Leftovers

• Vintage Everyday ☛ 20 Stunning Kodachrome Slides of the 1957 Rose Parade, Pasadena

  On New Year’s Day 1957, the streets of Pasadena, California, came alive with color, music, and celebration during the 68th annual Rose Parade. These rediscovered Kodachrome slides capture the vibrant spirit of the event in stunning, saturated color: from elaborate flower-covered floats and marching bands to cheering crowds lining the parade route under the California sun.

• Silicon Angle ☛ Amazon's Mechanical Turk service now on life support as it stops accepting new users

  Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk predates Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure business by a year. It serves as a crowdsourcing marketplace where users can post gigs that others can bid on to complete for them – tasks such as completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying the sentiment in a sentence, which cannot easily be automated any other way.

• DNA Lounge ☛ DNA Lounge: 5-Jul-2026 (Sun): Wherein we are going hard on movie nights

  Anyway, we've got a list, and if these next five movies go well and we start getting some regulars, maybe we'll be able to dip into the backstock as well. So if you want us to keep doing this kind of thing... vote by showing up.

• Howard Oakley ☛ Happy 250th birthday America 2

• Howard Oakley ☛ Happy 250th birthday America 1

  To celebrate the two-hundred and fiftieth anniversary of American Independence, this weekend I take a grand tour of some of the nation’s finest landscape paintings.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Seeing Bacteria, Nanoprisms, And More With An Atomic Force Microscope

    Unlike almost every other kind of microscope, atomic-force microscopes (AFMs) don’t use any kind of optical beam to image their subjects. Instead, they physically detect the subject’s surface with a tiny probe, repeating this thousands of times to build up a height map of the subject, sometimes with a resolution below a single nanometer. [Ben Krasnow] got to use an AFM in an investigation of one of his projects, and shared some unusual uses of it in his latest video.

• Career/Education

  • NPR ☛ Nearly half of Americans surveyed don't know what America 250 commemorates

    However, nearly half of Americans (46%) don't know that America's 250th anniversary commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

    This civic ignorance extends to basic governance: Nearly 60% do not know the main purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to limit government power, and do not know why the colonies declared independence from Great Britain.

  • Łukasz Niemier ☛ The Lion, The Witch, and the audacity of recruiters

    I am searching for a job. If you've read my posts recently you may have noticed my "for hire" block (hopefully it will disappear soon). During that search I noticed a lot of different behaviours from recruitment teams. However, two of them pushed me to write this article because of how bad they were.

• Hardware

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Video shows humanoid robot acting 'rogue', 'attacking' coworkers

    The robot’s martial arts-inspired fighting stances, quick lunges and playful “kicks” were all pre-programmed as part of a choreographed routine intended to highlight its agility, balance and responsiveness.

    Rather than signaling a real-world AI safety incident, the demonstration illustrates how modern humanoid robots can perform increasingly lifelike and dynamic movements, making staged performances appear convincing enough to blur the line between entertainment and reality on social media.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Are screen-free digital cameras the antidote to doomscrolling and smartphone addiction?

    It’s another way to rewind the clock to the perceived innocence of the analog era and get teens off their screens – something that, even without the bans on under-16s in the UK and Australia accessing social media, some were already gravitating toward.

  • Joel Chrono ☛ Do you need a Nintendo 3DS?

    The Nintendo 3DS was one of those consoles that I mostly admired from a distance. There are a few moments in time, sparsed throughout my youth where I interacted with one, an uncommon endeavor compared to my love for the PSP or even the older Game Boy Advance.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Column: Thanks to social media, tanning makes an unfortunate comeback among teen girls

    Initially, I assumed she was trying to avoid the worst part of the day for sun exposure. After all, in July 2020, when she was 10, she came home from Sinjin Smith’s Beach Volleyball Camp in Santa Monica with a face so burned and blistered, she was in bed for two days. None of the counselors had reminded her to reapply her sunscreen.

    She and her friends are now obsessed with the index, which they learned about on TikTok (where else?) because they want to get very tan, very fast.

• Proprietary / SaaS

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

    • Salon ☛ "Rubbish, it didn't help at all": Mick Jagger's no fan of AI

      “No one could agree, and I threw all these titles at it, and it came back with such rubbish, it didn’t help me at all,” he said. “I was saying, ‘These are my 12 album titles, give me some more,’ and of course in the end we never used any of them.”

      Jagger said if generative AI has any use, it’s as a confidence booster. He sees the junk that AI puts out is a shot in the arm for creatives who are doubting their own instincts.

      “It can unstick you, and you think, ‘OK, that was rubbish,’ or ‘Mine are loads better than yours,'” he said. “It gives you confidence.”

