Leftovers

• Futurism ☛ Google News Now Prominently Featuring Polymarket Bets Instead of Actual Journalism

  In our testing, Polymarket bets are also showing up on the Google News home page.

  But links from the prediction market can pop up all over Google News, including in searches. In further tests, looking up “will ships transit the strait,” referring to the Strait of Hormuz, returned numerous credible sources like Financial Times, The Guardian, and Reuters. Just below them, however, was a Polymarket bet on the number of ships that would be allowed to pass through the critical oil passageway.

• EFF ☛ Comparison Shopping Is Not a (Computer) Crime

  Unfortunately, Amazon is trying to block these helpful new tools, which can steer shoppers towards competitors. Taking a page from Facebook and RyanAir, they are trying to use computer crime laws to do it.

• David Oks ☛ How funerals keep Africa poor

  Your body is going to remain in that refrigerated unit for a long time. Typically it will be weeks or months; sometimes bodies can stay refrigerated for an entire year. Why so long? Because the longer that the body stays in the mortuary, the more time the family has to raise funds for a funeral truly befitting your status. And, since the hospital charges escalating fees for each additional week that your body is stored there, keeping your body refrigerated for a long time is itself a mark of prestige.

• Mike Brock ☛ Tech’s Liberal Economist Really Isn’t That Liberal at All

  This is the American project. Not the easiest version. The correct one.

  The word “assimilation” asks you to forget this. To imagine that there is a mainstream with the authority to absorb you, and that your belonging depends on your willingness to be absorbed. To imagine, in Smith’s version, that the mainstream is delivered via the content infrastructure of the same venture capital apparatus that employs his co-host and shapes his audience.

  There is no such mainstream. There is only the framework, the rights, the laws, the democratic participation — and inside that framework, a vast normative landscape of individual and collective meaning where culture lives, in all its irreducible, unassimilable, American plurality.

• Ava ☛ the public

  An online presence feels so at odds with being a private person in some ways, or being picky about people, and being intentionally harder to access in real life. It can even feel like a narcissistic shrine to oneself at times, or a hardening cast around you that makes it more difficult to change it and let it grow with you as time goes on. I deal with that right now.

• Law Society Gazette ☛ London firm faces £35,000 SRA costs bill on top of £3,000 fines

  North London firm YVA Solicitors agreed with the regulator that it should pay a fine of £2,500 after holding onto funds in the client account and then sanctioning seven payments not related to the delivery of legal services. Two partners with the firm, Christopher Yiannakas and Nicholas Kephalas, were each fined £500.

  Proceedings were brought before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal despite the eventual outcome being well within the SRA’s fining powers. The regulator had initially proposed that the partners should each be reprimanded rather than fined, but their sanction was upgraded by the tribunal, which had invited them to propose an appropriate sum.

  The tribunal heard that £12,800 was retained in the firm’s client account following a commercial property sale in 2022, even where there was no longer any proper reason to hold onto the money. The partners and the firm admitted breaching accounts rules.

  The SRA had received a qualified accountant’s report from the firm in 2022 referring to breaches of the rules. An investigation followed, culminating in an agreement that the sum was held while the firm awaited instructions and the client established a new banking facility.

• Science

  • El País ☛ The Trump paradox: Boasting about the Artemis mission while demanding deep cuts to NASA’s budget

    For the second year in a row, the Trump administration wants to slash NASA’s budget. This time, they’re seeking a 23% cut to the agency’s total budget. Artemis is spared, but $3.4 billion is being cut from the agency’s science budget, reducing it by half, and more than 40 “low-priority” missions are being canceled.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Cosmic Alchemy

    Specifically they have to be ‘neutron stars’, which sounds like a star wearing a Superman cape, but is just the ultra-dense remnants left over when a star dies.

    Then you need the two stars to collide. Not just line up in the sky when you’re looking at them – we’re making GOLD here, not the zodiac.

    It is tricky to do, but the payoff is great. One 2017 collision produced 3 and 13 earth-masses of gold (that’s a pretty wide margin of error, but obv the low end is fine).

  • [Old] University of Virginia ☛ Edsger Dijkstra - How do we tell truths that might hurt?

    Sometimes we discover unpleasant truths. Whenever we do so, we are in difficulties: suppressing them is scientifically dishonest, so we must tell them, but telling them, however, will fire back on us. If the truths are sufficiently impalatable, our audience is psychically incapable of accepting them and we will be written off as totally unrealistic, hopelessly idealistic, dangerously revolutionary, foolishly gullible or what have you. (Besides that, telling such truths is a sure way of making oneself unpopular in many circles, and, as such, it is an act that, in general, is not without personal risks. Vide Galileo Galilei.....)

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Ancient Māori remains point to largely plant-based diets before colonization

    New research led by the University of Otago—Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, in close partnership with mana whenua, is shedding new light on Māori diet and burial practices in Aotearoa New Zealand prior to European colonization. The study, conducted with the approval and guidance of Waikato hapū and iwi—Ngāti Maahanga, Ngāti Wairere, Ngāti Koroki Kahukura and Ngāti Hauā—provides the first direct scientific evidence that some Māori ate predominantly plant-based diets before Pākehā (European) arrival.

  • Rlang ☛ Hold On Hope: publication lag times at cell biology journals

    I’ve posted about publication lag times previously. The “lag” refers to the time from submitting a paper and it appearing in a journal.

    Publication lag times are still a frustration for researchers. Although preprints circumvent the delay in sharing science with others, publication is still king when it comes to evaluation. Contracts are short and publication delays can be long…

    I recently saw a post comparing median publication lag times for genetics journals. This motivated me to update my code and rerun the analysis for cell biology journals to see what, if anything, has changed.

  • CBC ☛ Why human eyes are better at observing the moon than cameras

    The five hours of observations were made using cameras and the naked eye. All four astronauts gave detailed descriptions of what they were seeing.

    One area of particular interest was the Orientale basin, a region straddling the moon's near and far sides. It is believed to have formed 3.8 billion years ago. Hansen also pointed to colour variations stretching toward Hertzsprung, a large crater on the moon's far side.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Dark side of the moon, as seen from Artemis

    And here's the moon in total eclipse. Humans are seeing it from this perspective for the very first time.

• Career/Education

  • Utah News Dispatch ☛ Fewer phones and more books — Cox commends new education laws

    A bell-to-bell cellphone ban and an early literacy plan were among the governor’s priorities this year, while other new laws may help take students’ attention away from social media

  • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries September 2026

    CNI is pleased to once again serve as a cooperating organization for the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL), taking place September 22–25, 2026, in Faro, Portugal. Full details and the call for proposals are available on the conference website: https://tpdl2026.ualg.pt/. The submission deadline is May 3, 2026.

  • Dr Molly Tov ☛ i'm tired of wanting things i don't even respect

    Today, I was journaling out some uncomfortable feelings (as you do), when I wrote, "I am tired of wanting things I don't even respect."

    Then I wrote it down a second time, block quote style:

    "I am tired of wanting things I don't even respect."

  • Bill Glover ☛ Why You Can't Change Anyone

    I’ve always felt uncomfortable at the thought of advising others. Throughout my 13 years in consulting, the idea of offering advice from a position of ignorance always felt odd. I do agree that an outside perspective can be useful but all too often there is an expectation to associate the role with expertise, experience or knowledge. This was a mistake. The only way I knew how to approach consulting was from a place of discovery. The job as I saw it was more to listen and observe than it was to act.

  • Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Cassidy Williams on Technical Blogging

    Cassidy started blogging her first semester in college and has kept at it ever since. Readers get dev tips mixed with musings, both professional and personal. She takes blogging up a notch in December with Blogvent and maintains a steady weekly cadence for her wildly popular newsletter, Rendezvous with Casidoo. Oh, and she does videos too; just see her recently relaunched YouTube channel.

    She recently popped into the Overcommitted community (a great group, btw), and we couldn’t resist asking her our usual writerly questions.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Ask the Librarians: Recapping a Scholarly Kitchen Roundtable at the 2025 Charleston Library Conference

    The Scholarly Kitchen (TSK) hosted a panel of librarian guest authors and Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) volunteers on stage at the 2025 Charleston Library Conference. I had the pleasure of moderating this wonderful panel of experts in their engaging and wide-ranging conversation on hot topics that the scholarly communications industry faces today: [...]

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Hackable history: Clay Interactive and Raspberry Pi at the Young V&A

    Going to the museum used to mean “you can look, but you can’t touch.” Finding this model thoroughly boring, Clay Interactive put a bunch of Raspberry Pis inside the new exhibits they were developing at the V&A Museum of Childhood, helping to transform the building into the Young V&A.

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ Iran war piles more pain on already battered PC market

    This is the bad news from market watcher IDC, which says that the remainder of the year will see further declines in PC shipments as system prices continue to go up.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Intel inks multiyear data center chip partnership with Google

    Google’s C4 instances use a specific variant of Xeon 6 called Granite Rapids. It’s based on a core design called P-core that includes multiple AI-focused optimizations. One of those optimizations is AMX, a set of extensions to the machine language in which Intel chips express computations. AMX speeds up a calculation called multiply-accumulate that AI models run frequently during inference.

  • ACM ☛ How NASA Built Artemis II’s Fault-Tolerant Computer

    Effectively, eight CPUs run the flight software in parallel. The engineering philosophy hinges on a “fail-silent” design. The self-checking pairs ensure that if a CPU performs an erroneous calculation due to a radiation event, the error is detected immediately and the system responds.

    “A faulty computer will fail silent, rather than transmit the ‘wrong answer,’” Uitenbroek explained. This approach simplifies the complex task of the triplex “voting” mechanism that compares results. Instead of comparing three answers to find a majority, the system uses a priority-ordered source selection algorithm among healthy channels that haven’t failed-silent. It picks the output from the first available FCM in the priority list; if that module has gone silent due to a fault, it moves to the second, third, or fourth.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • CBC ☛ You can now get a prescription for nature access if you live in Hamilton, here's how

    For Paul Stacho, who lives in Stoney Creek, access to conservation areas has been life changing. He said if people are able to overcome a financial barrier to spending time outdoors, they will realize how much it can help.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Reserve officer in fight with Army for owning marijuana dispensary

    But that officer, Maj. William Norgard, is arguing his business ventures outside of the Army are not in violation of military regulations, and he’s gearing up to challenge the service — a fight that his lawyer says is likely to end up in court.

  • Derek Thompson ☛ How ‘Zombie Flow’ Took Over Culture

    The late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was troubled by a paradox of progress. People alive today have more sophisticated machines, medicines, and systems for organizing the world. So why haven’t these advances made us happier? “The gods of the Greeks were like helpless children compared to humankind today and the powers we now wield,” he wrote. And yet “we do not understand what happiness is any better than Aristotle did, and as for learning how to attain that blessed condition, one could argue that we have made no progress at all.”

• Proprietary

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Iranian attacks on US critical infrastructure puts 3,900 devices in crosshairs

    Of the programmable logic controllers manufactured by Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley that Censys identified as potentially exposed to Iranian government attackers, nearly 3,900, or about 3 out of every 4, are based in the United States.

  • Sven Luijten ☛ Volume control not working on Apple TV remote

    The volume control on my Apple TV remote recently stopped working. The buttons simply would not adjust the volume like it used to, so I had to use the TV's own remote Luckily, the fix is simple. As described in this comment on Reddit, you hold down the "Control Center" and "volume down" buttons for about 5 seconds and wait for the status light on the Apple TV to turn back on again. This reboots the remote, which fixed the issue for me.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Honda paywalls its garage door opener

    Honda has taken a feature that used to be a single dumb button press: open garage, go inside, live your life, and turned it into an app, a login, a piece of hardware, and a subscription, because apparently even arriving home now needs a payment plan.

  • EFF ☛ Banning New Foreign Routers Mistargets Products to Fix Real Problem

    American consumers deserve better. They deserve the assurance that the devices they use, whether routers or other connected smart home devices, are built to withstand attacks that put themselves and others at risk, no matter where they are manufactured. For this, a nuanced, careful consideration of products (such as was part of the FCC’s 2023-proposed U.S. Cyber Trust Mark) is necessary, rather than blanket bans.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ On Microsoft's Lousy Cloud Security - Schneier on Security

  • Ars Technica ☛ Federal cyber experts called Microsoft's cloud a "pile of shit," approved it anyway

    The tech giant’s “lack of proper detailed security documentation” left reviewers with a “lack of confidence in assessing the system’s overall security posture,” according to an internal government report reviewed by ProPublica.

    Or, as one member of the team put it: “The package is a pile of shit.”

  • Hackaday ☛ Nissan Shuts Down NissanConnect App For Older Leaf EVs

    Increasingly it would seem that we’re looking at the Car-as-a-Service (CaaS) model being implemented.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Semafor Inc ☛ American Gen Zers grow more uneasy about AI

      “Gen Zers are unconvinced that artificial intelligence will help them search for accurate information, come up with new ideas and think carefully about information,” the report stated.

      The findings mirror broader concerns among Americans over AI, despite rising adoption rates.

    • The Register UK ☛ Security reserchers tricked Apple Intelligence into cursing

      Security researchers at RSAC estimate there are at least 200 million Apple Intelligence-capable devices in use as of December 2025, and up to 1 million apps on the Apple App Store that employ it. So they decided to try to break in - and the vast majority of the time, it worked.

      The RSAC team used two techniques to bypass Apple's input and output filters and the safety guardrails on Apple Intelligence's local model. They tested the attack with 100 random prompts and succeeded 76 percent of the time, according to a report shared with The Register ahead of publication.

    • Security Week ☛ Apple Intelligence AI Guardrails Bypassed in New Attack

      It primarily processes tasks directly on Apple silicon via a compact on-device LLM. The AI draws on the user’s unique context (messages, photos, and schedules) to power practical features such as system-wide writing tools and Siri. For more complex reasoning, it offloads requests to larger foundation models via Private Cloud Compute (PCC) on Apple’s dedicated cloud infrastructure.

    • The Verge ☛ Florida launches investigation into OpenAI

      Uthmeier also says that OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been “linked to criminal behavior” related to child sexual abuse material and the “encouragement” of self-harm. He adds that ChatGPT may have been used to “assist” the person suspected of carrying out a shooting at Florida State University in April 2025. This week, the family of a man killed during the FSU shooting filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the suspect of being in “constant communication with ChatGPT.

    • The Cyber Show ☛ What "AI" means now

      The "AI" bubble will soon burst. That is a good thing. It's a necessary correction of a mass hysteria that's gripped the world for many years now.

      It was supposed to be useful. When I was an "AI" researcher in the 1990s one particular technique we used was Fuzzy Logic. We made simulated "neural" circuits like Perceptrons and Boltzmann Machines to combine lots of sensors. We made decisions based on the weighted contributions of many inputs and then we corrected or trained (back propagated errors) those weights until the system made the right choices more often.

