Leftovers

• Robert Reich ☛ Please don’t thank me

  For another, I don’t deserve thanks. I’m not sacrificing anything except the time it takes me to write these posts or tape some videos.

  I’m not risking anything, either. I’m not going to lose my job, because I’m no longer employed. I’m not risking friendships, because most of my friends agree with me. I don’t mind receiving angry emails and letters, because I’ve got a very thick skin. I could be harmed, I suppose, but I’m an old man with not so many years left anyway.

  Third, I’m no different from tens of millions who are doing what they can. This is a national emergency, and all of us are called upon to save our country from the sociopath in the Oval Office and his dangerous lapdogs. It just happens that the thing I can do is write and talk to a camera.

• Dan MacKinlay ☛ Local social platforms: a technical implementation guide — The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises

  This is the technical companion to A social platform for your neighbourhood, which lays out the social and institutional case for community-owned local platforms. That post is the why. This one is the how—or at least a plausible how, since the right technical choices depend heavily on what the community actually wants to build.

• Matt Birchler ☛ Analyst hat comes off, reviewer hat goes on

  As an analyst, I’m interested in helping people understand Apple as a company, why they make the decisions they do, and what that could mean for the future of their products. This is not the same thing as being a reviewer, which is all about giving consumers useful information when they’re considering whether they want to buy a product. When I wear my analyst hat, I’m thinking about profit margins, supply chains, and product segmentation, but when I put my reviewer hat on, I’m really just thinking about customer value.

• Astrid Yu ☛ curl > /dev/sda

  How I made a Linux distro that runs `wget | dd`

• Science

  • The Register UK ☛ NASA abandons Lunar Gateway plans for base on Lunar surface

    NASA's ambitious plans to build a space station in orbit of the Moon are officially on hold, administrator Jared Isaacman said Tuesday, with the space agency instead skipping the orbital habitat in favor of building a permanent base on the Lunar surface.

  • The Verge ☛ NASA wants to put a $20 billion base on the Moon | The Verge

    According to NASA, the agency aims to build the base in three phases, with the first involving the development of communications and navigation systems, along with the delivery of robotic landers and vehicles to help astronauts traverse the Moon. The next will involve “recurring astronaut operations on the surface” of the Moon, followed by the establishment of a “long-duration human presence,” allowing for the delivery of heavier infrastructure to create a permanent lunar base.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Critics call FCC router rule a ‘big swing’ that could create more supply chain uncertainty

    Under the Secure Equipment Act and Secure Networks Act, the FCC may ban foreign technology manufacturers if they are deemed a national security risk. But the federal government has almost always opted to narrowly target specific foreign companies with known or problematic connections to foreign adversaries, like Chinese telecom Huawei or Russian antivirus firm Kaspersky Labs.

  • Android Police ☛ The FCC just banned all foreign-made routers

    It's worth noting that some routers "produced" in foreign countries will be allowed to be imported to the US, albeit only after said company has been granted a conditional approval by the DoW (Department of War) or the DHS (Department of Homeland Security). The FCC has a link to find companies that have gained said 'conditional approval,' and as of today, it only lists a few drone-related companies.

  • Rlang ☛ Digital Biology with R: Advanced Bioinformatics, Predictive Modeling, and Time Series Analysis for Modern Life Sciences

    Digital biology is no longer a niche intersection between biology and computation. It has become a core framework for how modern laboratories, biomedical teams, and translational researchers generate insight from complex biological systems. Whether the objective is to identify gene-expression signatures, model disease progression, classify patient subgroups, or study temporal changes in biological signals, the ability to work fluently with data is now inseparable from the practice of advanced life science.

• Career/Education

  • California State University Northridge ☛ In-person vs. online: How CSUN students learn differently

    CSUN students learn differently every day. Some learn in lecture classrooms, taking notes as professors educate. Others attend Zoom meetings in the library nook with headphones in, attending synchronous courses in between times of self-learning. Then there are students who learn asynchronously, finishing their online coursework on their own time.

    Each of these class formats – in-person, remote or hybrid – impact students’ ability to manage time, stay focused and determine success on CSUN’s campus.

  • Marc Brooker ☛ My heuristics are wrong. What now?

    Over the next couple of years, the most valuable people to have on a software team are going to be experienced folks who’re actively working to keep their heuristics fresh. Who can combine curiosity with experience. Among the least valuable people to have on a software team are experienced folks who aren’t willing to change their thinking. Beyond that, it’s hard to see.

  • CER ☛ Spring 2026 PCAS Update: Recruiting a new Lecturer

    Our sections pretty much fill up these days, so our growth comes from offering more sections. We are trying to hire lecturers every year. We’re up to three now: [...]

• Hardware

  • New York Times ☛ Arm Holdings, in Break From Past, Will Sell Its Own Computer Chips

    The company, a British unit of Japan’s SoftBank, on Tuesday announced plans for the first silicon product that Arm will design and sell since its founding in 1990. It is a microprocessor aimed at data centers running artificial intelligence tasks.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Arm moves beyond IP with AGI CPU silicon — 136-core data center chip targets AI infrastructure with Meta as lead partner

    The chip packs up to 136 Neoverse V3 cores running at up to 3.2 GHz all-core and 3.7 GHz boost across two dies, all within a 300-watt TDP. It supports 12 channels of DDR5 memory at up to 8800 MT/s, delivering more than 800 GB/s of aggregate memory bandwidth or 6GB/s per core with a target of sub-100ns latency. I/O includes 96 PCIe Gen6 lanes and native CXL 3.0 support for memory expansion and pooling.

  • The Register UK ☛ Arm rolls its own 136-core AGI CPU to chase AI hype train

    While GPUs have gotten the lion’s share of attention in recent years, the rise of agentic systems like OpenClaw have brought the need for general-purpose compute back into view. These frameworks need CPU cores and memory to write and execute code, automate tasks, and facilitate the reinforcement learning used to train next gen models.

    Arm is betting on the proliferation of these agents to drive a four-fold increase in CPU demand, and it’s positioning its latest chip to capitalize on this trend.

  • Wired ☛ Arm Is Now Making Its Own Chips

    “Let me be clear: We are now in a new business for ARM, and we are supplying CPUs,” Haas said, holding up one of the company's new chips. Arm’s primary reason for moving in this direction, Haas said, is demand from customers.. But as artificial intelligence proliferates throughout the economy and demand for computing resources skyrockets, Arm is also trying to capture a sliver of the growing AI CPU market.

