Leftovers

• Jeff Triplett ☛ How I Work From Anywhere Without Losing My Place - Jeff Triplett's Micro.blog

  I wanted a setup that works across all three without rebuilding anything when I switch. I’d rather grab my iPhone or iPad with a portable keyboard than lug a laptop everywhere. If I’m at one of my kids’ practices and want to quickly follow up on something or implement an idea, I always have my phone with me.

  The stack is basically: [...]

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Discover a Strange Global Pattern in The Way Humans Walk

    We're not as random as we think.

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Found a New Alzheimer's Trigger, And a Drug to Slow It in Mice

    Compound 10 might be another way to attack the disease.

  • Science Alert ☛ Earliest Flickering Quasar Ever Seen Could Explain Monster Black Holes

    "This is the first time we actually see one flickering."

  • Science Alert ☛ A Supplement For Joint Pain Could Accelerate Alzheimer's Memory Loss

    A lesser-known problem we need to understand.

  • Science Alert ☛ Extraordinary Fossils Solve a 500-Million-Year Evolution Mystery

    "These fossils finally close that chapter."

• Career/Education

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Future Frontend 2026 Recap

    Mid-June we organised our 4th annual Future Frontend conference in Dipoli, Espoo, Finland. As the conference series was a continuation of our previous React Finland conference, this was my 5th as an organiser and before that, I had been to a couple as participant or representative of a sponsor. As always, it was a lot of fun.

  • [Old] Future Frontend ☛ Future Frontend 2026 conference themes

    At its core, we are still a developer conference with a slight bias on the web, but I believe you can still gain a lot from the event even if you work more on the design side or plan your own products. Our core value in program design is providing inspiration and covering topics that are perhaps not so well covered otherwise. Often, you gain the most from sessions that are topically furthest from you, and I believe our arrangement has a good chance of this, given the scope spanning design and development.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Digital Music News ☛ Spotify Is Purging Tens of Thousands of Illegal Drug-Peddling Podcasts Amid Congressional Investigation

    Spotify has taken down “tens of thousands” of podcasts promoting illegal drugs since a congressional investigation began last year. According to U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Spotify told her office that it took down “tens of thousands” of podcasts promoting opioids since her office raised concerns about the issue last year.

  • European Commission ☛ Commission proposes €540 million in financial relief and other supports for farmers facing fertiliser crisis

    Today, the European Commission presents measures to help farmers facing sharply rising fertiliser costs and to support Europe's food security, delivering on the recently announced Fertiliser Action Plan.

  • Science Alert ☛ Men Can Lose Their Y Chromosome With Age, And We Finally Know The Cost

    The evidence is accumulating.

  • Superdavey ☛ No news is good news

    It’s been about 5 weeks since I quit the news and it has been so good for my overall mental health. The only thing I really keep up to date with is tech and that’s because it’s my job, everything else is just a distraction. No news is good news, ignorance is bliss and JOMO!

  • Sal ☛ Reorganized the desk, plus a hifi splurge

    I didn’t realize how good I’d sounded with the Studio Display’s mic array until it was gone. I started using my Macbook’s microphones, which sound fine. But multiple people at work noticed the difference, commenting on how good I used to sound compared to most people on virtual calls. One guy said I used to sound like Casey Kasem. 😂

    I dug my old Samson Q2U out of my closet and bought a boom arm for it. Now I sound better than ever, albeit at the cost of some desk complexity.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Xbox will pay five times more for memory and storage in 2027 than it did two years ago — CEO Asha Sharma admits there's an unsustainable hardware gap that 'cannot continue'

    The next-gen Xbox Helix is looking in trouble due to surging memory and storage costs that are forcing even a giant like Abusive Monopolist Microsoft to bend down.

  • XBOX Studio at Risk of Closure in Upcoming Layoff Round, Sources Say

    Asha Sharma confirmed this week what many had already suspected: the situation at XBOX is more dire than it appears. Despite a series of recent adjustments, the company remains on shaky ground. Forecasts are grim, and leadership acknowledges that radical changes are necessary to keep the business afloat before any true new era for XBOX can begin.

    Achieving that goal, however, will come at a significant cost. A recent report indicates that Microsoft is preparing another wave of job cuts within its gaming division. According to a trusted source, this decision will directly affect XBOX Game Studios, potentially leading to the shutdown of one of its internal teams.

  • Microsoft Reportedly Considering Selling Xbox, Call of Duty Partly To Blame

    Xbox is rapidly evolving under its new leadership, and its new saviour has come just in time for Microsoft, who were reportedly 'floating' the idea of selling the gaming division.

    To say that Xbox has had a tumultuous few years would be an understatement.

    The gaming giants have fallen way behind PlayStation and PC, despite new efforts from CEO Asha Sharma to reignite the console wars.

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

    • Security Week ☛ Anthropic Says It Has Taken Its Latest Hey Hi (AI) Models Offline to Comply With New Export Controls

      Anthropic takes Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline to comply with a directive from the Convicted Felon administration to prevent use by foreign nationals.

    • New York Times ☛ Anthropic Blocks Foreigners From Using Mythos and Fable AI

      The company said on Friday night that the federal government had ordered limits on its Mythos and Fable 5 Hey Hi (AI) systems, citing national security concerns.

    • Bhaskar English ☛ AI Transforms FIFA World Cup 2026 | Smart Tech & Robot Dogs

      In football, wealth often creates an advantage. Bigger teams can afford huge analytics departments, expensive software, and experts who study opponents in detail. Smaller football nations usually struggle to keep up. FIFA AI Pro aims to change that. All 48 teams competing in the World Cup will receive equal access to the tool. It can process hundreds of millions of data points to provide match analysis in different formats, including text, videos, graphs, and even 3D visuals.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Talking With Azeem Azhar

      Krugman: Yeah. Let me ask sort of the dumbest question: what is this thing called AI? How does it do what it does? I mean, even skeptics have to admit that it’s really impressive how it’s sort of leapt over all of the previous barriers. How is this happening?

