Leftovers

• C4ISRNET ☛ Army debuts data operations center to serve as information hub

  The armed forces have used data from military, intelligence and business sources for the past several years.

  Historically, that has been a somewhat cumbersome process, as different datasets are often separated from one another, necessitating different security clearances, or housed on different systems. The ADOC is meant to mitigate those issues, functioning as a kind of information hub.

• Ruben Schade ☛ www.rubenerd.au

  Now I can tell you’re all fascinated by this, but it leads to the obvious question of why. I’ve accumulated twenty years of inbound links, the majority of which will never be updated. Why do I this to myself? And why www?

  A few reasons. I’m tired of telling people I’m not in the US just because I write in English. I’ve started putting www back into my domains again, because I miss when we had a Web, not a small collection of social network silos. I’m also increasingly viewing ties to the current US administration as a geopolitical liability, if I’m being candid. Bringing it back in-house makes sense.

  Mostly though, I’m based in Australia. That also happens to be a sentence with six words.

• Dan Q ☛ The Lost Art of the Amusing WiFi Hotspot Name

  Long ago, you could move to a new area, scan for local WiFi networks, and fully expect to see a wonderful diversity of different network names. Some named for their locations, sure, but others named for people, or fandoms, or just “fun” ones.

• Kev Quirk ☛ I've Completed 100 Days To Offload (Again)

  101 posts in the last year; which means I've complete 100 Days to Offload for a second time! 🎉

• Science

  • ARRL ☛ The ARRL Solar Update

    Solar activity remained at low levels this week. Most of the C-class activity came from either Region 4414 or Region 4409, which has developed a delta spot in its intermediary area. All remaining spots were either stable or in slight decay, with Region 4406 rotating over the west limb by the end of the reporting period.

  • Rlang ☛ Developer Engagement and Bioconductor

    During the Chan Zuckerberg Institute’s Essential Open Source Software for Science cycle 6 funding round, the Bioconductor Community Manager, Maria Doyle, secured a grant to fund a developer engagement position for Bioconductor, and I was fortunate enough to be offered that role. I am Nick Cooley, and I’m excited to see what this role can bring to Bioconductor. My background is relatively diverse, I received my PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Missouri, and I worked on prokaryotic genomics and functional genomics at the University of Pittsburgh from 2017 to 2025.

• Career/Education

  • The Atlantic ☛ Is Schoolwork Optional Now?

    By the time Liu graduated, ChatGPT was already causing chaos in the classroom. But the automation of school is intensifying. If at first teachers worried about students using chatbots to write essays, now new agentic tools such as Claude Code are allowing students to outsource even more of their work to the machines. Need to take an online math quiz? Write a biology-lab report? Create a PowerPoint presentation for history class? AI can do all of this and more. One high schooler recently told me that he struggles to think of a single assignment that AI wouldn’t be able to do for him.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Many paths into mentoring: Building inclusive Code Clubs in Glasgow

    Across Glasgow’s libraries, Code Clubs are opening doors for young people to explore creativity, problem-solving, and confidence through coding. Behind many of these sessions is Claire Quigley, who supports volunteers and helps Code Clubs thrive in community spaces across the city.

• Hardware

  • Observer Research Foundation ☛ Redesigning the India-EU Semiconductor Partnership for Industrial Impact

    The 16th India-EU Summit, held on 27 January, produced the ’Towards 2030 Comprehensive Strategic Agenda’, which outlined the semiconductor provisions through joint R&D on chip design, heterogeneous integration, reciprocal talent exchanges, and a dedicated framework for AI chip applications. On paper, it is the most substantive institutional commitment the two partners have produced on technology cooperation.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Korean government to take action over soaring DRAM costs, including monitoring markets and pricing — [Internet] data plans to be restructured and recycled PCs to be distributed to vulnerable groups

    According to the former, Korea's central government dumped 22,000 computers last year, with more than half of those being scrapped despite being in working order or eligible for basic tasks after servicing. The rest are sold or donated to various organizations and groups. Now, the government plans to increase the number of these PC are reused, while also expanding support initiatives that provide PCs to vulnerable groups. Alongside these measures, the Herald reports the government will also expand a subsidy program that provides cash to low-income households to help with the purchase of PCs for students.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Ruben's Retro Corner: Home

    Welcome to Ruben's Retro Corner! This site is, first and foremost, a journey into abject nostalgia. I grew up in the 1990s, meaning the world of GeoCities, Tripod, Angelfire, animated GIFs, Netscape Navigator, and screeching dialup modems. Web 1.0 had many foibles: it was slow, it was expensive to host a lot of things, and it was slow (did I say that already?). But as I said at the start of the page, it was ours. Attention was something people gave you for making something fun, not something we fracked to extract all possible value.

  • Sal ☛ You can clean those "scratches" off ceramic dinnerware | Sal's

    I assumed the ceramic was getting scratched and slowly ruined, which bummed me out because I bought my wife a nice set of mugs last Christmas, and they were all starting to look like this. To my delight, I learned that these streaks are actually just superficial metal deposits from the silverware that can be removed with a cleaner like Barkeeper's Friend.

  • NVISO Labs ☛ Understanding Keyloggers: Risks and Defense Strategies

    One way to do this is through keyloggers. Keyloggers are tools that covertly record all keystrokes and transmit them to an attacker. Broadly, there are two types: software-based keyloggers and physical keyloggers. Malware keyloggers are often a secondary feature of so‑called stealer malware, which actively collects stored browser passwords, session cookies, tokens, and other secrets from the infected system and sends them to the attacker. Live keystroke recording is mostly an add‑on to modern stealer malware. However, kernel‑mode or user‑mode native keyloggers are much rarer but still exist as standalone malware in targeted attacks. Physical keyloggers, on the other hand, are hardware components—usually a cable or an inline device—physically connected to the system or a peripheral like the keyboard. However, there are also variants that are built directly into a keyboard, making them even less conspicuous. The captured data is then either stored on the device for later physical retrieval or accessed by the attacker wirelessly.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Artemis II Hello World photo was taken on a Nikon D5

    What’s interesting is why NASA is using a 10 year old camera? Well my best guess is that it’s proven and already certified for space flight.

