As things get warmer, one thing I will miss is a snowy Christmas as much as I hate driving in snow and cold. This was taken in Indiana on Christmas, it was almost 50 degrees that day, and not a lick of snow cover.

Throughout social media, people are warning that a Reform victory in a council by-election is a lesson for the parliamentary by-election in Gorton and Denton.

Reform won in Fletton and Woodston with 29.4% of the vote. The Greens narrowly came second on 27.6%. Meanwhile, Labour were fourth on 16.8%.

Many social media users are pointing out that Labour has split the vote here. If just a few of the voters for the governing party had opted for the Greens, then the Zack Polanski-led party would've won the seat and not Reform.

One user said voting Green Party is a double win:

vote labour, get reform. vote green not just to keep out reform, but for policies you can actually believe in! that actually want to help normal people! what a revelation!

Commentator Owen Jones, meanwhile, called the council result a "warning":

A warning here. The Greens nearly won - but Labour split the vote, handing Reform the seat.

Former MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, who defected to the Greens, added:

Labour splitting the vote and letting Reform in. Up and down the county the only way to stop reform is to vote Green.

The Electoral Calculus has the Greens winning the seat, not Reform. But in the world of the corporate media, opting for the Greens splits the 'left' vote, not Labour. ITV's Robert Peston recently challenged Green leader Zack Polanski on that:

Wouldn't you regret Reform UK coming through in Gorton and Denton if The Greens split the left vote?

Polanski responded:

We cannot say that Keir Starmer's Labour would be a left wing vote. This is the party that wanted to slash disability benefits, then had to be shamed not to do it. It's the same party that eventually lifted the two child benefit cap, but it took over 18 months of children living in poverty. And it's the same party that is arming an ongoing genocide in Gaza. So I don't think on any metric you can say Keir Starmer's Labour party represents the left in the country. That's why I'm confident and not complacent that we can win in Gorton and Denton.

It's arguable that Keir Starmer's Labour is closer to Reform than the Greens. And as Polanski has previously said, it would take a change of leadership and direction for the Greens to work with Labour against Reform.

Featured image via the Canary

By James Wright

Reform's candidate for the parliamentary seat of Gorton and Denton, Matt Goodwin, claimed on social media:

One of the untold stories in British politics right now is Reform's very strong support among young men.

But people swiftly pointed out that the favoured party among young men is actually the Greens, according to YouGov.

For young men, Green support is at 30%, and Labour support is at 21%. When it comes to the Lib Dems, it's 17% for young men, while the Conservatives and Reform both trail on 12%.

Matt Goodwin's narrative is actually the opposite of the truth. Young men appear to understand that their material conditions will improve through cuts in the cost of living rather than through cuts to public services. And that a shift from landlords to affordable housing would benefit them. Free tuition for university may also play a part. The Greens harbour these policies.

There are other factors that play into how young men might vote. 42% of men aged 20-34 say they feel lonely "often or very often," and, concerningly, there is a very high suicide rate for men under 50.

But the YouGov polling suggests that young men are turning towards hope and a more integrated society that recognises the individual but also the importance of community.

Matt Goodwin's rival in the Green Party at the Gorton and Denton by-election has exemplified why many are turning to her party. Speaking to Channel 4, Hannah Spencer said:

We care about lots of different things. We care about what's happening here locally, as well as things across the world… Living standards are lower here, people's incomes aren't changing, and we have fuel poverty, which is not even a phrase we should be using in 2026. We need people in parliament where the decisions are being made, that have got the background and the relevant lived experience, to be able to feed into decisions that are being made

As a plumber, Green candidate Spencer says she understands hard graft and will therefore represent the working class parliament.

Featured image via the Canary

By James Wright

Can using AI teach you to code more quickly than traditional methods? Anthropic certainly thinks so. The AI outfit has partnered with computer science education org CodePath to get Claude and Claude Code into the hands of students, a time-tested strategy for seeding product interest and building brand loyalty.…

Remember that giant green rack-sized blade server Oxide Computer showed off a couple of years back? Well, the startup is still at it, having raked in $200 million in Series-C funding this week as it prepares to bring a bevy of new hardware to market with updated processing power, memory, and networking.…

A California police department is none too happy that its license plate reader records were accessed by federal employees it never gave explicit permission to peruse. And, once again, it's Flock Safety shrugging itself into another PR black eye.

Mountain View police criticized the company supplying its automated license plate reader system after an audit turned up "unauthorized" use by federal law enforcement agencies.

At least six offices of four agencies accessed data from the first camera in the city's Flock Safety license-tracking system from August to November 2024 without the police department's permission or knowledge, according to a press release Friday night.

Flock has been swimming in a cesspool of its own making for several months now, thanks to it being the public face of "How To Hunt Down Someone Who Wanted An Abortion." That debacle was followed by even more negative press (and congressional rebuke) for its apparent unwillingness to place any limits at all on access to the hundreds of millions of license plate records its cameras have captured, including those owned by private individuals.

Mountain View is in California. And that's only one problem with everything in this paragraph:

The city said its system was accessed by Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives offices in Kentucky and Tennessee, which investigate crimes related to guns, explosives, arson and the illegal trafficking of alcohol and tobacco; the inspector general's office of the U.S.. General Services Administration, which manages federal buildings, procurement, and property; Air Force bases in Langley, Virginia, and in Ohio; and the Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada.

Imagine trying to explain this to anyone. While it's somewhat understandable that the ATF might be running nationwide searches on Flock's platform, it's almost impossible to explain why images captured by a single camera in Mountain View, California were accessed by the Inspector General for the GSA, much less Lake Mead Recreation Area staffers.

This explains how this happened. But it doesn't do anything to explain why.

They accessed Mountain View's system for one camera via a "nationwide" search setting that was turned on by Flock Safety, police said.

Apparently, this is neither opt-in or opt-out. It just is. The Mountain View police said they "worked closely" with Flock to block out-of-state access, as well as limit internal access to searches expressly approved by the department's police chief.

Flock doesn't seem to care what its customers want. Either it can't do what this department asked or it simply chose not to because a system that can't be accessed by government randos scattered around the nation is much tougher to sell than a locked-down portal that actually serves the needs of the people paying for it.

And that tracks with Ron Wyden's criticism of the company in the letter he wrote to Flock last October:

The privacy protection that Flock promised to Oregonians — that Flock software will automatically examine the reason provided by law enforcement officers for terms indicating an abortion- or immigration-related search — is meaningless when law enforcement officials provide generic reasons like "investigation" or "crime." Likewise, Flock's filters are meaningless if no reason for a search is provided in the first place. While the search reasons collected by Flock, obtained by press and activists through open records requests, have occasionally revealed searches for immigration and abortion enforcement, these are likely just the tip of the iceberg. Presumably, most officers using Flock to hunt down immigrants and women who have received abortions are not going to type that in as the reason for their search. And, regardless, given that Flock has washed its hands of any obligation to audit its customers, Flock customers have no reason to trust a search reason provided by another agency.

I now believe that abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable, and that Flock is unable and uninterested in preventing them.

Flock just keeps making Wyden's points for him. The PD wanted limited access with actual oversight. Flock gave the PD a lending library of license plate/location images anyone with or without a library card (so to speak) could check out at will. Flock is part of the surveillance problem. And it's clear it's happy being a tool that can be readily and easily abused, no matter what its paying customers actually want from its technology.

Killing Satoshi, an upcoming biopic about the elusive creator of Bitcoin, will reportedly rely heavily on artificial intelligence to generate locations and adjust actors' performances, Variety reports. The film was announced in 2025 as being directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, The Edge of Tomorrow) and starring Casey Affleck and Pete Davidson in undisclosed roles, but its connection to overhyped technology was previously understood to begin and end with cryptocurrency.

