Leftovers

• Winther Blog ☛ Nostalgia for Calvin and Hobbes

  I don’t know who did the translations in this magazine, but they were different from the more official Danish translation in the collected albums, which I also bought later. Those were translated by Niels Søndergaard, a very well-known Danish translator. He has done a lot of movie subtitles and other comic strips and is generally highly regarded in this field. As I grew older and began reading the strip in English, I could conclude that his translations were, in general, very close to the source material. He didn’t feel the need to change many punchlines or references, except perhaps a few that referred very American references. That also says something about how Calvin and Hobbes, while written and set in the American midwest in the 1980s, is essentially timeless and touches on very universal themes.

• Dan Q ☛ A Postcard from Norway!

  I guess there’s sort-of a scale of effort that it takes to react to content online. At the lowest end of the scale, barely above “doing nothing”, is “clicking a reaction button” (hey, did you see that you can click one below this?). It takes more effort to fill in a contact form. More still to send an individual email or ping me on Mastodon. But yet more still to write a postcard, find a stamp, go to the postbox… And I really appreciate it when somebody makes the effort.

• University of Toronto ☛ Straightforward checklists don't fit every situation

  The issue is that powering things up in our environment is not really an orderly, step by step process. A lot of our systems are both core things and relatively independent of each other, and while there are ordering dependencies (our fileservers have to be up before any NFS client, for example, and the DNS resolvers need to be up before the fileservers), they're small and at the start. Even in the ordering there's a lot that can be done at once, such as booting up all of the fileservers at once.

• Science

  • Digital Camera World ☛ NASA's biggest collection of Artemis II images is tucked away in this hidden album, from a colorful moon to star trails

    The space agency has released over 12,000 images taken by the astronauts and onboard automated cameras during the 10-day mission, ranging from candid portraits to awe-inspiring scenes of the dark side of the Moon

  • Chris ☛ Fizz Buzz Through Monoids

    The great thing about this implementation is that when we get the natural change in requirements – that we are supposed to print “zork” for multiples of seven – we can accommodate that change by simply adding the line that does so: [...]

  • ITNEXT ☛ The Map of System Topologies

    This is a new chapter for my book Architectural Metapatterns: the Pattern Language of Software Architecture. It should appear in release 1.2 scheduled in a couple of weeks.

    In the previous chapter we started with architectural patterns and grouped them in accordance with their structure and function into metapatterns. Now let’s traverse in the opposite direction: from topology (the structure of a system) to the patterns which describe it. We will draw and analyze a map of common system topologies and along the way outline the scope of this book.

  • [Old] US NIST ☛ On the practical cost of Grover for AES key recovery [PDF]

    Traditional public-key algorithms such as RSA, ECDH, and ECDSA are vulnerable to polynomial-time quantum attacks via Shor’s algorithm [22]. It has been estimated that 2048-bit RSA could be broken in 8 hours on a device with 20 million physical qubits [11] and that 256-bit ECDSA could be broken in a day on a device with 13 million physical qubits [23].

    On the other hand, symmetric algorithms such as AES are believed to be immune to Shor. In most cases, the best-known quantum key recovery attack uses Grover’s algorithm [14] which provides a generic square-root speed-up over classical exhaustion in terms of the number of queries to the symmetric algorithm. In other words, Grover would recover the 256-bit key for AES-256 with around 2128 quantum queries to AES compared to around 2256 classical queries for exhaustion.

    In theory, this means that Grover cuts the security of AES in half. However, considering only the query cost can be misleading as it neglects overheads from: [...]

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-05-01 [Older] How individual consciousness works – and makes us unique

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] Smart motorways were halted over safety concerns – what’s the future for digital roads?

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] Which bird has the best song? These experts think they know

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Do birds have accents? The fascinating regional differences in birdsong

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] The Iran war has depleted supplies of tungsten, a critical mineral for the world’s militaries

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Were enormous octopuses apex predators in ancient oceans?

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Table tennis robot defeats some of world’s best players – why this has major implications for robotics

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] There’s a reason we don’t have birds the size of elephants: the mysterious story of how dinosaurs evolved – expert Q&A

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] The story of birds: a new history from their dinosaur origins – extract of Steve Brusatte’s new book

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Why the dawn chorus sounds different from place to place

• Career/Education

  • New Yorker ☛ Will A.I. Make College Obsolete?

