Leftovers

• Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ 'Stalker' filming location in Tallinn makes European film heritage list

  The Tallinn site earned its name after Tarkovsky's sci-fi masterpiece, which included a key scene where the eponymous Stalker and several other characters pause before entering the film's fictional Zone.

  "'Stalker' filming locations in Tallinn are an important part of our film heritage, and these specific places carry strong cultural and historical significance," said Estonian Film Institute (EFI) director Edith Sepp.

• USMC ☛ Remains of USS Arizona crew buried as unknowns after Pearl Harbor to be identified

  Last November, Operation 85 announced that they had reached the required 60% threshold for the Arizona, meaning 643 families. However, it has awaited DPAA confirmation since then.

• Threat Source ☛ It pays to be a forever student

  As much as we tend to be myopic as security professionals and focus on our tradecraft, we are all part of a series of interconnected systems that lets humanity function. Learning those systems — their quirks, their limitations, and their vulnerabilities — makes you a better hacker. Stay curious, friends.

• Dr Molly Tov ☛ an apology to whichever of my family has to clean out my basement when I die

  I did tear down my notebooks once - the pile I had from about 1996 to 2009. I regret this. I had to guess in the moment what counted as "useful" and what should be "tossed out," and I learned later I was wrong. I haven't done that since.

  Instead, I have a steadily-growing pile of notebooks on a bookshelf in my basement. They are sorted, more or less, by date (dates are written in the inside front cover). The tab system (since 2015) gives some idea what's in the newer ones.

  These piles are going to be my descendants' problem. I apologize in advance, but I am not Swedish Death Cleaning these. You can read them. You can mulch them. You can burn them. I won't care. I'll be dead.

• Science

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ “We Don’t Know Most Things”: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on Curiosity and the Cosmos

    Prescod-Weinstein, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire and core faculty in women’s and gender studies, brings a unique perspective to both cosmology and social justice. Her research spans theoretical physics and Black feminist science studies, and in this book, she takes readers on a cosmic journey that connects neutron stars to poetry, quantum theory to pop culture, and our place in the universe to our struggles here on Earth.

    This week, I caught up with Prescod-Weinstein to discuss curiosity and cosmic wonder, the mythology of genius, Deep Space Nine, and how to think beyond false narratives and manufactured inevitabilities.

    This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

  • John D Cook ☛ Simple approximation for solving a right triangle

    Suppose you have a right triangle with sides a, b, and c, where a is the shortest side and c is the hypotenuse. Then the following approximation from [1] for the angle A opposite side a seems too simple and too accurate to be true.

  • John D Cook ☛ Approximation to solve an oblique triangle

    The previous post gave a simple and accurate approximation for the smaller angle of a right triangle. Given a right triangle with sides a, b, and c, where a is the shortest side and c is the hypotenuse, the angle opposite side a is approximately

  • John D Cook ☛ How nonlinearity affects a pendulum

    The equation of motion for a pendulum is the differential equation

    \theta'' + \frac{g}{\ell}\sin \theta = 0

    where g is the acceleration due to gravity and ℓ is the length of the pendulum. When this is presented in an introductory physics class, the instructor will immediately say something like “we’re only interested in the case where θ is small, so we can rewrite the equation as: [...]

• Career/Education

  • CS Monitor ☛ Scandinavia's U-turn on book reading

    In 2009, Sweden – home to tech giants Spotify and Klarna, among others – swapped out printed school textbooks for computers and tablets. In 2023, it announced a €104 million ($122 million) plan to bring back book-based learning, especially in the early grades. Finland began a similar reversal in 2024. And so has Norway which, starting in 2016, issued an iPad to every 5-year-old starting school. Now, its government, teachers, and librarians are going all out to boost reading – through library-based, youth-friendly activities and community reading sessions.

    Behind these shifts is public concern over declining literacy and reading comprehension. But the change also points to a broader embrace of screen- and tech-free learning as a means to support less distraction, active engagement, and deeper learning among young people.

  • XOXO ☛ Launching XOXO Explore

    Our talk videos finally have a proper home on the XOXO website, filterable by year and topic, with each video page now including a talk description, relevant tags, and links to other related videos from our full archive of conference talks.

  • Truthdig ☛ Trump’s Proposed Budget Guts Local Libraries and Museums

    Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, noted that her panel did not agree to the same Trump request in fiscal 2026 to eliminate funding for the agency.

    “I personally have always been a fan of libraries, and it does a lot for local communities,” said Capito, whose panel writes the annual bill to fund the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

    “So, that’s what he does, he proposes, and then we look at it and make our own decisions,” she said.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

    I don’t think there’s compelling evidence that using AI makes you less intelligent overall. However, it seems pretty obvious that using AI to perform a task means you don’t learn as much about performing that task. Some software engineers think this is a decisive argument against the use of AI. Their argument goes something like this: [...]

  • Matt Webb ☛ The Wind in the Willows and reading out loud

    But it’s not the lengthy sentences that makes this prose work for me. It’s the rhythm.

    And I don’t really get that from reading it dead on the page. It’s because I’ve been reading The Wind in the Willows out loud.

  • Dan Sinker ☛ A Short Post In Defense of Libraries

    At a time where everything is designed to extract as much from you as possible, whether it is money, time, or attention—or all three—the library is a radical space. Which is, in part, why they are so often under attack.

    This week the school district in the progressive college town that I live in announced that they would be cutting all middle school librarian positions in a misguided attempt to try and staunch the bleeding from years of budget mismanagement. (This is not a post to say fuck you to the administrators that made that decision, but just to get that out of the way: fuck you.)

