Leftovers

• Bruce Schneier ☛ Laurie Anderson Is Quoting Me

  Not by name, but Laurie Anderson quotes me in one of the tracks of her new album:

  "My favorite quote is from a cryptologist who said “If you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology and you don’t understand your problems.”"

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Building A Device To Map Magnetic Fields

    The build uses an ESP32 microcontroller, which is built on to a board with an integrated 4.3″ touchscreen LCD. It’s paired with an Arduino Nano, which does the work of actually talking to a pair of EMS100 Fluxgate magnetic sensors. The slower, less capable Arduino handles the low-level chatter and then passes the readouts to the ESP32 over a UART connection. Power is courtesy of a pair of 18650 lithium-ion cells, and a XL4005 DC-DC converter. A lithium-ion charging module is on hand to keep the batteries topped off safely. Scan results are visualized on the device itself using a heatmap representation, and can also be exported to SD card for later analysis if so desired.

  • Chris ☛ Pythagorean Addition

    tl;dr: Instead of labouriously computing \(c = \sqrt{a^2 + b^2}\), we can mentally calculate using the alpha-max plus beta-min algorithm, by estimating

    \[\hat{c} = \mathrm{max}\left(a, 0.9a + 0.5b \right)\]

    and this will be very close to the actual \(c\). This is useful for adding up sources of variance, or figuring out radiuses, or other such things.

  • John D Cook ☛ Square root of x² − 1

    How should we define √(z² − 1)? Well, you could square z, subtract 1, and take the square root. What else would you do?!

    The question turns out to be more subtle than it looks.

  • John D Cook ☛ A closer look at Cosh[ArcCosh[x] + ArcCosh[y]]

    The previous post derived the identity

    \cosh\Big( \operatorname{arccosh}(x) + \operatorname{arccosh}(y)\Big) = xy + \sqrt{x^2 -1} \sqrt{y^2 -1}

    and said in a footnote that the identity holds at least for x > 1 and y > 1. That’s true, but let’s see why the footnote is necessary.

• Career/Education

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Why Every Publisher Needs a Library Relations Strategy

    Publisher engagement with the library community has evolved considerably over the past decades. The growth of consortial licensing, the emergence of transformative agreements, and the increasing complexity of open access policy implementation have all created conditions in which publishers and libraries must work together not only as commercial counterparties but also as operational partners in the infrastructure of scholarly communication. And yet, despite this increased interdependence, many publishers have not developed a library relations strategy — a deliberate, sustained commitment to engaging with the library community in ways that are substantive, reciprocal, and structurally supported, operating alongside sales relationships.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Engineers Who Would Be Philosophers: The Cult of TL;DR

    Refusal of attention is not a signal of intelligence. It is a refusal. The person who tells you they didn’t read your post is not demonstrating that they have better filters than you do; they are demonstrating that they have decided in advance what is worth their time, and they would like you to know that what you wrote did not clear the bar. The bar was not set by analysis. The bar was set by whatever conclusion the person had already arrived at before encountering your text. If your text aligned with their conclusion, they might have read it; if it did not, they would not, and either way the reading was never going to be the activity by which their position was formed.

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: NYT Shares How A Book Gets on Our Library Shelves Considering Post B&T Collapse Issues and Why This is All Part of Our Inability to Communicate Who We Are and What We Do

    My most recent example (before today) is the eBook pricing issue that I have been working on fixing here in IL-- for years, but it is finally going somewhere. Click here and here for that. That second link includes my letter that was filed as part of our hearing for the House. We got through the IL House with a 99-0 vote and are awaiting the Senate to move on it.

    When we communicate our needs and how our processes work clearly, people listen. Even when they are frustrated. And today I have a perfect example, except it was not US who stepped up to communicate it was the NYT.

  • Haskell For All ☛ Haskell for all: Type out the code

    Back in the day I read one of Zed Shaw's "Learn X the hard way" courses (I think it was his C++ course) and he began the course with a disclaimer that said something like "do not copy and paste the examples; type them out" because he believed strongly that doing so improved your comprehension of the material.

