GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • The Cyber Show ☛ #062 | S7 | Cyberwar | Midnight in the war room

    In this first part of Cyberwar we meet the cast of Midnight In The War-Room, a Thomas LeDuc (Semparis) feature length documentary on the human side of cyber conflict. Lots of first-rate stories and commentary from the front lines of cyber.

Leftovers

• Scoop News Group ☛ Zero lessons learned: Convicted scammer allegedly ran another athlete-focused phishing scam from federal prison

  “While serving time for stealing credit card numbers from athletes and celebrities to fund his lifestyle, Ford allegedly engaged in the same conduct again,” Theodore S. Hertzberg, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement.

• The Drone Girl ☛ A Texas church will put on a free 10,000-drone Easter light show

  Looking for something a little more memorable than an Easter egg hunt this year? A Texas church is putting on what may be the most ambitious drone light show series ever attempted in the United States — and it’s open to the public for free.

• Kevin Boone ☛ Kevin Boone: The “small web” is bigger than you might think

  So there’s good news and bad news, although actually it’s the same news: the small web is too large, and too active, to publish all the updates on a single page, even for just one day. Well, I could publish them, but nobody has time to read them all. It’s good news, because the small web is very much alive, and growing. It’s bad news because I was hoping to be able to implement a feed aggregator, of the same kind that exists for Gemini, and the current scale of the “small” web makes that impractical.

  To be fair, I should point out that the “small” web was never defined by the number of sites, but by the lack of commercial influence. That there’s still a place for private, non-commercial websites on an Internet dominated by advertising is something we should celebrate.

• Jessica Nickelsen ☛ More tweaking

  I’ve slowly somehow got to a point where I am going to be starting a small webshop. It’s just going to be selling fountain pen inks here in New Zealand, from places like Taiwan and South Korea, instead of the usual ok-but-kindof-boring inks you tend to get here. If that sounds like something you might be interested in I’m just ramping things up on Instagram here but I’ll post again once the actual shop itself is happening. I’m trying to keep it very low key, more just doing this because it’s so frustrating to try and ship things to NZ without paying an arm and a leg, especially if you want to try samples, and mess around and experiment.

• Dave DeGraw ☛ You and Your Spinner Can Go to Hell

  There’s a new cancer on the web. It’s been around for at least 20 years, but recently it’s gotten to unprecedented ubiquity. I’m talking about the spinner.

  What’s a spinner?

• Dan Q ☛ A Hundred Inconveniences

  When the house first flooded and friends told me that I’d be faced with many months of headaches, I figured this was hyperbole. Or that, somehow, with the epic wrangling and project management skills of Ruth, JTA and I combined, that we’d be able to accelerate the process somewhat. Little did I know that so many of the problems wouldn’t be issues of scale or complexity but of bureaucracy and other people’s timescales. Clearly, we’re in it for the long haul.

• Austin White ☛ Losing a Friend

  The post was written by Michael's daughter, Katie, and while I was sad to learn about his passing, I am glad she did it.

• Career/Education

  • Bertrand Meyer ☛ Celebrating Tony Hoare's mark on computer science

    Had they included just one of Tony Hoare’s major achievements, many scientific careers would be considered prestigious enough. His had a long list, which I am going to try to summarize, not pretending to get anywhere clause to exhaustiveness, on the sad occasion of his passing away last week at the age of 92. (Note: the text as given here is a first draft. I will polish it in the coming days.)

    I will talk about the personality of C.A.R. Hoare, more recently Professor Sir Tony Hoare (the initials stand for Charles Anthony Richard but he was always known as Tony) in the second part of this article. I should already note, however, for anyone not familiar with his texts, that “Hoare contribution” also connotes an unmistakable style. In his Turing lecture [1], he stated explicitly that for him there was no clear delimitation between the research and the writing, and it shows. Here for example is his explanation of the (profound) rule that he introduced for the axiomatics of recursion [2] (the “infinite regress” is the initial impression that a call to a routine within that routine will lead to an endless cycle): [...]

  • [Old] Blain Smith ☛ Read the Fucking Manual

    There's a particular kind of engineer I've been noticing more and more lately. They show up in Slack channels with half-formed questions. They post screenshots of error messages on Twitter asking "anyone know what this means?" They copy-paste compiler errors into ChatGPT and treat whatever hallucination comes back as gospel. They interrupt their teammates with questions that could be answered in thirty seconds of reading documentation.

