Leftovers

• Marcel Kapfer ☛ One Website

  But I am not three people; I am one strange person with many different interests. I don't need to publish my work on different pages, and I don't need to try to hide myself.

  Sure, there are people who are convinced that a dedicated photography page is (even for me) more professional, and that putting everything together would make me look more like an "amateur." And I don't argue against that. Perhaps they're right. Perhaps not. In the end, for my personal online presence, I don't care. I do not intend to go professional in any of these areas (music composition or photography, that is), and if I would, I would need to re-evaluate how I present my work anyway.

  Combining all my output into a single portal would not only reduce the time required to create and run these pages but would also allow me to present myself completely, as I am, without having to think much about where a certain post fits best.

• Johnny Decimal ☛ A new website, and a focus on small business

  There’s so much overhead when you run a business, and when you’re small, you have to do it all yourself. With last year’s Small Business System (SBS) we hoped to give you a space to put everything: a hundred less decisions to make. Our dream was always to expand to become your ‘operations layer’, to provide you ops manuals and guidance and support. So that’s what we’ll be doing from now.

• But she's a girl... ☛ Laws of sewing

  This is actually quite nice as it forces me to take my time and pay attention to the details. In the process, I have noticed some seemingly rigid ‘Laws of Sewing’ over a few projects.

• Small Cypress ☛ buying nothing

  I am doing a full month of not buying anything I don't actually need. I sat down and figured out a list of exceptions, because I need to make sure I don't find a good excuse to break my rules. Once I break my own rules, I can be completely deflated.

• Science

  • J B Crawford ☛ extremely low frequencies

    We probably all realize, as did the Navy, that pushing to yet lower frequencies and longer wavelengths would produce better penetration of the seawater, at the cost of basically every other property becoming worse: larger antennas, less efficient transmitters and receivers, narrower bandwidths. The possibility of going even further—from Very Low Frequency to Extremely* Low Frequency—was just a solution in wait of a problem. The military had a lot of those, and the Cold War was one huge problem.

  • Overpopulation ☛ The role of mortality in fertility transition studies

    These differences become even more pronounced at regional levels. In Middle Africa, TFR data suggest that fertility peaked in 1987 and has since declined, while 2SNRR measurements indicate that fertility has yet to decline at all in this region. Similar discrepancies appear across Southern Asia and parts of Northern and Eastern Africa, where 2SNRR-based fertility transitions occur later, peak at lower levels, and decline more gradually than TFR-based assessments suggest.

• Career/Education

  • Project Censored ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] Innovative Apprenticeships Address Shortages in Childcare and Early Ed

  • Futurism ☛ Bosses Horrified as "AI Native" College Graduates Hit the Workplace

    And though universities have many purposes beyond simply preparing students for the workplace, that is one function that they do undoubtedly serve. The results could be rocky: as Cal State Chico ethics professor Troy Jollimore told the New Yorker in 2025, “massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate.”

  • Hackaday ☛ Remembering The BBC Computer Literacy Project

    The Computer Literacy Project was run by the nation’s broadcaster and included a raft of TV programming about computers, as well as the commissioning of a machine specifically for the project. You know this machine as the Acorn BBC Micro, and aside from eventually providing the genesis of what would become ARM, it remains one of the most high-spec 8-bit machines in terms of built-in hardware. We hear from the luminaries of Acorn about the development of this machine, and then the film moves into some of the wider cultural effects.

  • Lucidity ☛ The Worlds Left To Conquer

    So when I kicked off the company, some traitorous part of me was hoping that it would be difficult, as horrible as that would be for me personally. If it was hard, yes, perhaps I’d have to go back to some miserable office and be beset on all sides by smiling imbeciles talking about innovation, but it would make sense. It simply can’t be that easy to be free of those structures. Surely there’s a reason for it that isn’t simply “Wow, we’re systematically producing people that are terrible at their jobs and they can’t even see it.”

    Unfortunately, that really is most of the explanation.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Canvas is open source, but its cloud services ransomware attack really hurts

    It’s also not clear that self-hosted infrastructure would be more resilient: a university could be subject to a ransomware attack with very little recourse. At the same time, the centralized nature of Canvas’s core offering means every institution that uses it, including over half of all US higher education institutions, were in a hard place right in the middle of final exam season. Access is coming back, but at the time of writing, it hasn’t been fully restored. It’s a hard lesson about the dangers of putting everything in the cloud.

  • Neil Selwyn ☛ Is Ed-Tech falling out of favour?

    This disquiet should not come as a surprise for anyone with even passing familiarity with education in the 2020s. School systems in many parts of the world have become dominated by a certain class of ed-tech that is impersonal, inflexible and uninspiring. Students spend increasing amounts of time on their devices locked into tutoring software, slide-decks and Google Docs. Communication takes place through email and message apps, while guidance and support is outsourced to chatbots and pedagogical agents. We have reached the point where the day-to-day running of schools is funnelled through learning management systems and corporate mega-platforms such as Google Classroom, with progress displayed through dashboards and analytics systems, more akin to monitoring hospital patients than nurturing young people’s development. In comparison to the hype about ‘virtual learning communities’ and ‘cyberschools’ during the 1990s and 2000s, the ed-tech dream of the 2020s seems to have soured. This is not the technological liberation and digital creativity that we were promised!

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Iran war squeezes India's pharma supply chain

  • India Times ☛ AI study finds hidden mathematical laws shaping cuisines across cultures

    The study also identified what it called a "complexity trade-off". Simpler recipes with fewer ingredients often rely on distinctive or rare ingredients to create flavour, while longer, more elaborate dishes tend to depend on common staples to avoid becoming overwhelmingly complex.

    Perhaps most intriguingly, the nutritional composition of dishes, including protein, fats and carbohydrates, was also found to follow predictable mathematical distributions across cuisines worldwide.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Unlocked Repost: Curing U.S. Health Care, Part I

    Impressive as the raw numbers are, they don’t tell the whole story. Before the ACA, even upper-middle-class Americans often found it impossible to get health insurance if they had pre-existing medical conditions. Many Americans were trapped in jobs they wanted to leave but couldn’t for fear of losing their employment-based coverage. Meanwhile, dire predictions from the usual suspects about runaway costs proved wrong. In fact, overall U.S. medical spending has grown much more slowly since the ACA was enacted than before.

  • [Old] Open Source Pledge ☛ Burnout in Open Source: A Structural Problem We Can Fix Together

    It carries on like this for months. The project you made for you, once a source of joy, is now a source of stress and anxiety. You feel profoundly unseen. Reluctantly, you begin to wonder: is it time to give up on the dream?

    I’m a psychologist, and I’ve been compiling a report on the problem of burnout in Open Source Software (OSS).

• Proprietary

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Apple reportedly strikes deal for Intel to make some of its chips — two tech giants reached a preliminary agreement for Intel to make processors for Cupertino

    It’s currently unclear which chips the U.S. semiconductor company will be making for the largest consumer electronics firm in the world, but it previously made the x86 processors used in Macs and MacBooks from 2006 to 2023. Intel also had the chance to build the A-series chips that Apple used for the iPhone and iPad, but it fumbled the opportunity — with Tim Cook complaining to TSMC founder Morris Chang, “Intel just does not know how to be a foundry.”

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Cloudflare cuts 20% of its jobs due to AI, and its stock takes a 19% spill — 1,100 jobs disappearing as company increased usage of AI sixfold over past months

    Jobs cuts related to increased AI usage have practically become background noise at this point, but there's still the occasional outlier that merits inspection. In this case, Cloudflare announced both its quarterly results and the fact that it's cutting 20% of its workforce over this year — to the tune of 1,100 heads.

