Leftovers

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Intel shutters open-source evangelism program and archives key community projects — closures point to significant shift in open-source leadership

  Its disappearance appears to coincide with a thinning of Intel's open-source leadership. Notably, one of the last prominent evangelists associated with the program, Katherine Druckman, apparently departed the company in mid-2025, leaving a visible gap in the kind of developer-facing advocacy Intel had historically invested in.

• Joshua Blais ☛ Using the [Internet] like its 1999

  If you only use social media and video hosting frontends - getting fed by algorithms and visiting the same 5 sites everyday on constant doomscroll, then the [Internet] has never been alive for you. That experience is perhaps ~3-5% of what the [Internet] could be.

  For the vast majority of people, yes - the [Internet] is dying: living inside an algorithmically controlled echochamber that they will never get out of, they live and die by what they are “supposed to see”. But, it does not have to be like this.

• Dan Q ☛ The Dungeon of Dark Patterns – Dan Q

  Navigating around the dark patterns of modern UX certainly feels like a dungeon delve, sometimes. Now we just need the episode in which the adventurer has difficulty unsubscribing from requests from their patron…

• Ben Werdmuller ☛ It pays to reward curiosity more than looking smart

  It helps to be genuinely curious; playful; maybe risk being a little bit unserious. Then people start to loosen up, and that’s when the good stuff starts coming.

• Science

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ USDA Moves to Shutter Maryland Research Facility

    Rep. Glenn Ivey, who represents the area, said decommissioning the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center could “dramatically” disrupt scientific research.

• Career/Education

  • New Yorker ☛ Can We Get A.I. Out of Schools?

    Artificial intelligence has, with sudden and crushing speed, seeped into the fabric of our everyday existence. It’s in our love lives, our reading material, our health care. It is also, increasingly, in our schools. As the staff writer Jessica Winter reports, in an alarming new column, many school districts around the country have adopted A.I. tools for elementary-school classrooms, and the practice is quickly spreading. With it comes a growing number of parents, educators, and cognitive scientists who are expressing anxiety about the ubiquity and seeming inevitability of this technology’s usage in K-12 education. Does the “efficiency” these tools offer undermine the premise and the promise of learning? What happens when we impose cognitive offloading on kids who have yet to do much cognitive onloading? Did anyone stop to ask whether we should have A.I. in schools at all? I recently caught up with Winter, who covers family and education, to discuss what she learned.

    This conversation has been edited and condensed.

  • Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Dan Moore on Technical Blogging

    Authentication, authenticity, author…those are all good starting places for introducing Dan Moore, who currently leads CIAM Strategy & Identity Standards at FusionAuth. Community is a constant with Dan. If you’re on Bluesky, you know he’s the one to blame for your ever-growing bookmark queue. His blog-become-book, Letters to a New Developer, shares his personal lessons learned to help new developers navigate the awkward realities of their first job. He’s even found zen in the snarkiest of communities: the orange site that many of us love to hate (but can’t quite resist).

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ YouTuber has DIMM idea, builds working DRAM in backyard

    The YouTuber opens his second video on the making of his sample chips with an acknowledgment that the whole experiment has been driven by RAM prices skyrocketing last year and into the beginning of 2026, leading to vendor quotes that constantly fluctuate and even delays in broadband expansions caused by a lack of memory chips.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Telex (Hungary) ☛ It took a massive propaganda campaign to turn Hungarians into potato lovers

    According to Magyar Néprajz, the reason for this lay primarily in its botanical characteristics, as it had to be cultivated using completely different methods than those used for crops grown before. Moreover, it appeared so unusual and novel at the time, that its appearance gave rise to all sorts of superstitions and people even believed it to be dangerous. This was not entirely unfounded, as its fruit and leaves are indeed poisonous, whereas its tuber is edible. Corn, which was cultivated according to the well-known methods used for other grains, spread much faster than the potato. At first glance there may not seem to be a connection between the two ingredients, but there are several traditional Hungarian dishes in which cornmeal, or the porridge made from it, has been replaced by potatoes. Examples include tócsni, which was originally a flatbread made from solidified leftover polenta, or potato bread, which used to be made with cornmeal. The popular corn porridges were consequently replaced by slambuc, dödölle,and vegetable stews.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ US Justice Department downgrades risk of state-licensed medicinal marijuana

    Medicinal marijuana products that are legal at the state level will see looser federal regulation under an order the U.S. Department of Justice published Thursday, while a process that could remove the drug in all forms from the federal list of the most dangerous drugs is set to begin in late June.

    The order, signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, shifts many marijuana products from Schedule I — the Drug Enforcement Administration’s list of drugs with the greatest potential for abuse and least legitimate use — to Schedule III.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Are You Waiting for Opioid Settlement Money From Purdue, Mallinckrodt or Endo? Get in Touch.

    Our recent investigation details changes to a bankruptcy settlement that leaves out some of the hardest-hit victims of the opioid crisis. Here’s how you can share your story with ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Many Opioid Victims Will Be Shut Out of Purdue’s $7.4B Bankruptcy Settlement

    But this $7.4 billion bankruptcy plan — including $870 million that has been set aside for individual victims — will shut out tens of thousands of those who originally applied for a settlement, ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer found. Fewer than half of those who filed claims against Purdue will get any kind of help under the new plan, despite the company touting it as “the only opioid settlement to date that meaningfully compensates individual victims.”

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Cultifying the U.S. Military

    Simply put, the method in Hegseth’s apparent madness is to destroy the integrity of the professional military corps through destructive and despotic behavior that drives out those – like Admiral Holsey – who hold to their principles.

    And this should terrify every American. A powerful military always poses a potential threat to democracy. To keep that threat in check, the military must be presided over by an officer corps that understands that its duty is not to any one person, but to the Constitution and the rule of law. The U.S. military has been largely insulated from political influencesince the nation’s founding. But Hegseth is trying to subvert that.

