Leftovers

• Ruben Schade ☛ We’ve lost Vim, and gen-“AI” as a drug

  Anyway, where to now? I switched to Vim as my primary editor around 2006, and while it hasn’t been without my frustrations for me at times, its proved utterly indispensable. The closest I’ve come to feeling at “home” with an editor was KDE’s Kate. Maybe this will provide me the impetus to finally make the switch wholesale. It’s an excellent editor.

• Joel Chrono ☛ I made a one-page notebook

  I grabbed a piece of paper, folded it in 8 sections, cut in the middle to turn it into a little book, and started to write on it!

• Ava ☛ my time management

  I work full time, while also studying part time, volunteering, and blogging here, together with fitness, other hobbies and keeping up with things, feeling available to people most of the time. What helps me do that, especially when I am chronically ill?

• Career/Education

  • CS Monitor ☛ Why libraries have a hold on me: A love letter

    But I enjoy the starch of virtue I get from walking to the library to pick up my book. The space devoted to holds is almost as big as the rest of the stacks now. They don’t have as many books out on the main bookshelves anymore. It feels like an orphanage for books nobody wants to put a hold on.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years

    In 2021, being a good software engineer felt great. The world was full of software, with more companies arriving every year who needed to employ engineers to write their code and run their systems. I knew I was good at it, and I knew I could keep doing it for as long as I wanted to. The work I loved would not run out.

    In 2026, I’m not sure the software engineering industry will survive another decade. If it does, I’m certain it’s going to change far more than it did in the last two decades. Maybe I’ll figure out a way to carve out a lucrative niche supervising AI agents, or maybe I’ll have to leave the industry entirely. Either way, the work I loved is going away.

• Hardware

  • Sal ☛ Can’t quit the Apple Keyboard

    I have nice mechanical keyboards. I’ve owned probably around ten of them. I’ve tried brown switches, blue switches, red switches, clear switches, and other switches than I can’t remember the name of. I have keyboards that can quick-switch between four devices. Keyboards that can be extensively customized. Keyboards with cool little volume knobs.

    I keep coming back to the Apple keyboard. Specifically, the smaller Magic Keyboard with Touch ID. Here’s why: [...]

  • Mike Rockwell ☛ Assorted Thoughts on Headphones

    Audio gear seems like an infinite well at the moment and I’m excited to have an entire category of gadgets and accessories to explore.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Bix Frankonis ☛ We Do The Walk

    My walks have resumed, as of Sunday, March 1, and properly continued in a daily fashion since, making this my first full week of getting in the walk in the past five months.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Cisco warns of two more SD-WAN bugs under active attack

    As usual with these sorts of notices, Cisco offered little detail about how the flaws are being exploited or who is behind the attacks. The company also declined to say whether the activity is linked to a cyberbaddie it warned about just days earlier.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ A Satellite Receiver Trusted by Pentagon, ESA Has More Than 20 Security Flaws — and the Maker Never Responded

    The researcher, who published the findings on Thursday, discovered the flaws in IDC’s SFX2100 satellite receiver during a routine penetration test of a critical infrastructure client. After exhausting the standard 90-day responsible disclosure window — including direct outreach to IDC’s president on LinkedIn — the researcher moved to full public disclosure.

    The vulnerability list runs the full gamut of embedded device failures. Hardcoded credentials, unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE), OS command injection, path traversal, and some seriously permissive file system configurations. Twenty CVEs now carry formal identifiers spanning CVE-2026-28769 through CVE-2026-29128.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Turn off Apple Intelligence reporting

    I recently completely restored my iPhone Air and when I was digging into settings I noticed that Apple Intelligence reporting is turned on by default. I don’t have Apple Intelligence turned on at all but I still wanted the reporting off. Call me paranoid but I don’t trust Apple software to not be taking up battery cycles even though the overall setting is not on.

  • Angelino Desmet ☛ My Smartbox Group complaint, not posted on LinkedIn

    Whatever CEO thought this was a solid idea can order themselves a Bongo Voucher, throw their useless master's degree in the bin, and interpret all of this as a euphemism for the nastiest slurs unwelcome on this magnificent cyber gathering of human excellence.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ There's a Blatant Problem With OpenAI That Endangers Kids

      But when PIRG tested the sign up process for OpenAI, Google, Meta, and xAI, the providers asked “no substantive vetting questions,” requiring only basic information like an email address and a credit card number. Only Anthropic asked how the testers intended to use its models, or if the product they planned to build was intended for minors. Once PIRG got developer access, it reported, it then built a chatbot simulating an AI-powered teddy bear on three of the platforms, each taking less than 15 minutes.

