Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Het kabinet treft voorbereidingen voor dreigende tekorten aan fossiele brandstoffen. Daarvoor treedt fase 1 van het Landelijk Crisisplan Olie (LCP-O) in werking. Dat bevestigen ingewijden na een bericht van De Telegraaf. Aanleiding daarvoor zijn de oplopende spanningen in het Midden-Oosten. Van acute tekorten is nog geen sprake, van beperkende maatregelen evenmin.

EINDHOVEN (ANP) - De overname van de voormalige Philips-lampendochter Lumileds door het Chinese San'an Optoelectronics gaat niet door. De Amerikaanse waakhond (CFIUS) wilde geen goedkeuring geven om risico's voor de nationale veiligheid van de VS. Vervolgens hebben San'an en diens Maleisische samenwerkingspartner Inari Amertron Berhad laten weten de deal te schrappen.

Lumileds is een van de grootste bedrijven ter wereld op het vlak van ledverlichting. De onderneming met hoofdkantoor in Eindhoven telt ongeveer 3300 medewerkers in meer dan vijftien landen. Topman Steve Barlow van Lumileds omschreef de overname vorig jaar nog als volgende stap voor het bedrijf, dat nu nog in handen is van Amerikaanse investeerders. De overname zou ook extra groei mogelijk maken.

Het is niet voor het eerst dat de VS zich verzetten tegen een Chinese overname van Lumileds. Meer dan tien jaar terug wilde Philips het bedrijf ook al aan een Chinese partij verkopen. Destijds gingen de Amerikanen daar ook tegenin. Uiteindelijk vond Philips toen een koper in een groep investeerders.

Tegenslag

Volgens de South China Morning Post is het afketsen van deze deal ter waarde van 239 miljoen dollar de nieuwste tegenslag voor Chinese tech-investeringen in het buitenland, na de Nexperia-affaire. San'an is de grootste maker van led-chips in China en het bedrijf dacht met Lumileds internationaal te kunnen groeien.

Rond het Nijmeegse Nexperia brak vorig jaar een diplomatieke rel uit tussen Nederland en China. Toenmalig minister Vincent Karremans (Economische Zaken, VVD) stelde de chipfabrikant tijdelijk onder curatele. Hij vreesde dat topman Wing Zhang het Europese deel van het bedrijf naar China zou verplaatsen. De Ondernemingskamer greep ook in en schorste Wing tijdelijk als topman. Die laatste zaak loopt nog steeds.

ROTTERDAM (ANP) - Door de ontwikkelingen van zaterdag lijkt de situatie in de Straat van Hormuz weer terug bij die van vrijdag vóór 15.00 uur. Dat constateert een woordvoerder van de Koninklijke Vereniging van Nederlandse Reders (KVNR) nadat Iran had aangekondigd de Straat van Hormuz weer voor de scheepvaart te sluiten. Ook werd zaterdag duidelijk dat er weer schepen zijn beschoten in de voor de olie- en gasleveringen belangrijke zeestraat.

Dit laat zien dat "terughoudendheid gepast is", stelt de woordvoerder van de redersvereniging. Hij herhaalt dat de berichten van vrijdag over de heropening van de Straat van Hormuz als "positief signaal" kunnen worden gezien, maar dat het afwachten blijft hoe de situatie in het Midden-Oosten komende dagen verder ontwikkelt.

Door de Iranoorlog zitten al weken een kleine honderd Nederlandse schepen vast in het gebied. Van de meer dan vijfhonderd opvarenden zijn er ongeveer honderd Nederlanders. Reders willen zo snel mogelijk weer kunnen varen, maar dat moet volgens de KVNR dan wel veilig en betrouwbaar kunnen.

1. Mannen en vrouwen zoenen om verschillende redenen. Mannen zoenen omdat zij seks willen of omdat ze het goed willen maken met de partner. Vrouwen gebruiken een zoen om een band te creëren met de partner en om hem te beoordelen als potentiële huwelijkskandidaat.