    Gratuitously exposing service members to disease isn’t a small issue. But it’s much more important as a symptom of the ongoing effort to corrupt the military and make it a servant of extremist politics and politicians.

  • Derek Thompson ☛ If America's So Rich, How'd It Get So Sad?

    If neither cultural decadence, nor material inequality, nor phones and social media seem to fit the shape of this particular phenomenon, we have to keep looking for what broke our brains in the 2020s. The simplest explanation I can offer is this: As a cultural-political force, the 2020 pandemic never ended.

• Proprietary

  • [Repeat] Tom's Hardware ☛ Iran claims US exploited networking equipment backdoors during strikes — says devices from Cisco and others failed despite blackout in attack that 'indicates deep sabotage'

    Iranian state media has alleged that equipment from Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, and MikroTik failed during U.S. and Israeli military operations against Iran. The report, which claims that “American ‘black boxes’ failed at zero hour of the attack on Isfahan,” concerns devices that Iran claims either rebooted or dropped offline despite the country having already been disconnected from the global Internet, a fact it says "indicates deep sabotage."

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ FBI Extracts Deleted Signal Messages from iPhone Notification Database

    "The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database…."

  • Riccardo Mori ☛ Tim Cook steps down as CEO of Apple. Several observations on his tenure from a long-term Apple customer and observer.

    Among the working titles for this post were Good riddance and Stop the praises, and I haven’t chosen them not because I thought they were somehow mean-spirited, but because they sounded like coming from a place of deep care. They sounded like the reaction of someone with deep emotional investment in the whole thing. But over the past few years I — a long-time enthusiastic Apple user and customer — have become desensitised towards most of what Apple does and what Apple has become. And I have to thank Tim Cook for that.

  • The National Cyber Security Centre, UK ☛ NCSC: Leave passwords in the past - passkeys are the future

    The NCSC stopped short of endorsing the adoption of passkeys last year due to some key implementation challenges. However, progress within industry means they can now be recommended to the public as the more secure and user-friendly login method and to businesses as the default authentication option to offer consumers.

  • The National Cyber Security Centre, UK ☛ Passkeys: what you need to know

    The digital industry is moving rapidly towards offering passwordless authentication for logging into online services and accounts, and many major platforms already support it.

    The NCSC supports the public adoption of passkeys and recommends using passkeys over passwords wherever available.

  • The National Cyber Security Centre, UK ☛ Comparing the security properties of traditional user credentials and FIDO2 credentials for personal use | National Cyber Security Centre

    FIDO2 credentials, including passkeys (which synchronise across a user’s devices) and single-device passkeys, provide a modern alternative to traditional multifactor authentication (MFA) methods such as passwords combined with SMS codes or push notification approvals. FIDO2 credentials are designed with strong security properties including high entropy, per-account uniqueness and phishing-resistance.

    This paper examines the threats targeting credentials used by individuals for personal purposes (as opposed to authenticating to their employer’s systems) and then proposes a credential lifecycle against which the functionality and resistance to attacks of traditional MFA and FIDO2 credentials are compared.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Trump Officials Built an AI Tool to Turbocharge Deregulation

      Artificial intelligence has a history of making poor regulatory decisions with disastrous effects on people’s lives. Newly released documents show the Trump administration sought to deploy a powerful AI tool to accelerate its deregulation spree.

    • Wired ☛ AI Tools Are Helping Mediocre North Korean [Crackers] Steal Millions

      On Wednesday, cybersecurity firm Expel revealed what it describes as a North Korean state-sponsored cybercrime operation that installed credential-stealing malware on more than 2,000 computers, specifically targeting the machines of developers working on small cryptocurrency launches, NFT creation, and Web3 projects. By using the AI tools of US-based companies, including those of OpenAI, Cursor, and Anima, the [cracker] group—which Expel calls HexagonalRodent—“vibe coded” almost every part of its intrusion campaign, from writing their malware to building the fake websites of companies used in its phishing schemes. That AI-enabled [cracking] allowed the group to steal as much as $12 million in cryptocurrency from victims in three months.

    • Terence Eden ☛ Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

      But notice, in the second one, there's a link to a dodgy casino! There's no https:// so it didn't jump out as a link.

    • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Death by A.I. - Ken Klippenstein

      The U.S. military’s secretive Special Operations Command plans to establish its first-ever center for AI-driven missions like targeted assassinations.

      Autonomous warfare is all the rage at the Pentagon, where computers and artificial intelligence process intelligence data, select targets and then transmit kill orders to a waiting robot, or a “loitering” missile or airplane.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Claude Code rate limits: Anthropic AI squeezes the customers

      Except the minor detail that Anthropic sells Claude Code at a massive loss. Anthropic’s spending $8 to $13.50 for each dollar that comes in.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ The user-tailored newsroom

      Newsrooms typically treat publishing as a one-size-fits-all broadcast. What if they tailored their work to a reader's needs and interests?

    • Expel Inc ☛ Inside Lazarus: How North Korea uses AI to industrialize attacks on developers

      Expel is actively tracking an APT group that we assess with high confidence to be North Korean (DPRK) state-sponsored. We suspect that the threat actor is a subgroup or spin-off of a larger organization, potentially starting out as fraudulent IT workers before pivoting to malware. The group is extremely active in targeting Web3 developers and is primarily focused on stealing high-value digital assets such as cryptocurrency and NFTs.

  • Social Control Media

    • Digital Music News ☛ YouTube Expands Likeness Detection to Entertainment and Music

      With an eye on doing away with deepfakes, YouTube has officially made its likeness detection tool available to the music and wider entertainment industries.

    • Raphael Amorim ☛ Farewell Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon

      I left Twitter, Bluesky, and Mastodon.