      We didn't call it "AI" then. To do so would have been pompous and pretentious. It was just "DSP" (Digital Signal Processing), or plain old "data processing".

    • Martin Fowler ☛ Feedback Flywheel

      The infrastructure I have described in earlier articles — Knowledge Priming, Design-First Collaboration, Context Anchoring, and Encoding Team Standards — is not a collection of static artifacts. They are surfaces that can absorb learning. The missing piece is the practice of feeding learnings back in: a feedback loop that turns each interaction into an opportunity to improve the next one.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Bernie and AOC Pump the Brakes on Artificial Intelligence

      Artificial intelligence is a hungry species. It is designed to steal people’s livelihoods, hoard personal data, and devour enough energy and land to remake and ruin entire towns. Senator Bernie Sanders, long critical of the wealthy accumulating power at everyone else’s expense, has warned with increasing alarm that unregulated AI in the hands of tech oligarchs represents that process in its most radical, existential form. The AI revolution has the potential to dwarf the nineteenth-century industrial revolution in both impact and pace, and perhaps even to dominate human society. But its spoils are not poised to be shared with anyone but tech capitalists and other members of the economic ultraelite.

    • Kyle Kingsbury ☛ The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Culture

      ML models are cultural artifacts: they encode and reproduce textual, audio, and visual media; they participate in human conversations and spaces, and their interfaces make them easy to anthropomorphize. Unfortunately, we lack appropriate cultural scripts for these kinds of machines, and will have to develop this knowledge over the next few decades. As models grow in sophistication, they may give rise to new forms of media: perhaps interactive games, educational courses, and dramas. They will also influence our sex: producing pornography, altering the images we present to ourselves and each other, and engendering new erotic subcultures. Since image models produce recognizable aesthetics, those aesthetics will become polyvalent signifiers. Those signs will be deconstructed and re-imagined by future generations.

    • Kyle Kingsbury ☛ The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Dynamics

      ML models are chaotic, both in isolation and when embedded in other systems. Their outputs are difficult to predict, and they exhibit surprising sensitivity to initial conditions. This sensitivity makes them vulnerable to covert attacks. Chaos does not mean models are completely unstable; LLMs and other ML systems exhibit attractor behavior. Since models produce plausible output, errors can be difficult to detect. This suggests that ML systems are ill-suited where verification is difficult or correctness is key. Using LLMs to generate code (or other outputs) may make systems more complex, fragile, and difficult to evolve.

    • Alcides Fonseca ☛ The impact of LLMs on the Software Economy by Alcides Fonseca

      There are a few people I recommend following to understand what is going on with software development: [...]

    • The New Stack ☛ Open source maintainers are drowning in AI-generated pull requests. Enterprise teams are next.

      The pattern is consistent: maintainers spend a disproportionate share of their time evaluating code that should never have been submitted, crowding out genuine contributions and accelerating burnout.

      This is not just an open-source problem. It is a preview of what is coming for enterprise engineering teams, and most of them are not ready.

    • James Bennett ☛ Let’s talk about LLMs

      As for what you should be doing instead of rushing to adopt LLM coding out of fear that you’ll be left behind: I think you should be listening to what all those whitepapers and reports and studies are actually telling you, and working on fundamentals. You should be adopting and perfecting solid foundational software development practices like version control, comprehensive test suites, continuous integration, meaningful documentation, fast feedback cycles, iterative development, focus on users, small batches of work… things that have been known and proven for decades, but are still far too rare in actual real-world software shops.

      If the skeptical position is wrong and it turns out LLMs truly become indispensable coding tools in the long term, well, the available literature says you’ll be set up to take the greatest possible advantage of them. And if it turns out they don’t, you’ll still be in much better shape than you were, and you’ll have an advantage over everyone who chased after wild promises of huge productivity gains by ordering their teams to just chew through tokens and generate code without working on fundamentals, and who likely wrecked their development processes by doing so.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Important XScreenSaver policy update

      No contributions built with, or assisted by, LLMs or any kind of "generative AI" tools will be considered. If you didn't bother writing it, I'm not going to bother reading it. XScreenSaver is art by humans for humans.

    • Erik Johannes Husom ☛ On the usefulness of AI agents

      It also has to be mentioned that I find the development process of LLMs morally wrong, although it seems to have fallen out of fashion to discuss it in some circles. Copyright infringement and exploitation of workers are serious issues – this has real negative consequences for real people. Agentic use has also further accelerated the energy consumption of AI, by leading to a gargantuan amount of tokens being generated when LLMs are deployed with increased autonomy. Moltbook (a social network for AI agents) and ClawXiv (distribution service for research papers written by AI agents) are examples of experiments where the ratio of benefits versus costs seems exceptionally skewed in this regard, even though it's very interesting from a research perspective to observe what AI agents produce when deployed in certain contexts. The price to pay for such tools is too high, but it's simply too hidden for most of us.

    • Martin Alderson ☛ What next for the compute crunch?

      I thought it'd be a good time to continue on the same theme as my previous two articles The Coming AI Compute Crunch and Is the AI Compute Crunch Here? given that both OpenAI and Anthropic are now publicly agreeing they are (very?) compute starved.

    • BoingBoing ☛ As Scam Altman pushes for IPO, the wheels are coming off OpenAI

      As a product. OpenAI is trapped between a far cheaper Gemini offering from Google, with its rising popularity, and Anthropic's Claude, which delivers results people are willing to pay for; it seems OpenAI is stuck. The company's bet on Nvidia hardware and massive datacenter presence has trapped them in an insanely expensive model that cannot compete with Google, and its own failings have ensured it cannot compete with Anthropic.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Verge ☛ The EFF is quitting X

      The digital privacy non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation will no longer be posting on X as of Thursday, largely due to a sharp decline in views on the platform over the past several years. In a blog post announcing the departure, EFF’s social media and video manager Kenyatta Thomas explained that the non-profit used to get 50 to 100 million impressions per month on X, but that has changed.

      “Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.”

    • EFF ☛ EFF is Leaving X [Ed: So EFF quits MElon hate hub NOT based on principles, based on "traffic" alone. No principles then. iophk: it exposes the EFF's actual values (or lack thereof)]

      We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.

    • The Verge ☛ Mastodon is about to launch its take on Bluesky’s starter packs

      Mastodon is preparing to roll out “Collections” in the next few weeks, a feature that allows you to find and create lists of accounts worth following, according to an announcement on Thursday. Collections, which take inspiration from Bluesky Starter Packs, will come with the ability to add up to 25 accounts to a single list.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Social media addiction? This detox could reverse a decade of damage.

      The young woman described to a jury what it was like to lose control of her life to social media.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Dark Reading ☛ ‘BlueHammer’ Windows Exploit Signals Microsoft Disclosure Issues

      This apparent lack of patience with Microsoft comes as no surprise to Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), who said his company has had "similar frustrations with the MSRC in the past, too."

      "I've heard from more than one researcher who has said they don’t work on Microsoft bugs anymore because the disclosure process is too frustrating," Childs tells Dark Reading.

    • The Register UK ☛ Criminal wannabes even more dangerous than the pros

      "Ransomware was a slower evolution for me to realize that's who is stealing from us today, that's the threat facing us today - it's not the potential catastrophic threat of tomorrow," Kaiser said. "I'm also really angry about ransomware because ransomware targets hospitals today, it kills people today."

