Linkage

Three days ago, Drew DeVault - founder and CEO of SourceHut - published a blogpost called, "Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face", where he complained that LLM companies were crawling data without respecting robosts.txt and causing severe outages to SourceHut.

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Then, yesterday morning, KDE GitLab infrastructure was overwhelmed by another AI crawler, with IPs from an Alibaba range; this caused GitLab to be temporarily inaccessible by KDE developers.

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By now, it should be pretty clear that this is no coincidence. AI scrapers are getting more and more aggressive, and - since FOSS software relies on public collaboration, whereas private companies don't have that requirement - this is putting some extra burden on Open Source communities.

The report is more interesting than this abstract sounds:

The present report is submitted to the Human Rights Council pursuant to Council resolutions 32/2 and 41/18. The Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, analyses the current state of international human rights law in relation to the recognition of gender and gender identity and expression, in connection with the struggle against violence and discrimination in its different forms. The present report and the report to the General Assembly at its seventy-sixth session complement each other. Annex 1 contains a description of activities that have taken place since May 2020, and annex 2 provides an outline of the report to the General Assembly.

For years, Samsung “Space Zoom”-capable phones have been known for their ability to take incredibly detailed photos of the Moon. But a recent Reddit post showed in stark terms just how much computational processing the company is doing, and — given the evidence supplied — it feels like we should go ahead and say it: Samsung’s pictures of the Moon are fake. 

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The test of Samsung’s phones conducted by Reddit user u/ibreakphotos was ingenious in its simplicity. They created an intentionally blurry photo of the Moon, displayed it on a computer screen, and then photographed this image using a Samsung S23 Ultra. As you can see below, the first image on the screen showed no detail at all, but the resulting picture showed a crisp and clear “photograph” of the Moon. The S23 Ultra added details that simply weren’t present before. There was no upscaling of blurry pixels and no retrieval of seemingly lost data. There was just a new Moon — a fake one. 

Karla Jay remembers joining the second night of street protests during the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City. For her, and for so many other LGBTQ+ people, something had shifted: People were angry. They didn’t want things to go back to normal — because normal meant police raids. Normal meant living underground. It meant hiding who they were at their jobs and from their families. They wanted a radical change.  

Radical change meant organizing. Jay joined a meeting with the Gay Liberation Front, which would become the incubator for the modern LGBTQ+ political movement and proliferate in chapters across the country. At those meetings, she remembers discussing what freedom could look like. Holding hands with a lover while walking down the street, without fear of getting beaten up, one person said. Another said they’d like to get married. At the time, those dreams seemed impossible.

Jay, now 78, is worried that history will repeat itself. She’s worried that LGBTQ+ people will be put in the dark again by the draconian policies of a second Trump administration. 

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“We have forgotten that the laws are written to protect property and not to protect people. They’re written to protect White men and their property, and historically, women and children were their property,” she said. “To expect justice from people who write laws to protect themselves has been a fundamental error of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans community.” 

The Trump administration pushed forward into a new phase of the rolling national constitutional crisis over the weekend, reportedly defying two different federal court orders imposing limits on its deportation of immigrants without due process. First, immigrant authorities deported Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University, despite a judge’s Friday order halting her removal. Second, authorities deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants, flouting another judge’s explicit directive to turn around American planes that hadn’t yet landed in El Salvador, where the migrants were being sent. The Justice Department claimed that it could not comply with the order barring Alawieh’s removal because it arrived too late. But the White House defended its defiance of the order prohibiting deportations of Venezuelans, insisting that the judge had no jurisdiction over the migrants—and that Trump holds absolute, unreviewable constitutional authority to expel noncitizens.

Taken on their own, these claims would be chilling enough. But they were coupled with another novel late-night claim of presidential power: On Monday, Donald Trump purported to reverse President Joe Biden’s pardons of Jan. 6 committee members. In a Truth Social post that came just after midnight, Trump claimed the pardons are now “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” asserting the power to undo their clemency because Biden allegedly signed it “by Autopen.” (It is the official position of the executive branch, unchallenged by the courts, that autopen qualifies as a valid presidential signature.)