    • SFGate ☛ SF emergency czar says cops made to be Waymos' 'roadside assistance'

      At a Monday hearing to discuss Waymo’s troubles during December’s PG&E outage that cut power to a third of the city, San Francisco supervisors and the director of the city’s emergency response complained about police and firefighters having to serve as “roadside assistance” for immobilized Waymo vehicles. Back in 2023, these worries about time-pressed first responders reached a fever pitch but eventually quieted; now, the December snafu is putting the topic back on city leaders’ to-do lists.

    • Futurism ☛ Emergency Responders Say They're Now Unpaid "Roadside Assistance" for Confused Waymos

      Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, warned that the frequency that police and firefighters have to respond to immobilized Waymos was becoming a public safety issue.

    • Techdirt ☛ We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI

      The irony of being forced to dumb down an essay about a story warning against the forced suppression of excellence was not lost on me. Or on my kid, who spent a frustrating afternoon removing words and testing sentences one at a time, trying to figure out what invisible tripwire the algorithm had set. The lesson the kid absorbed was clear: write less creatively, use simpler vocabulary, and don’t sound too good, because sounding good is now suspicious.

      At the time, I worried this was going to become a much bigger problem. That the fear of AI “cheating” would create a culture that actively punished good writing and pushed students toward mediocrity. I was hoping I’d be wrong about that.

      Turns out… I was not wrong.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots — 2.5 years of records were nuked in an instant

      Unfortunately, Gregory assumed at this point that the bot would continue cleaning up duplicate resources and only then look into the state file to see how it was meant to be set up in the first place. Terraform and similar tools can be very unforgiving, particularly when coupled with blind obedience. As Claude now had the state file, it logically followed it, issuing a Terraform "destroy" operation in preparation to set up things correctly this time.

    • The Register UK ☛ Brits fear AI will strip humanity from public services

      Brits are worried that AI will dehumanize public services, leading to less human contact and oversight as well as job losses, according to people questioned by pollster Ipsos.

      More respondents saw risks from AI than benefits, with 51 percent thinking it may lead to reduced human contact, 50 percent fearing job losses from automation, 47 percent concerned about over-reliance on technology reducing human oversight, and 46 percent worried about privacy and data security.

    • Martin Alderson ☛ Is the AI Compute Crunch Here?

      We're starting to see serious signs that some providers are really struggling to meet demand. I still think this is a seriously underpriced risk which has major implications for how much adoption AI can have over the next year or two.

    • Salih Muhammed ☛ I'm not consulting an LLM

      Now, in such a world, do you think that your intellect would has grown the same amount in which you had to actually do proper research, encounter crazy people, cultures, controversies, jokes, people who wrote interesting enough stuff that you followed them, arguments you disagreed with but couldn’t quite dismiss, footnotes that led nowhere and everywhere at once, half-broken blogs, bad takes that forced you to sharpen your own, or sources that contradicted each other so hard you had to build a model of the world just to survive the tension?

      I guess not.

      Because what would be missing isn’t information but the experience. And experience is where intellect actually gets trained.

  • Social Control Media

    • BoingBoing ☛ Why Mastodon matters now more than its creators imagined

      The difference from corporate social media comes down to incentive structures. Platforms designed around narcissism and parasocial relationships produce content optimized for engagement. A federated network with no central owner produces something closer to actual knowledge-sharing, because nobody profits from making it addictive.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Security Week ☛ Over 100 GitHub Repositories Distributing BoryptGrab Stealer

    Trend Micro’s investigation into BoryptGrab revealed the existence of multiple ZIP archives masquerading as free software tools that have been distributed since late 2025 through the GitHub repositories.

    All identified binaries contained similar Russian-language comments and URL-fetching logic, although the malware’s execution logic was not the same for all ZIP archives.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Court House News ☛ Google, Android users near final approval of $135M data transfer settlement

      U.S. Magistrate Judge Virginia DeMarchi on Thursday granted preliminary approval to a class of Android users claiming Google — without informing or getting users’ consent — transmitted large amounts of information between Android devices and its own servers. The transfers reportedly occurred when the devices were idle, untouched and with all apps closed. They also used people’s cellular data and didn’t compensate users for the data consumed.

      A final approval hearing is set for June 23.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Big Tech Oversees Itself at Homeland Security

      The official charged with overseeing the Department of Homeland Security’s artificial intelligence operations and massive surveillance dragnet came to the job from Anduril Industries, a powerful military AI contractor that could benefit from the reconnaissance build-out his office is overseeing, according to an ethics disclosure reviewed by the Lever.

