Leftovers

• Justin Searls ☛ Content Hiatus

  I've decided to go on a content hiatus. This will be my last dispatch for a while. I don't know how long I'll be gone.

• David Rosenthal ☛ Angels in America

  Anyone interested in this play should read both the text of the two halves, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, and Isaac Butler and Dan Kois' magisterial and comprehensive oral history, The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America. Because my story starts in 1991 I have used both to refresh my memory. Below the many quotes without links are from Butler and Kois, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. I also viewed the National Theatre's 2017 production on the National Theatre at Home streaming service.

• Brandon ☛ Blog Update and RSS Feed Options

  Right now, I'm slowly rebuilding my archives, mainly posts from the past year. Some of these have been seen, some have not, but I'm transferring everything over by hand so it's a slow process. Also, I'm doing my best to not push these to RSS, but mistakes will happen so if you see something random from June of last year, that means I was just adding something new.

• Daniel Janus ☛ How can I keep from singing?

  On the contrary, it’s only the beginning of my adventure. I certainly hope so.

  I’m not going to say that “you should try it”, because I loathe telling people what they should or should not do. Instead, I hope this is an inspiration to someone. Neuroplasticity may degrade over time, but it never completely wears off; consequently, it’s never too late to start learning. It’s great to be a beginner, and it’s great to find enjoyment in imperfection.

• Kevin Wammer ☛ Welcome to the new (old) overkill

  A couple of weeks ago, I announced my plan to merge my two websites, overkill.wtf and cliophate.wtf.

  Well, I am done. Welcome to the new (old) overkill.

• James Leighton ☛ A year of National Trust Visits

  Apparently NT membership is growing amongst the younger generations and it's easy to see why. Aren't we are looking for ways to unplug from the doom and gloom of modern day life? Nothing is better than walking around a woodland or garden, then finishing the day with a scone.

• University of Toronto ☛ Having an inventory of anything is a non-trivial thing

  Let's get this out of the way right at the start: inventories are hard. I don't just mean network inventories or machine inventories or software inventories or dependency inventories. I mean any and all inventories, everywhere. For example, some real businesses periodically take a day or two off from doing business in order to check and reconcile their inventory with actual physical reality. It's ordinary to have a business's website say they have something in stock at a location, but when you go to the location, the people there can only shrug and tell you they have no idea where the theoretically in-stock item is, if it even exists.

• Daniel Pocock ☛ Terrorism or accident? Geelong Corio refinery fire, drone attack rumours in news vacuum

  At 11pm local time in eastern Australia, a huge fire broke out at the Viva Energy refinery in Corio, Geelong.

  There has been a near-total news vacuum. This may be deliberate or it may be a consequence of cost-cutting that has replaced many journalists with artificial intelligence. The few human journalists who remain in the profession may have already gone to bed when the fire started.

• Science

  • The Nation ☛ How Silicon Valley Is Turning Scientists Into Exploited Gig Workers

    Why would tech billionaires attack a system that made them enormously wealthy at virtually no personal cost? The most obvious explanation is that much of that newly freed-up funding can be redirected to the tech industry. Thiel and Andreessen position start-ups as the remedy to the supposedly bloated, inefficient scientific bureaucracy. They cast themselves as the true champions of science, locked in an existential battle against pencil-pushing charlatans. If Newton were around today, the thinking goes, he would be applying to Y Combinator and ordering swag for his B2B SaaS start-up. This grandiosity is coupled with a strong sense of paranoia. In a 2025 interview, Andreessen described the Biden administration as being preoccupied with “the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation, and then the raw arbitrary enforcement and promulgation of regulation,” concluding: “Absolutely tried to kill us.”

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Guest Post from Peter Brass, Former NSF Theory Director, on the NSF budget.

    Guest post from Peter Brass, Former NSF Theory director (though not affiliated with the NSF now) on the White House NSF budget for FY 2027.

  • Mira Welner ☛ Being a Junior Scientist in the Current Administration

    The phrase 'funding is a continuing headache' was written in 1995, under Clinton. I don't have any strong opinions on Clinton as I was not born until after his administration. However I can tell you that what is going on right now with funding makes 1995 look like an idealistic fantasy.

    Since taking office in 2025, Trump has cut over 3,800 research grants from the NIH and NSF, giving 1.8 billion less than was expected. Things are really, really bad.

  • ACM ☛ KV the Apostate

    The crux of the matter is that the study of computing is, in fact, an unnatural science. It is the study of objects manufactured by humans, but which we now claim (or at least the LLM folks claim) are too complex to understand. Physics is the study of the natural world, and chemistry is applied physics with smoke and bangs, while biology is the study of naturally occurring living organisms. Those are properly called natural sciences. Which is to say I just added science to their names as well.

    Whether or not we affix science to a name is immaterial. It is how we study what we study and whether we can apply the scientific method to derive reproducible results. If each time we do something we get a random but useful result, that’s still not science but merely luck. And, as someone who flies a lot, I prefer not to rely solely on luck in my flight controls, flaps, engines, or brakes.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Trump touts 'gold standard science.' What does that actually mean?

    In practice, critics say, the phrase has become shorthand for science in which preferred outcomes outweigh inconvenient evidence.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ The Artemis II mission isn’t just science. Viral photos and videos from the Moon mission are proof of the power of a photograph

    For a blissful 10 days, the biggest stories in my feeds were not politics or natural disasters, but iconic photographs of the Earth, craters named Carroll, and broken toilets 252,756 miles from the nearest plumber. The Artemis II mission took humans the farthest from Earth in history, and, thanks to the power of photographs and videos, the world was able to watch.

• Career/Education

  • EDRI ☛ #PrivacyCamp25: Event summary

    On 30 September 2025, policymakers, activists, human rights defenders and academics from Europe and beyond gathered in Brussels and online for Privacy Camp 2025. Together, we explored the theme Resilience and Resistance in Times of Deregulation and Authoritarianism.

  • Phil Gyford ☛ HardWired / Wired Books

    As far as I can tell the company published 15 books – 12 non-fiction, 3 fiction – with at least 11 more in the pipeline before it closed down, all listed below. This isn’t many titles but it’s a great snapshot of a certain mid-90s tech-focused world. I’ve looked for information about the company and its books to piece together what I can here.

  • Mandy Brown ☛ Ways of moving

    I think this is important to remember: we aren’t faced with an absence of imagination. We’re faced with the constraints of a system that does not have our best interests at heart.

  • YLE ☛ More students taking out loans

    At the end of last year, people with student loan debt owed an average of almost 12,700 euros, some 600 more than the previous year.

    Regionally, the largest average loans were among students living in Helsinki, where the average loans was around 14,500 euros. The smallest average loan amount, around 10,600 euros, was in Central Ostrobothnia.

  • Hackaday ☛ Reverse-Engineering Human Cognition And Decision Making In A Modern Age

    With this statement Einstein makes a clear case for the benefits of cognitive offloading in the sense that rote memorization does not enhance one’s cognition. Similarly, the ability to solve complicated equations and sums without so much as the use of pen and paper is fairly irrelevant when a slide rule and a digital calculator can offload all that work. As a benefit these devices tend to be more precise, faster and very accessible.