4. Zoenen is gezond. Koppels die meer zoenen ervaren minder stress en zijn gelukkiger met hun relatie.

5. Mannen vinden de eerste kus fijner dan vrouwen. Vrouwen herinneren eerder het eerste paar gekochte schoenen dan de eerste kus.

Bron(nen): Barking up the wrong tree

BARCELONA (ANP/RTR) - De Braziliaanse president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva heeft fel uitgehaald naar de Veiligheidsraad van de VN en president Donald Trump, zonder die laatste bij naam te noemen.

De vijf permanente leden van de Veiligheidsraad moeten volgens Lula hun werkwijze veranderen nu ze er niet in zijn geslaagd de oorlog tegen Iran te stoppen. Hij zei op een bijeenkomst van linkse wereldleiders in Barcelona dat "we toch niet elke morgen wakker kunnen worden en elke avond naar bed gaan met een tweet van een president die de wereld bedreigt en oorlogen begint".

De Veiligheidsraad telt vijf permanente leden die uit de Tweede Wereldoorlog zijn voortgekomen als winnaars; China, Frankrijk, Groot-Brittannië, Rusland en de VS. Brazilië is een van de landen die dat uit de tijd vindt en net als India aandringt op een permanente zetel. Onder de deelnemers in Barcelona is ook de Duitse minister van Financiën Lars Klingbeil (SPD) die zei dat Duitsland klaarstaat om de Veiligheidsraad te veranderen.

Construction was stopped after suit challenged president’s authority to raze East Wing without congressional approval

The Trump administration can continue building a $400m White House ballroom at the site of the former East Wing, a US appeals court ruled on Friday.

The three-judge panel of the US court of appeals for Washington DC granted the administration a stay of an order days earlier that had aimed to halt most aboveground construction. That earlier order had resulted from a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which challenged whether Donald Trump had the authority to raze the East Wing and construct the ballroom without congressional approval.

Continue reading...

The grind to Europe continues for Brentford. A goalless west London derby with Fulham made it five league draws in succession for Keith Andrews’ side, the chance to go within touching distance of Liverpool squandered.

The saviour for Fulham was Bernd Leno with a staggering reflex save in the final minute of normal time, tipping over Dango Ouattara’s close-range effort. Calvin Bassey, the hulking centre-back, was quick to hug his keeper, recognising the game-saving moment.

Continue reading...

⚽️ Follow goal updates and much more on our clockwatch
⚽ Live scores | Latest tables | Top scorers | And mail John

From our weekend digest, Louise Taylor’s take on that huge game for Leeds.

Leeds are morphing from relegation contenders to reverse kingmakers with a key role to play in determining the identity of the teams that end up descending to the Championship. Thanks to Monday night’s fully merited 2-1 win at Manchester United – their first league victory at Old Trafford since 1981 – Daniel Farke’s 15th-placed side moved six points clear of the relegation zone with six games remaining. A win against rock-bottom Wolves at Elland Road on Saturday would lift Leeds to the virtual sanctuary of 39 points but it is just the first of four impending matches against the bottom four. With Burnley still to visit West Yorkshire and Leeds facing trips to Tottenham and then, on the final day, West Ham, Farke’s FA Cup semi-finalists will likely have a significant say in who finishes where when the top-tier music stops next month. Louise Taylor

Continue reading...

Manhattan church led by Norman Vincent Peale was known for opposing presidency of JFK – and Catholics in general

Donald Trump’s attacks this week on Pope Leo, for his criticism of the US attack on Iran and the US president’s decision to post an image of himself as Jesus Christ on social media, make a good deal more sense considering Trump attended services as a young man at the Protestant Marble Collegiate church in Manhattan, which was led at the time by an anti-Catholic pastor.

That church’s pastor in Trump’s youth, Norman Vincent Peale, who would later officiate at Trump’s first wedding, is best-known today as the author of the Christian self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking, but when Trump was 14, Peale made national headlines as the leader of a group of Protestant churchmen who loudly objected to the presidential candidacy of John F Kennedy, on the grounds that he was a Catholic.

