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This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump says he’s renaming Lake Ontario. Let’s talk about it. 

Can he really do that? Probably, though it doesn’t mean anyone will listen. 

Strictly speaking, Trump’s executive order, signed Thursday in the Oval Office, directs the Interior Department to update the lake’s name to “Lake America” in the US’s Geographic Names Information System. It remains to be seen whether products like Apple and Google maps will follow suit, but New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose state contains the US portion of the lake, says she won’t. 

Why is he doing that? The immediate answer is that Trump launched a trade war with Canada over the weekend, and he’s mad that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney won’t give him what he wants; this is a petty way to lash out. 

That doesn’t explain the trade war itself, though. Unfortunately, when my colleague, noted Canadian resident Zack Beauchamp, went looking earlier this week, he couldn’t find an explanation either. As he writes, there’s absolutely no constituency for this fight — other than Trump’s own imperial desires as he keeps joking-but-maybe-not-joking about making Canada the 51st state. 

Isn’t this just a stupid stunt? It’s a stupid stunt — but not just that. As my colleague Caitlin Dewey wrote earlier this week and Zack can attest, Canadians are royally pissed at the US. The trade war might feel like one more Trump fit of pique to Americans, but for Canadians, it’s a serious threat. 

Thursday’s executive order further ratchets up those tensions, and it specifically plays into the (very credible) school of thought that Trump isn’t really in this to redress US-Canada trade imbalances; as with many things Trump, it’s about dominance and the desire to claim a “win” at any cost.

Lastly, it’s worth dwelling for a second on the stunt itself. One, Lake Ontario isn’t Canada’s name for it; it predates either country. And two, ad hoc renaming of bodies of water — this isn’t even the first time this Trump term — puts Trump in some fairly uncomfortable company.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

My colleague Sara Herschander just debuted her new newsletter, Nice Things, which feels like a great fit for this section. It’s all about dreaming big to build a better America, one with widespread high-speed rail, affordable housing, and infrastructure that works. You can subscribe here and read a story from the first edition here.

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

This boxing drama wants its sex, drugs, bling and violence – but isn’t willing or naughty enough to truly go for it. Instead, it ends up as just a long, bruising slog

Fightland is what you might, for a joke, have called a drama that’s like MobLand but with boxing. That they have gone with that as the title of the new show from G-Unit Film & Television, the production company founded by the rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, is an immediate warning that this is not a series that bursts with originality, passion or technical finesse. At best, Fightland asks whether what it’s got will just about do, and hopes you’ll distractedly say yes.

Howard Charles is Maduka “Duke” Kilroy, a British boxer who, when we first meet him, is in Las Vegas, winning the world heavyweight championship. Everything’s going for him: he’s the champ and Joy (Deborah Ayorinde), the woman he enjoys a post-bout warmdown with on the silk sheets of a penthouse suite, seems receptive to his plan to take their relationship further. It’s a risky goal given that Joy’s husband is Kingsley Marshall (Nicholas Pinnock), Duke’s manager, who is also London’s top drug dealer; we’ve seen him brutally break the leg of a journalist who asks him about the secret drug-based wing of his empire.

На прошлой неделе обратил внимание на обильное и, на мой взгляд, не всегда уместное использование слова «честный» на Хабре. Решил детальней изучить ситуацию, собрал данные и в результате оказалось, что мне не показалось и так было не всегда, а пик, возможно, еще не пройден. В этой статье делюсь полученными результатами, методологией и датасетом для тех, кому может быть интересно попробовать найти какие-нибудь закономерности самостоятельно.

Andy Thapa is a charter and rescue pilot for a Nepali helicopter company. He's been rescuing people stranded by the catastrophic flooding, and carrying them to safety.

Если соединение в России внезапно стало медленным и нестабильным, первая мысль обычно вполне бытовая: оператор, перегруженный сервер, Wi-Fi, неудачный маршрут. Последние несколько дней мы разбирали похожий набор симптомов по логам Tunnel Cat и пользовательским жалобам — и обнаружили, что за похожими симптомами скрываются два принципиально разных явления: резкое замедление международного трафика и подмена TLS-сертификата с перехватом (MITM), пока зафиксированная только на Windows.

Assembly Bill 2760 seeks to ban the use of "shock gloves" by the Department of Homeland Security and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents.

The deadly flash floods in Nepal are not a surprise to many scientists. Glacial melt is accelerating because of climate change, putting millions of people at risk.

