Leftovers

• Homo Ludditus ☛ Fighting over semantics is what I often do

  I was searching for a French Scrabble dictionary (in the hope it would help me with wordle.louan.me) when I reached the site 1mot.net which randomly displayed this word upon opening: ébranchassent.

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ The Infosec Phrasebook

  Then there’s cyber, which gets prefixed to all of the above and increasingly used on its own. Cyber risk, cyber hygiene, cyber resilience, Cyber Essentials, “I work in cyber”. I have been on the internet long enough to remember when cyber was a verb, and what it meant when a stranger in an AOL chatroom asked if you wanted to. I cannot watch a minister say it into a microphone without that association firing, and at this point I’ve stopped expecting it to fade.

• Arcan ☛ Arcan: 10 Years of Online Obscurity

  The actual story starts around 2003. At that point I was mostly ‘done’ with the programming ‘languages’ part of the computing journey — it is the single most boring topic I can think of; the joy is in the music, not the sheet notes. When thinking of something to compose, I was struck by a nasty and incurable case of ‘oscilloscope envy’.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ IndieWeb Carnival May 2026: Roundup of love letters : Juha-Matti Santala

  This roundup post is a love letter in itself. A love letter to this wonderful community, to personal websites and blogs, to all the people writing and publishing their thoughts and experiences in the open web for all of us to read. To everyone who participated: thank you ❤️.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • John D Cook ☛ It’s not just Taylor series

    Both the cosine approximation and the Taylor approximation are good for small disks, say of radius 0.5. They’re both bad for much larger disks, and in fact the cosine approximation is worse.

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Say They've Cracked Mystery Behind a Dozen Strange Signals From Deep Space

    The team concluded that ASKAP J1745 is likely a “cataclysmic variable” star, or a system made up of a pair of stars, with one of them being a white dwarf — the dense stellar core left over after a relatively low-mass star has exhausted its fuel. Rose and his colleagues believe the radio burst may be caused by the white dwarf accreting material from the other star, a process that generates heat and thereby releases X-ray light.

  • The Conversation ☛ Quantum computers could expose our digital secrets – but there are much better reasons to build them

    Quantum computers are coming. Or, at least, that’s what current predictions say. These machines harness the power of quantum mechanics, the set of rules governing how physics operates at atomic and sub-atomic scales.

    Because of this, they operate in radically different ways to current machines. Tasks requiring trillions of years on existing supercomputers might be reduced to days on future quantum computers. They could tackle a range of challenges that are out of reach for existing technology.

  • Science Alert ☛ Physicists Just Achieved 'Perfect Randomness' For The First Time Ever

    The difficulty lies not in generating numbers that appear random, but in showing that no one could have possibly predicted the outcome – that the system isn't secretly affected by subtle hidden rules or biases.

    Now, a team of physicists at ETH Zurich in Switzerland has overcome that challenge by leveraging one of the strangest phenomena in quantum mechanics: entanglement.

• Career/Education

  • BinaryDigit ☛ Leaving the Tech World Professionally

    I can't even begin to explain how awful AI has ruined the tech world. I used to love hearing about new hardware, new software, open source projects, and ways that people were trying to solve problems we ran into. Now AI is shoved into everything we do, where it's not even needed or make sense to be applied to, and it's ruined the creative world - video, music, photography - and nothing feels "real" anymore. And not many people realize how it's not actually intelligent. It needs more and more data to be trained on, and costs so much to run via datacenters that it's obliterating the planet and people's wallets. Even if we keep LLMs around for fast, computational usages for coding and transactions, where "AI" makes the most sense, hopefully it can be downloaded onto local computers to run there instead of in "the cloud".

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ They Want to Get Rid of Your Property Taxes Because They Think You Are Morons

    One obvious thing to be said about this plan is: if you get rid of property taxes, you are going to cost local governments a lot of money. School districts are particularly worried. For good reason. The Florida Policy Institute took a stab at calculating the losses for every county and school district in the state. The initial $250,000 exemption would cost school districts $5 billion a year. That number would rise to $8.6 billion per year with total property tax exemption, which Desantis wants to have by the year 2030. Poorer counties, where property values are lower, would be hit harder by first tranche of the policy— “In many rural fiscally constrained counties, due to the assessed value of properties, the cost of a $250,000 homestead exemption is close to the cost of full elimination,” according to FPI.

