Leftovers

• Ricardo Mendes ☛ A Node on the Web

  What I find interesting is how my brain can experience genuine emotions from such simple stories.

• Phil Gyford ☛ Laboriously keeping track

  This doesn’t include spending in cash, which I didn’t track, and was more common in the early years when buying CDs. I mainly made this chart because I wondered how my spending now compared to previous years. I’m kind of pleased it isn’t really less that it used to be (the missing cash spending aside).

  I didn’t include spending on gigs, or contributions to radio stations, because while they’re music, they feel like a different kind of thing than buying music to own (sorry, I mean buying a licence to play files).

• Gabriel ☛ What’s in my NOW? #2

  CMF Phone 1 | Smartphone: I have been in the Apple ecosystem for about 15 years now, and I have grown, I think, bored with it. Part of me wants a change, but I am still unsure about it. So this is me testing the waters.

• Giles Turnbull ☛ gilest.org: An opinion about lists

  Building on that, I have further opinions about lists used not just on slides, but in text or on web pages too. Some numbers of items seem to look and feel right and some numbers of items just look and feel wrong. In my opinion.

  So, this many things in a list works well: [...]

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Uğur Erdem Seyfi ☛ A Little Explanation of Little's Law

    I recently read Concurrency in Go by Katherine Cox-Buday. In the “Queuing” section, there was a discussion of how we can use Little’s Law to predict our pipeline’s throughput, given sufficient sampling.

    I honestly wondered why I had not come across this simple idea before, after finishing that part. As I understand it, it can potentially be used in almost any situation where a queue is involved. Not just message queues, even things like physical queues. So I thought I’d write an intuitive explanation to help it stick and share the idea.

  • John D Cook ☛ How Kepler's equation led to Bessel functions

    There are multiple ways to describe the position of a planet in an elliptical orbit around a star. For historical reasons, these descriptions have arcane names such as mean anomaly, true anomaly, and eccentric anomaly. This post explains how these three are related.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Scientists warn Trump plan to axe US ocean monitoring system will leave world ‘flying blind’

    Decommissioning the US system, which plays a major part in a global ocean observation network, would lead to a massive increase in error in the annual estimates of ocean heating rates, according to research published last month.

    As a result, the forecasts and early warning systems for storms, tropical cyclones and El Niño would degrade, “sometimes dangerously so”, according to Sabrina Speich, an expert in global ocean monitoring at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and chair of the ocean expert panel of the Global Climate Observing System.

  • NBC ☛ NASA declares its Mars Maven spacecraft dead

    Launched in 2013 to study the Red Planet’s atmosphere from orbit, Maven mysteriously fell silent in early December after passing behind Mars. Data indicated the spacecraft went into a fast spin, which disrupted its orbit and drained the onboard batteries.

  • PBS ☛ NASA declares its Mars Maven spacecraft dead after 6 months of silence

    A review board convened by NASA earlier this year concluded that the spacecraft is useless and unable to be recovered. It's expected to remain in orbit for another 50 to 100 years before crashing into the planet, posing no issue to other spacecraft until then. An investigation continues into what caused the problem.

• Career/Education

  • El País ☛ Salvador Dalí at art school: A wayward and insolent student expelled for life

    A century has passed since the day that forever changed the life of Salvador Dalí: his second dismissal, this one permanent, from the Special School of Drawing, Sculpture and Printmaking at Madrid’s prestigious San Fernando Fine Art Royal Academy. In such a rigid, rule‑bound environment, Dalí felt out of place — and perhaps for that reason, this academic period has been overshadowed in scholarly writing. What dominates the narrative of those years in Madrid — which he described as the happiest of his life— are his escapades and artistic exchanges with Federico García Lorca, Maruja Mallo, and Luis Buñuel, his companions at the Residencia de Estudiantes, a pioneering cultural and academic residence, and a circle of mutual inspiration.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Child's play is more than just that

    In May, the U.S. House introduced a bipartisan bill to promote “childhood independence and protect parents who allow their children to play outside unsupervised, get off screens, and develop social skills.” Earlier this year, Indiana became the 13th state to pass a measure shielding parents from child neglect allegations for certain unsupervised activities. Last year, Florida, Georgia, and Missouri passed similar laws.

    However, it’s taken nearly two decades for the concept of “free-range” childhood – introduced by New York City mother Lenore Skenazy in 2008 – to impel adjustments in long-standing child protection laws. When Ms. Skenazy wrote online about letting her 9-year-old make his way home by subway and bus, she caught flak as “America’s worst mom” for allegedly exposing her child to a host of potential dangers.