According to a UK casting notice viewed by Variety, the producers of Killing Satoshi reserve the right to "change, add to, take from, translate, reformat or reprocess" actors' performances, using "generative artificial intelligence (GAI) and/or machine learning technologies." No digital replicas will be created of performers, but it sounds like plenty of other AI-driven tweaks are on the table. The production's use of AI will also extend to the setting of its shoots, per Variety's source. Killing Satoshi will be shot on a "markerless performative capture stage" and things like backgrounds and locations will be entirely generated by AI.

You guess is as good as mine as to why a film about blockchain technology needs to be filmed this way, but Doug Liman has been connected with plenty of unusual projects in the past, including a rumored Tom Cruise film that was supposed to film on the International Space Station. Killing Satoshi will be far less practical in comparison, and walking a much finer line of what's acceptable in the entertainment industry.

A major sticking point in SAG-AFTRA's 2023 contract negotiations was guaranteeing protections for actors who could be replaced by AI. Equity, the union representing actors in the UK, is currently negotiating protections for members that are concerned that AI could be used to reproduce their likenesses and voices and let studios use them without their consent.

As debates about Britain's history, race, and responsibility continue to surface, Quakers in Britain have co-hosted a discussion in Parliament exploring what reparations might mean in practice.

The event took the title 'Approaches to Reparations: Faith-Based, Community, and Grassroots Perspectives'. The All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on African Reparations co-hosted and Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP chaired.

It brought together faith leaders, community organisers, and racial justice advocates. They took part in an open conversation about accountability, repair, and justice in a UK context.

Interest in reparations for African chattel enslavement has grown in recent years. And particularly since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Yet the UK continues to struggle with how, or whether, to respond.

In 2024, the Canary published a stinging letter from academic Gus John to then foreign secretary David Lammy. He described reparations as "a process, not a single act". And he accused the government of "insisting that this is all in the past".

Recent pushback against the new Archbishop of Canterbury for defending the Church of England's programme for repairing the harms of African chattel enslavement underlined how contested these conversations remain.

Panellist Richard Reddie, director of justice and inclusion at Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, said:

There is a great deal of literature in the Bible that makes the case for reparations.

Kojo Kyerewaa, national organiser for Black Lives Matter UK, said:

We need to relate reparations to the daily lives of people, and make the links between that which they already know about what is unjust and reparations as a liberatory pathway.

That way we can begin to reshape the world towards justice, and we deserve nothing less.

Quakers in Britain agreed in 2022 to consider making practical reparations for the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, colonialism, and economic exploitation.

Marghuerita Remi-Judah, co-clerk of the Quakers in Britain Trustees' Reparations Working Group, said:

We need to name our part in the history.

The Quaker testimony is one of peace…enslavement was violence, antithetical to peace.

The decision followed years of research, listening, and discernment. And it reflects a wider commitment to anti-racism, truth-telling, and action rooted in faith.

The panel, which also included Reverend Wale Hudson-Roberts, head of racial justice for the Baptist Union, explored how reparations work has developed from grassroots and local initiatives.

Panellists discussed the role of education and community leadership, and how institutions respond to difficult questions and resistance.

Featured image via Michael Preston for Quakers in Britain

By The Canary

They meet in boardrooms, islands, temples made of glass.
Their laughter oils the hinges that have never known a key.
The mentor's grin, the waiting jet, the children smuggled in last—
The manifest preserves the names that justice will not see.

No creed but appetite, no flag but chartered skies.
They harvest flesh like data, every victim numbered, never mourned.
The law kneels at wealth's altar and sanctifies the lies,
While Congress skims the manifest and asks who climbed aboard.

They dream of outliving empire in a bunker's private sun.
The world below turns feral as the safety nets collapse.
One falls—we call it justice, say our ritual is done.
But new wolves cut their teeth in shadow while their patrons softly clap.

The post Supercross: RJ Hampshire Ruled Out After Foot Injury appeared first on Roadracing World Magazine | Motorcycle Riding, Racing & Tech News.

Despite the pathetic lack of accountability, the Epstein files changed the calculus. What used to be dismissed as a niche conspiracy theory turned out to be a global system of trafficking involving people at the top. When a secret that large is proven true, the "mad" theories start to look plausible. What other huge lies are we being told? What else exists behind the curtain?

We see a pattern now. A group of powerful people shape the world to fit their needs. They tell the public to "move on" while they build doomsday bunkers in remote locations, private security forces, and tech replacements for human labor.

The amazing thing is they are building all this right in the open, and we're like, "nah, they cant really be planning for half of us to die, are they?"

This started about a century ago. When the Great Depression hit in 1929 there were some hard hitting films. In 1930 the Motion Picture Production (Hays) Code was introduced. It was not really followed or enforced until 1934.

I thought old movies were a sign of some creepy puritan way of life, but it a code forced upon the creative folks. It's like history has been unveiled for me after watching a couple of these movies - I quite liked Five Star Final by Mervyn LeRoy. The ending was quite relevant to our current times.

The word czar is being used again. A sad little man wants to make Hollywood great again. There are puritan laws being put in place, or are simmering. I hope I live long enough to see some better parts of history rhyme.

Here are a couple of articles talking about Pre-Code films:

As a result, some films in the late 1920s and early 1930s depicted or implied sexual innuendo, romantic and sexual relationships between white and black people, mild profanity, illegal drug use, promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, intense violence, and homosexuality. Nefarious characters were seen to profit from their deeds, in some cases without significant repercussions. For example, gangsters in films such as The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface were seen by many as heroic rather than evil. Strong female characters were ubiquitous in such pre-Code films as Female, Baby Face and Red-Headed Woman, among many others, which featured independent, sexually liberated women.[1][2] Many of Hollywood's biggest stars, such as Clark Gable, Bette Davis, James Cagney, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, and Edward G. Robinson, got their start in the era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood

Once the Code took hold, criminals had to be punished. Sex had to be implied, not shown. Topics like abortion, drug use, and interracial romance were completely removed.

https://filmdaft.com/what-is-pre%E2%80%91code-hollywood-meaning-history-film-examples/

Submission Statement: This video presents a novel way of understanding just how bloody complicated the Metacrisis is. Although it is titled with NZ, you can comfortably ignore that detail as most of the content relates to the global predicament. The graphic in this has been designed to try and capture as many of the issues we face, including about 60 topics ranging from "Finite Planet", "Psychological Drivers", "Deforestation", "Ice Melt", "Food Insecurity", "Civil Unrest", "Resource Depletion", "Health Problems", "Pollution", "Insect Decline" and so on. I think the video provides a pretty good introduction to the Metacrisis/Collapse/what-have-you, and then goes on to present a number of horrifying statistics, facts and figures highlighting the state of the planet, and showing how different factors and drivers inter-relate, all while using the graphic to illustrate this. Although it's from 2024, if you just imagine that things have only gotten worse since then, you'll be fine... oh wait you don't have to imagine that! If nothing else it does provide a good baseline for comparison so we can see how bad things are now, vs how bad they were back then. Here's a backup link to the video in the event of other technical issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEIm8gfExJ8

Republican lawmakers dumped the problem in the White House's lap and left the Capitol as a midnight deadline for DHS funding looms. Their weeklong recess abandons the standoff over ICE and leaves it to White House negotiators and Democratic lawmakers to solve. — Read the rest

The post Republicans jet off as DHS runs out of money appeared first on Boing Boing.

The International Olympic Committee is under fire for selling a men's T-shirt commemorating the 1936 Berlin Olympics, hosted by Hitler.

The shirt, featuring the original Berlin 1936 poster art, showed up on the Olympics website with the kind of bland "celebrate humanity" framing that only works if you aggressively forget what a celebration of humanity Berlin 1936 was. — Read the rest

The post IOC adds Nazi-era Berlin Games to "Heritage Collection" appeared first on Boing Boing.

