2026-04-09

Horseshit

• Youth should not be criminalized: More countries weigh teen social media ban, experts warn it's 'lazy'

• The Age-Old Urge to Destroy Technology

• Bronze Age shield shown in Scotland for first time in more than 230 years

• Does Vinyl Sound Better?

  All of this is, of course, highly subjective. The convenience of digital music is hard to beat, but there is something to be said for the warmth and feel and even the pops and cracks from dirt and debris on the surface of a record. And there are other, more subtle benefits to listening to music on vinyl. The most important, to me, is the fact that once I put on a record, I am locked into that record. That is, it is far less convenient to skip tracks than it is with CDs or other digital formats, so I am forced to listen to the album as an album instead of a collection of songs I can shuffle. As a fan of album-oriented music, this is very important to me and arguably something that has diminished in the digital music age.

• We're Drugging Ourselves with Dopamine

• Why some California homeowners feel trapped in houses they want to leave

• Digital Hopes, Real Power: How the Arab Spring Fueled a Global Surveillance Boom

• The blue light from your phone isn't ruining your sleep

• Every company is now a media company–and every boss a star

Epstein

• Bill Gates to testify before House Oversight in Epstein probe

celebrity gossip

• Africa's Human Capital – Bill Gates Letter to The Economist

• Tom Brady becomes 'chief wellness officer' at GLP-1 weight-loss shot company

Obit

• Jim Whittaker, first American to summit Everest, dies at 97

Musk

• Elon Musk seeks ouster of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as part of lawsuit

Electric / Self Driving cars

• Used EV sales spike alongside gas prices

• Chinese electric truck maker Windrose makes first US delivery

• Waymo's Robot Car Testing Ends in NYC After Permits Expire

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Yale Law School Loses Top Spot in US News Rankings After Scandals Tarnish Ivy League School.

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• What Is a 'Cyberdeck': Meet Gen Z's New DIY Obsession

• Volunteers turn a fan's recordings of 10K concerts into an online treasure trove

• Microsoft hints at bit bunkers for war zones

• How the Vision Pro Rollout Inflamed Tensions at Apple

• Apple's chips are the core of a new landscape, but its biggest win is Windows

• Men Are Buying Hacking Tools to Use Against Their Wives and Friends

• LinkedIn Hit with Class-Action Lawsuits over Browser-Extension Scanning

• US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology

• FBI: Americans lost a record $21B to cybercrime last year

• Why Microsoft's war on Windows' Control Panel is taking so long

• Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

  • Amazon Stopping Support for Old Kindles

• Our digital devices are putting our right to privacy at risk

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• Artemis delivers some exceptional, high-quality photos of the Moon

• Artemis II: Integrity completes its first return trajectory correction burn

• What Is Going on with the Artemis 2 Toilet?

• With Orion still flying, NASA is nearing key decisions about Artemis III

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• OpenAI Doubling Down on Text Models, Shifting Strategies to Superapp Plan

• UK's grand plan to fuel AI with public data faces uphill battle

• Milla Jovovich released an AI memory system. None of benchmark scores are real

• Claude AI down: Anthropic users hit with errors as chatbot goes offline

• Anthropic's latest AI model could let hackers carry out attacks faster

  • Anthropic Mythos model can find and exploit 0-days

  • Anthropic's most powerful AI model Mythos Preview is too dangerous for release

  • New Anthropic model is too dangerous to release publicly

• Row over 'virtual gated community' AI surveillance plan in Toronto neighbourhood

• Japan relaxes privacy laws to make itself the 'easiest country to develop AI'

• Intel is going all-in on advanced chip packaging

• Anthropic may have leaked Claude Code source on purpose

• Maine Is About to Become the First State to Ban New Data Centers

• Brands Adopt 'No AI' Disclaimers to Stand Out Amid the Slop

• Google's AI Overviews tell millions of lies a day.

• AI-Driven Demand for Gas Turbines Risks a New Energy Crunch

• DARPA puts money where bots' mouths are, seeks new science of AI communication

• US court declines to block Pentagon's Anthropic blacklisting for now

• Anthropic's Restraint Is a Terrifying Warning Sign

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Satoshi Nakamoto Unmasking

  • Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto? My Quest to Unmask Bitcoin's Creator

  • Takeaways from Our Search for Bitcoin's Creator

  • The New York Times may have found Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto

  • Brit says he is not elusive Bitcoin creator named by New York Times

  • British computer scientist denies he is Bitcoin developer Satoshi Nakamoto

• Major Polish crypto exchange presumed insolvent

• Digital Assets Rules Need Clarity

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Insurers' $1T Buildup in Private Credit Is Leaving Regulators in Dust

• Software job openings surge this year, defying AI fears

• Tech industry lays off nearly 80k employees in the first quarter of 2026

• No big trucks for little roads: American OEMs say EU is blocking imports

• No more American Dream? Housing market strains buyers and owners

• Doritos at $7 a bag ended up costing PepsiCo billions

• California’s $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers led to ‘negative outcomes,’ researchers say

• Wells Fargo whistleblower award slashed by Wall Street watchdog

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• The most connected hospice doctor in California.

  A CBS News Investigation found one Los Angeles County hospice physician’s name, Dr. Rajiv Bhuva, on Medicare claims for nearly 2,800 patients across 126 California hospices in 2024, according to the last full year of available data.

