Leftovers

• Meduza ☛ Russian regional outlet says website was [cracked] to plant fake ‘exclusive interview’ with governor downplaying drone strikes

  The editorial team called on anyone who had shared the fake material to delete any messages based on it, since they did not reflect reality.

• Vintage Everyday ☛ The Story Behind the Album Cover for Supertramp’s 1979 Masterpiece “Breakfast in America”

  Despite the New York theme, the photo was actually shot in a studio in Los Angeles.

• Nate Graham ☛ KDE email, part 3: don’t filter your email

  You started with the problem of “I get too much email to comfortably handle”. With filtering, you’ve split up the “too much email” into multiple folders, but all those folders put together are still impossible to comfortably handle.

  You may have told yourself that this system helps you prioritize, because the most important emails go to your inbox.

  But it’s not true; an email’s importance can have much more to do with its content than the characteristics you’re probably using for filtering (sender, mailing list ID, subject line, etc).

  For example: [...]

• Jamie Zawinski ☛ Happy time_t 1777777777 to all who celebrate

  # date +'%F %r %Z = %s'
  2026-05-02 08:09:37 PM PDT = 1777777777

• Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: A few notes on Michael Rabin

  My post listed results of his that proved upper and lower bounds on problems. My point was that he proved upper and lower bounds for MANY different levels- from decidable to regular. And I am sure I left out some of his results.

• Science

  • Medievalists.net ☛ Huge Medieval Coin Hoard Discovered in Norway

    “The hoard contains coins dating from the late 10th century through to the 1040s,” explains Svein Gullbekk of the Museum of Cultural History. “Foreign coinage dominated circulation in Norway until Harald Hardrada (1046–1066) established a national coinage. This hoard appears to have been deposited at the very beginning of that transition.”

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Archaeologists unearth largest coin hoard ever found in Norway

    Beyond their value as currency and historical artifacts, these coins tell the story of a country transitioning between the 980s and the 1040s, a time when foreign currency dominated and Norway would establish its own mint.

  • David Bessis ☛ The fall of the theorem economy

    But that was stupid. By claiming the result, I had killed the incentive for anyone to write it up.

    If I had to pick my second best result, it would be Theorem 0.5 in my old preprint on Garside categories. I had high ambitions for this paper, yet I ended up not submitting it anywhere. The creative process had drained me, and I left active research before regaining the courage to clean up the preliminary sections.

• Career/Education

  • Federal News Network ☛ A court ruling protected the Institute for Museum and Library Services, but the fight isn’t over

    A federal court has blocked administrative efforts to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services. But the administration’s latest budget proposal would eliminate its funding anyway, putting legal clarity and budget reality on different tracks.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Why I don't like the "staff engineer archetypes"

    The most influential piece of writing about staff engineers in the last decade has to be Will Larson’s Staff engineer archetypes. He argues that the “staff engineer” title covers at least four very different roles: the team lead, the architect, the solver, and the right hand. This taxonomy gets cited a lot as advice for people who are trying to become effective staff engineers. For both of my promotions to staff engineer, my manager at the time linked me to the “staff engineer archetypes” and asked me to consider which of these archetypes I was aiming towards.

    These archetypes definitely exist1. However, I think it’s bad practical advice to tell engineers to try and target them.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Hyde Stevenson

    This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Hyde Stevenson, whose blog can be found at lazybea.rs.

• Hardware

  • John D Cook ☛ The shape of a guitar pick

    So then I did a little research. The shape referred to in this post is known as the “351,” but even for the 351 shape the aspect ratio varies slightly between picks.

• Proprietary

  • So-Called 'Artificial Intelligence' ('AI') / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Spectator AU ☛ We are closer to AI extinction than we think

      A spectre is hanging over humanity: the spectre of superintelligent AI. While governments busy themselves with the mundane work of politics and putting out the fire of the day, the most consequential technological development since the splitting of the atom is accelerating beyond anyone’s ability to control it.

      "We are entering an era where the AI systems themselves are threats, not just humans"

    • Futurism ☛ An Elegant Solution to AI Slop: Tax It, and Use the Resulting Billions of Dollars to Fund Cultural Institutions, Artists, and Researchers

      Such a tax would “restore balance to what has heretofore been a one-way extraction,” and “ensure robust institutional support structures for human creativity forced to compete in a sea of meaningless content,” Pepi writes. Essentially, you shave off a little of the AI industry’s bottom line to fund the arts, sciences, and other cultural institutions that they mined for free.