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Library Journal's 150th Anniversary Coverage: Sure Bets (Part 1)

    Library Journal is turning 150 this year and they have been celebrating with special coverage. One of my favorite things they have been doing is publishing lists of "Sure Bets" by genre based on a survey they did with library workers last fall. I wrote about the survey here.

    For each genre (or format) they have not only compiled the top titles, but also, they have provided a spreadsheet of every submitted title from the survey!

  • Dmytro Barabash ☛ Hire based on the conversation about code, not the code itself | Dima Barabash

    Weeell, okay, here we go... The process most teams use to hire engineers doesn't give the signal it was built for anymore.

    The processes that some (most) companies use to hire engineers today give you no understanding of whether a person fits certain requirements at all.

    The whiteboard just checks if a person can write code by hand, without any helpers and under pressure. Today, this is not the job that an engineer does or should do. Now an engineer has to make decisions at the product level and communicate with the team at different levels. But the whiteboard only checks a specific result, in fake conditions. Code overall is already a result. What matters is thinking.

  • Ruby Association ☛ 2025 Grant Accomplishment Report

    The following projects have been completed, and their deliverables have been accepted by the grant committee.

• Hardware

  • [Repeat] Kev Quirk ☛ Update on My Coffee Ridden Framework 13

    There wasn't. They told me that the LED pattern I was seeing when powered on was indicative of a communication error with the board, so it's dead and needed to be replaced.

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

    For years, the best way to get 10 gigabit networking on laptops was to buy an expensive, large, and hot 10 GbE Thunderbolt adapter. With new RTL8159-based 10G USB 3.2 adapters coming onto the market, the bulky adapters might be a thing of the past. Just look at the size of the thing in comparison to my Thunderbolt adapters: [...]

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ Acquired 1962 Olympia SM7 Portable Typewriter (Olympia Werke A.G.)

    Acquired via thrift on April 10, 2026. It finally fills my itch to have an italic typeface for use in personal correspondence. It’s in spectacular starting condition though a bit gamey, but this should clean up nicely. It immediately needed a bit of forming on the carriage lock and a new ribbon, but it’s generally ready to be in the regular rotation.

  • Cynthias Blog ☛ The Nintendo Switch Switch

    Yesterday I had the idea that it would be cool if I turned a Nintendo Switch (will be referred to as NX to avoid confusion as NX is the code name for the Nintendo Switch) console into an actual network switch. I thought about it a bit and realized that it would be doable in hardware at least, since the NX docking station has USB-A ports.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ Does Mouthwash Really Damage Your Heart? Here's What We Know

    One of the important roles these oral bacteria have is converting the nitrate in our food (typically from sources such as leafy greens) into nitrite.

    When we swallow nitrite, the body turns it into nitric oxide. This happens via the nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide pathway, also called the enterosalivary pathway. It's one example of how bacteria contribute to keeping the body healthy.

    Nitric oxide plays an essential part in regulating blood pressure and supporting brain function and muscle function.

    But according to some online influencers, the reason mouthwash harms heart health is because it affects the "healthy" bacteria – the ones that produce nitric oxide.

  • Makoism ☛ 55 for 55

    According to my guesstimated morbid math, I now have somewhere around 39% of my time left on the planet. Simple math: 55 divided by 90 puts me at roughly 61% done.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Melanomas: get yourself checked!

    Anyway, the point of this post wasn’t to get gross, but to let you know that if you’re at all unsure about a mark on yourself, and you live somewhere that gets a lot of sunshine (or maybe even not, the sun doesn’t discriminate), get yourself checked. It could be among the most consequential decisions you make.

  • Ben Kuhn ☛ You should try contra dancing

    This makes it a grounding and nourishing antitode to a lot of everyday stressors. When I was so drawn to it in middle school, I don’t think it was just about the fun: on some deep level it was very good for me.

  • BBC ☛ Trump administration reclassifies cannabis as less dangerous

    According to the announcement, Blanche also ordered that a hearing be held in June as part of a rule-making process to reclassify all marijuana more broadly.

    Once the rule change is published in the Federal Register, it has 30 days until it takes effect. During that time, it can be legally challenged - which is expected - and be blocked from being implemented for months or even years.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft tackles quality control issues. Just kidding, it's encouraging experienced workers to leave

    Microsoft has committed to improving the quality and reliability of Windows, and a step on the path to that goal is… encouraging a chunk of its US staff to leave the company.

    As confirmed by The Register sources, the company has announced, via internal memo, a voluntary buyout scheme for US employees. So if you work in that region, are at the senior director level or below, and if your age plus years of employment at Microsoft comes to 70 or higher – you might be eligible to leap from the gangplank of the good ship Nadella rather than receiving a shove from HR.

    There will be some exceptions, including employees with sales incentive plans, but a figure of approximately 7 percent is a guide to how big a chunk of the workforce could be eligible. That translates to just under 9,000 employees.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ What is a passkey, how does it work and why is it better than a password?

    The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has called time on the password – from now on, you should use a passkey.

    The NCSC said this week it would no longer recommend using passwords where passkeys were available. They should be consumers’ first choice of login across all digital services because passwords were not secure enough to stand up to modern cyber threats.

  • Macworld ☛ Tim Cook's legacy: 9 small bets that paid off and 2 big swings that didn't

    But while everyone knows about the headline triumphs – the iPhone X, the Apple Watch, AirPods, MacBook Neo – Cook has had a hand in a vast array of more understated achievements. Here, we take a look at some of the most underrated Apple products that came to fruition during Tim Cook’s tenure – and a couple he’d probably rather forget.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Control Center is Homeless

    For months, HomeKit controls will be missing after an iOS update or device restart. In this case, I am missing controls for my garage door, my thermostats, and a couple of scenes.