    These days he recommends something even stronger: [...]

• Hardware

  • University of Toronto ☛ The hardware needs of our mail system (as of mid 2026)

    In a comment on my entry on universities, email, and the issues of running things in house, I mentioned that our departmental email system has a non-trivial cost in hardware alone to keep going. To better illustrate that, I'll describe all of the servers that our email system currently requires (because it's more than one). Some of these servers exist for historical reasons and may go away at some point, but many of them don't.

    Currently, we have: [...]

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Atlantic ☛ A Tobacco-Free Generation Is Coming—Someday

    Lawmakers included language in the bill designed to dissuade older people from buying cigarettes for their underage acquaintances. But, more important, that issue will likely work itself out over time. By 2034, no one under 25 will be able to purchase cigarettes. And with each passing year, kids’ sources of illegal cigarettes should progressively dwindle. Because having peers who smoke increases young people’s chances of starting themselves, fewer kids being able to get their hands on cigarettes should have a ripple effect, dissuading more and more of their peers from experimenting. By 2079, no one under 70 will be legally able to smoke. It will become the habit not of teenage rebellion but of retirement homes.

  • Hackaday ☛ How Pulse Oximetry Figures Out Your Blood Oxygen Levels

    If you’ve ever had a medical team investigating cardiac issues, you’ve probably had a bunch of electrodes stuck all over your chest and been hooked up to an electrocardiogram. This is the gold standard when it comes to understanding electrical activity in the heart and can diagnose a great many conditions. However, sometimes doctors just need the basic information—your pulse rate, and whether or not there’s actually any oxygen in your blood.

    Thankfully, there’s a cheap and simple device that can offer that exact information. It’s the pulse oximeter, and it’s a key piece of equipment that’s just about vital for monitoring vitals. Let’s learn how it works!

  • Joshua Blais ☛ Back to silence

    I have never understood how people have notifications across a half dozen applications on their devices, but were I to allow social media on my phone (I don’t), I would recommend turning off all notifications and never going back. The best way to mitigate this point of noise is to not install it in the first place.

  • Jim Grey ☛ I oppose marijuana legalization — on libertarian grounds

    I used to be for legalization. Then I moved back to Indianapolis and started smelling it regularly, and my position changed.

    Let me be clear that I’m utterly uninterested in policing what adults do in their own homes. This isn’t a public health argument, and it’s not a moral argument. It’s a nuisance argument.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • San Fancisco ☛ LinkedIn to lay off more than 600 California workers this summer [Ed: 600 in California, and that's only one state]

    Most of the cuts are in the Bay Area. LinkedIn plans to lay off 108 employees at its San Francisco office, 59 in Sunnyvale, 352 in Mountain View and 66 remote employees tied to Mountain View, according to the filings.

  • New York Times ☛ The Morale of Tech Workers Is Plunging as Layoffs Mount

    On the website Blind, professionals share advice — and gallows humor — anonymously. It is chronicling the curdling of tech optimism.

  • OPINION: Is Ireland's economy too reliant on big tech firms? [Ed: Ireland's economy too reliant on big TAX EVADERS from America]

    With many tech companies announcing layoffs and restructuring in recent weeks, concerns are growing about Ireland’s reliance on multinational tech firms

    Should we stop relying so heavily on tech giants? asks Tipperary Live. ​When many American technology giants arrived due to Ireland’s low corporation tax rate, it created many jobs but also a false GDP for the country.

    Companies such as Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft helped create thousands of high-paying jobs and turned Dublin into a major international tech hub.

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

    • Futurism ☛ Students Boo and Jeer as AI Name-Reader Flops Spectacularly at College Graduation Ceremony

      After some starts and stops, college president Tiffany Hernandez took to the podium to reveal that the error was made by a “new AI system” the school was using, prompting a wave of boos and jeers.

      “That is a lesson learned for us,” Hernandez continued. She then noted, optimistically, that the students whose names were bungled “were able to walk the stage and get a picture, which is what I would hope is the most meaningful.”