  • The Newsprint ☛ Bauhaus Clock for iPhone and iPad

    Bauhaus Clock for iPhone and iPad is a design-first, utility-second sort of app. It’s simple, doing nothing more than tell the time in one or two locations. But how it tells the time — with its gasp-worthy combination of visual, haptics, and audio features — make it one of those delightful apps you’ll love to have on your device.

  • India Times ☛ Apple, Intel have reached preliminary chip-making deal: Report

    The companies were engaged in intensive talks for more than a year and they hammered out a formal deal in recent months, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Canvas Panic on Campus

    That’s when I learned about the outage. Canvas, an online service used by as many as 40 percent of North American colleges, among them Washington University in St. Louis, where I teach, had gone down globally—victim to a ransomware attack. Just like ride-share apps replaced the physical act of hailing a cab, “courseware” such as Canvas has replaced more analog systems at almost every college and university, which now use the tool to run classrooms, manage assignments, and handle grading. When Canvas goes down, college classes cease to operate.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Cyberattack on Canvas hitting Michigan schools amid exam season

    The outage also hit Eastern Michigan University and Wayne State University.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft CTO confesses that 30-year-old code from the mid-90s still forms the bedrock of Windows 11 — ancient Win32 API still the backbone, but CTO says it's 'more relevant than ever in 2026'

    Remember, the firm is currently in the midst of a major transformation, targeting enthusiast hot button areas like Windows performance, overhead, and reliability. This drastic pivot was cautiously welcomed in contrast to Microsoft being widely slammed for boasting about Windows “evolving into an agentic OS” last November. Currently, Microsoft seems to be flailing around, trying to stop folks straying to pastures greener like Mac and Linux.

  • India Times ☛ Schools reach out to Canvas [crackers] as breach hits US classrooms

    ShinyHunters, a [cracking] group with a string of data theft and extortion campaigns targeting major global companies, said in a May 3 post on its website that it had stolen roughly 6.65 terabytes of Canvas data related to nearly 9,000 schools worldwide that included student names, email addresses and private messages between ‌students, teachers, and other ⁠staff.

  • International Business Times ☛ Canvas [Cracked] By ShinyHunters: Are Your Private Messages Now Exposed In The Dark Web?

    Shortly after Instructure confirmed the breach, ShinyHunters posted a 'pay or leak' ultimatum with a deadline set on 6 May, according to Inside Higher Ed. The group claimed to have exfiltrated 3.65 terabytes of data including names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and user messages from Canvas LMS.

  • Dark Reading ☛ ShinyHunters Claims Second Attack Against Instructure

    In a May 8 statement to Dark Reading, Instructure acknowledged what students like Pomazanov were experiencing. It reported that on May 7, it took Canvas offline, again, to contain the ongoing incident. "We have confirmed that the unauthorized actor exploited an issue related to our Free-For-Teacher accounts," a company spokesperson wrote, without detailing the exact nature of the vulnerability. "As a result, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily shut down our Free-For-Teacher accounts. This gives us the confidence to restore access to Canvas, which is now fully back online and available for use.”

  • Scoop News Group ☛ ShinyHunters claims nearly 9,000 schools affected by Canvas data breach

    After announcing on May 1 that it had exfiltrated several terabytes of data containing the personal information of 275 million users, it announced a deadline of Thursday before “everything is leaked and there will be no chance at a negociation for anyone. Instructure has not even bothered speaking to us to understand the situation or to even negociate with us to prevent the release of this data. Our demand was not even as high as you might think it is.”

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

    • Wired ☛ Nick Bostrom Has a Plan for Humanity’s ‘Big Retirement’

      Philosopher Nick Bostrom recently posted a paper, where he postulated that a small chance of AI annihilating all humans might be worth the risk, because advanced AI might relieve humanity of “its universal death sentence.” That upbeat gamble is quite a leap from his previous dark musings on AI, which made him a doomer godfather. His 2014 book Superintelligence was an early examination of AI’s existential risk. One memorable thought experiment: An AI tasked with making paper clips winds up destroying humanity because all those resource-needy people are an impediment to paper clip production. His more recent book, Deep Utopia, reflects a shift in his focus. Bostrom, who leads Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, dwells on the “solved world” that comes if we get AI right.

    • Android Police ☛ I used these tools to block AI slop on Spotify, and I should have done it sooner

      Spotify and other music streaming platforms are slowly filling up with AI slop.

      Reluctant to take a stance against the rising tide of soulless music, Spotify has allowed people to publish AI-generated music on its platform while posing as real musicians.

    • Rui Carmo ☛ The Local AI Moat

      The societal impact of the entire thing in the always hype-driven geek community is, of course, fascinating (especially since a very small number of people have a disproportionate amount of influence in this little echo chamber), and I sometimes feel like Jane Goodall observing packs of opinionated chimpanzees, but I digress.

      Personally, after spending the day mulling on this, I find the whole thing extremely depressing, for three reasons: [...]

    • Martin Chang ☛ LLM usage policy on this blog

      Either way, this blog is my own, my thought and my opinion. I WILL NOT use LLMs to generate content for this blog. Beyond using them for typo correction and grammar checking. Otherwise I feel dishonest and defeates the purpose of writing. At the end of the day, I own my own thoughts and I am the only persion responsible for my own growth.

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ Claude’s Chrome Extension Flaw Shows Why Agentic Browsing Needs Real Guardrails

      Anthropic’s latest Chrome extension issue deserves more attention than a quick “vendor patched a bug” headline. As CyberScoop reported, researchers say Claude’s browser extension could be hijacked by another extension, including one with no special permissions. That is not a small bug. That is a warning shot.

      The bigger problem is not just Claude. The bigger problem is agentic AI inside the browser.

    • Joost de Valk ☛ Vol. XV: out with the AI slop

      The driver for this redesign was simple. The old site had a system for generating an AI image for every blog post, with structured prompts that kept everything in the same visual style. At first I liked it. Over a few weeks, that flipped. It was AI slop, and I disliked seeing it on my own site every time I opened the homepage.

      I decided I didn’t want AI-generated images on my posts at all; the design and the typography should do that work instead. Once that landed, the rest piled on. I’ve been writing more, and longer. The old layout didn’t have a real table of contents on a post. The archive wasn’t easy to browse. If I was going to keep posting essays of two or three thousand words, I needed the plumbing for it.

      So: redesign.

    • Akseli Lahtinen ☛ AInsecurity in software

      If you truly believe in your product, you will spruce it up. Make it look nice. For me, generated "AI" icons and codebase just smells of insecurity and not believing in your own product.

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Hyperscalers ate my next computer

      I have been idly building the specs my next desktop PC – a Linux gaming and AI rig – for the better part of the past year. It is starting to feel like a doomed exercise.

      The plan was modest enough: enough memory to run a decent open-weight large language model locally – up to 128GB – a current-generation CPU with a respectable thread count and a GPU that wouldn’t embarrass itself when asked to load a 70 billion-parameter model into VRAM.

      There’s just one problem. Building a rig like that today can cost as much as a second-hand car. The reason, in a phrase, is that hyperscalers have eaten the consumer hardware market alive.

    • [Repeat] Tom's Hardware ☛ Internet archival sites struggling to preserve the internet because of skyrocketing hard drive prices due to the AI boom — Wayback Machine and Wikimedia punished by stratospheric storage pricing and stricter anti-scraping measures blocking the wrong bots

      The 28-30TB hard drives ideal for the job are simply out of stock or available at a grossly inflated price. Fortunately, Internet Archive has active donors and a passionate community of bit-rot fighters that help alleviate some of these concerns, but only by finding workarounds. The organization is also trying to source drives from manufacturers, but they're likely busy with backorders instead.

    • The Register UK ☛ GPT-5.5 may burn fewer tokens, but it always burns more cash

      For 1 million tokens, GPT-5.5 is priced at $5 (input), $0.50 (cached input), and $30 (output). Its predecessor GPT-5.4 charges $2.50 (input), $0.25 (cached input), and $15 (output) per 1 million tokens.