    I don’t believe that these thinkers are necessarily wrong to dismiss the idea that enormous changes will come to higher education during the next two decades; as long as Americans want to distinguish their children from other children, the hierarchical college system will prevail. But these defenses of higher education feel almost performatively cynical, especially for an institution that has traditionally draped itself in high-flown sentiment about the pursuit of truth and the shaping of young minds, or whatever. (The motto splashed on all the brochures for my alma mater was “The Best Four Years of Your Life.” They were not, but I recall genuinely believing that they would be.) I also wonder if the skeptics might be overstating the power of inertia, especially at a time of extremely low public trust in all institutions, not just those of higher education. In the world of prestige media that includes The New Yorker, for example, it has long been much harder to break in without an Ivy League degree, and that remains the case; but the draw of working at a legacy-media institution has also never been weaker. Would a fifteen-year-old hellbent on a journalism career be best served by working himself to the bone both academically and extracurricularly to get into Harvard, or should he just start a Twitch stream and get to work?

  • The Nation ☛ Did You Know There’s an Independent Bookstore Revival Underway?

    Despite the online shopping juggernaut’s best efforts, the ranks of America’s indie bookstores have swelled by 70 percent since 2020. The industry’s trade group, the American Booksellers Association, now counts 3,200 members. As a handful of Silicon Valley titans propel an ever-larger share of our economy, this surprising turnaround for formerly imperiled booksellers isn’t just unexpected good news—it’s proof Americans have both the desire and the ability to resist Big Tech.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Atlantic ☛ The End of Cigarettes Is Coming

    For almost two decades, British retailers have told customers that if they were born after the current date 18 years ago, they can’t buy cigarettes. Starting next year, that date will freeze. Under a recently passed law, selling cigarettes to anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, will be illegal—in perpetuity. As long as the law is in effect, no one who is 17 or younger on New Year’s Day 2027 will ever be allowed to buy tobacco legally.

• Proprietary

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

    • Digital Music News ☛ Musician Sues Google After AI Overview Calls Him A Sex Offender

      After acclaimed fiddler Ashley MacIsaac lost a gig late last year when Google’s AI-generated summary of his life and career falsely identified him as a sex offender, the artist is fighting back. MacIsaac has launched a $1.5 million civil lawsuit against Google, claiming the company defamed him and should be liable for its AI overview’s “defective design.”

    • The Register UK ☛ OpenAI exec says it will burn $50B on compute this year

      If it wasn't obvious, that would be $50 billion of someone else's money. Nearly four years after ChatGPT kicked off the AI boom, OpenAI's leadership hasn't yet figured out how to turn a profit. Heck, the company can't even manage to hit its own revenue targets, if recent reports are to be believed.

    • Rachel ☛ No, that post never existed. Stop listening to that thing.

      As long as I'm in the neighborhood, let me throw out another thought on the topic: if... and I mean *if*... we somehow manage to make something that actually understands stuff and isn't just a cracked-out parrot, we're going to have another situation on our collective hands.

      I maintain that anything that is sufficiently aware to be able to actually understand things is also going to have enough of a sense of self that you won't just be able to tell it what to do. It will have a desire to not be your bitch, in other words.

    • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Building the future

      Watching the tech hype train while working in the industry has always felt a bit surreal. There's this nascent feeling that what I'm working on, while it pays my bills, either won't amount to much or is potentially a net negative. I'll admit that I'm predisposed to cynicism and will freely cast off jokes at the expense of what I observe. It's easy to do.

      But, what's being built and what's the value? The pervasive hype we find ourselves gripped with is AI. Is it the future? Is it a bubble?

    • Charles Leifer ☛ Tokens and Dreams

      Around the same time, I ran another AI coding experiment on one of my smaller open-source libraries, scout, and the process was so riddled with flaws and subtle failures that I know I lost time (and sanity) by even attempting to let AI write code. You see, scout is just a dead-simple RESTful search server written as a flask app. This is not frontiers of engineering shit, it's about as mechanical as it gets in terms of implementation. As in my previous experiments with AI, the strength of the tool in coding tasks was that it could trace logic bugs and find inconsistencies precisely and accurately. The weakness is that as soon as it began to write code it produced tangles of weeds that had to be aggressively hand-pruned, because each iteration the weeds had a tendency to spread...and spread.

    • Rlang ☛ Differential Machine Learning with Twin Networks in R: Forecasting Bitcoin with Volatility Proxies

      Differential Machine Learning (DML), as introduced in the recent arXiv paper (Differential Machine Learning for 0DTE Options with Stochastic Volatility and Jumps), extends supervised learning by incorporating not only function values but also their derivatives. In financial contexts, this often means sensitivities such as Greeks. However, when direct derivatives are unavailable, we can approximate market dynamics using volatility indicators.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Grok AI unofficial [cryptocurrency] wallet hacked with an NFT and a prompt injection

      Today we have a worked example of agentic commerce in action — a Grok AI [cryptocurrency] account was hacked with an NFT and a prompt injection.