    Education officials, whose own initial estimates of revenue losses echo those of FPI, are freaking the fuck out. “It would have a significant adverse effect on the quality of education here,” the Pasco County superintendent of schools told the Tampa Bay Times. Even a $150,000 exemption, the very first step up Desantis’s proposed ladder, would amount to “about an 18% decrease in teacher salary, to give you a scope of it.”

  • Johnny Decimal ☛ Deciding to work for myself

    I started doing extra freelance work early in my career to supplement my salary. So I gained a bit of experience at having a 'side hustle', although no one called it that yet. This continued for about 5 years alongside salaried jobs. But when I think about seriously deciding to work for myself, it's a specific time.

    I had a decade's worth of in-house experience with smaller local companies and large global networks. So I knew what working for other people was like. And I was tired. I knew I wanted a change and was contemplating going thermonuclear - retraining to something totally different.

  • Orhun Parmaksız ☛ Today is my first day at JetBrains

    As my open source career progressed, I started to realize that I'm increasingly doing more people work than code work. This first became apparent with interacting with issues/PRs and then writing documentation/blog posts. And nowadays it shows itself by doing livestreams, giving talks at conferences and building communities. I mean heck, I'm still dreaming of organizing a full blown terminal-oriented conference at some point.

    I guess the weird part is, I enjoy doing all of these things although they sound stressful and even scary. For me, being public and interacting with people is something that I do naturally at this point. I believe I subconsciously learned the skill while trying to reach out to more people through my open source projects. These days when I combine this outreach and interaction with building creative things, I just have hell of a fun (e.g. building something that I have zero idea about on a livestream).

    That is why, I asked myself: "Why not do this professionally?" Then, that question turned into an opportunity, and eventually a decision. Well, here we are.

  • Seth Godin ☛ Rethinking famous college admissions

    This shift saves money, reduces anxiety, is probably more fair. It’s auditable and improvable and uses far less time as well. It used to be impossible. Now that it’s not just possible but easy, the pressure falls on the constituents who’d prefer to avoid it.

    Is it better to believe that you got into a famous college because of a mysterious, perhaps human, definitely flawed, and easily gamed system, or would we prefer a different sort of black box, one that puts data to work in a coordinated and prioritized way?

• Hardware

  • Marcin Juszkiewicz ☛ Arm desktop: so many cores, not enough speed

    Using a system with 80 AArch64 cores can be a pleasure. Or a pain…

  • Jim Grey ☛ Worth the wait?

    It could be worse. A lab I used faithfully for a long time started out quick, but became so popular that I routinely waited three to four weeks for scans. Then they started jacking their prices so high — seriously, $17.75 per roll now, scans not included — that I threw in the towel with them and shopped for a new lab.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ It Makes You Sick: The Attacks on Health, Healthcare, and Care

    A nurse said something to me a few weeks ago that rearranged my reality a bit along those lines. He said that in some poor communities of color, there's a real question about whether a young person's asthma should be put on their medical chart even while they're being treated for it. That's because for a lot of poor kids, the military is a way out of that poverty, and the asthma diagnosis could shut it off to them – and of course more poor kids live in places where air pollution results in asthma. Although we were in New Mexico and he was from Connecticut, something about how he said it, the fierce passion, the moral rigor, made me see my own state, California, in a new light, or to feel viscerally what I had long known cerebrally.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Put your phone away:’ Sweden urges parents to restrict screen use around children

    “Put your phone away when you’re with your child. Use it only if you need to or when you’re using it together,” the health authority said in a statement. Adults who “create good screen habits for themselves” would influence children’s habits, it added.

    The agency also recommended that parents declare some parts of the home, such as the bedroom or around the dining table, “screen-free zones”, and urged parents to “protect and respect your child online. Think before posting pictures or videos.”

  • Science Alert ☛ Humans Are Still Evolving Right Before Our Eyes on The Tibetan Plateau

    Beall has been studying the human response to hypoxic living conditions for years. In research published in October 2024, she and her team revealed some of the specific adaptations in Tibetan communities: traits that improve the blood's ability to deliver oxygen.

    To unlock this discovery, the researchers looked into one of the markers of what we call evolutionary fitness: reproductive success.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Tech Times ☛ Oracle’s 30,000 Layoffs Enter Final Phase: Sign the Release or Forfeit Severance

    The largest workforce reduction in Oracle's 49-year history crossed a legal threshold today, June 1, as the first cohort of U.S. employees reached their official last working day under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. The departure window runs through June 15, at which point Oracle will have completed the separation of an estimated 30,000 workers — approximately 18% of its global workforce — who were notified by email on March 31. For anyone who has not yet signed the separation agreement, today marks the start of the final countdown, and the terms deserve scrutiny before a signature goes on the page.