  • Rachel ☛ Replacing an Apple Time Capsule? Skip the Ubiquiti UNAS-2

    I should have paid attention to it. It was actually telling me that it had fallen off the local network. Yes, even though I used nothing but their own hardware. You see, this little monster has 2.5 gig Ethernet, so I had also purchased a new switch from them to do exactly that.

    There I am, with a brand new Ubiquiti 2.5G switch, with its provided power supply, and the short (and weird) little Ethernet cable which came with the UNAS 2 itself. It's UI stuff into UI stuff across UI stuff into more UI stuff. There's nowhere for them to claim it's something out of whack, unless they're the ones shipping the badness.

    Spoiler: they're the ones shipping the badness.

  • GreyCoder ☛ HERE WeGo: A Free, Privacy-Respecting Navigation App

    The standout capability is offline maps. You can download entire countries or continents ahead of time and navigate without any [Internet] connection. This is especially useful for international travelers or anyone exploring rural areas. GPS still works without data, so turn-by-turn voice guidance runs smoothly even in airplane mode.

  • The Register UK ☛ NCSC: Passkeys now good enough to be the default standard

    The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has officially endorsed passkeys as the default authentication standard, marking the first time the agency has told consumers to move away from passwords entirely.

    New official guidance states that passwords should not be used where passkeys are available, overturning decades of conventional advice. A technical report, released today at the NCSC's annual CYBERUK conference, concludes passkeys "are at least as secure as, and generally more secure than" a password and two-step verification (2SV) combo.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Harvard University ☛ What to make of ‘AI psychosis’?

      Torous is a co-author of a viewpoint paper in The Lancet that proposes a functional typology of psychotic phenomena associated with large language models. He and co-authors Matthew Flathers, a BIDMC-affiliated computer scientist, and Spencer Roux, a member of Harvard’s Digital Patient Advisory Board, suggest that AI psychosis — which is not a formal diagnosis but a media label — can actually refer to several distinct phenomena.

      Torous and his co-authors created their typology based on AI’s role in a patient’s delusions as either the catalyst, the amplifier, the co-author, or the object.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Google CEO says 75% of company’s new code is AI-generated | Semafor

      Perhaps more startlingly, Pichai said the workflow was now “truly agentic” — rather than engineers giving prompts which AI completes, engineers now supervise autonomous digital teams.

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ What does 'thinking' mean now?

      At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) systems and tools based on large language models (LLMs) are being rapidly introduced into industries and daily life, the basic definition of ‘thinking’ and the essential skills we teach the next generation are being called into question.

    • The Register UK ☛ Open source models can find bugs as well as Mythos

      Speaking at the Black Hat Asia conference in Singapore today, Herbert-Voss said Mythos excels at finding both "shallow" bugs - well-described flaws that are and easy to validate - and more complex vulnerabilities.

      In his talk, he attributed this to "supralinear scaling": where researchers assumed LLM capability would improve linearly, evidence now suggests a model trained on twice the data, compute, and time produces something four times more capable.

    • 404 Media ☛ Researchers Simulated a Delusional User to Test Chatbot Safety

      For companies selling these chatbots, engagement is money, and encouraging users to close the app is antithetical to that engagement. “Another issue is that there are active incentives to have LLMs behave in ways that could meaningfully increase risk,” Nicholls said. “We suggest in the paper that the strength of a user’s relational investment could predict susceptibility to being led by a model into delusional beliefs—essentially, the more you like the model (and think of it as an entity, not a technology), the more you might come to trust it, so if it reinforces ideas about reality that aren’t true, those ideas may have more weight. For that reason, design choices that enhance intimacy and engagement—like OpenAI’s proposed ‘adult mode,’ that they seem to have paused for now—could plausibly be expected to amplify risk for delusions.”

    • PC World ☛ Investigation: RAM prices are falling. Don’t fall for it

      AI data centers are gobbling up memory manufacturing capacity. The trend is expected to continue for quite a while, and there’s almost no capacity left for consumer-level RAM and storage fabrication. As a result, prices for RAM, finished computers, storage, game consoles, phones, even products as innocuous as SD cards are rising higher and higher. It’s a terrifying development for PC enthusiasts on the hunt for more performance without spending a fortune.

    • The Cyber Show ☛ Every time you say "AI" a kitten dies.

      As a computer scientist I am saddened. There are enormous benefits to be had from machine learning, advanced signal processing, and agentic approaches that we might more usefully regard as "Next Generation Applications". It's distressing to think work I've done in my own life, in research and education, comes to such a dismal end in the hands of high-IQ hooligans. The problem with talking about "next generation applications" is "next generation" is always vague and works any time).

      "It doesn't matter what temperature the room is, it's always room temperature" –Steven Wright

      "AI" has become a football song for a bunch of rowdy away fans. Our disgrace as scientists, as always, is letting a few technofascists snatch the steering wheel from the hands of democracy. When people are unable to distinguish tools with huge social benefit from social control toys of insecure men, it's a double loss.

    • Terence Eden ☛ Does Mythos mean you need to shut down your Open Source repositories?

      Much Sturm und Drang in the world of Open Source with the announcement that the "Mythos" AI is now the ultimate hacker and is poised to unleash havoc on every code base.

      So should you close all your Open Source projects to make them safe?

      No.

      Firstly, all your Open Source code has already been slurped up.

    • Stephen Hackett ☛ The Problem With AI: 'Software Brain'

      AI is the most complex thing to happen to the technology industry, and Patel nails many of the reasons why.

      Here is a bit of his argument, after he outlines just how unpopular AI has become in the real world: [...]

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ Vibe Coding Has a Security Problem, and Shipping Code You Do Not Understand Is Not a Strategy

      “Vibe coding” has become the catch-all phrase for building software mostly through prompts, iterations, and AI-assisted generation instead of line-by-line engineering. Some of that is genuinely useful. I am not anti-AI, and I do not think serious teams should pretend these tools are going away. But I do think a lot of people are getting dangerously comfortable shipping code they do not really understand, on stacks they did not really design, with security assumptions they never actually validated.