Continue reading...

Rising sea levels and ecological damage caused by heavy use of flood defence system force city authorities to consider next move

The Arsenale, the colossal shipyard that was the engine of the Venetian Republic’s domination for seven centuries, remains the nucleus of the city’s control over the water. Its northern section is made up of cavernous brick warehouses called capannoni, which in the 16th century could produce a warship a day through a rigorously ordered assembly line.

Now, one of them houses the operations centre of the Mose, the sprawling flood defence system that protects the city.

Continue reading...

Some failed startups are reportedly selling old Slack messages, emails, and other internal records to AI companies as training data, creating a new way to cash out after shutting down. Fast Company reports: Shanna Johnson, the CEO of now-defunct software company Cielo24, told the publication that she was able to sell every Slack message, internal email, and Jira ticket as training data for "hundreds of thousands of dollars."

This isn't a one-off scenario. SimpleClosure, a startup that helps companies like Cielo24 shut down, told Forbes that there's been major interest from AI companies trying to get their hands on workplace data. Because of this, SimpleClosure launched a new tool that allows companies to sell their wealth of internal communications -- from Slack archives to email chains -- to AI labs. The company said it's processed 100 such deals in the past year. Payouts ranged from $10,000 to $100,000. "I think the privacy issues here are quite substantial," Marc Rotenberg, founder of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, told Forbes. "Employee privacy remains a key concern, particularly because people have become so dependent on these new internal messaging tools like Slack. ... It's not generic data. It's identifiable people."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today's links

• Georgia's voting technology blunder: It's possible for Dominion machines to suck, but not in the way that Tucker Carlson says they do.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: GWB's illegal iPod; McDonald's breakfast sandwich fanfic; Technofeudal debt; "The Everything Box"; $100m deli.
• Upcoming appearances: Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Georgia's voting technology blunder (permalink)

Nearly 25 years ago, in the aftermath of Bush v Gore, I got involved in a bunch of ugly tech policy fights over voting machines. The hanging chad debacle in Florida prompted Congress to appropriate funds for states to purchase new touchscreen voting machines based on a robust, open standard. The problem was, those machines didn't exist.

The voting machine industry in those days was already very consolidated (it's far more consolidated today). They went shopping for a standards body that would publish a spec for a "standard" voting machine that could soak up those federal dollars in time for the 2004 election. The only taker was the IEEE, who unwisely offered to serve as host for this impossible rush job.

Once the voting machine reps were around a table at IEEE – largely sheltered from antitrust scrutiny thanks to the broad latitude enjoyed by firms engaged in standardization, which is otherwise uncomfortably close to collusion – they admitted what everyone already knew: there was zero chance they were going to develop a new standard in time for the election.

Instead, they decided they were going to publish a "descriptive standard." Rather than designing a new standard, they'd write down the specs of their own products – the same products that were considered so defective they needed to be replaced before the election – and call that the standard.

That was my first encounter with this issue as an activist. I had just started at EFF and a lot of our supporters were IEEE members, who were appalled to see their professional association being used to launder this incredibly politically salient, technically incoherent scam. We got a ton of IEEE members to write to the board, who shut down the standards committee and kicked the voting machine companies to the curb.

The voting machine companies weren't done, though. Diebold – one of the leaders in the cartel – knew that its voting machines were defective. They'd crash, lose their vote-counts and malfunction in other ways that were equally damaging to election integrity.

This was an alarming piece of news, but perhaps just as alarming is the way it came to light. A Diebold employee described this situation in a memo that was subsequently hacked and dumped by parties unknown. That memo, along with the accompanying tranche of extremely alarming revelations about Diebold's voting machine division, was the subject of one of the first mass-censorship copyright campaigns in internet history.

Diebold didn't dispute the veracity of these damning revelations: rather, it claimed that since the memos detailing its gross democracy-endangering misconduct had been prepared by an employee, that they were therefore works-made-for-hire whose copyright was held by Diebold, and thus anyone who reproduced the memo was infringing on the company's copyright.