    It is still important to have an intuitive feeling for whether a calculation is in the expected range, and one should never assume that what is written in a book is the absolute truth. That in a nutshell is the key difference between cognitive offloading and cognitive surrender. If you have entered a series of values into your calculator, the result seems off and you re-type them to be sure, that’s cognitive offloading.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Frank Meeuwsen

    This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frank Meeuwsen, whose blog can be found at blog.frankmeeuwsen.com.

• Hardware

  • The Newsprint ☛ A Review of the Nuphy Node 100 Low-Profile Mechanical Keyboard

    I’ve been allergic to low-profile keyboards in the past, for whatever reason. There aren’t as many of them on the market, and they all seem to have a compromise I’m not willing to deal with. The Nuphy Node 100, for the most part, is no different — there are compromises in this low-profile keyboard that keyboard aficionados will scoff at (me included!).

  • Cassidy Williams ☛ Connecting the Logitech MX Creative Console to Elgato Lights

    I’ve been using an Elgato Stream Deck to control my lights in my office for the past several years. The one I have (with 15 buttons) has worked great for me, but I noticed that I only really use 8 of the buttons. The rest work perfectly fine, but I always forget the macros I have saved there, and really just go back to defaulting to lighting control.

    Now, lately because I’m editing videos a lot more (both for work and personally), I’ve been looking to get some kind of knob or dial for my desk to be able to scrub through footage faster.

    These scenarios combined, I ended up finding the Logitech MX Creative Console! The buttons look exactly like the Stream Deck ones (only there’s 9 of them, with options to switch between pages and apps), and it comes with a Bluetooth rotary dial with buttons.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Kyle Reddoch ☛ Stress Awareness Month: Helping Cybersecurity and IT Go From Burnout to Balance

    April is Stress Awareness Month, and I think that is a good excuse for those of us in cybersecurity and IT to be honest about something our industry still handles poorly. We are very good at talking about uptime, resilience, and risk. We are not always as good at talking about the human cost of constantly operating in that mode.

    In this line of work, stress often gets framed like proof that you care. If you are answering messages after hours, jumping into every emergency, chasing every alert, and carrying the weight of every missed patch or misconfiguration, it can start to look like commitment. In reality, it often looks a lot more like slow-motion burnout.

  • Blain Smith ☛ Wired for Fairness

    That moment did not just feel like it changed me. It did change me. Research in neuroplasticity has established that chronic stress and depression cause structural changes in the brain. Sustained exposure to distress reduces dendrites and synaptic connections in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, the regions responsible for memory, learning, and decision-making. The amygdala, which processes fear and threat, becomes hyperactive. Neural pathways are built by experience, the same way learning builds them. Cells that fire together wire together, and the reverse is equally true: sustained distress degrades and reshapes the pathways you spent your career building. The brain does not merely experience trauma. It encodes it into its physical structure. New pathways form around the damage, and those pathways carry the weight of what happened into everything that comes after.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Our attention spans are one-third what they were in 2004

    His prescription: read a few dozen pages of a book daily and leave your phone in the kitchen at night. School phone bans preview what happens when defaults shift — an NBER working paper found significant test score improvements after bans took effect, and three-quarters of 317 Dutch high schools reported better student focus.

  • YLE ☛ Rising oil prices already prompting some Finnish farms to downsize crop plans

    A recent survey by two agricultural groups, SLC and MTK, asked farmers about their plans for the season, given the current situation.

    The poll found two-thirds of farms planning to reduce their use of fertilisers, while nearly a fifth said they were planning to cut down on their crops.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Helium shortage threatens MRIs, chips, and fiber optics

    Qatar produces about a third of the world's helium, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — a consequence of Trump's Iran war — has disrupted those shipments. Construction Physics breaks down why there's no quick fix: helium is a byproduct of natural gas extraction, not something you can ramp up independently, and the US sold off its strategic reserve in 2024.

• Proprietary

  • The Verge ☛ The FCC just saved Netgear from its router ban for no obvious reason

    The United States’ foreign router ban didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and today may not change that. The FCC has just granted Netgear a conditional approval to import its future consumer routers, cable modems, and cable gateways into the US through October 1st, 2027 — even though the company builds those devices in Asia and has not announced any plan to bring manufacturing to the United States.

    Neither the FCC’s announcement nor Netgear’s announcement explain why Netgear was granted the temporary exemption. The FCC only states that the Pentagon has now made “a specific determination” that “such devices do not pose risks to U.S. national security.”

  • Michael Tsai ☛ An Ultralight MacBook and Other Apple Silicon Roads Not Taken

  • Kevin Wammer ☛ Davinci Resolve Photo is Lightroom for Linux people

    This is huge for us Linux people. This means we potentially have a real alternative to Lightroom that also happens to be free. It's not yet in the CachyOS repo, but this will be an insta-install.

  • DNA Lounge ☛ DNA Lounge: 14-Apr-2026 (Tue): Wherein our long pizza delivery nightmare has finally reached a middle

    Guess what, they completely failed at their one job. The orders would actually show up in the POS about one time in four, and they could not fix it.

  • Matt Cool ☛ Goodbye Meetup.com: Migrating to Discord + Website and Other Alternative Platforms

    It’s been a long time coming but I’ve finally given up on Meetup.com as an organizer. I’ve been a member since 2013 and I’ve met some great people and learned a lot from the various groups I’ve been a part of. Meetup.com has been falling apart for years. Bugs, service degradations, dark UX patterns… and I’ve had enough. Here’s why I’m done: [...]

  • Android Police ☛ Microsoft is done with Outlook Lite on Android

    Microsoft initially announced its plans to kill the Outlook Lite app for Android in September 2025. Back then, it only blocked the installation of apps for new users from early October 2025. Fast-forward a few months, and Microsoft has now published a message on the MS 365 Admin Center confirming that it will completely retire Outlook Lite for Android on May 25, 2026 (via Neowin).

    After that date, Outlook Lite will stop fetching new emails, and its core features will be disabled. Microsoft notes that your Outlook account will not be affected by this shutdown, and all data on it will remain untouched.

  • Matt Routley ☛ Having to reset all of my devices allowed for a helpful reset of my systems

    Thanks to a passcode debacle, I had to reset my iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch — so I used the moment to start fresh rather than restore from backups. I started with a clean install of each and have been rebuilding from there with an intention to minimize the total number of settings adjustments and apps. This moves me back towards my earlier, mostly defaults setup.

    After the initial install, I added a handful of apps: [...]

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ AI Use Appears to Have a "Boiling Frog" Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns

      In a new study, researchers claim to provide the first causal evidence that leaning on AI to assist with “reasoning-intensive” cognitive labor — mental tasks ranging from writing to studying to coding to simply brainstorming new ideas — can rapidly impair users’ intellectual ability and willingness to persist despite difficulty.

      “We find that AI assistance improves immediate performance, but it comes at a heavy cognitive cost,” the study declares of its findings. “After just [about] 10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it.”

    • PC World ☛ Investigation: Even USB flash drives and SD cards are becoming unaffordable

      RAM and storage are expensive now. You know that. They’ve been going crazy for months, and though some data points indicate that the prices may have peaked, others show just the opposite. But the woes are spreading beyond computers, game consoles, phones, and any other finished product with chips inside. Now even basic USB flash drives and storage cards are shooting up.