      The AI biz claims that the cost increase is offset to some extent by token processing efficiency – delivering better results using fewer tokens.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Flaw in Claude’s Chrome extension allowed ‘any’ other plugin to hijack victims’ AI

      “The flaw stems from an instruction in the extension’s code that allows any script running in the origin browser to communicate with Claude’s LLM, but does not verify who is running the script,” wrote LayerX senior researcher Aviad Gispan. “As a result, any extension can invoke a content script (which does not require any special permissions) and issue commands to the Claude extension.”

  • Social Control Media

    • CBC ☛ 2026-05-03 [Older] Hundreds of youths descend on Vancouver's Scientology building as part of speedrunning trend

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Scientology Buildings Reportedly Removed Door Handles After Viral Speedrun Stunts Bring Disruption Inside

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] How child soldiers in Sudan become influencers on TikTok

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] 'Let's Buy Spirit' Campaign Raises $23M In Pledges After Viral TikTok Joke — Why It Won't Work

    • NL Times ☛ Experts warn rising ‘manosphere’ influence on boys may drive violent, sexual offenses

      According to staff members, the manosphere can encourage boys and young men to develop distrust toward female workers, making communication more difficult.

      The manosphere is an online space where men express anti-feminist views and promote macho behavior. Groups within it frequently blame feminists, or women in general, for a range of societal problems. Resentment toward women—and in some cases hatred and violence—is often encouraged.

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Report: Social media bans alone won't keep kids and teens safe online

      The report highlights the scale of youth online exposure. Nearly all Estonian children ages 9–16 use the internet [sic] daily, while OECD data shows half of all 15-year-olds spend more than 30 hours a week on digital devices, and primarily for entertainment purposes.

    • Futurism ☛ Man Wearing Smart Glasses Secretly Records Woman, Demands Money to Delete Video From His Socials

      “In the moment I just thought ‘OK this guy is just trying to talk to me, to chat me up,'” she said (the broadcaster didn’t reveal her real name, but identified her as Alice.) “I was hoping that he would leave me alone eventually but he did actually follow me.”

      Alice only realized what happened when a friend sent her the video, which had racked up about 40,000 views.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Flipping Off Phones

      On this week’s episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks with his Atlantic colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany about what our phones are doing to us. Tiffany recently wrote about swapping her iPhone for a flip phone as part of a movement called “Month Offline.” Kaitlyn talks through her personal experience: the joys and inconveniences of a dumbphone and the difficulty of unplugging completely. Warzel and Tiffany talk about the growing smartphone backlash, legal cases against “big tech,” and how, even if many people are convinced that their phones are a problem, the science remains far from conclusive regarding direct harm.

    • Mike Brock ☛ On Free Speech and "Woke"

      The taboo regime is gone because we let it go. The renormalization is happening because we have not yet found the analytical apparatus to name it. The free-speech rhetoric is doing the work it is doing because we have not yet had the philosophical vocabulary to distinguish the principle from the instrument. This Dispatch is one piece of the work of building the apparatus. There will be more.

    • Ava ☛ your social media habits sound like an abusive relationship

      As someone who has been off of these platforms for quite a while, some of the things people share with me sound extremely odd to me; weird rules and behaviors they feel the need to abide by or else!.... Whatever that may be. Some I even recognize from back when I used them, but now I have a completely different view of them as I am no longer embedded in a culture that normalizes them.

    • RTL ☛ 'Perfect timing': European minnows bid to challenge social media giants

      There is a familiar litany of criticisms levelled at the big players, including sorting users into "filter bubbles", unevenly-enforced moderation and addictive design.

      European would-be competitors see those as openings to vaunt their own virtues.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Meta Has Entered Its Death Spiral

      Since those salad days, its trajectory has never been quite the same. Sure, it’s maintained market share with a series of cynical acquisitions of would-be competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp, but Facebook’s feeds have been inexorably taken over by industrial-scale engagement bait and sleazy ads as users failed to stick around.

      By 2026, after a failed pivot to the Metaverse — oh yeah, it changed its name to Meta back in 2021 — scrolling Facebook feels like an infinite timeline of AI slop, ads, and lazy misinformation, none of which the company seems to have an iota of interest in cleaning up.

    • The Register UK ☛ Meta fights Ofcom over how many billions count as billions

      The law allows Ofcom to fine companies for up to 10 percent of their qualifying worldwide revenue, or £18 million, whichever is higher. For Meta, which brought in about $201 billion last year, that means the numbers stop sounding like regulatory penalties and start sounding like national infrastructure projects.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • The Register UK ☛ NHS code clampdown draws open source backlash

    On Monday, The Register reported that the management at the NHS told its tech leadership to wall off the organization's FOSS repositories due to concerns about new LLM bug-hunting tools finding security vulnerabilities.

    If you will pardon a Douglas Adams quotation, this has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Dutch banks urge Meta, TikTok and Google to fight online fraud surge

    • Andrew Helwer ☛ Laptops all have built-in security tokens these days

      Another drawback of security tokens is that if you lose one, its private key is gone for good. There’s no way to back it up! So when you buy a security token, you really commit to buying at least two security tokens unless you want to risk locking yourself out of your various accounts. There is one alternative: maybe the only thing the cryptocurrency industry has contributed to the wider world is a moderately user-friendly method of backing up & restoring private keys by converting them into human-readable word list (see BIP 39) that can be written down. Of course this has produced some very innovative phishing attacks to convince users to write down that list of words in the wrong place, but that’s the game you play if you allow private keys to leave a secure enclave. Still, if you’re really paranoid about losing all of your security tokens you can use BIP 39 word lists as a method of last resort for regaining access to your systems.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ UK wants fresh fingerprints on £300M biometrics platform

      SCBP is part of the long-running Home Office Biometrics (HOB) program to bring together the government's collections of fingerprints, DNA profiles, and facial images. SCBP provides the core components of the Immigration and Asylum Biometrics System (IABS) used for passports, immigration and borders, and the corresponding Ident1 service used by law enforcement.

    • International Business Times ☛ Trump's FCC Shatters Privacy as They Demand Your Government ID Before Approving Any New Phone Number

      Under the mandate proposed on 30 April, consumers seeking to secure a network connection would be required to present a government-issued ID alongside their legal name, physical address, and any existing phone numbers. While authorities maintain the framework targets negligent service providers, the resulting identity-verification regime would close off one of the final semi-anonymous communication tools readily available to the public.

    • Kevin Liu ☛ Easy improvements to personal opsec

      Threat model: A casual adversary who asks Grok-5 for “name, phone, and address of all people in [X reference group],” with the intent of causing disruption or harm. I don’t expect the strategies below to work against adversaries that are highly-competent (including but not limited to government actors) or specifically targeting you; it’s very possible they won’t even work against casual adversaries in the future.

    • The Argument ☛ I can never talk to an AI anonymously again

      But soon, the entire debate over internet anonymity will be as anachronistic as an iPod Touch. That’s because Claude Opus 4.7 is here, and last week, I discovered it could identify me from text I had never published, text from when I was in high school, text from genres I have never publicly written in. And if it can identify me, soon, it will be able to identify many of you.

    • Chris Morgan ☛ I’ve banned query strings

      So I’ve decided to try a blanket ban for this site: no unauthorised query strings.

    • India Times ☛ US nears $400 million settlement with TikTok on child-privacy violations: ABC News

      The U.S. alleges that for years, millions of American children under age 13 have been using TikTok and that the site "has been collecting and retaining children's personal information."