Under Section 512 of the then-new Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Diebold was empowered to send "takedown notices" to the web hosting providers whose users had posted the memos, and if the web hosts didn't remove the content "expeditiously," they would be jointly liable for any eventual copyright damages, which are statutorily set at $150,000 per infringement.

Every web host folded. No one wanted to take the risk of tens of millions of dollars in statutory damages.

(Incidentally: anyone who tells you that "online safety" requires us to make online platforms liable for their users' speech needs to explain how this wouldn't empower every crooked company whose dirty laundry had ended up online wouldn't just do what Diebold did. It's not technically insanity to do the same thing over again in expectation of a different outcome, but it is awfully stupid and reckless.)

That might have been the end of things, except for the kids at Swarthmore, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. Two students, Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith, were outraged by Diebold and they had accounts on Swarthmore's webserver. So they uploaded thousands of copies of the leaked memos, but linked to just one of them from a page about the leak. As soon as that copy was deleted by Swarthmore's webmasters in response to a DMCA takedown from Diebold, the students updated the link to point to another copy. And another. And another.

That's where EFF got involved. We repped the Online Policy Group, whose page linking to the Swarthmore resources was taken down by a Diebold notice. We won. The memos became a matter of public record. The Swarthmore kids started a nationwide network called "Students for Free Culture." It was pretty danged cool.

That wasn't the end of the Diebold story, though. Diebold was and is a very diversified conglomerate that made a lot of tabulating machines: ATMs, cash-registers, medical monitoring devices…and voting machines. Every one of these machines produced a paper-tape of its tabulations as an audit trail that could be used to reconstruct its calculations if it crashed…except the voting machines. The voting machines that kept crashing, and whose crashes presented a serious risk to the legitimacy of US elections in the wake of the worst electoral crisis in the country's history.

Diebold's stated reason for this was that adding a paper tape was haaaard (even though all its other machines had paper audit tapes). Not only was this a very unconvincing excuse, it was downright alarming in light of the promise of Walden O’Dell (Diebold CEO and prominent Bush fundraiser) to help "Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president":

https://fairvote.org/diebold-partisanship-and-public-interest-elections/

Now, to be clear, I don't think that O'Dell was going to steal the election for Bush (that's the Supreme Court's job). Rather, he was just a loudmouth asshole CEO who supported the (up to that point) worst president in American history, and who also made garbage products that were not fit for purpose.

In the decades since, voting machines have been the subject of lots of scrutiny by the information security community, because they suck. Time after time, the most sphincter-puckering defects in widely used machines have come to light:

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/05/11/report-claims-very-serious-diebold-voting-machine-flaws/

The hits just kept on coming:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061007120655/http://openvotingfoundation.org/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=1

At Defcon, the amazing Matt Green has presided over the Voting Village, where it's an annual tradition for hackers to probe voting machines. This exercise has produced a string of terrifying revelations that precisely described how these machines suck:

https://www.votingvillage.org/cfp

Pretty much everyone I knew thought that voting machines were garbage technology…right up to the moment that the My Pillow guy, Tucker Carlson, and a whole menagerie of conspiratorial Trumpland mutants started peddling a bizarre story about how Hugo Chavez colluded with the Canadian voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems (who bought Diebold's voting machine business when they finally dumped the division) to rig the 2020 election for Joe Biden. They told so many outlandish lies about this that Fox ended up paying Dominion $787.5 million to settle the case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems#Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox_News_Network

That's when something very weird happened. A bunch of people who had been skeptical of voting machines since the Brooks Brothers Riot suddenly became history's most ardent defenders of those same garbage voting machines. The cartel of voting machine companies – who had a long track record of using bullshit legal threats to silence their (mostly progressive) critics – were drafted into The Resistance(TM), and anyone who thought voting machines were trash was dismissed as a crazy person who has been totally mypillowpilled:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210203113531/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-machines-election-steal-conspiracy-flaws/

There's a name for this: it's called "schismogenesis": when one group of people define themselves in opposition to someone else. If the other team does X, then your team has to oppose X, even if you all liked X until a couple minutes ago:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

This schismogenic reversal persists to this very day. Every time Trump promotes another election denier to his cabinet, a federal agency, or a judgeship, the idea that voting machines are garbage becomes more Stop the Steal-coded, even though voting machines are, objectively, garbage.