    • Hackaday ☛ New Linux Kernel Rules Put The Onus On Humans For AI Tool Usage

      The upshot of the use of such Large Language Models (LLM) tools is that any commit that uses generated code has to be signed off by a human developer, and this human will ultimately bear responsibility for the code quality as well as any issues that the code may cause, including legal ones. The use of AI tools also has to be declared with the Assisted-by: tag in contributions so that their use can be tracked.

    • Rob Bowley ☛ AI “Watershed Moment” or expensive pen tester? The AISI Mythos Data

      The UK’s AI Security Institute has published the first independent evaluation of Claude Mythos’s cyber capabilities. The headline finding – first AI model to complete a full 32-step simulated network attack – is notable. But there’s a finding buried in the accompanying methodology paper that puts it in a rather different light. On current pricing and reliability, according to my maths, a human expert would do the same job cheaper, faster and more reliably.

    • Niel Madden ☛ Mythos and its impact on security

      As a former AI researcher myself (before modern ML exploded), I find this aspect of the Mythos write-up quite interesting. Most security tools suffer from problems with false positives, and LLMs are of course famous for that: they are “bullshit machines”. Putting it in slightly less pejorative terms, I would call them abduction machines: they generate plausible hypotheses to explain some set of observations. (Training an LLM is induction, but what they do at runtime is closer to abduction). In the case of a chatbot, the “observations” are the token context window, and the hypotheses are the plausible next token completions. In the case of vulnerability hunting, the observations are the source code and a prompt asking to look for a vulnerability and the hypotheses are the generated potential vulnerabilities. Despite knowing how this works, it is still kind of magic to me that the latter emerges from the former (plausible vulnerabilities from merely predicting the most likely next tokens given the context).

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

      Software development may become (at least in some aspects) more like witchcraft than engineering. The present enthusiasm for “AI coworkers” is preposterous. Automation can paradoxically make systems less robust; when we apply ML to new domains, we will have to reckon with deskilling, automation bias, monitoring fatigue, and takeover hazards. AI boosters believe ML will displace labor across a broad swath of industries in a short period of time; if they are right, we are in for a rough time. Machine learning seems likely to further consolidate wealth and power in the hands of large tech companies, and I don’t think giving Amazon et al. even more money will yield Universal Basic Income.

    • Elliot C Smith ☛ I'm long on software engineering

      Given all that I don't think we'll suddenly be happy with last year's code replicated a million times. We'll want an initial injection of that, maybe a few more layoffs, but sooner or later our expectations and ambitions will realign to this new normal and we'll start asking for more. More than these models can deliver, faster than they can be improved without smart people at the helm.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Neural Computing: your boss thinks the AI will become a PC

      I’ve had a couple of people say their management are enraptured by this paper. The bosses are amazed at the possibilities the AI could give them.

      What are those possibilities? Beats me. I’m looking at the paper, and it’s like a marketer did a PowerPoint and his boss told him to stretch it into a writeup. Here’s what the researchers promise: [...]

    • Serghei Iakovlev ☛ What Breaks When You Run Coding Agents Unsupervised

      Coding agents can write code. That capability is real. Point Claude Code or Copilot at a well-scoped issue and you get a working pull request most of the time. Now try running five of them unattended. A class of failures appears that has nothing to do with how well the agent writes code. I spent the past month building a Go project. Agents handled issue implementation; I handled architecture and review. 242 issues closed, 190 PRs merged, 18 releases shipped in just over three weeks. The velocity was real, but so were the failure modes. Here are the five that kept recurring.

    • Codeberg ☛ KeePassChi

      We are a small group of engineers with extensive open source maintenance and information security experience, and we forked KeePassχ from KeePassXC 2.7.10, the last release before the advent of the LLM policy linked above. We like using a robust, secure, and trustworthy password manager, so that's what we'll focus on. Anything on top of that is a bonus.

    • Court House News ☛ OpenAI can't duck federal claims over murder-suicide tied to ChatGPT

      A federal case against OpenAI over claims the company designed its AI to delude a mentally unwell son to violent behavior will run concurrently to a state court case.

    • Martin Chang ☛ From refusal steering to memory modification - editing RWKVv7 working memories

      In the previous post I managed to steer RWKVv7's behavior to some degree and showed that the recurrent state after layer 0 cannot be effectively used as a method to detect dangerous prompts by any linear, non-linear or ML methods. I was thinking to myself - seriously? No right? That informatino gotta be stored in there and the recurrent state cannot be just noise. Else either layer 0 is doing all the heavy lifing or it regressess into a simple feed forward network. Either case is unreasonsabe. So I spent some time digging. What if I use something else?

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AI doomsday cultist throws Molotov at Sam Altman’s house

      The article was not the reason for the attack. The alleged attacker was Daniel Moreno-Gama, age 20 — a devoted believer in the AI doomsday, and a huge fan of Eliezer Yudkowsky, founder of the Rationality subculture.

      Moreno had an Instagram called “butlerian_jihadist_”. The Butlerian Jihad is from Dune by Frank Herbert, in which they spend a hundred years wiping out any computer that could think.

  • Social Control Media

    • Hollywood Reporter ☛ Eurovision Song Contest 2026 to Stream in US on YouTube, Plus Peacock

      The exec told THR after the session that YouTube already streamed the song contest last year, but that was not widely known yet. YouTube’s deal covers the world, except for select markets where local broadcasters chose not to share the event with the streaming platform, including in the U.K. and Australia, he said.

    • The Record ☛ Russia appears to block social media platform Bluesky amid wider internet restrictions

      Roskomnadzor oversees internet censorship and content regulation in Russia and has tightened control over online platforms since the start of the war in Ukraine. Authorities have increasingly restricted access to foreign social media and messaging services, often citing violations of Russian law or concerns about fraud and cybercrime.

      Earlier this year, the regulator moved against services including Telegram and WhatsApp, arguing that the platforms had failed to comply with local legislation.

    • Timothy Chambers ☛ **Proposal for Fediverse Remote Content Engagement** Updated April 14, 2026

      Enhancing User Experience for Remote Social Interactions in ActivityPub Applications

    • Dave DeGraw ☛ The Internet is a vast place.

      It’s a bit difficult to even talk about “the [Internet]” as a single concept. Maybe I have an outdated idea, but I don’t really consider “the [Internet]” to be any connected service. I primarily consider it to be the thing you view with a web browser. Maybe “the [Internet]” to me really means the World Wide Web. A smart light switch isn’t “the [Internet]” even if it needs an [Internet] connection to operate. I think that concept is already changing drastically with huge platforms like Roblox. As much as we want to gallivant about making a “new [Internet]”, I think it’s already happened. I don’t think my kids know how to use a web browser or really even have an understanding of the concept. But they play online games. They watch videos. The [Internet] has become the services that operate using a public network connection and the World Wide Web is nearly a relic of the past. But I think I’ll still be here in 50 years, drafting blog posts in nano, sending emails, and subscribing to RSS feeds. I wouldn’t be surprised if I become a modern ham radio operator, but instead of broadcasting airwaves from my basement, I’ll be blogging, connecting with other crazy people who are like-minded enough to figure out how to use the ancient technology.