      AI slop is more than just an ugly annoyance. In Pepi’s view, it’s a “malicious manipulation of human cognitive labor and the institutions that support it.” These billions of “facsimiles of human creativity and cognition” end up drawing resources away from actual human creatives.

    • Futurism ☛ Man Says His Waymo Ditched Him at the Airport Before He Could Get His Luggage Out of the Trunk, Refused to Return

      Losing your suitcase is a rite of passage for travelers, something you can usually blame on human error. Having your bags stolen by a robotaxi before you even reach the inside of the terminal, however, is a new frustration fit for 2026.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Chinese court says AI is no excuse for firings

      The ruling last week sided with a tech worker who was fired after refusing to accept a demotion when his job was automated by AI.

      The decision, which legal scholars said is a landmark moment for labor protections in China, comes as Beijing looks to balance its support for AI innovation with job market challenges.

    • The Register UK ☛ How to roll your own local AI coding agents

      In this hands on, we'll be looking at how to deploy and configure local models like Qwen3.6-27B, for coding on your computer, and explore some of the agent frameworks you can use with them.

    • OSTechNix ☛ Microsoft Apologizes for Enabling AI Co-Author by Default in VS Code

      This caused VS Code to automatically insert a "Co-authored-by: Copilot" tag into Git commit messages whenever AI contributions were detected.

    • Security Week ☛ US Military Reaches Deals With 7 Tech Companies to Use Their AI on Classified Systems

      But AI has already raised concerns that its use could invade Americans’ privacy or allow machines to choose targets on the battlefield. One of the companies contracting with the Pentagon said its agreement required human oversight in certain situations.

      Concerns about military use of AI arose during Israel’s war against militants in Gaza and Lebanon, with U.S. tech giants quietly empowering Israel to track targets. But the number of civilians killed also soared, fueling fears that these tools contributed to the deaths of innocent people.

    • The Verge ☛ AI music is flooding streaming services — but who wants it?

      Things have only gotten worse at Deezer, where daily uploads of AI-generated content have grown to 75,000, and are threatening to overtake actual human-made music. And Spotify removed over 75 million spam tracks in just 12 months.

      Deezer was the first major streaming platform to implement a system that detects and labels AI-generated content. The service also prevents its algorithm from recommending it and has demonetized 85 percent of the streams. In a recent press release, Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier said that, “AI-generated music is now far from a marginal phenomenon and as daily deliveries keep increasing, we hope the whole music ecosystem will join us in taking action to help safeguard artist’s rights and promote transparency for fans.”

    • PC World ☛ Oxford study: 'Friendly' AI chatbots are less accurate, more sycophantic

      The researchers analyzed over 400,000 responses from five different AI models of varying sizes and architectures: Llama-8B and Llama-70B (Meta), Mistral-Small (Mistral AI), Qwen-32B (Alibaba Cloud), and GPT-4o (OpenAI). The results show that “warm-tuned” versions of these models more often gave incorrect answers, reinforced users’ misconceptions, and avoided uncomfortable truths.

    • Dave Gauer ☛ The First of a Double-Take

      This happened often enough that it finally dawned on me after dismissing these wrongly-seen intriguing images that there was absolutely nothing wrong with drawing what I’d thought I’d seen. The colors and composition might retain a superficial resemblance, but the only thing I was ripping off was my own imagination.

    • The New Stack ☛ Most AI coding is "like taking your Ferrari to buy milk": IBM's Neel Sundaresan

      “Coding is an analytical task. It’s different from shopping [online],” he says. “If the system makes a wrong recommendation, or if it makes a recommendation that kind of interferes with my thought process — that matters.”

      The user experience, he argues, is orthogonal to whatever the AI is doing underneath. You can have a better model and a worse product if you get the surface wrong.

    • Lars Faye ☛ Agentic Coding is a Trap

      Yet, in an ironic twist of fate, it's the individual's critical thinking skills and cognitive clarity that AI tooling has now been proven to impact negatively.