    This isn't engineering. This is learned helplessness dressed up in collaborative clothing.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Ternary RISC Processor Achieves Non-Binary Computing Via FPGA

    You would be very hard pressed to find any sort of CPU or microcontroller in a commercial product that uses anything but binary to do its work. And yet, other options exist! Ternary computing involves using trits with three states instead of bits with two. It’s not popular, but there is now a design available for a ternary processor that you could potentially get your hands on.

    The device in question is called the 5500FP, as outlined in a research paper from [Claudio Lorenzo La Rosa.] Very few ternary processors exist, and little effort has ever been made to fabricate such a device in real silicon. However, [Claudio] explains that it’s entirely possible to implement a ternary logic processor based on RISC principles by using modern FPGA hardware. The impetus to do so is because of the perceived benefits of ternary computing—notably, that with three states, each “trit” can store more information than regular old binary “bits.” Beyond that, the use of a “balanced ternary” system, based on logical values of -1, 0 , and 1, allows storing both negative and positive numbers without a wasted sign bit, and allows numbers to be negated trivially simply by inverting all trits together.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Maize mysteries: Scientists uncover new information on how DNA works in maize

    Maize serves as a vital model species for advancing our understanding of plant biology, yet many mysteries remain about the intricate processes governing how DNA works and organizes itself in the genome. A team of FSU researchers together with colleagues at North Carolina State University has made a breakthrough in understanding how DNA replicates in maize, uncovering the existence of two distinct subcompartments in the nucleus that hold genetic material. This discovery not only advances the fundamental knowledge of plant genomics but may have broad implications for gene regulation and crop improvement.

  • The New Lede ☛ Analysis finds "hot spots" for glyphosate and cancer in Iowa and other Midwest states - The New Lede

    A new analysis links high use of the weed killer glyphosate to elevated rates of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), particularly in the Midwest, reinforcing years of research linking cancer to the weed killer made popular by Monsanto.

  • Dan Q ☛ You don’t have to disconnect

    For a while I thought that this would be a sensation unique to folks who, like me, had their first experiences of the Internet in a very intermittent and deliberate way. In the 1990s, I used to go on the Internet: a premeditated act that required being somewhere with a landline and the appropriate hardware, requiring that nobody was using or intending to use the phone, booting up a computer, dialling-up to the local Internet Service Provider, and then going about what I wanted to do. At that time, it was uncommon to use the ‘net for trivial things like checking the weather or what’s on at the cinema, because picking up the local newspaper would probably be a faster way to achieve that! Similarly, it wasn’t so-useful as a procrastination activity, because picking up a book or going for a walk was more accessible and reliable.

    But this isn’t a generational thing, or at least not entirely. Gen Zs are seeing the joy in retro tech from before they were born, which is something I’ve witnessed myself: I’m part of a couple of online communities that do quite a bit of retro-Web and other retro-tech stuff, and I’ve been amazed at how young the demographics can skew in some of these groups! Like: there are people who were born after Facebook was founded who yearn to recreate the kind of dial-up experience that I had, before their parents met.

• Proprietary

  • Security Week ☛ Oracle EBS Hack: Only 4 Corporate Giants Still Silent on Potential Impact

    The Cl0p ransomware and extortion group has taken credit for the EBS hacking campaign, which involved exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities to access data stored by organizations in Oracle’s enterprise management software. The compromised data was then leveraged for extortion.

  • Chris Hannah ☛ The Mac I Want Doesn't Exist

    However, I can't say I haven't been temped by shiny new things. Every time there's been a new generation of M chip released I wonder what the increase in performance would feel like.

    But performance on it's own is unlikely to convince me to upgrade. I usually need three things: [...]

  • Baldur Bjarnason ☛ The two worlds of programming: why developers who make the same observations about LLMs come to opposite conclusions

    Our current software crisis – we’ve had a few – has been ramping up since the US gave up on regulation after the 2007 crash. Instead of reforming and regulating finance, the US decided to let the finance industry take over all of its industries, which hasn’t been great overall, but for software it’s meant that “quality” stopped mattering.