    • Berggruen Insitute ☛ We Need A Way To Prove Personhood Online

      MJ Rathbun is a bot.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • David Bushell ☛ Behold the perfect algorithm!aeaaad

      1984, Minority Report, Black Mirror — bedtime stories compared to the horrors the UK Government publish, am I right?

      I’m led to believe “Watch this space” is the latest propaganda piece from His Majesty’s Nanny State. I haven’t read past the title but according to gaming site Dexerto, YouTube lawyers read it and YouTube ain’t happy. Poor little YouTube.

    • Medium ☛ Physna and Palantir Announce Strategic Partnership to Revolutionize 3D Data Analysis for Defense and Commercial Sectors

      The majority of enterprises and government agencies have access to large quantities of 3D data (such as CAD models, digital twins, or simply physical access to parts that can be 3D scanned). Physna, short for “Physical DNA”, uses proprietary technology and processes to normalize that 3D data and evaluate complex relationships previously invisible to software. This empowers customers to make data-driven decisions with capabilities such as: Precise part identification and evaluation, automated supplier matching, part deduplication and standardization, accelerated job quoting, accelerated design, and AI predictions ranging from part performance to cost and manufacturing requirements.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Salon ☛ White nationalists march on DC, test free speech limits

    Videos and photographs showed masked marchers wearing matching uniforms, carrying flags including variations of the U.S. flag and Confederate symbols and chanting slogans such as “Reclaim America” as they moved near Union Station, Metro stations and streets around the National Mall.

    Some commuters and bystanders documented encountering the group on public transit and in busy pedestrian areas, with social media posts describing confusion and unease during what was otherwise a heavily trafficked holiday weekend.

  • Ricardo Mendes ☛ A Node on the Web

    If that trajectory continues, the real test will not be the fireworks but the midterms: whether democratic institutions remain capable of constraining executive power, or whether political retaliation, institutional erosion, and the concentration of power become [the new normal].

  • Paul Krugman ☛ European vs. U.S. Economic Performance: An Update

    Understanding Europe’s economic performance is of huge importance, not just for Europeans, but for the rest of the world. The stakes go beyond economics. With authoritarianism on the rise in America, Europe is now the world’s great bastion of democracy. Hence it is important that it maintain its standing as a counterbalance to the US and China. Furthermore, Europe’s economic performance relative to the U.S. is often cited as a data point in debates on economic and social policy. Thus it’s important to understand what that record actually shows.

  • Mike Brock ☛ A More Powerful President Over a Weaker Presidency

    The argument is this. The Roberts Court, in a sequence of rulings — Loper Bright stripping agencies of interpretive authority, the tariffs case cutting presidential emergency powers, Trump v. Slaughter voiding the removal protections that had insulated independent agencies since Humphrey’s Executor in 1935 — is not, appearances notwithstanding, enlarging executive power. It is contracting the executive branch as a whole, while consolidating the president’s control over what remains of it. The result, in her formulation, is a smaller executive commanded more completely. And because the powers stripped from the agencies had to go somewhere, they go, by the Court’s logic, back to Congress — which will now, at last, be forced to do its constitutional job.

    That is the thesis. It has a name in constitutional scholarship. It has a name in the concurrence of a Justice she reads aloud on her own podcast. The name is the ratchet. And the reason to write this piece is that Sarah Isgur, having read the name aloud on the record, having heard it named by Neil Gorsuch of all people, does not follow the name to where it leads.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Scientists want to ban mirror life before it's built

    Mirror life — synthetic organisms built from molecules with reversed chirality, the opposite handedness of every natural protein and DNA strand on Earth — would be essentially invisible to the immune systems of humans, animals, and plants, according to Noema's look at the fight to ban mirror life before it exists. Thirty-eight scientists, including 16 national academy members and two Nobel laureates, called for a research halt in December 2024, backed by a 299-page technical report; by April 2025, 96 experts from more than 20 countries had endorsed a moratorium.

• Environment

  • Futurism ☛ You'll Never Guess Why Government Officials Are Sinking a Four-Story Riverboat Casino Into the Abyss

    “You’ll start seeing fish on it within a few weeks, but for it to become a highly productive reef structure its going to take a couple years before all the tuna kits, the bryozoa, the corals before they start really settling on it and providing the base of the food web that’s going to feed the larger predatory fishes,” Craig Newton, supervisor of the Alabama Marine Resources Fisheries Section told WPMI.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Prepare for Airplane Purgatory