  • Harvard University ☛ High-tech for the 1700s

    Harvard College, founded in 1636, was a pioneer in teaching the applied sciences. Over the centuries, the institution amassed thousands of tools used for lessons in physics, trigonometry, and more. Some of these items even helped propel the Continental Army to victory in the Revolutionary War.

    A new exhibit on view through 2026 at the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments spotlights the 18th-century tech that powered early America. “Revolutionary Technology,” curated by postdoctoral fellow Emma Mendoza Broder, Ph.D. ’25, was made possible by support from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation and Revolution250.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Because of a Mathematician From Rural Virginia Work on Global Positioning, You Have No Excuse for Getting Lost

    “I still had an insatiable thirst for knowledge,” she wrote in her memoir, It Began With a Dream. “I always had this sense that there was more to accomplish.”

• Hardware

  • Martin Chang ☛ Programming the ET-SoC-1

    Like the Tenstorrent Wormhole, the ET-SoC-1 is based on RISC-V, uses custom extensions, uses a NoC, and is arranged into a grid. On the ET-SoC-1, each node on the grid is called a shire. There are different types of shires: compute, memory, PCIe, etc. For simplicity, "shire" without specifying the type is assumed to be a compute shire.

  • Josh Lospinoso ☛ ARM64 Is Not Just x64 With More Registers | Josh Lospinoso

    The ABI-level reality was not x64 with different register names. That is the point of this post. ARM64 is not just x64 with more registers. It is not even one ABI. There is the A64 instruction set. There is AAPCS64, the base procedure-call standard. Then there are platform ABIs layered on top: Linux-oriented AAPCS64 environments, Windows ARM64, Apple ARM64, ARM64EC, and more. The hardware supplies registers. The ABI decides which ones are part of your packet.

  • [Old] Steel City Snapper ☛ An upgrade to my scanning system – Part 1 the journey to date – Steel City Snapper photography

    My scanning journey has been an evolving beast over the past ten years of film shooting. My first scanner was a Canoscan LIDE which could only scan prints, not negatives, and it wasn’t long before I moved to a proper negative scanning solution in the form of an Epson V550 flatbed. The flatbed was ok for a starting point: not too expensive and the results were much better than from a scan of a lab print, but over time I became dissatisfied with the scans – there was a slight mushiness to them that I knew could be improved upon.

  • [Old] Steel City Snapper ☛ An upgrade to my scanning system – Part 2 the chosen solution revealed!

    After taking the decision to try the DSLR scanning route, there were a number of options to choose from, but perhaps the biggest choice was between a copy-stand system, or something more all-in-one. I’ve seen may people use copy stands but they always presented me with a number of problems to overcome. The most obvious being that I don’t have a copy stand. The second that, even if I got one, I don’t really have anywhere to keep it. Added to that are a number of other issues that I believe copy-stand scanning presents, including the setup and configuration to ensure everything is perfectly level and free from vibration, the risk of stray light being reflected on the negative, and dust. Sure, there are systems that solve some of these issues, but they feel like workarounds and I suspect they would become a chore.

  • Ava ☛ i made a ring!

    Not a webring - maybe some day - but an even cooler one!

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • N Recursions ☛ N Recursions: Contaminants in our food

    Chemical contaminants in our food have been a major concern in recent times, and there are a massive number of educated and uneducated people who are blissfully ignorant of it and aren't able to correlate their various pains, rashes, urination issues, inflammation, pimples, fungal infections, kidney pain, intestinal pain, burning sensation, chills, dental issues, ADHD, lethargy, brain fog, cancer, Parkinsons, and various other issues, to the food contaminants. Even when these cause various health issues, many doctors aren't suggesting anything about switching to safer foods. Moreover, the high costs of organic foods are prohibitive enough that even people severely affected are not buying safer foods. I found it even more appalling that not all organic food is actually organic. Whenever I tell people why I cannot eat certain foods at their homes or functions, it became hard to just say "allergy", because it isn't just an allergy, and there is much that they need to understand about how it affects me and others. So I decided to list out various contaminants and how they affect health.

  • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ Biden’s clean drinking water plan is being rebranded as MAHA

    But both funding streams were appropriated well before Trump took office. Congress originally passed the bipartisan infrastructure law, also known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or IIJA, in 2021, promising to deliver more than $50 billion over five years to revamp the nation’s water infrastructure — the largest investment of its kind since the passage of the 1972 Clean Water Act. Billions of dollars for lead pipe removal and PFAS contamination were tucked into the Biden-era law and scheduled to run out this year.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • SANS ☛ Microsoft's Coreutils for Windows - SANS Internet Storm Center

    I've been using the GnuWin32 CoreUtils for Windows for many years now (it gives you many *nix core commands on Windows).