      The government said TikTok violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires services aimed at children to obtain parental consent to collect personal information from users under age 13.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Google's DeepMind to train AI on player actions in quarter-million-player MMORPG Eve Online — Google bought in by purchasing a minority stake in the newly independent Fenris Creations

      Readers are likely more familiar with Eve Online being stewarded by CCP Games. Fenris Creations was recently formed when the developers sought to buy back the Eve Online game rights from Korean game-maker Pearl Abyss. The new Icelandic company paid $120M in cash and crypto to set up. While that may sound like a huge sum, Pearl Abyss spent more than double that amount to acquire the game maker back in 2018.

    • The Register UK ☛ Minister gives Palantir's NHS platform a clean bill of health

      The US spy-tech firm was awarded the contract to underpin the Federated Data Platform (FDP) after winning a succession of pandemic-era deals, worth a combined £60 million, without competition.

    • The Record ☛ GM to pay over $12 million in California privacy settlement involving driver data

      California authorities began investigating GM in 2023, a year before the New York Times reported that the car company and other auto manufacturers were selling consumers’ driving data to brokers who in turn sold it to insurers.

      The probe found evidence that from 2020 to 2024, GM peddled hundreds of thousands of consumers’ geolocations, driving behavior, names and contact information to Verisk and LexisNexis, earning about $20 million nationwide from the sales, the press release said.

      The consumer data sold was collected by GM’s OnStar feature, a service which is marketed as an emergency assistant and provider of directions, according to the press release.

  • Confidentiality

    • Panagiotis Vryonis ☛ shg, the SHell Guard

      While it is convenient to use your shell history as part of your long term memory, the downside is things that shouldn’t be there, end up there: A command you prepended with API_KEY=..., a quick and dirty curl --user "name:password", a PGPASSWORD=... psql, an ALTER USER USER() IDENTIFIED BY ..., and so on. And they are all probably saved in shell or app history file.

      This is not good, obviously. Credentials should not be saved in places where a malicious program can just read them, and they should not be preserved in backups.

• Defence/Aggression

  • NL Times ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] Box with photos, papers of WWII resistance fighter discovered in Royal Library depot

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Firetrucks swarm Cologne Cathedral after smell of smoke

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Riina Solman: Monuments idolizing terror belong in the trash heap of history

    There is no justification whatsoever for preserving Soviet monuments in Estonia. Yet intelligent people still debate whether Soviet symbols hold some kind of value as part of preserving layers of cultural heritage. They do not. In the urban landscape, they serve only to fuel national discord and provoke new conflicts, writes Riina Solman.

  • RFA ☛ Satellite imagery shows Philippine construction on two islands in disputed Spratlys

    The expansion of the runway at Thitu Island and the port at Nanshan Island, are intended to solidify Manila’s physical presence in the Spratlys in response to recent Chinese escalations in the Spratly archipelago, a scattering of hundreds of small islands, atolls and reefs claimed by many different countries, experts said.

  • India Times ☛ ByteDance targets 25% rise in AI infrastructure spending

    ByteDance has significantly increased its AI infrastructure spending by 25% to 200 billion yuan ($29.4 billion) this year, driven by rising memory chip costs and an expanded AI focus. The Chinese tech giant is prioritizing domestic AI chips, aligning with Beijing's push for local technology amid US rivalry. This investment supports ByteDance's AI chatbot, Doubao, which has seen substantial downloads.

  • The Nation ☛ Hungary Just Showed How to Kick Out a Strongman

    Trump is using authoritarian tactics that were perfected by Viktor Orbán. But the Hungarian authoritarian leader’s defeat may also offer a road map for beating Trumpism.

  • SBS ☛ Three IS-linked women arrested at Australian airports, expected to be charged

    Three women have been detained after families linked to the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) group landed back in Australia after spending around seven years in a northern Syrian refugee camp.

  • New York Times ☛ Opinion | Hegseth Is Sending Us a Warning

    How did we get here? In November, Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, a retired Navy captain, released a video with several other legislators reminding service members that they have a duty to disobey unlawful orders. “We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now,” they said. “This administration is pitting our uniform military and intelligence community against American citizens.”

  • Omicron Limited ☛ TikTok algorithm showed a pro-Republican bias during the last US presidential election

    Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE, created 323 dummy (bot) accounts across the states of New York, Texas, and Georgia. These bots were trained to be either Democrats or Republicans by watching videos aligned with partisan content, while others stayed neutral. Then the team tracked the videos TikTok recommended on these accounts' For You pages over 27 weeks.

    The results revealed a clear partisan imbalance, as the team explains in their paper: "Republican-conditioned accounts received 11.5% more party-aligned content compared with Democratic-conditioned accounts across all states."

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] How a controversial gas pipeline deal could further stall Bosnia's EU accession

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Julie K. Brown on Pulitzer Win, 8 Years After Jeffrey Epstein Exposé

    Brown’s work went on to win many prestigious accolades, but not a Pulitzer Prize, the most competitive award in journalism. That all changed on Monday, when the committee granted her a special citation, citing her “groundbreaking reporting in 2017 and 2018 that exposed Jeffrey Epstein’s systematic abuse of young women, the justice system that protected him, and, over time, his powerful network of associates and enablers.” In a Friday morning interview with Rolling Stone, the journalist talked about why she was heartened by the recognition, why she isn’t letting up, and why no matter what, the focus should stay on the survivors.

  • The Independent UK ☛ A Jeffrey Epstein pop-up museum is now open in New York City. Here’s what to know

    It took organizers roughly a month to print, bind and arrange the collection, according to Wired. “The evidence in this room is evidence of one of the most horrific crimes in American history,” the exhibit's chief organizer David Garrett told Wired. “When people come through this room, I hope they realize that in America, we have the rule of law, and if they stand up they can take action and demand accountability for the crimes that were committed.”

    Part of the installation details the timeline of Epstein’s relationship with President Trump, from their initial meeting in Palm Beach in 1987, to Epstein’s attendance at Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples and the end of Epstein’s Mar-a-Lago membership in 2007.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Jeffrey Epstein’s brother claims released suicide note is a ‘forgery’: report

    “I’ve known Jeff all my life. If he was going to kill himself, if he was going to write a suicide note, he would’ve written it ‘to somebody,’ not just a blanket statement saying goodbye,” Epstein said. “I don’t buy that.”

  • TMZ ☛ Jeffrey Epstein's Brother Says Suicide Note is a Forgery

    Jeffrey Epstein's brother says the disgraced financier didn't write the suicide note his former cellmate claims he did ... calling it a forgery.

  • Techdirt ☛ I Reached Out To The White House Counterterrorism Czar For Comment. He Lashed Out On X.

    My editors and I decided it was time to break out the Gorka files. For six months, I had monitored Gorka’s public remarks for clues about the status of his long-promised national counterterrorism strategy and updates on deadly U.S. strikes in Africa and the Middle East. It had started as old-fashioned beat reporting; I cover counterterrorism, and he’s the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.

    The trove of details I collected from months of Gorka’s public statements, along with interviews with more than two dozen current and former security officials, were woven into a ProPublica investigation published in April. It’s an in-depth look at Gorka and his role in the hollowed-out national security apparatus after a year of leadership turmoil and personnel loss as Trump shifted resources toward his immigration agenda.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Wall Street Journal story on Trump and Epstein took six months and 20 staff

    Speaking at Truth Tellers, The Sir Harry Evans Investigative Journalism Summit in London on Wednesday, Tucker joked that the story had caused “a whole world of pain”.

    She said: “It’s a really good example of why the kind of journalism that we’re all endeavouring to keep alive and focus on is challenged, because it took an awfully long time. It took a huge amount of resources.”

• Environment

  • Vox ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] These tropical forests are critically important. Why is this religious sect cutting them down?

  • The Age AU ☛ 2026-05-03 [Older] A crying glacier and a shivering ice shelf: A beautiful, tragic story

  • CBC ☛ 2026-05-02 [Older] Coral reefs in Mauritius are turning ghostly white. Can nurseries rescue them from climate change?