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK: Man arrested over theft of 56K Hospital Authority patients’ personal data

      Police identified the 30-year-old suspect as an employee of a systems maintenance contractor hired by the Hospital Authority. The HA said over the weekend that personal information belonging to patients in the Kowloon East cluster was leaked onto a “third-party platform.”

    • American Oversight ☛ Groups Sue Trump Admin for Records on Medicaid Data Sharing with Immigration Enforcement

      Thursday, the National Health Law Program (NHeLP) and American Oversight filed suit against the Trump administration for failing to release records related to a sweeping federal policy enabling the sharing of Medicaid enrollee data with immigration enforcement agencies.

      The lawsuit comes amid a broader pattern of reported data sharing and use across the administration for immigration enforcement, including Medicaid data from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), taxpayer data from the Internal Revenue Service, and traveler data from the Transportation Security Administration. This pattern has also raised serious concerns about how the administration is handling sensitive personal information, including reported instances in which federal officials improperly disclosed confidential taxpayer data.

    • NL Times ☛ Camera scanning cars issue 500,000 unjustified parking fines per year, regulator says

      More and more Dutch municipalities are using camera scanning cars to check parked cars, and then use an AI algorithm to determine whether they are parked illegally or without paying. These automatic scanners are able to check many more cars than an enforcement officer on foot, but also result in around 500,000 unjustified fines per year, the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) calculated based on data from municipalities.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Telenor faces lawsuit for giving Myanmar junta customer data

      A Swedish non-profit has filed a class action lawsuit against Norway's Telenor, accusing it of endangering customers in Myanmar by sharing their data with the junta. The company said it had no real choice.

    • BoingBoing ☛ CIA's Ghost Murmur detected airman's heartbeat at 40 miles

      The CIA deployed a classified technology called Ghost Murmur, developed by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works division. According to unnamed sources cited by Newsweek — details the outlet could not independently verify — it uses quantum magnetometry to detect the electromagnetic signature of a human heartbeat, then applies AI to filter that signal from environmental noise. An unnamed source described it as "like hearing a voice in a stadium. In the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you."

    • Newsweek ☛ What Is Ghost Murmur? Secretive CIA Tool Linked to Iran Airman Rescue - Newsweek

      An anonymous source told The Post the swathe of Iran where the airman was sheltering was "about as clean an environment as you could ask for," with few other people in the area and little to interfere with the new tactics.

      The Ghost Murmur works "best in remote, low-clutter environments," this person said.

      Trump said the airman, currently identified only as a colonel, had used a "very sophisticated beeper-type apparatus" U.S. military personnel carry to communicate his location from the mountain ridgeline.

    • ADF ☛ ‘Invasive’ Surveillance Tech Violates Africans’ Freedoms

      A shadowy industry is thriving alongside Africa’s digital boom: mass-surveillance systems powered by artificial intelligence. As Chinese-built surveillance technology is proliferating across the continent, experts are warning that it is a dangerous threat to citizens’ rights.

    • Hindustan Times ☛ ‘Face as passport’: Bengaluru airport trials paperless biometric travel system

      The trial covered the entire passenger journey, from booking tickets and managing travel plans to moving through the airport, using biometric technology only. Instead of physical documents, passengers were identified through a secure digital identity linked to their face. This allowed them to cross checkpoints like entry, security and boarding without manual verification at every step, said a joint press release.

    • Security Week ☛ 300,000 People Impacted by Eurail Data Breach

      The incident was initially disclosed in January, when the company warned that customers who were issued a Eurail pass might have been affected.

      The data was stolen after [intruders] breached the Netherlands-based company’s network and stole files containing basic identity and contact information.

    • Osservatorio Nessuno ☛ Italian spyware maker SIO still developing and distributing Spyrtacus

      We analyzed a 2025 sample of the Spyrtacus spyware, version 8.71. Among its capabilities it can record the screen and take screenshots, record voice calls, export WhatsApp messages, upload files, and dynamically execute downloaded modules. We confirm attribution to SIO S.p.A. and provide a small set of IoCs to detect infections of this malware family.

  • Confidentiality

    • GreyCoder ☛ Comparing Bitwarden, Proton Pass, LastPass and 1Password - GreyCoder

      Only Bitwarden offers self‑hosting, which is valuable if you want full control over your data and infrastructure.

    • Tim Bray ☛ Password Manager Angst

      Our family has used 1Password for many years. Most recently 1Password 7, now at least three years out of date. We didn’t want to upgrade to the latest version, went looking for alternatives, and have been exploring Bitwarden. The best choice isn’t obvious; here’s the story thus far.

• Defence/Aggression

  • France24 ☛ Jihadists kill Nigerian troops including senior brigadier general

    Jihadists in northeast Nigeria killed several troops including a brigadier general in an assault on a military base, local government and intelligence sources told AFP on Thursday, the second killing of a high-ranking officer in five months.

  • Vox ☛ It should be much easier to remove Donald Trump from office

    While it is theoretically possible to remove Trump from office (or, at least, to strip him of his powers permanently) using the amendment, the removal process is too cumbersome, has too many failure points, and requires too much of a bipartisan consensus to be an effective method of removing a president who is merely bad at being president, rather than one who is literally incapable of performing their duties.

    The 25th Amendment was enacted shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, and was intended to solve a different problem than the one the United States faces today — what if the president of the United States was still alive, but was physically or mentally incapacitated in a way that prevented him from exercising the powers of office?

  • ADF ☛ Survivors of Russia’s War Bear Hidden Costs

    With his hands in bandages and his voice shaking, the Kenyan man wore a mask to hide his identity because he lives in fear of retribution from Russian authorities. Speaking publicly for the first time, he described the “living hell” he experienced after being lured to Russia under false pretenses and forced to fight in the war against Ukraine.

    “I thought I was signing a basketball contract,” he told the BBC in a February podcast. “I was tricked, and I don’t want any Kenyans or Africans to be tricked in the same way I was.”

  • The Independent UK ☛ British man Jermaine Grant charged with directing activities of Somali terror group Al-Shabaab

    He is also charged with three counts of attending an Al-Shabaab commando training camp in Kismayu in Somalia, contrary to Section 8 of the Terrorism Act 2006 and two counts of possession of an article (AK47) for terrorist purposes, contrary to Section 57 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Greece plans to ban social media for kids

    The new rules come amid wider scrutiny over social media’s impact on young people: A verdict in a recent US case found Instagram and YouTube were deliberately built to be addictive, and the EU is probing the impacts of social media on mental health.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Finnair Captain: GPS spoofing and jamming are a daily nuisance

    A Finnair aircraft experienced some difficulty landing in Kirkenes on Monday, 6 April. Finnair has confirmed that this was due to GPS spoofing.

    The aircraft attempted to land twice. The second attempt was successful, whereas the first was disrupted.

  • YLE ☛ Farmers protest outside parliament over food supply concerns

    "Food is running out. Farms are decreasing in number and the harvests aren't improving so much that food is sufficient in stores and many other places," explained Salmu, who is also an administrator of a Facebook group called Tractor March 2026 (Traktorimarssi 2026 in Finnish).

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Pope Leo SLAMS Trump’s threat to wipe out Iran’s civilization as “truly unacceptable” and urges Americans to call their senators and representatives to end this madness now

    This is the kind moral leadership that the world is starving for right now. The United States has lost its leadership role on the world stage because the president has crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed. He has his finger on the nuclear button and 93 million Iranians in his sights. Even if he does back down — and we fervently pray that he will — we must hold him accountable. This man and everyone who enabled him must be prosecuted and imprisoned for life. War criminals belong behind bars.