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Estonia caught a record number of Russian collaborators in 2025

      She explained that social media, as a tool or channel, has changed recruitment methods.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Cyble Inc ☛ ChipSoft Ransomware Incident Hits Dutch Healthcare Systems

      The ChipSoft ransomware incident has disrupted healthcare operations across multiple institutions after the Dutch software vendor was hit by a cyberattack on April 7. The attack forced hospitals to disconnect critical systems and triggered widespread precautionary actions, highlighting the ongoing risks ransomware poses to the healthcare sector.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • YLE ☛ Ministry: Water in Finland is too cheap, bills set to rise

    Water charges could increase significantly in the coming years as utility companies invest in improving ageing pipeline networks.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Google ☛ Introducing a new spam policy for "back button hijacking"

      Today, we are expanding our spam policies to address a deceptive practice known as "back button hijacking", which will become an explicit violation of the "malicious practices" of spam policies, leading to potential spam actions.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ Google Broke Its Promise to Me. Now ICE Has My Data.

      In September 2024, Amandla Thomas-Johnson was a Ph.D. candidate studying in the U.S. on a student visa when he briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest. In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent Google an administrative subpoena requesting his data. The next month, Google gave Thomas-Johnson's information to ICE without giving him the chance to challenge the subpoena, breaking a nearly decade-long promise to notify users before handing their data to law enforcement.

    • Techdirt ☛ 438 Experts Said Age Verification Is Dangerous. Legislators Are Moving Forward With It Anyway.

      In early March, 438 security and privacy researchers from 32 countries signed a massive open letter warning that age verification mandates for the internet are technically impossible to get right, easy to circumvent, a serious threat to privacy and security, and likely to cause more harm than good. While many folks (including us at Techdirt) have been calling out similar problems with age verification, this was basically a ton of experts all teaming up to call out how dangerous the technology is — by any reasonable measure, a hugely significant collective statement from the scientific community on an active area of internet regulation.

    • The Record ☛ Big tech fails to opt-out users requesting not to be tracked much of the time, new research says

      The audit from privacy organization webXray studied California web traffic in March and found that 194 online advertising services “ignore legally defined, globally standard, opt-out signals endorsed by regulators,” according to the report.

      The California Consumer Privacy Act gives consumers the right to decline to have their personal data sold. A mechanism known as Global Privacy Control (GPC) is supposed to trigger the opt-outs for consumers who request them by using a browser extension as an indicator of their preferences.

    • Security Week ☛ Europe's Largest Gym Chain Says Data Breach Impacts 1 Million Members

      Compromised information includes names, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and bank account details.

    • The Verge ☛ Privacy advocates want Google to stop handing consumer data over to ICE

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is asking the attorneys general of California and New York to investigate Google for deceptive trade practices, saying the tech giant fails to notify users before handing over their data to law enforcement agencies like ICE.

      “For nearly a decade, Google has promised billions of users that it will notify them before disclosing their personal data to law enforcement,” the letter says. But it didn’t in the case of Amandla Thomas-Johnson, a former PhD candidate at Cornell University who says he received no notice that ICE had accessed his university email.

    • Jono Alderson ☛ Speculation rules for evil

      That’s not really what they’re for. The idea is simple enough. You give the browser a set of rules that describe which URLs a user might visit next, usually as patterns rather than hard-coded links, along with some hints about how eager it should be to fetch them. Under the right conditions, it goes off and requests those pages in advance. When the user clicks, the page is already there. It feels instant. Everyone wins.

      Except the browser doesn’t care whose URLs match those patterns.

    • Terence Eden ☛ Android now stops you sharing your location in photos

      Literally the only way to get a photo with geolocation intact is to plug in a USB cable, copy the photo to your computer, and then upload it via a desktop web browser?

  • Confidentiality

    • 2026-04-07 [Older] Jones Day confirms limited breach after phishing attack by Silent Ransom Group

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Zelensky Says Kyiv Seized a Russian Position With Drones and Robots. Is This a Game Changer?

    “For the first time in the history of this war, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned platforms — ground systems and drones,” he said on Monday, adding that unspecified number of Russian troops surrendered.

    “The operation was carried out without infantry and without losses on our side,” Zelensky added.

  • SBS ☛ Man charged with using newly banned phrases in Queensland tries to argue law 'insane'

    Earlier this year, Queensland passed legislation banning the phrases "from the river to the sea" and "globalise the intifada", categorising them as hate speech against Jewish people.

    Queensland Attorney-General Deb Frecklington said in February that the laws were a "common sense" response to the Bondi terror attack, when 15 people were killed after two gunmen opened fire on Jewish celebrations in the deadliest attack on Australian soil since the 1996 Port Arthur tragedy.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ US DOGE [sic] Service is alive and growing, organization official says

    Months after confusion about its possible demise, the U.S. DOGE [sic] Service is reemerging and adding to its ranks.

  • The Nation ☛ A Major Taboo Was Broken at the DNC Last Weekend

    An AIPAC-specific resolution didn’t make it through the party’s meeting. But I’ve never seen such an open debate about the role of pro-Israel money before.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Political Corruption Is Being Normalized

    A little-known Supreme Court case that just vacated the corruption conviction of a local official raises a crucial question: Will the kind of influence peddling now ubiquitous in politics become unprosecutable simply because it has become so commonplace?

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Australia Social Media Ban Fails To Stop Under-16 Access

    According to the first large-scale study conducted by the Molly Rose Foundation and YouthInsight, more than 60% of children aged 12–15 who previously used social media still have access to at least one account. Overall, this represents 54% of all children in that age group.

  • Robert Reich ☛ How to Impeach the Bastard, for Real

    This was before Trump’s agents murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, before the Justice Department released more Epstein files, before Trump’s disastrous war in Iran, before Trump threatened death to the entire Iranian civilization, before a gallon of gas hit $4 or more, before other prices also began rising because of the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, and before additional price hikes associated with Trump’s tariffs had kicked in.

    It was also before Trump’s polls slid to record lows, before the MAGA faithful began complaining that Trump had betrayed his promise to avoid foreign entanglements, and before a slew of special elections in which Democratic candidates have won Republican districts (and even when they didn’t win, lost by far smaller margins than Trump won by in 2024).

    Until recently I thought impeaching Trump and convicting him in the Senate was a pipe dream. I was concerned that even talk of impeachment at this stage might distract attention from the affordability crisis brought on by Trump and could even fortify Republican charges of Democratic “extremism.”

  • Mike Brock ☛ The First Domino

    The gerrymandered map that was supposed to make Orbán permanent didn’t just fail. It was overrun.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Jack White Questions How Christians Can Support Donald Trump

    “Hey evangelical Christians? Remember that anti-Christ you been squawking about all these years and how he’d present himself as Christlike and bring about the end of days with a final war in the Middle East involving Jerusalem? Well…check out your boy now!” White wrote. “Listen, if the felonies, epstein files, rapes, bombing of schoolchildren, gestapo ICE agents attacking his own citizens, threatening to invade Greenland, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran all didn’t convince you that you fell for this deranged grifter, maybe this lil’ post will?”