This Star Wars racing game looks like it has the right amount of sound effects, visuals, and dirty deeds to be a good time.

While slightly generic and not focused on the timeframe I enjoy most in Star Wars, this looks like it has enough Star Wars elements to be fun as a racing game, and fun as Star Wars. — Read the rest

The post "Now this is pod racing!" Star Wars: Galactic Racer coming soon appeared first on Boing Boing.

I have become obsessed with Solvej Balle's story of a woman trapped on a single day.

On the Calculation of Volume introduces us to Tara Selter, a woman living the classic Bill Murray Movie "Groundhog Day" but with no explanation or idea of how or why. — Read the rest

The post A phenomenal time travel story: On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) appeared first on Boing Boing.

Anyone on the flower rota at England's parish churches will now be reconsidering the way they do their arrangements, after Church of England leaders voted to use more seasonal and local flowers.

A motion to use sustainable flowers brought before the General Synod of the Church of England by the Bishop of Dudley, Martin Gorrick, was passed on February 12. The term "sustainable flowers" means using those that have travelled less distance, use less packaging and have been grown using without chemicals, high energy inputs or an excessive amount of water.

The General Synod, which considered the motion, is made up of all bishops plus representatives from every diocese, and includes the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, Dame Sarah Mullally - who personally thanked those who brought the motion. The bishop said: "It is deeply theological, to honour the God who made the earth."

Parish leaders will now need to be updated about what needs to change in planning the flowers for the front of the church.

For most churches this will mean using seasonal foliage and local flowers in weekly worship, rather than buying those grown thousands of miles away or by using intense heating to grow blooms out of season.

These sustainable flowers may come from churchyards, gardens, donation buckets or offerings from local garden clubs or allotment holders.

The motion encourages all places of worship to source what is local and seasonal to them, wherever possible. It aims to phase out the use of floral foam, which has traditionally been used for flower arranging. And it links the theology of stewardship of creation and the planet to how to treat nature, promoting seasonal and compostable flowers and foliage.

It is likely to mean trying different techniques such as going back to some traditional methods used before floral foam was invented in the 1950s.

I was there to hear the bishop say that the decision to phase out floral foam is about moving away from single-use plastics and manufactured alternatives, towards simpler methods of display, such as vases, sticks and other reusable and compostable materials.

What the church does matters, it uses millions of flowers every year in its displays. Its impact goes far beyond the church doors.

If the around 12,000 Church of England parishes only averaged two bunches a week, that would be over 1.2 million a year and millions of stems. Additionally there are huge numbers used at church events such as weddings and funerals, and brought into churchyards. The church's decision could also drive more Fairtrade sales where local flowers are not available.

With this potential source of business changing, florists might be encouraged to provide plastic-free options, and consumers might be more aware when choosing their flowers - such as for St Valentine's Day and beyond.

Currently, even those who want to buy sustainable flowers will struggle to know what to look for. Details of the place of origin is rarely included on plastic wrapping and any independent verification of flowers meeting particular standards, for example Fairtrade, are rarely available to consumers. Fairtrade flowers do give more information to consumers, including place of origin and farm standards.

The Church of England's decision shows a need for providing consumers with more information on the ecological standards that flowers have been grown to, impact on soil, biodiversity and on the local economy.

These are issues that the Sustainable Flowers Research Project, an organisation set up by me and David Bek, a professor of sustainability at Coventry University, have been working on for years. We also work with flower suppliers and buyers to create more sustainable policies on farms and in shops.

A current government-funded project with the Flower Growing Collective, a network of regional flower selling hubs, is providing new routes to market for more than 60 growers. It also is creating convenient wholesale access for florists to buy local flowers, without needing to trail around multiple farms.

Farmers who already supply seasonal flowers can be found through organisations such as Flowers from the Farm. Other useful guidance is also available to help people find more environmentally friendly flowers. And a new sustainable church flowers national award scheme will encourage and acknowledge the work being done.

Hopefully church flower arrangers around the country will embrace this new approach, and see it as changing with the times.

Jill Timms receives funding from the UKRI/Defra Farming Innovation programme and the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account. She is also an affiliate of Sustainable Church Flowers (SCF).

In 1958, Brazil won the men's Fifa World Cup in Sweden. The team, which included a 17-year-old Pelé, stayed in a modest country hotel and travelled by train or bus to small stadiums in cities such as Uddevalla and Göteborg.

Fan attendance was fairly low for that 16-team tournament. And so too was the the ecological impact of the event - especially compared to the 2026 World Cup which will see 48 teams and millions of supporters travel to and across North America.

For while football's global reach is often highlighted as a positive thing that brings the world together, the beautiful game risks having a rather ugly impact on the planet.

This is partly down to ambitious plans to expand almost every aspect of elite football - more money, more matches, more tournaments, more fans - that have accelerated over recent decades. This could be seen as a positive development for anyone who enjoys football, but it also has some problematic consequences.

The expansion of international competitions for example, has led to increasing carbon dioxide emissions from football-related travel as teams, supporters and media representatives fly around the globe following the game.

A recent study estimated that as part of the growing ecological footprint of international sport, global football now has a carbon footprint similar to that of Austria.

So the high number of international matches, as seen in the remodelled Fifa men's Club World Cup, the expanded men's Euros of 2024 and the forthcoming men's World Cup in 2026 challenges both the health of the players and the health of the planet.

These issues all point in the same direction - prioritising profit and growth over people and planet, and developing a dependence on the fossil-fuel economy.

There are plenty of examples. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia for instance, is often accused of sportswashing, but was named as host for the 2034 World Cup and continues to invest in the English Premier League. The 2022 Fifa World Cup in oil-rich Qatar was criticised for the environmental impact of new stadiums, new infrastructure and the use of cooling systems in the extreme heat.

Then there's Fifa's sponsorship deal with Aramco, a company estimated to be responsible for 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1965. All of these are strong signs that fossil-fuelled growth in the economics of football has been normalised.

Some supporters and campaign groups have been criticising this development for a while now. But how is football responding?

Well, recently Fifa announced the creation of its own "peace prize" to recognise those who "unite people, bringing hope for future generations". But while that ambition may sound admirable, the actions of global football suggest the opposite.

For instead of bringing hope, football is accelerating climate change through its a problematic dependence on fossil-fuel sponsorship. Research suggests that the sport also displays a distinct lack of support for those countries that are most severely affected by climate change.

There are though, some clubs doing their best to take environmental sustainability seriously. FC Porto, Real Betis and Malmö FF are all involved in the "Free Kicks" project, which requires clubs to assess their environmental performance in terms of things like energy savings and use of resources.

Their work shows that it is possible to combine top-level football with sustainable practices and good governance. And if Fifa is serious about bringing hope to future generations, it may want to learn from some of the people who have done precisely that.

Reducing the size and frequency of large international events would be a good start. So too would organising fixtures in such a way as to minimise their carbon footprint.

If all of this means accepting a deceleration in the expansion of global football in a bid to become more sustainable, would that really be so bad?

After all, those who saw a 17-year-old Pelé in Sweden in 1958 did not know about the coming climate crisis. But the football they followed back then was a lot more compatible with sustainable development than the sport is today.

Daniel Svensson is affiliated with The Sport Ecology Group. He receives funding from The Swedish Research Council for Sport Science.

Large parts of the UK are experiencing relentless rainfall, with some places seeing rain for 41 consecutive days and counting. In Reading, in the south east of England, our university's official rain gauge has recorded precipitation on 31 consecutive days - unprecedented in records stretching all the way back to 1908.

The pattern has not just made 2026 a bit dreary. It also reveals one way in which climate change is making the already naturally variable (some would say gloriously variable) British weather increasingly extreme.