    Microsoft has just released their coreutils version for Windows.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Pink Extortion Group Emerges Targeting Microsoft 365 Data

    Researchers assess that CL-CRI-1147 is likely affiliated with the broader “Com” cybercriminal ecosystem—a loosely used term for financially motivated actors linked to several high-profile extortion campaigns. The group’s tradecraft closely resembles that of cybercrime crews such as ShinyHunters and Blackfile, both known for targeting cloud environments and stealing corporate data for extortion purposes.

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

    • LabX Media Group ☛ arXiv Takes the First Step to Combat “AI Slop” in Submissions

      The introduction of generative AI tools has expanded access to many writing resources in research, from helping translate between languages, improve fluency, and correct grammar. Alongside these benefits, though, some people have used AI beyond its role as an assistant to polish their finished product. In some instances, researchers have used AI to help them write their paper but left in copied text from the AI prompt, comments from the model, or hallucinated references, suggesting that they did not check the model’s output for accuracy. Some editors have referred to articles with these characteristics as “AI slop.”

    • PC World ☛ OpenClaw was too dangerous for your PC. Now it’s the blueprint

      Of course, the claws on those assistants are pretty dang sharp, and this week, Microsoft and Nvidia were showing off their enterprise-grade mittens, all in the hopes of convincing you, me, and everyone else to buy laptops and desktops running on AI agents.

      Will it work? Ask me again come Thanksgiving.

    • The Verge ☛ Meta made its own AI-generated clickbait news feed

      When targeting me, a reporter based in London, the prompts were aggressively British, involving topics like tea, manners, pubs, royals, football — sorry, soccer — and, naturally, the art of queuing. Suggested stories included “A royal butler finally settled the milk first debate” (the tea goes first, apparently), “The psychology of joining a queue without knowing why,” “The anatomy of the devastating British tut,” and “Inside the extreme sport of visiting every UK pub.” Some made even less sense, like “When a bit of a pickle means total disaster.”

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Criticizing the everything machine (06 Jun 2026)

      "Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic):

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

      I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.

    • Futurism ☛ CEO Says There Will Be No Raises Because He Spent All the Money on AI

      In one of the most egregious examples yet, cloud software company Teradata told its more than 5,000 employees not to expect a raise this year because its budget was being spent on AI instead, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider.

      “We will fund this AI investment by reallocating the budget from 2026 annual salary adjustments,” Teradata CEO Steve McMillan wrote in the memo.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ ‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year

      We were also interested in looking at Cloudflare’s breakdown of human/bot traffic by country. The most bot-ridden traffic comes from the tiny island of Gibraltar (92.1%), followed by Singapore (76.4%), then Iran (76.4%). While some of these places have a lot of data centers and hosting infrastructure compared to population size, Iran’s high bot count may rather come from the heavy use of VPNs with automated scraping and bypass tools. Cloudflare has also previously flagged Iran as a hotspot for malicious bot activity.

    • [Repeat] Scoop News Group ☛ Your AI agent could become your biggest insider threat

      “In cyberattacks, you talk about the kind of execution time of adversaries coming in and dropping ransomware, we’re now seeing the kill chain drop to 30 and 10 minutes depending on what they’re doing,” Desmond said. “Six months ago, that was a couple of hours.”

      But that speed, when paired with direct access to business networks or cloud services, can also create an insider threat nightmare for organizations that must monitor for both malicious actors and potential mistakes from legitimate employees using the technology.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ AI-Powered Bots Create Governance Challenges

      Rather than behaving like traditional automated tools, modern AI-powered bots are now capable of mimicking legitimate users with a level of sophistication that many organizations struggle to detect.

    • APNIC ☛ Non-Human Identity for workloads: Securing the next phase of automation

      Non-Human Identity (NHI) is undergoing a transformation to reduce the attack surface, as the industry has rapidly increased the number of application programming interface (API) connections, both internal and external. Much of this change can be attributed to automation enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the speed at which work can be completed today.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Seattle to pass one-year AI data center moratorium next week — will use window to study community impact of AI buildouts

      The city intends to spend the one-year hold on data center development to study its impact on the community surrounding it and what the local government should do to ensure that its constituents benefit from the project. This includes putting up pollution standards, determining energy connection requirements, setting contract terms, setting labor standards, and other regulations that will apply to data centers. Wilson also mentioned that Seattle will ascertain if these projects are a “good use of urban land” during this period.

  • Social Control Media

    • El País ☛ How social media platforms keep students hooked: Notifications during school hours and paid ‘teen ambassadors’

      TikTok executives decided not to disable notifications during school hours, ignoring recommendations from their own safety team, and paid millions of dollars to parents’ and teachers’ associations to promote the social network in schools. Snapchat sent alerts to teenagers while they were in class urging them to share what was happening in the classroom. Google executives knew that YouTube was recommending videos to students during the school day that were unrelated to their lessons. Meta paid “teen ambassadors” to promote Instagram and hand out gifts to their classmates.