      That is not innovation. That is borrowed confidence.

    • Bobby Hiltz ☛ Dissecting AI News as a Layperson

      The news is awash with headlines making claims about AI.

      But, how do I — a standard issue, non-dev, mouth-breathing, normie human — understand all of this?

      This is a paraphrase of a common plight among my students (and some colleagues (and myself)). “The news said this,” they say, “how am I supposed to understand or digest this?”

    • Mahesh Balakrishnan ☛ Your Agent is a Distributed System (and fails like one)

      In vibe engineering, the agent acts upon infrastructure (S3 buckets, DynamoDB tables, EC2 instances, K8s deployments…). Large-scale infrastructure is not forgiving. There is no reset. Only SEVs at 2 AM.

      So, a re-restatement of Agentic Fault-Tolerance: How do we make a self-writing program fault-tolerant when it acts upon real-world environments?

      To answer this question, we examine the many types of failures that agents can experience.

    • The New Stack ☛ Vectors gave us AI search, tensors are going to make it smarter

      While vectors are aces at turning information into numerical strings, their inherent flatness is limiting.

      What do we mean by flatness? A vector is a one-dimensional tensor. That means each number is positioned along a single axis. Tensors, in contrast, can have multiple axes. (All vectors are tensors; not all tensors are vectors.) This means tensors can represent the same quantum of information with more context.

    • Mark Dastmalchi-Round ☛ Sloppy Copies

      I wrote it off as a new form of the regular Internet background noise, and carried on working on the site in the evenings; Life moved on. Then a few days ago, I discovered something that really threw me for a loop - I found what seems to be a bunch of almost literal scammy copies of my app.

    • Frederik Braun ☛ Frederik Braun: Multiple things can be true at the same time

      AI is also bad for the environment, due to their excessive electrical power requirements. AI is making hardware expensive. Memory and storage are no longer affordable, most of it going straight to people who are buying it to fill a datacenter that has not yet been constructed and with money they don't have.

      AI has plagiarized all the works that are (publicly) available on the internet. It destroys and devalues creative work. AI is also unpredictable. Given the stochastic nature of these systems, there is no way to make them reliable.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Bill to ban AI chatbots in children's toys introduced

      The U.S. Public Interest Research Group tested AI toys and found they "frequently veered into adult themes, vulgar language, and discussion of explicit content when used consistently." Some toys went further, discouraging children from stopping play even after the child said they were done. Moore pointed to China, where more than 1,500 AI toy companies manufacture these products, and flagged a second concern: the toys serve as a channel for collecting behavioral data on minors.

    • US House Of Representatives ☛ Congressman Blake Moore Introduces Bill to Ban Artificial Intelligence Chatbots in Children's Toys | U.S. Congressman Blake Moore

      The insertion of AI chatbots into children’s toys, many of which are made by companies that explicitly state that their platform should not be used by young children, poses serious data privacy challenges, locks children into addictive and unpredictable engagement patterns with toys, and risks exposing them to explicit content through chatbots trained on data generated by adults.

      “Every aspect of how we adopt artificial intelligence must be human-centric. America will continue to compete, innovate, and strive to break barriers in AI development, but we must prioritize basic ethics and restrain these tools where they will negatively impact human activity when it comes to privacy, safety, human development, and addiction,” Congressman Moore said. “There is no shortage of data on the impact addictive technologies have on America's youth. Kids have a lot to learn when it comes to relational maturity, self-control, and self-discipline. We cannot allow AI chatbot programs to infiltrate the children's toy or childcare industry or give our kids the idea that playing with AI is somehow similar to building real-life experiences and relationships. The AI Children's Toy Safety Act draws a line in the sand. AI companies shouldn’t be using children’s toys as a vessel for data collection or influence on minors.”

    • US House Of Representatives ☛ AI Children's Toy Safety Act [PDF]

      Beginning on the date that is 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, no person may manufacture for sale, import into the United States, sell or otherwise convey to another person, offer to sell or convey to another person, or distribute in commerce in any manner any children’s toy or child care article that incorporates as part of such toy or article an artificial intelligence chatbot.

    • The Register UK ☛ Anthropic Mythos shaping up as nothingburger

      That marketing may have outstripped reality. Early reports from Mythos preview users including AWS and Mozilla indicate that while the model is very good and very fast at finding vulnerabilities, and requires less hands-on guidance from security engineers - making it a welcome time-saver for the human teams - it has yet to eclipse human security researchers.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Atlantic ☛ How Short-Form Clips Took Over the Internet

      In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks with the business writer Ed Elson about the rise of the “clip economy”—the idea that short video clips pulled from podcasts, livestreams, and other long-form content have become the dominant unit of online media, not just a promotional tool. Elson explains how figures like Andrew Tate pioneered armies of paid clippers to flood social platforms with content and how the viewership numbers on clips often perform better than the original shows. Warzel and Elson discuss what this means for legacy media organizations, as well as the broader societal costs of phone-driven attention erosion.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • APNIC ☛ Revocation of X.509 certificates

      Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a system designed to support the use of public/private keyed digital signatures through a system of structured transitive trust. The objective of a PKI is to enable trusted communications between parties who may have never directly met and may not necessarily even know each other at all.

      A PKI normally uses X.509 public key certificates, which are digital objects that contain: [...]

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Palantir's Employees Are in Crisis

      It’s been directly involved in the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, an effort that’s been implicated in numerous deaths. The company has even been linked to US airstrikes that leveled a school in Iran, killing over 120 schoolchildren.

