Leftovers

• Wired ☛ How the Internet Broke Everyone’s Bullshit Detectors

  The reveal turned out to be anticlimactic: a promotional push for the official White House app. But the episode demonstrated how thoroughly official communication has absorbed the aesthetics of leaks, virality, and platform-native intrigue. Even when official accounts adopt the aesthetics of a leak, questioning whether a record is real or synthetic is the only defensive move left.

• Pedro ☛ On self-hosting

  But every time I plan for that, it never quite works out. The main reason? Time.

• David Revoy ☛ Unified Vs Split-panels: experimenting with publishing digital comics on the Fediverse - David Revoy

  Hey, the Fediverse is an incredible space for creators. I connect to it via the Mastodon instance of Framasoft, named Framapiaf, since 2017. As you might now know, this is my favorite social media for everyday use and also for posting my art. The reasons are multiple: post in chronological order (no algorythm), a true decentralization, an efficient filtering system, and much much more.

• Elliot C Smith ☛ Spreadsheets and Disposable Software

  A trend I am seeing, and experiencing, is an increase in disposable software. Software that does a little thing, for a little while and then gets deleted. No long term plan for maintenance or support.

  Like everything, there's positives and negatives to the change. Overall I see more software going the way of the spreadsheet: useful, accessible but ultimately disposable.

• Jeremy Cherfas ☛ Number go up. And down. And back up.

  The main reason is that the logfiles are stored in different places and Hetzner does not let me use rsync to bring them down to my machine. After some tinkering I found ways to overcome those obstacles, but the picture that emerged was extremely confusing and inspired no confidence in the numbers.

• Science

  • CS Monitor ☛ With Artemis II back on Earth, what’s next for NASA?

    NASA now turns its attention to future moon missions, with the ultimate goal of building a moon base in the 2030s and launching crewed missions to Mars in the 2040s.

    History tells us that sustaining government funding, public support, and mission safety will be easier said than done. On Saturday, however, the Artemis II crew and NASA leaders began to process the magnitude of the mission during their first public comments since splashdown.

  • Science Alert ☛ If Venus Has Life It May Have Come From Earth, Scientists Say

    Using the "Venus Life Equation" (VLE) framework developed by Noam Izenberg et al. in 2021, the team's models predict that life could exist in Venus' clouds for at least a few days per century, thanks to material ejected from Earth.

  • Wired ☛ Flight Path Data Shows How Mosquitoes Target Humans

    In this context, a research team led by the Georgia Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology has succeeded in automatically deriving a dynamic model governing mosquito flight by applying Bayesian inference statistical methods to a vast amount of data recording mosquito movements.

  • PassiveRadar ☛ How Passive Radar Works

    Active radar is monostatic: the transmitter and receiver sit in the same place. Passive radar is bistatic: the transmitter (e.g., an FM radio tower) and receiver (your sensor) are in different locations.

    A passive radar receiver picks up two copies of the broadcast signal: [...]

  • The Independent UK ☛ Bill Nye roasts Trump over president’s NASA plans: ‘Surprising, illogical and very troubling’

    The Trump administration's planned cuts would end 53 planned or ongoing NASA Science missions, would slice away $13 billion in funding, and would stop the development of most of the planned NASA Science missions.

• Career/Education

  • ANF News ☛ Yazidi Youth Union opens a new library in Duhola, Shengal

    Following the previously opened “Martyr Vejîn Youth Library” in Khanesor, the new library has attracted significant interest from local youth and residents. In addition to Yazidi youth, members of village and institutional People’s Communes also attended the opening ceremony.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ We collected data on how 779 Michigan school districts regulate cellphones − here are the trends

    Cellphones were used by 97% of young people ages 11-17 during the school day in 2022, with both good and bad effects.

    Cellphone use can distract students and lead to disengagement from school, impaired learning and poorer mental health. It can also lead to exposure to interpersonal violence, such as bullying or fights, and harm broader well-being.

    But students also use phones in beneficial ways, such as monitoring their blood sugar levels, connecting with family and peers, and even contacting digital tip lines to prevent violence.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Teach the kids why to write, not how to write ‘right’

    In movies like “Matilda” or “The Breakfast Club,” power-hungry educators use writing tasks in attempts to control children. For the SAT, writing means 50 minutes of effectively following their ideal essay structure. In K-12 schooling, my peers and I noticed writing skills were only emphasized for final essay assignments, which teachers marked up with red ink. As a future English teacher, writing instruction and its purpose flood my mind.