    • The Record ☛ FTC considers setting aside or modifying $150 million privacy penalty against X

      The tech giant was fined $150 million and prohibited from continuing to profit from what an FTC press release at the time called “deceptively collected data.”

      Twitter came under new ownership in October 2022 when Elon Musk bought the company.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Not-Yet-Enabled Code Added to Meta A.I. App for Glasses-Based Facial Recognition Feature

      Some companies are irredeemably bad and rotten to the core. The sooner Meta runs out of money and closes up shop, the better the world will be.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Dark Reading ☛ Exposed Fuel Tank Gauges Under Attack in the US

      The agencies said they're "aware of malicious cyber activity" targeting these systems in the US, but didn't attribute it to any one particular threat group; the statement might be in reference to reports last month that threat actors loosely linked to Iran have been attacking ATGs at gas stations around the country.

      The notice highlighted how, by compromising vulnerabilities in ATGs, threat actors could conceivably alter tank readings, pump controls, and other settings. If plant operators aren't wise to being infiltrated, and especially if the readings concern safety-critical systems, the consequences could be dire. ATGs also perform functions besides bare readings, like alerting operators about abnormal conditions in a tank. Attackers could theoretically disable such alerts, raising the chances for something very dangerous occurring.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ Internet Age-Gates Are a Growing Global Threat

      The problem of censorship and surveillance goes far beyond the borders of the internet. EFF continues to explore support for legislative and litigation challenges that recognize how these laws harm everyone’s rights to privacy, free expression and due process.

    • 404 Media ☛ ICE’s Plan to Let Cops Around the Country Scan Faces to Verify Immigration Status

      The app would be a dramatic escalation in the technology being used to carry out the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are already using Mobile Fortify, a facial recognition app that taps into a wide array of DHS and other government databases, on U.S. streets, stopping people and scanning their faces. With that app, ICE officers point their phone camera at a person, the app scans their face, and the app returns a wealth of biographical information and whether they have been issued an order of removal. The app has made mistakes and been used against American citizens.

    • 404 Media ☛ Immigrant Rights Lawyers File Lawsuit Over Palantir’s ELITE

      JB said ELITE is what ICE uses to track the apparent density of people in a particular location. “You’re going to go to a more dense population rather than [...] like, if there’s one pin at a house and the likelihood of them actually living there is like 10 percent [...] you’re not going to go there,” he added.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Elon Musk is about to become the world’s first trillionaire, and you should know exactly what that means in human lives

    Now consider what that pile could actually do.

    The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates it would take about $20 billion to end homelessness in the United States. Musk’s projected fortune could fund that for fifty-five years. Every veteran, every family in a shelter, every kid sleeping in a car. Off the street. For half a century.

    The UN World Food Programme says ending world hunger by 2030 would cost roughly $40 billion a year. He could write that check for the next twenty-seven years and still have walking-around money left.

    He could erase every penny of student debt held by the 20 million Americans under thirty-five, about $561 billion, and still have more than half a trillion sitting there.

    He could fund universal Pre-K for every three- and four-year-old in America, at roughly $70 billion a year, for the next fifteen years

  • Robert Reich ☛ My Parents and D-Day

    Today is the 82nd anniversary of D-Day — the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. It’s referred to as “D-Day” after the military term for a day when a secret combat attack or operation is planned.

    It was the largest seaborne invasion in history. It began the Western Allied effort to liberate western Europe from Nazi Germany.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Documents Show Social Media Companies Specifically Marketed to Schoolchildren

    YouTube is maybe the trickiest of all these platforms to govern within schools because it has no alternative. There is a vast library of genuinely educational and informative video on the site, and then there is the rest of YouTube. It therefore makes sense to allow its use among students and within schools. However, YouTube has also been honed for boosting engagement, something which affects all users. That is not to say we should have exactly the same standards for children and adults, but it highlights the difficulty of using a singular platform with general-market financial incentives in an educational setting.

  • Yle ☛ Microsoft buys land for data centre on Finland's west coast

    Microsoft has signed a preliminary agreement to buy about 190 hectares in the Vaasa region of western Finland for a possible data centre.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Finland: 4 suspects in sabotage of undersea Estonia cables

    The apparent sabotage on December 31 was one of several incidents of damaged undersea infrastructure in the Baltic since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

    Soon after, Finland seized the Fitburg cargo ship — flying the flag of the Caribbean state of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines — while it was en route from Russia to Israel, suspecting it of involvement in the damage to cables linking Helsinki and Tallinn.

  • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ 10 classic films about D‑Day, recommended by a war historian

    The allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, commonly known as D-Day, was an enormously significant moment in the history of the Second World War.

    Commanded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, D-Day began the liberation from Nazi rule of France (followed in turn by the rest of western Europe). This fact, together with the sheer scale and drama of the event itself, has made it a persistent subject of commemoration, as this year’s anniversary events will again make apparent.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ NSA using Claude Mythos for 'offensive cyber operations,' report claims — says 'half-a-dozen' Anthropic engineers embedded inside the agency

    Just months after the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) labelled Anthropic a "supply chain risk", completely cutting off the firm from being a vendor of any AI wares, a new report claims that the National Security Agency (NSA) is using Anthropic's cybersecurity-focused Mythos model "for offensive cyber operations" with the help of "half a dozen" staff from Anthropic embedded inside the agency. The report comes from Financial Times (FT), which cites "people familiar with the arrangement."

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ O'Leary's AI Data Centres Face Backlash on Both Sides of Border

      Utah Senate President Stuart Adams is demanding O’Leary reduce the footprint of the project by 75%, shrinking it from 40,000 to just 10,000 acres (16,200 to 4,050 hectares) and include more environmental protection and transparency measures.

    • David Pogue ☛ Rise Up, People! Make AI Optional!

      The first problem: By Google’s own calculations, the AI Overviews are incorrect 28% of the time.

      The bigger problem: AI is an environmental disaster. It’s already a monstrous energy hog, and its appetite is doubling every six months. (You can thank the 4,200 data centers that AI companies have built all over the country so far. 1,500 more are going up as we speak.)

      By 2030, AI will consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity—enough to power every household in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania combined.

      60% of that will come from polluting power sources.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ A disease of deforestation: how Ebola is linked to the smartphone in your pocket

      But cutting down the trees in which bats live ruptures this delicate balance between Ebola-carrying animals and humans. The bats don’t just vanish when their trees are gone. They squeeze into the fragments of forest that remain, in closer proximity to humans, increasing the likelihood of encounters in which humans are exposed to their viral-laden blood, saliva and excreta. That’s why, with each percentage-point increase in deforestation in central Africa, as a 2025 analysis found, the incidence of malaria and Ebola spikes by 20% to 40% . It’s why the 2014 Ebola epidemic was preceded by the loss of 85% of the forest cover in the south-west corner of Guinea, where the outbreak began. The current outbreak of Bundibugyo Ebola fits the pattern, too, being preceded by a record loss of 1.5m acres of Congo basin rainforest in 2024, according to satellite data analyzed by Global Forest Watch.

    • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ Data Centre Will Be One of Earth's Largest Heat Sources, Physicist Warns

      “These are not data centres in any familiar sense of the term,” wrote [pdf] Dr. Robert Davies, a physicist and complex systems scientist, in an assessment for the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation. “From here on, I’ll refer to these energy-and-heat behemoths—massive compute fused with massive power generation—as Gigascale AI Smelters, smelting data and material strip-mined from people and planet.”

      At a realistic generation efficiency for a gas plant, Davies said supplying 9 GW of electricity would mean “burning fuel at a continuous rate on the order of 16 to 18 GW, day and night, year-round.”

      “Essentially the entire fuel burn ends up as heat released at the site, because the electricity is consumed onsite and degrades, in full, to heat.”

    • Western Water ☛ Moab's uranium mess inches toward a fix

      The federal government is working on a long-term plan to clean up dirty groundwater at an old uranium mill site near Moab, Utah. An estimated 16 million tons of radioactive waste sat for decades in a pile next to the Colorado River.

    • Seattle Times ☛ Five large data centers eyed for Seattle

      City Light recently sent the companies proposing the data centers cost estimates for the grid infrastructure upgrades that are needed to support them. And it plans to send the updated large load contracts to the mayor’s office for review soon.

      Depending on how the companies feel about those terms, they may or may not follow through on their proposed projects. Data center operators are proposing many more projects than they actually build, market analysts say, likely in search of the most favorable terms.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Ever seen a cave cricket? Australia now has three new species of these spindly, spider-like creatures

      Caves are remarkably good at supporting life. Underground air temperature and humidity levels are usually consistent. For vulnerable species unable to tolerate fluctuations above ground, caves are a haven. This is why ecologists think of caves as evolutionary time capsules. They preserve troglofauna—small animals living mostly or entirely within caves—that might have otherwise died out during ancient climate change events.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Silicon Angle ☛ After filing for its IPO, Anthropic says we need a way to slow down AI. Fat chance.

    Some argue that this is further savvy marketing by Anthropic, contending its models are just too good for our own good, but it’s also clear that the company’s leaders mean it. To be clear, they’re not actually calling for a slowdown, but the option to slow down if things get out off hand — though that may be a distinction without a difference. Here’s the thing, though: Who’s going to agree to a slowdown? Absent any action, we’re left with … the marketing.