  • Hackaday ☛ From Zip To Nought: The Rise And Fall Of Iomega

    If you were anywhere near a computer in the mid-to-late 1990s, you almost certainly encountered a Zip drive. That distinctive purple peripheral, with its satisfying clunk as you slotted in a cartridge, was as much a fixture of the era as beige tower cases and CRT monitors. Iomega, the company behind it, went from an obscure Utah outfit to a multi-billion-dollar darling of Wall Street in the span of about two years. And then, almost as quickly, it all fell apart.

    The story of Iomega is one of genuine engineering innovation and the fickle nature of consumer technology. As with so many other juggernauts of its era, Iomega was eventually brought down by a new technology that simply wasn’t practical to counter.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • India Times ☛ Meta ordered to pay $375 million in New Mexico trial over child exploitation, user safety claims

    The verdict marks the first time a jury has ruled on such claims against Meta, as the company faces a wave of lawsuits over how its platforms affect young people's mental health.

  • The Washington Post ☛ New Mexico wins case alleging Meta put kids at risk of sexual abuse

    A jury in New Mexico sided with the state attorney general’s office in a landmark case accusing social media giant Meta of allowing its platforms to become venues for child predators to solicit young users.

  • BBC ☛ Meta told to pay $375m for misleading users over child safety

    A jury found that Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, was liable for the way in which its platforms endangered children and exposed them to sexually explicit material and contact with sexual predators.

  • Politico LLC ☛ Meta hit with $375M verdict in New Mexico child safety case

    The verdict stipulates that Meta must pay $375 million in civil penalties for violating New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, a consumer protection law.

    “Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a press release. “Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough.”

  • NPR ☛ New Mexico jury says Meta harms children's mental health and safety, violating state law

    The jury agreed with allegations that Meta made false or misleading statements and also agreed that Meta engaged in "unconscionable" trade practices that unfairly took advantage of the vulnerabilities of and inexperience of children.

  • RFI ☛ New Mexico jury finds Meta liable for endangering children

    "Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew," he added.

  • France24 ☛ Meta ordered to pay $375 million over child exploitation in landmark verdict - France 24

    During closing arguments, prosecution attorney Linda Singer told jurors that Meta's algorithms had directed adults toward content posted by teenage users while the company concealed internal findings about the risks to young people.

  • The Verge ☛ Meta misled users about its products’ safety, jury decides

    Meta willfully violated New Mexico law by misleading users about the safety of its products and engaging in an unconscionable trade practice, a jury found. The company will face a $375 million penalty for the violations, awarding the maximum penalty of $5,000 per violation for 37,500 violations across two counts. The jury decided against Meta on every count, though it declined to award a penalty as high as the state sought, which would have been closer to $2 billion.

  • Scicomm Media LLC ☛ Tools to Manage Dopamine and Improve Motivation & Drive

    Dopamine is a molecule in the brain and body that is closely linked to our sense of motivation. It can also enhance our depth of focus and lower our threshold for taking action toward specific goals. The simplest way to think about dopamine is that when our dopamine levels are elevated, we tend to focus our attention on outward goals — the things we want — and we feel motivated to pursue them. “Dopamine is about wanting, not about having,” said Dr. Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the chief of the Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford, on the Huberman Lab Podcast (and she is 100% correct). Contrast that with serotonin, which is associated not so much with “wanting” but with feelings of well-being about what we already have. These are generalizations of course — dopamine and serotonin do other things too, but they are accurate, nonetheless. It is hard to overstate how much dopamine levels shape our perception of life, our emotions, and how capable we perceive ourselves to be — when dopamine levels are low, we feel unmotivated, derive less pleasure from pursuits and feel physically tired. This newsletter will detail how to manage dopamine levels to enhance motivation.

• The Fed

  • Is The US Government Broke? Treasury 2025 Filing Shows $41.7T Negative Net Position

    The US Treasury Department’s fiscal year 2025 consolidated financial statements show a federal government with $6.06 trillion in total assets, $47.78 trillion in total liabilities, and a negative net position of $41.72 trillion, giving fresh ammunition to arguments that the US government is functionally insolvent.

    Consolidated balance sheet position worsened by nearly $2.07 trillion from FY 2024 to FY 2025. Total liabilities now stand at nearly eight times reported assets. The largest balance-sheet drivers were a $2.0 trillion increase in federal debt and interest payable, which reached $30.33 trillion, and a $438.8 billion increase in federal employee and veteran benefits payable, which rose to $15.47 trillion.

  • The U.S. Government’s Own Numbers Show It’s Insolvent

    — The U.S. Treasury’s FY2025 financial statements show a negative net position of $41.72 trillion.

    — Including unfunded Social Security and Medicare obligations, total federal promises exceed $136.2 trillion.

    — The GAO has declined to certify U.S. government financial statements for 29 consecutive years.

• Proprietary

  • Security Week ☛ Iran Built a Vast Camera Network to Control Dissent. Israel Turned It Into a Targeting Tool

    For years, cybersecurity experts have warned that cameras could be [accessed] for war.

    In 2019, security engineer Paul Marrapese discovered he could easily [access] millions of cameras from the comfort of his home office in California.

    Despite speaking up repeatedly since, the number of unprotected cameras only continues to grow. A scan of unprotected camera feeds this year turned up nearly three million hits in almost every country in the world, Marrapese told AP, including nearly 2,000 cameras in Iran alone.

  • Hackaday ☛ US FCC Prohibits Approval Of New Foreign-Made Consumer Routers

    The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is tasked with regulating both wired and wireless communications, which also includes a national security component. This is how previously the FCC tossed networking gear made by Huawei and foreign-manufactured drones onto its Covered List, effectively banning it from sale in the US. Now foreign-made consumer routers have been added to this list, barring explicit conditional approval on said list that would exempt them during a ‘transition phase’.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Ads Are Coming to Apple Maps Later This Year

    Apple, in a press release with the title “Introducing Apple Business — a new all‑in‑one platform for businesses of all sizes”, buried in a section tucked in the middle labelled “Enhanced Discoverability in Apple Maps”, both of which are so anodyne as to encourage missing this key bit of news: [...]

  • City News CA ☛ U.K. midwife facing deportation from Canada after work permit denied over English test

    Canadian immigration officials insisted that Gilchrist, a native English speaker, do a language test.

    She says she completed the test last July, but the application she filled out didn’t give her the option to upload her results.

    As well, she says, the checklist that came with the application didn’t even mention the test.

    Now, because she wasn’t able to submit the test, her work permit has been cancelled.

  • Felix ☛ Fuck Every Single Microsoft Product

  • PC Gamer ☛ I crashed out reading layoff condolence letters in this shop sim about a laid-off adventurer made by a laid-off Xbox developer

    "Hark Elm! We've been missing you back at the party, it's such a shame you got laid off," reads a scroll on my desk in the opening minutes of Dungeon Bodega Simulator. "I heard you opened a shop! What a quaint way to bounce back, I'll try and stop by next time we adventure in that area."