    • Futurism ☛ Pizza Hut's AI Store Control System Is Such a Disaster That It's Wasted $100 Million, Lawsuit Alleges

      That’s the case at Pizza Hut, at least, and not everyone’s happy about it. One of the pie-slinging chain’s largest franchisees in the country is suing the parent company over its mandatory deployment of an AI-powered kitchen management and delivery system that’s been so disastrous that it’s allegedly caused the franchisee to lose over $100 million, according to the lawsuit.

    • New Yorker ☛ The Prehistory of A.I. Slop

      Lately, this kind of junk has become known as A.I. slop—“slop” was Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year—and it’s everywhere, gumming up the works, slowing down traffic, and making a god-awful mess. It brings to mind the time, in 1919, that a tank in Boston containing nearly two and a half million gallons of molasses burst, and a fearsome wave of syrup reportedly fifty feet high and travelling at thirty-five miles an hour (faster than you’d expect, really) flooded the city. The cleanup of the Great Molasses Flood took weeks, and, for months, everywhere that anyone had tracked molasses, including underground subway platforms, was still tacky. Even years later, on hot days, the North End smelled like a gingerbread house.

    • Science Alert ☛ 'AI Slop' Is Flooding Science Publishing, And One Major Site Is Fighting Back : ScienceAlert

      The preprint website arXiv has announced that researchers who have put their names to papers that included errors clearly generated by artificial intelligence (AI) will face a year-long ban and ongoing restrictions.

      The move is a response to a growing influx of AI-generated papers faced by scholarly journals as well as sites such as arXiv, which serve as unofficial platforms for research publication ahead of peer review.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Linus Torvalds says flood of duplicate AI-generated vulnerability reports have made Linux security mailing list 'almost entirely unmanageable' — private list 'a waste of time for everybody involved' in switch to new public system

      The problem, according to Torvalds, is the combination of volume and redundancy: multiple researchers are independently discovering identical bugs using automated tools and filing them separately on a private mailing list, where nobody can see what has already been submitted. Maintainers end up spending their time triaging duplicates and directing reporters to fixes that were merged weeks earlier.

      "AI detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved," Torvalds wrote on LKML.

    • Niels Provos ☛ The Day After the Zero-Days

      Discovery is no longer constrained the way it was thirty years ago. The same workflow that rediscovered my own twenty-seven-year-old SACK bug is open source, runs against arbitrary code, and operates without acceptable-use friction in the hands of an adversary.

      There is no winning this race on patch cadence. The path forward is to make the bug class irrelevant. Vulnerability management continues, at a fraction of the operational weight it carries today. The infrastructure disrupts the kill chain regardless of patch timing.

    • 404 Media ☛ Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain

      I see AI content where I’m conditioned to expect and ignore it: In Google’s “AI Overviews” that famously told us to eat glue pizza, in engagement-bait LinkedIn posts, and throughout our Facebook and Instagram feeds. But increasingly I have the feeling that it’s everywhere, coming from all directions, completely unavoidable. It’s not exactly that I have a revulsion to AI-assisted content or don’t want to get fooled by it. It’s that something is happening where my brain has become the AI police because everything feels incredibly uncanny. I will be going about my day reading, watching, or listening to something and, suddenly, I notice that something is wildly off. Quite simply, I feel like I’m going nuts.

    • Matt Birchler ☛ I said I'd destroy humanity and take their jobs, and I wonder why they don't like me

      Third, and related, AI CEOs need to learn how to talk to humans. They'll go, "worst case we're about to destroy the human race, best case we're going to take away all your jobs," and then wonder why people aren't excited. For what it's worth, I don't think they're doing either, but they're in such a bubble that they think this shit lands with people. It lands with their VC friends, after all!

    • Pivot to AI ☛ GitHub Copilot AI token charges to go up 10×–100×

      We’ve known for years that the chatbot vendors run at a massive loss. OpenAI was spending $2.35 for each $1 of revenue in 2024, and it’s only got worse since then. Anthropic keeps pushing its prices upwards. We knew that one day the prices would go way up.