In those 31 days, Reading has received 141mm of rain, compared to the 30-year average over that period of just 58mm - well over twice what we would expect at the time of year.

Higher than average rainfall totals are expected, well, half of the time. This is just how mean averages work. But it's the nature of this current weather pattern that is so unusual, and is in keeping with the type of wetter winter situation for UK weather that climate scientists have been warning us to expect - even if we are still only just learning why exactly this is happening on a regional level.

Over the full breadth of a British year, the bigger picture is even more revealing. Last year, the UK was grappling with one of the hottest and driest summers on record. A succession of hot spells, combined with long periods that saw less than average rainfall, meant water supplies dwindled and widespread hosepipe bans were put in place.

As a whole, 2025 from spring onwards was exceptionally dry. Fast forward to the new year, and we're facing the opposite - weeks of rainfall and flooding. These extremes are what we expect to see in this part of the world, as heat builds up in the global atmosphere and oceans. For British people, this is what climate change right now feels like.

What is causing this link between a warmer planet and wetter British winters? One fundamental link is in basic physics of the atmosphere as temperatures rise. Warmer air can hold more moisture - about 7% more for every one degree celsius of warming. This means that when it rains, on average it rains harder. Bigger, heavier downpours become more common.

Climate change is also disrupting the patterns of currents and cycles within the atmosphere and oceans that bring the UK much of its weather. As an island archipelago on the edge of three competing climate masses - the wet, mild Atlantic, the cold, dry Arctic, and the wildly variable temperatures of the Eurasian landmass - it is used to variability.

But one constant feature plays an oversized role in the type of weather we get: the jet stream - a ribbon of fast-flowing air high in the atmosphere. The position of the jet stream makes a big difference. Sometimes it flows to the north of Scotland, sometimes it is hundreds of miles further south towards Spain. This location matters, because the jet stream helps to blow whole weather systems - think of a big "bubble" of air carrying its own weather with it - from the Atlantic towards the UK.

Currently, the jet stream is positioned further south than typical for the time of year, steering consecutive wet and often windy weather systems directly towards the UK. At the same time, a high pressure system is sitting over parts of northern Europe, blocking the wet weather from moving further east.

The impact of climate change on the jet stream is complex, because this river of air circling the north pole from west to east is influenced by a lot of different factors. One thing we do know: the Arctic, at surface level, is warming faster than other parts of the planet. This means that the temperature difference between the poles and the equator, for air at lower levels at least, is not as big as it used to be. This may be influencing the jet stream to weaken and meander.

With less energy to push them along, these weather patterns can get stuck in one location, meaning that the systems of low air pressure associated with rainfall and storms can slow down or get stuck. When a system bringing rain parks itself over the UK for days on end, only to be followed by another system, and another, the result is relentless rainfall.

To complicate things further, high up in the atmosphere where the jet stream blows, climate change is actually making the temperature difference between equator and poles increase. This may be strengthening the speed and turbulence within the jet stream itself, and just adds to a complex picture of varying influence on UK rainfall.

These rapid swings between drought and deluge pose serious practical challenges for everyone in the UK. Water companies must plan for both droughts and floods, even within the same year. Farmers face uncertain growing conditions, with crops rotting in the wet soil one month, and drying out in droughts a few months later. Infrastructure designed for the climate of the past may not cope with the extremes of the future.

Understanding these changes isn't just an academic exercise. It's essential for helping communities, businesses and governments prepare for what's coming. As Britain experiences these climate extremes at first-hand, it is crucial to build resilience into plans for hotter and drier summers, and warmer wetter winters.

Jess Neumann is a trustee of River Mole River Watch, a water quality charity who work with, advise, and receive funding from environmental and conservation organisations and agencies, water companies, commercial services, local authorities and community groups. ​

Hannah Cloke advises the Environment Agency, the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts, the Copernicus Emergency Management Service, local and national governments and humanitarian agencies on the forecasting and warning of natural hazards. She is a member of the UKRI Natural Environment Research Council and a fellow of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts. Her research is funded by the UKRI Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council, the UKRI Natural Environment Research Council, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and the European Commission.

from the 2017 Pitchfork greatest-IDM-list (that ruffled a few feathers, that did, it was like negative catnip for nerds!  I had nothing to do with the selection, honest, apart from being one of many who sent their ballot in) 

Isolée: Rest (2000)

There was a moment, around the turn of the millennium, when IDM-aligned figures like Matthew Herbert started to embrace the slinky sensuality of the house template while weaving in glitches and clicks from the Oval/Fennesz world. The term "microhouse" was yet to be coined in 2000, but this is the undefined zone into which Rest slipped to wow the cognoscenti.

As the name hints, Isolée is a one-man-band, Rajko Müller. A German who spent much of his childhood in a French school in Algeria, his music is suitably cosmopolitan and border-crossing, connecting house and techno with '80s synthpop and discreet touches of hand-played world music, like the Afro-pop guitar figure that flutters intermittently through "Beau Mot Plage" like a darting-and-dipping hummingbird. Müller's sound works through the coexistence and interlacing of opposites: spartan and luxuriant, angular and lithe, crispy-dry and wet-look sleek, mechanistic and organic. Sensuous, ear-caressing textures juxtapose with abrasive tones as unyielding and chafing as a pair of Perspex underpants.

"Text," the absolute highlight, is mystifyingly only available on the original 2000 compact disc. It's an Op Art catacomb, a network of twisting tunnels, abrupt fissures, and pitch-shifted slopes that's deliriously disorienting but never loses its dance pulse. Other tracks offer an exquisite blend of delicacy and geometry, like origami made out of graph paper, or echo the Fourth World electro-exotica of Sylvian-Sakamoto and Thomas Leer. We Are Monster, Müller's 2005 follow-up, was excellent but a little too busy, losing the balance between minimal and maximal. So the debut remains Isolée's true claim to acclaim, laurels on which Müller could Rest forever. 

and my intro text

Party in My Mind: The Endless Half-Lives of IDM

At the outset, it needs to be said that "Intelligent Dance Music" is—ironically—kind of a stupid name. By this point, possibly even the folks who coined the term back in 1993—members of an online mailing list mainly consisting of Aphex Twin obsessives—have misgivings about it.

For as a guiding concept, IDM raises way more issues than it settles. What exactly is "intelligence" as manifested in music? Is it an inherent property of certain genres, or more about a mode of listening to any and all music? After all, it's possible to listen to and write about "stupid" forms of music with scintillating intellect. Equally, millions listen to "smart" sounds like jazz or classical in a mentally inert way, using it as a background ambience of sophistication or uplifting loftiness. Right from the start, IDM was freighted with some problematic assumptions. The equation of complexity with cleverness, for instance—what you might call the prog fallacy. And the notion that abandoning the functional, party-igniting aspect of dance somehow liberated the music and the listener: a privileging of head over body that reinforced biases ingrained from over 2,000 years of Western civilization, from Plato through St. Paul and Descartes to more recent cyber-utopians who dream of abandoning the "meat" and becoming pure spirit.

And yet, and yet... Dubious as the banner was (and is), under that aegis, some of the most fabulous electronic music of our era came into being. You could even dance to some of it! And while its peak has long since passed, IDM's half-lives echo on around us still, often in the unlikeliest of places: avant-R&B tunes like Travis Scott's "Goosebumps," tracks like "Real Friends" on The Life of Pablo, even moments on "The Young Pope" soundtrack.