Which is bad. It's bad because we are going into another election season where the stakes are – incredibly – even higher than Bush v Gore, and electoral authorities and state legislatures are making the world's most unforced errors in their voting machine procurement decisions, and if you've conditioned yourself to reflexively dismiss voting machine criticisms as conspiratorial nonsense, then you are part of the problem.

Just because some voting machine criticism is conspiratorial nonsense, it doesn't follow that voting machines are good, nor does it follow that every voting machine critic is a swivel-eyed loon or ratfucking Roger Stone protege.

Take, for example, Princeton's Andrew Appel, a computer scientist who's been publishing well-informed, well-documented warnings about defects in voting machines for years and years. Appel's latest is an alarming note about Georgia's new plan to "tabulate" ballots using OCR software:

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/04/10/ballot-tabulation-by-uploading-scanned-images-for-ocr-is-quite-insecure/

The Georgia legislature has wisely banned the use of QR codes on the paper ballots generated by touchscreen voting machines. We have, at long last, progressed to the point where we use "ballot marking devices" (BMDs) that produce a paper record that can be hand-counted. The problem is that voters barely ever glance at these paper ballots before dropping them in the box to make sure the choices they made on the touchscreen are correctly reflected on the ballot – only 7% of voters carefully inspect their ballots!

This problem is greatly exacerbated if these ballot papers are tabulated by a machine that reads a QR code or barcode, rather than interpreting the human-readable information on the ballot. People are even less likely to pull out their phones and scan the QR code to ensure it matches the words on the paper. That means that a BMD could output different choices in the QR code than it prints in the human-readable part – and the Dominion BMD machines they use in Georgia run outdated software that's super-hackable:

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/02/24/georgia-still-using-tragicomically-insecure-voting-system/

So Georgia's state leg passed Senate Bill 189, which establishes that "The text portion of the paper ballot marked and printed by the electronic ballot marker indicating the elector’s selection shall constitute the official ballot and shall constitute the official vote for purposes of vote tabulation." In other words, you can't count by scanning QR codes, you have to actually interpret the human-readable text on these ballots.

These machines still suck, to be clear (the fact that they don't suck for the mypillovian reasons that Tucker Carlson believes doesn't mean they're good) – but thanks to SB189, they are way less dangerous to democracy than they might be.

But not if Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger gets his way. Raffensperger is another guy who was drafted into The Resistance(TM) after he refused to commit election fraud for Trump, but he's also not good. He can still be terrible in other ways – and he is.

Raffensperger has announced his plan to circumvent the Georgia legislature by using Dominion ICX touchscreens to produce ballots with QR codes, which will then be tabulated in Dominion ICP scanners – but then he's going to "verify" the tabulation by running those same ballots through optical character recognition (OCR) software.

As Appel points out, this is the same stupid plan that Raffensperger tried in 2024, where he called the OCR step an "audit" of the QR tabulation. Back then, he grabbed 200dpi "ballot image files" from the Dominion BMDs and ran them through OCR software run by a company called Enhanced Voting. Appel sums up the fundamental incoherence of this approach.

First, the BMDs are super-hackable, so we don't trust them to print the same info in the QR code as they print in the human-readable text (which no one looks at anyway). If we don't trust them to print accurate info in the QR code, then why would we trust them to accurately generate that 200dpi QR code that's generated for the audit? As Appel writes, "it would be fairly easy for an unsophisticated attacker to alter ballot-image files–just replace the ballots they don’t like with copies of the ones they do like."

Then there's the step where these files are zipped up and transferred to the outside vendor for the audit – a step that Raffensperger has not explained. And even if the files make it to the outside contractor safely, that contractor could "change the inputs (ballot images) or outputs (tabulations)."