    I can actually feel my heart rate spiking, reading those words. Early in my career I was laid off from game development. Twice. Sadness, anxiety, even a little bitterness as still-employed coworkers "reach out" with hopes that you'll "find something soon" are all swallowed stones that fester in your stomach. You start asking yourself if you deserve to "bounce back," if everyone is quietly condescending to you, if you should cut your losses from the industry entirely.

  • Neowin ☛ Epic Games is laying off over 1,000 staff, blames worsening Fortnite engagement

    Epic Games, the company responsible for the Unreal Engine game development engine and the hugely popular live service experience Fortnite, just confirmed a massive layoff wave that will affect over 1,000 of its employees. The company is blaming worsening engagement in Fortnite for this shift, saying it needs to make major cuts to keep afloat.

    Earlier today, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney sent a note with information about the layoff wave and the difficulties the company is facing. It has now also been shared with the public on the Epic Games blog.

  • India Times ☛ Spotify layoffs in Podcast Group claimed to be not due to cost cutting

    Spotify has laid off 15 employees in its podcast division. The latest round of job cuts accounts to 3% of the company’s headcount, as reported by Variety. Most of the jobs cuts came at The Ringer, which is the sports and pop culture site Spotify acquired in 2020 and at Spotify Studios. This restructuring at Spotify also lead to the cancellation of New York, New York With John Jastremski, a podcast focused on New York sports.

  • Three NACON Owned Studios File for Insolvency

    Four subsidiaries, three of them being game studios owned by French Publisher NACON have now also filed for insolvency, requesting that ‘judicial reorganisation proceedings’ are opened.

    Back in February, NACON filed for insolvency, sharing that their majority shareholder, Bigben Interactive, were facing serious financial difficulties. NACON have now provided an update, advising that four subsidaries – three studios, and one motion capture company are now also filing for insolvency.

  • Game World Observer ☛ Subsidiaries of Nacon have filed for insolvency

    The studios are seeking court permission to begin a procedure known as judicial reorganization. During this process, their current debt obligations are temporarily frozen, allowing the teams to calmly develop a plan to address financial issues. Sometimes, this pause can last up to a year and a half.

    As added by journalist Gauthier Andres from Origami, these developments will also affect the studio Big Bad Wolf, which is currently working on Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss. However, Nacon’s statement does not mention it.

    All of this is part of a larger process. At the end of February, Nacon itself filed a similar application, which the court has already approved. At that time, Nacon explained that it had to take such a step in light of issues faced by its largest shareholder, Bigben Interactive, which failed to make payments to bondholders.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Is Reportedly Killing Its Disastrous Video AI Slop App

      Less than five months on, OpenAI is looking to rid itself of the “unholy abomination” of Sora, a mind-numbing TikTok-like experience that few users stuck around to actually use regularly. (After initially topping App Store charts, downloads plummeted.)

    • Techdirt ☛ An Open Training Set For AI Goes Global

      However, there is an alternative to this “grab it all” approach. It involves using materials that are either in the public domain or released under a “permissive” license that allows LLMs to be trained on them without any problems. There’s plenty of such material online, but its scattered nature puts it at a serious disadvantage compared to downloading everything without worrying about licensing issues. To address that, the Common Corpus was created and released just over a year ago by the French startup Pleias. A press release from the AI Alliance explains the key characteristics of the Common Corpus: [...]

    • 404 Media ☛ Delivery Robot Drives Through Bus Stop Shelter, Shattering Glass Everywhere

      A Serve Robotics food delivery robot crashed through the glass wall of a bus stop shelter in Chicago earlier this week, shattering the glass all over the sidewalk. The crash comes amid a protest against delivery robots in Chicago and a few weeks after a politician who represents part of Chicago said he would not allow the robots into his district.

    • Michel Alexandre Salim ☛ Hi, my name is Michel, and I (reluctantly) use LLMs

      Is this pragmatism? Or is this selling out? Probably a bit of both, the and I don’t blame those with strong ethical concerns if they stop reading now. But if you’re still here, these are some ground rules I’m setting myself - if it proves helpful to you, I’d love to hear about it; if you have feedback, likewise, I’m all ears.

    • Don Marti ☛ A Vibe CMS

      I’m not going to name the site because first of all, the company that runs it has a lot of domain names, and second, now that they have their automatic slop CMS going, they can always get more. The point of writing this is not, look, I found a slop site, everybody add it to your blocklist. The point is that the advice to use a blocklist to keep your ad from showing up on crap sites was always bogus—even before widespread use of LLMs, editing a blocklist for one brand or agency was always a losing race against all the crap site makers in the world registering domains.

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ Code as a Tool of Process

      Writing code is a process that confronts you with questions about the details.

      If you gloss over the details, things are going to work unexpectedly and users will discover the ambiguity in your thinking rather than you (see also: “bugs”).

    • Rachel Andrew ☛ Do you need AI for that? – Rachel Andrew

      My social feed has divided mostly into two camps—those who can now only talk about how excited they are about AI, and those who are refusing to use it at all.

    • Charles Leifer ☛ Slopification and Its Discontents

      I realized that there is a huge gap between Claude's ability to read and analyze versus it's ability to generate or modify in-place, which becomes more dramatic the larger the scope of work. This skill-gap was apparent even in the smaller tasks, such as analyzing the asyncio extension: Claude was able to skilfully identify areas where resource cleanup was fragile and find gaps in test-coverage. Much of this required deep thinking about lifetimes, API contracts, async-vs-sync behavior, race conditions, deadlocks, etc. But when tasked to produce new or novel implementations, it stumbled and kept gifting me the same turd in different colored wrapping paper. What happened to all the insight and ingenuity Claude had shown while reading the code?

    • MIT ☛ MIT AI Incident Tracker

      AI incidents are on the rise, yet current databases struggle with inconsistent structure, limiting their utility for policymaking. The AI Incident Tracker project addresses this by creating a tool to classify AI incidents based on risks and harm severity. Using a Large Language Model (LLM), the tool processes raw reports from the AI Incident Database (AIID) and categorizes them using established frameworks, such as the MIT Risk Repository and a harm severity rating system based on CSET’s AI Harm Taxonomy.

      This project provides a proof-of-concept analysis of reported AI incidents, including preliminary insights into trends in the available data.