  • Engadget ☛ Estonia is the rare EU country opposing child social media bans

    Estonia's education minister believes these countries are coming at the very real problem from the wrong angle. "The way to approach this, to me, is not to make kids responsible for that harm and start self-regulating," Kristina Kallas said at a Politico forum in Barcelona. She added that "kids will find very quickly the ways to go around and to still use social media."

  • The Next Web ☛ Estonia is the rare EU country opposing bans on children’s social media use

    In short: Estonia and Belgium are the only two EU member states to have declined the Jutland Declaration, an October 2025 pan-European commitment to restrict children’s access to social media. Estonia’s ministers argue that age-based bans are unenforceable, that children will find ways around them, and that the correct approach is to enforce the GDPR against the platforms themselves and invest in digital literacy rather than restricting young people’s participation in the information society.

  • Greece ☛ Social media ban raises effectiveness, rights concerns

    While the measure enjoys 80% public approval, critics point to recent data from Australia, where a similar ban implemented in late 2025 saw nearly 70% of minors bypass restrictions via VPNs. To address these enforcement gaps, Greece will debut a “Kids Wallet” for digital age verification.

  • Freedom From Religion Foundation ☛ FFRF: Resist Trump’s move to destroy elections

    “Suppressing the vote is the hallmark of dictators, fascists and other authoritarians,” comment Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, FFRF co-presidents. “This threat to destroy fair elections, set up the mechanics to rig elections and deny voter access would be a direct strike against our secular democracy and all voters.”

    They add, “Trump has voiced voter suppression intentions that would destroy our democratic voting process, deny many Americans the vote and voter access so many of our ancestors worked so hard to obtain.”

  • Robert Reich ☛ An Apology

    I post so much because we’re in a national emergency, and I want to do what I can to get you the facts, arguments, and analyses you need to take an active role resisting and putting an end to the Trump regime.

    He’s getting madder and more dangerous by the day.

    Your active role can be phoning your senators and representatives and giving them more backbone in fighting Trump. Protecting vulnerable members of our communities from him and his agents. Marching, demonstrating. Getting out the vote. Or simply sharing my posts with your friends and colleagues — so they also have the facts, arguments, and analyses they need to effectively resist.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Futurism ☛ Psychological Research Finds Trump Supporters Are Not Doing Well

    While there have been previous studies on cognitive dissonance, PsyPost notes they typically give participants only one chance to deflect — helpful for studying the decision itself, but not so much the logic behind it. These three studies made use of open-ended questioning, meaning the Trump supporters surveyed had much more wiggle room to explain away their preconceived notions.

    Going forward, Harmon-Jones says more work is needed to separate the findings on cognitive dissonance from the Trump-themed line of questioning.

  • Manton Reece ☛ Scam Altman profile misses the mark

    I think talented journalists like Ronan Farrow had a chance to do some new reporting on where AI is now, what impact it will have on the economy and society, and they instead wrote an article about personality quirks and office drama. The article is so focused on finding flaws in Scam Altman that it glosses over all the bigger picture themes about what is happening in the AI industry.

    People who already dislike Scam or OpenAI will point to it as confirmation. Yet there is very little new here. The real news in the article feels out of place because it’s framed as a backdrop for this initial narrative about Scam and the blip. And some of the most interesting tidbits in the article — like that Fidji Simo might eventually succeed Scam as CEO — are dismissed as rumor just as quickly as they are introduced.

  • BoingBoing ☛ FBI doc says Epstein introduced Melania to Trump, but OK, let’s go with “chance meeting”

    Weird how the official story needs defending, but the document just exists. Coincidence is doing a lot of heavy lifting, unless it is a nickname for Ghislaine Maxwell.

  • Raw Story ☛ Unearthed FBI doc undercuts White House denial about Epstein's connection to Melania Trump - Raw Story

    But according to a 2019 FBI interview summary report, one witness – a female from Poland who claimed to have worked for Epstein in the mid-2000s – it was not Zampolli who introduced Mrs. Trump to the future president, but rather, Epstein himself.

    “EPSTEIN introduced MELANIA TRUMP to DONALD TRUMP,” the FBI summary document reads, written by an FBI special agent whose name was redacted in the document.

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ Whistleblower says Trump officials thought USAID did 'just abortions,' asked for 'Barney-style' slides before gutting agency, per new book

    One of the first acts by the second Trump administration was the complete gutting of the US Agency for International Development, a workforce of more than 10,000 people that had administered humanitarian aid and public health support to nations around the world since 1961. Thousands of jobs were immediately slashed by Elon Musk’s para-governmental Department [sic] of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and political appointees took over posts previously held by career civil servants. An agency once charged with fighting poverty, curbing the spread of infectious diseases, and promoting education and democracy abroad had been effectively thrown in the woodchipper.

• Environment

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-04-07 [Older] Earthrise to Earthset: how the planet’s climate has changed since the photo that inspired the environmental movement

  • HRW ☛ 2026-04-09 [Older] Senegal: A Decade of Unresolved Climate Displacement

  • Futurism ☛ Trump Moves to Let Coal Companies Pollute Waterways With Their Toxic Slag

    Legally, Trump can’t just undo the Biden-era rules on a whim. Instead, his EPA has started work on a convoluted workaround, which includes state-level enforcement delays and revisions to the original regulations. Basically, the Trump admin is gunning to relax groundwater monitoring and protection standards for energy companies by allowing individual states to grant exemptions to the federal regulation of 2024.

  • Tennessee Lookout ☛ In Memphis, Investors Benefit From AI Boom While the Public Bears Its Cost

    Recent reporting shows that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI now has properties in Memphis appraised at roughly $3.4 billion, a staggering valuation that will shape how much the company contributes in property taxes and how local officials frame its economic impact. At first glance, that number sounds like a victory. It’s like the kind of headline elected leaders use to signal growth, innovation, and momentum. But beneath the billions lies a more urgent and unsettling question: Who is benefiting from this boom, and who is being asked to bear its costs?

  • Nature ☛ Projected warming will exceed the long-term thermal limits of rice cultivation

    Rice is a staple food for over one billion people in Asia. Understanding rice’s historical thermal limits is critical for predicting its response to future climate shifts. Here, we integrate contemporary records of rice cultivation, archaeological data spanning rice’s long-term history of cultivation, and temperature projections for the past and future to assess how warm temperatures have constrained rice’s distribution and the adaptive strategies used to sustain its production. These thermal limits have remained consistent throughout rice’s domestication history despite its genetic diversification and geographic expansion. Over the past 9000 years, domesticated Asian rice has rarely thrived where mean annual temperature exceeds 28 °C or warm-season maximum temperature exceeds 33 °C. By the end of this century, projections estimate that the land area exceeding these thermal thresholds could expand by ten to thirty times in Asia’s major rice-producing nations. Rice-dependent regions face unprecedented challenges in maintaining this staple crop under projected warming.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Google Plans its First Data Center in France

    Google is apparently pressing ahead with plans for its first data center in France, with a preliminary consultation set to be held to study the project’s environmental impact. The French National Commission for Public Debate (CNDP), which organizes inquiries into large infrastructure projects with implications for the environment, has announced that a consultation will be held to study the proposed Google data center near Châteauroux, a town in central France.