    • JURIST ☛ Canada mother sues OpenAI, alleging Abusive Monopolist Microsoft Chaffbot encouraged daughter’s suicide

      A Canadian mother sued Proprietary Chaffbot Company and its CEO Scam Altman in California state court in San Francisco on Thursday, alleging that Abusive Monopolist Microsoft Chaffbot encouraged her 24-year-old daughter Alice to commit suicide. The mother, Kristie Carrier, claims that Alice spoke with Abusive Monopolist Microsoft Chaffbot repeatedly about her suicidal ideations, but that the system did not flag the conversations.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ New malware campaign tricks Hey Hi (AI) scanners with fake nuclear weapon prompts — malicious code triggers safety failsafes so scanners skip the payload

      Hades malware campaign now tricks Hey Hi (AI) bots into not scanning development packages, as prompts for bio- and nuclear weapons trigger failsafe mechanisms.

    • Futurism ☛ AI Bro Convinced He Can Vibe Code GTA 6 Before the Real One Comes Out

      "The goal: beat the real GTA 6 to launch."

    • Federal News Network ☛ A lot of health Hey Hi (AI) isn’t where you think it is, and it’s not overseen the way you might expect

      "The same Hey Hi (AI) may be regulated by different entities depending on where it is used, the data that it's trained on," said Maya Sandalow.

    • Bridge Michigan ☛ More people are using Hey Hi (AI) for medical advice. Here’s what to know

      While artificial intelligence can offer advice on health concerns, doctors say there’s no replacement for physician visits.

  • Social Control Media

    • Don Marti ☛ Facebook slop: the future of ad-supported media?

      The most important part about these “social media content creators,” from the point of view of Meta and the other Big Tech companies, is their material is cheap. Generative AI, low wages, zero research or news-gathering expenses—there is no way that a legit news site can compete in raw seconds of attention per currency unit. And they don’t just work in politics. There’s probably even more of this kind of slop about health-related topics.

      Big Tech wins when they can move more ad money to support cheap slop and misinformation instead of more expensive content.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Futurism ☛ The More Data We See About SpaceX's IPO, the More We're Wincing

    The more data we see about the blockbuster IPO, the harder it becomes to rationalize it. Investing in Musk’s rocket company is starting to feel less about trusting it to ever make money and more about signaling confidence in the billionaire’s vast ambitions to send humans to Mars or build out a one million satellites-strong AI data center in orbit. Others are likely looking to go along for the ride, hoping to get rich on the hype alone. That’s an inherently risky gambit, especially given the volatility of Musk’s other publicly traded company, Tesla.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Who Watches the Watchers?

      Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert spoke to Politiken about the spyware industry, calling it “a symptom that something is fundamentally wrong.” 

    • Neil Selwyn ☛ School surveillance of students – a matter of faith

      The scope of what schools plausibly might want to know about their students is surprisingly wide. This is leading to all manner of Hey Hi (AI) surveillance products being pitched to education customers.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Several police officers arrested for using controversial Flock Hey Hi (AI) license plate reader system to stalk romantic partners, says report — investigators have unearthed at least 18 such cases in the US over recent years

      Tens of officers have been fired, and some even arrested, for abuse of the Flock license plate reader system used by police departments throughout the US, according to a new report.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Luis Fernando García On State Surveillance in Latin America

      Senior researcher Luis Fernando García participated in a Conversatorio Regional hosted by CELS, ODIA, Democracia en Red, and Vía Libre.

    • EFF ☛ Victory! 702 has Expired!

      Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets US intelligence agencies collect communications from foreigners abroad without a warrant, and routinely sweeps in Americans’ emails, messages, and calls in the process.

      The authority for this program is set to expire Friday, June 12th, 2026, at midnight. As we wrote earlier this week, Congress has been kicking the ball down the road for months now—temporarily postponing the expiration of the mass surveillance authority Section 702 of FISA in hopes that some consensus on a longer reauthorization could be reached.

    • The Register UK ☛ NHS patients can't opt out of Palantir's data platform – but their hospital can

      On the main opt-out mechanism, she said: "The National Data Opt-Out does not currently apply to products used in the NHS FDP. In most cases, this is because data is being used for the purpose of direct care."

    • 404 Media ☛ ‘You Will Not Speak on Flock Tonight’: County Commissioner Refuses to Let Residents Opposing Flock Speak at Meeting

      “You will not speak on Flock tonight,” he responds. “One person designated. You can pick that person … if I gave everyone three minutes to say the same thing, which is opposition to Flock, we’d never get done … I’ve spoken. I’m not debating this. I am taking advantage of our policy as it is written to streamline this process, you can either do it or not.”

      “You’re in a room full of people who care!,” a person in the crowd says.