    [...]

    There is little to no downside to poor software quality. The upside of doing the job well is limited compared to tactics like lock-in, dishonest subscription models, and monopolies

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ AI in Peer Review: Revisiting an 8-year-old Debate - The Scholarly Kitchen

      In September 2018, SSP’s New Directions seminar facilitated an Oxford debate on artificial intelligence (AI) in Peer Review, where Angela Cochran represented the opposition and Neil Blair Christensen the proposition.

      Now, they revisit the AI in Peer Review topic to reflect on what has transpired since 2018, discuss if their positions have changed, and consider directions for AI in Peer Review

    • El País ☛ By your command, my robot: AI war games spark debate about ethical limits

      Four decades after the release of that iconic movie, the United States seems to be revisiting some of the moral dilemmas posed by director John Badham. The limits of using artificial intelligence for military purposes are fueling a global debate with real-world consequences.

    • The Register UK ☛ Gartner suggests Friday afternoon Copilot ban

      The analyst reminded the audience that all Copilot output isn’t fit for sharing without review, making validation necessary for all users at all times. He suggested Friday afternoons are a time when workers might just want to get the job done and won’t bother to check for errors that Microsoft’s chatbot produces, perhaps making that slice of the working week a fine time to ban use of Copilot.

    • Yury Molodtsov ☛ AI Won’t Kill SaaS But It Might Kill The Messy Middle

      AI won’t kill the SaaS models. OpenAI itself famously runs on Slack and uses countless off-the-shelf tools. There’s simply no point in rebuilding key apps your entire workflow depends on with vibe coding. You will be just wasting resources.

    • Elliot C Smith ☛ What do AI based layoffs say about their ability to scale?

      What it does say however is that these companies are hamstrung trying to double in size.

      Why? Because if you take the same 2x improvement, in theory these companies should be able to double their output. If doubling their output doesn't double their revenue then they're at some sort of a ceiling.

    • Better Simple ☛ Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

      If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole.

      Django contributors want to help others, they want to cultivate community, and they want to help you become a regular contributor. Before LLMs, this was easier to sense because you were limited to communicating what you understood. With LLMs, it’s much easier to communicate a sense of understanding to the reviewer, but the reviewer doesn’t know if you actually understood it.

  • Social Control Media

    • Terence Eden ☛ Some updates to ActivityBot

      I couple of years ago, I developed ActivityBot - the simplest way to build Mastodon Bots. It is a single PHP file which can run an entire ActivityPub server and it is less than 80KB.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Stryker says hospital tools are safe, but digital ordering systems still down after cyberattack

      The Fortune 500 company produces a wide range of digital tools for hospitals, emergency medical equipment, disposable products for surgical procedures and implants used for hip, knee and shoulder replacements. Since Wednesday, Stryker has dealt with company-wide technology outages that caused factory closures and work disruptions at its locations in multiple countries.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ The ransomware economy is shifting toward straight-up data extortion

      “When you look at the actors in the English-speaking underground, those actors are almost all just focusing on data-theft extortion right now,” Stark added. This includes groups like Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, Clop and other groups that have been responsible for some of the largest and farthest-reaching attacks over the past few years.

    • Google ☛ Ransomware Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures in a Shifting Threat Landscape

      This report provides an overview of the ransomware landscape and common tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) directly observed in the 2025 ransomware incidents that Mandiant Consulting responded to. In this analysis, we excluded activity focused only on data theft extortion. Key insights include: [...]

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Papers Please ☛ DMV wants to upload California drivers license data to the national REAL-ID database

      The DMV Budget Change Proposal is accompanied by a “policy” bill, AB-2156, introduced in February on an “urgency” basis to take effect as soon as enacted, that would override the provisions of California motor vehicle and privacy law that currently prohibit this upload.

      Both the budget and policy proposals have the support of the DMV and Governor Newsom. It will be up to members of the state legislature — and public pressure — to stop them before they are enacted into state law and have to be challenged in court.