    • Wired ☛ CBP Used Online Ad Data to Track Phone Locations

      Trump ousted Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem this week. Her tenure was marked by aggressive anti-immigration tactics and ICE and CBP’s killing of two US protesters. A highly sophisticated iPhone hacking tool kit that was likely originally built for the US government is in the hands of multiple other nations as well as scammers who have likely used the tools to infect tens of thousands of phones or more. Some US lawmakers are calling for an investigation into the threat of the decades-old side-channel hacking technique. And WIRED went inside how music streaming CEO Elie Habib built the open-source global threat map World Monitor in his spare time.

    • Site36 ☛ Roadmap for interoperability: EU expands its (border) police databases with facial recognition | Matthias Monroy

      The “Interoperability Project” merges the major European databases. The agency responsible is the European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems (eu-LISA), headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia. Most of the related initiatives are scheduled for completion in 2026. The project covers the Schengen Information System (SIS II), used for law enforcement searches; Eurodac, which to date has primarily stored fingerprints of asylum seekers; the Visa Information System (VIS); and the soon-to-launch European Criminal Records Information System for Third-Country Nationals (ECRIS-TCN).

    • Doc Searls ☛ Sat Enough Day

      Is Conditional Consent compatible with MyTerms? This—_Instead of "accept all" or "reject all" per site, users define rules across three dimensions: cookie purpose, website category, and third-party processor. Allow analytics on shopping sites but deny tracking on news sites — your preferences, your logic._—suggests the answer is yes. Or at least maybe.

• Defence/Aggression

  • RTL ☛ Why have 1,000 ships at times lost their GPS in the Mideast?

    Experts say this deficiency explains why since the start of US-Israeli strikes, the jamming of satellite navigation signals has left about 1,000 ships in the Gulf and the Gulf of Oman unable to determine their location, either momentarily or continuously.

    Dimitris Ampatzidis, a senior risk and compliance analyst for the energy market intelligence firm Kpler, told AFP the number represents about half of the vessels in the area.

  • US Navy Times ☛ Russia provided Iran with information that can help Tehran strike US military, sources say

    Still, it’s the first indication that Moscow has sought to get involved in the war that the U.S. and Israel launched on Iran a week ago. Russia is in the rare club of countries that maintains friendly relations with Tehran, which has faced years of isolation over its nuclear program and its support of proxy groups that have wreaked havoc in the Middle East, including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.

  • Hackaday ☛ Hiding A Bomb In Plain Sight

    While we are no fans of war, we have to admit we are always fascinated with war technology. Even if that means microwave death rays. Certainly, hiding explosives in coal qualifies as a wartime hack.

• Environment

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Iran's threat to burn ships is choking off Persian Gulf oil flow to world

    About 20% of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ How much water do the data centres use? It's a secret.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ How much water do the data centres use? It’s a secret

    The AI companies insist: we barely use water, hardly a drop!

    But we won’t tell you how much water we use. And we’ll take you to court to stop you from finding out.

  • Big Blue Press LLC ☛ With $1 Billion Google Data Center Deal Inked, the Roanoke Valley Enters the Game

    Neither the power company nor the water authority would specify the amount of electricity and water the project might need. By the time of the Botetourt County announcement, project representatives had already persuaded electricity and water officials to sign non-disclosure agreements. McEvoy signed a secrecy deal with the Google project back in March 2024.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Sellers blocking AusPost Parcel Lockers

      This is how it works. The post office staff accept the incoming parcel on your behalf, even signing for it if necessary. They then file the parcel in one of the lockers outside, then uses your unique Parcel Locker code to notify you. You arrive with your QR code, and the locker pops open to reveal your parcel.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Renewable Energy and National Security

      The usual argument for promoting solar and wind power is that relying on renewable energy avoids the environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels. This environmental damage includes, but isn’t limited to, climate change. In addition, air pollution imposes shockingly large direct and immediate costs by harming our health and reducing our life expectancy.

      But now we know that there is another reason for nations to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels: security. In a dangerous world, it’s infinitely safer to rely on the sun and the wind than to depend on fossil fuels that must be transported long distances, from nations that are untrustworthy, often exploitative and located in regions that frequently devolve into war zones.