  • Dedoimedo ☛ Slimbook Executive report 13 - Reasonable, can be awesomer

    Four months ago, I gave you the previous long-term report of this machine. Not my finest hour. Indeed, in the last two articles, I had my fair share of complaints about the firmware, about the operating system, about all sorts of unnecessary problems and regressions that beplagued my lovely, poor laptop. Not only that, probably the worst part of the whole story is that this Linux-flavored system used to work superbly, until it didn't.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Bill might make it easier to know what your baby's diaper is made of

    Child health, environmental and consumer advocates have grown concerned over what goes into making disposable diapers, which can contain chemicals, plastics and other ingredients linked to potential health and environmental risks, according to multiple studies, including a 2024 study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment. If approved, advocacy groups said the bill would give parents more information for decision-making and pressure manufacturers to avoid using ingredients they wouldn’t want to disclose.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Psilocybin mushrooms are going mainstream, but scientific research and regulation lag behind

    Importantly, research suggests that psilocin also alters the brain’s ability to strengthen or weaken neural connections, referred to as synaptic plasticity. This process likely underlies the profound and sometimes long-lasting effects psilocybin mushrooms can have on thoughts, emotions and perception.

  • Truthdig ☛ The Push for Artificial Inheritance

    In the months afterward, however, the project released a trickle of videos from the event on its YouTube page. One shows a talk by the theoretical physicist Stephen Hsu, who co-founded the IVF genetic testing company Genomic Prediction and, in 2020, resigned from a Michigan State University leadership role amid controversy. In it, he suggested the Lighthaven conference would shape the trajectory of humanity for generations to come: “I believe that future historians, when studying the moment in time when humans seized control of their own evolution as a species, they will highlight this meeting.”

    The Lighthaven meeting was yet another sign of an accelerating commercial push to begin manipulating human DNA in ways that could ripple through generations to come. Reporting last year indicated that three different startups — Bootstrap Bio, Manhattan Genomics and Preventive — were entertaining ambitions to develop and potentially deploy embryo editing technology in human pregnancies. According to a recent X post by Manhattan Genomics co-founder Cathy Tie, the company shut down in March due to “co-founder conflict,” and Tie has launched a new venture, Origin Genomics, that similarly aims to advance gene editing “at the earliest stages of life.”

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Smartphone use for 4-6 hours leading to new diseases: Adityanath calls for lifestyle changes

    Addressing the Cardiological Society of India conference, NIC-2026, at Atal Bihari Vajpayee Medical University, Adityanath highlighted the rapid spread of diabetes as a major challenge.

    He urged doctors and experts to promote a healthy lifestyle and a disciplined routine that avoids excessive smartphone use.

  • India Times ☛ AI chatbots offer children harm as if it were help, says activist

    "None of us is immune, when a machine can offer lethal guidance to a young person as if it were fact," he said.

  • Phillippine Daily Inquirer ☛ AI chatbots offer children harm as if it were help, says activist

    According to the centre’s most recent report “Killer Apps”, eight out of 10 AI chatbots were willing to assist teen users “in planning violent attacks, including a school shooting, religious bombings, and high-profile assassinations.”

    Out of 10 chatbots, only Anthropic’s Claude and Snapchat’s My AI consistently refused to assist would-be attackers.

  • France24 ☛ AI chatbots offer children harm as if it were help, says activist

    Ahmed said he was "the only one" of the five people threatened by a US visa ban still in the United States, adding he is now "fighting in federal court against that unconstitutional threat to send me to prison".

    The US State department has accused the five of attempting to "coerce" US-based social media platforms into censoring viewpoints they oppose.

• Proprietary

  • Cyble Inc ☛ TotalRecall Breaks Recall Security Via AIXHost Gap

    When Microsoft reintroduced its redesigned Recall feature, security took center stage. The architecture was built around hardened components, including Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) enclaves, AES-256-GCM encryption, Windows Hello authentication, and a Protected Process Light (PPL) host.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Adobe Is Mucking With Users’ /etc/hosts Files

    Michael Tsai is among many people who have found the same is true on their Macs. For whatever reason, my hosts file has not been mucked with by Adobe.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Police Officer Helplessly Waves Arms at Waymo That Careened Wrong Way Through Whataburger Drive-Thru

      Thousands of Waymo self-driving taxis have flooded the street of major urban centers across the country, where critics say they’ve quickly turned into a drain on city resources, with municipal agencies overrun with calls about stalled cars that block traffic or make sudden stops on busy roads.

      In the latest incident, the San Antonio Police Department (SAPD) was forced to intervene after a Waymo vehicle drove into the drive-thru lane of a Whataburger — from the wrong direction.

    • Stanford University ☛ NVIDIA Founder Jensen Huang and Congressman Ro Khanna examine role of AI in the U.S.

      The newly founded Stanford Leadership Institute, based at Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), hosted a discussion on practical insights and important questions about leveraging the benefits of AI while addressing its risks on April 9.

    • The Register UK ☛ Mozilla calls out Microsoft over Copilot push in Windows

      Firefox-maker Mozilla is calling out Microsoft after Redmond said it would scale back some Copilot features in Windows, arguing the rollback shows the company pushed AI too far without enough regard for user choice.

      Mozilla VP of global policy Linda Griffin said on Thursday that Microsoft pushing Copilot into every corner of Windows it could find was less of an example of offering a new feature to users, and more about just installing it for them "without user consent."

    • Nick Heer ☛ Autonomous Car Companies Will Not Tell U.S. Senator How Often a Human Driver Intervenes

      Anyway, sure would be nice to know how often a person needs to intervene, but I bet none of these companies are going to willingly disclose that unless they all do. Nobody is going to move first.