  • University of Michigan ☛ What are ‘weeder’ courses really measuring?

    Students often call them “weeder” courses. The label suggests these classes simply filter out who belongs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields and who does not. But introductory STEM courses are not neutral tests of students’ abilities — course format, grading policies and teaching choices all shape who succeeds, and these choices do not affect all students equally.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ The new Books Kinokuniya in Chatswood

    When Borders shut their doors globally in 2011, I didn’t hold out much hope that this important and wonderful part of my childhood would stick around for much longer either. I’m so happy to see it succeed, and to witness see all the people streaming out with their manga, art books, and novels. It gives me hope for the world.

  • Computer History Museum ☛ Software Preservation Group

    The seed for the Computer History Museum's Software Preservation Group was Grady Booch's 2002 email “Preserving classic software products.” This led to a 2003 workshop at the Museum and to the founding of what was originally called the Software Collection Committee. The committee held monthly meetings for about four years and a 2006 workshop brought in outside collectors and archivists to share ideas. The meetings covered a wide variety of topics, and additional discussions took place on the SCC_active mailing list.

    The idea of pilot projects to assess the difficulty of tracking down historic software quickly arose. A project to find the original FORTRAN compiler began in 2004 and reached a successful conclusion by 2005. Other early pilot projects were NLS / Augment and the programming language APL. The Software Collection Committee was renamed the Software Preservation Group in late 2006 and wound down its meetings during 2007. However a series of preservation projects continued, including most recently Modula-3.

    In March 2005 a Plone content management system was set up to allow communication among committee members and to encourage outside participation. In Summer 2025 it was converted to the current form to record the early history of workshops and meetings and serve as a permanent repository for the various preservation projects. The selection of projects was based on the interests of the people carrying them out — see the Acknowledgements below.

• Hardware

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Your archived photos may be slowly disappearing – but Lexar wants to do something about it

    The memory cards in your camera bag may be slowly losing your photos, but almost nobody in the industry is talking about it

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Finding a beige BenQ FP531 monitor

    BenQ monitors are great. The controls are the easiest to use of any monitor brand I’ve used before or since. There’s no messing around in menus with a series of obtuse buttons: you press the function you want, you adjust it, done. I love NEC monitor quality, but the BenQ is night and day easier to use.

  • David Hamp-Gonsalves ☛ SVG based Vector Scope

    I was gifted a Sencore SC62 oscilloscope from the mid-80s. It had spent a good chunk of its 40+ year life in a barn. This beautiful device along with many similar models are being discarded since modern scopes have become so cheap and capable. To avoid that fate I wanted to repurpose it into something that would allow it to live indoors once again.

  • J B Crawford ☛ IrDA

    Well, if I had written this two or three years ago, free-space optical might have counted as quite obscure. The idea of using a modulated laser or LED light source for communications over a distance is actually quite old. Commercial products for Ethernet-over-laser have been available since the late 1990s and achieved multi-gigabit speeds by 2010. Motivated mostly by Strategic Defense Initiative and Ballistic Missile Defense Organization requirements for hardened communications within satellite constellations, experiments on a gigabit laser satellite-to-ground link were underway in 1998, although the system ultimately only provided satisfactory performance at a rate of around 300Mbps [^1]. As it turns out, FSO computer networking is nearly as old as computer networking itself, with a 1973 experimental system briefly put into use at Xerox PARC.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ 'Forever Chemicals' May Be Weakening The Bones of Children, Study Warns

    Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been given their nickname because they stick around so persistently in the environment. They've been used in manufacturing and other industries for decades, and are basically impossible to avoid.

    In a new study, researchers from across the US and Canada looked at health data logged for 218 kids as they grew up, examining levels of several PFAS in their blood: perfluorohexane sulfonic acid (PFHxS), perfluoroctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), and perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA).

  • Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ A lunch without alcohol

    The table today had all the usual offerings of alcoholic beverage. There were bottles of wine, cans of beer, a freezer packed with zivania, and plenty of ice cubes for those who wanted to blend whiskey with cola. Some folks who were sitting further away from me were drinking as usual. Though those around me chose to abstain for once. Someone remarked that “we are already having a good time, we do not need the drinks”. I nodded without saying a word.

• Proprietary

  • Andy Nicolaides ☛ Breaking up with Big Tech - Progress update

    I wrote a post, some time ago now, about some initial plans to move my tech (software and hardware) stack away from U.S. companies and into some European alternatives. I've been fiddling around with this in general today so I thought I might finally dust of my blog and share a progress update on this.