So this is very bad. Voting machines suck. Raffensperger sucks.

And here's the stupidest part: as Appel explains, there is a much more secure way to do this, and it's very cheap:

Just use their existing Dominion ICP (polling-place) scanners to count preprinted, hand-marked optical-scan "bubble ballots" that the voter has marked with a pen.

This is what other states are doing. As Appel writes, "This doesn’t even require a software upgrade of any kind. Although it would be a fine idea to install a software upgrade that addresses known security vulnerabilities in the ICX and ICP, the ICP can count hand-marked ballots with or without the upgrade."

This is a purely unforced error, in other words. As such, it's part of a series of shitty vote-tech choices that politicians and officials have been making since Bush v Gore. Truly, we live in the stupidest timeline.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Announcing EFF's Public Resource Fellowship https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/announcing-effs-public-resource-fellowship

• Wrench – Side Table A by Iyo Hasegawa https://adorno.design/pieces/wrench-side-table-a/

• BOOM: Ticketmaster GUILTY of Monopolization https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-ticketmaster-guilty-of-monopolization

• I Was an Enthusiastic Early Adopter of AI Scribes. Here’s Why I Stopped https://benngooch.substack.com/p/i-was-an-enthusiastic-early-adopter

• Mayhem’s Legacy: Why MetaBrainz Matters More Than Ever, and Why We’re Looking for Someone to Lead It https://compassmapandkey.com/2026/04/18/mayhems-legacy-why-metabrainz-matters-more-than-ever-and-why-were-looking-for-someone-to-lead-it/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago GW Bush’s iPod contains “illegal” (according to RIAA) music https://memex.craphound.com/2006/04/16/gw-bushs-ipod-contains-illegal-according-to-riaa-music/

#20yrsago Fan fiction community for McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches https://web.archive.org/web/20120112221730/https://mcgriddlefanfic.livejournal.com/profile/

#10yrsago High tech/high debt: the feudal future of technology makes us all into lesser lessors https://web.archive.org/web/20160415150308/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/rental-company-control/478365/

#10yrsago Three pieces of statistical “bullshit” about the UK EU referendum https://timharford.com/2016/04/three-pieces-of-brexit-bullshit/

#10yrsago Southwest Air kicks Muslim woman off plane for switching seats https://web.archive.org/web/20160416041342/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/muslim-woman-kicked-off-plane-as-flight-attendant-said-she-did-not-feel-comfortable-with-the-a6986661.html

#10yrsago China’s Internet censors order ban on video of toddler threatening brutal cops https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/04/minitrue-4/

#10yrsago Tiny South Pacific island to lose free/universal Internet lifeline https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pacific/299017/niue-to-get-better-internet-service-at-a-cost

#10yrsago The Everything Box: demonological comedy from Richard “Sandman Slim” Kadrey https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/16/the-everything-box-demonological-comedy-from-richard-sandman-slim-kadrey/

#5yrsago People's Choice Communications https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#charter-hires-scabs

#5yrsago "Anti-voter-suppression" companies are lobbying to kill HR1 https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#tissue-thin

#5yrsago $100m deli made $35k in 2019/20 https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#hometown

#5yrsago Mass-action lawsuit against Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#sue-facebook

#1yrago Trump fought the law and Trump won https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/16/weaponized-admin-incompetence/#kill-all-the-lawyers

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Los Angeles: LA Times Festival of Books, Apr 19
  https://www.latimes.com/events/festival-of-books

• San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
  https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda

• London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
  https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691

• NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
  https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8

• NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
  https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

• Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

• Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that peacefully passed the crown, predicted trouble on the horizon, gave life after death, and coastally shelved an idea.

First, scientists watch a succession story play out for years in a naked mole rat colony. Then: prediction markets as a public health threat, the thorny questions of posthumous reproduction, and a walk on the shores of an ancient alien seas.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

Digging into the palace intrigue of a rodent realm 

Abeywardena, Shanes C., M. Schraibman, Alexandria et al. “Peaceful queen succession in the naked mole rat.” Science Advances.