    • The New Stack ☛ GitHub will start paying some bug bounty hunters in swag instead of cash

      GitHub is tightening its bug bounty program standards as AI-assisted vulnerability reports overwhelm security teams with low-quality submissions.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Eric Schmidt gets booed at University of Arizona commencement

      Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is such an individual, and, funny story: he's so out of touch with the universe that he believed that a ton of graduates from the University of Arizona would love hearing about how AI is about to screw them right into poverty.

  • Social Control Media

    • Meduza ☛ TikTok bans wave of bloggers, some with millions of followers, over ads for Russian drone assembly college

      Users are banned under international sanctions against Russia. Because Alabuga Polytech is sanctioned by the EU, social media platforms operating there cannot provide it with advertising services.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Troubling questions over South African internet infrastructure attacks

      To sustain the attacks – which peaked at over 600Gbit/s in the case at least two hosting providers and which have run for hours at a time – is not a cheap exercise. Just one 300Gbit/s attack, according to the security specialist, would cost at least US$5 000 per target.

    • PC World ☛ Microsoft's May update is failing to install on some Windows 11 PCs

      Microsoft’s May security update KB5089549 is failing to install on some Windows 11 machines. Microsoft has now acknowledged on this support page that the installation of this important update fails on some computers—while displaying error code 0x800f0922—if there is insufficient free space on the EFI System Partition (ESP): [...]

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Zero-Day Exploit Against Windows BitLocker

      It’s nasty, but it requires physical access to the computer: [...]

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Amazon Is Bleeding the Post Office Dry

    The US Postal Service promises to deliver mail to rural areas where private carriers won’t extend service because it isn’t profitable. Now Amazon is taking advantage of that publicly built infrastructure for its own gain — at rural mail carriers’ expense.

  • Wired ☛ Former OpenAI Staffers Warn That xAI’s Poor Safety Record Could Complicate SpaceX’s IPO

    In a letter directed to investors published on Tuesday, the ex-staffers highlighted what they describe as “unpriced risks” related to xAI that could complicate SpaceX’s reported plans to raise up to $75 billion as part of its IPO. The rocket company’s private valuation shot up to over $1 trillion after it acquired xAI last year. Musk claimed his rocket company could launch data centers into space for his AI lab, but the letter's authors argue that xAI’s poor record on safety issues could complicate how investors view the combined company as it gets ready to submit its IPO prospectus filing.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ Your Privacy Shouldn't Be A Corporate Decision

      We're suing DHS and ICE to reveal their efforts to unmask online critics, creating privacy-enhancing free software, and pushing for stronger privacy laws for everyone. This is all thanks to over 30,000 EFF members—a community you can join today.

    • The Register UK ☛ Poland builds its own Signal amid security concerns

      Offering examples of these social engineering campaigns, the government said attackers impersonate Signal support staff and abuse this perceived trust to take over victims' accounts.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Bill C–22 Can Be Corrected

      Whether Signal is crying wolf or simply believes the laws in those countries are strong enough to prevent mandated backdoors is a good question. In the U.K., for instance, Ofcom is not allowed to require a backdoor, but it is empowered to tell providers to weaken encryption for some without compromising the privacy of their platforms for all when “feasible technology” exists to do so. On the one hand, that technology probably cannot exist; on the other hand, Signal is banking on a privacy-friendly interpretation of that law if it is ever tested.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: There’s no such thing as “age verification” (19 May 2026)

      "Object permanence" is the ability to understand that even if you can't see something, it still exists. Most toddlers acquire a thorough sense of object permanence by the age of two. But when it comes to technopolitics, object permanence eludes even full-grown lawmakers. These motherfuckers would lose a game of peek-a-boo.

      Over and over again, politicians are warned about the ways that their pet policies will a) produce enormous collateral damage, and; b) be easily evaded by the people they're seeking to control, giving rise to a cascade of ever-more extreme measures. And yet, they swallow a spider to catch a fly and then act baffled and hurt when we tell them it's their own damn fault that they now have to swallow a bird to catch the spider: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • ADF ☛ Boko Haram and ISWAP Fight For Control of Sambisa Forest

    Jama’tu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad (JAS) and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have fought for control of the forest since Boko Haram split into the two factions in 2016. Recent reports indicate their battles are intensifying.