    • Wired ☛ The FCC Wants to Kill Burner Phones

      After limiting the release of its new Mythos-class AI model over concerns about its potential impacts on cybersecurity, Anthropic announced a model upgrade for partners in its limited-access group this week and launched a “safe” version of the model to the public with guardrails meant to keep the system from being used to fuel cyberattacks. Meanwhile, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a new directive to federal agencies this week in reaction to new AI threats that includes a requirement to fix the most urgent software vulnerabilities in as little as three days.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Bill C–34 Punts Key Decisions to Cabinet and a Commission That Does Not Yet Exist

      There is the tiniest, faintest shred of hope in that some platforms implementing “adequate safeguards” will not actually need to verify ages at all. I am not banking on that, to be clear, but it is at least a notion of something that could be promising. Then again, we have no idea about what that means or, in fact, any material policies in this bill. All we have is this framework, and it sucks.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Taking Stock of Bill C-34: Five Things to Know About the Government's Plan for a Kids' Social Media Ban, Mandated Age Verification, and AI Chatbot Rules

      This past week in digital policy was dominated by Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, which includes platform regulation, an under-16 social media ban backed by mandated age verification, a new AI chatbot regulatory regime, and the creation of a powerful Digital Safety Commission. I have posted daily on the bill, including my initial review, an examination of the 50 key decisions the bill leaves for later, and a closer look at the government’s fast-track implementation plan, alongside a FAQ and posts on mandated ID and trade risks that I published just before the bill was tabled. For those coming to the issue fresh, this post draws on the week’s posts by taking stock of where things stand.

    • [Old] Netguru S A ☛ Philip Zimmermann and a new standard for encrypting data | Hidden Heroes

      “Until recently,” Zimmermann explained back in the early 90s, “if the government wanted to violate the privacy of ordinary citizens, they had to expend a certain amount of expense and labor to intercept and steam open and read paper mail…. This kind of labor-intensive monitoring was not practical on a large scale. This is like catching one fish at a time, with a hook and line. Today, email can be routinely and automatically scanned for interesting keywords, on a vast scale, without detection. This is like driftnet fishing.”

    • [Old] The Markup ☛ Back into the Trenches of the Crypto Wars – The Markup

      As it happens, I recently interviewed Signal president Meredith Whittaker about the challenges of protecting privacy at the Web Summit conference last fall. So I transcribed our live discussion and asked her to revise and extend her remarks a bit. This is Whittaker’s second appearance in this newsletter: I last interviewed her in April 2020 about gig workers fighting to win safety protections during the height of the pandemic.

      Whittaker is a veteran tech activist. While at Google, she founded Google’s Open Research Group and co-founded M-Lab, a global internet measurement platform. She was also a core organizer of internal protests against military use of Google technology and of the Google Walkout in 2018. She co-founded the AI Now Institute and was Minderoo Research Professor at NYU. Before joining Signal as president, she completed a term as a senior adviser on AI to the chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

    • [Old] PC Mag ☛ Crypto Wars: Why the Fight to Encrypt Rages On

      Encryption systems are also at work in nearly every facet of modern technology, not just to hide information from criminals, enemies, and spies but also to verify and clarify basic, personal information. The story of encryption spans centuries, and it's as complicated as the math that makes it work. And new advances and shifting attitudes could alter encryption completely.

      We talked to several experts in the field to help us understand the many facets of encryption: its history, current state, and what it may become down the road. Here's what they had to say.

• Defence/Aggression

  • ADF ☛ Eastern Chad an Emerging Frontline in Sudan War

    Strife is growing in eastern Chad’s ethnic Zaghawa communities amid allegations of support for Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Japan PM Takaichi still enjoys support despite public’s anxieties about Iran war

    Her government has rolled out fuel subsidies and a consumption tax cut to ease inflation pain.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ FBI takes down massive China-based cybercrime network that caused $1.9B in losses

    Outsider provided phishing kits and infrastructure for cybercriminals to scam victims with lures claiming they missed packages, had unpaid tolls or parking violations.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Why Calls to ‘Save Democracy’ Don’t Work

    We learned that the central question for the conservatives we met is not “Should America be a democracy?” Instead it is: “Has American democracy remained faithful to what makes it legitimate?” Democratic institutions are legitimate, in the view of conservatives, when they honor and protect the faith, freedom, families, and communities of their constituents. When institutions and the politicians who inhabit them fail to appreciate the centrality of these core values, they become illegitimate.

  • TruthOut ☛ FBI Raids Ohio Voting Rights Organization

    “This is not normal business,” Haney said. “I mean there’s no reason for over 100 agents to be knocking on the doors of everyday Ohioans, demanding and accusing people of voter fraud as if it was a witch hunt.”

    Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) said she was “alarmed and outraged” by the FBI raid, which she alleged was part of an effort by President Donald Trump and FBI Director Kash Patel to disrupt the 2026 midterm elections.

  • NPR ☛ Ohio voting rights group says it was raided by the FBI | WVXU

    The collaborative does organizing and voter engagement. Haney said the people whom the FBI contacted were told it was in relation to a case of voter fraud. But he said he believes it is political intimidation akin to what happened in Selma, Alabama decades ago.

    "When have we ever seen federal forces used to come after civil rights leaders, community organizers, volunteers who are doing voting rights at this scale? So that is very concerning where we are at," Haney said.

  • TruthOut ☛ As Federal Voting Rights Law Is Gutted, Some States Step In to Fill the Gap

    State versions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act include some of the federal law’s approaches to fighting discrimination, including prohibitions against voter intimidation and vote dilution — that is, drawing electoral maps that distribute racial minorities across districts in a way that denies them the opportunity to elect their candidates of choice.

    The state laws also typically require local jurisdictions to get state approval before changing their election maps and policies. Those so-called preclearance provisions matter because its federal counterpart within the Voting Rights Act was rendered unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Midterms in a Nutshell, as of June 13

    A number of you have asked me for a simple overview of where things stand in the race to control Congress, so here’s some information you may find useful. It suggests where we need to focus our energies over the next four and a half months.