Murderous queens. Bloody power struggles. Strictly enforced hierarchies. I’m speaking, of course, of naked mole rats, a bizarre species of rodent that becomes embroiled in violent conflicts over the succession of one breeding queen to the next. 

Though aggression in succession is the norm for these animals, scientists now report a rare peaceful transition of power from one queen to her daughter in a captive colony. 

The discovery suggests that “the less common peaceful trajectory to queen succession…is possible under some conditions” especially when “aggression-based enforcement may be insufficient or unnecessary and when the cost of a ‘war’ may be too high,” according to the new study.

As we’ve covered before on the Abstract, mole rats (both the naked kind and the non-naked kind) are the only mammals to live in eusocial colonies similar to bees or ants, meaning they are reigned over by one breeding queen and her subordinate workers. In addition to this unique social structure, mole rats display a number of fascinating behavioral and genetic adaptations, including long lifespans and low rates of cancer, which has made them a popular species for research.

Naked mole rats may not look all that intimidating, but when it’s time to anoint a new queen, the fur starts to fly (or it would, if these animals had any fur). If a queen dies or is deposed by rivals, subordinate females in the colony battle to take the throne.

But scientists co-led by Shanes Abeywardena and Alexandria M. Schraibman of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies observed a different succession story that unfolded over many years in the Amigos captive colony housed in San Diego. 

Starting in 2019, a queen named Teré reigned over the colony and produced many healthy pups. Once the colony became crowded, with nearly 40 members, Queen Teré began delivering litters with no surviving pups. When the researchers removed half of the members, she began to produce surviving pups again, though not many. The team then deliberately introduced another stressor by moving the colony to a new facility in 2022, which ceased Queen Teré’s fertility.

In response, Alexandria, one of Teré’s daughters, became pregnant in 2023 and 2024, but her litters also produced no survivors, and she had to be euthanized in 2024 due to a uterine torsion. Finally, the long reproductive hiatus was ended after three years by the ascension of Alexandria’s sister, Arwen, who became Queen Arwen upon her delivery of healthy pups in October 2025.

“Aside from a single incident on 6 February 2025 in which one animal was found with a superficial bite wound and dried blood around the face, an injury that resolved without recurrence, no aggression or dominance related conflict was observed,” the researchers said. “Instead, Queen Teré was reported to exhibit ‘guarding’ behavior of Arwen and her litter. No other signs of social instability, behavioral escalation, or colony-wide distress were documented.”

“Together, these observations indicate that following the decline of Queen Teré’s reproductive capacity and the loss of the intermediary breeder Alexandria, Arwen successfully assumed the reproductive role without eliciting aggression from the reigning queen or from other colony members,” the team concluded.

The study is an antidote to the story we covered last week about a lethal chimp “civil war,” demonstrating that animals with strict dominance structures choose peace over violence in some cases. My only note is that Teré’ be given the honorific Queen Mother for her service.

In other news…

The over/under on predication markets

Packin, Nizan Geslevich and Rabinovitz, Sharon. “Prediction markets as a public health threat.” Science.

Prediction markets (PMs) are exploding in popularity, but researchers warn that the “addictive design, vulnerable users, and permissive regulatory environments” that characterize these markets “are a well-established formula for population-level harm,” according to the Policy Forum section of the journal Science. 

PMs operated by companies like Kalshi or Polymarket “pose underappreciated threats to democratic integrity” and are linked to “addictive behaviors,” according to authors Nizan Geslevich Packin of Baruch College Zicklin School of Business and Sharon Rabinovitz of the University of Haifa. For instance, PMs can enable insider trading about classified government information and expose millions of users to the risk of addiction and major financial losses.

“A public health approach reframes PM risks as predictable outcomes of environmental design, analogous to tobacco control’s success in treating smoking as population-level exposure rather than individual vice,” the team argued in the article. 