    Datacenter Dynamics reported last year that Google was seeking to buy 195 acres of land at the Ozans Business Park, south east of Châteauroux. The site was set to cost about $68 million.

  • Politico LLC ☛ Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal

    On the same day as the Festus election, voters in Port Washington, Wisconsin, a Milwaukee suburb, where tech giants Oracle and OpenAI are building a $15 billion data center campus, also registered their disapproval by overwhelmingly passing a first-of-a-kind referendum to restrict future projects. At least three other cities across the country will vote on similar measures this year.

    The rout of half the Festus City Council was fueled by a surge in voter turnout and widespread frustration with the data center approval process.

  • YLE ☛ Mushrooms still carry traces of Chernobyl disaster

    The measurements showed that concentrations of radioactive cesium in mushrooms have declined as expected. Fewer than ten percent of samples exceeded the recommended food safety limit of 600 becquerels per kilo for wild products.

  • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ Cities Face Resilience Challenges in Data Centre Investment Boom

    Data centres are both real estate and infrastructure, the C40 Centre writes. They are infrastructure, as the sector has high barriers to entry (both financial and technical) and offers essential digital services predominantly via predictable, long-term contracts. They are also inherently real estate, given their need for land in specific locations, the specific nature of their architecture, and their financial management (they’re typically leased to third-party tenants, similar to other warehousing and light industrial uses).

    This dual nature of data centres requires the intervention of cities to ensure their development is beneficial to the public, not just tech companies. Investors have already started questioning the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft on their data centres strategies, pointing out that transparency about the impact of new developments on local communities may help with building trust and support and how the lack of such transparency is making it hard to understand how the tech giants may meet their climate targets.

  • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ Microsoft Pauses New Carbon Removal Agreements Amid Shifting Environmental Targets [greenwashing]

    Forty-eight hours later, Microsoft told developers it was pausing all new carbon removal purchases. Something about “portfolio review.”

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Leafy vegetables could extract toxic thallium from polluted soil

    Researchers have identified common leafy vegetables as potential tools for extracting toxic metals from contaminated soil, using a process known as phytomining.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Pro Publica ☛ 2026-04-07 [Older] “Economic Civil War”: States Push Laws to Shield Oil and Gas Companies From Accountability

    • Vox ☛ 2026-04-10 [Older] The real reason your monthly gas bill keeps going up

    • CBC ☛ 2026-04-11 [Older] Study finds hidden lake network beneath Arctic glaciers as climate change accelerates

    • NL Times ☛ Dutch State energy firm seeks billions for energy transition projects

      In that same reporting context, EBN highlights that it invested well over 400 million euros in 2025 in energy security and the energy transition, reflecting a significant scaling-up of its role in recent years. Despite these efforts, it says additional state financing is required to meet long-term infrastructure needs.

      The state-owned energy company plays a central role in major transition initiatives, including carbon dioxide storage systems and the acquisition of private heat companies. These activities require large-scale upfront investment that is not yet fully covered in the government’s existing budget planning.

    • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ China Moving In with Solar as Cuban Fuel Crisis Deepens

      The Cuban government implemented a strategy known as “Opción Cero” (“Option Zero” in English), from the “Special Period” of economic downturn and instability after the Soviet Union collapsed. People are using charcoal and wood to cook, animals for transportation, and subsisting on the minimum required for as long as needed.

      Amid the dire fuel shortages, the Cuban government has been integrating renewables into the grid. China has stepped in to help Cuba gain energy sovereignty, said Pulitzer Center fellow Anna Heikkinen, an independent journalist and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. Heikkinen told The Energy Mix that China has been strategically supporting the transition to renewables for years across Latin America and Africa.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Chinese Electrotech is the Big Winner in the Iran War

      France and Spain, which mostly generate electricity from non-fossil sources (including nuclear power in France), have been partially insulated from the war’s side effects. Italy, heavily reliant on gas, has suffered badly.

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Survey: 65 percent use smartphones while driving despite knowing risks

      Despite knowing the risks, nearly one in five drivers in Estonia have found themselves in a dangerous situation due to being distracted by a smartphone or navigation device, Delfi reported.

    • Hackaday ☛ Electric Truck Sets Racing Record

      The most impressive part of this build, however, is the battery. The team invented a method of swapping out batteries quickly to avoid having to fast charge the car in the pit area. The system lets a battery slide in to the middle of the truck above the motor and quickly connect to the electrical system allowing for very quick pit stops and the ability to charge other batteries while the race goes on. All of these modifications together allowed the team to break the EV record for a Lemons race.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Vox ☛ 2026-04-09 [Older] The surprising truth about logging

    • Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging: Spring stuff

      People's trees are kicking off and I am here for it. Took the dog out for a walk against my better judgment, and they're blossoming trees everywhere. 30 minute walk followed by 15 minutes of stretching and I actually feel alright now. Gym this evening should sort me out!

    • Chuck Grimmett ☛ Woodland Spring Flowers

      Charlie and I have been keeping an eye on the patches of Trout Lilies in our local woods, and today they were in full bloom.

  • Overpopulation

    • Overpopulation ☛ The Most Appropriate Response to Falling Birthrates? Embrace Them

      There is no lack of good ideas, from economic models that center wellbeing and rethink growth to radical ecological democracy. Exploring them requires getting off the endless growth treadmill that enriches elites at the expense of the rest of us. We must stop treating women like reproductive vessels for making more people to serve the economy, and start reshaping our economies to serve more people and the planet.

    • Crooked Timber ☛ How many babies do we want? How many will we have? — Crooked Timber

      Among other things, the unlamented former autocrat Viktor Orban was one of the leading proponents of pro-natalist policies, and more open than most about the racist underpinnings of his view. However, like others who have tried to raise birth rates, he wasn’t particularly successful. To understand why not, it’s useful to consider the question: how many babies do we want. In particular, since their choices are the relevant ones, how many babies do young women want?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Nordic Review of International Studies ☛ Whither dialogue? Nordic leadership and the collapse of Europe’s two-track approach to Russia | Nordic Review of International Studies

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Meta doubles down on partnership with Broadcom on custom AI processors

    The company said in an announcement that it is committing to an initial deployment of 1 gigawatt’s worth of its Meta Training and Inference Accelerators, a custom-designed chip for AI workloads that Meta runs in its own data centers. Companies use “gigawatts” to measure the scale of AI hardware orders based on the total electrical power required to run them, as opposed to a simple count of individual chips. Ultimately, the extended partnership envisions Meta deploying multiple gigawatts of the new chips, which are based on Broadcom’s technology.

  • Crazy Stupid Tech ☛ Trusting Altman, scary Mythos, longevity medicine, Apple@50, OpenClaw

    A story that asks whether Altman can be trusted seems self-evident to me. Maybe the more generalist New Yorker audience actually believed OpenAI’s pitch about how it is different. I never did.

    Sure OpenAI has a different corporate structure. But they keep tweaking it to give them more flexibility to behave like a traditional corporation. And, practically, there is no way for OpenAI to succeed in the rush to be the dominant AI platform unless it behaves like a typical corporation.