    Oracle Gave Workers a Choice: Sign Away Litigation Rights or Receive Nothing

    Oracle's severance offer follows a structure common in large American companies — four weeks of base pay for the first year of service, plus one additional week per year of tenure, capped at 26 weeks, with one month of COBRA health coverage included. The critical condition: employees must sign a release waiving their right to sue in order to receive any benefit at all.

  • PC World ☛ I ditched Windows for a Chromebook—and it fixed my biggest PC frustrations

    Now, I want to be fully transparent: I admit that I still own an all-in-one Windows PC (currently running Windows 10 because Microsoft doesn’t think it’s capable of Windows 11).

    However, my Windows PC only exists as a backup for those increasingly rare times when my Chromebook isn’t right for the task. Most days, my Chromebook is more than sufficient. Here’s why I switched and why I now love Chromebooks more than Windows laptops.

  • PC World ☛ Proton Mail now lets you send and receive Gmail, with one big catch

    At the same time, Proton acknowledges that Google can still read and analyze any emails sent to the Gmail address. The aim is therefore for users to start by moving important accounts and contacts to a Proton address and then gradually leave Gmail entirely.

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

    • Connor Tumbleson ☛ GPTBot is terrible

      I was mad at GPTBot (OpenAI) hitting my little tiny Halo Infinite site nearly 5 million times in 14 days. It is absolutely ridiculous of that scale of requests (357k/day) which surmounts to just analytics on Halo Infinite matches. It seems because they rotate around 400 different IPs that none of my "burst" rate limit detection works. I may need to research a smarter technique to target this form of AI bots harvesting content at an insane rate.

      So I wondered why GPTBot was obsessed with this, so I tried out a simple query myself on my own gamertag.

    • I Cringely ☛ The Lying Machine

      There is a lawsuit grinding through a federal court in Minnesota that every insurance executive in America should be reading instead of their quarterly AI roadmap.

      The case is Estate of Lokken v. UnitedHealth Group. It was filed in late 2023 by the families of two deceased Medicare Advantage members, and it alleges that UnitedHealthcare used an artificial-intelligence tool called nH Predict to decide how much post-acute care its members were entitled to — and that the tool was wrong roughly nine times out of ten, a figure the plaintiffs draw from how often its denials were reversed on appeal. UnitedHealth denies that the tool makes coverage decisions at all; it calls nH Predict “a guide” and says the real decisions are made by clinicians following Medicare criteria. A judge will sort out who’s right. But this past March, that judge ordered the company to open its books and hand over a wide swath of documents about exactly how the thing works. The machine is going to testify.

      I’m not here to litigate that case. I’m here because of the legal theory the plaintiffs were allowed to keep. The court tossed several of their claims but let two survive, and one of them should make every carrier’s general counsel sit up straight: breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. Bad faith. The doctrine that turns a wrong coverage decision from a refund into punitive damages.

      Hold onto that, because it’s the whole column.

    • Futurism ☛ Neighbors Horrified by Data Center Twice the Size of Manhattan

      Given the widespread backlash to data centers across the entire country, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of these residents are now rushing to council meetings to forcefully refute the plans. After all, they’ve watched as other areas that welcome the facilities struggle with rising electricity prices, stressed water systems, and noise pollution.

      Worse yet, the Great Salt Lake is already in crisis: it’s rapidly disappearing amid devastating droughts across the state. An extremely resource-intensive data center could place a massive new strain on it, regardless of the many reassurances from developers.

    • Futurism ☛ Unfortunate Company Accidentally Blows Half a Billion Dollars on Claude in One Month

      On the cultural angle, many companies whose CEOs are drunk on spiked AI Kool-Aid have been encouraging employees to use AI as much as possible, a trend that some call “tokenmaxxing.” Meta now includes AI usage on employee’s performance reviews, for example. Amazon had an internal leaderboard that tracked how much its employees used AI tools, which it recently shut down after finding that some tryhards were directing AI agents do useless tasks to boost their scores, the Financial Times reported.

    • Axios ☛ AI sticker shock hits corporate America

      Corporate leaders are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns.

      Why it matters: Companies that rushed to embrace AI are now confronting ballooning IT costs, uncertain productivity gains and growing employee skepticism.