    • Dave DeGraw ☛ Re: Opinions [about vibe coding]

      Over the course of my career, I’ve developed a small informal list of “DeGraw’s Laws of Software Engineering”. I’ve recently been moved to create a 4th law:

      "Any proposed efficiency gains from using LLM and AI tools will be consumed twofold by discussion and debate surrounding said efficiency gains."

    • Futurism ☛ We Talked to a Writer Accused of Publishing An AI-Generated Essay in The New York Times

      The writer Kate Gilgan found herself at the center of a literary scandal last month when, on social media, another writer accused her of using AI to write an emotional first-person essay about the experience of losing custody of her young son at the height of her alcoholism. The piece had been published in the NYT’s famously competitive “Modern Love” column back in October; the accusations were made without any hard evidence, and the writer who accused Gilgan of using AI, The Lit Mag’s Becky Tuch, pointed only to the style of Gilgan’s article as evidence. Others quickly piled on, and soon much of literary social media was swarming with speculation and analyses via AI content detectors (which, we should note, are known to be unreliable.)

    • Futurism ☛ First AI Model From Zuckerberg's Wildly Expensive Superintelligence Lab Flops Compared to Virtually All Rivals

      But there’s a big problem that could undermine its flashy new announcement. Despite investors buying into the enthusiasm, sending Meta’s shares soaring six percent following the announcement, the company admitted it likely won’t be able to keep up with competing models.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Anthropic's Claude Mythos isn't a sentient super-hacker, it's a sales pitch — claims of 'thousands' of severe zero-days rely on just 198 manual reviews

      For the record, it is not. It might be good at finding vulnerabilities in software, but many of them aren't as potentially damaging as Anthropic wants us all to believe.

    • The Register UK ☛ Amazon rejects AWS climate disclosure proposal

      All of that extra infrastructure needs power, and the proposal notes that utilities in states such as Virginia – the datacenter capital of the world – now have to build new gas-powered generator plants to meet the growing demand, or even keep coal-fired facilities online. All of this is pumping millions of tons of extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

      As a result, Amazon faces questions over how it intends to deliver on its climate promises. The company relies heavily on renewable energy credits (RECs), according to the proposal, which asks whether the volume purchased will increase and whether enough will be available. Amazon's investors would benefit from analysis that explains how the company will tackle those concerns, it states.

    • The Register UK ☛ Suits won't quit AI spending, even if they can't prove ROI

      The poll, conducted in February and March, found ROI is not a primary driver of AI investment for many organizations, although they can measure it in specific areas. Most said they could measure ROI in productivity (76 percent), quality and performance of work (71 percent), speed and accuracy of decision-making (67 percent), and profitability (64 percent).

      However, just 14 percent were confident in measuring business value from improved analytics used by the C-suite for business decision-making.

    • The Verge ☛ Gen Z’s love-hate relationship with AI

      A new Gallup report released this week, based on responses from nearly 1,600 people ages 14 to 29 across the US, suggests the hype is wearing off for the digital-native generation as AI becomes more embedded in school and work. Enthusiasm is falling and resentment is growing, even as many young people feel they still need to use the technology.

    • Sean Conner ☛ Some comments about my being called out by an LLM and other random links about LLMs

      Lionel Dricot sent me an email about yesterdays' post, saying it was more plausible to him that the author was a human playing an AI (technically an LLM) rather than an AI. Then, I came across more comments about it where the discussion turned to it being an LLM with significant human control behind it, maybe as part of someone's sociology thesis. Both are plausible, and it's hard for me to figure out which is more plausible, an LLM-based chatbot autonomously running with [Internet] access, or one with more human agency behind it. I don't know which scenario is worse.

      There was another reply: [...]

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

      Machine learning shifts the cost balance for writing, distributing, and reading text, as well as other forms of media. Aggressive ML crawlers place high load on open web services, degrading the experience for humans. As inference costs fall, we’ll see ML embedded into consumer electronics and everyday software. As models introduce subtle falsehoods, interpreting media will become more challenging. LLMs enable new scales of targeted, sophisticated spam, as well as propaganda campaigns. The web is now polluted by LLM slop, which makes it harder to find quality information—a problem which now threatens journals, books, and other traditional media. I think ML will exacerbate the collapse of social consensus, and create justifiable distrust in all kinds of evidence. In reaction, readers may reject ML, or move to more rhizomatic or institutionalized models of trust for information. The economic balance of publishing facts and fiction will shift.

    • Balthazar Rouberol ☛ Fighting Big Tech AI scrapers with sticks and rocks

      AI scrapers have found my personal forge and have started to scrape it at the rate of several requests per second. I realized this had been going on after about 3 weeks (!), by randomly looking at my Datadog host dashboard.

      My forgejo instance is running behind nginx and Anubis, which should prevent crawlers from reaching it in the first place, but this one was getting in.

      Looking at the nginx access logs, I saw: [...]

    • Anil Dash ☛ Y2K 2.0: The AI security reckoning

      Now, we’ve had some of these kinds of exploits happening to a limited degree with the current generation of LLMs. So what’s changed? Well, we’ve been told that the new generation of AI tools, currently in limited release to industry insiders and security experts, are an order of magnitude more capable of discovering — and thus, exploiting — security vulnerabilities in every part of the world’s digital infrastructure.

      This leaves us in a situation akin to the Y2K bug around the turn of the century, where every organization around the world has to scramble to update their systems all at once, to accommodate an unexpected new technical requirement. Only this time, we don’t know which of our systems are still using two digits to store the date.

      And we don’t know what date the new millennium starts.

    • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Package Security Defenses for AI Agents

      Yesterday I wrote about the package security problems AI agents face: typosquatting, registry poisoning, lockfile manipulation, install-time code execution, credential theft, and cascading failures through the dependency graph. Agents inherit all the old package security problems but resolve, install, and propagate faster than any human can review.