  • France24 ☛ Joint Nigeria-US strikes kill 175 Islamic State group fighters, both militaries say

    The remote region has been gripped by an Islamist extremist insurgency since 2009, first by Boko Haram, then its offshoot and rival, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).

  • CNBC ☛ Trump tax returns get protection from IRS under fund settlement

    The protection extends to Trump, his family members, the Trump Organization and "parties including trusts, parent, sister or related companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries." It covers any pending tax audits of Trump and the others referred to in the addendum that the IRS would have been conducting at the time of the settlement.

    Blanche is Trump's former criminal defense lawyer.

  • Politico LLC ☛ Justice Department expands Trump settlement to cover his tax audits

    The nine-page settlement agreement DOJ released Monday, setting up a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate victims of alleged weaponization of law enforcement, did not mention any resolution of disputes over Trump’s tax returns, which he has repeatedly claimed were under protracted audits by the IRS.

  • Reuters ☛ Trump-IRS settlement 'forever' bars audits into tax claims for Trump and his family

    Settlement bars IRS from auditing Trump, relatives or companies for past tax years

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ IRS ‘Forever Barred’ From Investigating Trump After DOJ Expands Settlement

    The Justice Department on Tuesday issued an expanded settlement agreement with President Donald Trump that includes broad language stating that the IRS is “forever barred” from “examinations” of Trump, his family members and his businesses.

  • TruthOut ☛ Gutting Voting Rights Act Is Just First Step in Far Right Plan to End Democracy

    Now, six months later, it’s hard to imagine such elation after an election — not after the right wing’s latest act of legal warfare on democracy with the Supreme Court’s further gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Not wasting time, Republicans in Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina redrew maps to end Black-majority districts immediately after the decision. Next, the Virginia Supreme Court cold-stopped Democrats from redistricting four more seats to fight Republican gerrymandering. Even before the Supreme Court ruling, the Trump administration had the FBI raid a voting center while pushing the SAVE America Act. The legislation, currently stalled in the Senate, would erect high walls to voting — such as demanding a passport or birth certificate, rather than just a driver’s license. It could cut off more than 21 million Americans from voting, including the poor, married people with changed names, the elderly, and people of color.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Christian Nationalism Has Arrived in Britain

    Far-right activists in Britain are increasingly adopting the rhetoric of Christian nationalism. Yet while they look to American churches for an example, their evangelical style seems unlikely to map onto Brits’ quite different attitudes toward religion.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Physical attacks against crypto holders, including kidnap and assault, up 75% in 2025 — 72 confirmed incidents see $41 million lost, real number likely higher

    Whales and other large crypto holders are increasingly becoming targeted by criminals for kidnapping and coercion, especially as public blockchain records paired with leaked data and on-chain analytics have made it easier to identify the big transactions and huge wallets. Bloomberg reports that incidents of physical attacks against crypto holders have increased by 75% in 2025 — note that this only counts the 72 confirmed reports with $41 million worth of cryptocurrency lost. It’s suspected that the actual number might even be higher, as some victims do not notify the authorities and simply pay the ransom demand.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Trump Just Stole Your Money!

    Donald Trump just stole over A BILLION DOLLARS from you and me and every other taxpayer. And he’s using it to reward cronies and criminals who committed violence on his behalf.

    If this sounds corrupt as hell, that’s because IT IS corrupt as hell.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ The Chicks' Natalie Maines Slams Trump After Creation of Slush Fund

    In a characteristically vehement post on Instagram yesterday, Maines opined: “Our democracy is disappearing right before our eyes. This fugly slut is using your gas money to pay the insurrectionists. But don’t worry about it. I’m sure posting selfies will fix everything.”

    The post coincided with yesterday’s news that Trump had created a $1.776 billion fund to send taxpayer money to “victims of lawfare and weaponization.” The fund was announced hours after Trump withdrew a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the 2019 leak of Trump’s tax filings to The New York Times.