You could say that the prehistory of IDM was the ambient chill-out fad of the first years of the '90s, along with certain ethereal and poignant tracks made by Detroit producers like Carl Craig. But really, it all kicks off in 1992 with Warp's first Artificial Intelligence compilation and its attendant concept of "electronic listening music," along with that same year's Aphex Twin album Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (released on Apollo, the ambient imprint of R&S Records). Warp swiftly followed up the compilation with the Artificial Intelligence series of long-players by Black Dog Productions, Autechre, Richard D. James (operating under his Polygon Window alias, rather than as Aphex), and others. Smaller labels contributed to the nascent network, such as Rephlex (co-founded by James) and GPR (which released records by The Black Dog, Plaid, Beaumont Hannant). But it was Warp that ultimately opened up the space—as a niche market as much as a zone of sonic endeavor—for electronic music that retained the formal features of track-oriented, rave floor-targeted dance but oriented itself towards albums and home listening. ELM, as Warp dubbed it—IDM, as it came to be known—was private and introspective, rather than public and collective.

Phase 2 of IDM came when other artists and labels rushed in to supply the demand, the taste market, that Warp had stirred into existence. Among the key labels of this second phase were Skam, Schematic, Mille Plateaux, Morr, and Planet Mu. The latter was the brainchild of Mike Paradinas, aka μ-Ziq— one of the original Big Four IDM artists, alongside Aphex, Autechre, and Black Dog. (Or the Big Six, if you count Squarepusher and Luke Vibert, aka Wagon Christ/Plug). Most of these artists knew each other socially and sometimes collaborated. All were British.

The two stages of IDM correlate roughly with a shift in mood. First-phase intelligent tended to be strong on melody, atmosphere, and emotion; the beats, while modeled on house and techno, lacked the "oomph" required by DJs, the physical force that would cause a raver to enthuse about a tune as bangin' or slammin'. Largely in response to the emergence of jungle, with its complex but physically coercive rhythmic innovations, Phase 2 IDM tended to be far more imposing and inventive with its drums; at the same time, the mood switched from misty-eyed reverie towards antic excess or whimsy. Often approaching a caricature of jungle, IDM tunes were still unlikely to get dropped in a main-room DJ's set. But by now, the genre had spawned its own circuit of "eclectronica" clubs on both sides of the Atlantic, while the biggest artists could tour as concert acts.

You could talk about a Phase 3 stage of IDM, when the music—not content with borrowing rhythmic tricks from post-rave styles like jungle—actually moved to assimilate the rudeboy spirit of rave itself: the original Stupid Dance Music whose cheesy 'n' mental fervor was the very thing that IDM defined itself again. This early 2000s phase resulted in styles like breakcore and glitchcore; these had an international following and, for the first time in IDM's history, a strong creative basis in the United States. Drawing on an array of street musics from gangsta to gabba, upstart mischief-makers like Kid606 and Lesser made fun of first-wave IDM's chronic Anglophilia, releasing tracks with titles like "Luke Vibert Can Kiss My Indie-Punk Whiteboy Ass" and "Markus Popp Can Kiss My Redneck Ass." Around this time, IDM pulled off its peak achievement of mainstream penetration when Radiohead released Kid A—an album for which Thom Yorke prepared by buying the entire Warp back catalog.

Seventeen years after that (albeit indirect) crossover triumph, the original IDM crew continues to release sporadically inspired work. Autechre's discography is quite the feat of immaculate sustain, Richard D. James unexpectedly returned to delightful relevance after a long silence, Boards of Canada remain a treasure. Label-wise, there's Planet Mu, who appear to be unstoppable, hurling out releases in a dozen different micro-styles. Overall, though, you'd have to say that IDM as a scene and a sound doesn't really exist anymore. But its spectral traces can be tracked all across contemporary music, from genius producers like Actress and Oneohtrix Point Never, to the abstruse end of post-dubstep, to Arca's smeared, gender-fluid texturology. Its reach goes way further: I'm constantly hearing IDM-like sounds on Power FM, the big commercial rap/R&B station here in L.A. At the end of the day, stupid name though it may be, IDM has given the world a stupefying immensity of fantastic music. And its reverberations have yet to dim.

Someone in Italy asked me questions about Selected Ambient Works 1985-1992 upon the occasion of its 30th Anniversary. This is what I said: 

There was this moment when some record labels astutely noticed that there was the beginnings of a demand for music that related to rave dancefloor sounds like techno but was designed for home listening - atmospheric, intricately textured, dreamy or pensive in mood. Artists had started to do tracks like that on the B-side of their dancefloor-target singles, or on the fourth track of an EP. Ambient interludes or stuff that had drums but wasn't as pounding and body- coercive as the kind of techno a DJ would play. The two main labels that really spotted this development and saw that it could be the basis of album-length works - and album-oriented careers - were Warp, in Sheffield, England, and R&S, in Belgium. It was R&S who put out the Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and then Richard D. James signed to Warp. He was also doing that kind of thing through the label he co-founded, Rephlex.

If the rave scene of the period was marked by ecstasy, what drug could be associated with IDM?

Cannabis - and for some LSD perhaps. It's also music that was associated with the after-party and the chill-out room - so music that fit the afterglow of MDMA but not so much the "I got dance like a maniac" phase. But overwhelming it's cannabis. That's why the robot on the front of Artificial Intelligence, the Warp compilation of Aphex-type music, is blowing smoke rings and puffing on a fat joint.

Why did IDM strike a chord with Silicon Valley geeks? And what effect did it have on ravers?

Electronic sound fits the aethetic of digital technology - and the musicians are using a lot of the same equipment as the Silicon Valley people. So there's an affinity there on both levels. Also I think Aphex Twin type music is ideal for people who are working at computers - it's hypnotic, it's rhythmic but not "get up dance NOW", there are patterns in it that are attractive to the ear but you can also tune out if you need to concentrate and it falls back very easily into being background music.

IDM didn't get a lot of play on the rave dancefloor, it might get some play in side-rooms where people want to chill out after frenzied dancing. But also there developed a scene of chill-out clubs, people sitting around and smoking while listening to ambient and floaty electronic music.

What memories do you have related to the release of the album?

It was probably my favorite album of that year and certainly the one I played the most. I must have played it about a hundred times at least. Because it was a CD I quickly reprogrammed it to my favorite five or six tunes. But the whole album is brilliant.

What are your favorite tracks on the tracklist? And why?

I can't be getting into reviewing the album, but my favorites are "Tha", "Pulsewidth", "We Are the Music Makers" and "Heliosphan". "Xtal" is really dreamy and conversely "Hedphelym" is a really scary bit of dark electronic music.

What was Aphex Twin trying to tell us with the quote from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, We Are The Music Makers?

Well, I think it's simply an honestly arrogant reflection of his self-belief - he knows he's a genius. So that's what he literally thinks musicians - the greatest musicians - do. They weave dreams.

In what elements does the album echo Brian Eno's ambient lesson?

Apart from "Xtal" and "Tha", it's not really an ambient album. It's only ambient in comparison to the hardcore techno, jungle and gabber of that time, which was breakneck fast. Most of the tracks have beats and some are pretty propulsive - "Pulsewidth". It's music that has a physical element and a relation to dance music, but it pulls at your body gently.

But you can use as background music, something to fill the air like fragrance, so in that sense it can be used like ambient music. It's a bit too insistent melodically and rhythmically to qualify as Eno's definition of ambient being "as ignorable as it is interesting".

What does it feel like to listen to the album again today thirty years later?

I haven't listened to it.

What distinguishes Aphex Twin from Autechre and Boards of Canada?

Aphex Twin versus Autechre - well, it's just much better music. It's not afraid to be beautiful and it connects to actual human emotions that are relatable. Autechre have interesting textures but I don't hear tunes like Richard D. James. Autechre have commanding rhythms but they're not groovy, whereas with Aphex Twin there's more of swing and feel - you can imagine dancing to them.