      There’s no silver bullet for securing agent coding workflows because LLMs can’t reliably distinguish safe packages and metadata from malicious ones, but these defenses can reduce the blast radius when something gets through. Some of them introduce friction, but agents can absorb that friction better than humans.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Claude Mythos: the AI hacking model too good to release! Allegedly

      The hype is very stupid and there’s a lot of gullible people swallowing press releases whole. But today, let’s just ask: does it do the thing?

      Chatbots can find bugs in computer code, sure. A bot can look through text and check for patterns. And you don’t have to find all the bugs, finding just some is fine. If it’s easy to check the bugs are real, you’ve got yourself an expensive static code checker.

      Mythos fails that second one. So Anthropic sends the chatbot spew to humans to pick through for the real bugs: [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • MinnPost ☛ My generation is addicted to social media content

      As a student, it’s hard not to notice all the phone screens in class or in hallways locked in a state of mindlessly scrolling through social media. College students are dependent on quick-hit style social media content at the most critical time in their careers, where every procrastinated test counts and every bad grade decides their job after graduation. When discussing this issue, it is time to focus on those who are most directly affected: Gen Z students.

      When I have conversations with students regarding the habit of endless online scrolling, they often tell me that it is something they cannot help. In a survey conducted by Morning Consult, 53% of Gen Z adults reported they doomscroll, which is scrolling mindlessly through specifically negative content, regularly. The impact of this on our country’s future has the potential to be incredibly consequential as it trains the minds of youth to have very short attention spans.

    • Nieman Lab ☛ Do links hurt news publishers on Twitter? Our analysis suggests yes

      The report found that Twitter drove little traffic to most news sites, generating only around 1.5% of most publishers’ traffic. But, the authors wrote, “Twitter excels at both conversational and breaking news…Though Twitter may not be a huge overall source of traffic to news websites relative to Facebook and Google, it serves a unique place in the link economy. News really does ‘start’ on Twitter.”

      Ten years later, the site formerly known as Twitter still drives very little traffic to news sites. But it’s also bad for conversational and breaking news.

    • Codeberg ☛ blinry/threadcat: Converts a Mastodon thread to Markdown, and downloads all contained media files. - Codeberg.org

      Takes the URL to a Mastodon toot, and converts the thread (all children by the same author) to a Markdown blogpost. It also downloads all included media files, and their alt texts.

    • [Old] Neritam ☛ Are you unintentionally helping Trump?

      Well, the fact of the matter is, if you’re active on social media at all–Twitter, Facebook, whatever your fancy–you’ve no doubt spread one of Trump’s lies. I know I have.

      Yep. I didn’t mean to, just like I’m sure you or your friends didn’t mean to. But that fact remains that we have.

    • Kenneth Reitz ☛ Don't Read the Comments

      Aaron Swartz told us not to read the comments.

      He was right. The comment section of the early-to-mid [Internet] was a place where nuance went to die and bad faith went to thrive. "DON'T READ THE COMMENTS" became a survival heuristic for anyone who published anything online.

      I've always had a hard time following that advice.

    • Idiomdrottning ☛ “Twitter (I refuse to call it X)”

      But what I see when I see “Twitter (I refuse to call it X)” is “I think Twitter pre-Musk was acceptable”, and that’s the messaging I’m not onboard with. As if it weren’t a silo site, a harassment vector, and part of what was driving the Earth straight of the cliff and putting MAGA tyranny on the throne and having shallow discourse that was disproportionately respected and credited in mainstream media reporting (compared to how few people were actually on there) and with gov’t agencies using it and lending it infrastructure-level credibility.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Healthcare IT under siege: CloudWave is fighting back

      Rural and community hospitals, in particular, are facing intense cost strains as ransomware attacks proliferate. The challenge for healthcare providers is that their expertise lies in clinical care, not IT services, making system resiliency more vital than ever, according to Erik Littlejohn (pictured, left), president and chief executive officer of CloudWave, formerly Park Place International LLC. Electronic health record and electronic medical record systems are particularly high-stakes targets — and when they go down, the consequences extend far beyond IT disruption.

    • The Record ☛ Dutch hospitals face disruptions after ransomware attack on software provider ChipSoft

      A ransomware attack on Dutch healthcare software vendor ChipSoft has forced the company to disable parts of its digital services used by hospitals and patients across the Netherlands, the national cybersecurity center for the healthcare sector said.

      ChipSoft was hit by the attack on April 7, according to a statement from Z-CERT, which said it has been working with the company and healthcare institutions to monitor the situation and coordinate support.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Evan Hahn ☛ In defense of GitHub's poor uptime

    GitHub is not meeting that, and it’s frustrating. Even though they’re owned by Microsoft’s, one of the richest companies on earth, they aren’t clearing this bar.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ We Need You: Our Privacy Cannot Afford a Clean Extension of Section 702

      We go through this every couple of years: Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which of Americans’ communications with foreign persons overseas is up for renewal. As always, Congress can reauthorize it with or without changes, or just let it expire. We know, we know, it’s a pain to have to do this every few years–but it gives us a chance to lift the hood of this behemoth tool of government surveillance and tinker with how it works. That’s why it’s so important right now to urge your Member of Congress not to pass any bill that reauthorizes Section 702 without substantial reforms.

    • 9to5Mac ☛ FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages

      According to 404 Media, testimony in a recent trial involving “a group of people setting off fireworks and vandalizing property at the ICE Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas,” showed that the FBI was able to recover content of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even though Signal had been removed from the device: [...]

    • Forbes ☛ FBI Pulled Deleted Signal Messages From An iPhone Without Breaking Encryption

      Most people who use disappearing messages believe something that isn't true. They believe that when the message vanishes from the screen, it has vanished from the phone. They believe that when they delete the app, they have deleted what the app knew. Neither belief survives contact with how a modern smartphone actually works, and a recent federal case in Texas is the clearest reminder of that fact in years.