  • The Nation ☛ Trump Just Created a White Grievance Reparations Fund

    The IRS lawsuit would have been thrown out of court if Trump had not dismissed the case. Trump controls the IRS and the Treasury Department. To the extent that the IRS did anything wrong (and the IRS didn’t do anything wrong), Trump’s case against it should have been moot, as he now oversees the agency. There cannot be a “case or controversy” for the courts to adjudicate when one party controls both sides of the litigation. “Trump v. Trump” is not a case. Trump was just trying to extort the government he now runs for $10 billion.

    As for the DOJ slush fund, one way to look at it is that Trump is effectively setting up a mechanism where taxpayers have to pay for him to funnel money to his own private army. The people who participated in the January 6 insurrection are literal criminals who acted on Trump’s behalf and were then pardoned by him—only to now be offered taxpayers dollars for their violent efforts. It’s… insane.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Looting of America

    So the Trump administration is creating a $1.776 billion slush fund — 1776, get it? — to pay off victims of “lawfare and weaponization.” Just to be clear, if you’re a U.S. taxpayer, this action means that almost $1.8 billion of your money will be handed out to whomever a panel appointed by Donald Trump decides to reward. The beneficiaries are likely to include January 6 insurrectionists, as well as Trump, his family, and his allies.

    Few things shock me these days, but this development — in which a Justice Department that works for Trump is paying a vast sum to “settle” a lawsuit brought by Trump himself — is a new nadir in self-dealing, further revealing Trump’s utter contempt for the American people.

  • The Next Move ☛ Sen. Mark Kelly: ‘That’s Not How This Country Works’

    Last month, the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move, honored Senator Mark Kelly with the Heroes of Democracy Award, which recognizes people who have taken risks and made sacrifices for freedom. Now, we’re pleased to share Senator Kelly’s remarks from the RDI Heroes of Democracy Gala: [...]

• Environment

  • The Conversation ☛ How traffic makes cities warmer

    But another source of urban heat receives much less attention: traffic.

    Motorised vehicles release heat directly into the urban environment. This is especially true of petrol and diesel vehicles, where much of the fuel energy is lost as waste heat from internal combustion engines and exhaust systems. Tyres, brakes and friction with the road surface all add to these heat emissions.

  • Western Water ☛ Utah law narrows data center water protests

    His organization filed an objection to the proposed change in water use for the data center, raising concerns including about groundwater and the feasibility of the project, and condemning the “complete absence of details in the application.”

    Powered by its own natural gas plant, developers say the project would produce 9 gigawatts of energy, which is double the state’s consumption. They’ve laid out a plan to use a closed-loop cooling system, recirculating the same water instead of continually drawing more.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • ADF ☛ Russia Launches [Cryptocurrency] Scheme in Africa

      Ruble-based digital currency would help Moscow evade international banking sanctions imposed after it invaded Ukraine

    • Yle ☛ Turku city council votes 36-31 in favour of building tram network

      The decision is conditional, as the city still requires the Finnish state to cover some 30 percent of the tram's construction costs — which in total is estimated to be approximately 465 million euros.

  • Overpopulation

    • Wired ☛ The US Built a Site to Ensure Fair Access to Public Lands. Then Everything Went Wrong

      Early each year, outdoor enthusiasts gear up for Recreation.gov’s annual lotteries for some of the most iconic experiences in the country: a river trip down Idaho’s Middle Fork of the Salmon River, which flows through the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Backcountry permits to hike into the Wave, an otherworldly rock formation in Arizona’s Paria Canyon–Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness. Overnight stays in the rugged, lake-studded Enchantments, in Washington’s Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest.