  • Social Control Media

    • Krebs On Security ☛ [Crackers] Used Meta’s AI Support Bot to Seize Instagram Accounts

      The Instagram accounts for the Obama White House and the Chief Master Sergeant of the U.S. Space Force were briefly defaced with pro-Iranian images and messages over the weekend, after instructions began circulating on Telegram showing how to trick Meta’s “AI support assistant” bot into resetting account passwords.

    • Task And Purpose ☛ Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force’s Instagram [breached]

      Bentivegna’s account for his role as Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force included at least one profile post showing pro-Iranian art, and several Instagram stories showing anti-American and pro-Iranian messages were posted over the course of the evening of May 31. Photos of the hacked account and its posts spread around military social media and Reddit pages.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Karl Bode ☛ Privacy-Eroding Corruption Is Literally Killing U.S. Troops

      The U.S. lacks privacy protections because it's too corrupt to function, but the consolidated press is too broken to make that clear to anyone.

    • Jonathan Kamens ☛ Slate’s new privacy policy is a dumpster fire

      When she shared it with me, I observed an obvious, immediate red flag: the email does not say what was changed in the new policy, or offer a link to something the recipient can read to find out what has changed. This is always a bad sign, which means one of two things: either the company changing its privacy policy doesn’t want you to know what has changed, or they have no idea themselves what has changed so they can’t tell you.

      After carefully reviewing Slate’s new privacy policy, I think it’s almost certainly the latter. The new policy was obviously created by incompetent clowns, and I doubt they could tell readers what the effective changes are even if they wanted to.

    • Wired ☛ Websites Can Now Spy on You Through Your Hard Drive

      Thanks to the newly detailed FROST technique, telltale SSD activity can be measured in the browser using simple JavaScript.

    • Yle ☛ Court overturns pharmacy chain's €1.1m data protection fine

      The ombudsman's investigation found that the pharmacy firm, owned by the University of Helsinki, had used cookies and other tracking tech in its online store. According to the data protection body, the chain said it discontinued the use of Google's and Meta's tracking technologies in September 2022.

• Defence/Aggression

  • RFERL ☛ Ukrainian Drones Target Refinery In Latest Attack Deep Inside Russia

    Ukrainian drones targeted a Russian oil refinery hundreds of kilometers from the Ukrainian border, the latest in a campaign of deep strikes aimed at disrupting Russia’s oil industry.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ The Rush to Disavow the Terrorist Slush Fund

    Which is to say that, as some Trump insiders rush to distance themselves from the Terrorist Slush Fund, they’re not answering very basic questions, such as what happened to Trump’s expressed plan (which predated the IRS lawsuit) to give any money he bilks from his own government to charity, or why Trump sued the IRS in the first place, much less for the absurd amount of $10 billion. The only explanation in either story as to the latter point is this paragraph from WSJ: [...]

  • Timothy Chambers ☛ "The First One Is Always Free" Google Chromebooks and Students Sreen Time - Tim Chambers

    It is just a small portion of the life of a child, who may spend hours a day engaging with a screen of one kind or another. It did not, for example, address the use of cellphones, a primary way many kids absorb screen-based content. Nor did it assess the district’s decision last year to ban the use of the phones during school days — and what impact that might be having on how kids use, or misuse, school-issued devices.

  • Boston Globe ☛ A Cambridge screen time audit found a mix of uses educational and less-so

    Researchers found the youngest students in Cambridge were only spending 20 or so minutes during a school day up close with screen-based technology (which wouldn’t include, say, a YouTube video projected on a wall), and the vast majority of usage in classrooms at all grade levels was educational.

    But they also found what school leaders said were bad habits, such as students in some cases being allowed to use tablets during lunch and recess, or getting to interact with screens as a reward for finishing assignments early.

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Romania confirms Russian Shahed-type drone behind earlier strike on residential building

    Romania's Defense Ministry on May 31 confirmed that the weapon that struck a residential building in Galati overnight on May 29 was a Russian Geran-2 (Shahed-type) drone.

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Estonian FM: France sends the right signal on shadow fleet

    "Russia's shadow fleet keeps oil revenues flowing to the Kremlin while undermining maritime safety and environmental standards," Tsahkna added. "Europe must continue tightening the net around the vessels, companies and networks that make this trade possible."

    The French Navy intercepted the sanctioned Russian oil tanker Tagor in the Atlantic Ocean on Sunday morning to enforce international sanctions, French President Emmanuel Macron announced.