      Last week, the Peter Thiel-cofounded company poured fuel on the fire with a 22-point summary of CEO Alex Karp’s 2025 book “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West,” an ominous corporate manifesto that critics called a “hideous ideology” and “example of technofascism.”

    • The Atlantic ☛ Scam Altman Wants to Know Whether You’re Human

      If Scam Altman has his way, this could be sort of how it works in real life. Last week, he announced an expansion of the verification service World ID, created by a start-up called Tools for Humanity. Altman co-founded the company in 2019, the same year he became CEO of OpenAI. Onstage last Friday, he described the product as a way to certify personhood in a digital landscape rife with bots, deepfakes, phishers, and other sorts of impostors. Think of it as an evolution of CAPTCHA, the security program used to identify bots and prevent attacks on websites. To verify your humanness and secure a World ID, you must stare into a white, frosted orb and allow the company to take pictures of your face and eyeballs.

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Why Do We Love Movies? This New 'Smart' Movie Theater Tracks Viewers' Brain Waves and Heart Rates to Find Out

      Located on the institution’s new campus, the 35-seat Smart Cinema theater pairs the familiar high-resolution laser projector and Dolby surround-sound speakers with technologies foreign to most movie houses: heart rate monitors, EEG headsets and infrared cameras. By monitoring viewers’ pulses, brain waves, body heat, skin responses and eye movements, researchers say they can more accurately capture in-the-moment, knee-jerk reactions that may be lost or forgotten after the credits roll.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Hiding Bluetooth Trackers in Mail

      It was used to track a Dutch naval ship: [...]

    • [Old] Harvard University ☛ How Delta Airlines and other companies use dynamic pricing to determine how much you pay

      It’s not the only line of business to do so, he adds. Today, companies are increasingly harnessing personal data as well, gathering or buying information on users’ demographics, location, interests, and consumer preferences to sell us more stuff — for more money. Peek inside your grocery cart, your fast-food bag, or your favorite ride-hailing app, and there’s a good chance that your online and offline activity played a role in determining how much you paid, says Giansiracusa, whose new book, “Robin Hood Math: Take Control of the Algorithms That Run Your Life,” examines the ways in which public and private entities use algorithms to impact our daily lives.

    • The Independent UK ☛ JetBlue sued over ‘surveillance pricing’ claims of tracking personal data to raise fares

      JetBlue faces a proposed class-action lawsuit, alleging it uses customers' personal data to set ticket prices. This legal challenge emerged after a social media post and the airline's response sparked concerns of "surveillance pricing," making flights more expensive.

  • Confidentiality

    • RIPE ☛ ADoX Deployment in the Wild

      Encryption between DNS resolvers and users is growing - but what about the next hop? We measure the real-world deployment of encrypted resolver-to-authoritative DNS (ADoX), finding limited, highly concentrated adoption and little support among resolvers.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Defence Web ☛ Boko Haram, ISWAP target military bases

    On 13 April, terrorists from Islamic State West African Province (ISWAP) attacked a military base in the Borno State community of Monguno. Among the dead was the base commander, Colonel I.A. Muhammed, along with four soldiers. A week earlier, an attack on a base in Benesheikh, also in Borno, killed an unconfirmed number of Soldiers along with the base’s commander, Brigadier General Oseni Omoh Braimah.

    The attacks were the latest in a string of more than a dozen terrorist attacks on military outposts in Borno and Yobe states since the beginning of 2025. The attacks have killed dozens of soldiers and multiple high-ranking officers. Terrorists have also launched deadly assaults on civilians across the region.

  • El País ☛ Pentagon email raises the possibility of suspending Spain from NATO due to Iran disagreements

    “We don’t base our decisions on emails; we base them on official documents and government ⁠positions, in this case of the United States. The Spanish government’s position is clear: full cooperation with our allies, but always within the framework of international law,” Sánchez replied upon his arrival at the informal summit of European leaders in Nicosia, Cyprus.

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Trump cannot expel NATO members over Iran stance, alliance official says

    "NATO's Founding Treaty does not foresee any provision for suspension of NATO membership, or expulsion," the NATO official said.

  • Greece ☛ EU to prepare blueprint for mutual assistance pact, amid NATO doubts

    Cyprus President ⁠Nikos Christodoulides said EU leaders agreed at a summit in ⁠his country on Thursday evening that it was time to flesh out the pact, set out in Article 42.7 of the bloc’s core treaty.

    “We agreed last night that the (European) Commission will prepare a blueprint on how we respond in case a member state triggers Article 42.7. There are ​a number of questions that we need to ⁠have an answer to,” Christodoulides said.

  • BIA Net ☛ Turkey bans social media for children under 15

    The parliament passed an omnibus law on Apr 22 that includes provisions prohibiting social media providers from offering services to children who have not completed the age of 15.

    The legislation, which amends the Social Services Law and various other laws, requires platforms to implement age verification measures and provide differentiated services for users above 15.

  • teleSUR ☛ Norway to Propose Social Media Age Limit for Children

    Under the proposed legislation, children would be allowed to use social media from Jan. 1 of the year they turn 16. Technology companies would be responsible for verifying the age of young users when they log in.

    Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said the government plans to submit the bill before the end of the year, adding that the legislation is aimed at safeguarding children’s digital lives.

  • India Times ☛ Norway plans to ban social media use by children under 16

    Norway said on Friday it would present a bill in parliament by year-end to ban children from using social media until they ‌turn 16, ⁠making ⁠technology companies responsible for the task of age verification.