      I’ve been offline for a week, and I wasn’t planning to write anything about it. But since people started reaching out and asking, I decided to write a short post I can share when needed — and also as a reminder to myself of why I left.

      Ever since Twitter’s acquisition, I’ve been asking myself for a long time: Why am I still using this? The place has become completely toxic. While I’ll miss the quick access to information (or at least I think I will), I’m actually grateful not to have it anymore.

    • Mother Jones ☛ Truth Social CEO Out After $1.1 Billion in Losses

      The company, which is majority owned by Donald Trump, has seen its stock plummet 84 percent under Nunes’ leadership, from its debut price of $58 back in 2024. The current share price of around $9.80 is arguably still optimistic for a company that has lost $1.1 billion since it went public, and recorded just over $10.6 million in revenue in the same time.

      Even as the company struggled, Nunes prospered. In 2024 alone, his pay outstripped any revenue the company has made over its lifetime—he drew a salary of $1 million, a bonus of $600,000 and was awarded stock worth another $46 million.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Ransomware negotiator pleads guilty after leaking victims' insurance details to 'BlackCat' hackers — perp gave attackers a precise picture of exactly how much each target could afford to pay

      Angelo Martino, a 41-year-old former ransomware negotiator at the incident response firm DigitalMint, has pleaded guilty to conspiring with the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware gang to extort five U.S. companies whose data his employer had been hired to protect, the Department of Justice announced on Monday.

    • Google ☛ How UNC6692 Employed Social Engineering to Deploy a Custom Malware Suite

      In late December 2025, UNC6692 conducted a large email campaign designed to overwhelm the target with messages, creating a sense of urgency and distraction. Following this, the attacker sent a phishing message via Microsoft Teams, posing as helpdesk personnel offering assistance with the email volume.

    • Wired ☛ Newly Deciphered Sabotage Malware May Have Targeted Iran’s Nuclear Program—and Predates Stuxnet

      On closer examination, Guerrero-Saade discovered it contained a kernel driver—a piece of code designed to run at the deepest, most highly-privileged level of an operating system—called Fast16.sys, which appeared to have been compiled in 2005. (Guerrero-Saade declined to say who had uploaded the code to VirusTotal, because VirusTotal discourages users from trying to identify uploaders.)

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Threat Source ☛ IR Trends Q1 2026: Phishing reemerges as top initial access vector, as attacks targeting public administration persist

      Pre-ransomware incidents made up just 18 percent of engagements this quarter, and we did not observe any ransomware deployment due to early and swift mitigation from Cisco Talos Incident Response (Talos IR). This is a slight increase from last quarter but overall very low compared to Q1 and Q2 2025, when we observed ransomware in 50 percent of engagements.

    • The Record ☛ China-linked hackers targeted Mongolian government using Slack, Discord for covert communications

      According to ESET, the hackers relied heavily on legitimate online services to conceal their activity, using Discord, Slack and Microsoft 365 Outlook to communicate with compromised machines and manage command-and-control infrastructure.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ DHS startles Congress with request for millions to develop ICE ‘smart glasses’

      And while Democrats said they were worried about the civil liberties implications inherent in the new technology — which DHS said would give federal agents access to “real-time” information such as biometric identification data while working in the field — Republicans appeared markedly less concerned.

    • Techdirt ☛ Arkansas Tried To Pass An Unconstitutional Social Media Law. Again. It Lost. Again.

      The legislature did manage to fix the content-based definition problem that sank the first law, but the progress stops there. Act 900 imposes four main new requirements on social media platforms: a prohibition on “addictive practices,” default settings for minors (including a nighttime notification blackout), privacy default settings at the most protective level, and a parental dashboard requirement. Every single one of these provisions fell apart on review, each in its own special way.

    • CBC ☛ Edmonton police emails, documents provide new information on Canada-first AI facial recognition bodycam pilot

      Documents and emails obtained by CBC News offer new insight into the Edmonton Police Service’s trial of bodycam facial recognition technology — the first police agency in Canada to do so.

      The AI-powered facial recognition software was trained to detect the faces of about 7,000 people on a watchlist, based on mugshots of people police say have serious criminal warrants or are flagged as potential safety risks.

    • France24 ☛ What the Palantir CEO’s ‘manifesto’ tells us about the changing face of war

      A Palantir post citing CEO Alex Karp's book called for mandatory military service and closer ties between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon while criticizing "hollow pluralism" and warning of a new AI arms race. But Palantir is just one of the tech companies blurring the lines between Silicon Valley and Washington – while growing too big too fast for traditional oversight.

    • The Nation ☛ Palantir’s Manifesto Promises a Dystopian Future

      By way of analytic context: Palantir is a data analytics company and defense contractor that sells surveillance technology to the US government and allied countries, as well as to the private sector. It’s won $1.9 billion in US contracts since 2008, and Karp received $6.8 billion in compensation in 2024, making him the highest-paid public company CEO that year. Under the Trump administration, Palantir has won contracts to consolidate data on individual Americans and track migrants, raising concerns about data privacy and the government’s ability to surveil its own citizens and potentially, to punish political dissenters. Palantir’s technology has also been used to target Iranians and Palestinians in Gaza for bombing, to devastating effect.

    • [Old] Scripps Media Inc ☛ Navy sailors say free Wi-Fi on ships has improved quality of life

      Following a string of suicides aboard ships, News 3 is following up on the Navy’s plan to install free Wi-Fi on all 280 naval ships to address mental health problems among sailors.

    • Matt Birchler ☛ Quick Reads is the future that passkey enthusiasts dream of

      What I personally find exciting about this is that one of my frustrations with passkeys in general is that they are a technology that was pitched as an alternative to passwords, and a lot of their benefits only apply if the password is taken out of the equation. However, I'm yet to find a single service that lets me rely entirely on a passkey. There's always a password in the mix. I guess one of the benefits of having a purely greenfield solution is that I was able to omit passwords from day one and create the passkey future many people dream of.