Trump

• Trump and Iran announce two-week ceasefire that will open Strait of Hormuz

• How Trump Took the U.S. to War with Iran

Democrats

• Minneapolis considers legalizing venues where adults can engage in sex

Left Angst

• ICE acknowledges it is using powerful spyware

• Nuclear brinkmanship usually works. It's also dangerous

  I didn’t want to put this idea out into the ether with a glib tweet or something until we got through last night, but this was, in my view, a not-so-thinly veiled nuclear threat. It was a little bit ambiguous, but nuclear threats usually are. And it wasn’t exactly that subtle. I mean, Trump literally said “a whole civilization will die tonight” and that this was “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World”. Whether it was a credible threat was another matter. But I clearly wasn’t the only one who was thinking about the potentially existential stakes.

• 'This Is Just Not How the Human Race Should Operate,' Says US Senator

  “That is pure evil,” the senator said of Trump’s threat, which the president issued on his Truth Social platform. “But even if he doesn’t go through with it, even if Iran agrees to a deal, this is just not how the human race should operate—compelling others’ behavior under the threat of murder of innocent people.”

  • How many people has Iran helped kill recently in the name of Islam and hate of Jews? Of course "that doesn't count" on the Left...

• All Nations, World Bodies 'Must Urgently Intervene' to Stop Trump From Wiping Out Iran: Amnesty

  Amnesty International on Tuesday joined advocacy groups and political leaders around the world in calling for swift action to stop President Donald Trump from carrying out his genocidal threats against Iran, with the human rights group specifically putting pressure on all governments and the United Nations. As Iranians put their bodies at risk on Tuesday by gathering at energy facilities and bridges in hopes of preventing their destruction, the watchdog group Beyond Nuclear warned that Trump could create a “fatal nuclear disaster” by attacking Iran’s nuclear power plant in the port city of Bushehr.

• Trump is facing the biggest US humiliation since Vietnam

  you can’t forget it. You mustn’t. A moral boundary was crossed on Tuesday. Something was said which changes everything. And for us to go back on it, to pretend it didn’t happen, betrays every possible value upon which our society is based. The President of the United States threatened genocide. There are no caveats to that sentence. There are no legitimate counter-arguments, no definitional uncertainties. He did so with six words, which we must commit to never forgetting. “A whole civilisation will die tonight.”

  • Iranian rhetoric has never been objectionable, however.

• U.S. Made a Deal That Gives Us Nothing We Wanted

• Wildlife Conservation Police Are Searching Flock Cameras for ICE

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Fraud racket stretching to Nigeria exposed in California

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Justice Department Conducts Court-Authorized Disruption of DNS Hijacking Network Controlled by a Russian Military Intelligence Unit

  Today, the Department of Justice and the FBI announced a court-authorized technical operation to neutralize the U.S. portion of a network of small office/home office (SOHO) routers compromised by a unit within Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU).

  Since at least 2024, GRU actors have exploited known vulnerabilities to steal credentials for thousands of TP-Link routers worldwide. The actors then accessed many of these compromised routers without authorization and manipulated their settings to redirect DNS requests to GRU-controlled servers - i.e., malicious DNS resolvers. GRU actors were indiscriminate in their initial targeting and manipulation of routers. The actors then implemented an automated filtering process to determine which DNS requests were of interest and warranted interception. For select targets, the GRU’s DNS resolvers provided fraudulent DNS records for specific domains that mimicked legitimate services – including Microsoft Outlook Web Access – to facilitate Actor-in-the-Middle attacks against encrypted victim network traffic. In doing so, the GRU actors harvested unencrypted passwords, authentication tokens, emails, and other sensitive information from devices on the same network as the compromised TP-Link routers.

  • US disrupts Russian military-run DNS hijacking network

  • Thousands of Consumer routers hacked by Russia's military

  • Russian spooks hack Wi-Fi routers to spy on West

• The twilight of America's sky knights – Fighter jets are an anachronism

• NERC is 'actively monitoring the grid' following Iran-linked cyber threat

• What Is Ghost Murmur? Secretive CIA Tool Linked to Iran Airman Rescue

• US Navy seeks 1,200% increase in Tomahawk missile procurement for 2027.

World

• Inside a huge compound where 10k workers scammed people globally

• Egypt plans to introduce SIM cards specifically for children

• Hungary and Russia struck 12-point plan for closer ties, documents show

• Greece to ban under-15s from social media from next year

• 500 MWe Nuclear Fast Breeder Reactor built by India attains first criticality

• Greece to ban social media for under-15s from 2027, calls on EU action

• US carmakers say proposed EU rules could block large pickup trucks from Europe

Iran / Houthi

• Russia and China veto UN resolution aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz

  Russia and China strongly defended their opposition to the U.N. resolution, both citing Trump’s threat to end Iran’s civilization as confirmation that the proposal would have given the U.S. and Israel “carte blanche for continued aggression,” as Russian envoy Vassily Nebenzia put it.

• Iran demands Bitcoin fees for ships passing Hormuz during ceasefire

  • Iran eyes crypto toll for oil tanker transits through Strait of Hormuz

• Fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire shows cracks as attacks continue across the region

• How Pakistan managed to get the US and Iran to a ceasefire

• Strait of Hormuz appears to remain closed amid conflicting US and Iran briefings

• Food shock is inevitable due to the Iran war

• Iran Ceasefire: Israel intensifies Lebanon strikes and Iran closes the strait

• Iran Tightens Its Grip on Hormuz Despite Cease-Fire

Israel

• Middle East ceasefire in serious doubt as Israel assaults Lebanon

• Israel kills 254 in Lebanon after US-Iran agree ceasefire

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russians turn to cat feeders, classifieds, and vacuum cleaners to stay connected

China

• On Rare China visit, Taiwan's opposition leader calls for reconciliation

• HK police can now demand phone passwords under new national security rules

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Economic Civil War: States Push Laws to Shield Oil Companies from Accountability

• Why the Persian Gulf has more oil and gas than anywhere else on Earth

• 'Non-survivable': heatwaves are breaching human limits