  • Pro Publica ☛ 2026-05-02 [Older] Event With Links to Oil Industry Teaches Judges “Healthy Skepticism” of Climate Science

  • Vox ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] The strange reason why wildlife agencies want Americans to buy more guns

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] The Minilateralist Incentive: A Climate Change Conference in Colombia

  • Truthdig ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini Alliance Cracks as Climate Denialists Turn on RFK Jr.’s Movement

  • The Revelator ☛ Protect This Place: Southern Appalachia

    This area is home to the greatest diversity of salamanders on Earth, including the giant eastern hellbender. Varying elevations throughout the mountains create unique ecosystems for more tree species than anywhere in North America, and the region serves as an important migration corridor for species from the North and South.

    The Appalachian Mountains are known as the oldest mountains in the world, and Marion is famous for its annual Bigfoot Festival. West Marion is a historically Black community, which lost its school after desegregation and community connectivity after the new interstate was built right through the middle.

  • 404 Media ☛ University Claims Withholding Water From Nuclear Weapons Data Center Is 'Unlawfully Discriminatory' to Data Centers

    The University of Michigan did not return 404 Media’s request for comment.

    Ypsilanti Township has been fighting the proposed datacenter for more than a year now. Data centers are wildly unpopular in the United States. They often cause noise pollution, affect water quality, and drive up utility bills for their neighbors. Local opposition to the Ypsilanti Township data center has been compounded by its connection to America’s nuclear weapons industry.

  • Daniel Holden ☛ Respectable people don't Litter

    But while it's an undeniable truth that the mints are now gone, this does not mean they disappeared on their own. By walking away from the mints, our business guy simply passed on the torch - someone will have had to work out what to do with the mints, and most likely it was the kind of person who, according to twelve-year-old-me at least, would have been without a job if not for him.

    That's one of the mad things about living on a planet with 8 billion people. If you have an inconvenience, in certain circumstances you can pretty much just baseball bat that thing into the crowd and let it hit some random poor sod on the head. To you, the inconvenience may as well have disappeared. To the person who got it to the head - it may as well have teleported out of nowhere. Isn't that fun!

  • Michigan Advance ☛ As drought worsens, Western states brace for wildfires, water shortages

    That snowpack is like a savings account that the West draws on when the hot, dry months arrive. It moistens the landscape as it melts, lessening the risk of severe wildfire. The runoff feeds into river basins, and the swelling waterways provide power to hydroelectric dams, irrigation to farmers and drinking water to cities.

    This year, Western states are heading into the summer with a desperately low balance — threatening wildfires, drinking water, crops, electricity and more.

  • Western Water ☛ Utah data center water fight intensifies

    Nearly 3,900 protests were filed over water concerns.

    Residents fear impacts on the Great Salt Lake and local water supplies.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Local DK ☛ Sweden halts construction of power cable to Denmark after EU row

      In March, the Commission agreed that Sweden would not have to share bottleneck fees paid to Svenska Kraftnät with other EU countries.

      But a new conflict has blown up over some of the Commission's other proposals. According to TT, the Commission will not agree to let Sweden use the bottleneck fees to fund power production as well as grid expansion.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Maryland citizens slapped with $2 billion power grid upgrade bill for out-of-state AI data centers — state complains to federal energy regulators, says additional cost breaks ‘ratepayer protection pledge’ promises

      The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel (OPC), a state agency that represents its utility consumers, filed a complaint before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) regarding PJM Interconnection, LLC’s plans to charge it $2 billion of the $22 billion it spent to upgrade its grid to accommodate increasing demand from data centers. According to the OPC’s press release, this $2 billion bill will cost the state’s consumers an extra $1.6 billion in the next ten years alone — that means an extra $823 million for residential (approx. $345 per customer), $146 million for commercial (approx. $673 per customer), and $629 million for industrial customers (approx. $15,074 per customer).

    • Android Police ☛ I ditched my super-fast phone charger for a super-slow one, and I'd recommend everyone do the same

      Most people who've owned a phone know that its battery life diminishes over time. It might begin by lasting days, but after a few years of use, you'll be lucky to see it last until lunchtime.

      Due to the nature of the tech, charging speed directly impacts it. So, to keep my handset ticking much longer, I began using the slowest charger I own, and I always tell others to do the same.

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] Wong confirms China negotiating on jet fuel supplies

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] Von der Leyen: Europe must quit unstable energy markets

    • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] This Was the Plan: UAE Exit From OPEC Marks Corporate Capture of Global Oil: As Conflict Destabilizes The Region, The Collapse Of Collective Control Hands Unprecedented Leverage To U.S. Power And Energy Giants

    • CBC ☛ 2026-05-03 [Older] Poilievre argues Carney has 'wasted an entire year' on possible Alberta pipeline

    • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-05-02 [Older] Oil, Empire, and the Price of War: How Energy Became the Ultimate Weapon

    • University of Michigan ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] City Council plans trial rollouts for Sustainable Energy Utility and Downtown Service Team

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-04-30 [Older] Australia’s battery boom has doubled in a year – and is rewiring the energy grid

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Blackstone buys into Danish Eurowind Energy

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Extreme weather and green energy on the rise in Europe

    • CBC ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] U.A.E. leaving OPEC amid Middle East energy supply crunch

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] UAE quits OPEC in shock move amid energy turmoil

    • Vox ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] We’re missing the economic fallout of the Iran war — just like we did with Covid

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Germany: Stranded whale 'Timmy' being transported towards ocean in special barge

    • New Yorker ☛ A Century of David Attenborough

      Below, New Yorker writers and staffers share some of their favorite scenes from the Attenborough bounty.

  • Overpopulation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Germany's birth rate reached lowest level on record in 2025

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Germany news: Cabinet discusses 2027 budget plans as Iran war threatens finances

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Germany: Merz hails 'historic' health care reform

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Worried Britons ‘prepping’ for major disruption with stash of tins and cash, survey shows | Business | The Guardian

    Fears over a natural disaster or cyber-attack are pushing households into contingency planning, Link survey shows

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • European Parliament ☛ Discover Europe Day 2026 with the European Parliament

    On 9 May, the European Union celebrates its achievements of unity and long-term peace, commemorating the Schuman Declaration in 1950.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Why Trump, DOGE’s [sic] NEH Cuts Were Too Slapdash to Hold Up

    U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon ruled in favor of plaintiffs, Kadetsky among them, finding that DOGE [sic] personnel didn’t have authority to terminate NEH grants and that the cuts violated the First and Fifth Amendments. The NEH, responsible for funding research, education programming, and restoration work, “was not created as a vehicle for government expression,” McMahon wrote in her ruling, but rather to “support the intellectual and cultural work of private citizens, scholars, teachers, writers, and institutions.”

  • Silicon Angle ☛ AI data center firm IREN's stock soars after it strikes $2.1B deal with Nvidia

    The partners plan to deploy up to 5 gigawatts of Nvidia’s DSX-branded infrastructure in the neocloud company’s global network of data centers. Investors reacted positively to the news, with IREN’s stock gaining more than 27% at one point today, before settling back to an 8% gain in late trading.

  • The Register UK ☛ Tech is now rolling out the old grievance grift

    We should pay attention to this argument as it transfers from politics to technology, because it is revealing the alleged victims' intent. They have done, and are going to do, some very unpopular things and, when people push back, those complaints need to be quickly marginalized.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ EU AI Act Deal Brings Nudifier App Ban And Rule Delays

    The European Union has reached a provisional agreement to amend parts of the EU AI Act, introducing simplification measures for businesses while also expanding restrictions on harmful AI applications, including so-called “nudifier” apps and AI-generated child sexual abuse material.