    • FingerprintJS Inc ☛ We Found a Stable Firefox Identifier Linking All Your Private Tor Identities

      We recently discovered a privacy vulnerability affecting all Firefox-based browsers. The issue allows websites to derive a unique, deterministic, and stable process-lifetime identifier from the order of entries returned by IndexedDB, even in contexts where users expect stronger isolation.

      This means a website can create a set of IndexedDB databases, inspect the returned ordering, and use that ordering as a fingerprint for the running browser process. Because the behavior is process-scoped rather than origin-scoped, unrelated websites can independently observe the same identifier and link activity across origins during the same browser runtime. In Firefox Private Browsing mode, the identifier can also persist after all private windows are closed, as long as the Firefox process remains running. In Tor Browser, the stable identifier persists even through the "New Identity" feature, which is designed to be a full reset that clears cookies and browser history and uses new Tor circuits. The feature is described as being for users who "want to prevent [their] subsequent browser activity from being linkable to what [they] were doing before." This vulnerability effectively defeats the isolation guarantees users rely on for unlinkability.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Independent UK ☛ Pete Hegseth ‘butted heads’ with Navy secretary over shipbuilding and push to ignore judge’s orders before firing: reports

    "Hegseth and Phelan reportedly butted heads when Phelan refused to ignore a recent federal judge’s ruling that said punishing Senator Mark Kelly for making a video in which he reminded military officers of their constitutional duty to not to not follow illegal orders would violate his First Amendment rights,” Jennifer Griffin, Fox News’ Pentagon correspondent, reported on Thursday.

  • NL Times ☛ Rare first edition of Anne Frank's diary found in Eemnes thrift store

    Anne’s father, Otto, was the only member of the family to survive the war. He published the diary his daughter kept. The first print of the diary consisted of only 3,036 copies.

    Het Achterhuis, called The Secret Annex in English, is the most widely read Dutch-language book in the world. The book has sold tens of millions of copies and has been translated into over 70 languages.

  • LRT ☛ Lithuanian president warns EU defence union cannot substitute NATO

    His comments follow a call by European Union Commissioner Andrius Kubilius for a formal defence union. "However, if this represents our ambition for the European Union to play a larger role within the NATO organisation as a component part, then such initiatives should undoubtedly be supported," Nausėda added. ​

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Follow the breadcrumbs: Lessons from a forgotten Nazi concentration camp, liberated 81 years ago

    History does not disappear. It fades, quietly, when it is no longer told.

    On the University of Kansas campus stands the Campanile, built in 1951 as a memorial to nearly 300 students who died in World War II. Visitors pass every day, many unaware of its purpose and meaning.

    Inscribed in stone above the names is a declaration that still resonates: “Free government does not bestow repose upon its citizens but sets them in the vanguard of battle to defend the liberty of every man.”

    Eighty-one years after Flossenbürg’s liberation, the witnesses are nearly gone. The responsibility to remember is not.

    Neither is the warning.

  • The Indiana Capital Chronicle ☛ Indiana’s got a voting problem. News outlets can only do so much to fix it

    Our state population is similar in size to Washington. Yet, Indiana routinely ranks among the states with the lowest voter turnout. In the last presidential election, only 59% of registered voters cast a ballot. Compare that to Washington, where 70% of eligible voters cast a ballot that same year. The best states in the country for voter turnout are Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan, where 75% or more of eligible voters participate.

    It’s not a registration problem for Indiana. Well over 90% of people who are eligible to vote are registered. So what’s going on?

  • The Georgia Recorder ☛ How Trump’s order on mail ballots threatens Postal Service independence

    Postal experts said Trump ordering the postmaster general to take any action — let alone on a matter as sensitive as elections — violates guardrails in federal law against presidential control of the mail. Multiple people with deep knowledge of Postal Service history said they couldn’t recall a similar order in the agency’s modern era.

  • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ Donations keep flowing for Arizona Sen. Kelly since Trump ‘sedition’ accusation

    Kelly raised about $13 million in the first three months of 2026. That’s on top of $12.5 million in the previous quarter, most of which poured in after Nov. 18, when he and five other congressional Democrats called on military personnel to disobey illegal orders.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Jewish Labor Bund Stood Against Zionism

    Molly Crabapple’s new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, recovers the story of the Jewish Labor Bund — a socialist movement that opposed both assimilation and Zionism, and whose warnings about ethnonationalism have not lost their urgency.

  • Wired ☛ US Special Forces Soldier Arrested for Polymarket Bets on Maduro Raid

    The Department of Justice announced Thursday that it arrested Gannon Ken Van Dyke, an enlisted member of the US Army’s special forces, for allegedly using “classified, nonpublic” information about the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to notch more than $400,000 in profits on Polymarket trades. A grand jury indicted him on five counts, including multiple violations of the Commodity Exchange Act.

  • The Verge ☛ US arrests soldier who allegedly made $400k on Maduro Polymarket bets

    As described in the indictment, prosecutors allege Van Dyke was directly involved in the planning and execution of “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture Maduro, and in the days before the capture, made several transactions purchasing “$33,934 worth of ‘YES’ shares on Maduro and Venezuela-related markets,” eventually profiting $409,881. Photo by )

  • Robert Reich ☛ Operation Epic Failure

    Although the U.S. and Israel have destroyed much of Iran’s conventional navy, the naval arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, equipped with many smaller vessels, remains partly intact, and it’s that navy that’s hampering oil shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

  • Politico ☛ European civil servants are being forced off WhatsApp

    Governments in France, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium have started rolling out in-house messaging services for officials to exchange sensitive information, in an effort to stop staff from using popular encrypted apps and switch to local alternatives they can control. Defense alliance NATO also has its own messenger, and the European Commission plans to make the switch by the end of the year.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Bill Gates probed by his foundation over close ties to p£dophile Jeffrey Epstein

    The Microsoft billionaire’s relationship with Epstein was exposed last year when the Department of Justice released a tranche of documents containing emails and photos of the two.