    • Aba Search and Replace ☛ The age of fast food

      AI works in the short term, but in the long term, it's as unsustainable and unhealthy as eating fast food for every meal. It can quickly generate a lot of code that nobody fully understands. As an extreme example: Gregory Terzian, a Servo developer, called the web browser generated by Cursor's AI agents "a uniquely bad design that could never support anything resembling a real-world web engine".

      There certainly are many options that lie between using an AI agent to build a whole product and using no AI at all. Just like restaurants that order ready-to-cook chicken breasts instead of buying whole birds with heads and feet intact, you can carefully use AI for boring tasks. In many real projects, there are one-shot scripts, long configuration files, boilerplate, prototypes, or bureaucratic reports. If you can avoid or abstract out these tasks, it's wonderful, but sometimes you just can't, either for legal reasons or because of corporate bureaucracy. AI is fine for these tasks.

      However, please treat AI output as a disposable, low-quality attempt, not like a piece of wisdom sent to you from heaven: [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • Omicron Limited ☛ 'GangTok': Insights into the presence of gang culture on TikTok

      In a new study, a University of Cincinnati sociologist and his research team are shedding light on how TikTok content produced by gang members could be used to better inform law enforcement and policymakers for more appropriate action. The team led by John Leverso, an assistant professor in the UC School of Criminal Justice, has published their research in Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ A suspected YouTube interface bug spikes RAM usage above 7 gigabytes, users report severe lag and frozen tabs — bug might be trapping browsers in an endless layout loop

      Users across multiple browsers, including Firefox, Brave, and Microsoft Edge, have described videos stuttering, tabs becoming unresponsive, and systems slowing to a crawl while watching YouTube. Some users reported the individual YouTube tabs consuming more than 7GB of RAM.

      Many of the initial reports blamed YouTube's ongoing war against ad blockers or recent browser updates, as the issues seemed to have first been noticed after a Firefox update. However, similar reports from Brave and Edge users have increased the spotlight on YouTube.

    • The Centre for Social Justice ☛ English children more likely to own a phone than be “able to throw a ball”, warns new report

      Young children are more likely to own a smartphone than be able to throw a ball, according to a new report.

      New research from a major think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, reveals that while a range of studies show fewer than half of English 10-year-olds meet a basic level of competence in throwing a ball, over 70 per cent now own a smartphone.

    • The Centre for Social Justice ☛ Inactive Nation: Part one: Getting under-11s in England moving again [PDF]

      New analysis for this report finds that English 10-year-olds are now more likely to own a smartphone than be able to throw a ball, while over half of primary school children, or 2.1.million, are insufficiently active (defined as doing less than an average of 60 minutes of at least moderate intensity physical activity per day).

      Among disadvantaged children the picture is worse. Fewer than 4 in 10 meet recommended activity levels. They are also significantly less likely to take part in sport, both inside and outside of school,8 and are more exposed to the dangerous rise in sedentary lifestyles due to poorer access to safe outdoor play areas. Screen time is filling the gap.

    • The Centre for Social Justice ☛ Inactive Nation - The Centre for Social Justice

      Instead, growing numbers of children under the age of 11 are swapping outdoor play and activity for screens, at the expense of their physical, social, and emotional development. At ages 8 to 9, children are now spending around two hours a day online, rising to three hours among older primary school pupils.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • CBC ☛ NASA says it will put humans on the surface of the moon in 2028. How realistic is that?

    NASA is aiming to put astronauts on the lunar surface in "early 2028" — just 24 months from now.

    However, while the space agency has contracted lunar landers to Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX, neither has produced a finished product, at least not publicly.

  • Futurism ☛ NASA's Moon Landing Schedule Slipping Horrendously Under Trump

    But whether SpaceX and Blue Origin will be ready in time for a late 2027 launch is a very different question. We have yet to see Starship successfully launch and land in one piece, let alone a single glimpse of the Blue Origin’s finalized lander.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Guardian UK ☛ AI facial recognition oversight lagging far behind technology, watchdogs warn

      Dr Brian Plastow, who holds the same role in Scotland, warned the technology was “nowhere near as effective as the police claim it is” and said there was a “patchwork legal framework” throughout the UK. He said in England and Wales, police were “really just marking their own homework”.