    • The Register UK ☛ Age verification isn't sage verification inside OSes

      It is incoherent and tautologous. It talks of "digital signals" between OS, application stores, and apps. This excludes, one surmises, all those analog signals that developers would be tempted to use. Yodeling, perhaps, or interpretive dance. It talks of "age verification" without verification. It applies to users "on a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or download an application." We can run Doom on smart toothbrushes. Everything is a general purpose computer if you stare at it hard enough, sayeth Turing. Not all operating systems have user accounts, saith FreeDOS, And what of smart TVs, which all ages can simultaneously use?

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ End of “Chat Control”: Paving the Way for Genuine Child Protection!

      The controversial mass surveillance of private messages in Europe could soon come to an end. Negotiations between the European Parliament and EU member states regarding the extension of the so-called “Chat Control” concluded yesterday without an agreement. This means that starting April 4, US tech giants like Meta, Google, and Microsoft must stop indiscriminately scanning the private chats and photos of European citizens. The digital privacy of correspondence is restored.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Public will be stunned by NSA Section 702, says Sen. Wyden

      Senator Ron Wyden says the NSA is doing something with Section 702 surveillance that the government won't tell Congress about — and when it's eventually declassified, the public "will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information."

      Wyden, some will recall, warned in 2011 that the unconstitutional PATRIOT Act was being secretly reinterpreted in ways Americans wouldn't accept. Two years later, Edward Snowden proved him right: the NSA had been collecting bulk phone metadata on millions of Americans.

    • Techdirt ☛ The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing Under Section 702

      So to tally this up: Congress is about to vote on reauthorizing Section 702 with a secret legal interpretation that Wyden says will stun the public when it’s eventually revealed, with “reforms” that placed surveillance approval authority in the hands of conspiracy theorists who won’t even keep a spreadsheet, with a massively expanded definition of who can be forced to help the government spy, with secret promises about restraint that the current administration has no intention of honoring, and with a nominee to lead the NSA who won’t commit to following the Constitution.

      The Wyden Siren is blaring. And if history is any guide — and it has been, without exception — whatever is behind the classification curtain is worse than what we can see from the outside.

  • Confidentiality

    • Marco d'Itri ☛ Bypassing deep packet inspection with socat and HTTPS tunnels

      Recently I found myself with a few hours to kill, but with the only available connectivity provided by an annoying firewall which would normally allow requests only to a few very specific web sites. This post shows how to work around this kind of restrictions by hiding SSH in an HTTPS connection, which then can be used as a SOCKS proxy to allow general connectivity. socat does all the hard work.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Digital Music News ☛ American TikTok Investors Forced to Pay $10B to the US

    The payment is part of the agreement through which the coalition of investors gained control of TikTok’s U.S. operations from Chinese parent company ByteDance. This money comes in addition to the investments made to create the new entity through which to run the platform in the United States, those familiar with the matter said.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Trump Administration to Receive $10 Billion Kickback for TikTok Deal

    “View from nowhere” journalism means these reporters from the Journal cannot call this naked corruption what it is, nor can they quote someone stating it. They can only gesture toward the obvious while writing the straightest of articles about the wackiest events. Things are going well.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Gets $10 Billion Kickback To The Treasury For Offloading TikTok To His Billionaire Buddies

    We’ve discussed at length how Trump’s “fix” for TikTok’s problems basically involved forcing the sale of the platform to his greedy billionaire buddies (with the help of pathetic Democrats). The deal fixed none of the real issues Trumpland pretended to be concerned about (national security, privacy, propaganda), and China still maintains a significant ownership stake.

    It was one of the more embarrassing examples of U.S. cronyism and corruption in recent memory.

    But wait, as they say, there’s more!

  • YLE ☛ Tampere to ban face coverings in schools, daycare centres

    The City of Tampere is preparing new guidelines to ban face coverings in schools, daycare centres and other educational institutions.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Atlantic Council ☛ The coming compute war in Ukraine

      This scenario hasn’t transpired yet. But the conditions that could make it inevitable are already in place.

      The war in Ukraine is often described in the language of weapons: air defense systems, artillery pieces, drones, and munitions. Yet a less visible element will shape the next phase of the conflict just as decisively as any piece of military hardware: the infrastructure to create and harness computational power, or compute.

    • Task And Purpose ☛ Why the MQ-9 Reaper just won’t quit

      So why aren’t the MQ-9s being visited by the Grim Reaper? It turns out, because the military just can’t quit it. The longer answer is that the Air Force and Marine Corps are finding new ways to upgrade its capabilities, but in short, the MQ-9 serves a role that isn’t easily replaced.