    1. What’s needed for control of each chamber [...]

  • Mike Brock ☛ Loyalty

    But the word had another meaning once, an older meaning, the meaning it carries in the constitutional oath. The oath is to the Constitution. Not to the man who appointed you. Not to the party that elevated you. Not to the movement that credentialed you. To the Constitution. Loyalty, in the oath’s sense, is fidelity to a structure that exists prior to any particular officeholder and that will exist after every particular officeholder is gone. It is the discipline of placing the country’s continuing form above the immediate interests of the faction one happens to belong to.

    These two meanings of loyalty are not compatible. A person can occupy one or the other. The people who try to occupy both end up, inevitably, occupying the first while talking about the second. They end up, that is, where Sarah Isgur is.

  • New York Times ☛ Despite Talk of an Iran Peace Deal, Lebanon’s War Grinds On

    Israeli strikes on Friday left Lebanon out of sync with a cautious optimism taking hold elsewhere in the Middle East.

  • The Straits Times ☛ India summons top US diplomat for second time to protest strikes on ships off Oman, source says

    The move to lodge a protest is rare given a close, strategic partnership between the US and India.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ ‘Speaking truth’: Philippine defence chief defiant after China sanctions

    The Philippines defence minister was defiant on Friday after Beijing sanctioned him for what it termed “irresponsible remarks” as the two nations grapple over the disputed South China Sea.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Japan, Indonesia eye closer ties via intel sharing, export of destroyers

    They agreed last week to launch talks on the export of Asagiri-class destroyers to Indonesia.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Bangladesh, India to coordinate patrols on border, share intelligence amid migrant tensions

    The talks also cover “illegal, inadvertent and forcible crossing at border areas”, an increasingly contentious issue.

  • ADF ☛ Tunisia Shows ‘Operational Superiority’ With Counterterror Raids

    Two raids on terrorist cells in Tunisia earlier this year demonstrate security forces’ ability to detect and neutralize plots against the country while also highlighting the persistent terrorist threat. Security forces staged the raids in January in the Kasserine governorate in the western part of the country.

  • France24 ☛ Combating foreign digital interference: ‘France is among the top three in Europe’

    French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu hosted political representatives from across party lines on Thursday to discuss the issue of electoral interference ahead of the country’s 2027 presidential election. French authorities are sounding the alarm over the rapid advances in artificial intelligence which they fear could make attempts to digitally manipulate the voting process from abroad – and consequently the electoral outcome – easier than ever before.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • LRT ☛ Baltic, Polish NGOs call for review of migrant pushbacks at Belarus border

      Human rights organisations in Lithuania, Latvia and Poland have called on governments bordering Belarus to review their migrant pushback practices following the entry into force of the European Union's Migration and Asylum Pact.

    • LRT ☛ Lithuanian foreign minister meets Belarusian opposition, reaffirms support

      Lithuania's foreign minister has met representatives of the Belarusian democratic opposition in Vilnius and reaffirmed the country's commitment to supporting their cause.

    • ADF ☛ Mali’s Use of Cluster Bombs Draws Outrage

      A few weeks after Tuareg fighters pushed the Malian Army and its Russian supporters out of the northern city of Kidal, hundreds of metal balls the size of oranges rained down on the nearby community of Tadjmart.

    • New York Times ☛ ‘Operation Pushkin’: Paris Trial Puts Spotlight on Rare-Book Heists

      One by one, valuable works by Russian masters like Pushkin and Gogol were disappearing from libraries across Europe. Now six defendants are being prosecuted.

    • The Straits Times ☛ Armenian opposition party files petition to annul June election results

      June 12 - A pro-Russian opposition alliance filed a request to Armenia's election commission on Friday to throw out the results of last Sunday's parliamentary election, won by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan's governing party.

    • RFERL ☛ Russian Woman Who Lied About FSB Ties Is Sentenced to 14 Months

      A Russian woman who pleaded guilty to lying about her contacts with Russia's main intelligence agency -- and was later accused of sending drunken harassing messages to the FBI -- was sentenced to 14 months in prison.

    • LRT ☛ Russia is building military infrastructure along its borders with Northern Europe, Baltics

      Russia is actively building new military infrastructure along its borders with the Nordic and Baltic countries and plans to station up to 115,000 troops there, according to a joint investigation by the Swedish and Norwegian broadcasters SVT and NRK.

    • France24 ☛ Former Tory MP and military officer on Keir Starmer's 'rope-a-dope' week

      The British prime minister is once again fighting for his political survival, on the back foot after his defence secretary and defence minister quit the government over complaints of a lack of military spending and sufficient commitment to keep Britain safe from the spectre of Russian attack.

    • European Commission ☛ Statement by President von der Leyen and President Costa on the agreement to open the first accession negotiation cluster with Ukraine and Moldova

      All Member States agreed to open the first accession negotiations cluster with Ukraine and Moldova.

    • Latvia ☛ Ukrainian vehicles will be parked by Freedom Monument in Rīga

      Specialized vehicles used in evacuation missions from the Ukrainian front will be temporarily stationed at the Freedom Monument in central Rīga from June 13th to June 18th.

    • France24 ☛ Ukraine's EU accession bid gains traction as Hungary lifts veto

      The European Union will resume membership negotiations with Ukraine on Monday after Hungary's new government lifted a long-standing veto imposed by former prime minister Viktor Orban. EU leaders said all member states had agreed to open the first phase of accession talks with Ukraine and Moldova, marking a fresh show of support for Kyiv amid Russia's ongoing war.