    • Google AI Overview Picked Up My Article, and Now It’s Digging Its Own Grave

      If you have been following my blog lately, you know what happened. Google AI Overview has access to my full articles behind the paywall and presents the key information for free. I decided to use that against them. A few days later, the first results of the experiment are in.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Scotsman ☛ For the sake of our sons, we must reclaim masculinity from the manosphere

      It shows how the manosphere draws on scientific falsehoods, conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and attempts to rewrite history to fit a narrow, angry worldview. Crucially, this content is no longer hidden in dark corners of the internet, it is being pushed aggressively into the feeds of boys and young men still working out who they are.

    • The Age AU ☛ English comedian Josie Long on weather, politics and Australia’s “weird prehistoric animals”

      Her recent focus on the long and the short of time’s passage has perhaps contributed to the decision to switch off the buzz of social media. “I’m 43, I don’t have time to waste. I want things slower and better and with more depth. I was quite online politically through Twitter or whatever, and you think: what of it has lasted? What of it is important?”

    • CS Monitor ☛ When TikTok failed them, Kenyans began policing their own feeds

      The problem is not unique to Kenya. The first line of defense against harmful social media posts globally is artificial intelligence, which can be taught to flag rule-breaking content it sees or hears.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Offended? Not me. How people use denial to appear rational on social media

      The team, which included researchers from the University of Kent, analyzed a network of real X (Twitter) exchanges that began with a woman telling a joke and quickly spiraled into a heated argument. Findings have been published in the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict.

    • The Verge ☛ Instagram and Facebook are about to be filled with affiliate content

      The new features will be convenient for anyone profiting from affiliate revenue. For everyone else, it will likely make the platforms feel even more like a shopping mall. The built-in affiliate content is similar to how TikTok Shop works, with easily accessible links for tank tops and camera mounts floating across video after video.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Russian access broker sentenced to over 6 years in prison for ransomware schemes

      Volkov, also known as “chubaka.kor,” operated as an initial access broker, a specialized role in which he identified and exploited vulnerabilities in corporate networks and sold that access to ransomware operators. The function has become increasingly common in the ransomware ecosystem, enabling criminals to profit from attacks without directly deploying malware or executing extortion demands.

    • Security Week ☛ Poland Faced a Surge in Cyberattacks in 2025, Including a Major Assault on the Energy Sector

      During the morning and afternoon of Dec. 29, coordinated cyberattacks hit a combined heat and power plant supplying heat to almost 500,000 customers, as well as multiple wind and solar farms in Poland.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Federal News Network ☛ TSA employees at ‘breaking point’

    Aaron Barker, president of AFGE Local 554, which represents TSOs in Georgia, pointed to the Trump administration’s efforts to disband TSA union rights and potentially shift to more privatized airport security screening.

    “It has always been about privatization,” Barker said. “I believe this is a play to try to move in that direction, and I just don’t think that this is going to end well with ICE going into the airports.”

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Dark Reading ☛ Attackers Hide Infostealer in Copyright Infringement Notices

      Attackers are using copyright-infringement notices to target multiple industry sectors in a fileless phishing campaign that delivers data-stealing malware.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Air Force Times ☛ Deadly Iran school strike casts shadow over Pentagon’s AI targeting push

      So what went wrong?

      “Was artificial intelligence, including the use of the Maven Smart System, used to identify the Shajareh Tayyebeh school as a target?” more than 120 House Democrats asked in a March 12 letter to the Pentagon, just days after 46 Senate Democrats sent a similar request demanding clarity on the deadly hit.

      The Maven Smart System, a targeting and intelligence platform built by data analytics company Palantir Technologies under a $1.3 billion Pentagon contract, was built to solve a problem that has grown exponentially in recent years: information overload — with artificial intelligence as its secret weapon.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Pentagon formalizes Palantir's Maven AI as a core military system with multi-year funding — platform's investment grows to $13 billion from $480 million in 2024

      Palantir took over and built a full command-and-control platform that ingests data from more than 150 sources, according to Palantir's public demonstrations: satellite imagery, drone video, radar, infrared sensors, signals intelligence, and geolocation data. Computer vision algorithms trained on millions of labeled images automatically detect and classify battlefield objects, with yellow-outlined boxes marking potential targets, blue outlines flagging friendly forces and no-strike zones, and an ‘AI Asset Tasking Recommender’ proposing which weapons platforms and munitions should be assigned to each target.

    • Reuters ☛ Bombed Iranian girls school had vivid website and yearslong online presence

      The school’s online activity calls into question how the American military vets and reviews strike locations. Reuters first reported investigators at the Defense Department believe U.S. forces were likely responsible for the bombing, and new indications emerged that the U.S. may have relied upon outdated targeting data.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Iran Telegram Malware Used To Spy On Dissidents, FBI Warns

      The Iran Telegram malware campaign has once again put the spotlight on how state-backed cyber actors are adapting their tactics by blending into widely used digital platforms. In a recent alert, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) revealed that cyber actors linked to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) are using Telegram as a command-and-control (C2) infrastructure to deploy malware.

      The campaign specifically targets Iranian dissidents, journalists, and individuals or groups perceived as opposing the Iranian government. According to the FBI, these operations have led to intelligence collection, data leaks, and reputational damage, indicating that the intent goes beyond simple access and leans toward sustained monitoring and impact.

    • Hackaday ☛ Age-Verification And The World Before Social Media

      Although it may be hard to believe for current generations, there was a time when the Internet and the World Wide Web were not as integrated into society as it is today. The only forms of online ‘social media’ that existed came in the form of IRC, forums, BBSes, newsgroups and kin, while obtaining new software for your PC involved generally making your way over to a physical store to buy a boxed copy, at least officially.

      In this era – and those before it – age-verification already existed, with various goods ranging from tobacco and alcohol to naughty adult magazines requiring you to pass some form of age check. Much like how movies also got age-gated, so did video games, with a sales clerk taking a very good look at you before selling you that naughty puzzle game or boxed copy of Quake 3.

      Today we’re seeing a big fuss being made about online age-verification, with the claim being that it is ‘for the children’, but as any well-adjusted adult can attest to, this is essentially a big bucket of hogwash.

    • Wired ☛ Your Body Is Betraying Your Right to Privacy

      Police are intensely interested in the secrets our bodies can reveal. The FBI has invested billions of dollars in its Next Generation Information (NGI) biometrics database, billed as the largest such database in the world. Through this system, the FBI collects “voice profiles, palm prints, faceprints, iris scans, tattoos, and, of course, fingerprints,” with the goal of using this information to identify suspects (and victims). The system also pulls in genetic information from CODIS—the agency’s Combined DNA Index System—which contains 21.7 million DNA profiles of offenders and arrestees (almost 7 percent of the US population). Many states have built their own similar databases using samples from arrestees, victims, and other sources, which are sometimes collected in ethically dubious ways. The district attorney’s office in Orange County, California, for example, had a program where they would dismiss misdemeanor violations in return for a DNA sample. That “spit and acquit” sample, of course, could later be used to match suspects in future prosecutions.