  • Pro Publica ☛ How Trump Reversed Biden’s Crackdown on Guns

    “Just because no one is watching the trafficking pipelines right now doesn’t mean guns aren’t flowing through it. It just means they’re not being intercepted,” she told me.

    “And as you walk away from that, and you don’t have your focus on that anymore,” she added, “that pipeline is going to be flowing, and we are going to start to see the violent crime impact from that over time.”

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • 404 Media ☛ We Sued ICE to Get Its Spyware Contract. The Agency Is Redacting Essentially Everything

    Many of the redactions in the documents center around what ICE describes as trade secrets and records compiled for law enforcement purposes. We believe the redactions are an overreaction, withholding information in the public interest about what capabilities ICE bought and for what purpose. ICE gave Paragon the opportunity to request certain parts of the documents be redacted.

  • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ SEC Moves to Kill Climate Disclosure Rule

    The SEC said in a statement that it is now moving to rescind the disclosure rules “in their entirety because they exceed the scope of the agency’s statutory authority.” The rules, finalized in 2024, “impose substantial costs on public companies and their shareholders that are not justified by the informational benefits they may provide to some investors,” the commission said.

    Eliminating the rule will “avoid the practical effect of dictating corporate behavior” and ensure that agency rules will “be imposed only when the expected benefits justify the likely costs and burdens,” SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said in a statement.

  • Truthdig ☛ The USDA Canceled $300 Million in Farm Grants, Citing Fraud. Did It Make Up the Evidence?

    That finding by the NAD should put the USDA’s justification for cancellation under closer scrutiny, she added, because it “underscores, in my opinion, that terminations were not based on anything the awardees did or didn’t do.” To her knowledge, none of the grantees — including Agroecology Commons — had budgets that included any of the claims USDA has made concerning wasteful or fraudulent spending.

    “This termination doesn’t seem like it was rooted in anything about our conduct with this grant,” said RAFI’s Koppa. “It seems to be part of some sort of larger motivation where we were not being treated fairly.”

• Environment

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ More cities are pressing pause on data centers as local backlash grows

    Hearing backlash from residents, cities and counties across the country in recent weeks have blocked planned data centers amid concerns over rising electricity prices and environmental harms.

    The local actions come as state lawmakers also are looking to limit or repeal the incentives for the centers, which are sprawling campuses of computer servers that store and transmit the data behind apps and websites.

  • The New Lede ☛ Report calls for stricter fertilizer rules as US nitrate pollution crisis grows

    US farmers annually apply over 11 million metric tons of nitrogen fertilizer, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), making it the most used fertilizer in the country. The new report, published by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), finds that an estimated half of these nutrients aren’t taken up by crops, but leach into the environment instead in ways that cost the US billions of dollars annually in water treatment costs, beach closures and habitat loss. Most of the costs hit small and rural farming communities, the report states.

    “Excessive fertilizer use is poisoning water, air and wildlife … it is outrageous and unacceptable,” said J.P. Rose, a director of soil health, nature at NRDC and co-author of the new report. “We need commonsense guardrails on nitrogen overapplication and runoff.”

  • India Times ☛ SoftBank set to dethrone Toyota as Japan’s most valuable company

    SoftBank Group Corp. is poised to overtake Toyota Motor Corp. as Japan’s most valuable company, marking a milestone for the global artificial intelligence boom and a dramatic reshuffling of the country’s corporate hierarchy.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ SoftBank to spend up to $87 billion on French AI data centers — country offers ample nuclear grid that US sites lack

    There’s a stark contrast between this and SoftBank’s American plans, where, to feed its planned 10GW data center in Ohio, the company has to build its own energy generation infrastructure in the form of a natural gas plant that’ll cost roughly $33 billion to build and generate roughly 9.2GW. France lets it skip that step and plug into an existing low-carbon fleet, sidestepping the strained grids and rising local opposition slowing U.S. buildouts.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Hackaday ☛ On The Wisdom Of Replacing A NiMH Module In A Prius Battery Pack

      Even with that it still a high-voltage battery with all the associated risks, and as raised in the comments there’s a big question about putting a new(er) cell into a pack with more worn-out NiMH cells as generally the cells wear out fairly evenly. While this fix can give the pack some more life, the new cell won’t match the internal resistance and other parameters of the pack, leading to issues like voltage drift. Then there’s the issue that if one cell failed, others probably aren’t far behind, so this hack would soon become a regular ritual.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Dark Reading ☛ Microsoft's Zero-Day Legal Threats Spark Backlash

    In a blog post last week, the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) addressed the recent flurry of zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits published by an anonymous researcher who goes by "Chaotic-Eclipse" or "Nightmare-Eclipse." It started in early April, when the researcher published a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit on GitHub for "BlueHammer," a privilege-escalation flaw in Windows Defender tracked as CVE-2026-33825.