  • [Repeat] New York Times ☛ Reid Hoffman to Leave Microsoft’s Board of Directors

    The LinkedIn co-founder was a key bridge to Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI, but he also came with some baggage.

  • The Record ☛ Trump considers Palantir exec to lead CISA

    The Trump administration is considering a technology executive at Palantir to run the federal civilian cybersecurity agency, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

    Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer at Palantir Technologies, has emerged as a lead contender for the long vacant Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director role, according to the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss the administration’s search.

  • The Record ☛ EU unveils tech sovereignty package to cut reliance on US, Chinese suppliers

    The package bundles two draft laws — a Chips Act 2.0 and a Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) — alongside an Open Source Strategy and a roadmap for digitalizing the energy system, intended together to “help widen choice in core technologies for EU businesses, citizens and public administrations.”

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ How disinformation in Congo is worsening Ebola epidemic

      "They say the disease comes from the lab as a bioweapon; that the vaccination is more harmful than the virus; that there is a simple cure that is being concealed; that the disease is not real. Big Pharma is mentioned either as the profiteer of the crisis or as the ones who originated it," Nehring told DW.

      "It's all been known for decades. And it varies, there are 100 different variations of these narratives."

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Nation ☛ We Took CBS’s Money. We Won’t Trade It for Silence.

    The implicit lesson here was that gratitude should speak for itself. The expectation was simple: accept the recognition, cash the check, and leave the criticism to someone else.

    We cannot. We are the four most recent recipients of the Mike Wallace Memorial Scholarship, funded entirely by CBS News. The network has invested tens of thousands of dollars in our education and recognized us as representatives of journalism’s future. That future—thanks to the corporate leadership of CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss, whose editorial interventions in the network’s flagship newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, spurred the firing of several of the network’s veteran producers and reporters—is now in jeopardy. The shameful attack on 60 Minutes hasn’t happened because the program, or the network, is losing ratings, revenue, and respect; it’s occurred as part of the bid to impose ideological orthodoxy on the network’s news division. Weiss’s agenda to appease the Trump administration sends the message that institutional loyalty matters more than editorial independence, and that the truth is merely one side of a debate. The upshot of this timorous model of newsgathering is that neutrality, not objectivity or accountability, is the highest virtue of journalism. Mike Wallace didn’t think so, and neither do we. Below, each of us offers our personal reflections on our tenure as Mike Wallace scholars amid the corporate news crisis at CBS.

  • New York Times ☛ ’60 Minutes’ Stars Will Stay After Pelley’s Firing Because They Don’t Want Show to ‘Die’

    Lesley Stahl and two other “60 Minutes” correspondents said on Friday that they would remain in their posts, ending days of speculation about whether a roiling crisis at the CBS News program would leave it entirely deprived of on-air stars.

  • StokeonTrentLive ☛ Dad, 53, shouted 'dirty Muslims' in Hanley riots - now he's been jailed

    Now Lockett has been jailed for 20 months at Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ ‘I Touched a Nerve’: British Teenager Banned From Russia Over Work on Crypto Sanctions Evasion

    Russia had added Browder and four other British citizens to its entry ban list in the latest round of retaliatory sanctions announced by the Foreign Ministry on Tuesday. Award-winning investigative journalists Catherine Belton and Richard Holmes were also on the list.

    “It’s a badge of honor,” Browder told The Moscow Times. “And I’m in great company.”

  • Meduza ☛ Telegram founder Pavel Durov says Russia’s Internet crackdown has pushed ‘digital sovereignty’ further out of reach and driven developers to leave

    Internet blocks in Russia have only pushed the country further from “digital sovereignty,” Telegram founder Pavel Durov said.

    “The people who could actually build a Russian smartphone OS are bailing out of the country in droves because the internet there is broken,” he wrote on his Telegram channel. “And without that kind of system, every app on a phone — ‘homegrown’ or not — is wide open to targeted surveillance and censorship from the U.S. through backdoors in iOS and Android and their app stores.”

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Telegram Founder Durov Slams Russia’s Internet Censorship as a Boon for U.S. Spying

    “It’s just changing the packaging without changing the core reality. Nothing but Potemkin villages with a distinct flavor of corruption,” Durov wrote in a post on his Telegram channel.