• Defence/Aggression

  • ADF ☛ Terrorism Worsens in Burkina Faso

    Terrorists have killed about 2,000 civilians in the country annually in recent years, according to some estimates. Government-aligned forces are reported to have killed up to 132% more civilians in that time, the council reported. Terrorists linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group now operate openly in as much as 80% of the country.

  • ADF ☛ Islamic State Group Quietly Gaining Momentum in Libya

    While the Islamic State (IS) group is present throughout Libya, it is more of a danger in the south, with links to the Sahel, according to The Jamestown Foundation. Its presence is most consistent in the southern Fezzan region, where its logistical networks are used to transport people, vehicles and weapons from Sudan, through Chad, to the tri-border area of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.

  • Defence Web ☛ Nigerian terrorists increase COTS armed drone use - DefenceWeb

    Nigeria’s Premium Times reported earlier this year that Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) terrorists acquired 35 quadcopter drones transported through smuggling routes in the Lake Chad basin.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ VW to shift from cars to missile production for Israel

    Volkswagen is reportedly in talks to shift part of its production toward missile-defense components in partnership with, a move that could mark a major transition from civilian manufacturing into the global arms industry.

    While no final agreement has been confirmed, the discussions have already sparked global debate.

  • The Strategist ☛ In European defence, a sudden reluctance to buy American

    US companies are looking at their footprint in Europe, and what happens if the US ceases to be the partner of choice.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Brad Lander Is Demanding an AIPAC-Free Congressional Race

    Former NYC Comptroller Brad Lander is demanding Rep. Dan Goldman sign a “People’s Pledge” ahead of the congressional primary pitting the two against each other to limit the influence of lobbying groups like AIPAC on campaign funding and advertising.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Treason in the Futures Markets

    But in any case, Trump’s sudden climb-down was startling. Who could have seen this coming?

    The answer is, the person or people who bought large quantities of stock market futures and sold large quantities of oil futures around 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement. As CNBC reports,

  • Vox ☛ The Supreme Court seems alarmingly willing to trash 1000s of ballots, in Watson v. RNC

    Which brings us to the specific legal theory in Watson. The GOP (along with the Libertarian Party of Mississippi) claim that three federal laws which set the date for federal elections (one governing presidential elections, one governing House elections, and one governing Senate elections) preclude any state from counting a ballot that arrives after Election Day, even if it was mailed prior to that date.

  • New Yorker ☛ A Former Prisoner of the Iranian Regime Watches Trump’s War

    A journalist who was wrongfully detained for five hundred and forty-four days never got to say goodbye to Tehran. Now he’s fielding messages about chaos and destruction in the home he left behind.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • HRW ☛ 2026-03-23 [Older] A Step Toward Justice for Abuses in Ukraine

    • CBC ☛ 2026-03-20 [Older] As Middle Eastern countries struggle to down Iranian drones, Ukraine sends 200 specialists to help

    • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-03-20 [Older] Choosing Life: Ukraine’s Quiet Work of Healing War Trauma

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-20 [Older] Drone defense in the Iran war: What can Ukraine offer?

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] EU summit: Hungary holds Ukraine aid ransom over Druzhba oil

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-03-18 [Older] Forged from Ukraine War: Sean Penn Receives Oscar Statuette from War-Damaged Train Metal in Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-17 [Older] Starmer urges allies to keep focus on Ukraine amid Iran war

    • CNN ☛ 2026-03-23 [Older] Russian authorities detain suspect over St. Petersburg cafe blast

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-23 [Older] Report: Hungary using more Russian oil, despite EU phase out

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-22 [Older] Adrift Russian tanker risks Mediterranean ecological disaster

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-22 [Older] Ukraine, Russia trade strikes as US-backed talks resume

    • CBC ☛ 2026-03-21 [Older] Robert Mueller, 9/11-era FBI chief who later probed alleged Cheeto Mussolini-Russia ties, dead at 81

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-03-21 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini's 'I'm Glad He's Dead' Post Follows $32 Million Mueller Russia Probe

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-03-20 [Older] Europe Is Sanctioning Critics of Israel and Militarism

    • CPJ ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] Israeli strike injures Russia Today crew in southern Lebanon

    • Bleeping Computer ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] Russian hackers exploit Zimbra flaw in Ukrainian govt attacks

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-03-19 [Older] Inside 'Paranoid' Vladimir Putin's High-Security Fortress: Decoy Offices and Air Defences Guard the Russian Leader

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-03-17 [Older] Germany news: Ukrainians on trial over Russia spying claims

    • Vox ☛ 2026-03-17 [Older] How Cheeto Mussolini’s war with Iran is helping Putin

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ “I had absolutely nothing to do with the wiretapping of Szijjártó" – investigative journalist tells Telex

    “I had absolutely nothing to do with the wiretapping of Szijjártó – it took me years and a great deal of effort to finally obtain evidence of this communication. Besides, practically everyone knows Szijjártó’s number, even the CEO of the smallest foreign company operating in Hungary has it,” Szabolcs Panyi, investigative journalist for Direkt36 and VSquare told Telex on Monday, after Mandiner (a paper with close ties to the government – ed) published an audio recording intended to expose him.

    The recording features Szabolcs Panyi and an unidentified female voice. Among other things, the journalist talks about being in contact with a government agency of an EU country, but the pro-government press was quick to spin the story and claim that it was in fact Panyi who had given Péter Szijjártó’s phone number to a foreign intelligence service.

  • The Dissenter ☛ US Court Rejects Perdue's Anti-Whistleblower Lawsuit

    A United States court rejected an effort by poultry manufacturer Perdue Farms to eliminate the Labor Department’s process for reviewing whistleblower claims.

    Whistleblowers Rudy Howell and Craig Watts, who had contracts with Perdue, alleged that the corporation retaliated against them when they raised concerns about animal welfare and other health and safety hazards.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Exclusive: ICE's Bounty Hunters

    An internal ICE financial ledger I obtained shows how the agency is turning local police departments across the county into a vast, decentralized immigration army. This includes payments if cops sign up to be deputized, reimbursements for transportation, salary supplements for cops who process migrant children, and per-arrest-style incentive payments.

    All of this is taking place under an ICE program called 287(g), part of a 1996 law that granted the Attorney General (and later the Secretary of Homeland Security) the authority to enter into written agreements with state and local governments on immigration. The first agreement under the law was signed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement after 9/11; as of last year, the number of agreements has swelled past 1,000.