    "I was not bluffing Microsoft and I'm doing it again," Nightmare-Eclipse wrote on their blog at the time.

  • The Record ☛ Microsoft says it will not pursue security researchers after zero-day backlash

    The post drew criticism from the security community, with many researchers expressing sympathy for Nightmare Eclipse’s grievances against Microsoft, including the researcher’s allegation the company deleted their Microsoft Security Response Center account, withheld bounty payments and removed their attribution from at least one advisory.

    In the new statement — shared on social media rather than its official blog — Microsoft said it is taking the feedback seriously, adding: “To be clear about our approach to legal matters, we have no intention to pursue action against individuals conducting or publishing their security research.”

  • Digital Camera World ☛ GoPro is at risk of potential bankruptcy amid lower sales and high memory costs, new documents reveal

    The 8-K form that GoPro has filed with the SEC indicates that the company could struggle to pay its debts over the next 12 months. The form re-files the company's 2025 financial results with an auditor's report.

  • SQ Magazine ☛ Anthropic Confidentially Files for Historic AI IPO

    The confidential filing allows SEC officials to review Anthropic’s registration documents before they become publicly available. During this process, regulators can request changes, clarifications, and additional disclosures before the company proceeds with a public offering.

    In its official announcement, Anthropic said: [...]

  • Wired ☛ Anthropic Confidentially Files for What Could Be the Largest IPO Ever

    Anthropic announced the filing in an unsigned, two-paragraph blog post, noting that the amount of money it is seeking to raise—and at what valuation—has not been set. The company said that the timing of the IPO would “depend on market conditions and other factors.” The announcement comes just days after Anthropic unveiled a $65 billion fundraising round.

  • India Times ☛ EU has had productive meetings with Anthropic over possible future access to Mythos

    Designed ​to find flaws in ⁠computer code ‌to help bolster ​defences ​against cyberattacks, Mythos was ⁠initially seen by some cybersecurity experts ​as enabling attacks on the ​technology systems it aims to protect, although such fears now seem overstated.

  • India Times ☛ AI giant Anthropic confidentially files for US IPO

    Anthropic did not disclose the size or terms of the offering. It last raised $65 billion ​at a post-money valuation of $965 billion ⁠in late ‌May, putting it ahead of rival ​OpenAI.

  • Futurism ☛ Trump Shovels $4 Billion Directly to Elon Musk, Who Spent a Fortune Getting Him Elected

    Elon Musk spent just shy of $300 million supporting Donald Trump’s reelection in late 2024 — a full-throated financial commitment that appears to be paying off in a big way.

    Musk’s space company SpaceX, in particular, has massively benefited from the duo’s on-and-off-again relationship, scoring billion-dollar deals with the government.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The USA Is Living Under Political Capitalism

    The form of capitalism we currently live under is one in which wealth extraction depends not on market power but on political maneuvering.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Next Move ☛ How Iran Will Spin the Breakdown of Talks

      One of the main purveyors of this plastic propaganda goes simply by “Mr. Explosive.”

      Explosive told the BBC that he spreads his message using Lego because it is “a world language.” The videos set rebellious English-language lyrics and AI-generated imagery to catchy tunes. They’re engineered to travel, portable across borders the Iranian regime cannot otherwise breach, and the toy-brick surface does the cruder work no straight propaganda could.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Nick Heer ☛ Meta Legal Action Forces Sarah Wynn-Williams to Sit Onstage in Silence

    To be sure, Wynn-Williams’ silent appearance onstage is the kind of thing that would encourage press coverage and, presumably, this publicity could encourage book sales. Yet Meta has, for a full year now, insisted that “Careless People” is just a bunch of old anecdotes; pay no mind, there is nothing to see here. But its lawyers are vigorously enforcing the arbitration order (PDF) preventing her from making public remarks about Meta that could be construed as critical or negative.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Putin Orders FSB and Government to Make ‘Critical Services’ Available During Internet Outages

    President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian government and the FSB security service to ensure that critical online services remain accessible during mobile [Internet] outages.