Taken together, these actions and declarations amount to a significant escalation in Trump’s transformation of his own presidency into an autocracy or, perhaps more accurately, a monarchy. His Justice Department has taken vague claims of “Article II authority” to new extremes, ascribing to him an unchecked right to expel immigrants with no semblance of due process—and as his defenders have asserted all weekend, to ignore lawful court orders that stand in his way. Meanwhile, Trump himself has made it clear that this extreme and dangerous new vision of executive power does not apply to the presidency, but only his presidency: It is not a set of neutral principles, but an ever-evolving pretext for his own personal whims and cruelties, dressed up in legalese concocted by the conservative legal movement for precisely this purpose.

Looking forward to a sun-soaked holiday in Sydney, Sonya, a transgender woman from the Philippines, instead found herself locked in an Australian detention center. What should have been a simple vacation turned into a harrowing ordeal—one that has sparked outrage over Australia’s treatment of transgender individuals and Asian migrants.

Sonya arrived in Australia in February, eager to explore the country as a tourist. But upon landing, she was immediately profiled by the Australian Border Force (ABF). Without consent, her phone was confiscated, and she was subjected to invasive questioning.

“The environment was highly uncomfortable… there was an inmate there that threw hot water on us,” Sonya recalled, detailing the abuse she faced while in detention. Worse still, she was denied a clear timeline for her deportation. Despite offering to purchase her own ticket home, she was left in limbo, with no answers and no way out.

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Villawood has long been criticized for its treatment of detainees, particularly transgender individuals. Sonya, a trans woman, was housed in a male compound, subjecting her to heightened risks of abuse and violence. Trans men, too, have been placed in female compounds, disregarding their gender identities altogether.

Adding to the distress, Sonya was denied access to her luggage and critical hormone medication, which could have had serious medical consequences. Her experience is not unique—other transgender detainees have reported being under constant surveillance, sexually harassed during pat-downs, and intimidated by officers.

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Sonya’s detention is part of a broader, deeply flawed system known as Operation Inglenook. Launched in 2022, this initiative was supposedly designed to crack down on visa fraud, human trafficking, and exploitation within the sex industry. Yet, in practice, it has overwhelmingly targeted migrants from East and Southeast Asia, including many transgender women.

Between November 2022 and August 2024, 165 people were denied immigration clearance under Operation Inglenook, the vast majority of whom were from Asian countries. The initiative has been widely criticized for racial profiling, with border officials reportedly targeting travelers based on their appearance, gender identity, and perceived profession.

“To implement these laws, border officials look out for migrants whose appearances they believe do not match their gender marker or who fit into the racist stereotype of the ‘promiscuous Asian sex worker,’” said Damien Nguyen, spokesperson for the Asian Migrant Sex Worker Advisory Group (AMSWAG).

“The government weaponizes the false idea that we are by default victims of sex trafficking to justify mass visa cancellation, torturous detainment, and overpolicing,” he added.

On 14 February, the US Department of Education’s office of civil rights issued a letter providing notice to American educational institutions, schools and universities of the department’s new interpretation of federal civil rights law. The letter lays out new conditions for institutions to receive federal funding, including in the form of student loans or scientific and medical research.

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in federally assisted programs or activities. The education department’s “Dear Colleagues” letter redefines the central targets of Title VI to centrally include supposed discrimination against whites. The letter was followed, on 28 February, with a set of guidelines for its interpretation. The novel understanding of anti-white discrimination in these documents is a chilling manifestation of educational authoritarianism.

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The guidelines for what would count as a Title VI violation are vague. From the guidelines:

"a racially-oriented vision of social justice, or similar goals will be probative in OCR’s analysis of the facts and circumstances of an individual case."

The most straightforward way to read the letter and the guidelines is as defining “school-on-student harassment” as including Black history. The letter treats teaching large swaths of Black and Indigenous history as akin to a white professor consistently referring to all of their Black students with a terrible racial slur.

The “more extreme practices at a university” that “could create a hostile environment under Title VI” include “pressuring them to participate in protests or take certain positions on racially charged issues”. But reason, rationality and morality are sources of “pressure”. How does one distinguish the pressure placed on people by moral arguments for racially charged issues from other kinds of pressure?