    • Small Cypress ☛ anxiety over anonymity & who knows that i keep a blog

      A lot will be lost as the internet becomes less and less anonymous and age-verification sweeps the land. I think of the thousands of people in active addiction over at places like r/stopdrinking who either don't know they can be doxxed or don't post or ask for help because of the fear of losing their jobs. I feel like I can only talk about my own sobriety here because I have several years down and strong work protections.

      I write here knowing my anonymity clock is ticking, and I hope I keep writing once it's gone.

    • Site36 ☛ Forced "border partnership": EU Commission wants to allow U.S. also to query political views and "ethnic origin"

      Under certain conditions, the draft also permits the transmission of particularly sensitive categories of personal data, including information on “racial or ethnic origin, political opinions or religious or other beliefs, trade union membership” as well as details relating to “health or sexual life.”

      The draft even allows data received to be passed on to authorities in third countries or international organisations — albeit only with the prior consent of the transmitting authority. Which third countries might specifically be involved is left open. Candidates could include Interpol as well as close US allies such as the United Kingdom or other Commonwealth states, and Israel, which has concluded its own data-sharing agreement with the United States.

    • Don Marti ☛ don’t preempt me bro (2026 edition)

      Privacy is more than just a personal or business issue. It’s a collective problem. One of the areas in which privacy issues are going to have the biggest impact is national security.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Logging off: How Michigan is prioritizing 'Kids Over Clicks'

    For Michigan’s children and teenagers, the consequences of that calculated design are impossible to ignore, and for the Michigan Kids Code Coalition, they are unacceptable to tolerate.

    Tech is everywhere. Almost every American teenager has a smartphone, and nearly half of teens say they are online “almost constantly.” In many ways we’re learning about its harms and benefits as we go, but it’s clear that it’s time to take a look at how our digital environment is shaping adolescence.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Sunday thought: What is Being Born

    Make no mistake. These are terrible times — the worst I’ve lived through, and I’ve lived through some bad ones. (Remember 1968? Nixon’s enemies list? Anyone old enough to recall Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts?) Trump and his goons are doing everything they can to destroy America and much of the world.

    But out of the embers and rubble that Trump and his despicable regime have wrought, a new America is being born. We are making it happen.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Industry’s Court in a Stolen Republic

    On April 18, 2026, the New York Times published the most consequential breach of Supreme Court confidentiality since the Dobbs draft leak — and, I would argue, a more consequential one. Adam Liptak and Jodi Kantor obtained internal memos that the justices wrote to one another during the five days in February 2016 when the Court was deciding whether to block Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. The memos, written in the institutional formality the Court uses to insist on its own dignity, document the reasoning that produced what Stephen Vladeck has called the modern shadow docket. They also document something more specific. They document the capture of the Court of the United States by the fossil fuel industry.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • CS Monitor ☛ Fighting for a better life: connecting global stories

    Our foreign desk editors noticed independently that people from their regions were leaving to fight as mercenaries in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Together, they found a global story.

  • The Nation ☛ Why Is the DNC Covering Up Its 2024 Autopsy?

    The autopsy is a serious matter. Reportedly, it is 200 pages long and based on more than 300 interviews with officials from all 50 states. Martin had repeatedly promised to release the report, but now he insists that it does not need to be made public after all. His explanations to Favreau for why secrecy is the best policy were so obviously self-serving and disingenuous that they provoked a lengthy Reddit thread where viewers of the Pod Save America interview compared Marty to Jerry Lundegaard (a comparison also made on the Majority Report show).

    The interview began with Favreau asking why Martin had backtracked on his explicit promise to release the report. Martin responded: [...]

• Environment

  • Manton Reece ☛ Manton Reece - Burning tokens

    With the higher GPT-5.5 pricing, I wasn’t sure if in practice it would matter, so I preemptively disabled /fast in Codex. Seems like a non-issue. I can’t get anywhere close to using half of my tokens. Whenever I check it’s at 80% or higher remaining.