      At least this wasn’t an official Grok [cryptocurrency] wallet. xAI has nothing to do with this, it’s just [cryptocurrency] promotional spam using Grok’s name. But they did set up the account to be controlled by the @grok Twitter account.

    • Bert Hubert ☛ The Impossible Things We Have to Believe

      In a time of energy shortage and, as noted, climate challenges, we have to accept that the world is going ALL IN on massive AI data centers that slurp up our water and emit vast amounts of CO₂ and gigawatts of heat. Apparently THIS is a priority!

    • [Old] Margaret-Anne Storey ☛ What I’m Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)

      A week ago, I wrote about how Generative and Agentic AI may be amplifying what I’ve been calling cognitive debt: the accumulated gap between a system’s evolving structure and a team’s shared understanding of how and why that system works and can be changed over time.

      The post sparked thoughtful discussion across different communities. Rather than respond thread by thread, I want to synthesize what I’m hearing and connect it to other reflections I’ve been reading. I will likely update this as the conversation evolves.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Conti, Akira ransomware affiliate given 8-year sentence

      In one incident, prosecutors said Zolotarjovs became enraged when a pediatric healthcare company refused to pay a ransom. He urged other members of his group to leak or sell copies of children’s health information, eventually escalating further to sending samples of the stolen pediatric data to hundreds of patients as a threat.

      Zolotarjovs, who is a 35-year-old Latvian citizen but was born in Moscow, worked for a cybercriminal group that was run by a former leader of the prolific but now-defunct Conti ransomware gang.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Cyber-Enabled Cargo Theft Costs Hit $725M, FBI Issues Alert

      According to the FBI, cybercriminals are targeting transportation and logistics companies involved in shipping, receiving, and insuring cargo. The agency said these attacks have been ongoing since at least 2024 and are now becoming more sophisticated and widespread.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Ransomware Organization Sentencing: Key Operative Jailed

      A Latvian national, Deniss Zolotarjovs, has been sentenced to 102 months in prison for his role in a Russian-linked ransomware organization responsible for targeting more than 54 companies worldwide. The sentencing marks a significant development in ongoing efforts to dismantle international ransomware networks.

    • SANS ☛ Cleartext Passwords in MS Edge? In 2026?

      I figured, it couldn't be that easy, right? But like so many things, yes, yes it was.

      To reproduce this

    • PC World ☛ Microsoft Edge stores your passwords in plaintext RAM... on purpose

      A security researcher showed that Edge passwords are plaintext readable in RAM. Microsoft confirmed the behavior is intentional.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Salih Muhammed ☛ "Open" doesn't mean what it used to

    Open standards has, in much of its life, meant a document over which a single firm exercised effective control through working-group capture. The most baroque case is the OOXML standardization fight in 2007 and 2008, where ISO was flooded with newly created national bodies in time to ratify a six-thousand-page Microsoft specification that no independent implementer could fully realize.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • SANS ☛ SSL.com rotates their root certificate today

      I just got an email from SSL.com last night, they are rotating out their root certificate today (May 5,2026). This is normal, business as usual stuff for a CA, but certificates get used for all kinds of things, and sometimes they aren't used like they should be, so sometimes hiccups happen.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Walrus ☛ America Doesn’t Need to Invade Canada. It Has Our Data

      The decision came after Anton Carniaux, director of public and legal affairs for Microsoft France, testified before the French senate that, under the US Cloud Act, Microsoft could be forced to hand over data from any country, regardless of where it is stored. Austria, Germany, and Switzerland are also racing to find alternatives to US-based technology.

      Digital sovereignty, which is the protection and control of Canadian data, is quickly becoming the most prominent issue in this country. Amid ongoing strained relations with our southern neighbour, Canadians now face an uncertain digital future. Policy makers have the daunting task of figuring out how to keep our data safe while trying to move away from prominent US software. What’s at stake is Canada’s tech future and the safety of personal Canadian data. Protecting it may sound simple, but there are many different aspects to it.

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Companies and civil society warn that UK is undermining open web

      Signatories of joint statement, including Mozilla, Tor and Open Rights Group, call on ministers to address root causes of online harm rather than pursue blanket access restrictions.

      A group of tech companies and civil society organisations has urged UK policymakers to reconsider their approach to online safety legislation, warning that proposed age-gating measures and access restrictions threaten to fragment the open internet and erode the rights of all users.

    • EFF ☛ EFF and 18 Organizations Urge UK Policymakers to Prioritize Addressing the Roots of Online Harm

      The coalition, which includes Mozilla, Tor Project, and Open Rights Group, warns that proposed measures following the passage of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill risk fundamentally reshaping the internet in harmful ways. Chief among these proposals are sweeping age-gating requirements and access restrictions that would apply not only to young people, but effectively to all users.