  • Truthdig ☛ Palantir Just Unmasked Itself to the World

    The manifesto published by Palantir Technologies last week is neither a technical document nor an economic vision. It is an explicit political document announcing a new phase in the trajectory of digital capitalism, a phase in which it has abandoned its claim to neutrality and decided to unmask itself, revealing its full ideological face. Palantir is not an isolated case in the global technological landscape. It is one of several major technology companies that sell their technologies to systems of repression and human rights violations and has been condemned by international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, for its role in enabling forced deportations, mass surveillance and the persecution of dissidents.

    Most damning of all, documented reports have revealed a direct partnership between this company, alongside other Western technology companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft, and the Israeli military, providing data and targeting systems that were used in operations in Gaza, making it an actual partner in documented war crimes against Palestinian civilians. In this regard, it does not differ in substance from other major digital capitalist companies that practice the same thing in different forms with varying degrees of openness.

    It is a class declaration of a project for a digital fascist alliance that relies not on traditional violence alone, but also on digital surveillance and repression, data analysis, artificial intelligence, the manipulation of public opinion and the suppression of dissent through imperceptible yet deeply impactful methods — an alliance whose crimes do not remain within elite circles and corporate offices, but extend to battlefields and the bodies of civilians, embodied today in its clearest form in Trumpism, its alliances, its crimes, and its aggressive wars.

• Environment

  • India Times ☛ Google's $15 billion data centre in Vizag to host 5-GW capacity

    Google Cloud is building a massive AI-ready data centre in Vishakhapatnam. It will have a capacity of 5 gigawatts. This investment is Google's largest in India. The project will be completed over five years. The new campus will be part of Google's global network. It will enhance data transfer capabilities.

  • Futurism ☛ Tech Companies Are Using Insidious Tactics to Build Data Centers on Indigenous Lands, Activists Say

    “We were there in Tulsa to pass the moratorium last month, and we were there this morning in Oklahoma City to show that the community does not want these data centers,” Ash Leitka, director of Honor the Earth’s Department of Sovereignty and Self Determination told Futurism. “We want clean water. We want privacy and security. We want jobs and economic stability, all of which hyperscale data centers threaten and negatively impact. The falsely generated demand for AI and AI infrastructure truly is a death cycle.”

  • Futurism ☛ Just 11 AI Data Centers Could Belch More Fumes Than Entire Countries

    The magazine examined emissions estimates provided by gas power projects that are being built to supply energy to the data centers. Construction of these sprawling facilities has surged to meet the demands of the AI industry, and to get them online as soon as possible, many of the newly built data centers are relying on gas power. This strategy means data centers don’t have to wait to plug into local power grids and be saddled with the controversy that invites, such as surging energy bills. Gas turbines can be trucked in on-site and start providing power almost immediately.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ The Planet Needs Prosperous Forests. These Scientists Are Planting More Than 33,000 Trees to Find the Perfect Species Blends

    Pullen and her colleagues at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, Maryland, are building a 22-acre forest. It’s unlike most you’ll find elsewhere in the United States—or even the world. This one will be a carefully planned patchwork of plots with tightly controlled variables, such as certain species combinations, to test how they might affect the trees’ growth and environmental benefits.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ In wartime, megascale data centers may make way for distributed architectures

    Among the targets in the war between Iran and the US have been data centers. AWS was hit by drones, and Iran has threatened to target US tech. This piece makes the point that these buildings don’t just store vast amounts of civilian customer data: increasingly, they store military data, too. That make them an even more attractive target and makes the security consequences of an attack that much worse.

    Meanwhile, data centers — including here in Pennsylvania, where I live, as well as Chile, India, and many other places around the world — have been the cause of significant objections from local populations. They push energy costs up, have a serious environmental footprint, and can even change the local climate.

    So why have these giant megascale data centers at all?

  • Energy/Transportation

    • New York Times ☛ How Jet Fuel Shortages Could Affect Summer Travel to Europe and Beyond

      Volatile fuel prices because of the war in Iran are straining airlines around the globe, but perhaps nowhere as much as in Europe, where jet fuel supplies could run low by mid-May. European airlines like Lufthansa and KLM have announced they are cutting flights, and others could follow.

    • 404 Media ☛ The AI Compute Crunch Is Here (and It's Affecting the Entire Economy)

      What this means is that the age of cheap, underpriced AI appears to be ending, or at least the compute crunch means the venture capitalists and investment firms funding OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have to be willing to burn even more cash in order to continue subsidizing their products.

    • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Spirit Airlines is the Canary in Trump's Fossil Fuel Mine

      Donald J. Trump, the serially failed businessman whose addiction to being rescued means he has little incentive to act responsibly, has opined once before that an airline’s aircraft and assets are good. That’s what he said about Eastern’s Shuttle business.

      There are a slew of stories about this chapter of Trump’s life, which makes it really weird that Republicans addressed whether the government can run an airline, not whether Trump, personally, has proven he cannot.

    • Heliomass ☛ Station Stories: Green Lane

      Since it’s our first station on Merseyrail, we should take a step back and have a quick look at the network as a whole.

      The Merseyrail system consists of three lines: [...]

    • Chris Coyier ☛ It’s an assumed truth that Safari is better for battery life — without data to support it.

      I applaud Matt Birchler who did real testing on this (2024). He scripted a 20 minute loop that watched YouTube videos, scrolled Mastodon, scrolled websites, and typed in Google Docs. He ran it in Chrome vs Safari for 3 hours each 6 times. The data actually showed Chrome was a little bit better.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Futurism ☛ Millionaire Big Game Hunter Trampled to Death by Elephants

      "Oh dear, how sad. Hope the elephants didn't hurt their feet."