  • Security Week ☛ Adobe Patches Reader Zero-Day Exploited for Months

    The vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2026-34621 and a CVSS score of 9.6. According to the software giant, the flaw stems from improperly controlled modifications to prototype attributes and can be exploited to execute arbitrary code.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ The "heads I win, tails you lose" mentality

    The article goes onto say that the Neo is a better experience for most people for most things than the similarly-priced Windows laptops, but I pulled this quote because I think it's telling. There's a class of Apple fan that puts Apple in a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation. Through the Apple silicon generation, Apple has been pushing the speeds of its RAM and SSDs higher and higher, typically ahead of what you'd get in mainstream PC parts. Faster computers are good, but it's led to an argument from some Apple fans that anything less than what Apple's offering at the highest end of RAM/SSD speeds is unworthy of people time and money.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • New Statesman ☛ Will AI kill tribute bands?

      Alongside the tribute boom, there’s a growing interest in hologram concerts. Abba Voyage, a virtual show in east London, has had over three million visitors since it opened in 2022. The show is performed by avatars, or Abba-tars in this case. This digital tribute act was difficult to create: the band had to perform in motion capture suits for five weeks as 160 cameras scanned their bodies. The footage was then used as a reference point for hundreds of animators and visual effects artists.

      But as AI improves, hologram concerts will become quicker and easier to produce. Phil Copping, a seasoned Freddie Mercury impersonator, tells me he’s been working as a body double for a virtual Queen experience. “It uses the next stage of technology from what Abba has done,” he explains. “It’s my body, my movement, but with an AI face swap, that has been refined over the course of the year. I mean, it’s absolutely phenomenal what they’ve managed to do.” I ask him whether tribute bands like his own, Supersonic Queen, could be squeezed out. “ I think it’s a different entity,” he says. “I’ve seen the Abba show and I was blown away with how good it was, but it’s a different experience.”

    • Futurism ☛ Why Does It Suddenly Feel Like OpenAI Is Melting Down Into Disaster?

      It was a PR disaster on OpenAI’s part. Altman later admitted that the move “looked opportunistic and sloppy,” but the damage had already been done. The eyebrow-raising deal triggered a mass exodus with uninstall rates of ChatGPT spiking overnight and making Anthropic look incredible by comparison — at the exact moment that its models have been pulling decisively ahead among programmers.

    • Futurism ☛ Gen Z Sabotaging AI at Work So It Won't Take Their Job

      A new report by the AI company Writer and research firm Workplace Intelligent found a massive portion of workers across the US, UK, and Europe are intentionally trying to sabotage their bosses’ AI initiatives.

    • Kenneth Reitz ☛ Write It First, Then Let AI Drive - Kenneth Reitz

      I've been finding the opposite to be true. Write the initial version by hand. Pour your taste, your instincts, your opinionated architectural decisions into that first draft. Then let AI take the wheel for cleanup, feature additions, bug fixes, documentation, and ongoing maintenance.

      This isn't a minor workflow preference. It's a fundamentally different model of what human-AI collaboration looks like in software, and I think it reveals something important about how intelligence — artificial or otherwise — actually works.

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

      Like television, smartphones, and social media, LLMs etc. are highly engaging; people enjoy using them, can get sucked in to unbalanced use patterns, and become defensive when those systems are critiqued. Their unpredictable but occasionally spectacular results feel like an intermittent reinforcement system. It seems difficult for humans (even those who know how the sausage is made) to avoid anthropomorphizing language models. Reliance on LLMs may attenuate community relationships and distort social cognition, especially in children.

  • Social Control Media

    • New York Times ☛ Elon Musk, Who Owns X, Appears to Post on TikTok

      Mr. Musk, TikTok and Meta, which owns Instagram, did not respond to requests for comment. The New York Times could not independently verify if Mr. Musk was behind the TikTok and Instagram accounts.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • University of Michigan ☛ We should be more worried about cyber warfare targeting the civilian economy

      This evolution from purely government-targeted attacks is concerning. The most critical economic infrastructure in the U.S. is largely run by the private sector. By attacking health care or financial service business, cyberattackers are able to cause national disruption and increase political pressure without committing to a full military strategy. Despite inflicting more damage, hacking civilian companies is easier because they typically don’t have as robust cybersecurity as military systems. The consequence is a structural vulnerability where adversaries can achieve nationwide economic disruption without triggering the kind of military response that a traditional attack would provoke.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Pro Publica ☛ Who’s Been Impersonating This ProPublica Reporter?