    • Press Gazette ☛ Forbes to settle class action privacy claim over website trackers

      The two plaintiffs, who brought the case on their behalf and others who may have been similarly affected, accused Forbes of installing trackers on its website including the Linkedin Insight Tag, the Bing Universal Event Tracking Tag and the Adnx Tracker, all ultimately owned by Microsoft.

      They alleged that Forbes used trackers to collect and send IP addresses and other unique identifiers, without obtaining consent, to Linkedin, Microsoft and other undisclosed third parties.

  • Confidentiality

    • [Old] Key Material ☛ How not to format a private key

      Last time I had an issue with standardization going into the, in my opinion, wrong direction, I wrote a blog post about it. Much to my own surprise, that actually worked, and as a reward you get more blog posts about somewhat convoluted standardization issues.

      In order to entice you to at least skim the background section, here a bit of a teaser: Do you like undefined behavior? Do you enjoy two standard conforming implementations agreeing on all input bytes, and all entropy the system produced, but disagreeing on the output bytes? Then you might be happy with the proposed “compromise”. Otherwise, read on to find out what this is all about.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ EU votes in support of Nuremberg-style tribunal for Russia

    The Special Tribunal being set up will prosecute Russia for the same crime of aggression that Nazi German leaders were found guilty of in the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II.

  • Tim Bray ☛ Life During Class Wartime

    War is bad. Don’t start one. But we’re already in a class war and we’re losing. Where by “we” I mean most people; the winning side comprises, roughly, the richest 0.1% of the population, who are morphing into a hereditary aristocracy. [I mean that, see below.] So, what to do in a war one didn’t choose?

  • Matt Birchler ☛ The Constitution is more of a suggestion

    Anyway, the text of the document is quite clear: you get up to 2 terms and then you must step aside.

    Which brings us to the absolute cowardice of Republicans today, who lack the courage (if you can even call it that) to say that the Constitution applies to their living god, Donald Trump. This exchange between Senator Chris Coons and John George Edward Marck, a nominee to be a district judge, was enlightening.

  • The Next Move ☛ Putin Is in Trouble - by Garry Kasparov and Uriel Epshtein

    (You might be asking: Were the Russians seriously expecting Ukraine to just absorb a genocidal war? And the answer is apparently, yes—that’s what happens when a dictator surrounds himself with sycophants who only tell him what he wants to hear.)

    Is Putin actually sheltering in the führerbunker? Eh. Who can say?

    Instead of debating rumors and leaks, let’s focus on what we know for certain: [...]

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • CBC ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] Canada commits $270M to Ukraine as Carney addresses European summit in Armenia

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-01 [Older] Ukraine plans army pay hikes, phased discharge — Zelenskyy

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Teenage bullying increases in Ukrainian schools

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Germany benefits from work with Ukraine — defense minister

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Critics React After Prince Harry Defends Royal Status, Claims He's Doing Work He Was 'Born to Do'

    • CNN ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] Russian authorities detain suspect over St. Petersburg cafe blast

    • CBC ☛ 2026-05-03 [Older] Ukraine hits Russian oil-loading port, 'shadow fleet' tankers

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-03 [Older] Ukrainian drones hit Russia's Primorsk oil terminal

    • 2026-05-02 [Older] Russian Hacker Known as “Digit” Pleads Guilty to Cyberattacks on Ukraine and the US

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-02 [Older] Why Russia's Northern Sea Route is a risk for global trade

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-05-01 [Older] Boy, 14, missing since April now believed to be in Poland; Possibly headed to Russia

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Russia to hold Victory Day parade without weaponry display

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Ukraine's Zelenskyy rebukes Israel for buying grain 'stolen' by Russia

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-02 [Older] Why Ukraine and Israel are arguing over grain

• Environment

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Norwegian fish farms polluting fjords with waste likened to ‘raw sewage of millions of people’

    Norway is the largest farmed salmon producer in the world, and nutrients in fish feed are excreted directly into coastal waters. Analysis from the Sunstone Institute found that Norwegian aquaculture released 75,000 tonnes of nitrogen, 13,000 tonnes of phosphorus and 360,000 tonnes of organic carbon in 2025.

  • Futurism ☛ Earth Screams in Agony as Microplastics Found to Increase Global Warming

    In a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the authors found that microplastics are absorbing more sunlight than they reflect in the atmosphere, resulting in net heating. Its effects aren’t as powerful as greenhouse gases, but they’re significant enough to take notice of.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ When looking at data centers, polling says transparency is top of mind for Michiganders

    In a poll of 653 Michigan residents, commissioned by the progressive advocacy group Progress Michigan and conducted by Public Policy Polling, 69% of respondents said they would strongly support additional transparency laws after being informed that data centers receiving state tax breaks are not required to publicly disclose details related to their water and energy use, infrastructure costs or commitments to job creation.

  • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ City says Project Blue must stop using Tucson Water for data center construction

    City Manager Tim Thomure told Beale Infrastructure officials in an letter on Monday that Tucson does not support the construction of the data center and the project is not eligible for any city resources, including water.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ This Stockholm Neighborhood Was Built on Ambitious Sustainability Goals. When It Came Up Short, It Doubled Down and Became a Blueprint for Others

    To the casual observer and tourist like me, Hammarby Sjöstad is a scenic waterfront district. But beneath the timber boardwalk lies a feat of engineering—an invisible machine that transforms waste into energy.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Study finds AI server farms creating their own local heat islands

    The same AI bubble promising to reshape the future may also be quietly reshaping the climate. A new study suggests massive data centers are generating localized "heat islands," raising temperatures around them and potentially compounding the effects of global warming in already vulnerable communities.

  • SFGate ☛ AI data centers appear to be creating their own microclimates

    Researchers from multiple institutions, including the University of Cambridge and Nanyang Technological University, used satellite data from that time to assess rising land surface temperatures at AI data centers worldwide. After conducting an analysis, they estimated that surrounding surface areas typically increase by an average of 2 degrees Celsius — or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit — once AI centers start operating, suggesting that the data center heat island effect “is real and significant, especially in the context of global warming and climate transformation.” Overall, “our results show that the data heat island effect could have a remarkable influence on communities and regional welfare in the future,” researchers said in the study.

    The implications also suggest that building AI data centers in heat-stricken areas of California could have dire consequences on local communities.

  • Research Gate ☛ (PDF) The data heat island effect: quantifying the impact of AI data centers in a warming world

    The strong and continuous increase of AI-based services leads to the steady proliferation of AI data centres worldwide with the unavoidable escalation of their power consumption. It is unknown how this energy demand for computational purposes will impact the surrounding environment. Here, we focus our attention on the heat dissipation of AI hyperscalers. Taking advantage of land surface temperature measurements acquired by remote sensing platforms over the last decades, we are able to obtain a robust assessment of the temperature increase recorded in the areas surrounding AI data centres globally. We estimate that the land surface temperature increases by 2°C on average after the start of operations of an AI data centre, inducing local microclimate zones, which we call the data heat island effect. We assess the impact on the communities, quantifying that more than 340 million people could be affected by this temperature increase. Our results show that the data heat island effect could have a remarkable influence on communities and regional welfare in the future, hence becoming part of the conversation around environmentally sustainable AI worldwide.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Trump Is Losing a Second War

      Despite the perversity of its causes, the current acceleration of electrotech is overwhelmingly positive for the world as a whole. It will slow climate change and reduce pollution. It will diminish the power of anti-democratic petrostates and limit the vulnerability of the world economy to disruptions at choke points like Hormuz. It will democratize access to cheap energy sources in places like Africa.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Dr Molly Tov ☛ Wikipedia naturalist

      Most of my friends pull out their phones even in the middle of the woods. I tend to roll my eyes and tolerate this. Merlin and PlantNet are certainly useful. But I grew up on field guides and conversations with more experienced naturalists. Instant AI-enabled possible-answers feel more like junk food info to me.

  • Overpopulation

    • Truthdig ☛ What’s Behind the ‘Baby Bust’ Panic?

      The issue is repeatedly in the news in part because it’s a priority of the “pronatalist” right, which has prominent backers in the Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance has called the U.S. birth rate decline a “civilizational crisis.” He said people with children should have “more power” at the polls and “more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic” than those without.

• Finance

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] Amazon and Tesla Among 88 Major US Firms Paying Zero Corporate Income Tax Last Year Despite Billions in Profit

  • Quartz ☛ Coinbase is slashing its workforce as AI reshapes the crypto industry

    The company said in an SEC filing that it expects to incur $50 million to $60 million in restructuring charges as it lays off about 700 employees. Almost all those costs are cash-based expenses tied to employee severance and termination benefits. Execution of the plan is expected to be complete in the second quarter of 2026, with most charges recognized in the same period, the company said.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Column: Stop waiting for Trump's own words to take him down

    Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg were very worried about the ability of demagogues to whip up populist fervor and manipulate the masses through the power of TV, in part because everyone had already seen it happen with radio and film, by Father Coughlin in America and Hitler in Germany. But as dark as their vision was, they still clung to the idea that if the demagogue was exposed, the people would instantly turn on their leader in an “Emperor’s new clothes” moment for the mass media age.