“The window for precautionary action is closing,” the researchers emphasized. “Each week of billion-dollar PM activity…prolongs a large uncontrolled experiment on users.”

It remains to be seen whether this warning about the dangers of a wild new industry will materialize into meaningful regulatory action. Want to make a bet?

Creating new life after death

Bamford, Sandra Carol. “Spectral Connections: Anthropological Engagements with Posthumous Reproduction.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

Posthumous children—children born after the death of one or both parents—are popular in myth and fiction, from the Greek Dionysus to more modern characters like John Connor or Daenerys Targaryen. 

But this is also a real demographic of people that may evolve in interesting ways as reproductive technologies enable larger numbers of posthumous conceptions—in which the sperm and egg donors for an embryo may be deceased, such as the case of a boy born in 2018 whose mother and father had both died years earlier in a car crash.

In this way, “frozen sperm, eggs (or embryos) are, at one and the same time, both alive and dead,” said Sandra Bamford of the University of Toronto in a new anthropological study of the topic. “Through their frozen gametes and the potential of new kin connections in the future, the dead remain as active participants influencing the lives of the living.”

The study, which is part of a broader journal issue exploring kinship, pulls together many intriguing case studies, including the “Nuer ghost marriage” practices of Sudan, in which a deceased man can be considered the father of a kinsman’s children, or the case of William Kane, who bequeathed frozen sperm to his girlfriend, sparking a legal battle with his adult children after his death by suicide. 

In other words, the legal, ethical, and practical implications of posthumous conception are still very much in flux, raising thorny questions about when, and how, the dead can produce new life. For instance: the ambiguities over judging the consent of a deceased person over the use of their posthumous gametes; the rights of posthumously conceived children to be named heirs of estates; and the possible emotional and psychological toll on posthumously conceived children, along with their family members.  

The Rime of the Really Ancient Mariner 

Zaki, Abdallah S. and Lamb, Michael P.  “Identifying the topographic signature of early Martian oceans.” Nature. 

We’ll close, as all things should, with waves lapping on long-lost alien shores. The surface of Mars is etched with the memory of rivers, lakes, and perhaps even an expansive ocean that may have covered much of its northern hemisphere between three and four billion years ago. 

Scientists have already mapped out the rough contours of what may be an ancient Martian shoreline, but a new study throws the seas into sharper relief by identifying topographic signs of a possible coastal shelf. The team argued in their study that these shelf features may be a better indicator of a past ocean than shoreline features, based on similar observations on Earth.

“Our results indicate that long-lived ancient oceans on presently arid planets may be best identified not only through discrete shorelines but also through…a global coastal shelf,” said researchers led by Abdallah Zaki and Michael Lamb of Caltech University. The study supports “the presence of an ancient ocean on the northern plains of Mars that was bounded by a coastal shelf.”

While this ocean dried up long ago, its topographic remnants are a reminder of a time when Mars was warm, wet, and perhaps, wriggling with life.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

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Onze inzet: De Koeweitse F-18-piloot die DRIE Amerikaanse F-15's neerschoot blijkt Maverick te zijn geweest die zijn vertrouwde jachttoestel van een Koeweitse basis stal, omdat hij de enige was die wist dat deze drie Amerikaanse F-15-crews geactiveerde sleeper cells waren die op het punt stonden Air Force One neer te halen. Beter idee ja? Dan zien we uw pitch tegemoet in de comments. Het enige dat we tot nu toe weten is dat de productie bevestigd is en het voorgestelde verhaal Tom Kruis aansprak: "Bruckheimer previously said in 2024 that Tom Cruise liked the storyline that was being prepared for the next one. “We pitched Tom a story he liked. But he’s a very in-demand actor and he’s got a lot of movies lined up, so we have to wait and see." Afijn, geen reden te klein voor de onderstaande scenes op de voorpagina.

"Daggers, assume attack formation"

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"Come on Mav, don't think, just do"

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"They want Mach 10? Let's give 'em Mach 10"

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De facto onze redactie tbh

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(1986)

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De enige doctrine die we erkennen

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