    • Chuck Grimmett ☛ Brook Trout Conservation on Earth Day

      Charlie’s school had an Earth Day event today and I set up a table on conserving brook trout, New York’s state fish, and the only trout native to the eastern US.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Guardian UK ☛ It’s no surprise Trump has met his match in Pope Leo – the US president represents the polar opposite of Christianity

    In other words, be selfish. Get away with what you can. Only a fool would put the collective good ahead of their own individual gain. It’s the same cast of mind that led Trump to cancel a visit to a military cemetery in 2018, because he considered the US’s war dead “losers” and “suckers”. If they’d have been smart, like him, they’d have dodged the draft, as he did.

    Name the ugliest human quality, and Trump will demonstrate it and glory in it. [...]

  • India Times ☛ Nvidia becomes first company to cross $5 trillion in market value

    The chipmaker’s valuation stood at about $5.08 trillion, ahead of Alphabet at $4.1 trillion and Apple at $3.97 trillion. Microsoft and Amazon followed with market values of $3.13 trillion and $2.82 trillion, respectively.

  • The Atlantic ☛ James Talarico’s Tough Sell

    Talarico has made it his mission to confront what he describes as the unbiblical, un-Christian brand of right-wing Christian nationalism rampant in the MAGA movement. He is particularly concerned about efforts to use the state to enforce this more punitive vision of Christianity. He has described Christian nationalism as the worship of power instead of Christ, and “a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”

  • Android Police ☛ Amazon eero and Leo routers escape the FCC’s foreign router ban

    The FCC's crackdown on foreign-made routers is in full swing, though one of the US' biggest companies just got conditional approval to keep its hardware on shelves, all while bringing in new ones.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Catastrophe Has Come

    Everybody understands that a very mentally ill man is the most powerful man in the world. The fact that everybody’s mental programming, somehow, someway tells them when they read that, what they are reading is a partisan viewpoint, that say, someone like me would have said no matter what, out of some tribal apologia, I want you to know that you are delusional. Completely. Utterly.

    Hear me. Your entire world is about to come crumbling down, and ours along with it. You are at a disadvantage, you see, because you believe in your mind that what everyone wants is to “get back to normal.” To go back to the old way. But here’s the thing: there’s no going back. Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall. He cannot be put back together again.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • France24 ☛ Fake BBC report spreads false claim that Zelensky has a stolen painting

      A fake BBC news report claims that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is displaying a stolen painting by artist Paul Cézanne in his office. However, it turns out that the “report” features doctored footage of Zelensky with the painting photoshopped onto his wall.

    • DeSmog ☛ French PR Executive Behind Facebook Network Spreading Heat Pump Hate

      Studies show that this low-carbon technology is up to three times more efficient than gas boilers, and, when properly installed, can halve households’ heating bills.

      But posts disseminated in the Facebook groups by several inauthentic accounts describe heat pumps as “useless” and compare them to a “lawn mower that never stops”, while installers are branded “swindlers” (“margoulins”) and “environmental fraudsters” (“éco-délinquants”).

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Evidence Isn't Just for Research

      In an era with an unprecedented volume of mis- and disinformation flooding our communication channels, please enjoy this demonstration of how to establish public trust through fact-based, evidence-based analysis and logical reasoning.

    • Pro Publica ☛ A Michigan County Claiming Solar Farms Are a Health Threat Isn’t Alone

      Health Fears: Some critics say large solar farms are a public health threat. While there is little reputable evidence for this, their claims have helped power a backlash.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Putin Defends Mobile Internet Outages as Necessary Measure in Fight Against Terrorism

    The comments mark the first time Putin has personally waded into the confusion caused by the internet disruptions, which some have criticized as a kind of “digital iron curtain.” While online restrictions have become common since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, outages have intensified in recent months, with monitoring groups saying most regions throughout the country now face daily [Internet] disruptions.

  • Meduza ☛ Report: Detainees in alleged plot against Russia’s [Internet] regulator may belong to anti-censorship movement

    People detained in connection with what the FSB has described as a planned terrorist attack against Roskomnadzor leadership may belong to Alyi lebed (“Scarlet Swan”), a movement that has campaigned against [Internet] restrictions in Russia. That is the conclusion of the Russian human rights group Department One.

    Activists used software tools to compare the voice of one detainee, visible in FSB operational footage, with that of Alyi lebed channel administrator Sofia Chepik and found a “high degree of similarity.”

  • Crooked Timber ☛ On Reinforcing Cynicism in the Academy

    But the reason why I use ‘cynicism’ is because nobody believes that Harvard’s funding drive is designed to create intellectual pluralism at the disciplinary or methodological level where groupthink may be lurking. (I have published on the epistemic and normative risks to society of disciplinary groupthink, so this is not a merely intellectual matter.)1 The fundraising goal is not a means to advance knowledge. Rather, Harvard’s fundraising is patently a means to appease a hostile and dangerous administration and the intellectuals that are partisans of it.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Independent UK ☛ Wounded Lebanese journalist recounts hours of agony after Israeli strike killed colleague

    Khalil was allegedly threatened

    Faraj believes that the journalists were deliberately targeted. Khalil had said publicly that during her coverage in southern Lebanon in the previous Israel-Hezbollah war in 2024, she had received threatening messages from an Israeli number.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Christina Lamb warns journalists are being targeted

    Lamb warned journalists are now being deliberately targeted in war zones and are being put at risk by wearing the flak jackets emblazoned with the word “press” which are meant to protect them.

    She said she is “convinced that press freedom and journalism are under threat more than at any time in my almost four decades of reporting”.

  • Project Censored ☛ American Press Freedom on the Brink

    Every year, RSF scores and ranks 180 countries and territories based on their level of press freedom. The Index evaluates five indicators: political context, legal framework, economic context, sociocultural context, and safety. The United States has declined in each of these indicators and steadily fallen on the Index over the past decade, dropping in rank from 49th in 2015 to 57th in 2025.

    [...]