    The agreement, reached early Thursday by negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council, forms part of the EU’s broader “digital omnibus” package aimed at refining the implementation of the bloc’s landmark AI legislation.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ FCC reverses course, allows software updates for foreign-made drones and routers until 2029 — agency says blocking security patches could create cybersecurity risks

    The Federal Communications Commission announced on Friday, May 8, through its Office of Engineering and Technology (OET), that it was extending temporary waivers allowing certain foreign-produced drones, drone components, and consumer routers to continue receiving software and firmware updates in the United States.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ I’m a US drone pilot devastated by the FCC ban, but there is finally a way I can make my voice heard

    While there are American drone brands, none that I’ve found offer consumer drones – just expensive drones for Hollywood-level films, industrial drones, and military drones. That means American drone tech has been effectively placed on an indefinite pause until an American drone company is able to develop and launch a consumer drone – a process that will likely take years.

  • Sandor Dargo ☛ An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West by Konstantin Kisin

    Given how much I enjoy their style, I was happy to read Kisin’s bestselling book An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West. In this book, he defends the British and Western societies in which he is so grateful to have found himself.

    Let me share a couple of ideas from the book so you can decide whether you’d find it interesting.

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ Hey California! What Does It Take to Be Governor?

    How the state government works is not a mystery; it is not run by a secret priesthood whose initiates shut out all others from the sacred rites. A whole lot of unelected people are not just involved but expert in how legislation gets passed, and how the state administers its programs. Around the actual elected officials are thousands of people – staffers, lawyers, campaigners, and organizers (and, alas, lobbyists) trying to usher a piece of legislation through the process or prevent it from passing. State employees turn successful measures into policy. Journalists who build careers around reporting on the process, the politics, and the players are crucial for keeping the rest of us informed and holding politicians accountable. A lot of these people become as expert as any elected official (or more so in specialized areas); a lot of legislators rely on their expertise.

  • News Fuitures ☛ An Invitation to Build the Civic Information Economy

    What would it mean to rethink the economic systems supporting civic information, view sustainability in new ways, explore incentives that reward public outcomes, and build feedback loops that help funders understand the real-world impact? How do we create economic practices that encourage many responsive solutions in an era of polycrisis, rather than fewer?

    We propose that a true civic information economy, reframes civic information not just as an evolution of the journalism economy but as an economic sector in its own right. This sector deserves a diverse set of structural incentives to support a multitude of participants and to become sustainable, participatory, and aligned with public needs.

  • Bert Hubert ☛ George Orwell's review of Russel's Power: A New Social Analysis

    The most interesting part of Mr. Russell’s book is the earlier chapters in which he analyses the various types of power—priestly, oligarchical, dictatorial, and so forth. In dealing with the contemporary situation he is less satisfactory, because like all liberals he is better at pointing out what is desirable than at explaining how to achieve it. He sees clearly enough that the essential problem of today is “the taming of power” and that no system except democracy can be trusted to save us from unspeakable horrors.

    Also that democracy has very little meaning without approximate economic equality and an educational system tending to promote tolerance and tough-mindedness. But unfortunately he does not tell us how we are to set about getting these things; he merely utter what amounts to a pious hope that the present state of things will not endure. He is inclined to point to the past; all tyrannies have collapsed sooner or later, and “there is no reason to suppose (Hitler) more permanent than his predecessors.”

  • India Times ☛ Cloudflare to cut about 20% of 5,000-plus workforce as AI adoption reshapes operations

    The company said the restructuring will affect more than 1,100 employees worldwide. Cloudflare had 5,156 full-time employees at the end of 2025.

  • India Times ☛ OnlyFans sells minority stake to Architect Capital at $3.15 billion valuation: Report

    San Francisco-based Architect will ‌buy ⁠a 16% ⁠stake in OnlyFans for $535 million, the WSJ ​reported citing the terms of the deal announced on ​Friday.

  • Futurism ☛ Under Threat of Perjury, OpenAI's Former CTO Is Admitting Some Very Interesting Stuff About Scam Altman

    In other words: under oath, the former CTO — and briefly interim CEO — of the company behind the world’s most popular chatbot, ChatGPT, said that OpenAI’s still-reigning head exec falsely told her that lawyers had greenlit the company to leapfrog over certain safety protocols when, to the then-CTO’s understanding, that wasn’t true. Yikes!

  • Vox ☛ Elon Musk could lose his legal case against OpenAI and still get most of what he wants.

    Even if Musk doesn’t win his case, he’ll have managed to air out a lot of OpenAI’s dirty laundry in the process. “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America,” Musk texted Brockman just before the trial began. “If you insist, so it will be.”

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Ken Burns Makes the Case for the Greatness of 1776

    In this interview, Burns discusses his views on America’s Revolution, its flaws and aspirations, what it’s legacy and place in history really is, and how his team was able to make a cinematic documentary long before the existence of photography.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Ex-FBI Director James Comey indicted again — reports

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Why Ghana walked away from a US health deal

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] South Korea: Yoon's obstruction sentence hiked to 7 years

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Thailand ex-PM Thaksin Shinawatra is granted early parole

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini threatens US troop cuts in Germany

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] What are the sticking points for the EU's new budget?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Hungary inspires Israeli opposition bid to defeat Netanyahu

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Hungary's Magyar meets EU's von der Leyen in high-stakes Brussels visit

  • CBC ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini's move to deport Haitian, Syrian immigrants goes to Supreme Court, with possible wider implications

  • TruthOut ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Far Right Israeli Settler Movement Enters Syria in a Push for “Greater Israel”

  • HRW ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] Israel Bankrolls War Crimes in Occupied Syrian Golan

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Yle ☛ School show sparks Russian propaganda concerns

      The song, performed widely in Russia, praises "Mother Russia" and invokes the idea of "Holy Rus", a historical concept frequently referenced by Vladimir Putin in denying Ukraine's nationhood.

      Large Russian flags were waved during the school performance, prompting criticism, including from Education Minister Anders Adlercreutz (SPP).

      "School cannot become an arena where this kind of propaganda is pushed onto students and staff," he told Yle.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Estonia retains second place in world academic freedom ranking

    The Academic Freedom Index assesses the state of higher education and research in five categories: freedom of research and teaching, freedom of academic exchange and dissemination, institutional autonomy of universities, adherence to research ethics and good practices and academic and cultural freedom of expression. Estonia has remained near the top of the rankings for years and this year only the Czech Republic was rated higher in terms of academic freedom.

  • Common Dreams ☛ ABC Learns from Past Mistakes, Takes Stronger Stance Against Carr and Trump's Censorship Campaign

    “The Commission’s actions threaten to upend decades of settled law and practice and chill critical protected speech, both with respect to The View and more broadly,” reads ABC’s filing. “It is therefore imperative that the Commission act quickly to assure broadcasters that it will uphold its long-established standards protecting broadcasters’ good faith news judgment in including political candidates in bona fide news programming.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ FPF commends ABC for fighting back against FCC censorship

    ABC is accusing the Federal Communications Commission of violating the First Amendment and chilling press freedom, in a regulatory filing in its dispute with the FCC over whether “The View” is a bona fide news program exempt from the agency’s equal time requirement. The following can be attributed to Freedom of the Press Foundation Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern: [...]

  • [Old] Internet Society ☛ Mandated DNS Blocking: Critical Considerations [PDF]

    Mandated DNS blocking, often presented as a straightforward policy solution, is ineffective, harmful, and impractical. It is ineffective because it is easily circumvented by users and fails to remove targeted content, which simply reappears under new domain names. It is harmful because this blunt instrument cannot distinguish between lawful and unlawful material, leading to overblocking, fragmentation of the Internet's global naming system, and the failure of interconnected services, including critical security protocols. Finally, it is impractical because the DNS is not bound by geography, meaning national blocking orders against global resolvers create unintended and widespread extraterritorial effects. Mandated blocking is the wrong tool for a role the DNS was never designed to play. To address online harms, interventions must focus on the content itself and the actors responsible — not on compromising the universality, reliability, and security of the Internet's core infrastructure.