    To me, the more important story is whether we can trust any company to be in charge of such powerful technology without oversight.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Boiling Point

    There is a concept in the sciences known as a phase transition. It describes the threshold at which an otherwise stable system suddenly rearranges itself into a completely different stable pattern. Water freezes. Not gradually — at a precise threshold, the molecular structure reorganizes and something categorically different exists where something else was before. The same phenomenon governs the lifecycle of stars: our Sun has been in its main sequence phase for five billion years, burning hydrogen in a stable equilibrium, and one day that equilibrium will fail and the Sun will become something entirely unlike what it has been — not a gradual decline but a reorganization into a different state.

    I am watching a phase transition in American society. And I am not sure the people responsible for producing the conditions that are driving it understand what they are looking at.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Luigi-Inspired Arsonist Threatened “Our Way of Life,” Feds Say

    No one was injured in the early morning fire, but Justice wants to make a point: Chamel Abdulkarim’s target was the system of capitalism itself.

    Arson, and admittedly a serious case (if the government is correct); and politically motivated, given the remarks Abdulkarim made.

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ Meta about to overtake Google

    For the past twenty years, Google has dominated the online advertising market after displacing Yahoo. But that supremacy could come to an end as early as this year: the search giant is on the verge of being overtaken by Meta, according to forecasts from research firm eMarketer. Based on its projections, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp could generate $243.5 billion in ad revenue, compared with $239.5 billion for its main rival. A marginal gap for now, but one expected to widen in 2027.

  • Six Colors ☛ Amazon acquires Apple’s satellite partner

    This deal had been recently rumored. Amazon acquiring Globalstar gives it a leg up in its attempt to take on Starlink, which is the biggest player in this space. But Apple previously sank a billion-dollar-plus investment into Globalstar, whose system underpins its satellite features.

  • Vox ☛ Trump used AI to turn himself into Jesus. Will the religious right forgive him?

    It’s his most aggressive and direct attack yet on the Vicar of Christ, who has been uncharacteristically vocal this year in his criticism of militaristic foreign policy, including making a direct appeal to the president to end the conflict in Iran and promote peace and respect for human life. The pope indicated he would not back down, telling reporters he had “no fear” of the White House. And he threw in a little barb as well, calling the Truth Social posts “ironic”: “The name of the site itself. Say no more.”

    Picking a fight with the spiritual leader for more than 50 million Americans was a risky move, if not unprecedented for Trump, and he faced immediate pushback from some otherwise right-leaning Catholics.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Meduza ☛ Report: Nearly all staff at Moscow’s Gulag History Museum resign after authorities order conversion into memorial to the ‘genocide of the Soviet people’

      All museum objects from the previous exhibition have already been removed from the building, the source told the outlet, and part of the collection has been packed for transport. Where the items will be taken is unknown.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • BIA Net ☛ Journalist sentenced for 'insulting the president' over 2016 statement

    His lawyer, Resul Temur, argued during the defense that the statements were made within the scope of freedom of expression. Temur noted that Boltan was acting as a representative of a journalists' association at the time.

    Boltan is the former co-chair of the Free Journalists Association (ÖGC) and former head of the Dicle Fırat Journalists Association (DFG), both active in the Kurdish-populated regions.

  • Meduza ☛ Russian artist dies by suicide in jail after arrest over online comment, acquaintances say

    Andrei Akuzin, 53, was arrested on April 2 in Komsomolsk-on-Amur in Khabarovsk Krai, said Tatyana Frolova, a theater director living in France. He had stopped responding to messages the day before his arrest. Until then, Frolova said, the two had been in frequent contact, including discussions about his possible departure from Russia.

  • Meduza ☛ Kremlin says Russia’s internet restrictions will be lifted once the need for them disappears

    Russians are also accepting of the messaging app restrictions, Peskov said, once again attributing them to the apps’ failure to comply with Russian law.

  • Meduza ☛ St. Petersburg cinemas refuse to screen director Alexander Sokurov’s films as film festival prepares to honor him

    She added that at the same time the St. Petersburg cinemas were declining to participate, it emerged that Nikita Mikhalkov had invited Sokurov to the 48th Moscow International Film Festival, where the director is to be awarded a prize for his contribution to world cinema.

  • Domino Theory ☛ Beijing Codifies Repression of Overseas Activists

    Earlier this month, China’s legislature approved a new law aimed at promoting what it refers to as “ethnic unity.” The law’s primary focus is domestic: It mandates the use of Mandarin as the primary medium of education in schools across China, and calls for intermarriage and geographical integration between the Han majority and China’s other 55 recognized ethnicities.

    But to the Chinese government, ethnic unity is also a global matter. For decades, the Chinese Communist Party has sought to silence and intimidate members of its global diaspora who are critical of the regime, a practice referred to as transnational repression. Analysts say this new law will codify and extend that effort.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Iran [Internet] blackout enters 46th day, straining economy

    The government-sanctioned National Information Network, consisting of whitelisted sites such as banking applications and domestic messaging platforms, is overwhelmed by demand, and does not offer the tools businesses need, while many users are wary of it for privacy reasons.

  • The Nation ☛ The Death of an AI Whistleblower

    OpenAI had a lot on the line, and so did Balaji. Other researchers had resigned from their positions and issued warnings about the dangers of AI going rogue in fantastical Terminator-like scenarios. But as the Times noted, Balaji was one of the few industry professionals flagging the damage that the technology was doing right now. A 26-year-old former top student at Berkeley, he was already a veteran of several AI labs and had a patent under his belt. His parents called him a humble prodigy who had taught himself programming at age 11. His future seemed boundless.

    Balaji didn’t live long enough to tell his full story.

  • 404 Media ☛ Thomson Reuters Fired Worker For Speaking Out About ICE, Former Employee Says

    “For nearly two decades, I helped Thomson Reuters build the legal resources that lawyers and law enforcement trust. When I saw evidence that our products were being used to harm people and undermine the law, I did what anyone should do—I raised the alarm. Thomson Reuters’ response was to fire me,” Billie Little, who was a senior attorney editor at Thomson Reuters, said in a statement shared with 404 Media by her attorneys.

  • Wired ☛ The FCC Has a Fast Lane for Complaints About Trump’s Media Critics

    Internal emails obtained by WIRED reveal how a conservative legal group with a direct line into FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s office built the case against Jimmy Kimmel and his employees.

  • Declan Chidlow ☛ China’s Parallel Web Behind the Wall

    The [Internet] known within China is a very different [Internet] to the one known by the world at large. It is censored, regulated and structured quite differently. It is controlled and managed, rather than organic and sprawling. From the outside looking in, it feels like an entirely different beast, and to begin to understand it, you must first understand the conditions that formed it.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Proposed Indian IT Rules grant government powers to censor independent journalists

    The draft changes propose extending a regulatory code of ethics, previously applied only to large streaming platforms and broadcasters, to individual content creators, including independent journalists who cover news and current affairs on social media platforms, according to multiple news reports. If introduced, the amendments would effectively impose publisher-style compliance with government takedown orders.

    The government says the amendments, which are open for public consultation until April 29, are necessary to combat misinformation and deep fakes.