• Environment

  • DeSmog ☛ Big Oil Knew It Was Wrecking Louisiana’s Coast, Records Show

    For a century, oil companies dredged canals through coastal wetlands, dissecting marshes to get to and from wells, and dumped toxic wastewater into marshes and unlined earthen pits. Those wells, canals, pits, and leftover pollution were largely abandoned. Oil drilling is a dwindling portion of the state’s economy today, but its legacy is a fixture of the now-sinking landscape.

  • Kentucky Lantern ☛ Consumers thrown under pesticide industry’s steamroller in bill awaiting KY House vote • Kentucky Lantern

    First, because this bill applies to over 57,000 currently active pesticide products registered with the EPA under FIFRA. These products include much more than the agricultural pesticides used by the farmworkers in Kentucky. Registered pesticide products include a wide range of lawn and garden insecticides, herbicides and household disinfectants and antimicrobial agents, such as disinfecting wipes and sprays, and most household products with sanitizing or disinfecting claims.

    Second, you should care because pesticide exposure has been linked to elevated risks of numerous diseases, including Parkinson’s disease, leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other cancers, thyroid disease, diabetes, kidney diseases and rheumatoid arthritis, among other health issues. Evidence suggests that children are particularly susceptible to adverse effects from exposure to pesticides, including neurodevelopmental effects.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Sable Offshore Corp. begins pumping oil off California coast

    The California State Lands Commission, which had been overseeing inspections of Sable’s offshore pipelines, called an emergency meeting Monday night to consider additional litigation addressing a possible violation of the federal consent decree that delegated oversight of the pipelines to certain state agencies.

  • Court House News ☛ California officials push back against oil pipeline reopening

    Newsom said oil from the reopened Santa Ynez Unit would do little to alleviate cost concerns, as it would increase total oil production by 0.05%.

    “Donald Trump started a war, admitted it would spike gas prices nationwide, and told Americans it was a small price to pay,” Newsom said in a statement. “Now he’s using this crisis of his own making to attempt what he’s wanted to do for years: open California’s coast for his oil industry friends so they can poison our beaches. This wouldn’t lower prices by a cent.”

  • NL Times ☛ Meta signs $27 billion AI cloud deal with Dutch company Nebius

    Nebius, which originated as a spin-off from the Russian technology firm Yandex and is headquartered in Amsterdam, will deliver 12 billion dollars worth of capacity across multiple sites starting in early 2027 under the five-year agreement. Meta has also committed to purchasing up to 15 billion dollars in additional computing capacity. Nebius intends to sell surplus capacity to external clients, with Meta acquiring the remainder.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Pipeline That Caused Massive 2015 Santa Barbara Oil Spill Restarts Illegally

    The pipeline has been shut down since the massive 2015 spill at Refugio State Beach. Upon investigation, it was determined that the rupture was the result of progressive external corrosion, which remains a threat for the defective pipelines.

    In attempting to restart the defective onshore pipeline, Sable has run into widespread public opposition and accumulated a series of state law violations and criminal charges. To date, Sable has still not received all necessary approvals for a restart from California state agencies, including the Coastal Commission.

• Finance

  • Yahoo News ☛ Elizabeth Warren asks Meta, Amazon, and others why they're laying workers off despite tax perks

    In letters sent Sunday to the executives of Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon, Home Depot (HD), Meta (META), Nike (NKE), Verizon (VZ), Target, and UPS, Warren asked the companies to detail by March 30 how much of a tax cut they received in 2025 following President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, whether they anticipated any tariff refunds, and whether they made any contributions to Trump's projects, among other queries.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ Nvidia bets on AI inference as chip revenue opportunity hits $1 trillion

    Nvidia said the revenue opportunity for its ​artificial intelligence chips may reach at least $1 trillion through 2027, as the company outlined a strategy to compete more aggressively in the fast-growing market for running AI systems in real time.

  • The Georgia Recorder ☛ Bill targeting political spending from foreign adversaries passes House

    The original bill specifically named North Korea, Iran, China and Russia as hostile foreign governments, though that language was stripped out of the version that passed the House. The revised version of the bill relies on the U.S. Secretary of Commerce’s list of foreign adversaries.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ No, America is Not Respected

    A stunning poll from Politico — just released, but taken last month — confirms what I and other observers strongly suspected: America is now widely despised, despised like nobody has ever been despised before.