    Tarmac delays happen in part because modern airlines depend on keeping planes moving. Although air-traffic control decides each plane’s ultimate time of departure, airlines decide when a given flight boards, and holding passengers on the tarmac, rather than at a gate, frees up valuable real estate for the next arriving flight. It also ensures that a plane is ready to depart the moment a weather window opens. But some tarmac delays seem to be a matter of happenstance. I was recently on a flight that sat on the tarmac at LaGuardia for more than two hours after the airport closed a runway because of what the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey called a “two-inch depression” next to it. Plus, so many flights need to depart and land each day that a small stop in operations—because of, say, a passing storm—can create a pileup on the runway that takes hours to rectify. Even before Flight 661 was due to take off, air-traffic control had announced plans to delay flights out of Newark in anticipation of weather problems, then temporarily halted flights that evening because of thunderstorms in the vicinity. A spokesperson for United told me that Flight 661 requested to return to the gate as soon as crews figured out it wouldn’t take off in the foreseeable future, but the process “took longer than expected because of ongoing ground congestion.” Certain airports are also being forced to increase the time between takeoffs—and sometimes stop them altogether—owing to shortages of air-traffic controllers.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Barents Observer ☛ Norwegian influencer thought driving his gas-guzzling American classic to Moscow would make quite a spectacle. It didn't go as planned

      On Telegram, he explained:

      "I am currently in Murmansk. Here there is no issue for me to get gasoline, but there is a restriction of 30 litres per refuelling."

    • Hackaday ☛ Demonstrating LFP Battery Safety In Case Of BMS Failure

      Generally, LiFePO4 (LFP) batteries are quite safe and stable, but it’s still possible for something to go wrong, even something catastrophic, like the battery management system (BMS) developing a direct short. This is one of the tests required to be certified for the UL 2054 standard that targets household and portable battery safety. In a recent series of videos, [Will Prowse] demonstrates how a series of commercial batteries pass these tests, and how some still fail.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Washington’s orders to troops after July 4: You’re fighting for a new nation

    The Fourth of July and the signing of the Declaration of Independence severed ties with Great Britain and thus receives its due attention.

    But it was on July 5, 1776, that the former colonials got down to the nuts-and-bolts of governing and winning a war.

  • Tara Tarakiyee ☛ I Get No Ideas Inside the Machine

    I recently had the pleasure of running a workshop called "Can We Build Hardware Without Capitalism?" at Cables of Resistance. It was billed as a crash course in the material politics of computation, and the point wasn't to answer the question in the title. It was to build a shared language for asking it.

    The title isn't bait. I genuinely don't have a definitive answer, and I don't trust anyone who claims to, one way or the other. But I feel a renewed urgency about it, and you might reasonably wonder why an open source software nerd is suddenly this preoccupied with hardware. To explain that I have to be a bit vulnerable. The truth is I've spent this year struggling with a deep disillusionment, a grief really, around open source. That's where this starts.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Bicentennial Memories

    It’s a huge difference from the bicentennial, which I celebrated in an unusual but deeply memorable way.

  • Michael Green ☛ The Verb

    Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of men in Philadelphia committed an act of drafting so remarkable that we have mostly stopped noticing it. They wrote down three things a government exists to protect. The first two are states of being: life, liberty. Conditions you occupy. Then the third term breaks form. It is not a state. It is not a possession. It is not even an outcome. It is a verb.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Honourable Court

    Today is the final day in the military court in Severomorsk. The judge heard the final arguments from both the prosecution and the defense. The defendant, Olesia Krivtsova, is charged for 'discrediting the army' and 'justifying terrorism.' She has been declared wanted, arrested in absentia, and included in the register of extremists and terrorists. Here are her final words to the court. When I was 19 years old, I was added to the list of terrorists and extremists for the posts that were previously read out during the court hearing. This list, alongside people persecuted for their political views, includes organizations such as ISIS and the Taliban. The latter, by the way, was recently removed from the list, while a certain Yegor A. from Rostov was even fined for criticizing this truly terrorist organization, which has terrorized women and those who disagree with the regime for years.

    We used to laugh when saying that Russia’s partners would be North Korea, Iran, and Afghanistan. Today, this is no longer funny.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Journalist Olesia Krivtsova sentenced in absentia to six years in prison

    The criminal case against Krivtsova was opened in December 2022 after she reposted a message in a student chat on VKontakte about the explosion on the Crimean Bridge. She had been openly critical of Russia's ongoing, unprovoked war against Ukraine.

    At the time, Krivtsova was 19 years old and a student at the Northern (Arctic) Federal University (NArFU) in Arkhangelsk.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Holocaust and Genocide Scholars Are Navigating a Minefield

    Since October 7, academic institutions have applied overt and covert pressure to discourage Holocaust and genocide scholars from criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. Still, many academics are organizing new networks to defend free inquiry.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Researchers Create Self-Replicating Seedbox in Quest for Decentralized Democracy

    Tribler is part of a research project at Delft University of Technology, headed by associate professor Johan Pouwelse. Over the years, Tribler found itself to be a safe haven for pirate site channels, a decentralized music streaming platform, and an AI-powered search engine, among other things.