  • Greece ☛ Social media ban to affect Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat

    A proposed ban on children younger than 15 using social media platforms will stop access to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat as of January 1, 2027 for anyone born from 2012 on, the conservative government said Wednesday.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Hegseth, the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, and Mark Twain

    Upon hearing these words emerge from my radio as I was driving to work, I was reminded of the words of two Epically Furious theologians – furious at those who would cloak their idolatrous lust for military triumph with the mantle of God.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Former Army employee charged with leaking classified information to journalist

    A federal grand jury today charged Courtney Williams, 40, of Wagram, North Carolina, on a charge of willful transmission of national defense information, a violation of the Espionage Act. She was arrested on Tuesday and the FBI Charlotte Field Office is investigating the case.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Walls Are Closing In

    Read that sequence again. Trump fires Bondi on April 2. The DOJ uses the firing as the legal mechanism to dodge the subpoena on April 8. The firing and the dodge are not separate events. They are one operation.

  • The Dissenter ☛ DOJ Targets Fort Bragg Whistleblower With Espionage Act Charge

    The case against Williams is the second Espionage Act prosecution against a media source during President Donald Trump's second term.

    Three months ago, Representative Anna Paulina Luna proposed a subpoena against Harp and then referred Harp to the Justice Department for prosecution. Harp shared information from a public profile on Duke University’s website that identified a Delta Force commander, whose men were reportedly involved in kidnapping Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro.

  • NPR ☛ Bill Gates will testify in the Epstein probe; Pam Bondi testimony postponed

    Gates, who has denied having any knowledge of Epstein's crimes, will sit for a closed-door transcribed interview on June 10, according to a source familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share the details publicly. Gates' scheduled appearance was first reported by MSNOW.

• Environment

  • Harvard University ☛ Why are communities pushing back against data centers?

    Tech, data policy expert says concerns legitimate over rising power rates, water use, environmental issues amid mushrooming growth

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Finland’s nuclear waste vault in ancient rock nears operations

    Nuclear waste has long posed a challenge for the energy sector. While nuclear power produces low carbon emissions, the spent fuel remains dangerously radioactive for millennia, requiring isolation from humans and the environment.

    At Onkalo, that solution lies hundreds of meters underground. Waste will be sealed in copper canisters and buried in tunnels carved into stable bedrock, where multiple layers of protection are designed to prevent leaks.

  • Oklahoma Energy Today ☛ Reputation grows for Oklahoma data center opponent - Oklahoma Energy Today

    Blanchard agrees with those in Montana who raised concerns about the extensive amounts of water that would be needed. He explained many towns like Broadview are so-called “tank towns” where water is trucked in to the community.

  • Robert Bryce ☛ Europe To Big Tech: We Don’t Want You, Either

    Last week, in Claremore, Oklahoma, a man named Darren Blanchard was arrested during a heated public hearing over a proposed data center. Blanchard, who was speaking against the project, reportedly exceeded his allotted time in front of the Claremore City Council by about 30 seconds. For that infraction, he was arrested by Claremore police and charged with trespassing. Blanchard and other Claremore residents are fighting a data center being pushed by Beale Infrastructure, a company that is backed by Blue Owl Capital, an asset management firm that recently financed a Meta data center project in Louisiana. (I wrote about the Blue Owl/Meta project last November because the financing deal reeks of Enron. Blue Owl recently restricted redemptions in one of its private funds, and its stock price has plummeted.)

    There’s more.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Worries grow in Norway as Murmansk becomes Russia's main oil export hub

    Massive drone attacks this week on the major Baltic terminals of Primorsk and Ust-Luga have left Russia with few remaining routes for exporting oil, increasing reliance on the Kola Peninsula. In Norway, concerns are growing over the ecological risks posed by ageing “shadow fleet” tankers operating along the coast.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ 37 years on, no signs of leakage from plutonium warheads

    Leakage of caesium-137 and strontium-90 from the nuclear reactor has been confirmed, but there is no evidence that these isotopes are accumulating in the marine environment.

  • [Old] Neritam ☛ The Ocean Surface Is Warming Over 400% Faster Than in The 1980s

    They found the underlying rate of warming was about 0.06 °C back in the 80s, but that’s now increased to 0.27 °C per decade. The team notes this is not a linear increase but an accelerating one.

    While some of the excess heat was indeed driven by the recent El Niño, the researchers calculate that about 44 percent of it was due to the oceans absorbing heat much faster than anticipated over the last decade.

  • CBC ☛ Emperor penguins now endangered as climate change shrinks sea ice

    The number of chicks and other non-breeding penguins is not known, partly because the remote Antarctic region is so difficult to monitor. The assessment says that, depending how much the planet warms, emperor penguin populations could fall by 30 to 59 per cent over the next three generations.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ As Their Antarctic Habitat Melts Away, Emperor Penguins Are Now Considered an Endangered Species

    “Sea ice is their primary habitat,” says Philip Trathan, a member of the IUCN’s penguin specialist group, to CNN’s Andrew Freedman. “As sea ice decreases, their habitat also decreases. Major sea ice loss … will likely reduce breeding success and adult survival in the long term.”

    The news comes on the heels of a study published in February that found that the birds’ catastrophic molt might be putting them at risk of extinction in the warming world.

  • International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources ☛ Emperor penguin and Antarctic fur seal now Endangered due to climate change – IUCN Red List

    “These listings are not only sobering for two iconic animals; they reflect what is happening to penguins and seals globally,” said Dr Kathleen Flower, Vice President of Biodiversity Science at Conservation International. “Their decline underscores how quickly ecosystems are being degraded and how the compounding impacts of warming accelerate food scarcity, emerging disease, and habitat loss. The result is rapidly increasing extinction risk for many species. The Red List is an essential tool, but it must be adequately resourced and strengthened with climate‑informed science to identify risks and help reduce climate‑driven extinctions."

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The “Moderate” Think Tank Pushing Dems to Loosen AI Rules

      Ascendant DC think tank Searchlight Institute, pushing Democrats to the center, has ties to megadonor Simone Coxe, whose Nvidia-linked money could boost AI-backed efforts to defend data center build-outs and limit AI regulation.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Bicycle bell designed to defeat noise-cancelling headphones

      Škoda's DuoBell is designed to be heard by people wearing high-end headphones, inexpensively blowing through active noise cancellation without being ridiculously loud or unnecessarily "smart." It's a "simple analog solution" with has no electrical components and sounds like a normal bike bell. But in the harmonics is a magic note: 750 Hz.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Southwest limits passengers to one portable charger

      The FAA logged 97 air incidents involving lithium batteries in the year prior to the rule, up from previous years, in a trend that has been climbing since 2020. The incidents include smoke, fire, and extreme heat from battery packs, phones, laptops, vapes, and e-cigarettes. Southwest VP of Safety Dave Hunt cited those numbers as the reason for the policy.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Watch These Rock-Climbing Fish Scale a 50-Foot Waterfall in the Congo Basin, the First Known Evidence of This Behavior in Africa

      “Who would have believed it without being close enough to check, and document it with photographic and film material, that indeed some fish are able to ​climb waterfalls?” says study co-author Pacifique Kiwele Mutambala, an ichthyologist at the University of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), to Reuters’ Marta Serafinko. “It illustrates that there are wonders out there that surpass our imagination.”