    Several of the files also included communication between the late financier and the Gates Foundation’s staff.

• Environment

  • India Times ☛ Europe risks falling behind US, China on AI data centre build-up, Nokia CEO says

    Nokia's CEO raises an alarm about Europe's lagging status in the development of AI data centers, warning that inadequate infrastructure and low investments could push businesses towards the more adaptive environments of the US and China. He also points out the ongoing regulatory and energy supply challenges.

  • Memphis Flyer ☛ AI’s Slippery Slope

    Add in their polluting gas turbines and the newly reported effect on regional temps (this month, from Fortune: “Data centers are so hot their ‘heat island’ effect is raising temperatures up to 6 miles away and impacting 343 million people worldwide, study finds”), and environmental concerns clearly abound.

    Beyond that, the societal implications are grim and growing darker by the day. Countless human jobs are at stake in countless industries. And there is a push to use AI in creative endeavors. AI-generated artists, fake “performers” created with AI tools like Suno or Udio, are seeing millions of streams and topping charts on Spotify. This month, Berklee College of Music in Boston launched a new AI music course — an institution consistently named among the best in the world is now promoting generative AI songwriting. If you haven’t heard any (please don’t seek it out), AI music is soulless and devalues the time it takes to learn an instrument, train a voice, or work out meaningful lyrics.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Michigan’s gubernatorial hopefuls share approaches to AI data center regulations at press forum

    Michigan Advance asked the candidates about the rising tide of opposition to data centers, which is becoming more organized, more forceful and uniting rural conservative Republicans and urban progressive Democrats. In what ways would they regulate and rein in data centers, and would they support an outright ban on new facilities?

    Here’s how the candidates responded. Their responses have been edited for clarity and brevity: [...]

  • Kentucky Lantern ☛ Fighting for the ‘luxury’ of air in Kentucky’s worst region for pollution

    The 2026 “State of the Air” report from the American Lung Association shows 176,359 children in Kentucky breathe air with unhealthy levels of pollution.

    According to the report, the Jefferson County area — the report includes Clarksville, Indiana, and down to Elizabethtown as part of this area — is one of the dirtiest in the United States for ozone smog. Reasons for this include engine exhaust, factory output and wildfire smoke as pollution drifts in and settles in the Ohio Valley. Louisville is the most populous city in Kentucky.

  • The Nation ☛ Earth Day Was Born in Protest

    It’s important for journalists to understand the role of protest, partly because our coverage shapes what society as a whole knows about the controversies in question. Of course, we should not become the mouthpieces of protesters, but rigorous reporting does not equate to being a mouthpiece. Our civic role is to ascertain and share the facts as best we can so the public and policymakers can make informed judgments.

    Probably no environmental organization in the world is more associated with the tactic of protest than Greenpeace. Nonviolent protest has been part of Greenpeace’s DNA since the group’s founding in 1971, when activists sailed a boat into a prohibited area off the Alaskan coast to obstruct US nuclear bomb testing. Since then, Greenpeace has grown into a global operation, with branches in 55 countries that employ direct action, research, and public advocacy against fossil fuels, species extinction, nuclear power, overfishing, and other environmental scourges.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Cocaine Pollution Seems to Make Salmon Swim Faster and Farther Than Usual. Scientists Don't Know the Long-Term Consequences

    The illegal drug’s main byproduct, benzoylecgonine, caused more robust effects than cocaine itself. Wastewater treatment plants often don’t fully process such metabolites, so they are frequently found in bodies of water at higher concentrations than their parent drugs

  • Nebraska Examiner ☛ Nitrate contaminates the drinking water of millions of Americans, study finds

    States with big agricultural industries recorded more reports of elevated nitrate levels. In fact, the report found that 64% of all water systems that recorded nitrate levels at or above the legal limit were in just five states: California, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma.

    But Anne Schechinger, the organization’s senior director of agriculture and climate research who authored the report, said the issue affects urban and rural areas alike.

  • The New Lede ☛ Farm runoff linked to elevated nitrate levels in drinking water serving more than 60 million Americans

    While the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a threshold of 10 mg/L for nitrates — which can be naturally occurring — in drinking water, the agency says that levels above 3 mg/L are indicative of manure or fertilizer runoff from large-scale farms or, less frequently, wastewater plant discharge.

  • Environmental Working Group ☛ Drinking water of almost 1 in 5 Americans contains nitrates linked to cancer and birth defects

    Roughly 18% of the U.S. population relied on drinking water from community water systems with elevated – and likely human-caused – nitrate levels between 2021 and 2023, a new EWG analysis finds.

    Exposure to nitrates is linked to birth defects and cancer risks.

  • 404 Media ☛ Community Votes to Deny Water to Nuclear Weapons Data Center

    America’s nuclear scientists plan to break ground on an AI data center next week, but the Township where it’s being constructed just put a 365 day hold on providing it with water.

  • Wired ☛ New Gas-Powered Data Centers Could Emit More Greenhouse Gases Than Entire Nations

    New gas projects linked to just 11 data center campuses around the US have the potential to create more greenhouse gases than the country of Morocco emitted in 2024. Emissions estimates from air permit documents examined by WIRED show that these natural gas projects—which are being built to power data centers to serve some of the US’s most powerful AI companies, including OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI—have the potential to emit more than 129 million tons of greenhouse gases per year.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Maine Morning Star ☛ What to know before you get balcony solar

      In 2025, deep-red Utah became the first state to pass a bill making it easier to adopt plug-in solar systems. So far this year, four more states have all advanced similar measures — and nearly two dozen others are weighing bills of their own.

