Dying
Wealthy Americans have death rates on par with poor Europeans
The average life expectancy of someone born in Switzerland or Spain in 2019 was 84 years. Meanwhile, the average US life expectancy was 78.8, lower than nearly all other high-income countries, including Canada's, which was 82.3 years.
California man invites BBC to witness his death as MPs debate assisted dying
Wayne is expected to live less than six months, qualifying him for an assisted death in California. His request to die has been approved by two doctors and the lethal medication is self-administered.
The doctor runs an end-of-life clinic, and has assisted in 150 deaths before.
Politics
‘The Terror Is Real’: An Appalled Tech Industry Is Scared to Criticize Elon Musk
In Praise of Laurene Powell Jobs, Owner of The Atlantic, Superhero of Signalgate
Trump is setting the US on a path to educational authoritarianism
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. It makes the whole nation like Florida. This is why the teacher who wrote this article is probably fleeing to Canada.
California Voice: Under Trump, Voice of America radio has fallen silent
Russia and China are thrilled. Affiliate partner stations that need to fill air and screen time are already lining up programs from the international broadcasting services of Russia and China to replace American programming.
Trump Ends De Minimis Trade Loophole Once and for All
Under the loophole, shipments worth less than $800 can enter the U.S. duty-free, allowing foreign retailers to sell their products to Americans for cheap. This made companies like Temu possible. Wednesday’s announcement means that goods valued at or under $800 will be subject to a duty of either 30 percent of their value or $25 per item, which will increase to $50 after June 1.
DOGE has hit Social Security. These are the problems people are facing — and tips to cope
Many readers cited long waits on the phone for help. One person wrote in and said they were quoted a wait time of 100 hours. Another said her husband got through to an agent after three hours only to be told he needed to call a different number, and waited another three hours on hold there before giving up.
“They said we need to make an appointment, but there is no way to make an appointment on the main website,” she wrote. “They send you to a local office telephone number, which goes nowhere.”
Infosec
I tested DeepSeek vs Gemini 2.5 with 9 prompts — here's the winner
DeepSeek wins at everything except coding, including creative writing, real-world problem-solving, and analytical reasoning.
It takes two: The 2025 Sophos Active Adversary Report
- Median dwell time for all cases in 2024 was a swift two day
- Root cause: compromised credentials (41%) (MFA is essential!), exploiting vulnerabilities (22%), and brute force attacks (21%)
- Attacker abuse of living-off-the-land binaries (LOLBins) explodes
- RDP was used by attackers in 84% of cases
- Remote ransomware rose, where ransomware attackers compromise an unmanaged or under-protected endpoint, and leverage that access to encrypt data on managed, domain-joined machines. In its 2024 report, Microsoft found that 70% of successful attacks involved remote encryption.
All the malicious activity – ingress, payload execution, and encryption – occurs on an unmanaged machine, therefore bypassing modern security stacks, with the only indication of compromise being the transmission of documents to and from other machines.
DOGE Has Its Sights Set on US Computer Systems. Oh Boy.
DOGE disruptors plan to rip COBOL out at the SSA and rewrite the code for social security systems from the ground up. DOGE apparently thinks this can be done in a matter of months. That would be wrong.
DOGE’s new plan to overhaul the Social Security Administration is doomed to fail
Hackers are selling counterfeit phones with crypto-stealing malware
Kaspersky found thousands of counterfeit Android smartphones sold online with preinstalled malware designed to steal crypto and other sensitive data. They're sold at reduced prices, but are riddled with a version of the Triada Trojan that infects every process and gives the attackers “almost unlimited control” over the device.
Feeling curious? Google’s NotebookLM can now discover data sources for you
NotebookLM uses AI to analyze user-provided documents. Starting today, it will be even easier to use NotebookLM to explore topics, as Google has added a "Discover Sources" feature to let the app look up its own sources.
Critics suspect Trump’s weird tariff math came from chatbots
Screenshots from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok showed that chatbots arrived at similar calculations as the Trump administration.