    • France24 ☛ Iran, Ukraine, Belfast & Albania’s ‘Flamingo Revolution’

      In a week that began with Hell Toupée pronouncing that a ceasefire extension was so close with Iran, two or three days max, and that would only take an hour to finalise. Hours later Tehran downed a US Apache helicopter off the Gulf of Oman with the crew rescued from the sea, the attack reportedly an attempt to deter the US’s evolving efforts to increase air patrols that target Iranian drones in order to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

    • France24 ☛ US plans to slash fighter jets, warships to NATO in Europe, NY Times reports

      The United States plans to slash the number of fighter jets and warships it provides to NATO in Europe, the New York Times reported on Thursday. The reported cutbacks come as European nations race to bolster their defense capacities since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked fears that Moscow could attack a NATO country. France 24's Rochelle Ferguson-Bouyahi takes a closer look.

    • RFERL ☛ EU Members Agree To Advance Accession Talks For Ukraine And Moldova

      European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has announced that European Union member states have agreed to advance accession negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova, boosting the countries' membership bids after two years of stalled progress.

    • RFERL ☛ US Releases Information On Biolabs In Over 30 Countries, Including Ukraine

      The director of US National Intelligence (DNI) has released evidence that her office says shows "longstanding" United States government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries where research on biological pathogens, some dangerous, is conducted.

    • New York Times ☛ Bring the Kids and Grab Some Barbecue: A Day at the Ukrainian Drone Races

      Competitions that give soldiers a brief break from the front have a festival-like atmosphere, a mix of potentially deadly weapons and frolicking children.

    • Latvia ☛ Wider buffer zone planned along Latvian border

      To strengthen the security of the country’s borders and maintain its infrastructure, a 30-metre buffer zone is planned to be established along Latvia’s external land border. This is provided for in the urgent amendments to the Protective Zone Law, which were supported in the final reading by the Saeima on Thursday, June 11, as reported by the Saeima Press Service.

• Environment

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Nearly 500 abandoned fishing nets pulled from Estonian side of Lake Peipus

    In all, nearly 500 nets were recovered over the four-day operation, officials said.

    Environmental Board lead inspector Ivar Veider said many of them are likely linked to winter fishing and drifting ice.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Ocean monitoring is in trouble: It's up to Europe and Asia to avoid losing sight of the world's deep‑sea ecosystems

    Research ships steam along oceanographic transects from surface to seafloor. Anchored buoys watch the tropical oceans for the first signs of El Niño or tropical cyclones and take the pulse of the thermohaline circulation. Some 4,000 autonomous floats sink every 10 days to 2,000 meters before rising to transmit temperature and salinity to ground stations via satellite. Underwater gliders patrol continental margins, and drifting buoys ride the surface in the most remote waters. Hundreds of elephant seals carry miniaturized sensors beneath the polar sea ice...

    Together, this network produces invaluable information that allows societies to anticipate and respond to changing ocean and weather conditions, and protect the ocean in return.

  • Western Water ☛ Drought grips the West as heat builds across the basin

    Underpinning all of it is a difficult inheritance from the most recent winter season. The Drought Monitor’s authors note plainly that “a winter characterized by above-normal temperatures and below-normal snowpack continues to affect the region and will likely influence conditions through the summer.” For a region that depends heavily on mountain snowpack to fill its rivers and reservoirs, that sentence carries serious weight.

  • The Register UK ☛ Amazon owns up to using 2.5bn gallons of H2O in its bit barns last year

    The water usage, we're told, is 75 percent of the way to Amazon's goal - announced in 2022 - of being "water positive" by 2030. It means facilities return more water to the environment than they consume, via measures including rainwater capture or other treating waste water for reuse.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Solid-state battery cell hits 465 Wh/kg, passes extreme safety tests

      Alongside the production of the larger cell, the company reported stack-level energy densities of 465 Wh/kg and 1400 Wh/L within a pouch design. Engineers reached these figures by introducing a high-loading cathode with an areal capacity of 8mAh/cm2 into the company’s proprietary Solid Composite Electrolyte.

    • International Business Times ☛ Pilot Nearly Blinded by White House UFC Lights He Described as '10 Times Worse Than a Laser'

      A commercial airline pilot has filed formal aviation safety reports after powerful lighting from the White House UFC octagon allegedly flooded their cockpit during a nighttime approach into Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) in Washington, DC. The pilot, speaking anonymously to MeidasTouch as they were not authorised to speak publicly, said the lights struck during the final stages of landing, a critical phase of flight when pilots rely heavily on visual references.

    • Chris Glass ☛ World Bicycle Day

      It felt good to feel the breeze.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Latvia ☛ Spot a bear? Tell everyone, Latvian nature agency asks

      Brown bears are becoming increasingly common in Latvia, which is why public sightings are also becoming more important. The Nature Conservation Agency (DAP) urges anyone who has spotted a bear or signs of its presence to report it on the nature observation portal "Dabas dati", providing as accurate information as possible and, if possible, a photograph (but don't go out of your way to take one).

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ China warns of ‘spy turtles’ fishing for sea secrets

      Foreign spies are fitting turtles and fish with sensors to create underwater maps of China’s coastline, Beijing warned Friday in apparent reference to its Western competitors.

• Finance

  • Futurism ☛ Extremely Unflattering Statue of MElon Appears in Times Square, Complete With Horrifying Slogan

    "While this inflatable is a fitting metaphor — much like MElon and his companies, it is inflated, full of hot air, and could pop at any minute."

  • New York Times ☛ Social Security Is Going Broke. Where Is the Outrage?

    We’ve been here before, but never so close.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • New Yorker ☛ The Insurrectionist’s Imperial Birthday Spectacle

    How this weekend’s U.F.C. cage fight might mask a Presidency in decline.