  • Internet Society ☛ DNS Blocking: Mind the Unintended Consequences

    The Internet is essential for our everyday lives. We use it to reach out to friends and family, pay our bills, study, work, watch our favorite movies, and do an infinite number of other things. But at the same time, criminal activities are also happening online. Growing concerns about online copyright infringement and child safety have led governments to regulate online services, which sometimes leads to content blocking or even making entire websites and apps unavailable.

    The problem is that many countries are increasingly turning to the Domain Name System (DNS) to enforce public policy online, putting the entire Internet in danger and spreading side effects that affect perfectly legal content and services. Increasingly, they are relying on mandated DNS blocking to enforce regulations. But this is not only dangerous to the Internet ecosystem. It’s also ineffective.

  • Joseph Lorenzo Hall ☛ The Collateral Damage of Mandated DNS Blocking

    Need a concise version for court? Litigants globally use our shorter brief, Mandated DNS Blocking: Critical Considerations, as evidence to clearly explain these technical limits to judges.

  • The Independent UK ☛ In legal dispute over 'The View,' ABC argues Trump administration is trying to chill free speech

    ABC’s filing to the Federal Communications Commission, made public Friday, came in a dispute involving one ABC station in Houston, KTRK-TV. But the wording indicated the network was embarking on a broader battle with the administration.

  • The Independent UK ☛ ABC gets tough with Trump’s FCC over The View after caving on Jimmy Kimmel

    In a newly filed response to that investigation, lawyers for ABC and their Texas affiliate KTRK wrote that the FCC’s actions are “counterproductive to the Commission’s stated goal of encouraging free speech and open political discussion.”

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Telling the truth about Iran is more dangerous than ever

    After months of protest, crackdown and war, on-the-ground reporting is more impossible than it has ever been. These challenges shape every aspect of how we report on what is happening in the country

  • Arkansas Advocate ☛ Proposal links Arkansas library funding to limiting access to ‘sexually explicit materials’

    Such materials would have to be placed in sections of the library designated for patrons 18 years and older.

    Board members suggested that libraries update their software, if possible, to prevent library cardholders under 16 from checking out certain books without parental permission.

  • EFF ☛ 2026-04-29 [Older] Former EFF Activism Director's New Book, Transaction Denied, Explores What Happens When Financial Companies Act like Censors

  • Project Censored ☛ 2026-04-28 [Older] The Project Censored Newsletter—April 2026

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-05-03 [Older] Amendments Protecting Pro-Palestine Speech in California Schools Face Backlash

  • TruthOut ☛ 2026-05-03 [Older] Amendments Protecting Pro-Palestine Speech in California Schools Face Backlash

  • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-05-01 [Older] Pro-Palestine demonstrators contested speeches during the May 1st celebrations at Fælledparken

  • University of Michigan ☛ 2026-05-04 [Older] Outgoing Faculty Senate chair Derek Peterson praises pro-Palestine activists in commencement speech

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Richard J Tofel ☛ Some Rationalization May Finally Be Coming for Newsroom Intermediaries

    Something I hear pretty often these days in our industry is a complaint about redundant intermediaries who are soaking up scarce philanthropic dollars, with resultant inefficiencies and unnecessary burdens on newsrooms overwhelmed with too many trainings, too many conferences, too many audits, just too many distractions.

    Why, a funder asked me recently, do two intermediaries this funder saw as offering duplicative services both still exist? Because you—and your funder colleagues—let them, I said.

  • Meduza ☛ Report: Russia revokes all foreign press credentials for Victory Day parade

    Russian authorities stripped journalists from all foreign news outlets of their press credentials for the Victory Parade, the German publication Der Spiegel reported on the evening of May 7.

  • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Call for Proposals Summer 2026 Pre-Record Project Briefing Edition

    Briefings should focus on a timely topic or on a project related to digital information. We especially invite submissions on recent reports and updates on projects, programs, or organizations that may have reported at CNI in the past. We recommend that these videos run no more than 15-20 minutes, though we leave this to the presenters’ discretion.

  • The New Lede ☛ Cheers to independent journalism: A message to TNL readers

    When Goodman and a few other journalists started Democracy Now! in 1996, the daily radio program was practically a one-woman show, airing on just nine community stations. But today, even as pillars of news media crumble all around, the non-profit news program is going strong, with millions of viewers tuning in from around the world.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Celebrity Culture Is Swallowing the News Media

    As trust in media craters and revenue dries up, legacy news outlets are filling their feeds with celebrity heart-to-hearts and personality-driven coverage. The result is journalism that fawns over fame and power rather than holding it to account.

  • CPJ ☛ How the Trump administration is using immigration authorities to restrict speech 

    Here are four things you need to know about how immigration agencies have participated in restricting press freedom in the United States: [...]

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Senator at center of Utah AI data center debate gets physical, slaps phone out of reporter’s hand — reporter covering cases of harassment against his business

    A witness who saw the interaction called the authorities, resulting in the filing of a police report. Once the situation had cooled down, law enforcement officers told Wang that the Senator was apologizing for the incident. However, the crew was also served with a trespassing notice, warning them that they are prohibited from going on the property or premises of the business for a year.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Techdirt ☛ FBI Raids Office Of Dem Politician Instrumental In Redrawing Virginia Voter Maps… With Fox News In Tow

    If you’re not familiar with why Trump might be targeting L. Louise Lucas, here comes some remedial instruction. In April, Virginia voters approved redrawn voting districts that could conceivably shift the Democratic Party’s Congressional majority from 6-5 to 10-1. This was done in response to the GOP’s unprecedented mid-term gerrymandering — something that’s usually done every 10 years or so as census data begins to trickle in.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Trump’s fruitless search for a goreable ox (09 May 2026)

    I've got good news and bad news for Trump. The good news: you can get elected by promising to do something about the cost of living crisis, and the president actually has a lot of ways to improve people's daily costs. The bad news: everything you could do to fix working people's cost of living will make an oligarch worse off.

    This is the essential conundrum of Trumpismo: to keep his base happy, he needs to make their lives better; but to make their lives better, he'll have to make oligarchs angry. The oligarchs' wealth bonanza caused the cost of living crisis. Oligarchs' pleasure causes our suffering, so alleviating our suffering will reduce their pleasure.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Melania Trump’s Mother’s Day op-ed in Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post shredded by readers: ‘What a disgrace’

    Another posted: “She lives a life of excess and materialism and she’s telling mothers—some who work two and three jobs—to do more at home but make sure they take time for self care?... What a disgrace.”

    “Your husband compared a reporter to a female dog the other day,” one reader added.

    “You are one tone deaf person,” wrote another.

  • TruthOut ☛ Contractors Razed a 1,000-Year-Old Indigenous Site to Build Trump’s Border Wall

    “This wall cuts through sovereign ancestral lands that existed long before the U.S.-Mexico border,” adds Congressmember Adelita Grijalva, whose district includes the area. “The federal government is prioritizing this rapid construction of an unnecessary wall without any meaningful tribal consultation.”

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • EFF ☛ 2026-04-27 [Older] The Internet Still Works: SmugMug Powers Online Photography

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Iran Turns Internet Cables into Hostage Takers in the Strait of Hormuz

    Iran is moving to seize control of seven critical undersea internet cables running through the Strait of Hormuz, forcing foreign operators to beg for permits, cough up transit fees, and submit to Iranian law while handing all maintenance over to local regime-tied firms.