    The core idea always revolved around decentralization. The software and the network should be impossible to shut down. While academic achievements are not always picked up broadly, the research project’s output is highly valued and just secured funding through 2032.

    Ironically, the development of the decentralized BitTorrent client is highly centralized. It’s run by a university team and paid for by subsidies. However, its own research may offer an eventual solution to that problem, starting with a self-replicating seedbox.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Strategist ☛ Journalistic standards still matter in the social media age

    Journalism isn’t disappearing; its economic and institutional foundations are.

    Journalism was never simply about publishing information but rather about the systems surrounding publication: verification, accountability and liability. Those systems reduced errors, tested evidence and imposed consequences when journalists got things wrong. Much of the modern influence economy now preserves journalism’s reach while discarding many of the constraints that once made it credible.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Welcoming the Taliban? Germany's new Afghanistan policy

    Meanwhile, Kabiri, who steadfastly refused to cooperate with the Islamist group, now doesn't ever leave his apartment on his own, out of concern for his safety. He has also been forced to apply for asylum so he can remain in Germany.

    "I lost my first homeland, Afghanistan, and I do not want to lose my second home, Germany, because I truly feel at home here," he said. "In the past, anyone applying for asylum was subjected to intense scrutiny to ensure they had not cooperated with the Taliban. Now I may have to leave the country because I refused to cooperate with them. That's a double standard."

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • No One's Happy ☛ Kernel Anti-Cheat Is an Overreach

    I want to preface this with the fact that I’m not a gamer. I’m game-curious, but I often lack the time to really devote. But a close friend of mine games pretty frequently and he brought me (a bit) up to speed recently. I hobbled together a computer from various parts (and then overpaid for a GPU), I got excited about spending some liesure time playing. But during the process I realized that in order to play many of the biggest games, you are forced to install a closed-source driver and provide root access to your operating system. So I decided to do some research and found that the owners of this anti-cheating software include a Chinese firm on a US defense list, a Saudi sovereign wealth fund, and a private-equity chain.

    Furthermore, it hasn’t stopped cheating. They largely moved to external hardware that these drivers cannot see.

    [...]

    All of them exfiltrate system information.

  • Kmille ☛ FAQ: What is a TPM and how can I use it on Linux?

    A TPM (Trusted Platform Module) is a dedicated security chip on your mainboard. Nowadays, only TPM version 2.0 is relevant. It’s very likely your device has one, as it’s a Windows (soft) requirement since 2016. For Windows 11, a TPM 2.0 is a hard requirement and often the only requirement why a system can not be upgraded. A TPM is a passive device. When software is not using it, it’s not doing anything. A TPM can be used as a random number generator or as a private key storage. For example, it can hold your private ssh keys or encrypt credentials of your systemd services.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • BoingBoing ☛ Spokeswoman sues company after it uses AI to make new ads featuring her

        Fred's Appliance and its production company, Victory Media, admit AI was used to replicate her voice, but insists the video composition used in the new advertising did not: "We strongly disagree with allegations suggesting that our former spokesperson was digitally recreated or visually manipulated through AI."

  • Copyrights

    • BoingBoing ☛ No AI for Al. "Weird Al" Yankovic yanks AI commercial

      More than 200 musical artists, including Billie Eilish, Elvis Costello, and Stevie Wonder have signed an open letter protesting the potential harm artificial intelligence poses to the arts. And visual artists Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz, and Sarah Andersen filed a class action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, claiming their copyrighted works were illegally used to train the companies' AI models.

    • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ 'Weird Al' Yankovic’s secret? He’s just a normal guy who loves fun (interview) - syracuse.com

      And he’s also well aware of the rise of artificial intelligence in creating quick, gimmicky parodies. The Grammy-winning satirist has seen the tired “Weird AI” jokes, and wants no part of it.

      “I’m not a fan of AI,” Yankovic told syracuse.com. “I was offered this commercial before the tour. I’m not going to mention any names, but they told me it was for a business. It was business software that would increase productivity. And they offered me a nice pile of money. I said, ‘Oh well, yeah, sure, I could do that.’ And then a week before we’re supposed to shoot it, I find out, oh, this is, it’s AI. And I thought, ‘Oh no, I can’t be the poster boy for AI, forget it.’ So I felt bad about kind of pulling out at the last minute. But yeah, I’m not, I’m not down with that.”