      The impersonations were disquieting. Investigative reporting is hard enough with public trust in media so low and those in power stepping up attacks against journalists. Scammers giving potential sources another thing to worry about just makes our work more difficult.

      I can’t be certain what Fake Me is up to, but posing as a journalist in this way seems to be the latest evolution in online deception. ProPublica has chronicled the dark world of pig butchering, in which human traffickers in Asia force their victims to scam people by posing as friends or potential romantic interests. In those cases, the goal is cash.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Meduza ☛ Security researchers find 213 vulnerabilities in Russia’s state-backed messaging app Max

      Security researchers have identified 213 vulnerabilities in Russia’s state-backed messaging app Max through a bug bounty program, Positive Technologies CTO Alexei Batyuk said at the international Svyaz-2026 exhibition, the Russian business daily Kommersant reported.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Does age verification for social media help protect kids?

      The aim of such legislation is to protect young people, which seems logical because children's screen time, which is often high, can trigger conflict in many families. According to a 2025 study by the 38-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, half of all 15-year-olds in OECD countries spent at least 30 hours a week on digital devices.

      Despite this, the question remains: Are age limits really the best way to address the negative impacts of social media?

    • Bhaskar English ☛ FBI Recovered Deleted Signal Messages Without Encryption

      So where did the messages come from?

      Not from Signal itself. Instead, investigators found them in the phone’s notification storage, which saves previews that appear on the lock screen when a message arrives. Only incoming messages were recovered, which confirms they came from notification previews not the app’s message database.

      This matters because Signal’s disappearing-message feature works only on data the app controls. Once the operating system creates a notification preview, that copy exists outside the app’s control.

    • Flyngpenguin ☛ Palantir is Full of Karp: Humanities Protect Against His AI

      Palantir has a serious problem. You can tell by the way their CEO Alex Karp just positioned AI as threatening humanities-trained workers and empowering vocational ones.

      That’s exactly backwards. And it’s political. He’s trying to prevent people from pulling the curtain back on his mistakes.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Atlantic ☛ Hungary Just Ousted the Unoustable

    But voters rejected Orbán’s party, Fidesz, in favor of Magyar’s new faction, Tisza. In the process, they set a new national record for turnout. Magyar is a onetime Orbán loyalist who turned on the prime minister two years ago and managed to do what past opposition leaders couldn’t—overcome the incumbent’s enormous advantages. Since 2010, Orbán has rewritten election rules and removed independent checks on his power. He has suffocated civil society while extending his control over the media. And he has presided over patronage networks that have enriched his friends and family while impoverishing his society. State contracts helped turn the prime minister’s childhood friend, once a gas retrofitter, into a billionaire, but salaries for everyday Hungarians have languished at less than half the EU average. “It’s not livable,” Bendegúz Neszádeli, an 18-year-old who had just voted for the first time, told me. He held up a bracelet, braided with the Hungarian tricolor, that’s handed out to maiden voters. “It feels like there’s a future again.”

    The European Parliament calls Hungary an “electoral autocracy”—voting still takes place, but under fundamentally undemocratic conditions. That makes elections harder to contest but, as Hungarian voters proved, not impossible to win. Today, an election toppled a government whose advantages included support from the governments in both the United States and Russia. Echoing a chant in the crowd, Magyar declared in his victory speech, “Russians, go home.”

  • Robert Reich ☛ Sunday thought: How the Hell Did We Get to This Point?

    I’m also wondering how 19 super-rich American households could have added $1.8 trillion to their wealth in just the last 24 months — roughly the size of the economy of Australia — while the rate of child poverty in the U.S. has more than doubled, from a low of 5.2 percent in 2021 to over 13 percent now?

• Environment

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Surcharge on heavy industrial water users fetches Punjab govt ₹110 crore | Hindustan Times

    The Punjab Water Regulatory and Development Authority (PWRDA) has generated nearly ₹110 crore in the 2025-26 fiscal year by imposing a surcharge on 1,733 industrial units consuming 3lakh litres of water every month, officials said.

    The industries brought under the PWRDA ambit are bottling plants, distilleries, paper units, textile and dyeing units and sugar mills.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Phillippine Daily Inquirer ☛ Inside the green taxi: When the shift to electric becomes a question of survival

      His story reflects a broader reality across the transport sector. Fuel prices, long volatile, have become even less predictable amid global tensions. For drivers operating on narrow margins, even small changes can have immediate consequences.

