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“OSINT Tools and More – Editor’s note: Happy fifth anniversary to Jeremy Caplan’s excellent Wonder Tools Substack newsletter. He started his newsletter a couple of months before I launched the Toolbox newsletter. If you’re not subscribing, you should!. I took a fact-checking and OSINT tools course from the Knight Center for the Americas last month. …
The Freedom of the Press Foundation has launched an ongoing secrecy news database, which they are calling The Classified Catalog, to keep track of all secrecy-related news during the Trump administration. Reporters, FOIA requesters, and the public can use it to chart stories about FOIA news and litigation, disappearing messages, information being taken down from …
Your Local Epidemiologist: “There are concerns that Secretary Kennedy will politically influence or change ACIP—the external committee for vaccine policy in the United States—which means the possibility of changing eligibility or access to vaccines. If this happens, it will be a mess. States will be on their own, insurance companies will be looking for third-party …
Elite Universities Form Private Collective to Resist Trump Administration. WSJ – no paywall, April 28, 2025. Separate from public dissent, group of school leaders strategize behind scenes about how to respond and push back against White House. Leaders of some of the nation’s most prestigious universities have assembled a private collective to counter the Trump …
Nature: “President Donald Trump and his administration have gutted science agencies, terminated research programmes and cancelled billions of dollars in grants to universities. What are the long-term impacts for the United States and the world? In just the first three months of his second term, US President Donald Trump has destabilized eight decades of government …
Via Kottke.org: “This is a lovely little short film about the many snowy owls that migrate down from the Arctic and settle at Boston’s Logan airport and the man who safely captures & relocates the owls away from the airport. I love this story about what a fierce hunter the snowy owl is: A snowy …
Ars Technica: “ChatGPT will now recommend products to be bought offsite—but no sponsored ads just yet. On Thursday, OpenAI announced the addition of shopping features to ChatGPT Search. The new feature allows users to search for products and purchase them through merchant websites after being redirected from the ChatGPT interface. Product placement is not sponsored, …
TechDirt: “We generally understand how LLM hallucinations work. An AI model tries to generate what seems like a plausible response to whatever you ask it, drawing on its training data to construct something that sounds right. The actual truth of the response is, at best, a secondary consideration. It does not involve facts. It does …
The World After Amazon – A project to support workers to reclaim the power of future-making Read as a PDF Read as an EPUB Order a book Listen as a podcast Download the audiobook In 2023, the Worker as Futurist Project supported 13 rank-and-file Amazon workers to write short, speculative fiction about The World After …
“Records reviewed by WIRED [no paywall] show law enforcement agencies are eager to take advantage of the data trails generated by a flood of new internet-connected vehicle features. Automakers are increasingly pushing consumers to accept monthly and annual fees to unlock pre-installed safety and performance features, from hands-free driving systems and heated seats to cameras …
Organic Maps is a free Android & iOS offline maps app for travelers, tourists, hikers, drivers and cyclists based on OpenStreetMap data created by the community. It is a privacy-focused, open-source fork of Maps.me app (previously known as MapsWithMe), maintained by the same people who created MapsWithMe in 2011. Organic Maps is one of the …
The Atlantic – no paywall: Experts fear what comes next. “If you were tasked with building a panopticon, your design might look a lot like the information stores of the U.S. federal government—a collection of large, complex agencies, each making use of enormous volumes of data provided by or collected from citizens. The federal government …