    • India Times ☛ Snap unit to use Qualcomm chips for upcoming AI smart glasses

      Specs, the Snap smart glasses unit formed early this year, will use Qualcomm chips for its upcoming devices under a multi-year deal announced on Friday, marking its first major move.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Heads They Win, Tails We Lose: What Lies Behind the U.S. Trade Battle For Control over Data

      The U.S. is employing a two-pronged strategy to enhance its control over global data flows. The first prong is the U.S. CLOUD Act, a 2018 law that grants U.S. authorities the power to compel any service provider subject to U.S. jurisdiction to hand over data, regardless of where the information is physically stored. For instance, such a company can be compelled to disclose data it holds in Canada, potentially overriding Canadian privacy protections. The second prong leverages trade policy by pressuring countries who respond to that vulnerability by building domestic alternatives challenging the applicability of the U.S. law. Countries that try to insulate themselves from the first prong are told the remedy itself is the barrier.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Still Not a Privacy Law: Bill C-25’s Political Party Privacy Provisions Fall Short Again

      Two weeks later, the government introduced Bill C-25, an Elections Act reform bill that includes updated privacy provisions for political parties and which dropped just before Parliament took a holiday break. The government has framed this as delivering on its commitment to strengthen political party privacy protections. The bill does restore some elements that C-4 had stripped away from prior proposals such as security safeguards proportionate to the sensitivity of the information, breach notification to affected individuals when there is a real risk of significant harm, contractual protections when personal information is transferred to third parties, and three specific prohibitions (on providing false information about collection purposes, selling personal information, and disclosing personal information to the public to cause harm). These were all features of the earlier Bill C-65 that died in a previous Parliament or were recommended by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Could Bill C-22 Make Canadians Less Safe? The Systemic Vulnerability Gap in Canada’s New Surveillance Law

      The lawful access debate in Canada has to date focused on privacy concerns such as access to subscriber information, mandatory metadata retention, and international production orders. But there is another dimension to Bill C-22 that has received less attention and may matter even more to the daily security of Canadians: the risk that the bill’s surveillance-capability requirements and lack of clarity about systemic vulnerabilities will make Canadians less secure. The international experience with similar laws is not reassuring, as it points to risks of hacking, removal of security features that protect users, and reduced investment and innovation. Bill C-22 heads in much the same direction.

  • Confidentiality

    • EFF ☛ Yikes, Encryption’s Y2K Moment is Coming Years Early

      Google moved up its estimated deadline for quantum preparedness in cryptography to 2029—only 33 months from now. That’s earlier than previous deadlines, and they proposed the new post-quantum migration deadline because of two new papers that comprise a big jump in the state of the technology. It’s ahead of schedule, but not altogether unexpected. Cryptographers and engineers have been working on this for years, and as the deadline gets closer, it’s not surprising to see more precise timeline estimates come up.

    • Let's Encrypt ☛ The difficulty of making sure your website is broken - Let's Encrypt

      Have you ever needed to make sure your website has a broken certificate? While many tools exist to help run an HTTPS server with valid certificates, there aren’t tools to make sure your certificate is revoked or expired. This is not a problem most people have. Tools to help manage certificates are always focused on avoiding those problems, not creating them.

      Let’s Encrypt is a Certificate Authority, and so we have unusual problems we need to solve.

      One of the requirements for publicly trusted Certificate Authorities is to host websites with test certificates, some of which need to be revoked or expired. This gets messed up more than you might expect, but it’s a bit tricky to get right. Test certificate sites exist to allow developers to test their clients, so it’s important that they’re done right.

      We’d previously used certbot, nginx, and some shell scripts, but the shell scripts were getting a bit too complicated. So we wrote a Go program tailored to the specific needs of a CA’s test certs site.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Children’s rights vs Big Tech: What HK can learn from landmark US trials

    The US verdicts resonate in Hong Kong, which follows international human rights standards, yet our public conversations about platforms often oscillate between moral panic and technological fatalism. We do not ask hard, unsettling questions.

    In Los Angeles, jurors awarded US$6 million (HK$47 million) to a young woman, Kaley, who began using social media at six. She argued that Instagram and YouTube designed addictive features – infinite scroll, autoplay, constant nudges to stay online – that harmed her. She hated her body and thought about hurting herself.

  • Nevada Current ☛ Given Trump's threats, mail votes should be cast early, and NV needs more drop boxes, officials say

    Nevada U.S. Reps. Steven Horsford and Susie Lee along with U.S. Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, joined Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Defend The Vote Action Fund executive director Brian Lemek to sound the alarm on election security.

    Horsford is worried about the Supreme Court’s case that seeks to eliminate the grace periods for when ballots that are mailed in could be received and counted.

  • JURIST ☛ Greece prime minister announces plan to ban social media for children under 15

    A February poll showed that 80 percent surveyed Greeks approved of a ban. This is not the first measure Greece has taken to limit social media access, as the government has previously prohibited mobile phones in schools and set up parental control platforms to limit teenagers’ screen time.

  • TruthOut ☛ Democrats Reject Resolution Condemning AIPAC Money in Primaries

    However, some Democrats know that the party cannot forever avoid either U.S. financial and military support for Israel’s expansionist conquests or the influence of AIPAC. One DNC member speaking on the condition of anonymity said they had received direct calls about the resolutions from “two presidential aspirants who would have to answer for the DNC’s positions on Israel and AIPAC if they run,” according to Politico.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ France to replace Windows with Linux across key government systems

    The country now plans to move some of its government systems away from Microsoft Windows and toward Linux, an open-source operating system.

    Officials see the move as part of a larger push to secure national infrastructure and limit exposure to foreign tech providers.

    The change will begin within France’s digital agency, DINUM. Authorities have not shared a full timeline.