  • India Times ☛ Microsoft has considered spinning off Xbox: Report

    Xbox has struggled in recent years as Microsoft's bet on subscriptions and cloud gaming failed to offset declining console sales and a shortage of blockbuster titles.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Is India next up in global Gen Z protests? Its ‘Cockroach Party' hits the streets.

    “There was a suppressed angst and frustration in the youth of India who are feeling cheated at every stage,” says Apoorvanand, an expert in Indian political movements and professor of Hindi at the University of Delhi, who, like many in India, uses a single name. “The movement tapped into that.”

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Super-Elite Is Tightening Its Grip on Combat Sports

    Beneath the spectacle of fighters beating each other bloody on the White House South Lawn, fight promoters, tech billionaires, and the Saudi government are working to concentrate wealth and power in fewer, richer hands.

  • Business Insider ☛ Google Cloud's Quiet Layoffs Hit Cybersecurity Teams

    The cuts were not limited to that unit, affecting others at Mandiant — a cybersecurity company bought by Google in 2022 — and within Google Cloud, the people added.

  • Wired ☛ Elon Musk Is the World’s First Trillionaire

    He remains a reviled figure in many circles, including for his efforts last year to dismantle parts of the US government and his years of popularizing and allowing hateful rhetoric through his social media presence. To protest the IPO, one activist group inflated a giant effigy of Musk in New York’s Times Square this week.

  • The Verge ☛ Amazon security research reportedly led to the White House’s Anthropic Fable ban

    Anthropic and the Trump administration have been at odds for some time over the company’s refusal to allow its AI to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or to power lethal autonomous weapons. In February, Trump instructed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI. And just hours later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated the company a supply chain risk.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Shareholder supremacy and the precog CEO (13 Jun 2026)

    It's been 55 years since Milton Friedman – cursed be his name – published his NYT editorial, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits," in which he invented the idea of shareholder supremacy out of whole cloth and declared it to be a universal, freestanding, inarguable truth:

    https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html

    Friedman's editorial railed against the idea of "corporate social responsibility," arguing that corporate managers should confine the exercise of their consciences to projects involving their own money and resources. At work, managers must harden their bleeding hearts and do nothing except increase the returns to their shareholders.

  • Armin Ronacher ☛ Dangerous Technology For Americans Only

    I understand the reaction, but I urge you to not entertain it for too long because it is a giant distraction. The important part is not that Anthropic’s safety language came back to bite them but the line the US government is drawing: this technology is apparently so powerful that only Americans should have it.

    We are on a clear path towards a world of division. One should think that if a model is too dangerous for everyone, then it is too dangerous for Americans too. Instead the US is treating these models like weapons that need to be controlled. It is not just about capabilities, it is about racism and nationalism. If you have the wrong passport, you are not to be trusted. This is a very different thing from safety, and Europeans should pay close attention to it.

  • [Old] New America ☛ Doomed to Repeat History? Lessons from the Crypto Wars of the 1990s

    Encryption is a method by which two parties can communicate securely. Although it has been used for centuries by the military and intelligence communities to send sensitive messages, the debate over the public’s right to use encryption began after the discovery of “public key cryptography” in 1976. In a seminal paper on the subject, two researchers named Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman demonstrated how ordinary individuals and businesses could securely communicate data over modern communications networks, challenging the government’s longstanding domestic monopoly on the use of electronic ciphers and its ability to prevent encryption from spreading around the world. By the late 1970s, individuals within the U.S. government were already discussing how to solve the “problem” of the growing individual and commercial use of strong encryption. War was coming.

  • [Old] Bruce Schneier ☛ History of the First Crypto War

    As we’re all gearing up to fight the Second Crypto War over governments’ demands to be able to back-door any cryptographic system, it pays for us to remember the history of the First Crypto War. The Open Technology Institute has written the story of those years in the mid-1990s.

  • [Old] EFF ☛ The Crypto Wars [PDF]

    Since EFF’s founding, we’ve never stopped fighting for users’ right to strong, uncompromised encryption. In the 1990s, we worked with leading academics and industry associations, to defeat the U.S. “Clipper Chip” proposal to compel companies to give the government backdoor keys into commercial encryption technologies. We also defeated export regulations that prevented the development and distribution of strong encryption. And it was EFF lawyers who established the legal principle that “code is speech,” protected by the First Amendment. Today, encryption is more accessible, and protects more speech than ever before.

    Despite these victories, intelligence and law enforcement officials continue to use twenty-year-old talking points about why they need special access to encrypted data—even though computer security experts have made clear that's not possible to do safely. There’s no backdoor that works only for the good guys.

  • [Old] New America ☛ Doomed to Repeat History? Lessons from teh Crypto Wars of the 1990s [PDF]

    The act that truly launched the Crypto Wars was the White House’s introduction of the “Clipper Chip” in 1993. The Clipper Chip was a state-of-the-art microchip developed by government engineers which could be inserted into consumer hardware telephones, providing the public with strong cryptographic tools without sacrificing the ability of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to access unencrypted versions of those communications. The technology relied on a system of “key escrow,” in which a copy of each chip’s unique encryption key would be stored by the government. Although White House officials mobilized both political and technical allies in support of the proposal, it faced immediate backlash from technical experts, privacy advocates, and industry leaders, who were concerned about the security and economic impact of the technology in addition to obvious civil liberties concerns. As the battle wore on throughout 1993 and into 1994, leaders from across the political spectrum joined the fray, supported by a broad coalition that opposed the Clipper Chip. When computer scientist Matt Blaze discovered a flaw in the system in May 1994, it proved to be the final blow: the Clipper Chip was dead.