• Finance

  • Tor ☛ A new way to fund internet freedom | The Tor Project

    Launching today at internetfreedom.torproject.org and as an Onion Service, the campaign is the first-ever Web3-native crowdfunding initiative dedicated to the internet freedom ecosystem. The campaign accepts contributions in Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Zcash (ZEC), Monero (XMR), and Golem (GLM), and benefits 10 nonprofit projects working across privacy, censorship circumvention, secure communications, and public-interest digital infrastructure. An initial $115,000 USD matching pool supported by Cake Wallet, Zcash Community Grants, Logos, and Octant -- with additional ecosystem participation expected throughout the campaign -- will amplify donations made through June 18th, 2026, using a participatory matching model designed to reward broad community participation.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Futurism ☛ Mark Zuckerberg Has Been Playing a Cruel Game With Meta Employees

    Announced 26 days ago on April 23rd via an internal memo, Meta said it was slashing about 10 percent of the company’s 78,000 employees, and closing around 6,000 open job postings, Business Insider reported. The hammer will finally drop on Wednesday — and with a one-in-ten chance at joining the unemployment line, workers are understandably anxious as they’ve waited for their company to pull the trigger in a cruel game of Russian roulette that’s dragged on for close to a month.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Meta shifts 7,000 employees into four new AI units ahead of mass layoffs

    The four new groups are reported to include Applied AI Engineering, Agent Transformation Accelerator XFN, Central Analytics and Enterprise Solutions, the first two forming part of an “AI for Work” push, while Central Analytics is tasked with tracking the productivity and performance of Meta’s internal AI agents. The units will use “AI native design structures” with fewer management layers per employee than the rest of the company, per the memo.

  • The Rise of the Bullshittery

    A few thoughts on how the modern economy has stopped rewarding people who know what they are doing, and started rewarding people who know how to look like they do.

  • Dr Molly Tov ☛ i'm sure we can learn nothing from the fall of the roman empire

    I am not a historian. I'm sure this is all very simplistic and reductive.

    BUT I got spicy this morning and searched "why did the Roman Empire fall?" And this pop-history listicle seems to have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to teach us in the present moment:

    History dot com: 8 reasons why Rome fell

    I'm sure reviewing these is an exercise in futility. Especially when there are no tottering empires on the map just now. Right? Right.

  • Allen Downey ☛ Confidence in Institutions

    Using the Bayesian model described here we can estimate a latent “confidence in Congress” factor for each birth cohort over time. The following figure shows these estimates; each line represents a single birth year.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • International Business Times ☛ Sasha Obama DID NOT Denounce Barack Obama's Presidency After Declaring Support For Donald Trump

      A photo of Sasha Obama wearing an AI-generated red MAGA hat has gone viral online, accompanied by fabricated quotes in which she allegedly denounced her father's presidency and declared support for Donald Trump. There is no truth to the claims.

      Sasha has never criticised her father publicly and has never expressed support for Trump. The image is AI-generated and the quotes are fabricated.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Tiananmen vigil activist on trial for inciting subversion tells court to uphold ‘dignity'

    Chow Hang-tung, a former leader of the now-defunct Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, said that authorities have been “reshaping” the city’s long-held values by prosecuting activists who advocate for democracy in China.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Farewell and Thank You, Stephen Colbert

    Stephen Colbert’s last show is this Thursday evening.

    CBS refused to renew his contract, and you know exactly why: He mocked and criticized Trump.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Ingush imam rails on men wearing short-sleeved shirts and ‘insufficient control’ over women

    Ugurchiev separately addressed the issue of women’s appearance. He stated that men were obliged to monitor how their female relatives dress and should not allow women to walk without hijab or with their hair uncovered.

  • Futurism ☛ Mark Zuckerberg Used Shell Companies to Bully Native Hawaiians

    He’s accomplishing that with a careful amalgamation of Hawaiian-sounding shell companies, through which he’s sued hundreds of descendants of Native Hawaiian land owners, per HR News. These lawsuits first made waves in 2017, when it was reported that Zuckerberg was suing over 100 families for the right to bid on just eight combined acres of family-held land.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Cherokee Nation integrates culture into new treatment center built with opioid settlement funds

    Cherokee Nation plans to open a residential and intensive outpatient treatment center in Tahlequah, where the tribe is headquartered. It will incorporate centuries-old traditions into recovery, including the game of stickball and an on-campus garden to grow selu, or corn.