    I don’t mean that we’re disliked, although that too. But this isn’t a case of oderint dum metuant — let them hate so long as they fear. Instead, the world increasingly holds America in contempt.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Philosopher Kings, Part II: A Correction

    My previous essay on Marc Andreessen left the impression that he is a man of some moral worth to society. I want to correct the record. This was a form of whitewashing, and it was epistemically irresponsible of me. I should have been clearer. I will try to do better now.

    My last piece was too kind.

    I want to correct that. Not in the sense that I misstated anything — I did not — but in the sense that I failed to properly describe the prodigious depths of what we are actually looking at. I left the impression that the man contains some human qualities worth engaging. I apologize for the confusion. Let me try again.

  • Karl Bode ☛ Jack Dorsey Is A Pointless Dipshit

    It can't be overstated how unremarkable most U.S. billionaires are. The vast majority leveraged ivy league connections, familial wealth, and/or blind luck to wind up in the right place at the right time. After stumbling ass first into immense wealth, you'll notice they can rarely replicate any serious innovation.

    Elon Musk used wealth acquired from being useless at Paypal to saddle up to actual engineers and take singular credit for their work. Mark Zuckerberg bumbled into ownership of a global ad monopoly, and hasn't demonstrated the slightest indication of wisdom, savvy, charisma, or innovation in the two decades since.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Russia’s disinformation campaign tests Canada’s support for Ukraine

      On the surface, this shift isn't visible. Public polling commissioned by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) shows that nine in 10 Canadians still blame Russia for the war, with 87% agreeing that Moscow is acting in bad faith and is "responsible for starting and continuing the war."

      Canada, however, is not an isolated laboratory for Russian tactics.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Age AU ☛ Netanyahu death rumours: Iran war propaganda references Epstein, shooting down US jets

    Persian-language satellite news channels broadcasting from outside Iran have also been jammed and people who use satellite [Internet] devices are being arrested.

  • EFF ☛ Blocking the Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web’s Historical Record

    Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper.

    That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—the world’s largest digital library—has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s. The Archive’s mission is to preserve the web and make it accessible to the public. To that end, the organization operates the Wayback Machine, which now contains more than one trillion archived web pages and is used daily by journalists, researchers, and courts.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ UN Special Rapporteur: Islamic Republic Responded to January Protests with Gunfire, Internet Shutdowns, and Threats of Execution

    Another major focus of the report is the communications blackout and internet shutdown. Sato states that on January 8, 2026, the Iranian government “imposed a near-total shutdown of telecommunications services nationwide. Both international connectivity and significant elements of domestic communications were disrupted. The shutdown significantly disrupted protest coordination and access to emergency services, financial transactions and essential communications, leaving many families unable to determine the fate or whereabouts of detained or injured relatives for days. The imposition of telecommunications shutdowns in parallel with the use of force, discussed below, creates conditions that shield human rights violations from scrutiny.”

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Mother and 15-Year-Old Son Arrested for Insulting the Supreme Leader

    A knowledgeable source close to the family of these citizens confirmed the matter to HRANA, stating: “The reason for their arrest was expressing happiness over the death of Ali Khamenei,” amounting to insulting the Supreme Leader.

    So far, no information has been obtained about the charges brought against this mother and son.

  • The Independent UK ☛ British tourist arrested in Dubai for ‘filming footage of Iranian missiles’

    The man deleted the video immediately when asked to, and meant no harm, yet still faces charges, Detained CEO Radha Stirling said.

    The human rights advocate said the Briton is among 21 people, of various nationalities, who have been arrested under United Arab Emirates (UAE) cyber crime laws. He is currently being held in the Bur Dubai police station after being taken into custody on Monday, according to The Telegraph.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Tennessee Lookout ☛ Nashville journalist arrested by ICE granted bond, remains detained while feds considers appeal

    Rodríguez, 35, was unable to communicate with Coxander between the day of her arrest until this past weekend, creating a “very difficult situation when you’re trying to defend her rights as a journalist and to fight for her,” Coxander told reporters Monday.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Trump MELTS DOWN when female journalist REFUSES to be SHUSHED by him

    EVERY reporter should follow her lead — keep pushing, keep cornering him. Never give in to his bullying, and never stop demanding answers.EAKING: Trump MELTS DOWN when female journalist REFUSES to be SHUSHED by him.