  • Overpopulation

    • Crooked Timber ☛ Every child should be wanted

      Raising a child from birth to adulthood requires huge inputs of labour, time and money. In the context of a loving family, these parental inputs are more than offset by the joy of having children. Because this context is assumed, most estimates of the costs of raising children typically focus on the financial costs incurred by their parents. That’s been estimated at 13 per cent of a family’s disposable income on the first child and a further ten percentage points for each child after that. For median couples, that amounts to about $300,000 over 18 years for the first child. Subsequent children would be about $230,000 each.

      That’s a lot of money. But if the main work of parental care is replaced by paid workers unrelated to the child the cost is stupendous – in Australia $100 000 a year for foster care and as much as $1 million a year for high-needs children. And in the case of an unwanted child raised by their parents, the same work must be carried out without pay.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Wired ☛ Jack Dorsey Is Ready to Explain the Block Layoffs

    In an exclusive interview with WIRED, Block’s cofounder and CEO says he axed 40 percent of his workforce so that he can rebuild the company “as an intelligence.”

  • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Announcing New Working Groups

    The Open Source Foundations Consortium (OSFC) has formed seven new working groups for open source ecosystem governance. The working groups were approved by the OSFC Steering Committee following a six-month consultation period during which fourteen comments were received, twelve of which were from bots.

    Each working group operates under the OSFC Charter and reports to the Technical Advisory Board, which reports to the Governing Board, which reports to the Executive Director, who reports to the Steering Committee, which chartered the working groups.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Guardian UK ☛ The myth of Baba Vanga: how a mystic’s ‘prophecies’ fuel online propaganda

      The result is a combination with a far-reaching impact: a 2024 report on disinformation by the media organisation BIRN Albania, which surveyed 36 Albanian publications over a year, found at least a dozen articles, most of them citing Russian media, in which Vanga’s predictions were “often used by conspiracy and disinformation media to reinforce certain narratives against Nato and the EU”.

    • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Russia-linked disinformation campaign targets Ukraine amid tensions with Hungary

      The Hungarian media outlet reported on March 7 that the AI-generated images appeared in an article published by Ripost, a tabloid controlled and funded by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's ruling Fidesz party.

    • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ Information Warfare in the Israel/U.S.-Iran War: 5 Key Questions with Marc Owen Jones

      The Israel/U.S.-Iran War marks potentially the most significant event in the Middle East since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the collapse of the decades-old Assad regime in Syria in December 2024. Truly a regional conflict, the implications of the hostilities are having and will continue to have profound impacts on the region and world for the foreseeable future. The information space marks a central and evolving aspect of the war today.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ AI-Generated Misinformation Is Latest Weapon in Iran War

      A photograph of a massive explosion at an Iraqi airport; satellite images depicting damage to a U.S. Naval base in Qatar; video of Iranian ballistic missiles striking the center of Tel Aviv. These are all images that have circulated in the past week since the Trump administration attacked Iran. And none of them are real.

      These images — along with many more — were created or manipulated by AI, spreading misinformation about what is actually happening in and around Iran, and they are increasingly becoming a problem for those trying to distinguish truth and reality from lies and propaganda.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Why Georgia’s most vocal university now faces the biggest cuts

    When the specific faculty distribution and student quotas were made public, there was one university that stood out, having been cut dramatically in comparison to the rest — Ilia State University (ISU). ISU saw student numbers slashed by 92%, down from 3,000 students per year to only 300. ISU’s programmes, previously numbering more than 50 Bachelor degrees and 40 Masters and PhD programmes across four faculties, will now be reduced to only Pedagogy and some ABET-accredited STEM programmes, such as applied science, computing, and engineering.

  • JURIST ☛ UN expert: Sweden activists face erosion of rights amid growing restrictions on expression and assembly

    Mary Lawlor, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), expressed her concern over the declining status of activists’ rights in the Scandinavian nation. In a statement posted on the OHCHR’s website, Lawlor stated that she was “alarmed” about reports of threats, hate speech, stigmatization, and harassment of human rights defenders, and the growing restrictions to their “rights to freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly and association.”

  • Tim Bray ☛ Because Algospeak

    Recently I read Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch and Algospeak by Adam Aleksic. The language we speak (and text) to each other is at the core of who and what we are, and the Internet is the strongest among the forces that channel and fertilize its growth. So there’s scope for plenty of books on the subject. Both books educated and entertained, one made me angry.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Pacific Palisades' newspaper, shut down after the fire, stages comeback

    Longtime Pacific Palisades residents Laura and Tim Schneider purchased the paper and intend to relaunch it with a brand-new website on May 4, coinciding with the publication’s 98th anniversary.