    • The Scotsman ☛ Pioneering wildlife cameraman Doug Allan dies in Nepal

      Mr Allan is credited with capturing extraordinary and often never-before-seen wildlife behaviour, helping to shape how global audiences understand and connect with some of the planet’s most remote and fragile environments.

    • The Tyee ☛ They Cut Down ‘Grandpapa’

      Young trees can’t replace old trees — not, at least, until they grow old. One of the most remarkable findings about older trees is that the holes that form in their trunks and limbs make them skyscrapers of the animal world. Scientists in Australia found some 300 animal species using tree hollows, without even including insects. Hole-nesting birds — a group that includes local feathered friends like flickers, chickadees and tree swallows — depend on trees that have hollows or wood soft enough for birds to make hollows in. Few trees reach that point until they pass 50 years of age. Douglas fir trees, common in Vancouver, typically don’t form cavities until they’ve lived a century.

    • BBC ☛ Want to help garden birds? Don't feed them in warmer months, says RSPB - BBC News

      The UK's largest bird charity has issued new guidance advising people to stop using feeders to help wildlife thrive.

  • Overpopulation

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ How much water lies underground? Scientists finally have an answer

      Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Arizona took data from about 800,000 wells and applied a machine-learning model to estimate the depth of the water table nationwide.

    • Western Water ☛ EPA Rule Sparks Fight Over Water Authority

      A group of U.S. Senators led by California Senator Alex Padilla. raised strong concerns yesterday about a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency. The rule would change how Section 401 of the Clean Water Act. is applied, a provision that has long allowed states and Tribal governments to review and approve projects that may affect their water.

    • ADF ☛ A Rising Tide of Water Wars

      Disagreements like this are repeated to varying degrees across Africa’s 63 major river basins as countries jostle to secure future water and energy supplies, turning water security into a geopolitical flashpoint. Changing weather patterns, characterized by frequent and longer droughts, shorter rainy seasons and higher temperatures, make water increasingly scarce, increasing the potential for conflict.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • TruthOut ☛ Democrats Are Facing New Political Litmus Test: Military Aid to Israel

    Recently, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has emerged as a major point of contention in Democratic midterms, as candidates have moved to distance themselves from the deeply unpopular pro-Israel lobbying group.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft developer chief Julia Liuson is logging off

    Liuson is part of Microsoft's CoreAI division, introduced by CEO Satya Nadella in January 2025 and headed by EVP Jay Parikh, former head of engineering at Meta, who joined the company in October 2024. Liuson also assumed responsibility for GitHub when its CEO Thomas Dohmke stepped down in August 2025, at which time GitHub became part of CoreAI.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Appeals court rejects Anthropic’s bid to block Pentagon blacklisting

    The disagreement began earlier in the year during failed negotiations over a $200 million contract. The dispute centered on Anthropic’s reluctance to allow the DOD to use its Claude system “for all lawful purposes.” The company warned that such vague language could open the door to uses it opposes, including mass surveillance of U.S. citizens or autonomous weapons systems.

  • Wired ☛ OpenAI Backs Bill That Would Limit Liability for AI-Enabled Mass Deaths or Financial Disasters

    The effort seems to mark a shift in OpenAI’s legislative strategy. Until now, OpenAI has largely played defense, opposing bills that could have made AI labs liable for their technology’s harms. Several AI policy experts tell WIRED that SB 3444—which could set a new standard for the industry—is a more extreme measure than bills OpenAI has supported in the past.

  • New Statesman ☛ AI's sinister takeover of British politics

    Writing a law is not something for which there is a technological solution. It is not a perfectible process, it is a moral act that requires belief and responsibility. It is a process of debate. As MPs, advisers and lobbyists know, the real business of our constitution happens in the background – in emails, notes, agendas. If everyone involved is asking the same software to condense emails and write replies, if they are reading research and updates and memos composed by the same software, that software increasingly assumes the power of the people who previously did the thinking. Reading is thinking, and writing is thinking, and thinking is power. And when the inefficiencies of human thought, deliberation and opinion are cleared aside, we are left asking: who is in charge?

  • Techdirt ☛ Tech Lobbyists Are Trying To Kill Colorado’s Popular ‘Right To Repair’ Law

    There’s a meaningful push afoot to implement statewide “right to repair” laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws.

    Passage can be a challenge due to the relentless lobbying of numerous industries that very much enjoy a monopoly over repair (especially tech and auto). New York State’s law, for example, was watered down by NY Governor Kathy Hochul after passage because tech companies didn’t like it.

  • Karl Bode ☛ Whoops, The Tech Press Mythologized Another Unethical Asshole

    It's so weird that this keeps happening.

    But it appears that the U.S. tech press has once again spent years mythologizing a compulsive liar and rank opportunist who hides his self-serving financial interests behind stale sci-fi tropes and bullshit while endlessly failing upward.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ OpenAI IPO proceeds — even as CFO says the company is ‘not ready’

    There’s just the minor issue that when you do an IPO, your SEC S-1 filing needs to be an audited document that’s not a tyre fire. OpenAI’s own Chief Financial Officer, Sarah Friar, says the company is not ready at all: [...]

  • India Times ☛ Stripe appoints Manish Maheshwari as India head of revenue and growth

    Maheshwari brings more than twenty years of experience across technology, [Internet] platforms, and startups. He has held senior roles at Twitter, Flipkart, and Intuit, and has also founded ventures such as Fanory. ai.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Outpaced by the US, China’s military places selective bets on artificial intelligence

    The Chinese navy is enhancing its guided-missile frigate, the Qinzhou, with an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm designed to illuminate blind spots during air defense engagements, an official military website said.

  • [Old] Seattle Times ☛ Convicted Felons Handle Gates Fortune

    In recent months, for example, Goldman, Sachs & Co., Morgan Stanley & Co. and Alex. Brown & Sons have separately showered the Gates accounts with thousands of shares of red-hot stock offerings, including those of Peoplesoft Inc. and Compuware Corp. These allocations of initial public offerings enabled Gates and Evans to reap immediate, substantial paper profits.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • New York Times ☛ How Iran’s Information War Machine Operates Online

      The New York Times reconstructed how Iran was able to use overt and covert global networks alongside unwitting participants to spread its message through social media, state-affiliated news organizations and American influencers.

      Here is how the claim went from a single post to a global audience of millions in 69 minutes.

    • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Fact-check: How Kremlin disinformation targets Hungary's election

      For weeks, Russian propagandists and bot networks have pushed falsehoods about alleged attempts by Brussels and Kyiv to sway the vote, or even steal it in a "Maidan-style coup."

      The methods deployed by Kremlin disinformation have included spreading fake content posing as established media — including the Kyiv Independent.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Russian man who joked his way onto ‘foreign agent’ list gets suspended sentence

    A Russian court has sentenced Marat Nikandrov, a Moscow Region resident who in 2023 was designated as a foreign agent by Russian authorities on the basis of his own application, to eight months on a suspended sentence, the Russian business news outlet RBC reported, citing the court ruling. He was also given a one-year probationary period.

  • Meduza ☛ Russia’s internet regulator bans site that tracks which VPNs still work in the country

    The service was launched on March 18 by blogger and politician Maxim Katz to track which VPN services were still working in Russia. Katz described it as a nonprofit effort in which “volunteers in Moscow with no special technical skills” test the services. He said the method was simple: “They just turn them on and see if they work.”

  • Techdirt ☛ Someone Filed a Bogus DMCA Notice to Kill a Story About A Sketchy SEO Firm. It Worked — Briefly.