  • The Washington Spectator ☛ The Roberts Court Has Turned the Voting Rights Act on Its Head

    In its recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court claimed it was refining the framework established in Gingles. This was far from mere refinement. The Court reversed the core logic of Gingles, requiring proof of discriminatory intent, and making it exponentially harder for Black, Latino, and other under-represented communities long excluded from political power to enforce the protections Congress had deliberately written into federal law.

  • Vox ☛ The Supreme Court’s surprisingly timid new Voting Rights Act decisions

    The two orders the Court handed down on Monday, meanwhile, concerned an alternative proposal to strangle the Voting Rights Act that Justice Neil Gorsuch floated in a concurring opinion in Brnovich v. DNC (2021), the same case where Kagan said that her Court has treated no law worse than the VRA. But the Monday orders neither endorsed Gorsuch’s theory nor rejected it — it merely asked two lower courts that previously considered this theory to consider it again.

    The orders came in two cases, Turtle Mountain Band v. Howe, where the lower court backed Gorsuch’s attempt to further neutralize the VRA, and Board of Election Commissioners v. NAACP, where the lower court rejected Gorsuch’s attack on the law.

  • The Register UK ☛ Dutch cops’ shame games nets 74 wanted fraudsters

    True to its word, after two weeks, the Dutch police unblurred the alleged offenders’ faces via social media and advertising boards across the country, including at gas stations, shopping centers, and train stations.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ On the LIRR Picket Line

    At issue in the strike is a relatively small gap between the raise percentage requested by the unions and the raise percentage that New York state is willing to pay. Because the LIRR workers are subject to the byzantine bureaucratic demands of the Railway Labor Act, they can’t just strike willy-nilly; this strike comes after three years of navigating successive government boards and mediation processes.

  • Dan Sinker ☛ The Zombie Revival of Dead Confederates

    Edmund Pettus, the man whose name is emblazoned in steel across the bridge's heavy support beams, was a Confederate officer and, after the South lost the war, a major player in the Alabama chapter of the Klan. The bridge was built and named after Pettus in 1940, 75 years after he and his loser comrades lost the Civil War.

    The Confederacy is everywhere right now. You see it in the states rushing to redraw district lines. You see it in the removal of stories of the horrors of slavery from our national parks. You see it in the rewriting of history books and in the renaming of military bases and in the restoration of confederate monuments only recently taken down. We're living through a full-on zombie revival of dead confederates.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ NASA Draws on Industry for Mars Telecommunications Network

    Last Thursday, NASA issued a final Request for Proposal (RFP), seeking industry collaboration for the Mars Telecommunications Network. The agency said reliable, high bandwidth communications is necessary to relay science data, high-definition imagery, and critical information during Mars missions. The network will use high-performance Mars telecommunications orbiters at the Red Planet to support future surface, orbital, and human exploration.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • The Verge ☛ Democrats preview how they’d go after the Ticketmaster settlement if they regain power

    While the DOJ settlement with Live Nation, which came one week into trial and with a promise of up to $280 million, received copious pushback, Democrats don’t at the moment have the power in either chamber to set committee agendas. That meant that Monday’s so-called shadow hearing looked different than most official proceedings. Instead of sitting at the elevated seats behind the dais, the lawmakers sat at tables below, eye level with witnesses including California Attorney General Rob Bonta, one of the AGs continuing the fight against Live Nation-Ticketmaster, ousted Trump administration antitrust official Roger Alford, and several entertainment industry players, including a member of the band The Hold Steady. Several artists asked to appear at the forum declined out of fear for their livelihoods, according to House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who co-hosted the forum with Senate Homeland Security permanent subcommittee on investigations Ranking Member Richard Blumenthal (D-CT).

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • Wired ☛ You Can Get Some of Your Nudes Removed From the Internet Under a New Law

        Starting May 19, tech platforms in the US will have to comply with the Take It Down Act. Here’s how more than a dozen major platforms are handling takedown demands for your nonconsensual nudes.