    A reporter’s persistence forced Trump to show his total disregard for the troops.

  • Court House News ☛ BBC fights Trump’s latest defamation claims | Courthouse News Service

    In the filing, the UK-based media company argued Florida lacks jurisdiction over a dispute about a documentary that was never published in the state or the United States at all.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Guardian to appeal ruling which said 'alt right' description is defamatory

    Guardian News and Media has been granted permission to appeal a pre-trial libel judgment that found it was defamatory to call an influencer an “‘alt-right agitator”.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • EDRI ☛ Civil society calls for an ambitious Digital Fairness Act

    On 15 March, World Consumer Rights Day, EDRi and many other civil society organisations signed a coalition letter calling on the European Commission, urging them to deliver an ambitious Digital Fairness Act (DFA). The signatories stress that, altoughdigital technologies have become deeply embedded in everyday life, the online environment increasingly relies on business models built on behavioural manipulation, information asymmetries and data extraction.

    The joint letter highlights that harmful online practices are no longer isolated incidents. Many services rely on design systems that steer behaviour, distort choices and exploit people’s attention and data. These systems generate financial, mental and social harms while distorting competition and eroding trust across the digital economy. Civil society organisations are therefore calling for a strong legislative response that modernises EU consumer law to address a number of pervasive business models and protects people of all ages online.

  • University of Michigan ☛ It Happened at Michigan: Alumna Margaret Brewer was the first woman general in the Marines

    In 1973, she shepherded a major report calling for the Marines to end policies that kept women out of certain roles, such as military police and aircraft maintenance, because of their gender. The report also called for assigning women to the Marines’ combat force, the Fleet Marine Force (but not to the point of being in combat).

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Home Office use of AI in asylum cases likely to be unlawful, legal opinion finds

    The Opinion, written by Cloisters Chambers’ Robin Allen KC and Dee Masters, and Joshua Jackson of Doughty Street Chambers, opens the way to legal challenges by asylum applicants who believe that AI has been used in their assessments that determine whether or not they can be granted protection in the UK.

  • Law Society Gazette ☛ In depth: Four MPs are demanding to know why Andrew Milne is still on the roll

    Andrew Jonathan Milne (pictured) has become one of the country’s highest-profile solicitors, in more ways than one. Last week the 63-year-old was handed a 24-month community order requiring him to complete 300 hours of unpaid work and 20 days of rehabilitation, after he was found to have stalked a court blogger.

    Milne, admitted in 1986, was convicted of stalking without fear in February after a seven-day trial at Stratford Magistrates’ Court. His conduct toward Daniel Cloake, who runs the ‘Mouse in the Court’ blog, was said to amount to harassment. Ten days later, the Solicitors Regulation Authority restricted Milne’s practising certificate. He may not act as a solicitor without the supervision of an authorised person in 2025/26.

  • America Online ☛ Solicitor sentenced for stalking court blogger

    A solicitor convicted of stalking a court blogger called his victim a "sex slave", a court has heard.

    Andrew Milne, 63, targeted Daniel Cloake between March and August 2024, which included sending 120 emails, letters and attending the victim's London address.

    Milne was given a seven-year restraining order, a 24-month community order and ordered to complete 300 hours of unpaid work and 20 rehabilitation activity days during his sentencing at Thames Magistrates' Court.

    District Judge Lisa Towell said he had shown "no remorse whatsoever", and that he displayed "no empathy or insight into how you made Mr Cloake feel".

  • Law Society Gazette ☛ SRA chief signals shift away from enforcement as reports surge

    The head of the Solicitors Regulation Authority has said the organisation will lean less on enforcement in the future as report numbers continue to rocket.

  • Solicitor who misappropriated £1m from firm is struck off

    A solicitor who misappropriated £1m from his law firm and forged bank records to cover it up has been struck off.

    The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal said Jude Sebastian Fletcher misled both staff at his firm, Fletcher Day, and the Solicitors Regulation Authority “over a sustained period”.