  • Nick Heer ☛ The Growing Push for Digital Sovereignty

    Bednar references “Underground Empire” by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, a book about the coercive technical and bureaucratic power of the United States. I read it last year and I, too, recommend it. About a year before, I read “The Brussels Effect” by Anu Bradford, which covers the ripple effect of European Union regulations worldwide. I think reading both books is an interesting study in contrasts.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Record

    On April 9, 2025, I published a piece called The Time of Monsters. I argued that the warning signs of catastrophic conflict were flashing red for anyone willing to see them. I named the conditions: an insurgent elite backing itself into a corner where the calculation becomes power or jail; a feedback loop in which economic pain would reinforce the victimhood narrative rather than produce policy reconsideration; institutional erosion accelerating past the point where normal corrective mechanisms could function; the framing of disagreement as existential threat, which makes compromise impossible because it is experienced as surrender.

    I was not predicting war. I was mapping a mechanism. Two plus two equals four. The mechanism was running. I described where it ran.

  • International Business Times ☛ Pentagon's Alleged 'Bitter Lecture' to Pope Leo XIV's Ambassador Sparks Vatican Fury and US Visit Cancellation

    A closed-door meeting at the Pentagon in January 2026 has emerged as a flashpoint in the increasingly strained relationship between Washington and the Holy See, with reports alleging that senior US defence officials delivered what Vatican sources described as a 'bitter lecture' to Pope Leo XIV's then-ambassador to the United States. The encounter, first reported by Mattia Ferraresi, has since sent diplomatic tremors through both institutions and contributed to the Vatican's decision to shelve a planned papal visit to the United States.

  • CBC ☛ Vatican, Pentagon deny report of heated meeting with church's U.S. representative

    The digital outlet the Free Press reported on Monday that Pierre was "summoned" by the White House over comments made by U.S.-born Pope Leo XIV two weeks earlier. The report characterized parts of the meeting as a "bitter lecture warning that the United States has the military power to do whatever it wants."

    The report cited Vatican officials briefed on the meeting who spoke to the Free Press on condition of anonymity.

  • [Old] Neritam ☛ Facebook Meddles in the 2018 Midterm Elections

    In other words, Facebook’s administrators are meddling in politics — including the 2018 US midterm elections — in the name of preventing meddling in politics.

  • The Next Move ☛ Hungary Is America in Miniature

    It is not quite a functioning democracy. The country’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán took back the prime minister’s office in 2010 and hasn’t left since. Orbán has taken steps to extend government control over media and academia and make it difficult for opposition parties to organize. On the global stage, Budapest is squarely aligned with Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran (and, of course, with the demagogues running the show in Washington).

  • France24 ☛ Former IS group child ‘fighters’ jailed in Iraq seek repatriation to France - France 24

    Three Frenchmen [sic] who were taken to Syria by their jihadist parents as children and forced to work for the Islamic State (IS) group are seeking repatriation, their lawyer said on Friday. The men are among thousands of IS group "fighters" who are being held in Iraq after being transferred from Syria earlier this year.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Walrus ☛ It’s Time to Talk about Canada’s Links to Epstein

    Records reveal a web of relationships that endured after his conviction

• Environment

  • Mississippi Journalism and Education Group ☛ Amazon Is Expanding Data Centers in Central Mississippi, Governor Announces

    Amazon already has an artificial intelligence data processing center in Ridgeland and another data center campus in nearby Canton. With the additional $12 billion, it’ll be expanding its operations in Madison County and creating 700 jobs, Reeves announced Thursday. The company is also investing $1 billion into a project in Clinton that is projected to add 100 jobs to the community.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Army Corps reviews Google data center proposal, seeks public input

    A public notice published April 6 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Little Rock District said the project would include five industrial buildings totaling about 1.43 million square feet. The development would also include two office buildings, an electrical substation and supporting infrastructure such as transmission line corridors, parking lots, access roads and stormwater facilities.

    The project is expected to use more than 100 megawatts of power — enough to supply electricity to roughly 80,000 to 100,000 homes, based on average U.S. household energy use. There were approximately 88,000 households in Little Rock in 2024, meaning this Google data center could use as much power as all the households in Little Rock combined.

    According to the Corps, the development would result in the filling of nearly 17 acres of wetlands and more than 6,000 feet of streams.

  • Western Water ☛ Nevada’s first water reuse project breaks ground

    At the heart of the project is a treatment system that takes water already cleaned at a reclamation facility and purifies it even further. The process uses ozone treatment, biological filtration, carbon filtration, and ultraviolet light to produce what Nevada defines as Category A+ water.

    This level of treatment meets strict state standards and can be used for many purposes, including irrigation and replenishing underground aquifers. Some of the water will be sent about seven miles away for agricultural use, while some will be stored underground for future needs.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Light pollution has increased by 16 percent in less than a decade, but study reveals there's good and bad news for astrophotographers

    The study found that, during that time period, light pollution increased by 16 percent. While the study has implications ranging from sleep patterns to astronomy, the study hints that astrophotographers have more light pollution to fight with in order to capture a clean view of the night sky.

  • Mongabay ☛ Modest controls put on freewheeling squid fleet at South Pacific fisheries meeting

    “It’s a part of the world’s largest squid fishery … so it was very positive that attention was being paid to it,” Dave Gershman, a senior officer on international fisheries at the U.S.-based think tank The Pew Charitable Trusts, who attended the meeting as an observer, told Mongabay just minutes after the closure. “But this is only the start of what’s needed to put in place science-based management.”

  • Digital Camera World ☛ From a polar bear on a dead whale to socializing with a robot, these World Press Photo award winners create “urgent portrait of our world today”

    “This is a critical moment – for democracy, for truth, for the question of what we as a society are willing to see and call out what we are willing to ignore,” said the contest’s global jury chair for 2026 and Harvard Shorenstein Center fellow Kira Pollack. “The photographers recognized here have done their part. They have made their record. Now it is our turn to look.”

    Nearly 3,750 photographers from 141 countries submitted entries to the contests, totalling more than 57,000 photographs.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Airlines Increase Baggage Fees In Response to Iran War Fuel Shortage

    The price of jet fuel has almost doubled since the war began. This week, prices hit a high of $4.88 per gallon, compared to around $2.50 in late February.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Graham Helton ☛ Building A Hacker Van

      Roughly speaking, the plan (if you can even call it that) is to spend ~3 months turning this big empty metal box into a studio I can take on road trips whenever I want.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Robotic birds mimic mating to help bring back vanishing grouse

      Robotic bird decoys are being deployed at Grand Teton National Park to influence the behavior of real sage grouse and help restore a declining population.