      Considering a balcony power plant yourself? Check our tracker to see the status of plug-in solar legislation in your state, and keep reading for some FAQs on the tech.

    • Hackaday ☛ 2026 Green Powered Challenge: Cook With The Sun!

      One antenna is covered in square mirrors while the other is covered in sticky chrome-effect mirror sheeting. They’re described as sun tracking, but since we don’t see any mechanism we’re guessing the tracking is done by hand. The experiment takes place in Pakistan, so there’s a plentiful supply of sunlight that those of us in more northern climes can only dream of.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Oh no! The President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus is in trouble

      Fermi had blown that $746 million from the IPO and was running out of money. They admitted to shareholders they might have to sell some of the power plant gas turbines so they didn’t run out of liquid cash.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ Raspberry Pi reveals songbirds' favourite sounds

      Prateek Sahu, a graduate student from the University of Alberta in Canada, works on the auditory perception of songbirds at the institution’s Songbird Neuroethology Lab. He helped develop a cost-effective way to study songbirds’ auditory preferences using Raspberry Pi, and penned this guest post explaining the project.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ There is no nature anymore

      In the Brazilian rainforest, scientists have found microplastics in the bellies of animals ranging from red howler monkeys to manatees. In remotest Yakutia, where much of the earth remains untrodden by human feet, the carbon in the sky above melts the permafrost below. In the Arctic Ocean, artificial light from ship traffic—on the rise as the polar ice cap melts away—now disrupts the nightly journey of zooplankton to the ocean surface, one of the largest animal migrations on the planet. The remote mountain lakes of the Alps are contaminated with all kinds of synthetic chemicals. Polar bears are full of flame retardants. Cesium-137, fallout from nuclear bomb explosions, lightly rimes the entire planet.

      These examples are mostly pollution—nuclear, carbon, chemical, light—but I raise them not to highlight the ways human industry and technology degrade the environment but to note how the things humans build change it. Nobody really knows what the exact effects of all that will be, but my point is that no part of the globe is free of human fingerprints. We have literally changed the world.

  • Overpopulation

    • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ Judge blocks water rule that halted new housing developments across Phoenix Active Management Area

      In a Tuesday ruling, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney found that ADWR didn’t have the legal authority to implement the new unmet demand rule in the Phoenix Active Management Area because it didn’t comply with the Arizona Administrative Procedures Act rulemaking process.

      Blaney wrote that the unmet demand rule was illegal and blocked ADWR from using it to determine if developers had enough groundwater for the 100-year-supply requirement.

    • Western Water ☛ Flaming Gorge water release sparks concerns

      The goal is to keep Lake Powell from dropping to dangerously low levels. If water levels fall too far, the dam could lose its ability to generate power and move water downstream. That would create ripple effects across the West, where more than 40 million people rely on the Colorado River.

    • Yle ☛ Number of Finnish, Swedish, Sámi speakers in Finland drops below 5m

      People who natively speak either Finnish, Swedish or Sámi accounted for 88 percent of the population, according to the number-crunching agency.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ South Africa planning big overhaul of public sector IT

    The commitment appears in the department’s annual performance plan (APP) for 2026/2027, signed off by the minister, Solly Malatsi. Malatsi, a DA MP, is the first non-ANC politician to occupy the role since the first democratic elections in 1994.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Seriously, Tucker Carlson? Come On

    The problem is not just that Carlson ought to have known better. It’s that he did, as the journalist Jason Zengerle reports in his recent biography, Hated by All the Right People. Back in the early 2000s, Carlson harbored reservations about the war in Iraq, but he swallowed them to be what he felt was a good team player for the right, Zengerle notes. Later, he said, he’d gone “against my own instincts in supporting it. It’s something I’ll never do again. Never.” (The Iraq disaster may inform Carlson’s vehement opposition to the war in Iran.)

    And yet Carlson did just that with Trump, repeatedly. He initially found Trump coarse, but came around to him during the 2016 presidential campaign. By 2020, however, he’d become disgusted with Trump, including over his handling of COVID; Zengerle writes that Carlson first believed that the president’s approach was too blasé, then too strict. He told people he voted for Kanye West for president in 2020. When Trump tried to steal the election despite losing it, Carlson skewered Trump’s allies on air and was even harsher in text messages to colleagues.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Why Meta is laying off 10% of its workforce

    Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is planning to lay off 8,000 employees, or roughly 10% of its workforce, in May, as it seeks to cut costs to better prepare to do more with artificial intelligence.

    Meta told its employees about the layoffs in a Thursday memo that said the company will also close 6,000 open roles. Bloomberg earlier reported about the memo.

  • Deseret Media ☛ Meta slashes 8,000 jobs, or 10% of its workforce, as Microsoft offers buyouts

    Also Thursday, Microsoft said it was offering voluntary buyouts to thousands of its U.S. employees.

    The software giant plans to make the offers in early May to about 8,750 people, or 7% of its U.S. workforce, according to two people familiar with the plan who were not authorized to speak about it publicly.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Meta cuts 10% of staff, cancels 6,000 open roles in AI efficiency push

    The reduction in headcount is Meta’s largest since the 21,000-plus job cuts the company pushed through in 2022 and 2023, a period Zuckerberg called a “year of efficiency.”

    Meta’s capital expenditure guidance for 2026 sits as high as $135 billion, nearly double 2025’s roughly $72 billion, with the bulk earmarked for data centers, custom silicon and other AI infrastructure. Meta still trails OpenAI Group PBC, Google LLC and Anthropic PBC in generative AI.

  • New York Times ☛ Meta to Lay Off 10 Percent of Work Force in A.I. Push

    The layoffs affect about 8,000 employees, with Meta also planning to close 6,000 open roles, as the company focuses on artificial intelligence.