    We’ve talked for years about how the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown system is ripe for abuse. The legal structure of the law practically begs for such abuse: send a notice, content disappears, and the target has to fight through a slow counter-notice process to maybe get it back. The system rewards speed of takedowns over accuracy because the burden of getting it wrong really only works one way. Sites have incentive to take content down first and ask questions later to avoid facing expensive liability. Getting it wrong may frustrate those whose content has disappeared, but there’s basically no legal cost to the platform. But if they get something wrong and leave infringing content up, they could face a very expensive legal bill. Which means anyone with something to hide and no particular attachment to honesty has a ready-made censorship tool at their disposal.

  • TruthOut ☛ Pentagon Reportedly Threatened First American Pope for Criticizing Trump

    According to Christopher Hale of the Substack blog Letters From Leo, who independently confirmed the meeting had taken place, Vatican officials took the remarks about the Avignon papacy as “a threat to use military force against the Holy See.”

  • FAIR ☛ US’s Erosion of the Right to Cartoon Is No Laughing Matter

    Hegseth’s anti-comics viewpoint is part of a global trend. Cartooning for Peace, Cartoonists Rights, Reporters Without Borders and several others have teamed up to produce Under Pressure; the March 2 report surveys the status of caricaturists around the world.

  • [Old] Sinclair Inc ☛ Data center opponent pleads not guilty to trespassing charge

    The day after the meeting Claremore police posted a statement saying in part, "He was ordered removed by the City Manager, but refused to do so. Officers again told the man to leave, but he said, “I’m not gonna leave,” and continued with the behaviors that caused him to be expelled. Officers were left with no choice but to arrest him."

    "I’ve watched the video, I never have seen them ask him to leave one time," said Boegemann.

  • RFERL ☛ Nobel-Winners Memorial Labeled 'Extremist' By Russian Court

    Since its ban inside Russia, Memorial has been operating mainly from abroad to support hundreds of political prisoners still inside the country.

  • Meduza ☛ Novaya Gazeta journalist detained in Moscow on suspicion of illegally using personal data

    Security forces had earlier searched Novaya Gazeta’s Moscow offices. The Russian state news agency TASS said the search was connected to the case against Roldugin.

    Roldugin was taken to the Main Investigative Directorate of the Interior Ministry in Moscow for questioning after a search of his apartment that morning, Novaya Gazeta reported. As of 5:00 p.m., his lawyer had not been granted access to him.

  • The Record ☛ Russia accuses former Radio Free Europe journalist of aiding cyberattacks for Ukraine

    In a statement to state-owned media, the FSB said the suspect joined a Telegram channel controlled by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and passed information about a local print publication covering Russia’s war in Ukraine, as well as data about a critical infrastructure facility in the region. Authorities said the information was used to assist cyberattacks.

  • Meduza ☛ NTV pundit says he left Russia after FSB agents threatened him at home

    Victor Olevich, a political analyst who appears as an American affairs expert on a propaganda show on NTV, a Russian state-controlled television channel, said he has left Russia after coming under pressure from the Federal Security Service (FSB). He wrote about it on Facebook.

    FSB agents came to his home with “direct threats” in December and again in early February, he wrote.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Collateral damage: Svalbard governor’s website blocked in Russia

    Websites belonging to the Governor of Svalbard and the newspaper Svalbardposten have become inaccessible from within Russia. When users attempt to visit these sites, the pages fail to load; however, they can still be accessed using a VPN.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Murmansk activist Violetta Grudina faces charges for “discrediting the army”

    In December 2025, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that mass searches and the freezing of bank accounts belonging to Navalny supporters constituted political persecution. The court awarded Grudina and other activists €10,000 each in compensation for non-pecuniary damage.

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Cherkessk resident charged with extremism over ‘anti-Russian statements’

    The detention of the Cherkessk resident, whose name has not been disclosed, was carried out by officers of the Interior Ministry’s Centre for Combating Extremism (Centre ‘E’), together with the regional Federal Security Service (FSB) directorate and with the support of National Guard troops (Rosgvardiya). The press service of the Interior Ministry for Karachay-Cherkessia said that law enforcement officers were alerted by the suspect’s activity on an online platform.

  • La Prensa ☛ Nicaragua Holy Week Begins Under Government Repression, Church Processions Restricted

    The image of Jesús del Triunfo was unable to take to the streets, Palm Sunday processions were held inside churches under surveillance by plainclothes police, and the dictatorship attempted to project—through photographs—a religious freedom that does not exist

  • The Strategist ☛ From lecture halls to jail cells: the rising risks of university research

    Western governments are tightening export controls to safeguard military and industrial advantages amid rising geostrategic uncertainty. Western universities are thus increasingly forced to reconcile their dual roles as producers of tightly controlled research and development on one hand and as hubs of global knowledge exchange on the other.

  • YLE ☛ Thursday's papers: A mythbuster's opinion, moving out of the city, and Finnish Language Day

    Hyneman said he was frustrated by feelings that he cannot freely comment about things back home in the US.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ US: Pentagon must restore journalists' access, judge says

    In October 2025, the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said journalists could be deemed security risks and thus have their press badges revoked if they solicited unauthorized military personnel to disclose classified, and in some cases unclassified, information.

    Only one of 56 news outlets in the Pentagon Press Association agreed to sign an acknowledgment of the new policy, with the rest having to hand in their press passes and report on the Pentagon from outside the facility.

    The New York Times led a lawsuit challenging the new policy, and Friedman ruled in the journalists' favor on March 20, saying the policy violated protections for news gathered and due process in the US Constitution.

    He required the immediate restoration of reporters' access.

  • ANF News ☛ Dedeoğlu: Journalism bodies must be more courageous

    Turgut Dedeoğlu summarized the growing pressure on the press by saying, “The government holds a stick in its hand like the sword of Damocles and constantly swings it over journalists’ heads.” Dedeoğlu underlined that journalism, whether it pleases those in power or not, is responsible for informing the public accurately and continued: “If it were not for free press journalist Abdurrahman Gök, we would not have known or seen how a young man named Kemal Kurkut was killed during the 2017 Newroz. With the photographs he took that day, Abdurrahman Gök conveyed the truth to the public; he received an award but was also imprisoned by the state. Likewise, if journalist Nazim Daştan, who was killed together with his colleague Cihan Bilgin while covering news in Rojava, Syria, had not existed, we would not have learned that Taybet Inan was killed in Silopi during the curfew period and that her body was left in the streets for days. Or most recently, if journalist Hatice Duman from a prison magazine group had not been reported on by Pınar Gayıp, how would we have known that a journalist had been imprisoned for 30 years? Without the reports produced by journalists, we would struggle to grasp the truth in this country.”

  • CPJ ☛ Moscow police raid Novaya Gazeta, detain journalist Oleg Roldugin 

    “The search of Novaya Gazeta’s office in Moscow and the detention of journalist Oleg Roldugin mark the latest escalation in years of pressure exerted by Russian authorities on the media outlet,” said CPJ Chief Programs Officer Carlos Martínez de la Serna. “Officials must immediately release journalist Oleg Roldugin and allow Novaya Gazeta’s staff to work without fear of retaliation.”

    Seven hours after the start of the search, the newspaper reported that its lawyers were still not allowed to enter the building. The search continued for at least 12 hours. During that time, more than 10 employees with the media outlet had to remain inside the building and were unable to be contacted.