    I’m now back to running “high” and /fast for everything. If I think a problem is difficult, I’ll bump to “xhigh” and won’t think twice about it.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Ruben Schade ☛ The power went out at midday

      Yesterday we had a brief power outage that could be attributed to something that happened in our building, not the wider neighbourhood or power grid. There’s a lot going on in our block concerning power, hot water, painting, and whatnot, which has brought much… fun into our lives over the last month!

    • Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging: Bikes!

      Lovely day for it. I don't cycle with other people a lot but it's a very pleasant way to spend a morning.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Tracy Durnell ☛ Weaponized non-governance and political impotence

    I’m not a doomer about the challenges America faces, but I think it’s important to look them head on and acknowledge their scope. Repairing the damage done by this administration and transforming America into a resilient democracy is a project for the rest of our lives (for Millennials and older at least). I hope we will soon reach the nadir of American collapse after a descent for the first forty years of my life, and that my next forty years can be put to fixing this shit. It will take collective will that we have not exercised as a nation since WWII, but I believe in the American spirit to, at the end of the day, say fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.

  • Son Luong Ngoc ☛ QK Alice Duo - by Son Luong Ngoc

    Long story short, I think I am uniquely qualified to tell you how advanced China was in 2018, and they haven’t stopped getting better for the last 8 years. Their cars are now in the EU, selling with a huge margin. Their solar and battery tech is second to none. And let’s not forget to mention how most electronics, smartphones, are still coming out of Shenzhen today despite waves and waves of trade war.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Strategist ☛ Disinformation is Beijing’s weapon. Japan needs more than fact-checking to counter it

      China has been spreading anti-Takaichi disinformation across the region to influence public opinion. Early this year, a false narrative spread in Taiwan claiming that Takaichi’s grandfather was a soldier during the Japanese invasion of China and was involved in executions by beheading. This disinformation sought to not only confuse voters in Japan but also sway public opinion in Taiwan, illustrating how a single fabricated narrative can be simultaneously weaponised across multiple audiences in different countries.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Iran: Jailed Nobel winner Narges Mohammadi hospitalized

    Mohammadi received the Nobel prize for her activities promoting women's rights and opposing the death penalty — activities that have, however, caused Iranian authorities to imprison her several times.

  • Techdirt ☛ Appeals Court Hands Roy Moore Another Loss In Yet Another Bogus Libel Lawsuit

    Former judge Roy Moore made quite a name for himself while attempting to convert his sketchy judicial career into a presumably equally sketchy career as US senator. Prior to his run for office in the 2018 mid-term election, Moore had already been suspended from the Alabama bench for a long list of violations: [...]

  • Techdirt ☛ Brendan Carr ‘Launches’ His Bogus FCC ‘Review’ Of ABC Broadcast Licenses And It’s Just Pathetic And Stupid

    Brendan Carr’s FCC claims to be moving forward their their plan to “review ABC’s broadcast licenses” because Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about the president’s wife. And it’s every bit as dumb and legally baseless as you might expect.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Alarming Figures: 70% of Post-War Executions Involve Political Prisoners; A Comprehensive List of the Sentenced and Executed

    A review of the trend in carrying out execution sentences for political and security prisoners since the beginning of U.S. and Israeli military attacks on Iran indicates that this process has undergone significant changes in recent months. While in previous years a considerable portion of executions in Iran was related to drug-related offenses, during this period the share of political and security cases among carried-out sentences has increased markedly. Collected data indicates that over approximately 65 days, on average, nearly one political or security prisoner has been executed every three days.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ RFE/RL’s Russian language Georgia service Ekho Kavkaza closed down after 17 years

    Ekho Kavkaza has not yet officially addressed its audience with a farewell message; however, information regarding the suspension of its operations from 1 May was included in a press release published by RFE/RL about its ‘strategic reforms’ on Tuesday.

    According to an informed source within the organisation, staff members based in both the Tbilisi office and Prague HQ have already laid off. The source also noted that compensations have been given to contracted employees.

  • ANF News ☛ DFG: Press freedom in Turkey is under a multidimensional siege

    The statement also drew attention to the ongoing prosecutions against journalists. It noted that dozens of journalists were tried in the first three months, many cases are still ongoing, and prison sentences have been handed down. Additionally, censorship practices such as the closure of websites, access bans on news content, and the removal of social media content have become widespread.