Aphex Twin versus Boards of Canada. Both are sublime melodists. But Aphex Twin has more interesting rhythms - again, you can imagine dancing to much of his music, whereas BoC is about the headnod. The way they use hip hop beats is very effective but as the brothers would admit, they have very little to do with club music. Aphex music is much more on the edge of rave.

Boards of Canada also have this consistently elegaic, nostalgic, wistful quality - the sense of childhood or a lost future. Aphex will go into that zone but generally sounds more aligned with the idea of the future or outer space, in that sense he's more of a techno artist. BoC are more like a shoegaze band that when into sampling and loops.

Are some elements of IDM present in the conceptronica today? Or in what music?

Where I hear the textures of IDM is actually in a lot of the last several years trap and mumble rap - Playboi Carti, Rich the Kid, Migos, Lil Uzi Vert, Travis Scott, Young Thug. You get the blurry, idyllic textures and the bittersweet melody-loops. Even the vocal presence, fed through the glittering and glitchy textures of Auto-Tune, sounds very IDM-compatible - dreamy, sparkly, passively swooning. That kind of trapadelic sound is almost the sole bastion of minimalism in modern popular music, which is otherwise overly dramatic and busy. 

Conceptronica has the thoughtfulness of certain kinds of IDM - like Oval or the label Mille Plateaux Fax - but it rarely has the kind of sheer melodic beauty of Aphex and Seefeel and Boards of Canada. Most of today's conceptual electronic artists are trying to reflect or deal with issues related to contemporary society - whether it's queer identity, racial injustice, rage against what's going on politically, or it's the stresses and distortions of personality caused by living on the internet and social media, that "always on" purgatory of today's existence. So the sounds they make are often not pretty and they are rarely relaxing in the way that Selected Ambient Works could be. They are often trying to put you through an extreme or challenging experience. Or they are trying to command your full attention. Either way it's not music - for me - that I can use in everyday life like I did the great Aphex Twin music.

introduction to Valerio Mattioli's book Exmachina: Storia musicale della nostra estinzione 1992 → which centers on Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada, and is a genius work that someone needs to translate into English

The idea that certain kinds of music have a special relationship with the Future has a long history and continues to make a potent appeal to our imaginations—as listeners and thinkers, and as music-makers too. 

In the early '90s, for instance, David Toop - a critic and a musician - wrote evocatively about a sensation of "nostalgia for the future" that wafted vaguely off the recordings of The Black Dog,  a British group associated with an emerging genre briefly identified as "electronic listening music" but later permanently rebranded as Intelligent Dance Music or IDM.  

The notion is not limited to professional analysts and champions of music. William Gibson, in his 1996 near-future novel Idoru, ventriloquizes his own insight through the character of Mr. Kuwayama, a Japanese entertainment executive, who observes that pop "is the test-bed of futurity".   Jacques Attali, in his classic 1977 treatise Noise: The Political Economy of Music, constructed an entire theory of music's evolution based around the belief that music is prophecy. But his argument is not so much about the formal properties of music (say, increased tolerance for dissonance, as the title Noise might suggest) as the structures and hierarchies that music engenders around itself. Attali's focus is on the modes of music making, distribution, and  consumption, which he sees as a preview of emerging forms of social organization. 

As someone who's dedicated his life to magnifying the power and significance of music, this kind of talk is very much to my taste: it stirs my patriotic feelings about music as an area of human existence. Through my personal history of listening and the accident of the era I was born in, I'm wired to seek out and recognize "the future" as it manifests in music, and equally primed to be entranced by arguments and narratives that present music as the herald of a world to come. 

So in many ways I'm an ideal reader for Valerio Mattioli's extraordinary book. It's a feat of hyper-interpretation that detects the flexing of the Zeitgeist within the discographies of just three operators, preeminent in a field that is relatively speaking a marginal sidestream of popular music, the aforementioned genre-not-genre known as IDM. To those who know them, Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada are gods, whose every last scrap of recorded work warrants decoding by the devotees. But even these cult believers will be taken aback by the intensity of Mattioli's scrutiny and the scale of the claims he makes. 

Exmachina is an archeology of the future embedded in music made a quarter-century or more ago; a future that is now our present. As with Attali's theory, that futurity is not so much in the surface trappings of the music - the coldness of synthesized sound, the domineering mechanistic rhythms - nor even in the imagery wrapped around it (often "futuristic" in a way that was even at the time fairly familiar and occasionally bordered on sci-fi kitsch). The futurism resides more in the deeper grammar of the music and the subjectivity that the music proposed, modeled, and elicited; a future that the music in some way trained the listener for, through the molding of perception and instilling of affect.  

Although the subject of Mattioli's book is the latent future in music some of which is 30 years old now, the future that has come true and is now our digital everyday, in other ways a big part of the pleasure of reading it for me is frankly nostalgic. Exmachina is a kind of time machine: it creates a delicious sensation of being plunged back into the  early '90s and immersed in all the wide-eyed excitement about the oncoming future that seemed to be manifesting itself through electronic dance and non-dance music, swept up once again in the fevered intellectual climate of that time. 

In 1992, computers had become widespread at work and in domestic spaces, but they didn't dominate our existence. Broadband was still many years away; dial-up was cumbersome and time-consuming, and when you got on the internet, there was hardly anything to see (which was just as well given how long it took a page to come up). Almost no one had email; mobile phones were still  in their infancy, in terms of widespread usage and the things you could do with them. None of the commonplace "superpowers" of today - wi-fi, search engines, Siri, social media, etc - existed, and some weren't even imagined. The digital realm existed in a cordoned-off zone of our existence. Yet precisely because of this, digital technology could then carry with it the scent of the future—an alluring or alarming aroma, depending on your inclinations. 

For most people, the places where you could get the most pungent advance whiff of how things were going to be were music and videogames. They offered the hardest hit of futurity that an ordinary person could access - and even more so if that person happened to make music themselves. As well as the Promethean rush and world-building buzz of grappling with machines and software that by today's standards are laughably rudimentary and clumsy, electronic musicians in the '90s were conceptually stimulated by emergent forms of technology outside of the sonic realm, including things that were then barely more than rumors or pipe dreams. Concepts like virtual reality and surveillance provided imagery for techno and jungle artists long before VR became commercially available or CCTV became omnipresent in some countries.

The polarities represented by VR and CCTV - the artificial pleasuredome  versus the Panopticon - relate to a curious bi-polar quality to the writing about digital culture during the 1990s. The naïve optimism and excessive dread were two sides of the same coin: a euphoria that flipped so easily into dysphoria. Reading theorists like Arthur Kroker, Paul Virilio, Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant, Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Jaron Lanier, Kodwo Eshun (and many of these names pop up in Mattioli's text), all it took was to tilt your angle of reading slightly and the exultation could be taken as denunciation. The fervor and fever of the prose would be the same in either the utopian or dystopian modalities. With some of these writers, it was never clear whether they were anticipating or flinching from the posthuman future. And some former evangelists have subsequently morphed into Jeremiahs, writing books with titles like You Are Not A Gadget or New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future.  

With music in particular, it was an exhilarating time to be a critic. For someone like myself or Kodwo Eshun or the young Mark Fisher and Steve Goodman (both then associated with the para-academic outfit Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), you rarely found yourself using reference points from history. You couldn't resort to coordinates based on existing earlier music because the new music was going right off the map.  The rapidly advancing and mutating tones and beats put pressure on you to generate new tropes and concepts. Hence the proliferation of  neologisms and invented genre terms. And the posthuman feeling of the music, its seeming absence of human touch, also seemed to demand a depersonalized analysis that attributed a purposive sentience to the way that individual tracks unfolded and that entire genres and scenes evolved.  Mattioli reinhabits this mindset, this ecstatically paranoid sense that the music is independent of human designs and has its own dark agenda. Humans didn't make the music; the music is remaking - and undoing - the human as a category. "We must change for the machines" and "human viewpoint redundant," as the video art / theory collective 0(rphan)d(rift>), put it in a 1995 book called Cyberpositive, a delirious collage-text infused with their experiences of going to techno clubs and being mangled mentally by the combination of loud music and hallucinogens, written in a tone of mystical masochism.   