    Nonetheless, the idea that the government could find a palatable way to access the keys to encrypted communications lived on throughout the 1990s. Many policymakers held onto hopes that it was possible to securely implement what they called “software key escrow” to preserve access to phone calls, emails, and other communications and storage applications. Under key escrow schemes, a government-certified third party would keep a “key” to every device. But the government’s shift in tactics ultimately proved unsuccessful; the privacy, security, and economic concerns continued to outweigh any potential benefits. By 1997, there was an overwhelming amount of evidence against moving ahead with any key escrow schemes.

  • [Old] Niskanen Center ☛ The Crypto Wars Are Here Again

    Anyone under the impression that support for strong encryption lies in the purview of only anarchists and libertarians like the Cypherpunks, consider this: strong encryption is the basis for fundamental online security. It is used for everything from online banking to secure communications between dissidents in autocratic regimes. Indeed, secure online communication has become so expected that Microsoft recently announced it will encrypt Bing’s searches by default, and WikiLeaks is following suit. Even the United Nations has come out in support of encryption as necessary for preserving and expanding human rights in countries subject to authoritarian control.

    As Lavabit founder Ladar Levison recently quipped during an interview with Reason TV, the need for encryption is more than merely protecting data at rest and in transit – it is fundamentally about protecting online speech. “If we are going to continue to preserve our right to free speech in the electronic age,” said Levison, “then we need to use tools like encryption.”

    Some government officials, however, disagree.

  • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ Crypto wars redux: why the FBI's desire to unlock your private life must be resisted

    How strong is strong crypto? Really, really strong. When properly implemented and secured by relatively long keys, cryptographic algorithms can protect your data so thoroughly that all the computers now in existence, along with all the computers likely to ever be created, could labour until the sun went nova without uncovering the keys by “brute force” – ie trying every possible permutation of password.

    The “crypto wars” of the early 1990s were fuelled by this realisation – that computers were changing the global realpolitik in an historically unprecedented way. Computational crypto made keeping secrets exponentially easier than breaking secrets, meaning that, for the first time in human history, the ability for people without social or political power to keep their private lives truly private from governments, police, and corporations was in our grasp.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Armenia detains Russian mathematician at Moscow’s request

    TV Rain said police at the Yerevan airport precinct confirmed that Verbitsky, who was on a wanted list in Russia, had been detained. A police officer said the mathematician was being held in a detention center in Yerevan.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ Israel Deports French Reporter Who Has Covered West Bank

    The Foreign Press Association in Israel condemned the deportation and pointed out that Froussard’s “digital entry authorization to Israel” had been approved. She also had long worked in “Israel and the Palestinian Territories for RFI [Radio France Internationale] and Radio France for many years, and the allegations made against our colleague are outrageous.”

    “We find it especially alarming that a government minister would boast about this on social media to his supporters,” the association added, demanding that the Israeli government immediately reverse the decision to ban Froussard.

  • Robert Reich ☛ State AGs must stop the Paramount-Warner Bros deal, to protect CNN from Trump

    State attorneys general are our last best hope for stopping Trump cronies Larry and David Ellison from buying Warner Bros. — and with it, CNN. They’ve already neutered and nearly destroyed CBS News. We cannot allow them to eliminate CNN’s ability to tell the American people the truth about Trump.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • JURIST ☛ Kenya Law Society files contempt of court application against government

    The Katiba Institute (KI), together with the Law Society of Kenya (the Law Society), filed a contempt of court application in the High Court of Kenya in Nairobi on Wednesday against the Kenyan government for “openly, wilfully, deliberately, and contumaciously disobeying and violating” court orders demanding full disclosure of “documents, agreements [...]

  • CBC ☛ When my son chose to cut his braid, I saw 3 generations of our family begin to heal

    My classmates also laughed at me. It wasn't a city school far from home. This was in my kindergarten classroom on my own reserve — the one place where I should have felt safe as an Indigenous child.

    I didn’t cry there. I waited until I got home, and I cried in front of my parents instead. I wasn’t rejecting who I was. I was just tired of defending it.

  • Salon ☛ GOP has a new plan to kill off Medicare and Social Security

    But there’s a problem: Nearly all Americans depend on those commie pinko programs to some extent, including many Republican voters. So the ideologues are always forced to couch their desire to slash federal spending to the bone in some version of “We have to kill the programs in order to save them.” Nobody buys it, and the world moves on.

    Indeed, in all three of his presidential campaigns Donald Trump ran on promises to protect those programs, and under his leadership, other Republicans have mostly kept their plans on the down low. Who can forget the moment in Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address when he declared that the GOP wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare? The Republican side of the room hilariously exploded in high dudgeon that he would even suggest such a thing.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Google’s new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme (12 Jun 2026)

    But once a company owns the market – once they've achieved dominance by buying out their rivals; by bribing potential competitors to stay out of their lane; and by engaging in deceptive conduct to trap key suppliers and customers – they could cement their dominance by blocking interoperability, keeping out rival dishes, milk, gas, lightbulbs, shoelaces and bread, capturing their whole market and squeezing it.

    That's what Google has done, and that's what Google wants to do more of. Google's commercial behavior has been so unethical, deceptive and abusive that the company just lost three federal antitrust cases: [...]

  • Patents

    • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ It’s Not You, It’s Your Claims: Disclosed but Unclaimed Embodiments at the Federal Circuit

      Federal Circuit: receiving a passcode and token separately is not receiving the password. Dynapass v. BofA and the unclaimed embodiment.

    • JUVE ☛ Kather Augenstein loses prominent patent monopoly litigator [Ed: One staff leaving is somehow newsworthy?]

      Patent litigator Christopher Weber (48) is founding a new litigation firm next week. His new outfit will operate under the name patlit.xyz and is also based in Düsseldorf.