    Earlier this week, the FSB security service accused major web hosting services of helping Western intelligence agencies spy on high-ranking Russian officials through their iPhones.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ US top diplomat's Tiananmen comments 'smear' China, Beijing says

    Beijing has also moved in recent years to snuff out all public commemorations in Hong Kong, where an annual candlelight vigil had been held for decades before the imposition of a national security law in 2020.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Trial of HK Tiananmen activists looms over crackdown anniversary

    Hong Kong and Macau used to be the only places on Chinese soil that permitted large-scale vigils to mourn those who died on June 4, 1989, when the government sent troops and tanks to crush protests calling for political reform.

    But public commemoration has been effectively banned since the national security law’s introduction in 2020, following huge and sometimes violent pro-democracy protests the year before in Hong Kong.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Iran’s Next Internet Blackout Is Inevitable

    Internet blackouts have become routine in Iran, imposed during anti-regime uprisings and now two wars. But this one—Iran’s fifth—was the world’s longest, according to NetBlocks, the global [Internet] monitor. Some online connection is now restored, but for many Iranians, the partial reopening feels like the removal of a few bricks from the digital wall the Islamic Republic has built: Enough for Iranians to glimpse the outside world, but not enough for them to enter it, and the opening comes with the knowledge that the regime can brick the wall back up at any time.

  • JURIST ☛ China bans families from visiting cemetery ahead of Tiananmen crackdown anniversary

    Amnesty International on Wednesday condemned China for banning family members from visiting the resting places of people who perished in the 1989 Tiananmen Square repression. This is the first time in 37 years that the Chinese authorities have banned the visit.

  • The Dissenter ☛ Robin Andersen On US Media's Role In Israel's Genocide

    Robin Andersen, a writer, media studies professor, and member of the board of directors for Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, examines how the United States media covered Israel’s genocide in Gaza in her new book, “The Complicit Lens.”

    Not only were certain frames utilized to downplay the violence, but editors, producers, and reporters were also silent as journalists fell victim to Israel’s “censorship by murder.”

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Historic Evangelical Church in Mashhad Demolished by Unknown Individuals

    The historic Evangelical Church dates back to the early Pahlavi era and is located on Jannat Street, Golestan Alley, in Mashhad. On August 16, 2005, it was registered as one of Iran’s national heritage sites under registration number 13375.

  • RFERL ☛ 'I'm Horrified': Russia Sentences Traveler To 16 Years For Treason Over A $250 Transfer To A Ukrainian

    The fate of Loshchinin, a Belgian and Russian citizen who has lived in the European Union since 1999 -- the same year President Vladimir Putin first came to power as prime minister -- provides a grim look at the relentless and often arbitrary oppression the Russian state is meting out amid the all-out war against Ukraine, now in its fifth year.

    At a closed-door trial, a court in the northwestern city of Pskov found Loshchinin guilty of "financing representatives of a foreign state recognized as an adversary of the Russian Federation," Russian news channels on Telegram reported. The evidence: a single instance in which he sent a Ukrainian ex-girlfriend the equivalent of about $245.

  • MinnPost ☛ Child marriage with parental consent is still legal in Wisconsin

    Most states that have banned child marriage to date are led by Democrats. Wisconsin, where Republicans control the Legislature, is not following their lead.

  • The Nation ☛ Israel Tortured These Activists. Now They're Speaking Out.

    “The harder people screamed, the more [the Israeli authorities] enjoyed it, and the harder and longer they beat you. If you didn’t react, they would eventually get bored,” Ibrahim, who was transported to Ashdod port on a second prison ship separate from Pelegrini, told me. “You could hear screams of torture all around you, and everything was meant to break you and degrade you.”

  • Vox ☛ Meat companies say they’ll change after investigations but almost never do.

    But it appears that its promised reforms didn’t stick. In 2025, Animal Outlook sent a second investigator into the same hatchery and recently released a second exposé, this time finding similar behavior and welfare issues.

    To Animal Outlook, it didn’t come as a surprise.

    “I would’ve been more surprised had we seen the conditions improved demonstrably for these animals,” Ben Williamson, executive director of Animal Outlook, told me. “We know that fundamentally crowding this many animals in these kinds of tanks is going to lead to welfare problems. Treating these animals as commodities is going to lead to cruelty.”

  • TruthOut ☛ Senate Bill to Fund ICE and CBP Contains Zero Reforms to ICE

    The Senate stayed until 4:53 am voting on the funding package on Friday morning. But they were not debating whether or not to provide additional funding to ICE or CBP. The package to DHS received near-unanimous support from Republicans, with only one Republican lawmaker voting against it.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ 340 Local News Outlets Now Blocking The Internet Archive

    Earlier this year Nieman Lab broke the story that major news publishers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co., had started blocking the Internet Archive for fear that AI companies might scrape the nonprofit’s repositories for training data. As one of the last bastions of archival history, that is, in case you’re not aware, not very good for the public interest.

    Four months later and Nieman Lab now notes that the number of news outlets blocking the archive has soared to around 340 organizations: [...]