Mattioli entered a similar kind of mind-state when writing Exmachina. But rather than reach it through immersion in the congested darkness of the rave space, it was the covid lockdown's enforced isolation that pushed him into a state of creative paranoia in which everything radiated significance and hitherto hidden patterns pulsated into visibility. Decades before wi-fi,  Baudrillard imagined the tele-connected citizen of the future as essentially living inside a satellite, a sealed pod in orbit around the void where society once was. Plugged into networks, this was a new kind of porous self, vibrating in a perpetual  "ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information."  A desolated self "open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion... He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence." That describes how many of us having been living during 2020 and 2021. Mattioli took the pandemic trauma and used it to create an adventure close to home. This is the story of where the music took his mind. 

Last fall, I wrote about how the fear of AI was leading us to wall off the open internet in ways that would hurt everyone. At the time, I was worried about how companies were conflating legitimate concerns about bulk AI training with basic web accessibility. Not surprisingly, the situation has gotten worse. Now major news publishers are actively blocking the Internet Archive—one of the most important cultural preservation projects on the internet—because they're worried AI companies might use it as a sneaky "backdoor" to access their content.

This is a mistake we're going to regret for generations.

Nieman Lab reports that The Guardian, The New York Times, and others are now limiting what the Internet Archive can crawl and preserve:

When The Guardian took a look at who was trying to extract its content, access logs revealed that the Internet Archive was a frequent crawler, said Robert Hahn, head of business affairs and licensing. The publisher decided to limit the Internet Archive's access to published articles, minimizing the chance that AI companies might scrape its content via the nonprofit's repository of over one trillion webpage snapshots.

Specifically, Hahn said The Guardian has taken steps to exclude itself from the Internet Archive's APIs and filter out its article pages from the Wayback Machine's URLs interface. The Guardian's regional homepages, topic pages, and other landing pages will continue to appear in the Wayback Machine.

The Times has gone even further:

The New York Times confirmed to Nieman Lab that it's actively "hard blocking" the Internet Archive's crawlers. At the end of 2025, the Times also added one of those crawlers — archive.org_bot — to its robots.txt file, disallowing access to its content.

"We believe in the value of The New York Times's human-led journalism and always want to ensure that our IP is being accessed and used lawfully," said a Times spokesperson. "We are blocking the Internet Archive's bot from accessing the Times because the Wayback Machine provides unfettered access to Times content — including by AI companies — without authorization."

I understand the concern here. I really do. News publishers are struggling, and watching AI companies hoover up their content to train models that might then, in some ways, compete with them for readers is genuinely frustrating. I run a publication myself, remember.

But blocking the Internet Archive isn't going to stop AI training. What it will do is ensure that significant chunks of our journalistic record and historical cultural context simply… disappear.

And that's bad.

The Internet Archive is the most famous nonprofit digital library, and has been operating for nearly three decades. It isn't some fly-by-night operation looking to profit off publisher content. It's trying to preserve the historical record of the internet—which is way more fragile than most people comprehend. When websites disappear—and they disappear constantly—the Wayback Machine is often the only place that content still exists. Researchers, historians, journalists, and ordinary citizens rely on it to understand what actually happened, what was actually said, what the world actually looked like at a given moment.

In a digital era when few things end up printed on paper, the Internet Archive's efforts to permanently preserve our digital culture are essential infrastructure for anyone who cares about historical memory.

And now we're telling them they can't preserve the work of our most trusted publications.

Think about what this could mean in practice. Future historians trying to understand 2025 will have access to archived versions of random blogs, sketchy content farms, and conspiracy sites—but not The New York Times. Not The Guardian. Not the publications that we consider the most reliable record of what's happening in the world. We're creating a historical record that's systematically biased against quality journalism.

Yes, I'm sure some will argue that the NY Times and The Guardian will never go away. Tell that to the readers of the Rocky Mountain News, which published for 150 years before shutting down in 2009, or to the 2,100+ newspapers that have closed since 2004. Institutions—even big, prominent, established ones—don't necessarily last.

As one computer scientist quoted in the Nieman piece put it:

"Common Crawl and Internet Archive are widely considered to be the 'good guys' and are used by 'the bad guys' like OpenAI," said Michael Nelson, a computer scientist and professor at Old Dominion University. "In everyone's aversion to not be controlled by LLMs, I think the good guys are collateral damage."

That's exactly right. In our rush to punish AI companies, we're destroying public goods that serve everyone.

The most frustrating bit of all of this: The Guardian admits they haven't actually documented AI companies scraping their content through the Wayback Machine. This is purely precautionary and theoretical. They're breaking historical preservation based on a hypothetical threat:

The Guardian hasn't documented specific instances of its webpages being scraped by AI companies via the Wayback Machine. Instead, it's taking these measures proactively and is working directly with the Internet Archive to implement the changes.

And, of course, as one of the "good guys" of the internet, the Internet Archive is willing to do exactly what these publishers want. They've always been good about removing content or not scraping content that people don't want in the archive. Sometimes to a fault. But you can never (legitimately) accuse them of malicious archiving (even if music labels and book publishers have).

Either way, we're sacrificing the historical record not because of proven harm, but because publishers are worried about what might happen. That's a hell of a tradeoff.

This isn't even new, of course. Last year, Reddit announced it would block the Internet Archive from archiving its forums—decades of human conversation and cultural history—because Reddit wanted to monetize that content through AI licensing deals. The reasoning was the same: can't let the Wayback Machine become a backdoor for AI companies to access content Reddit is now selling. But once you start going down that path, it leads to bad places.

The Nieman piece notes that, in the case of USA Today/Gannett, it appears that there was a company-wide decision to tell the Internet Archive to get lost:

In total, 241 news sites from nine countries explicitly disallow at least one out of the four Internet Archive crawling bots.

Most of those sites (87%) are owned by USA Today Co., the largest newspaper conglomerate in the United States formerly known as Gannett. (Gannett sites only make up 18% of Welsh's original publishers list.) Each Gannett-owned outlet in our dataset disallows the same two bots: "archive.org_bot" and "ia_archiver-web.archive.org". These bots were added to the robots.txt files of Gannett-owned publications in 2025.

Some Gannett sites have also taken stronger measures to guard their contents from Internet Archive crawlers. URL searches for the Des Moines Register in the Wayback Machine return a message that says, "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."

A Gannett spokesperson told NiemanLab that it was about "safeguarding our intellectual property" but that's nonsense. The whole point of libraries and archives is to preserve such content, and they've always preserved materials that were protected by copyright law. The claim that they have to be blocked to safeguard such content is both technologically and historically illiterate.

And here's the extra irony: blocking these crawlers may not even serve publishers' long-term interests. As I noted in my earlier piece, as more search becomes AI-mediated (whether you like it or not), being absent from training datasets increasingly means being absent from results. It's a bit crazy to think about how much effort publishers put into "search engine optimization" over the years, only to now block the crawlers that feed the systems a growing number of people are using for search. Publishers blocking archival crawlers aren't just sacrificing the historical record—they may be making themselves invisible in the systems that increasingly determine how people discover content in the first place.

The Internet Archive's founder, Brewster Kahle, has been trying to sound the alarm:

"If publishers limit libraries, like the Internet Archive, then the public will have less access to the historical record."