      The project uses motion-enabled replicas designed to mimic mating rituals and draw birds back to safer breeding grounds.

    • Dr Molly Tov ☛ i am a bee landlord now

      One known issue with permanent solitary bee houses is parasites and dirt. Over time, the house gets packed with debris. It also attracts viruses, bacteria, fungi, parasites, and the like. This means bee houses require periodic cleaning, or they need to be disposable.

      After doing some reading, I decided to build my bee houses out of clean cans, stuffed with the hollow and/or pithy stems of various plants. I have a TON of these left over every year. My yard grows milkweed, primrose, mullein, and bergamot in abundance.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • [Old] PBS ☛ The Man With the Muck Rake, 1906 | American Experience | Official Site

    Roosevelt lashes out against lying political attacks, calling for honesty and sanity in public discourse.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Supply Crisis

    There is a personality structure in the clinical literature that operates, neurologically, on the same brain pathways as drug addiction. It requires a constant external supply — admiration, dominance, confirmation of specialness — not as a preference but as a structural necessity. The self, in this configuration, has no stable internal foundation. It exists only in the reflection coming back from the outside world. When that reflection confirms the self-image, the system functions. When it contradicts it — not merely fails to confirm, but actively contradicts — the clinical literature describes a predictable sequence: escalation, rage, reality distortion, and ultimately collapse.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ OpenAI pulls out of Stargate UK data centre

    This exciting facility was announced in September last year. It would be built in an “AI growth zone” in northeastern England with local partner Nscale.

    Nscale are best known for the vaporware data centre outside London that turned out to still be a scaffolding yard. Nscale hadn’t even applied for planning permission.

  • APNIC ☛ Bringing APNIC closer to Members: Introducing Sub‑Regional Forums

    Partnering with two Asia Pacific sub-regional organizations: The Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association (PITA) and the South Asia Network Operators Group (SANOG), APNIC is piloting APNIC Sub‑Regional Forums (SRF) to strengthen collaboration within the Asia Pacific region and support a more resilient global Internet.

  • Vidit Bhargava ☛ Thoughts from a recently concluded AI conference at UC Berkeley

    What's the biggest indicator of an insecure industry? Jargon. Where the notion of "This is too complicated for you to understand, let the experts handle it" is prevalent, you know it's an insecure industry that's trying to gate-keep others from joining because they fear that the knowledge they claim to possess would not be considered special anymore, or the money they're minting right now will start to get diluted. And that's exactly how it felt like going through multiple of the talks on Agentic AI that day.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Why did Melania hold a news conference, denying any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein?

    Why, then, did Melania hold this news conference?

    I can think of three possible reasons: [...]

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • France24 ☛ Orban's opponents targeted by AI-driven disinformation ahead of Hungary's elections

      The campaign for Hungary’s April 12 elections has been marred by disinformation. Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s party, Fidesz, has deployed a series of outrageous AI-generated videos to target his main rival Peter Magyar and his Tisza party, while a vast campaign orchestrated by fake accounts has emerged on TikTok and Facebook.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Viral photos being used to claim Artemis II footage is fake are actually AI fakes themselves. Oh, the irony!

      According to fact checks from mutlipe news outlets, including BBC and CBC, viral photos and videos circulating online claiming that Artemis II footage is fake are themselves AI-generated fakes.

      Photos from TikTok show the four astronauts wearing a harness system in front of a green screen. But when the BBC ran the photos through Google’s SynthID AI check, which reads embedded watermarks on Gemini’s AI creations, the tool said that those green screen photos were generated with Google AI.

    • Futurism ☛ Analysis Finds That Google's AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization

      In a sense, that may sound like an impressive figure. But here’s an even more impressive one: five trillion. That’s roughly the number of search queries that Google processes every year, translating to tens of millions of wrong answers that the AI Overviews are providing every hour — and hundreds of thousands every minute, the analysis calculated.

      In other words, Google has created a misinformation crisis. Studies have shown that people tend to trust what an AI tells them without question, with one report finding that only 8 percent of users actually double checked an AI’s answer. Another experiment found that users still listened to AI when it gave them the wrong answer nearly 80 percent of the time — a grim trend the researchers dubbed “cognitive surrender.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Telegram blocking rate in Russia reaches 95%

    That is the highest share recorded since the new restrictions on the messenger began, and Telegram is now being blocked more aggressively than WhatsApp or Signal, the outlet reported.

    The services Downdetector and Sboy.rf both recorded a sharp spike in user complaints about Telegram around 8–9 a.m. on April 10. Users reported that messages were failing to send and media files were not loading.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • JURIST ☛ US judge compels Department of Defense to restore journalist access to Pentagon

    In essence, according to the court, the Department of Defense “has invoked slightly different language to achieve that same unconstitutional result.” The judge issued an order enjoining the government from enforcing the new provisions against qualified journalists.

  • Project Censored ☛ We Need More ‘Muckrakers and Fewer Buck-Takers’

    Fifty years ago, Carl Jensen founded Project Censored because he knew that journalism was the lifeblood of democracy. He argued that the news media, despite its increasingly corporate and commercial nature, can have a positive influence on the world, especially when it operates ethically and independently in the public interest. He encouraged journalism programs at colleges across the country to turn out “more muckrakers and fewer buck-takers.”

  • BIA Net ☛ 'Disinformation law' used against 83 journalists since 2022

    The law on publicly spreading misleading information (TCK 217/A), passed by parliament in 2022 with assurances it would not be used against journalists, has become an increasingly frequent tool in investigations and lawsuits against members of the press.