  • International Business Times ☛ Meta To Cut 8,000 Jobs, Freeze Hiring Amid AI Push — What Workers Get In Severance

    The scale of this layoff puts it among the largest single-round tech layoffs of 2026, and it arrives at a time when Meta's core business looks anything but troubled. Meta is on track to surpass Google as the world's largest digital advertising platform in 2026, with ad revenue forecast at $243.46 billion, according to the Los Angeles Times.

  • The Record ☛ Trump’s pick for CISA director withdraws from consideration

    CISA is currently being run by Acting Director Nick Andersen, and it is unclear who the Trump administration will nominate to lead the agency going forward.

    The agency has been hobbled in recent months after losing about 30% of its workforce to widespread layoffs and experiencing furloughs due to the recent government shutdown.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Bigot says He's Sorry

    Well, thank you, Tucker. I — and I’m sure many others — appreciate your apology.

    And we hope your torment continues.

    By the way, I’ve got to ask: Are you also tormented by — and apologetic for — supporting Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen?

    And what about your minimizing the presence of white nationalists among those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021? And your claim that the attack on the Capitol “barely rates as a footnote?”

    Are you now tormented and apologetic for any of this?

  • Kyle Reddoch ☛ Cybersecurity Does Not Have a Specialization Problem. It Has a Context Problem - CybersecKyle

    That is not really a specialization problem. It is a context problem.

    I do not say that as someone who is anti-specialization. Cybersecurity is too broad now for everybody to be equally deep in every area. We need people who live in identity, cloud, networking, endpoint, vulnerability management, detection engineering, compliance, and incident response. That part is normal. The issue starts when specialization becomes so narrow that people know their slice of the stack but lose sight of how the environment actually works as a whole.

    That gap matters more than a lot of organizations want to admit.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ U.S. Spies on the Vatican

    When Trump declared Pope Leo “terrible for foreign policy,” the U.S. intelligence community took the president’s remarks as a directive to prioritize spying on the Vatican.

    It has for years, sources tell me. The CIA has human spies working inside the Holy See bureaucracy. The NSA and CIA seek to intercept telecommunications, emails, and texts. The FBI investigates crimes committed against and by the Vatican. The State Department closely follows the ins and outs of Papal diplomacy and politics. All of these agencies liaise with the Vatican’s own foreign policy, intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Pro-Russian propagandist crimes against state case heads to court

      State Prosecutor Taavi Pern said Bessedin has "consistently" cooperated with Russian state institutions and their representatives, in order to take part in influence activities as described in the indictment.

    • France24 ☛ Both Trump and Iran share false information about 8 women facing execution by the regime - Truth or Fake

      This Wednesday Donald Trump claimed that out of respect for him, Iran had agreed to spare the lives of 8 young Iranian women facing execution. But he was quickly struck with accusations that the women were AI-generated. Iran gave conflicting information, both mocking the AI claims but also declaring none of the women faced confirmed death sentences. The reality - as confirmed by two NGOs - is that all parties shared incorrect information.

    • Annie Mueller ☛ It’s a lot to process - annie's blog

      Information and misinformation. Part of the drowning is the effort required to try to distinguish between the two. You’re trying to keep your head above water and there are waves and in order to not be pulled under by a wave you have to quickly look at it (while it’s looming larger and larger above you) and decide: Real or not real?

      Looks real. Is it real? Decide! Quick!

    • Rolling Stone ☛ The Onion's InfoWars Takeover Stars Red-Pilled Jim Haggerty

      The Onion is now awaiting final judicial approval to formalize its takeover of the media company — for which it has tapped famed writer and comedian Tim Heidecker as creative director. Heidecker — the mind behind projects including The Tim and Eric Show and On Cinema — has been parodying Jones for years. In a satirical video announcing his new role at InfoWars, Heidecker emphasized that while the team at The Onion is throwing around a lot of potential ideas for the future of the website, he still wants to extend a “hand of friendship” to the team at InfoWars.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Truthdig ☛ MAMDANI Act: A Bill That Would Make Joseph McCarthy Blush

    Texas Rep. Chip Roy is preparing to introduce legislation he’s calling the “MAMDANI Act,” named after Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, that would let the federal government bar entry to, deport and strip naturalized citizenship from any person who advocates for or is “affiliated with” what Roy calls “totalitarian” movements. The list includes, from Rep. Roy’s webpage: [...]

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Atlantic ☛ If I Tried to Escape, I Would Be Killed

    I had been warned multiple times over my years of reporting from Iraq that I might be targeted for kidnapping or assassination. However, this is always a risk for journalists who work on the ground, and none of the previous warnings had been followed by any attempts. I have never traveled with security—not in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or elsewhere. I have always walked or used local transportation, and often stay with local families.

  • The Dissenter ☛ Israeli Forces Attacked Red Cross Trying To Save Journalists

    The Israeli military reportedly targeted two Lebanese journalists, assassinating Amal Khalil who worked for the Al-Akhbar newspaper and seriously injuring freelance photographer Zeinab Faraj.

    Lebanese Red Cross volunteers rescued Faraj but were unable to rescue Khalil before she died because the Israeli military opened fire on them, which Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam called a “war crime.”

  • Northwestern University ☛ Local TV News is Consolidating and Contracting

    Whether that will happen remains to be seen. But this surely won’t be the last instance of local TV news companies undergoing seismic reconstructions. And so this question emerges: Does the gutting of WRTV symbolize a new era of local TV news, or is it an extreme example of consolidation and cost-cutting by a new owner?