      In this context, electric vehicles are no longer seen purely as a long-term environmental solution. They are increasingly becoming a practical way to stabilize earnings and reduce risk.

    • Futurism ☛ Scientists Set New Record for Solar Cell Efficiency

      It’s great in theory, but there’s a huge catch. Of all the power our star graciously beams to us, only about 33 percent of it can ever be turned into usable electricity, and most commercial solar panels don’t even come close to that.

    • Michigan Advance ☛ How EVs could solve a problem with America’s rickety grid

      But instead of being burdens to the electrical system, a clever trick is putting EVs on a trajectory to help save it. More models feature the ability to send their energy back to the grid in times of high demand — a trick known as vehicle-to-grid, or V2G — forming a vast network of backup power across a city. As demand wanes through the night, they charge up, ensuring an EV owner has enough juice to get to work in the morning.

    • The Independent US ☛ Seven countries now generate 100% of their electricity from renewable energy

      Seven countries now generate nearly all of their electricity from renewable energy sources, according to newly compiled figures.

      Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo produced more than 99.7 per cent of the electricity they consumed using geothermal, hydro, solar or wind power.

    • YLE ☛ Finland gains direct rail link to Europe this summer

      Meanwhile, Ranne has backed a long-range plan to build a parallel European-gauge track alongside the existing Finnish tracks from Haparanda to Kemi and perhaps eventually Oulu. That would be part of the Rail Nordica project, primarily aimed at improving military mobility in case of future crises. Last year, the Finnish Parliament allocated 20 million euros for Rail Nordica planning.

      In some sections, dual-gauge gauntlet tracks could also be used, such as those now on the railway bridge between Haparanda and Tornio. Building such dual-use would be more economical than a completely new parallel track, which would be immensely expensive. In any case, construction is unlikely to start before the 2030s.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Futurism ☛ Billionaire Says Insider Trading Should Be Fully Legalized

    The effrontery of Peterffy’s remarks can’t be overstated. His company owns and runs ForecastEx, a prediction market that lets you place bets on the outcomes of real-world events, including elections and economic indicators.

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ Flowers Bloom on Soldiers' Graves: Lessons in Power and Consequence

    USAID created soft power around the world while also doing actual good in saving lives and preventing suffering; dismantling the organization was one of many actions this administration took that weakens this country in the long run and, really, the short run – that with all that macho strutting and bullying, they don't understand that they are weak and making this country weak says more about the epic incomprehension. This should remind us that knowledge is power, and understanding is power; stupidity is a weakness of theirs that has often benefitted the rest of us. Including, for better or worse, Iran, which in many respects has won this war. The country has suffered horrific losses, including the death of more than 160 schoolgirls in an attack on a school that was apparently a result of the Hegseth-era military's sloppy choice of targets. The heroic uprising against the regime was undermined, not strengthened, as the Trumpists thought, by this attack. They strengthened the regime instead. And Iran has seized control, for now, of the Strait of Hormuz and is demanding huge tolls from ship traffic there.

  • Don Marti ☛ Attribution cartel update

    The attribution cartel is learning from the failure of Google’s “Privacy Sandbox”. Where Google’s 2019-2025 project was noisy, the attribution cartel is quiet. Where Google tried to do a full ad stack in one browser, the attribution cartel is doing one key piece of the stack across multiple browsers. So far, it seems to be working. My best guess as to why is, as they say, all this. The companies involved have so flooded the zone that dumping one more load can happen without attracting much attention. With the whole “AI” infringement situation, the fraud and malware crisis on search and social, and the economy-wide trust collapse in general, it’s not a surprise that this thing is moving but not raising much of a stink.

    So what’s so bad about the attribution cartel?

  • Flyngpenguin ☛ The Old EFF Dog Don’t Hunt: Cohn of Silence Leaves X

    On The Daily Show, the wheels fell off. Jon Stewart, one of the sharpest interviewers in the world, pressed Cohn on platform liability and algorithmic harm. He correctly called out social media as “algorithmically driven speech” and “monetized, incentivized, algorithmic clusterfuck.” That’s a fact. Cohn replied by going on an offensive attack, trying to discredit Stewart personally on his own show to divert attention from his question: comparing Facebook’s algorithm to Stewart choosing guests for his show. This unfounded, illogical, assault on Stewart didn’t do the EFF any favors.