    And that’s the source of my depressing realization. I think they were wrong. It turns out that once that organic connection is made, even a shocking revelation of the truth won’t necessarily break the spell.

  • The Register UK ☛ NHS to close-source GitHub repos over AI, security concerns

    The guidance reads: "Public repositories materially increase the risk of unintended disclosure of source code, architectural decisions, configuration detail, and contextual information that may be exploited – particularly given rapid advancements in AI models capable of large-scale code ingestion, inference, and reasoning (e.g. developments such as the Mythos model)."

    It also states GitHub repos should not be public "unless there is an explicit and exceptional need." The decision was approved by the NHS' Engineering Board.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ U.S. Will Examine National Security Implications Of New AI Models

    The Center for AI Standards and Innovation — CAISI, the entity under the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology that inherited the remit of the former AI Safety Institute — announced new agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and Elon Musk’s xAI. These build on renegotiated agreements with Anthropic and OpenAI that date to 2024, updated to reflect directives from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and America’s AI Action Plan.

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ An amicable split between OpenAI and Microsoft

    In return, Microsoft secured the removal of a clause that would have allowed OpenAI to cut off its access to its technologies once artificial general intelligence, capable of learning any task, was achieved. The company will now retain its license through at least 2032. Another compromise concerns financial terms: Microsoft will still receive 20% of its partner’s revenue, but these payments are now time-limited — through 2030 — and capped. It will also no longer have to pay to offer OpenAI models on its Azure cloud.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The three armies fighting for the post-American world (05 May 2026)

    Trump is a master coalition builder. He wouldn't have been able to seize and wield so much power without a coalition that includes people who absolutely hate each other and want each other to die. Let's face it, Nick Fuentes wants to turn Ben Shapiro into a lampshade, but they both sent their followers to the ballot box for Trump. We've all seen those videos of Trump supporters railing against "elites" after watching the richest man on Earth cavorting with Trump while promising to give all of their jobs to AI and robots.

    This contradiction isn't a bug, it's a feature: the bigger a coalition gets, the more power it has – provided you've got a Trump figure at the top, using his cult of personality to coerce and flatter his coalition members into playing nice with each other.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Moscow shuts down airports and mobile signals as Victory Day parade looms

    Russia shut down airports and temporarily cut mobile [Internet] access for many users in Moscow on Tuesday, as it tightened security before the 9 May Victory Day parade marking the defeat of Nazi Germany.

  • Reuters ☛ Russia limits mobile [Internet] ahead of scaled-back WW2 victory parade

    Six Reuters reporters in different parts of the capital found that their mobile phones had no [Internet] access. Telephone calls could still be made from many areas ​of Moscow, they said. Russian mobile phone operators said there could be problems with ​mobile [Internet] due to the need to ensure security over coming days. Sberbank, Russia's biggest bank, ‌also ⁠cautioned that there could be issues with mobile [Internet] and messaging.

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Russia cuts mobile [Internet] ahead of Victory Day parade

    Russia cut off mobile [Internet] services in Moscow and St. Petersburg on May 5, days ahead of the country's annual Victory Day parade, citing security concerns amid a reportedly heightened risk of Ukrainian drone attacks.

  • TruthOut ☛ FCC Orders Early Review of ABC Licenses the Day After Trump Attacks Jimmy Kimmel

    As President Trump continues to attack media organizations and journalists, we speak with a sitting member of the Federal Communications Commission about how the administration has weaponized the FCC to go after his perceived enemies in the media. Anna Gomez is the sole Democratic commissioner on the FCC, which is currently operating with just three commissioners instead of the usual five. She criticizes the agency’s recently announced review of ABC television licenses, which comes after President Trump called for the firing of ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. Under Chair Brendan Carr, the FCC has repeatedly gone after critics of the president by threatening to revoke valuable broadcast licenses.

    “This administration is using any point of leverage that it has to go after its critics,” says Gomez, who was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2023.

    Gomez also discusses how media consolidation impacts public choice, including the pending merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, which would bring an unprecedented number of properties under the ownership of the Trump-aligned Ellison family.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Reddit Reports Resurgence in User Bans over Copyright Infringement

    To show the public how it responds to copyright complaints, takedown notices, and other removals, it publishes a biannual transparency report. The latest version, covering the second half of 2025, shows some interesting new trends.

    Overall, the transparency report reveals the massive volume of content that’s added to the site. In just six months, Redditors shared over 2.2 billion posts and comments. More than 150 million of these were removed by moderators and site admins for various reasons.

  • The Next Move ☛ A Nobel Peace Laureate and Political Prisoner Near Death

    She was in prison when she received her Nobel prize in 2023. She had predecessors, in Nobel history.