    He qualified in 1999 and was understood to have changed his name to Jude Grammer in November 2020 but by the time of the hearing had reverted to his original name.

    The tribunal, which went ahead in Mr Fletcher’s absence, heard that the SRA intervened in the firm in February 2023, having been alerted that HM Revenue & Customs had issued a winding-up petition against it for an outstanding debt of £1.2m.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • SANS ☛ /proxy/ URL scans with IP addresses

    Attempts to find proxy servers are among the most common scans our honeypots detect. Most of the time, the attacker attempts to use a host header or include the hostname in the URL to trigger the proxy server forwarding the request. In some cases, common URL prefixes like "/proxy/" are used. This weekend, I noticed a slightly different pattern in our logs: [...]

  • Inside Towers ☛ Study Warns EchoStar/DISH Defaults Will Trigger Billions in Losses

    A new economic impact study from The Brattle Group analysis finds that DISH’s default represents a 5-7 percent annual revenue shock to tower companies nationwide. To recover the loss and offset increased financing costs, tower companies are faced with the need to increase rents for remaining carriers by 6–11 percent, costs that would ultimately flow through to consumers in the form of higher wireless bills, according to the report.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft’s ‘unhackable’ Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss' — the 2013 console finally fell to voltage glitching, allowing the loading of unsigned code at every level

    A groundbreaking hack for Microsoft’s ‘unhackable’ Xbox One was revealed at the recent RE//verse 2026 conference. This console has remained a fortress since its launch in 2013, but now Markus ‘Doom’ Gaasedelen has showcased the ‘Bliss’ double glitch. Just as the Xbox 360 famously fell to the Reset Glitch Hack (RGH), the Xbox One has now fallen to Voltage Glitch Hacking (VGH).

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Digital Music News ☛ States Plow Ahead With Live Nation Lawsuit Following DOJ Deal

  As was also true last week, certain states aren’t appearing in new joint filings but nevertheless have yet to disclose settlements to the court. At present, Nebraska, Arkansas, and South Dakota seem to be the only states that have submitted settlement notices. Back to the trial itself, accounts of today’s proceedings indicate that the courtroom confrontation, while perhaps free of especially dramatic developments, featured testimony covering Ticketmaster’s fees, Live Nation’s possible influence over artists, the extent of the promoter’s venue control, the positioning of competitors such as AEG, and more.

• Court House News ☛ With DOJ sidelined, states resume antitrust trial against Ticketmaster

  Now, 36 states and the District of Columbia — rejecting the DOJ’s controversial settlement — are leading the case, which charges Ticketmaster and Live Nation with leveraging their power and influence as the most powerful concert brands to foster an anticompetitive market at the detriment of fans, venues and artists.

  The $280 million settlement included terms that the DOJ hopes will level the playing field with Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s competitors. Ticketmaster has agreed to offer venues an option to enter into nonexclusive agreements, which would allow other ticketing platforms to sell a certain number of seats.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Cyble Inc ☛ EU AI Act: Ban Proposed For AI Nudification Tools

      The European Union is moving one step closer to refining its landmark EU AI Act, with the European Council proposing new amendments aimed at simplifying regulations while addressing emerging risks from artificial intelligence.

      On Friday, the Council released its position on updates to the EU AI Act, including a new ban on AI nudification tools and stricter standards around the use of sensitive personal data. The proposal is part of the broader “Omnibus VII” legislative package designed to streamline the EU’s digital regulatory framework and reduce compliance burdens for businesses.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Bankruptcy Court Clears Path for $100 Million Sale of Redbox's Piracy Lawsuit Rights

    A Delaware bankruptcy court approved the legal framework for a $100 million+ sale of Redbox' piracy litigation rights. While a final deal is still being negotiated, the intended buyer of these rights plans to use them to sue Internet providers for failing to disconnect accounts of alleged BitTorrent pirates. Whether this strategy will pay off is highly dependent on a pending Supreme Court decision.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • picture perfect

      how is it fair
      that after carrying all the weight
      of everything staying the same
      year after year after year 
      unchanged, undisturbed 
      this picture perfect li(f)e
      I'd also have to be the one
      to carry the weight 
      of everything 
      changing