    Stewart raised environmental regulation as a model for platform harm. Cohn called protecting the environment a form of censorship. Pollution is a both sides argument now? Stewart pushed on liability. Cohn said people should never fight, just “leave” if they don’t like something. She said go to Bluesky, as if doubling down from false “both sides” of pollution to false “equivalence” of every technology is her big move. Stewart: “But if I shift over to Bluesky, then the world no longer makes sense.” Every structural solution Stewart raised, Cohn reframed with a hollow label of “censorship”. Don’t regulate, just leave.

    [...]

    EFF is pushing a centralization of power argument for individuals to lose rights, the literal negation of libertarian thought. There’s a word for that, and the rest of this post is about finding it.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • India Times ☛ China's state media turns to social media, AI to tell its story - often mock US

      In a five-minute AI-generated animation modelled after classic martial arts movies, China's state media frames an allegory for the war in Iran. A white eagle in regal attire representing the US unleashes an evil laugh before his army attacks a group of Persian cats draped in black cloaks standing in for Iranians, who vow to fight after losing their leader and close off a crucial trading route.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Iran's forced nationwide internet blackout becomes second-longest on record as it passes 1,000 hours offline — possessing Starlink terminals punishable by death, country using 'military-grade jamming' against service

    Iran's nationwide Internet blackout has crossed the 1,000-hour mark and is now one of the longest nation-scale shutdowns ever measured, according to connectivity monitor NetBlocks. The site has tracked the disruption since it was intensified on February 28 alongside joint U.S. and Israeli military strikes on the country. Starlink isn't the solution, either, as Iran is actively seeking those who possess Starlink terminals, and if caught individuals are punishable by execution.

  • Declan Chidlow ☛ Beyond the Square and Under the Rug

    At the protest’s peak on May 17th, there were some one million people at the square. At dawn on the 19th, Zhao Ziyang, who had lost the internal party struggle and knew his career was over, delivered a speech via megaphone to the protesters in the square and nationally via television. The following day, martial law was declared by Li Peng, and an estimated 300,000 troops were mobilised, though many were slowed or halted by mass non-violent resistance from protestors and civilians. Following a meeting that occurred on June 1st, the CCP decided to clear the square, and on the night of June 3rd and early morning of June 4th, the Chinese government deployed troops to suppress protests by force.

    Troops advanced into central Beijing and engaged with those trying to halt their progress. Unlike the previous non-violent resistance, this time demonstrators, bystanders, and soldiers were killed and injured. Estimates indicate anywhere from the high hundreds to the low thousands were killed, with many thousands more injured1. Much of this violence actually occurred near the Muxidi area along Chang’an Avenue, which makes the popular names ‘Tiananmen Square protests’ and ‘Tiananmen Square massacre’ somewhat misnomers – there is little evidence that anyone was killed in the square itself.

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Russia labels Stanford University 'undesirable' in escalating crackdown on Western schools

    The designation is part of the Kremlin's crackdown on civil society, international organizations, and Western universities — a campaign that has intensified throughout the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

    The Russian government did not explain why Stanford was deemed "undesirable." The label could expose anyone linked to the university, including students, to a four-year prison sentence.

    Stanford's Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) was also added to the list.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Flyngpenguin ☛ Food | flyingpenguin

    The KKK as “tax enforcers” who actually eliminate taxation is the real story here, which so far nobody is admitting.

    "The ban was part of a law passed during Reconstruction in July 1868, in part to thwart liquor tax evasion, and subjected violators to up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine."

    "Writing for a three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Edith Hollan Jones said the ban actually reduced tax revenue by preventing distilling in the first place, unlike laws that regulated the manufacture and labeling of distilled spirits on which ​the government could collect taxes."

    "She also said that under the government’s logic, Congress could ​criminalize virtually any in-home activity that might escape notice from tax collectors, including remote work and ‌home-based ⁠businesses."

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Musk hurls expletives at senior SA diplomat in Starlink row

    The outburst marks a further deterioration in Musk’s already strained relationship with the South African government, which he has repeatedly accused of racial discrimination over the country’s black economic empowerment framework. Under South African licensing rules, prospective telecommunications licensees, like Starlink, must cede 30% of their equity to historically disadvantaged groups – a condition SpaceX has said it doesn’t do anywhere in the world.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘It has your name on it, but I don’t think it’s you’: how AI is impersonating musicians on Spotify

    Fraudulent music streams have long been a scourge for the industry, but experts say generative AI has supercharged it