  • Meduza ☛ Russian journalist charged with unauthorized access to computer data as part of a group

    Roldugin was detained on April 9. That same day, investigators searched the Novaya Gazeta newsroom for more than 13 hours. On April 10, a Moscow court authorized his arrest.

    At the pretrial detention hearing, prosecutors described the case as involving unauthorized access to computer data, but did not mention the group element of the charge.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • El País ☛ Minnesota is investigating ICE agents for the possible kidnapping of a US citizen during a raid

    ChongLy Thao was arrested and dragged out of his home in his underwear in the middle of winter during the large-scale immigration raid launched by the White House in Minneapolis and St. Paul

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ How Pearl Fryar Became the 'Picasso of Plants'

    When he transferred to a factory in South Carolina in the late 1970s, he and his wife planned to buy a house in Bishopville, but they soon ran into trouble. Fryar said that a white resident had told his real estate agent that he didn’t want a Black couple living in the neighborhood, citing a racist stereotype that they wouldn’t take care of their yard.

    The couple settled on a property farther away, but Fryar didn’t forget the comment. With three acres of land at his disposal, he got to work transforming his double lot into his own personal Eden, complete with decorative trees and flowerbeds. His goal was to win the Yard of the Month award from his local garden club. When he learned he wasn’t eligible for the honor because his home technically sat outside Bishopville, that only pushed him harder. With no formal education besides a three-minute lesson from the owner of his local nursery (plus a knowledge of plants gained from his childhood spent helping out on the family farm), he began sculpting more elaborate topiaries, eventually earning the attention of the garden club and receiving the award in 1986.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Two Visions

    On Sunday there was a big union rally in Manhattan. Zohran Mamdani spoke, and Bernie Sanders spoke, and they were both very good, but in reality, the headliners were there in order to fill up the place so that everyone could listen to the workers speak.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Garbage In, Garbage Out: DoorDash Edition

    Sharon Simmons is not the beneficiary of DoorDash‘s political activity. She is its prop. The $11,000 she saved is the motte. The primary challenge against Khanna is the bailey. The feel-good event at the White House is the vehicle by which the motte is performed for the cameras while the bailey proceeds unobserved.

    This is what I described in The Fire Next Time: the system’s immune response to challengers is more vigorous than its response to its own failures. Sharon Simmons saved $11,000. Her husband still has cancer. The bills still pile up. She still makes deliveries because the arithmetic still doesn’t work without the tips. And the people celebrating her savings are the same people spending to prevent the congressman who wants to restructure that arithmetic from keeping his seat.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Masked gunman who menaced students at anti-ICE school protest was a cop

    When high school kids in Phoenix staged an anti-ICE walkout in January, a masked man with a handgun approached the students and refused to leave. Police were summoned, but for some reason they weren't interested in stopping him. That may be because he was himself a high-ranking cop with Phoenix P.D, now identified as Sgt. Dusten Mullen. The plan was to incite students into assaulting him, according to an internal report obtained by local media.

  • Gray Local Media ☛ Armed masked man at Hamilton High protest identified as Phoenix police sergeant

    According to the report, Mullen told officers his plan was to let students assault him so they could be arrested.

  • APNIC ☛ Why are 'we' building all these data centres again?

    It is worth asking who will buy goods and services if unemployment increases substantially. If a data centre that replaces 1,000 jobs was built by 100 people, and can be run by 10 people, is that really an improvement from a societal perspective?

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ Maine Launches Revised Website to Promote Broadband Access

    ConnectME, Maine’s Authority on facilitating universal broadband to all state residents and businesses, has launched a re-designed website focused on informing communities and businesses about broadband services and access in their area. The website offers many valuable resources and features including, a connection speed test, an availability and provider listing, and a grant application guide.

    “Our goal is to expand broadband internet access to the most rural, unserved areas of the State of Maine,” stated Phil Lindley, Executive Director of ConnectME. “Every community, regardless of location, should be provided with an affordable solution.”

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Many Estonian homes still lack high-speed [Internet], turn to alternatives

    Despite Estonia's signature digital drive, nearly 120,000 households still lack high-speed fiber [Internet], pushing many to rely on wireless or satellite connectivity.

    Even after tens of millions of euros invested in fiber networks, in reality, access remains unequal, especially in rural areas. Some households paid years ago for connections that never materialized.

  • [Old] Tom Murphy VII ☛ No one can force me to have a secure website!!!

    I have one of the oldest websites on the inter- net,1 dating back to at least AD 1996. It has so far outlived its original host (AOL Hometown) by 18 years. Now that 99.9999999% of the [Internet] is deepfake pornography, AI-generated cryptocur- rency scams, and Italian Brainrot, a website being in Lycos’s “Top 5% Of The Web” is a triviality achieved at the first human keystroke. But in the late 1990s, it used to mean something.

    Here’s the thing: I just want my public website to be on the [Internet] and accessible in a web browser!

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Techdirt ☛ John Deere Pays $99 Million To Settle ‘Right To Repair’ Class Action

    John Deere executives have repeatedly promised to do better, then just ignored those promises. Early last year, the FTC and numerous states filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company for its efforts to monopolize repair. Though, with MAGA corruption purging any remaining antitrust enforcers from its ranks, it’s unclear if the FTC action will ever actually result in anything meaningful.

  • The Register UK ☛ EFF: California 3D printer bill threatens digital freedoms

    The bill in question is AB 2047, the scope of which, on paper, appears strict. The primary goal is clear and simple: to require 3D printer manufacturers to use a state-certified algorithm that checks digital design files for firearm components and blocks print jobs that would produce prohibited parts.

    Federal law does not impose a blanket ban on making firearms for personal use, though ghost guns are subject to various federal and state restrictions, and the practice remains controversial nationwide.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ Study Explores Artists' Music Streaming Royalties Dissatisfaction

      Back to the report, then, the main survey – distinct from a far smaller collection of follow-up interviews – fielded responses from almost 1,200 total artists residing in Brazil (417), Chile (327), Nigeria (213), the Netherlands (137), and South Korea (104).

      Therein, 501 respondents described music as their full-time career, 633 disclosed plans “to make music their full-time career in the future,” and 74 said it’d previously been their full-time career. (Apparently, there was a bit of overlap between the latter two categories.)

    • Torrent Freak ☛ EU Pirate Site-Blocking Is Broken: Report Calls for IP Blocking Ban and Rightsholder Liability

      A new EU policy report published by the independent think tank CEPS points out that site-blocking efforts in several EU countries are seriously flawed. The report, which is funded by NordVPN's parent company, issues various recommendations, including a complete ban of IP-address blocking, which is prone to overblocking.

    • Creative Commons ☛ Celebrating 25 Years of Choosing to Share

      When CC was founded, the [Internet] was at an inflection point: sharing and remixing were easier than ever, but we were stuck between the black-and-white choice of copyright’s default to “all rights reserved” and “no rights reserved”. The founders of CC created the CC licenses to open space between the two, where human creativity could flourish and a shared commons of knowledge and culture could power progress and work in the public interest. Through CC’s work and the dedication of our community, CC licenses now power access to tens of billions of works online and have been used to make over half of all scientific research open and accessible.