    “The data from the first three months of 2026 reveals that press freedom in Turkey is under siege not only legally, but also in physical, digital, and economic dimensions.”

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Press Freedom Day 2026: 25 reasons to support HKFP

    As we mark Sunday’s UN World Press Freedom Day, ahead of HKFP’s 11th anniversary next month, our team of seven are soldiering on. We remain on the ground despite unprecedented political and financial pressure last year, including threats and harassment, scrutiny from multiple government departments, pressure on our corporate partners, and false complaints to the authorities.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ The way to save news is not to create monopolistic monocultures

    This isn’t anyone’s intention, but reducing competition at any level — funders, intermediaries, newsrooms, distributors — has the potential to create monopolies that become gatekeepers for vulnerable communities who need more support, not less. I don’t think that’s what the moment we’re living through needs. We need more ideas, more approaches, more funding, more communities served, and more diversity. The people who want to shut down an effective, independent press want to create a monoculture. The way to combat that is not to create another one.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Nation ☛ What Starbucks Taught Me About Union-Busting

    A new labor nonprofit called Union Now is trying to help workers weather firings, delays, and first-contract battles. We could’ve used their help in our Starbucks campaigns.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Chinese court rules companies can't fire workers just because AI is cheaper — ruling says automation alone doesn't justify layoffs

    A court in China has ruled that companies cannot automatically justify firing workers simply because artificial intelligence can now perform their jobs more cheaply, as businesses worldwide increasingly deploy AI systems to automate human labor. The decisions emerged from cases published in late April by the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court ahead of International Workers’ Day on May 1, including a dispute involving a tech worker whose responsibilities were gradually absorbed by large language models.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is cutting 8,000 jobs to pay for AI infrastructure — insatiable compute demand means the company can't rule out further headcount reductions

    Zuckerberg's comments land in the middle of a growing debate about whether companies are using AI as a convenient justification for workforce reductions they would make regardless. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman raised the issue in February, telling CNBC at the India AI Impact Summit that some firms engage in "AI washing" by attributing layoffs to the technology when the actual reasons lie elsewhere.

  • SICP ☛ On industrial relations

    Additionally, only a trade union can represent the positions of you and me, and of people like you and me, in the workplace, by being democratically constituted bodies where everyone can submit and vote on motions to define their position. Employer-sponsored feedback groups or consultative committees are opportunities for employers to hear that everything is fine from people they trust to say everything is fine. Maybe they might stock more biscuits in the break room, if you work on site.

    I’ve made the point before on this blog that technology doesn’t steal jobs; employers do. People worry about the effects of AI on employment for various reasons: the Taylorist argument that it increases productivity and reduces labour needs; the Captain Swing view that it replaces creativity and individual expression; the Weberian view that it centralises control and power.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • CopyrightLately ☛ Tenth Circuit Redeems Itself in 'Tiger King' Fair Use Case

      In March 2024, the Tenth Circuit ruled that Netflix’s use of a one-minute funeral clip in Tiger King wasn’t fair use because the documentary failed to comment on the “creative decisions” or “intended meaning” of a video whose artistic vision largely consisted of leaving a camera running on a tripod. The ruling was so alarming that the Motion Picture Association and the Electronic Frontier Foundation—two organizations that agree on copyright policy about as often as Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin agree on animal welfare—filed amicus briefs on the same side. The decision landed at #4 on my 2024 Worst Copyright Decisions list. It would have ranked even higher, but by the time I published that list, the Tenth Circuit had already vacated the opinion following a chorus of criticism from documentarians, copyright scholars, and other groups urging reconsideration.

      Yesterday, the Tenth Circuit finally issued a 79-page replacement opinion, nearly two years after oral argument on rehearing. (Apparently, getting fair use right takes considerably longer—and considerably more pages—than getting it wrong.)

    • Torrent Freak ☛ FlavaWorks Sues Operator and 325 Users of Private Torrent Tracker Gay-Torrents

      Adult entertainment company FlavaWorks has launched one of its largest legal campaigns this week. The company filed a detailed complaint centered around the long-running private torrent tracker Gay-torrents.org. The lawsuit targeted hundreds of users, the site's alleged operator, a French uploader, as well as a Bulgarian shell company through which millions of dollars in VIP donations were routed.