    In a list of directives published on the Kremlin’s website this weekend, Putin mandated that access to healthcare platforms, the Gosuslugi government services portal and electronic payment networks must remain available while broader network restrictions are in place.

  • [Old] Controversial YouTuber Charlie Veitch charged with public order offence and banned from Manchester City Centre

    Outside Manchester, he has also divided audiences by claiming on his shows that parts of Huddersfield have a “third World vibe,” describing Nelson, Lancashire as “rough” and home to “some of the most abandoned nice buildings I have seen on my tour of dystopian Britain” and Barnsley as “pure Soviet.”

    Veitch was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to a Brazilian mother and a Scottish merchant seaman father. He attended Edinburgh Academy and graduated from the University of Edinburgh with honours in philosophy.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Declan Chidlow ☛ Overview of Digital Accessibility Technologies

    There are a great number of tools and devices out there designed to improve computer use for people with disabilities or even make computer use possible at all. We can consider them in two broad categories, input and output. Input methods send data provided by a user to a device, while output methods send information provided by a device to a user.

    This is a non-exhaustive list of these technologies for reference. Though I have attempted to be relatively comprehensive in covering usage, accessibility often necessitates varied usage and unique assembly of technologies, such that this post does not and will not cover every case.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Pogroms, American Style

    If you believed any of that, you were naive. The Trump administration is trying to drive out all immigrants, legal as well as undocumented, with almost no pretense that its pogroms serve any wider social or economic purpose. And I use the word “pogroms” deliberately. The MAGA anti-immigrant campaign relies on cruelty toward immigrants, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding and a key source of American prosperity. And it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the cruelty isn’t just instrumental. Rather it’s the purpose of the whole endeavor.

    To understand what’s happening, a good starting point is the more or less official acknowledgement that virtually all immigrants — I’ll talk about the few exceptions shortly — are viewed as undesirables to be pushed out in any way possible. The New York Times recently published an article with the headline “Trump squeezes immigrants by cutting them off from jobs, health care and housing.”

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ Buffalo Bill Posing With a Group of Pawnee Nation Leaders and Performers From His Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, 1885

    For many Native American performers, joining Cody’s show was one of the few ways to legally leave the oppressive confines of government reservations. The show allowed them to travel the world, earn a relatively good wage ($50 a week for stars like Sitting Bull), and openly practice their traditions, wear their sacred regalia, and speak their languages at a time when the U.S. government was actively trying to assimilate them and erase their culture.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ The 2026 APNIC Survey is now open — have your say!

    The 2026 APNIC Survey is your chance to directly inform APNIC’s strategic planning, priorities, and future direction. It will be open from 1 to 28 June 2026.

    The survey is open to APNIC Members and the broader Internet community, especially in the Asia Pacific region.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Senator Pushes Fiber Broadband as Nebraska Debates BEAD Strategy

    U.S. Senator Deb Fischer (R) is urging Nebraska to prioritize fiber broadband expansion, challenging Gov. Jim Pillen’s view that newer technologies like fixed wireless and satellite can adequately serve rural areas, according to Nebraska Public Media. During a broadband roundtable with FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty and state telecommunications leaders, several participants argued fiber remains the most reliable long-term solution for rural internet access.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ Suno Fights to Conceal Training Figure Amid Major Label Lawsuit

      Rather, New York-based Inner City Press (ICP) is pushing to obtain the number – or, more specifically, to stop Suno impounding the legal docs containing the number.

      “These are not peripheral discovery documents — they are the core pleadings and supporting submissions for Plaintiffs’ motion to amend the complaint,” ICP’s Matthew Lee wrote in a letter urging the court to deny Suno’s request.

      From there, Lee argued that the “information is of direct public concern,” particularly for the professionals who “have a direct interest in understanding what is alleged about how their recordings were used.”

    • CopyrightLately ☛ Cox and Effect: Why Volitional Conduct Is AI Copyright's Next Battleground

      Despite its name, volitional conduct isn’t really about intent or mental state. It’s more like copyright’s version of proximate causation. Under the framework from the Second Circuit’s Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings—the case everyone calls Cablevision—”the person who actually presses the button” supplies “the necessary element of volition.” Last month, Anthropic filed a motion in the Concord Music I case arguing that because Claude produces output automatically in response to user requests, Claude’s users, not Anthropic, “cause the copying.”