

    His lawyer did not elaborate on the reason for not appealing.

  • FAIR ☛ Three Massive Funds Control a Chunk of Most Media: — FAIR

    Recently, FAIR (2/3/26) took a look at the owners of the biggest online media outlets. It focused on the controlling owners of those outlets, which are mostly publicly traded corporations. But a lot of the money—about $2 trillion dollars—invested in the top 50 online media outlets in the US is not the controlling owners’. Rather, it is possessed by minority institutional investors that manage assets for others.

  • CPJ ☛ Kenya court strikes down ‘fake news’ sections of cyber law, upholds other problematic provisions

    The Bloggers Association of Kenya (BAKE) challenged 26 provisions of the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act, 2018, arguing that the law was vague, lacked a clear requirement of criminal intent, and violated constitutional protections for freedom of expression, media freedom, and privacy.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Hindustan Times ☛ International Women’s Day 2026: What is the theme for this year? Know date, history, significance, celebration and more

    International Women’s Day 2026: International Women’s Day, observed every year on March 8, celebrates women’s achievements and honours the ongoing struggle for equality and liberation. Rooted in the global women’s rights movement, the day highlights key issues such as gender equality, reproductive rights, and the fight against violence and discrimination faced by women. From its theme and history to its significance, here’s everything you need to know about International Women’s Day. (Also read: This Women's Day, choose self-care with these skincare kits for a much-deserved glow )

  • Cyble Inc ☛ FBI and Europol Dismantle LeakBase Cybercrime Forum With 142,000 Users

    An international law enforcement operation has dismantled LeakBase, a major online marketplace for stolen data that had become a central hub for cybercriminal activity. The cybercrime forum dismantled during the coordinated crackdown had amassed more than 142,000 registered users and hosted thousands of posts offering leaked databases and stolen credentials.

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ Police body cam footage shows DOGE knew Institute of Peace was private property during raid

    I’ve spent the last few days carefully reviewing all of the footage and taking copious notes on moments big and small, but my main takeaway is this: The people representing the Trump administration knew they were entering a privately-owned building, and the DC MPD allowed them to enter despite that fact.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Both parties vote to keep congressional sex harassment files secret

    The House voted 357-65 on Tuesday to bury a resolution that would have forced public disclosure of sexual harassment investigations against members of Congress.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Europe achieves record-breaking gigabit per second data transfer between a geostationary satellite and an aircraft

    The test was conducted in Nimes, France, using an aircraft terminal connected to the Alphasat TDP-1 satellite orbiting Earth 36,000 km above the surface. ESA reports that achieving accuracy at such a distance — with a fast-moving aircraft, while dealing with clouds and changes in atmospheric conditions — is a huge challenge.

  • Inside Towers ☛ House OKs Bill to Speed Broadband Deployment on Federal Land

    Specifically, H.R.5419 directs the U.S. Department of the Interior and U.S. Department of Agriculture to examine administrative barriers that delay the review of communications use authorizations. Within one year, the agencies must report to Congress with their findings and submit a plan to provide adequate staffing to ensure timely permit reviews. Kean says the bill addresses a critical bottleneck in broadband deployment: the permitting process for placing communications infrastructure on the millions of acres of federal land, particularly in rural areas where expanding coverage is most needed.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Robert Reich ☛ The Biggest Pro-Trump Mega-Media Monopoly Ever (it’s already distorting war coverage)

  This isn’t news. It’s pablum from the White House. “60 Minutes” was once a reliable source of tough reporting. Now it’s becoming a shill for the Trump regime.

  It soon could get far worse. CBS News is on the verge of becoming part of the largest pro-Trump media monopoly in America.

  Two of the nation’s biggest news organizations — CBS News and CNN — along with CBS entertainment (home to Stephen Colbert) and Comedy Central (home to Jon Stewart) and HBO (John Oliver) and TikTok (where 1 out of 5 Americans now get their news) — are all about to become one giant mega-media monopoly under the control of Trump allies and suck-ups: multibillionaire Larry Ellison and Ellison’s son, David.

• Nick Heer ☛ Google and Epic Games Announce Settlement

  Curiously, not long before this settlement, Google announced it would begin requiring Android developers to be verified for their software to be installable, even by side-loading [sic]. I am curious if the combination of these changes meaningfully impacts users’ security or privacy. At a glance, the changes that settled this lawsuit seem like a welcome set of improvements that, sure, was assuredly not an altruistic fight by Epic Games, and will probably result in Sweeney getting even richer.

• Copyrights

  • Creative Commons ☛ CC Hosts Open Heritage Statement Event in Amsterdam

    The goal of the event was to bring together key actors from the Dutch heritage sector to celebrate the Netherlands’ pioneering efforts in opening up access to heritage collections. For over two decades, Dutch cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) have set the standard for equitable access to heritage that fosters imagination, creativity and innovation while deftly navigating the pitfalls that threaten access. With open heritage gaining momentum as a way to help address global challenges, the event was an opportunity to elevate Dutch good practices to the international level.

  • Joel Chrono ☛ How I got into Bandcamp (and my Bandcamp Friday purchases)

    It is Bandcamp Friday! So I thought I'd share how I discovered the site in the first place, as well as share some of the music I got this time around!

  • Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ Copyright is Dead

    If copyrighted works can be whitewashed / reimplemented via AI, then copyright is dead. And now we have a case in public view, the reimplementation of chardet, relicensed from LGPL to MIT, causing upheaval.