The guidelines create a culture of fear and intimidation around history. If one discusses Black history, one immediately risks endorsing the view that the United States “is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’”. The guidelines invite students to report their teachers and their school administrators for not adhering to a state-imposed ideology about history, as well as state-imposed ideology about gender, which threatens to make teaching critically about gender identity, or including trans perspectives, into school-on-student harassment. Failure to adhere to state ideologies about history and gender fits this new definition of “school-on-student harassment”. Billions in federal funding is at stake.

For anybody who loves British television from the 1970s and 80s, this is just delightful.

It is only comparatively recently that performance in arenas other than theatre and cinema has begun to receive serious academic attention. The ‘Spaces of Television’ project and the University of York’s ‘Playing the Small Screen’ symposium have each opened up discussions regarding the impact of production process and space upon television acting, yet little consideration has been given to those spaces in which performances were traditionally prepared prior to studio transmission or recording. This article attempts to address this by focusing on the BBC’s ‘Television Rehearsal Rooms’, better known by those who used them as the ‘Acton Hilton’, which offers a precise model of the ‘outside’ rehearsal process which characterised multi-camera studio production. A creative hub for not only drama, but also sitcom and light entertainment, the Hilton represented an extended community for the many performers who gathered there to rehearse – a community that has all but disappeared in the modern era of single camera location work, where prior rehearsal of the type conducted at Acton has virtually disappeared. Drawing upon a combination of archive research and interviews with practitioners, this piece examines the important role played by the Acton Hilton in the history of UK television acting.

Intersex advocates say that they have been shut out of the conversations about gender and health in the United States and that the January 28 executive order has far-reaching consequences for intersex kids, not just because it allows dangerous surgeries to continue.

“None of the EOs mention intersex people specifically — they are systematically scrubbing mentions of intersex people from government websites,” the intersex rights group interACT wrote  in an email to community members.

Several hospitals and doctors have complied with Trump’s order, announcing in recent weeks that they have halted gender-affirming care, though some have resumed care based on ongoing litigation. In some cases, those same health centers that have stopped gender-affirming care have also largely continued to perform controversial sex-altering operations in the form of intersex pediatric surgeries, according to interACT.

Intersex advocates say that juxtaposition lays bare the hypocrisy of the order and those following it. It’s been “striking” to see those same health providers continue non-consensual intersex surgeries, said Sylvan Fraser Anthony, legal and policy director for interACT.

“Hospitals have been so reluctant — flat out refusing or taking years before issuing some partial policy about whether they’re going to be changing practices related to these non-consensual surgeries on intersex children,” Anthony said. “They’ve taken years, if not decades, to review those [policies] and most have not been responsive at all to calls to review and update their standards and their practices for intersex children to respect their bodily autonomy. Whereas they’re responding within a matter of days and weeks to this executive order when no one is making them — rushing to make policy moves that harm trans patients.”

Utterly brilliant What she said:

A question that tormented me when I first discovered I’m trans was why I didn’t realize it until I was 45 years old. From what I see on Reddit, that question torments many late bloomers who don’t figure this out until well into adulthood. The pop-culture narrative says that trans people are supposed to have always known, right?

Well, I didn’t, and yet I was also definitely trans.

The torment only increased as I reflected back over my life, discovering one sign after another of my feminine identity. Some of them quite blatant. Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I realize? Was I just stupid? A clueless idiot, bumbling my way through life?

That explanation was not dismissed so easily: it aligned with many of the messages I’d been given about myself over the years. Further, I often felt like a clueless, bumbling idiot because I just didn’t understand how boys work or how to emulate what they were doing. So maybe that was the answer.

It took years, but ultimately I came to realize that I was asking the wrong question. I shouldn’t have wondered why I didn’t know sooner. Rather, I should have been asking “what stopped me from knowing sooner?” 

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Everyone else gets to play “be yourself,” while we play “fit in or die”. What we need is a disguise. A mask made of carefully-constructed persona that matches the expectations created by our gendered bodies. The better we build this disguise, the better we fit in, the less punishment we receive. The less danger of exile we face.

So, without even noticing that we’re doing it, we pull back from engaging with people. We observe more and do less, trying to figure out the unwritten rules. We over-think the heck out of every situation before we try anything, working out our best guess as to how we’re supposed to behave.