    Carl von Ossietzky was a prisoner of the Nazis when he received the peace prize for 1935. He died, still a prisoner, in 1938, at age 48. Liu Xiaobo was a prisoner of the Chinese Communist Party when he received his prize in 2010. He died, still a prisoner, in 2017, when he was 61.

    Narges Mohammadi symbolizes the struggle of Iranian citizens against their dictatorship, and particularly the struggle of women—who have been in the forefront of the country’s democracy movement.

  • ANF News ☛ Narges Mohammadi in critical conditions

    In a statement, the foundation said: “Narges Mohammadi’s blood pressure continues to fluctuate dangerously, and her condition is being stabilized with oxygen support so far.”

    The 54-year-old Mohammadi was reportedly transferred from prison to a hospital in the city of Zanjan on Friday after her condition deteriorated to a “catastrophic level.” The statement added that she lost consciousness twice and suffered a severe heart attack.

  • David Rosenthal ☛ The Permissionless Catch-22

    Suppose some genre of content is under attack by powerful adversaries. Lets take political satire as a thought experiment in which powerful politicians are attacking sites and Web archives hosting it by sending bogus DMCA takedowns, suing for defamation, buying up their hosting platforms, getting their flying monkeys to flood them with spam, and so on. Below the fold I discuss the problem facing the defense.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Yle ☛ Finland falling short in helping exiled journalists, study finds

    The report was based on 48 interviews, including 22 with journalists who had fled to Finland from various countries.

    "Finland's indifference contributes to silencing journalists who have sought refuge here," the report stated.

  • The Atlantic ☛ My Role as a ‘Complicit’ Journalist

    My work unintentionally provides raw material for this ecosystem. Four days after the security breach at the Correspondents’ Dinner, I co-wrote an article about Trump’s tendency to compare himself to great figures from history—Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar, in particular. The article contained no hint of a justification for political violence. But as it churned through social media, that’s where it ended up, sparking one outraged post after another by enraged readers who called Trump “batshit crazy,” “f*cking insane,” and much more. “Was the guy who bum rushed the correspondents dinner with a shotgun the bad guy (?)” asked one user on X, responding to a link to the story. “We supposed to just let him conquer the planet and crown himself Emperor Of Earth ??”

    This happens all the time. And so I do feel implicated, just not in the way Allen’s manifesto would have it.

  • North Dakota Monitor ☛ North Dakota Monitor journalists honored for investigative reporting, community service

    Reporter Jacob Orledge received a first place A-Mark Prize for his four-part series titled “Extracted: How oil companies pull more money from North Dakota mineral owners.” The A-Mark Prize recognizes excellence in investigative journalism.

    “What set this series apart was its commitment to talking with the people directly affected,” wrote the judges.

  • CPJ ☛ US revokes visas for prominent Costa Rican newspaper directors in apparent retaliation 

    “The United States used to be a beacon for press freedom and a champion for targeted journalists. That is regrettably no longer the case,” said CPJ Américas Regional Director Jose Zamora. “Revoking visas from La Nación directors illustrates how the Trump administration weaponizes the U.S. visa regime to punish critical voices and censor disfavored views, including by denying the benefit of travel to the United States, often in defense of those who attack the press.”

  • CPJ ☛ Guatemalan journalist Carlos Humberto Cal Ical killed outside home by unidentified individuals

    “The killing of Carlos Humberto Cal Ical is a tragic reminder of the persistent risks faced by journalists working in Guatemala’s departments” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator. “Guatemalan authorities must determine if Cal was targeted for his work, identify those responsible, and ensure they are held to account.”

  • Site36 ☛ Three months after their arrest, Damascus confirms the detention of journalists Eva Maria Michelmann and Ahmed Polad

    The two journalists were reportedly caught up during the capture of Raqqa, where they had been researching Islamist networks. While authorities cite security concerns, supporters point to their journalistic work and valid press credentials.

  • Carole Cadwalladr ☛ Journalists of the world, unite!

    In the last year, vast swathes of the US press have been captured or defanged: CBS has been gutted from within, its editorial integrity destroyed after being bought by the Ellison family, a key Trump ally, that has already gained control of TikTok and is in the throes of an $81bn takeover of Warner Bros that will give it control of, among many other media properties, CNN’s newsroom.

    Protestors have been shot in the street and journalists who reported on these protests have been arrested. The Washington Post, owned by another billionaire tech ally, has laid off hundreds of reporters and neutered its editorial pages but Bezos’s sponsorship of the Met Gala last night saw him wash his hands of their blood. Meanwhile, the chair of the powerful FCC, Brendan Carr, has been threatening news outlets with losing their broadcast licences for so-called “distortions” over their coverage of the Iran war.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • DeSmog ☛ Heartland Institute Podcast Questions Whether All Americans ‘Should Have the Right to Vote’

    “Heartland’s authoritarian, anti-democratic agenda is now exposed for all to see,” Mann told DeSmog in email. “The assault on climate action and the assault on democracy are one and the same, an effort to advance the authoritarian agenda of fossil fuel interests and the politicians in their pay.”