  • CPJ ☛ Somaliland journalist Ahmed-Zaki Ibrahim Mohamud held without charge since February

    “Ahmed-Zaki Ibrahim Mohamud joins a long list of journalists in Somaliland who have been arrested and held under dubious circumstances in recent months,” said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Muthoki Mumo. “Nearly two weeks after taking this journalist into custody, authorities have failed to formally present charges in court. They should release Ahmed-Zaki without delay.”

  • BBC ☛ Axel Springer agrees to buy Telegraph Media Group in £575m deal

    European media firm Axel Springer has agreed to purchase the Telegraph Media Group (TMG) in a deal costing £575m.

  • Axel Springer ☛ Axel Springer Announces Agreement to Acquire Telegraph Media Group

    Both parties believe that there are compelling benefits to the transaction: it will preserve the integrity of a heritage media brand and provide it with an exciting platform for growth and expansion into other geographies, while ensuring a commitment to high-quality, independent journalism and media plurality in the UK. Both parties look forward to discussing this further with the Department of Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS) and other stakeholders over the coming weeks.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Telegraph sold for £575m as German buyer elbows out Daily Mail

    Mathias Döpfner, the longstanding chief executive of Axel Springer, has made no secret of his desire to acquire assets after striking a deal with the private equity group KKR to take the media empire private two years ago.

    The takeover tabled by Axel Springer, which owns Politico and Business Insider, is a significant premium to the £500m deal from Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT) agreed in November.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Germany's Axel Springer makes swoop to bag UK's Telegraph

    The deal — which must still be approved by relevant authorities — could end a lengthy saga over the fate of the Telegraph Media Group, which publishes the 171-year-old, right-leaning Daily Telegraph as well as its Sunday sister paper.

  • Politico ☛ POLITICO owner Axel Springer buys Telegraph for £575M

    Axel Springer, which owns POLITICO, is buying the right-leaning British publication for £575 million (€662 million). The proposed deal is subject to approval by U.K. authorities.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • TruthOut ☛ Kristi Noem Is Leaving a Trail of Death Behind Her in ICE Jails

    Damas appears to be the tenth person to die while in ICE custody in 2026, which would bring the total number of people to die while incarcerated by the agency under President Donald Trump to at least 39. Damas’s death was first reported by the Arizona Daily Star on March 4. That day, ICE announced that 48-year-old Alberto Gutierrez-Reyes had died in a California hospital on February 27 after falling ill at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, where the population has skyrocketed in recent months.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Trademarks

  • Techdirt ☛ Iceland Foods Finally Surrenders In Trademark Fight With Iceland, The Country

    From there, Iceland Foods had but one final option for appealing all of these perfectly sane rulings, which would be to take this before the Court of Justice of the EU. And, while that would obviously be crazy, everything I’d seen to date led me to believe the grocer would do just that.

    But sanity seems to finally be on the menu, I guess. Iceland Foods has publicly announced that it is ending the fight and surrendering.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues

    To help train AI models, Meta and other tech companies have downloaded and shared pirated books via BitTorrent from Anna's Archive and other shadow libraries. In an ongoing lawsuit, Meta now argues that uploading pirated books to strangers via BitTorrent qualifies as fair use. The company also stresses that the data helped establish U.S. global leadership in AI.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ I can’t stand photos being called "content" – it insults photographers and kills creativity

    We no longer need go to a gallery, or buy a book or magazine to view such imagery; a quick Google Search brings it up on-screen. However, that ready access – like turning on a tap to get water – has stealthily reduced the artistry it took to create them to a commodity. Or so the tech giants would like.

  • [Old] Columbia University ☛ How Generative AI Turns Copyright Law Upside Down

    While courts are litigating many copyright issues involving generative AI, from who owns AI-generated works to the fair use of training to infringement by AI outputs, the most fundamental changes generative AI will bring to copyright law don’t fit in any of those categories. The new model of creativity, generative AI puts considerable strain on copyright’s two most fundamental legal doctrines: the idea-expression dichotomy and the substantial similarity test for infringement. Increasingly, creativity will be lodged in asking the right questions, not in creating the answers. Asking questions may sometimes be creative, but the AI does the bulk of the work that copyright traditionally exists to reward, and that work will not be protected. That inverts what copyright law now prizes. And because asking the questions will be the basis for copyrightability, similarity of expression in the answers will no longer be of much use in proving the copying of the questions. That means we may need to throw out our test for infringement, or at least apply it in fundamentally different ways.