    Local news is also vanishing, and millions of Americans, especially in rural and low-income areas, now live in “news deserts.”

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ U.S. citizens shot by ICE beg Congress to rein in federal immigration agents

    “Under President Trump, ICE and CBP have killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in cold blood, and shot, beat, harassed, arrested, or locked up countless more innocent people,” the top Democrat on the committee, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said. “Congress cannot stand idly by while Americans are hurt and killed by their own government.”

  • Court House News ☛ Feds yet to return vehicle Renee Good was shot and killed in

    “An armed, masked agent of the federal government killed Becca’s partner at a moment when Renee posed no meaningful threat to him,” Rebecca Good writes in the motion. “Such an apparent gross abuse of power by a federal official mandates a thorough and complete inquiry into his conduct.”

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Supreme Court says troops can sue military contractors

    The ruling allows a former soldier to use state injury laws to sue a U.S. business whose Afghan employee gravely wounded him in a 2016 suicide bombing. While the decision doesn’t curb the Feres doctrine, a 1950 court ruling that prevents troops injured on active duty from suing the federal government, it does offer a pathway for other service members to file suits in states with plaintiff-friendly laws, according to legal experts.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Photojournalists were limited to public hallways, but this photographer kept showing up anyway – and her persistence earned her this major award. Emotional ICE image wins World Press Photo of the Year

    “This image shows the inconsolable grief of children losing their father in a place built for justice,” World Press Photo Executive Director Joumana El Zein Khoury said. “It is a stark and necessary record of family separation following the US reform policies. In a democracy, the camera’s presence in that hallway serves as a witness to a policy that has turned courthouses into sites of shattered lives – it is a powerful example of why independent photojournalism matters.”

  • Robert Reich ☛ The REAL purpose of Trump's bigotry

    But why would Trump want to stir up racism and bigotry right now? Doesn’t he have enough of a problem on his hands with his war in Iran going so badly that even his MAGA base is starting to unravel over it? (Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other MAGA luminaries have recently broken with Trump over the war.)

    Bingo. This is exactly why he wants to stir up racism and bigotry now.

  • Dan MacKinlay ☛ So you’ve joined a union

    tl;dr Australian unions are flawed — affiliated to the political parties, biased toward incumbents, institutionally tired. IMO they are still worth joining, and being a workplace delegate is high-leverage: it opens up points of intervention that are hard to come by otherwise (inside gossip, colleague ties, negotiating room, a widened range of sayable things at work). Simply having a second centre of power in an organisation can be valuable, for the workers for sure, but even for the organisation itself. These notes come from my tour as a delegate with the CSIRO Staff Association at Data61, but draw from the experiences of my colleagues and comrades in the CPSU more broadly.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Roberto Viola ☛ BKOOL Bikes Are No Longer Locked In: Full Compatibility with QZ

    For years, many BKOOL bike owners faced a frustrating reality: excellent hardware, but limited software freedom. In recent times, BKOOL users were pushed toward a very narrow ecosystem, with ROUVY becoming one of the main remaining supported options after the BKOOL platform transition. ROUVY itself confirmed the migration path for BKOOL subscribers and hardware users. (Rouvy Support)

    That is exactly where QZ changes everything.

    With QZ, BKOOL bikes can connect to virtually all major indoor cycling and fitness platforms, restoring the freedom that many riders thought was lost.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Patents

    • Software Patents

      • EFF ☛ EFF Challenges Secrecy In Eastern District of Texas Patent Case

        The case Wilus Institute of Standards and Technology Inc. v. HP Inc., highlights a recurring transparency problem in patent litigation.

        Wilus claims to own standard essential patents (SEPs) related to Wi-Fi 6 — technology embedded in everyday devices. Wilus sued Samsung and HP for patent infringement. HP argued that Wilus failed to offer licenses on Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms, which are required to prevent SEP holders from exploiting their position, by blocking fair access to widely used technologies.

        In reviewing the docket, EFF found that many filings were improperly sealed under a lenient protective order without the required, specific justification needed in a proper motion to seal. Because there is a presumption of public access to court filings, litigants must file a motion to seal and demonstrate compelling reasons for secrecy. This typically requires a document-by-document and line-by-line justification.

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • India Times ☛ YouTube offers deepfake detection to Hollywood

        YouTube is offering Hollywood celebrities and entertainers a free detection tool to help combat their deepfakes, expanding the Google-owned video platform's efforts to guard against AI-driven impersonations.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Spanish Film Archivist Faces Prison and €870,000 Fine Over 'Non-Commercial' Movie Site

      A Spanish content creator who ran a film preservation website together with more than a dozen others, is now the sole defendant in a prosecution where he faces a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence and €870,000 in damages. "El Feo," as the defendant is known online, fought back at trial. Among other things, he stressed that the film archive was a non-commercial project he was no longer actively involved in at the time of his arrest.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Record Labels Drop Piracy Lawsuits Against Altice and Verizon in Wake of Cox Ruling

      The major record labels have walked away from two of the largest remaining ISP piracy liability cases. They filed joint stipulations this week, dismissing both lawsuits where billions of dollars were at stake. The action follows less than a month after the Supreme Court's ruling in favor of Cox Communications, which reshaped the legal landscape for contributory infringement.

    • The Verge ☛ The person who allegedly leaked the new Avatar movie has been arrested

      The Straits Times reports Singaporean police have arrested a 26-year-old man who is alleged to have uploaded the new Avatar movie (previously titled The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender) online after accessing a server where the project was being held ahead of its scheduled October 9th premiere on Paramount Plus. According to the authorities, a copy of the entire movie was found on the suspect’s electronic devices. If he is ultimately found guilty for unauthorized access to computer material, he could face a jail sentence of up to 10 years as well a fine of $50,000.