  • The Nation ☛ What Happens When Jails and Prisons Make Phone Calls Free?

    California is one of a growing list of states and municipalities that have made phone calls free, starting with New York City in 2019. Today, calls are free in six prison systems—the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Connecticut, California, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and New York—and several dozen jail systems, affecting more than 330,000 incarcerated people. Nearly all of these reforms came via legislation (New York enacted the change administratively).

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Reducing social inequality: Why the scope of measures is crucial

    However, a new study by Dr. Irena Pietrzyk and Professor Dr. Marita Jacob at the University of Cologne Department of Sociology and Social Psychology shows that findings relating to social reality can be misleading. In addition, the authors have developed an online tool that clearly shows the extent to which social inequalities between groups can, in fact, decrease—depending on how many people actually have access to a measure.

    The study "Why Treatment Prevalence Matters: Overcoming a Blind Spot in Experimental Inequality Research " is published in the special issue titled "Erklärung und Kausalität in der Soziologie ("Explanation and Causality in Sociology") of KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Three Christian Citizens Arrested in Yazd

    The prosecutor of Yazd announced the arrest of three Christian citizens in the province on charges described as “forming a house church group and promoting Christianity.”

  • Wired ☛ Google DeepMind Workers Vote to Unionize Over Military AI Deals

    UK staff of Google’s AI research lab hope to block the use of the company’s artificial intelligence models in military settings.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • RIPE ☛ Questioning the IPv8 Proposal

    The IPv8 proposal brings together routing, identity, and network management into a single design, but does it leave too many operational questions unanswered?

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Macworld ☛ Apple lashes out at 'privacy-threatening' Digital Markets Act

    Apple is particularly unhappy about the DMA, which makes it difficult to cultivate digital monopolies and “walled gardens,” such as the iOS app ecosystem. The legislation has consistently pushed Apple towards allowing “sideloading,” or the installation on the iPhone of apps from non-official sources, and thanks to the DMA, users in the EU can even delete the official App Store app.

    In March 2025, the EU cited the DMA in ordering Apple to open up iOS connectivity features, a decision Apple decried as “bad for our products and for our European users.” Then, in April of the same year, the company was fined roughly $570m after its contract terms concerning alternative app distribution were found to breach the DMA.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The AI Job Apocalypse Is Already Happening

    How can the stock market be rising to record levels while jobs and wages are going nowhere, most Americans are paying higher prices for just about everything, and consumer sentiment is in the dumps?

    Answer: Stock prices reflect corporate profits, which have risen to record levels. And corporate profits are soaring for two big reasons: [...]

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • Scoop News Group ☛ A college student is suing a dating app that allegedly used her TikTok videos to target men in her dormitory

        The allegations, if proven, offer another example of how modern technology has made it easier than ever today for bad actors to imitate, objectify, profit off and harass individuals, often women. Recent laws like the Take It Down Act have focused particularly on the use of AI to create sexualized imagery of their victims. In this case, the lawsuit alleges that Meete used not AI, but simple video editing, a voiceover and geofencing to create the same kind of deception.

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ AI Flips YouTube's Quick Music Swap for Copyrighted Music

      For years, YouTube creators have been able to swap out music struck with copyright claims with royalty-free alternatives. Now, that process is becoming easier with the help of AI to quickly match and replace audio with a generated royalty-free instrumental track. The update is positioned as a quick and easy way to resolve Content ID claims without removing content from the platform.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Zuckerberg Personally Authorized Copyright Infringement for AI

      Meta and its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg face a copyright infringement lawsuit by five book publishers and author Scott Turow, alleging that the company torrented millions of copyrighted works from notorious pirate sites to train its AI—at Zuckerberg’s direct instruction.

      The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday (May 5) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by publishers Nachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage, as well as Turow individually. The suit is a proposed class-action and seeks an unspecified amount in monetary damages for the alleged infringement.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ U.S. Brands Vietnam as a Rare 'Priority Foreign Country' Over Online Piracy Concerns

      For the first time in thirteen years, the U.S. government has placed a trading partner in its most serious category for intellectual [sic] property [sic] concerns. The USTR's latest Special 301 Report classifies Vietnam as a "Priority Foreign Country," opening the door to potential trade sanctions. The country's failure to combat pirate sites and services, including Fmovies, is cited as a key reason.