• Environment

  • Tennessee Lookout ☛ Depleted uranium company gains approval in rural East Tennessee

    BWXT’s rezoning is part of its expansion plan to fulfill its $1.6 billion contract with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration to provide high purity depleted uranium, or HPDU, which is used for nuclear weapons technology, tank armor and projectiles.

    The company is the only U.S. supplier of high purity depleted uranium to the federal government.

  • The Conversation ☛ We are flushing paracetamol down the toilet and into our water supply – here’s how it could be removed

    In the Nairobi river in Kenya, paracetamol concentrations have reached up to 16 micrograms per litre, which is high enough to cause cellular damage in water organisms such as clams. In Asian surface waters, high paracetamol levels have been reported as well.

  • Renewable Energy World ☛ Record heat, melting snow: What does it mean for California’s reservoirs?

    Providing about a third of the state’s water supply, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is a vital source of spring and summer runoff that refills reservoirs when the state needs the water most.

    But a warm wet storm followed February’s snow, and now, March temperatures are shattering records — prompting warnings of rapid snowmelt and swift rivers.

  • YLE ☛ SVT: Neste's "green" aviation fuel contains banned palm oil

    The world's largest producer of aviation biofuel, Finnish fuel firm Neste, has been using banned palm oil instead of recycled cooking oil, according to Swedish public broadcaster SVT.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft and Nvidia launch AI partnership to speed up nuclear power plant permitting and construction — simulation tools and generative models could hasten historically lengthy processes

      The idea of letting generative AI anywhere near safety-critical nuclear infrastructure might give the average reader pause, but it's already happening in the real world. Aalo Atomics, an Austin-based startup building modular nuclear reactors for data centers, has said that it reduced its permitting process workload by 92% using Microsoft's Generative AI for Permitting solution, saving an estimated $80 million annually.

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ Terafab, Elon Musk’s unrealistic project

      Elon Musk no longer speaks in gigawatts — the unit that has become the benchmark for measuring computing power dedicated to generative AI models. The Tesla CEO is now thinking in terawatts, or one thousand gigawatts. On Saturday, he unveiled Terafab, a project for a giant factory designed to produce chips for his self-driving cars, his robots, and the data centers he ultimately hopes to deploy in space. His goal: to reach a capacity of one terawatt per year. An extraordinary figure, roughly fifty times current global production.

    • Geoff Manaugh ☛ Contextual Collapse

      Of course, this could also mean that someday the caverns will simply collapse. Presumably, then, we’ll have to design and build a replacement—some helpful videos and papers can guide any ambitious architecture and engineering students in the right direction.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Mexico News Daily ☛ Camera traps spy a jaguar for the first time in Guanajuato's Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve

      The Conanp reported that the images were obtained via a 75-trap camera system operated by community monitors.

  • Overpopulation

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Why Colorado River negotiations stalled, and how they could resume with the possibility of agreement

      The federal government has not yet done so, but the prospect of such an action is not good news for the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River for water, energy, agriculture and recreation, nor for the estimated US$1.4 trillion in economic activity the river supports.

• Finance

  • The Walrus ☛ Manitoba Moves to Outlaw Algorithmic Pricing—a First in Canada

    Manitoba is the first government in Canada to recognize and address the potential issues with pricing algorithms that use your data against you. A few US states have started moving, but this is a wide-open policy space in Canada. Manitoba is setting the terms of this debate early, instead of waiting until personalized pricing is everywhere and politically untouchable.

    Normalization is a real risk here. Once firms get consumers used to being sorted, profiled, and priced differently, the practice starts to feel inevitable. But it is not. It is a choice about what kind of business practices we expect. Personalized algorithmic pricing pulls together affordability, privacy, competition, consumer protection, and data extraction all at once. It asks whether companies should be allowed to use increasingly intimate signals about our behaviour to decide what we see, what we pay, and what discounts we never even knew existed.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ OpenAI set to raise about $10 billion from MGX, Coatue, Thrive

    Abu Dhabi’s MGX, Coatue Management and Thrive Capital are set to participate in the round at a $730 billion valuation, not including the money raised, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private information. Altimeter Capital is also planning to put in money, the people said.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Epic Games Layoffs Impact 1,000+ People as Fortnite Wanes

    Despite being one of the most popular video games on the market since its 2017 debut, Fortnite is spending more money than it’s making in 2026. According to Bloomberg, Fortnite developer Epic Games is laying off more than 1,000 employees amid a broader downturn in engagement with the game over the past year. It’s the company’s second major round of cuts in three years, having eliminated 830 employees for similar reasons in September 2023.

  • CBC ☛ Epic Games to lay off more than 1,000 employees as Fortnite usage drops

    Epic had earlier this month raised prices of ‌Fortnite's in-game currency, citing higher costs to run the game. CBC News has reached out to the company for a statement.

  • New York Times ☛ Epic Games Lays Off Over 1,000 Employees, Citing Fortnite Slump

    The video game company Epic Games is laying off more than 1,000 employees, it said on Tuesday, citing a drop in the amount of time people are spending playing Fortnite.

  • RIPE ☛ Announcing the Results of the 2025 RIPE Code of Conduct Survey

    The RIPE community has spoken and the results are in. The RIPE Code of Conduct Team presents an analysis of the feedback received, discusses next actions, and shares a detailed breakdown of the results.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Yubico Partners with IBM and Auth0 to secure agentic AI and Harness its Power while ensuring Trust and Governance

    Yubico has announced a strategic collaboration with IBM and Auth0 to help organisations securely deploy AI agents at scale, introducing a new model of human-in-the-loop authorisation for high-risk automated actions.

  • Wired ☛ Pentagon’s ‘Attempt to Cripple’ Anthropic Is Troubling, Judge Says

    Anthropic has filed two federal lawsuits alleging that the Trump administration’s decision to designate the company a security risk amounted to illegal retaliation. The government slapped the label on Anthropic after it pushed for limitations on how its AI could be used by the military. Tuesday’s hearing came in a case filed in San Francisco.

  • LibreNews ☛ The political use of operating systems

    Choosing an operating system means not only choosing the stack of our virtual life, but it also means adopting a particular perspective, prioritizing certain needs and choosing the way we interact with technology. Making a political use of the technological power means choosing to change the direction of our computing life, gain consciousness on the alternatives and in a way that is equivalent to voting for a party or another, with the discussions, the drawbacks, and the advantages that come with it. This is the power of not letting others choose for us. This power of choosing comes with the necessity of observing the alternatives, and if OS producers are like parties, each of these parties is bringing a priority or an issue to solve. Microsoft, Apple, RedHat and other vendors explicitly state the issue they are trying to solve: Productivity.