  • RFERL ☛ Russia's FSB Detains, Accuses Former RFE/RL Freelancer Of Treason

    Last week, a news outlet called Chita.ru cited unnamed sources saying that a man named Aleksandr A. had been detained. The outlet identified Aleksandr as the head of a local political party.

    Two other people were also detained around the same time, the outlet said.

  • CPJ ☛ South Sudan’s new cybercrime law ramps up threat of jail for journalists

    South Sudanese human rights activist and researcher James Bidal told CPJ that the Act’s vague definitions of “false or misleading information” (Section 44) and “undesirable content” (Section 42) leave journalists and other citizens in a dangerous position of “legal uncertainty” as these terms can be interpreted subjectively by authorities.

  • ANF News ☛ Journalists’ appeals against travel ban rejected without grounds

    Resul Tamur recalled that, as in every hearing, their requests to lift the travel ban were also rejected at the last hearing held on 20 January and noted that the court has so far provided no justification for this decision. Tamur said: “We can clearly say that the decision is disproportionate, as it lacks any reasoning and has no identifiable basis. In addition, the absence of any time limit for the continuation of this measure constitutes a separate problem. We are now facing an indefinite travel ban or an indefinite judicial control measure. These decisions continue in an uncertain manner, with no clarity as to how long they will last. Their uncertain, disproportionate and indefinite nature clearly obstructs the professional activities of journalists and places them in a position of victimization.”

  • International Business Times ☛ Who Is Seth Harp? Journalist at Center of Delta Force Secrets Leak Involving Army Veteran Courtney Williams

    According to court documents, Williams, who served with Delta Force, provided Harp with sensitive tactics and procedures that are considered classified at the SECRET level. The case has brought national attention to the journalist and the controversial disclosure of elite military information.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Truthdig ☛ The US Is Dumping Elderly Migrants in Mexico Without ID, Money or Phones

    On March 25, the Trump administration informed a federal court that it has deported about 6,000 Cubans to Mexico under an “unwritten” deal in which Mexico agreed to receive them. For the past year, Villahermosa has been receiving a steady flow of non-Mexican deportees, mostly Haitians and Cubans, who are elderly or medically vulnerable. They have no ties to Mexico, and they are arriving in Villahermosa without documents, without phones and with no institutions or loved ones waiting for them. They are stranded in a migratory limbo: too invisible for anyone to care about them, struggling with their health and too old to start over.

  • Wired ☛ Meta Cafeteria Workers Did What Execs Won’t: Took on ICE and Won

    Under a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement program, federal authorities had detained Serigne, a Senegalese asylum seeker and the brother of dishwasher Abdoul Mbengue. “I didn’t know what to do at first, but we had this community, and I told them this news,” Mbengue says through a coworker who is translating his French.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘I had poked the bear right in the eye’: my fight to renounce my Russian citizenship

    When Putin invaded Ukraine, he raised murder to the level of national policy. I felt guilt by association. And I had to act

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Extreme wealth concentration — as strong as ever

    Longer answer: The “lifetime equivalent hourly wage” that I calculated in my book was assuming Musk would never take holidays, work 50 hours a week and work until 65. His 809 billion estimated assets would then translate into an hourly equivalent wage of 6,914,530 dollars per hour (hence almost 7 million per hour). Assuming he works 70 hours a week and until he turns 75, it would still amount to 4,938,950 dollars per hour – almost 5 million per hour.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Record ☛ FCC proposes new rule to further crackdown on illegal robocalls

    The FCC on Thursday said it is considering a new rule meant to combat robocalls that would force originating providers to gather more information from customers before they allow calls, verify the provided data more carefully and be assessed steeper penalties when they fail to stop illegal robocalls from being made on their networks.

  • Techdirt ☛ Musk, Bezos, Both Cry To Trump’s FCC In Bid To Dominate Satellite Broadband

    Both billionaires are hoping to leverage their ongoing support of Trump to their own benefit. Both have already had significant success on that front; Musk and Bezos convinced the Trump administration to redirect billions in infrastructure bill subsidies (earmarked for reliable, faster fiber) over to their LEO satellite broadband businesses for service they already planned to deploy.

    I’m not inclined to believe either billionaire or their companies. Nor am I inclined to believe that FCC boss Brendan Carr has the integrity or competence to manage this dispute or to protect the public longer term. Starlink has recently seen several satellites blow up in orbit and has been very murky about the reasons for it. Tens of thousands more LEO satellites are slated for launch in the next few years.

  • US Navy Times ☛ US Navy introduces free Wi-Fi to barracks in Greece, Italy

    “This initiative is a direct reflection of our unwavering commitment to the well-being of our sailors,” said Vice Adm. Scott Gray, commander of Navy Installations Command. “Providing free, high-speed Wi-Fi is a fundamental step in improving their quality of life, ensuring they have the connectivity they need for personal and professional growth.”

  • Logikal Solutions ☛ Starlink - Catastrophic Architectural Failure

    Starlink has a catastrophic architectural failure which is a shining example of why Agile can never be allowed even as close as the parking lot to any project of any size. If you attended a so-called University and they taught you Agile, you attended a Trump University and should sue to get your money back. Absolutely no business should recognize your degree.

    Agile is just hacking on the fly until the money runs out. Starlink is proof.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Now You Can Turn Off All of Spotify’s Video Content

    Just after rebranding itself as a multi-content platform, Spotify is rolling out new controls to stop video from playing alongside music and podcasts.

  • Wired ☛ Amazon Pulls Support for Perfectly Fine Older Kindles | WIRED [Anon: Amazon wants to phase out old Kindles"

    In an email to customers, Amazon announced that it would be ending service for Kindle devices older than the 2012 edition. Those devices will lose access to the Kindle Store.

  • CNET ☛ Amazon Is Pulling Support for Kindles From 2012 or Earlier. What to Do Now - CNET

    If there's a book you've been waiting to read on your old Kindle device, make sure you download it before May 20.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Register UK ☛ Microsoft locks out top open source devs, blames process

  Mounir Idrassi and Jason Donenfeld, the developers behind VeraCrypt and WireGuard respectively, both recently reported that Microsoft locked them out of their developer accounts for reasons unknown to them.

  Idrassi publicized his experience on March 30, saying: "Microsoft did not send me any emails or prior warnings. I have received no explanation for the termination and their message indicates that no appeal is possible.

• Rolling Stone ☛ Live Nation Trial: Closing Arguments to Begin Today

  Live Nation’s fate will soon be with a jury as closing arguments in the blockbuster antitrust case begin today, April 9.

  The more than 30 states suing Live Nation and Ticketmaster will make one last push to convince the jurors that the company — with its dominant position in ticketing, concert promotions, and venues — is a monopoly that exerts outsized control over the live entertainment industry. Live Nation’s lawyers will likely emphasize their argument that the company has succeeded on its own merits, its dominance rooted in the better quality products and services it offers compared to its competitors.

• Copyrights

  • Techdirt ☛ A Baseless Copyright Claim Against A Web Host — And Why It Failed

    That should have been the end of it. Instead, the firm demanded payment.

    So EFF stepped in as May First’s counsel and explained why AFP and Higbee had no valid claim. After receiving our response, Higbee backed down.

    This outcome is a reminder that targets of copyright demands often have strong defenses—especially when someone else posted the material.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Copyright row: Delhi HC refers dispute over ‘Oye Oye’ song in Dhurandhar 2 to mediation

    The suit alleged unauthorised use of the song ‘Tirchi Topiwale’ from the film Tridev in the track “Rang De Lal – Oye Oye”.