    These cables carry 15 to 20 percent of global internet and financial traffic linking Europe, the Gulf, and Asia. Gulf states depend on them for over 90 percent of their connectivity, banking, and cloud services. Iran, by contrast, routes less than 40 percent through them and leans on overland backups through Turkey.

  • Federal News Network ☛ What does the FCC have to do with cyber security?

    "Cyber attackers do not care, they look for any kind of vulnerability, whether it's as simple as a router to something more complex," said Zenji Nakazawa.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Victor Kropp ☛ Brandolini’s law

    Back in 2021–2022, I was co-hosting and producing a podcast. I purchased some fitting background music before we started and have been using it in every episode.

    Some distribution platforms even requested a proof of purchase when I first added the podcast there, which I, of course, provided. But not Spotify. Instead, Spotify decided to remove half of the published episodes at the beginning of this week, seemingly on a random basis. They claimed that I didn’t have permission to use the third-party music. And all that 3 years after the last published episode.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ When the free-trade right punished competition

    Yeah, although I’m not even onboard with that part. I get that you wrote “reasonable”, not “fantastic”, and maybe that’s where I’d land too as in “contrary to the rest of this law which is tyrannical, suffocating, makes a mockery of freedom, and furthers corporate trampling of people power, this part at least makes sense, I ‘only’ disagree with it (reasoning that it’s great if public infrastructure primarily benefit public works, and that this paragraph whiffs of the ‘marknadshyror’ debacle and, like it, will lead to furthering the collapse of what we the people built together and have together), whereas the rest of the law is just complete and thorough cruelty without any amount of reason, motivation, or consistency with self-professed free-trade values, just a blatant money grab and a punch in the face of all of us” kind of “reasonable”.

  • [Old] Reuters ☛ OpenAI executives weigh antitrust accusation against Microsoft, WSJ reports

    Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 to support the startup's development of AI technologies on its Azure cloud platform. Since then, however, OpenAI has been looking for ways to reduce its reliance on the tech heavyweight. The company plans to add Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google Cloud service to meet its growing needs for computing capacity, Reuters reported earlier this month.

  • [Old] USDOJ ☛ Antitrust Division | Testimony Of Franklin M. Fisher : United States V. Microsoft Corporation

    16. I now turn to a summary of my basic conclusions.

    17. Microsoft has achieved monopoly power in the market for operating systems for Intel-compatible desktop personal computers.

    18. Microsoft has foreseen the possibility that the dominant position of its Windows operating system will be eroded by Internet browsers and by Java, which are capable of supporting software applications that are operating-system independent.

    19. Microsoft has taken anti-competitive actions to exclude competition in Internet browsers in order to protect the current dominance of its Windows operating system. Microsoft's conduct includes: anti-competitive agreements with PC manufacturers that require the manufacturers to acquire Microsoft's Internet browser as a condition of acquiring Microsoft's Windows operating system, that hinder the manufacturers' promotion of competing browsers, and that restrain PC manufacturers from removing Microsoft's browser or substituting an alternative browser; the predatory pricing and distribution of Microsoft's browser; and anti-competitive and exclusionary agreements with Online Services (OLSs), Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Internet Content Providers (ICPs), and others. Taken together, Microsoft's actions as to browsers are not profit-maximizing in themselves but are profitable only because of their adverse effects on competition.

    20. Microsoft has also taken anti-competitive actions to restrain the use and availability of the Java technology in order to protect the current dominance of the Windows operating system. Further, Microsoft has engaged in a number of anti-competitive acts and solicitations designed to convince other firms not to compete against Microsoft in platform-level software.

    21. Microsoft is using its monopoly power over PC operating systems to secure monopoly power over Internet browsers.

  • Court House News ☛ Fox slams Newsmax over reoccurring antitrust claims

    Newsmax first leveled monopoly accusations against Fox Corporation and Fox News Network in a September lawsuit filed in the Southern District of Florida. The right-wing cable news outlet referenced “no-carry” provisions and financial penalties if distributors carried the channel. The outlet said Fox blocked Newsmax from platforms like Fubo, Sling TV and Hulu.

    These practices, Newsmax says, resulted in a smaller market share and lack of major advertisers.

  • Patents

    • [Old] Wired ☛ The Economy of Ideas

      Since it is now possible to convey ideas from one mind to another without ever making them physical, we are now claiming to own ideas themselves and not merely their expression. And since it is likewise now possible to create useful tools that never take physical form, we have taken to patenting abstractions, sequences of virtual events, and mathematical formulae - the most unreal estate imaginable.

      In certain areas, this leaves rights of ownership in such an ambiguous condition that property again adheres to those who can muster the largest armies. The only difference is that this time the armies consist of lawyers.

  • Trademarks

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Linux mascot Tux the penguin hits 30 years old — Linus Torvalds outlined the design of the 'slightly overweight penguin' on May 9, 1996

      Though we reckon Torvalds was correct in pushing for a penguin expressed in a simple brushstroke, the Tux mascot is still pretty detailed/ornate compared to a typical tech company logo. In 2026, even the fox from Firefox is on the way out, being reduced all the way to a circular spot, if we are reading the official teaser video correctly.

    • Right of Publicity

      • India Times ☛ EU strikes deal to ban sexualised AI deepfakes

        EU negotiators from the European Parliament and European capitals also agreed to delay the implementation of high-risk AI rules, concerning models deemed potentially dangerous to safety, health or citizens' fundamental rights.

        The rules had been due to enter into force in August 2026 for stand-alone AI systems and a year later for AI tools embedded in other products, but will now be pushed back to December 2027 and August 2028 respectively.

      • NBC ☛ Actor alleges James Cameron used her teenage face to create key 'Avatar' character

        Kilcher’s likeness was captured in production sketches, sculpted into maquettes and laser-scanned into high-resolution digital models, then distributed across multiple visual effects vendors to render Neytiri’s final appearance, according to the release. The image derived from Kilcher’s face went on to appear in the films, on movie posters and on merchandise without her knowledge or consent, it says.

      • Futurism ☛ James Cameron Accused of Stealing 14-Year-Old Girl's Face for Main Character of Billion-Dollar “Avatar” Films

        Filed Tuesday by native Peruvian actress and activist Q’orianka Kilcher, the suit alleges that Cameron “extracted” Kilcher’s “facial features” from a photo of her playing Pocahontas in the 2006 movie “The New World” and “directed his design team to use it as the foundation for the character of Neytiri,” one of the “Avatar” franchise’s main characters. When “The New World” was filmed, Kilcher, now 36, was just 14.

  • Copyrights

    • Ian Linkletter ☛ Update #33: The lawsuit is over! | Stand Against Proctorio's SLAPP!

      Yesterday, Proctorio filed a CDO in BC Supreme Court. A CDO is not a finding of fact or an admission of liability, but a mutual agreement to dismiss the lawsuit. The CDO dismisses all claims against me, but leaves the general framework of the 2022 injunction in place, which includes the Court’s clarification that I am free to access, download, disseminate, copy, record, post, transfer, share, or comment on material obtained from any public source. What I cannot do is access the Proctorio Help Center or Academy, or share materials from those sources, unless they come from a public source.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Sphere Posts 69% Q1 '26 Revenue Hike Amid Ticket Sales Jump

      And while one might assume that these often-sold-out live events are doing most of the heavy lifting revenue-wise, “Sphere Experience” Wizard of Oz showings played a major part in fueling the Q1 2026 growth, execs disclosed.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ U.S. Removes Bulgaria from Piracy Watch List After Torrent Tracker Crackdown

      Bulgaria has proven that the right legislative update can go a long way in Washington. The USTR credits the country's removal from the Watch List to a 2023 amendment of the Criminal Code, which makes piracy enforcement easier. This new legislation resulted in the shutdown of three long-running torrent trackers and the arrest of several individuals who now face criminal charges.