  • Inside Towers ☛ White House Unveils National AI Policy Framework

    The Trump administration released a legislative framework for a national policy on AI on Friday, calling on Congress to adopt a light-touch legislative approach to the technology. The framework aims to create uniform safety and security guardrails around the technology while preempting states from enacting their own AI rules.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Team Mirai and Democracy

    This is happening today in Japan. Constituents have spent about eight thousand hours engaging with Mirai’s AI Interviewer since 2025. The party’s gamified volunteer mobilization app, Action Board, captured about 100,000 organizer actions per day in the runup to last week’s election.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Goodhart’s Law vs “prediction markets”

    But rich people don't need to be disciplined by incentives. They can get no-bid contracts with Uncle Sucker without being tempted to rip off the USA. They can force their workers into nondisparagement clauses without being tempted to act like a colossal asshole, secure in the knowledge that they can sue workers who tattle on them. They can force their workers into noncompete clauses without being tempted to underpay and abuse their workers, secure in the knowledge that they can sue workers who take their labor elsewhere. They can force their workers into binding arbitration clauses without being tempted into maiming or killing them, secure in the knowledge that the workers can't sue them.

    So incentives matter…when you're fucking over working people. But incentives don't matter, when you're gilding the Epstein class's lilies.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Layoffs don’t boost the share price — they drop it

    Either way, the markets aren’t buying it. Layoffs really do mean your company is in trouble and your stock should get a price hit: [...]

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Plaque

    The object in the photograph is a circular plaque, laser-etched with the Apple logo, mounted on a base of 24-karat gold. It bears the inscription: President Donald J. Trump — Apple American Manufacturing Program. It was presented by Tim Cook to the President of the United States in exchange for tariff relief. It now sits on the Resolute Desk.

    I want to be precise about what this object is.

    It is not a gift in any meaningful sense. Gifts are given freely, without expectation of return, between parties of roughly equal standing or from a position of genuine affection. This is not that. This is a tribute. It is the physical instantiation of a transaction — favorable regulatory treatment rendered in exchange for a golden idol bearing the sovereign’s name. It is the vocabulary of court, not commerce. It is what you present when you need something from someone who has power over you and who wants, above all else, to be told that he is great.

  • Michael Geist ☛ Setting Canada’s AI Policy Priorities: My Appearance Before the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology

    The Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology is one of several House and Senate committees currently grappling with legal, regulatory and policy challenges and opportunities presented by AI. I appeared before the committee yesterday alongside Yoshua Bengio and Colin Bennett. Bengio unsurprisingly garnered the lion’s share of the questions, but the committee did give me the chance to highlight my thoughts on policy priorities and to address a few questions. I plan to post some reflections on the policy tensions in the coming days. In the meantime, the video and text of my opening statement are posted below.

  • Douglas Rushkoff ☛ The Holy War Delusion — Rushkoff Archive

    The one who called last summer, at the height of the starvation crisis in Gaza, took it further: “I think Israel may have made Judaism untenable for the foreseeable future. Maybe forever.”

  • YLE ☛ Finns trust the US about as much as they do Russia, China

    Antti Lehtinen, who heads SuomiAreena, said it was not surprising that trust in the United States has weakened.

    "But it is striking that trust has fallen to roughly the same level as that accorded to China and Russia," he said.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Press Gazette ☛ Social media overtakes newsbrands as MPs' primary news [sic] source

      Some 83% of a representative sample of 105 MPs cited social media as their primary source, up from 61% at the start of 2025.

      This means social media overtook news websites (on 77%) for the first time.

      But 96% of MPs still said they visit newspaper websites at least once a week, with 89% visiting daily and 60% visiting multiple times a day.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ The Trump Admin’s Own Investigators Found No EU Internet Censorship. So They Ignored The Findings.

    But if you get past the incredibly misleading headline, the actual reporting reveals quite an admission from within the administration, and it fundamentally undercuts everything they’ve been doing supposedly regarding “EU internet censorship.” The story reveals that the Trump administration ran its own investigation into EU censorship, found nothing, and then barreled ahead with the entire crusade anyway.

    Worth repeating, because it’s the whole story (even if WaPo buried it with their headline): the Trump admin investigated “EU censorship.” The Trump admin came up empty. And then the administration just kept going as if it were undeniable that what their own investigators couldn’t find must have happened anyway.

  • Mat Duggan ☛ Hosting a Snowflake Proxy

    In the nightmarish world of 2026 it can be difficult to know how to help at all. There are too many horrors happening to quickly to know where one can inject even a small amount of assistance. However I wanted to quickly post about something I did that was easy, low impact and hopefully helps a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of people.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Russian journalist sentenced to 10 years in absentia for saying 20% of Georgia is occupied by Russia

    Russian prosecutors based the case on two posts — one was Kichigina sharing a post about Bucha, the Ukrainian city where Russian forces murdered hundreds of civilians shortly after the beginning of the full-scale invasion. The post contained evidence to counter Russian claims that the mass murder was fabricated.

    The second concerned an Instagram story that Kichigina published on 8 August 2023 — the anniversary of the 2008 August War. In the story, Kichigina said Russian troops had invaded Georgia, bombed civilian cities, and that 20% of the country remained under Russian occupation. Both posts are no longer available.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Publisher audience engagement strategy for 2026

    Digital publishing still depends on discovery. But discovery is no longer a reliable business model. Reuters Institute reported in January that Google search traffic to more than 2,500 news sites fell 33% year on year, while media managers expect referrals from search to drop another 43% over the next three years. This is not a temporary wobble. It is structural.

    The question for senior digital and product leaders is no longer how to recover every lost click. It is how to turn a greater share of the attention publishers still earn into repeat use, richer audience signal, and more resilient revenue.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ welcomes Kyrgyzstan’s release of journalist Makhabat Tajibek kyzy, calls for charges to be dropped

    At an initial retrial hearing on March 23, the court in Bishkek rejected the journalist’s petition to dismiss the case but granted her request to be freed pending a verdict. She remains under a travel ban, however. The next hearing is scheduled for April 7.

  • CPJ ☛ Reporter İsmail Arı imprisoned in Turkey for spreading ‘disinformation’

    “Rights defenders who expressed worries that the ‘false information’ law would be abused to silence journalism were told that journalists wouldn’t be prosecuted unless the reporting causes concern, fear, or panic,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Who is scared of İsmail Arı’s reporting? The authorities must release Arı without delay and put an end to the misuse of this law.”

