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EFF – We Built You a Resource Hub to Fight Back. “Age verification laws are proliferating fast across the United States and around the world, creating a dangerous and confusing tangle of rules about what we’re all allowed to see and do online. Though these mandates claim to protect children, in practice they create harmful censorship …
HackADay: “We noted that Excel turned 40 this year. That makes it seem old, and today, if you say “spreadsheet,” there’s a good chance you are talking about an Excel spreadsheet, and if not, at least a program that can read and produce Excel-compatible sheets. But we remember a time when there was no Excel. …
Via Wikipedia – Allspice, also known as Jamaica pepper, myrtle pepper, pimenta, or pimento,[a] is the dried unripe berry of Pimenta dioica, a midcanopy tree native to the Greater Antilles, southern Mexico, and Central America, now cultivated in many warm parts of the world.[3] The name allspice was coined as early as 1621 by the English, …
Forbes: “Beverly Hills High School has deployed an AI-powered surveillance apparatus that includes facial recognition cameras, behavioral analysis software, smoke detector-shaped bathroom listening devices from Motorola, drones, and license plate readers from Flock Safety — a setup the district spent $4.8 million on in the 2024-2025 fiscal year and considers necessary given the school’s high-profile …
Crust News and Dominic Skinner: “The ICE List Wiki is now public. It documents immigration enforcement activity across the United States, not just ICE, but Border Patrol, HSI, DHS more broadly, and the hundreds of local police departments operating under 287(g) agreements. Agent identities, incidents, raids, vehicles, supporting agencies, and companies propping up the regime, …
CNN – no paywall – “Residents of mid-Atlantic states like Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania who have spent years plagued by high electricity bills just got some bad news: Relief is not on the way. As CNN recently reported, utility customers in Maryland and Washington, DC, are some of the first in the country to …
“In the late 1980s, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary sat on the New York Times best-seller list for 155 consecutive weeks and eventually sold 57 million copies, a figure believed to be second only to the Bible in the United States — but those days are thoroughly gone. Stefan Fatsis’s new book “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and …
The Epstein Files Transparency Act required full release of all unclassified DOJ Epstein records by December 19, 2025. To date, DOJ has released two partial, heavily redacted sets, still withholding an untold number of documents in multiple formats, and no schedule of release has been made public. In addition, the DOJ removed and added additional …
Via Kottke: Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Christmas – “In 2002, Aardman Animations produced a series of short episodes called Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Contraptions. In each episode, Wallace unveils a new invention, which Gromit then has to deal with. For the holiday season, Aardman has packaged a few of these short shorts into this compilation, Wallace & …
Code is open source. Global news sources are via Google News. Topics include: World, Nation, Business, News, Technology, Entertainment, Sport, Science and Health.
annas-archive.li/blog, 2025-12-20 “We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity. This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs. It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be …
Data Innovations: Researchers at IBM Europe and the European Space Agency have released ImpactMesh, a global, open dataset focused on measuring the impact of extreme floods and wildfires. The team collected satellite images from Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel satellites, which regularly observe the same areas using both optical imagery and radar, and paired images taken before …