  • BIA Net ☛ Kurdish journalists targeted in new wave of online censorship

    Unfortunately for many journalists, especially Kurdish journalists, his situation is hardly unique. In fact, over the last few weeks Kurdish journalists’ X accounts have been targeted in what is the latest in a long line of online censorship campaigns against them.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Independent UK ☛ Gap between rich and poor nations is growing even wider, UN report says

    The gap between rich and poor nations is growing even wider as actions agreed to by many countries last year, including overhauling the major global financial institutions, remain unfulfilled promises

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ It’s Tech Versus Teachers as Strike Looms Over LA Schools

    But there’s much more at stake in this current conflict than salary and workforce size. At a moment when AI technology and subcontracting are emerging as defining features of twenty-first-century public education, the struggle led by organized educators in California today puts on display all the major forces contesting for power over state and local government in the post-pandemic era.

    In Los Angeles, a district whose superintendent’s house was recently raided by the FBI for his role in the award of an allegedly fraudulent $6 million contract to an education AI company, educators’ demand to participate in the management decisions over third-party vendors is particularly pointed.

    Two paths forward have emerged for the country’s teachers’ unions. One is exemplified by technology companies such as OpenAI and Microsoft, with which AFT President Randi Weingarten recently announced a partnership to help introduce AI into public schools. The other, put forward by California’s teachers’ unions, has seen educators win contract language limiting the use of AI in schools across districts statewide.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ UK navy tracked three Russian submarines near undersea cables, damage would 'have serious consequences,' Putin warned — US and allies expand seabed protection efforts

    Healey declined to specify the exact location or the cables involved, saying only that the activity didn’t take place in UK territorial waters. He said UK forces would work with allies to verify that no pipelines or cables had been damaged. Addressing Vladimir Putin directly, Healey said any attempt to damage undersea cables or pipelines would "have serious consequences.”

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Stricter KYC Rules For Robocalls Proposed By FCC

    The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing stricter Know-Your-Customer (KYC) rules for robocalls as part of a broader effort to curb illegal calls and protect consumers. In a newly released Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the agency outlined plans to tighten requirements for originating voice service providers, which are considered the first line of defense against unlawful robocalls. The proposal reflects growing concern that existing KYC rules for robocalls are not being consistently enforced, allowing bad actors to exploit gaps in the system.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Iran Crisis & Gulf Cybersecurity Middle East Shift

    The Persian Gulf is a strategically sensitive region due to energy reserves, maritime trade routes, and ongoing geopolitical rivalries. The recent escalation involving Iran and regional adversaries has reinforced instability in the region and highlighted the growing relevance of Gulf cybersecurity, alongside traditional security concerns.

    The expansion of missile systems, drones, and cyber capabilities has increased the likelihood that conflicts could affect both physical infrastructure and digital systems, strengthening the importance of cybersecurity in Middle East frameworks.

  • APNIC ☛ Connecting the Pacific: Infrastructure, operations, and regional cooperation

    Across the Pacific, connectivity continues to advance through a combination of major submarine cable investments, accelerating satellite adoption, and steady improvements in operational capability. At the same time, structural constraints, such as small markets, geographic distribution, skills scarcity, and exposure to natural disasters, continue to shape how quickly and evenly these gains can be realized.

  • Wired ☛ ‘We Were Not Ready for This’: Lebanon's Emergency System Is Hanging by a Thread

    “We were not ready for this,” says Kamal Shehadi, the Lebanese minister of technology and AI, and minister of the displaced. “I have to admit that we didn’t expect something of this magnitude to happen.”

  • Inside Towers ☛ FCC to Update Satellite Rules for Space-Based Broadband - Inside Towers

    The FCC plans to vote later this month to update the agency’s satellite spectrum-sharing rules that could benefit low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband systems such as Elon Musk’s Starlink. The agency says the new framework will enable faster speeds, lower costs, and greater reliability, “representing another step to ensure that consumers benefit from competitive and affordable [Internet] options.”

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Remy Van Elst ☛ Put your SSH keys in your TPM chip!

    I've got a long history with hardware security modules, both professionally and for fun. For the longest time, my SSH private key has lived inside a hardware token of some sort, be it the Nitrokey, the Smartcard-HSM or a Yubikey. The private key never leaves the device, you yourself can't even extract it, neither can malware. It does not live on your filesystem or in an ssh-agent (in memory) and some hardware keys even require a physical touch to use the key. Way more secure than the file ~/.ssh/id_rsa. I do hope you have a password on your private keys. Most, if not all modern machines come with a comparable hardware solution, a TPM (trusted platform module). It's required for Windows 11 so most hardware has one. Its often used to verify the boot process. You can however, also use it to store your SSH keys and in this guide I'll show you how I recently did just that.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Digital Music News ☛ Ticketmaster Integrates Into ChatGPT

  Ticketmaster has climbed into bed with OpenAI in a partnership that not only sees integration with ChatGPT, but will see “sponsored ad placements” within the AI chat platform. This move is an effort to see if ChatGPT’s recently launched ad business can actually drive sales.

• Patents

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Process knowledge

    Despite (or perhaps because of) its centrality, "intellectual property" is one of those maddeningly vague terms that applies to many different legal doctrines, as well as a set of nebulous, abstract thought-objects that do not qualify for legal protection. "IP" doesn't just refer to copyright, trademark and patent – though these "core three" systems are so heterogeneous in basis, scope and enforcement that the act of lumping them together into a single category confuses more than it clarifies.

• Copyrights

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Canny Valley and Creative Commons

    The whole print run for Canny Valley was limited to 500 copies, and it is the only run I will do for the book. 100 copies were sold to Kickstarter backers, I kept 25 for myself, and the remaining 375 are now available as a thank-you gift for people who make tax-deductible gifts to CC.

    I have been a great supporter of Creative Commons since its inception – literally, I was around when Aaron Swartz, Matt Haughey and Lisa Rein worked with Larry Lessig to design the data scheme and user interface to create, use and re-use Creative Commons licenses. My debut novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was the first book ever released under a CC license: [...]