    Arı released a message via his lawyers while he was in custody. He said his social media posts and videos are being used as evidence against him.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • BIA Net ☛ Workplace deaths plague Turkey's textile hub as prominent union leader jailed

    In Antep, where a significant portion of Turkey’s textile production takes place, union leader Mehmet Türkmen has been arrested once again. Labor organizations link the move to strikes in the city that have slowed down production.

  • El País ☛ Forced to give birth at a hospital door for not having a male companion: Taliban edicts endanger the lives of Afghan women

    According to UNICEF, only 66% of women in Afghanistan currently give birth with skilled personnel present. Furthermore, although official data is limited, maternal mortality in 2024 reached 638 deaths per 100,000 live births, and neonatal mortality reached 24 deaths per 1,000 live births — figures among the highest in the world, according to the UN.

  • The Verge ☛ What is ICE actually doing at American airports?

    Despite the crowd, I had plenty of time to check out the ICE presence at JFK’s other terminals. I saw the same thing in each one: ICE agents, sometimes from ERO and sometimes from other divisions, gathered together near the check-in area. Sometimes a pair would break off and walk around. They weren’t violently arresting anyone, but they also weren’t helping manage the crowds, which is ostensibly why they had been dispatched to JFK and other airports in the first place.

  • Robert Reich ☛ A Report You Need to Read

    I’m summarizing it below because it deserves your attention.

    Critchfield and her team found that 279 people have been accused online by the Trump administration of assaulting federal ICE and Border Patrol agents, and more than half of these people — 64 percent — are American citizens.

    Of the 181 American citizens that the Trump administration has accused of attacking federal ICE and Border Patrol officers, close to half have never been charged, and none have been convicted at trial. But the public charges alone have caused them significant harm.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ The Consequences of Bad Labor Law

    Today—as airline security lines stretch six hours long and untrained Playskool paramilitaries begin to incompetently pose as TSA agents—is a good time to think about labor law. Not necessarily all of its minutiae, which can be deadening to the mind and have the effect of making you not want to think about it at all. Just the important parts.

    The main thing to understand about US labor law is that its primary function is to restrict the power of workers in favor of the power of businesses. The ideal of the law as a way to mediate the desires of both capital and labor in the interests of the common good has become wildly tilted towards the interests of capital. It exists, on balance, not to facilitate the existence of organized labor but to handcuff it. This is not a state of nature. It is a policy choice. And, when viewed in the context of a nation slipping dangerously into oligarchy, it is common sense that this policy choice will, in the long run, be proven to have been a very, very bad idea.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Jon Stewart Takes Aim at Donald Trump Sending ICE Into Airports

    He added, “American travelers are so stressed out. What incredibly uncontroversial American enforcement agency would we deploy to our airports to ease passengers’ journey?”

    Stewart noted how the Trump administration will now be deploying ICE agents to airports to help with the TSA lines. “We’re sending in ICE agents to calm the situation,” he said. “It makes perfect sense. It’s kind of like the way we calm our dogs during thunderstorms with a blanket of fireworks.”

  • Law Society Gazette ☛ ‘Burn it’ lawyer suspended for two years after contempt finding

    A former partner with City firm Jones Day who was found to be in criminal contempt of court has been suspended for two years by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

    Raymond John McKeeve, who apologised to the tribunal for his actions, was found, while in practice as a registered foreign lawyer, to have given instructions of ‘burn it’ or words similar in respect of electronic material held by his client. This instruction led to a High Court finding in 2022 that he was criminally liable for contempt of court.

  • Ex-manager who failed to refer work to law firm has to repay debt instead

    A tax specialist owes his former law firm £204,000 in overpayments he received while an employee after failing to refer work that would cover his debt, the High Court has ruled.

    Mr Justice Moody upheld a decision that a 2017 settlement between London criminal law firm Bark & Co and Andrew Lynch was enforceable after the five-year period it gave Mr Lynch to introduce work expired without him doing so.

    He also agreed with Ms Recorder Lambert KC that elements of the Tomlin order could be excised because they required Mr Lynch to make referrals which were banned by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA).

  • Portfolio Media Inc ☛ SRA Shuts Quarter Of Firms Over Accounting Breaches

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ The why and what of the CIDR Report

    For some time, I have been looking after a routing analysis report called the CIDR Report. I’d like to explain the reasons for this report, what is in the report, and share some thoughts as to its usefulness today to the Internet routing community.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Navajo Nation Celebrates New Tower

    Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren called the tower “a meaningful step forward,” as part of broader efforts that have added hundreds of miles of fiber and more than 140 towers across the region. The tower also allows multiple carriers, including AT&T and Verizon, to expand coverage, which the tribe hopes ensures long-term connectivity for the community.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Digital Music News ☛ Trump Personally Pushed the DOJ’s Live Nation Settlement

  While the terms of the deal should make it easier for rival promoters to compete for business in the Live Nation-dominated market, it also prevented Live Nation and Ticketmaster from being forcibly broken up.

• Press Gazette ☛ US judge dismisses Google news monopoly case

  The case was brought by Helena World Chronicle LLC, the publisher of 155-year-old Arkansas newspaper Helena World and the digital-only Monroe County Argus, and Mississippi-based Emmerich Newspapers, which publishes 25 print newspapers and 22 websites.

  They said they were bringing the lawsuit both on behalf of themselves and on behalf of all publishers of online newsbrands in the US whose websites had been indexed by Google since November 2019.

• Patents

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Who wins what in the EU's new trade deal with Australia?

    Australia may rank only around 20th among the EU's trading partners, but its strategic value is rising fast.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Rolling Stone ☛ AI Deepfakes Are Hurting Creators' Bottom Lines. They're Fighting Back

      Oyarzo says she never agreed to create an ad for the law firm. (The firm did not respond to Rolling Stone’s requests for comment.) She knew it was an AI-generated clip right away, because it wasn’t the first video Oyarzo had encountered. In November, Oyarzo’s video editor notified her of a similar ad with an AI-generated avatar that subtly resembled her, but with dark red hair and eyebrows instead of her brown hair. Oyarzo brushed it off, asking herself if she’d just convinced herself it looked like her.

• Copyrights

  • The Strategist ☛ Australia’s copyright framework is a sovereign AI decision

    No Five Eyes partner has a legal framework that supports domestic training of frontier foundation models, the general-purpose systems trained at the largest scales of computing and data, capable of reasoning across domains such as code, strategy and law. Yet defence and intelligence systems across those countries will increasingly run on exactly these models. If they are trained elsewhere under conditions Canberra won’t have set and will be unable to verify, that is not just a copyright policy; it’s a supply-chain vulnerability.