  • CS Monitor ☛ Haitian newspaper, the country’s longest-running, under threat by gangs

    It took eight months before Mr. Duval managed to send someone to the ransacked streets near the office to see what remained. It took even longer for him to accept his paper’s new reality, he says. Through it all, he’s kept publishing the paper online.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Report on the Arrest of Azam Mohebbi by the IRGC Intelligence Organization

    According to HRANA News Agency, citing BBC Persian, Azam Mohebbi was arrested by the IRGC Intelligence Organization in Urmia. Based on the report, Ms. Mohebbi had traveled to Kurdistan Province about 20 days ago to prepare a report and was subsequently arrested by the IRGC Intelligence Organization in Urmia. The report states that the arrest of this journalist was carried out on suspicion of cooperation with opposition groups.

  • CPJ ☛ US-Kuwaiti journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin acquitted of all charges

    Ahmed, is an award-winning journalist who has contributed to The New York Times, PBS, and Al Jazeera English, among others. He had not posted online since March 2, while visiting family in Kuwait, and was arrested on March 3.

    Lawyers for Shihab-Eldin’s sisters said on April 23 that Ahmed had been acquitted.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Katie Couric on Media's ‘Capitulation’ to Trump: A 'Shakedown'

    Katie Couric — the former longtime Today host who now runs her own independent media company — spoke with Variety for the 20th anniversary of the beginning of her five-year tenure as CBS Evening News anchor.

    Couric discussed the state of broadcast news today and why the “both sides” approach to reporting in an attempt to attract centrist audiences isn’t the solution. When asked by Variety if it was still possible to do a “straight-ahead newscast” in such a divided political climate, Couric said it is “very difficult for a number of reasons.”

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Satellite imagery suggests Stepanakert’s main church destroyed by Azerbaijan

    Satellite imagery analysis has suggested that Azerbaijan destroyed the Holy Mother of God Cathedral, the main Armenian church in Stepanakert. The church was the largest among Armenian churches in Nagorno-Karabakh.

    Armenian investigative outlet Hetq was among the first to verify reports of the church’s demolition circulating online. Images taken by the European Sentinel-2 satellite as of 2 April showed ‘the white paving stones surrounding the Mother Cathedral, but not the church itself’.

  • Tennessee Lookout ☛ Every Tennessee sheriff required to work with ICE in legislation headed to the governor’s desk

    The legislation requires sheriffs to enter the so-called 287(g) agreements with the federal government or risk losing state funding.

    If signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee, Tennessee sheriffs will have a Jan. 1, 2027 deadline to comply. Local police forces are not covered by the legislation and would retain autonomy over the decision to enter the agreements. The Lookout is seeking comment from Lee’s office about whether the governor intends to sign the legislation.

  • The Next Move ☛ Horror and Heroism in China - by Jay Nordlinger

    The sheer horror of Chinese communism has never quite penetrated the American or Western mind. This is a source of wonder and bewilderment to Chinese dissidents and their supporters.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Six Colors ☛ Scoring the differences between ESPN and Apple Sports

    In recent weeks, when I’ve fired up the ESPN app on my iPhone, an unpleasant sight has greeted me amid all the scores and upcoming games I’m trying to check in on. There, placed prominently in each entry for upcoming games, regardless of the sport, has been a big, ugly-looking block of betting odds.

  • The Ethical Computing Initiative ☛ ✨ Trustworthy Technology

    A (hopeful) new movement dedicated to a simple proposition—that our technology products should respect us! That is, support our wishes and uphold the principles of freedom, privacy, and informed consent.

    Does that sound odd? 🤔 😅

    We bet it does. Unless an expert in technology and its history, you’re unlikely to be aware how drastically the landscape has changed since the turn of the millennium. Fact is, in a little over two decades we’ve lost a significant amount of autonomy and agency to technology companies, through retreat and steady attrition alike.

    This initiative attempts to remedy that.

    For its part, “Trustworthy Technology” is a term we’re applying to a platform of largely existing Open hardware, FOSS software, and respectful network services deployed in support of our goals.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ Anthropic Claims Fair Use in Push to End Music Publishers Lawsuit

      With that, all eyes are on the case’s scheduled July 15th summary judgment hearing – and, in the bigger picture, exactly how much mileage Anthropic gets out of its fair use defense. A closing question: If training AI models on protected materials is actually fair use, what does the point mean for developers that ink licensing deals?

      Said question has become a big part of the majors’ (less Warner Music) copyright action against Suno. Following Warner Music’s settlement and licensing pact with the AI music generator, Universal Music and Sony Music are pushing to obtain a copy of the agreement via discovery.

    • Techdirt ☛ France Keeps Breaking the Internet to Stop Piracy, Even Though It’s Not Working

      As recently reported by TorrentFreak, a Paris Court of Appeal validated DNS blocking orders requiring Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to block access to pirate sites through their own DNS resolvers. This goes beyond traditional ISP resolvers, which France has been ordering blocked for years — this targets third-party resolvers — the ones that millions of people specifically choose to use because they offer better privacy, better security, and better reliability than their ISP’s default DNS.

      But, of course, in France (and to the usual crew of Hollywood lobbyists), “better privacy, security, and reliability” can only mean one thing: used for piracy.

      The court rejected all five appeals, and in doing so, articulated a legal principle so sweeping that it has no natural stopping point.

    • Creative Commons ☛ Update on CC Signals: What Changed and Why

      The biggest reason for the gap between updates is timing. We are deliberately resisting the pressure to move quickly simply because the broader technology landscape rewards speed. Our work touches the infrastructure of the commons. That requires care, consultation, and a willingness to sit with complexity.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Sflix, Myflixerz, HDtoday, and other Pirate Sites Go Dark as Backend Infrastructure Fails

      Dozens of pirate sites using popular brands such as Sflix, Watchseries, HDtoday, and Fmovies have become unreachable this week. The targeted domains all return a Cloudflare 521 error message, suggesting that the origin server refused the connection. Many of the sites in question are linked to a popular "Piracy-as-a-Service" operation that also acts as a hosting platform.