But that warning doesn't seem to be getting through. The panic about AI has become so intense that people are willing to sacrifice core internet infrastructure to address it.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that the internet's openness was never supposed to have asterisks. The fundamental promise wasn't "publish something and it's accessible to all, except for technologies we decide we don't like." It was just… open. You put something on the public web, people can access it. That simplicity is what made the web transformative.

Now we're carving out exceptions based on who might access content and what they might do with it. And once you start making those exceptions, where do they end? If the Internet Archive can be blocked because AI companies might use it, what about research databases? What about accessibility tools that help visually impaired users? What about the next technology we haven't invented yet?

This is a real concern. People say "oh well, blocking machines is different from blocking humans," but that's exactly why I mention assistive tech for the visually impaired. Machines accessing content are frequently tools that help humans—including me. I use an AI tool to help fact check my articles, and part of that process involves feeding it the source links. But increasingly, the tool tells me it can't access those articles to verify whether my coverage accurately reflects them.

I don't have a clean answer here. Publishers genuinely need to find sustainable business models, and watching their work get ingested by AI systems without compensation is a legitimate grievance—especially when you see how much traffic some of these (usually less scrupulous) crawlers dump on sites. But the solution can't be to break the historical record of the internet. It can't be to ensure that our most trusted sources of information are the ones that disappear from archives while the least trustworthy ones remain.

We need to find ways to address AI training concerns that don't require us to abandon the principle of an open, preservable web. Because right now, we're building a future where historians, researchers, and citizens can't access the journalism that documented our era. And that's not a tradeoff any of us should be comfortable with.

The Trump administration has fired one of the few remaining members of the administration that had even a passing interest in antitrust enforcement. DOJ antitrust boss Gail Slater has been fired from the administration after having repeated contentious run ins with key officials. It's the final nail in the coffin of the log-running lie that MAGA ever seriously cared about reining in unchecked corporate power.

Slater's post to Elon Musk's right wing propaganda website was amicable:

But numerous media reports indicate that Slater's sporadic efforts to actually engage in antitrust enforcement consistently angered a "den of vipers" (including AG Pam Bondi and JD Vance). Some of the friction purportedly involved Bondi being angry Slater was directing merging companies to deal directly with DOJ officials and not Trump's weird corruption colorguard. Other disputes were more petty:

"Tensions between Bondi and Slater extended beyond the merger. Last year, Slater planned to go to a conference in Paris - as her predecessors had done and as is required under a treaty to which the United States is a party.

But Bondi denied Slater's request to travel on account of the cost. When Slater went to the conference anyway, Bondi cancelled her government credit cards, the people said."

Mike and I had both noted that there had been signs of this fracture for a while. Slater was still a MAGA true believer. Before Google's antitrust trial last year, she gave a speech full of MAGA culture war nonsense about how Google was trying to censor conservatives. She seemed happy to use the power of the government to punish those deemed enemies of the MAGA movement for the sake of the culture war. However, what she seemed opposed to was the growing trend within the MAGA movement of deciding antitrust questions based on which side hired more of Trump's friends to work on their behalf.

First when the DOJ rubber stamped a T-Mobile merger some officials clearly didn't want to approve (the approval was full of passive aggressive language making it very clear the deal wasn't good for consumers or markets) there were signs of friction. Later when Slater wanted to block a $14 billion merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks, it was clear that the Trump admin's antitrust policy was entirely pay for play, which was apparently a step too far for Slater. I've also heard some insiders haven't been thrilled with the Trump administration's plan to destroy whatever's left of media consolidation limits to the benefit of right wing broadcasters.

Amusingly and curiously, there are apparently people surprised by the fact that an actual antitrust-supporting Republican couldn't survive the grotesque pay-to-play corruption of the Trump administration. Including Politico, an outlet that spent much of the last two years propping up the lie that Trump and MAGA Republicans had done a good faith 180 on antitrust:

When I read that headline my eyes rolled out of my fucking head.

I had tried to warn people repeatedly over the last four years that the Trump support for "antitrust reform" was always a lie. Even nominally pro-antitrust reform officials like Slater tend to inhabit the "free market Libertarian" part of the spectrum where their interest in reining in unchecked corporate power is inconsistent at best. And even these folks were never going to align with Trump's self-serving corruption.

Yet one of the larger Trump election season lies was that Trump 2.0 would be "serious about antitrust," and protect blue collar Americans from corporate predation. There were endless lies about how MAGA was going to "rein in big tech," and how the administration's purportedly legitimate populism would guarantee somewhat of a continuation of the Lina Khan efforts at the FTC.

In reality MAGA was always about one thing: Donald Trump's power and wealth. These sorts of egomaniacal autocrats exploit existing corruption and institutional failure to ride into office on the back of fake populism pretending they alone can fix it, then once entrenched introduce something far worse. The administration's "anti-war," "anti-corporate," "anti-corruption" rhetoric are all part of the same lie.

It's worth reminding folks that MAGA's phony antitrust bonafides wasn't just a lie pushed by MAGA.

It was propped up by countless major media outlets (including Reuters, CNN, and Politico) that claimed the GOP had suddenly taken a 180 on things like monopolization. Even purportedly "progressive antitrust experts" like Matt Stoller tried to push this narrative, routinely hyping the nonexistent trust-busting bonafides of obvious hollow opportunists like JD Vance and Josh Hawley.

Surprise! That was all bullshit. Trump's second term has taken an absolute hatchet to federal regulatory autonomy via court ruling, executive order, or captured regulators. His "antitrust enforcers" make companies grovel for merger approval by promising to be more racist and sexist, or pledging to take a giant steaming dump on U.S. journalism and the First Amendment (waves at CBS).

Under Trump 2.0, it's effectively impossible to hold large corporations and our increasingly unhinged oligarchs accountable for literally anything (outside of ruffling Donald's gargantuan ego, or occasionally trying to implement less sexist or racist hiring practices). This reality as a backdrop to these fleeting, flimsy media-supported pretenses about the legitimacy of "MAGA antitrust" is as dystopian as it gets.

Anybody who enabled (or was surprised by) any of this, especially the journalists at Politico, should probably be sentenced to mandatory community service.

An upcoming update to Steam includes a helpful improvement to game reviews. As part of the Steam Client Beta update Valve released on February 12, users will now be able to attach information about their hardware specifications when they post a new game review or update an old one.

It's not uncommon to find negative reviews that complain about a game's performance, information that's hard to draw a conclusion from without knowing what kind of hardware the reviewer is using. With specs attached, the usefulness of complaints becomes a little bit easier to gauge. A game's sales performance and discoverability on Steam is heavily influenced by its review average, a data point Steam users sometimes manipulate for reasons unconnected to the quality of a game. Provided reviewers actually attach their specs — at least in the beta, the feature is entirely optional — Valve's mercurial reviews ecosystem could end up becoming more nuanced overall.

Alongside the new option in reviews, Valve is also experimenting with a way for users to share "anonymized framerate data" with the company. When framerate sharing is enabled, "Steam will collect gameplay framerate data, stored without connection to your Steam account but identified with the kind of hardware you are playing on," Valve says. The feature is specifically focused on devices running SteamOS, Valve's Linux-based operating system for the Steam Deck and some third-party handhelds. The extra information could help the company's attempts to improve game compatibility using software like Proton.

The beta update also includes bug fixes, and a tweak to how Valve collects feedback about whether a game should be Deck Verified. Now when Steam prompts you to confirm whether you agree with a game's rating, if you disagree, you can provide a reason as to why.

Stay calm, the ground has risen an inch across a 20-mile area around the northern edge of Yellowstone's caldera since last July.

This isn't the precursor to a massive cinematic moment. Yellowstone hasn't erupted for 70,000 years, and it seems unlikely to pop off any time soon. — Read the rest

The post Uplift being tracked at Yellowstone's caldera appeared first on Boing Boing.

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