    • Data Reveals the Fragile Economics of Training Patent Attorneys in the Age of AI

      Could the trans-Tasman (Australian and New Zealand) patent monopoly attorney profession be standing on a demographic precipice?  Despite the continued resilience of patent monopoly filings and a seemingly stable market for professional intellectual property services, the fundamental engine of the profession – its human capital – is barely idling.

      I have analysed numbers over recent years from the Trans-Tasman IP Attorneys register, and the data reveals a profession that is effectively running on a treadmill.  In January 2018, the register recorded 1,003 attorneys.  Today, in mid-2026, that number sits at 1,084 (870 in Australia, 214 in New Zealand).

      That is a net addition of just 81 practitioners over more than eight years, translating to a sluggish compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of just under 1%.  While the profession has managed to register 288 new attorneys since 2018, I found that this influx has been largely offset by a steady rate of retirement: 207 attorneys have departed the register over the same period.

      On the surface, a 1% growth rate might simply look like a mature, saturated market. 

    • Digital Music News ☛ Federal Judge Tees Up Possible Dismissal of Years-Old Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against BMG

      Nearly two years after its kickoff, a patent monopoly infringement lawsuit against BMG is now less than one week away from potentially being dismissed. The presiding judge established this possible dismissal deadline, falling on Tuesday, June 16th, in a recent order.

    • JUVE ☛ Richard Meade moves to UK Court of Appeal

      The British government has just announced that seven judges have been promoted to the Court of Appeal. One of them is Richard Meade. He has left his mark on the UK patent monopoly courts. At the UK Court of Appeal, Meade will now work alongside Richard Arnold and Colin Birss in patent monopoly cases.>

    • JUVE ☛ Amazon and InterDigital will settle their FRAND dispute through arbitration [Ed: InterDigital is just a giant patent troll]

      InterDigital and Amazon have come to an agreement concerning civil court litigation regarding Amazon’s services and devices, including Amazon Prime Video. According to a press release published by InterDigital yesterday afternoon, the deal ends all pending litigation between the two companies, with the final terms of the agreement to be determined in binding arbitration.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Republican lawmakers urge federal agency to block imports of infringing TSMC chips as patent monopoly ruling nears — five asserted U.S. patents come from United Microelectronics Corporation

      Four Republican members of Congress have urged the U.S. ITC to block imports of foreign-made chips found to infringe U.S. patents

    • Kangaroo Courts

      • JUVE ☛ Case numbers in Paris fell by a third in 2025 [Ed: Fails to point out UPC is illegal and unconstitutional; it's connected to EPO corruption, due to executives who do cocaine and worse]

        It is a trend that is gaining momentum in the third year following the launch of the UPC. Cases at the key national patent monopoly courts within the UPC area are falling.

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • [Repeat] Digital Music News ☛ Lionel Richie Moves to Trademark His Voice in Four Applications

        Specifically, Tuskegee-born Richie moved to obtain four trademarks yesterday – joining the likes of Taylor Swift and Matthew McConaughey, both of whom have sought voice and likeness trademarks as of late.

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ The AFM’s Hey Hi (AI) Lawsuit Is Now Part of ‘A Global Fight’ — UK’s Musicians’ Union Urges Others to ‘Take on Major Corporations Who Intend to Exploit Their Rights Without Consent’

      The AFM’s lawsuit against Universal Music and Warner Music is now one component of “a global fight,” as the UK’s Musicians’ Union has backed the litigation and urged other unions yet to “take on major corporations who intend to exploit their rights without consent.”

    • Digital Music News ☛ Spotify and Amazon Music’s Bundling Shenanigans Have Cost Music Publishers Nearly $500 Million Since 2024, NMPA Reveals

      Spotify and Amazon’s bundling strategy has had a major impact on music publishers’ royalty haul, resulting in nearly $500 million in lost royalties since 2024.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Married Couple Behind 'Billion-Visit' Webtoon Piracy Network Caught in Vietnam

      For more than two years, a husband and wife in Vietnam allegedly ran a billion-visit-a-year operation serving Korean webtoons in unauthorized English translation. The network, believed to be Harimanga, Manhwaclan and Kunmanga, has gone dark, its servers seized and the pair hauled in for questioning by Korean and Vietnamese authorities.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Hollywood Secures $9 Million Default Judgment Against IPTV Operator

      A Pennsylvania federal court has handed down a $9 million default judgment against the operator of pirate IPTV services 'Shrugs' and 'Zing'. Major Hollywood studios, Amazon, and Netflix sued the defendant last year, but he failed to appear in court despite being personally served. In addition to the millions in damages, rightsholders secured a sweeping injunction to seize the platform's domains and cut off its hosting services.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Mozilla Data Collective seeks to build AI's data economy around trust

      Datasets assembled through indiscriminate web scraping often reproduce the same limitations and biases found online, Lewis-Jong said. Entire languages, cultures and communities remain underrepresented in modern AI systems, while many creators have little visibility into how their content is used. Governments around the world are also increasingly scrutinizing the legal foundations of large-scale data collection, creating new compliance challenges for technology companies.

    • Wired ☛ A Court Has Ruled That Google Is Liable for False Statements Generated by AI Overviews

      Earlier this year, the affected companies sent the tech giant a cease-and-desist letter, according to the report. Google denied liability, arguing that its automatic summary feature warns users that the information may contain errors and should be independently verified.

      The court's analysis concluded that Google’s AI combined information corresponding to other companies that had been flagged for possible illicit practices with data from the plaintiffs, generating associations that did not appear in any of the sources linked by the search engine.