  • Yle ☛ Finland tests subsea cable disruption monitoring tech

    The most recent incident occurred at the end of last year, when authorities suspected the cargo ship Fitburg of involvement in deliberately damaging an underwater communications cable in the Baltic Sea on New Year's Eve.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Bill Bennett ☛ In depth look at the NZ digital streaming business model

    Streaming and fast broadband have changed how we watch sport and other video entertainment, but the golden age is over. Where will digital media go next?

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Press Gazette ☛ European publishers seek £552m+ from Google claiming ad market abuse

    The European Commission found that Google was dominant in the market for publisher ad servers with its service Double Click for Publishers, or DFP.

    It was simultaneously dominant in the market for programmatic ad-buying tools for the open web through its services, Google Ads and DV360.

    The Commission said that Google had favoured its own ad exchange AdX in the ad selection process run by DFP, for example by informing AdX of its competitors’ highest bids which it needed to beat to win the auction.

  • Patents

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ The Floppy Disk patent was granted today in 1972 — when 80KB took up 8 inches and were really floppy

      The patent application for the floppy disk was granted to two IBM engineers on this day in 1972. U.S. patent number 3668658A was for a “magnetic record disk cover” that described a rotary magnetic medium housed in a protective cover that cleaned and protected the surface. These first floppy disks were a rather large 8 inches in diameter, but had a capacity of just 80 kilobytes. They were actually floppy, like the 5.25-inch disks that readers may be more familiar with, and in contrast to the rigid plastic-encased 3.5-inch ‘save icons.’

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Protection or profit? The hidden truth behind Nikon’s dispute with Viltrox

      Earlier this year, news broke about Nikon suing Viltrox over unlicensed products for the Z-mount. And following reports that Sirui and Meike pulled Z-mount-compatible lenses from sale in China, the legal dispute is once again in the headlines following a new Viltrox Z-mount patent.

    • Benjamin Henrion ☛ European Parliament Transparency 20 years later, still no transcripts?

      23 years ago, I was following the attempt by the patent industry to impose software patents in Europe via a European Directive.

      After facing public outrage, Big companies asked the European Parliament to reject the directive, and better push for a Central Patent Court instead. This has not taken the form of the Unified Patent Court (UPC), which has the last word over software patents in the EU, as the exception for computer programs lies in International Law (the European Patent Convention (EPC)) and not in EU law.

      In the context of the review of the IPRED directive, the Legal Affairs Committee has invited 'experts' to discuss issues related to enforcement of patents, and the UPC in particular.

      Back in the days, I complained that was no written transcript available of what is happening in the Committees, like the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI). I had to go physically to those meetings in Brussels in the European Parliament with a personal recorder device, connect the jack to the headphone plug, and record the audio of the meeting in order to have a trace of what was said. I then uploaded those recordings to FFII's media.ffii.org server, which vanished because the treasurer considered this server 'legacy'. Since there was no backup, most of those files are gone, maybe some files are recoverable via archive.org.

      There are now some video recordings of those committee meetings, which are available on the european parliament website.

      Since then, the power of those committees increased, as there is a higher probability that was is adopted by those committees is being adopted by the whole parliament.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Vietnam's Online Piracy Failures Trigger Section 301 Investigation, Tariffs on the Table

      A month after designating Vietnam as a "Priority Foreign Country" over its failure to deter online piracy, the U.S. Trade Representative has formally opened a trade investigation, opening the door to potential sanctions. Rightsholders are invited to submit comments, and the MPA, which pursued action against Fmovies, Sflix, 2embed, and other Vietnamese pirate operations, is expected to weigh in.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ YouTube Processed 2.5 Billion Content ID Copyright Claims in 2025

      YouTube's Content ID system processed a record 2.5 billion copyright claims in 2025, a 14% increase compared to a year before. While disputes remain rare, uploaders who challenged claims come out as the winner more often than not. Despite the increase in claims, the number of Content ID eligible rightsholders dropped.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Judge Vacates Order Sealing 'Sensitive' Udio Training Data

      Late last month, Sony Music moved to file a redacted version of its supersized amended complaint due to the presence of details that Udio “believes to be sensitive confidential information that should be sealed from the public record.”

      Though we already knew what those details pertained to – the training number, of course – Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein technically signed off on Sony Music’s motion this past Tuesday. And on Wednesday, the judge issued a distinct order vacating a previously approved request from Udio to seal the training number references.

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ The rise of copyright trolling

      The legal system should be able to stop activities like this, where companies regularly issue bullying or unfounded requests. Reputation management companies indulge in similar activities, similarly often without genuine legal foundations to their demands. Yet currently, there is no means to fine such companies or otherwise stop this behaviour.