Итан Сигел (американский астрофизик‑теоретик и научный журналист, автор рубрики «Спросите Итана», один из пропагандистов современных научных знаний), утверждает, что результаты одного из экспериментов дают надежду на разрешение спора между сторонниками классического непрерывного Эйнштейновского пространства-времени и сторонниками его квантования, квантовой гравитации. Причём в пользу последних.

@avshkol перевёл эту статью Итана, для всех, кто интересуется острыми проблемами и противоречиями современной физики. Неужели мы на пороге квантовой революции в ОТО, и осталось только выбрать наиболее подходящую теорию квантовой гравитации?..

New rules are aimed at protecting people in debt in England and Wales and stopping homeowners being ripped off

A clampdown on “rogue bailiffs” has been launched by Andy Burnham amid concerns that vulnerable people are being overcharged and face aggressive behaviour.

In the latest in a series of “everyday fixes” to ease the cost of living and “make Britain fairer”, the prime minister said he was strengthening the rules that apply to bailiffs in England and Wales to better protect people in debt.

Сердцебиение и нехватка воздуха, скорая, кардиолог. Сердце в порядке. Дальше невролог из-за головокружения, гастроэнтеролог из-за желудка, потом чекап целиком. Везде чисто. Остаётся единственный вывод: надо разобраться в себе. Здравствуй, психолог. И тут бестолку, только хуже становится от разговоров.

Трек типовой. В статье разбираю, куда идти, когда накрыло депрессией и тревогой. Исходя из собственного опыта.

Сегодня мы поговорим не просто об очередном минорном релизе, а о раннем архитектурном превью платформы Qwen 4. Главная идея Qwen 4 заключается в переосмыслении того, как трансформерные блоки обрабатывают контекст и расходуют память.

В этой статье мы разберем новые механизмы (GDN + QSA, Gated Residual, 51B N-gram эмбеддинги), сравним архитектуру и бенчмарки с популярной плотной моделью Qwen 3.8 27B, а также запустим новую модель локально.

От HAProxy до VLESS+Reality: все грабли одного MTProto-прокси

Если вы когда-нибудь поднимали свой MTProto-прокси для Telegram и он у вас "работает, но как-то не очень" — эта статья для вас. Я прошёл путь от "просто добавить relay" до "переписать всю цепочку на VLESS+Reality с нуля", и по дороге собрал приличную коллекцию граблей. Расскажу всё по порядку, чтобы вам не пришлось наступать на те же.

Исходная ситуация

Была задача простая на первый взгляд: поднять MTProto проксю для Telegram на сервере в РФ. Причина стандартная — хочется, чтобы телега работала

Взял mtg (ghcr.io/9seconds/mtg:2 — отличная реализация MTProto-прокси с поддержкой fake-TLS), поднял на сервере — и оно не работает. Точнее, работает, но еле-еле: то подключается, то нет, на мобильном интернете почти всегда фейл.

Первая мысль, которая приходит в голову почти всем в такой ситуации: "провайдер блокирует адреса Telegram". И это отчасти правда — но, как выяснилось, правда не вся.

Первая попытка: спрятать Telegram за релеем

Логика была такая: раз провайдер режет соединения именно к IP Telegram, то уберу эти IP из виду. Арендую второй сервер за границей, туда ставлю настоящий mtg, а на RU-сервере — просто TCP-релей (HAProxy или голый iptables DNAT), который прозрачно перекидывает байты дальше.

Клиент → RU-сервер (HAProxy, чистый TCP passthrough) → Зарубежный сервер (mtg) → Telegram

Казалось бы, логично: сервер в РФ теперь физически ничего не знает про Telegram, он просто гоняет байты во внешний IP. Провайдер не должен видеть ничего подозрительного.

• Dos Santos and Russell smash hurdles world records

• Werro comes within 0.42sec of 800m world record

• Bednarek and Wanyonyi clock world-leading times

Masai Russell and Alison Dos Santos each set a world record while Mondo Duplantis won a historic pole vault on a frenetic Thursday night in Zurich.

The Letzigrund Stadium had a raucous sell-out 25,000 crowd and the still, balmy weather conditions helped the athletes no end.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

I passed five Flock cameras on my drive to work today, entirely without realizing it. The AI-powered license plate readers have metastasized on light poles and roadside posts across the country over the past few years, building a vast national database of vehicle movements that law enforcement agencies can access with few restrictions. 

What are they doing with all that data? Who has access, and for how long? We don’t have clear answers to these questions — and lawmakers on both the right and the left increasingly want them.

Yesterday, Senate Republicans opened an inquiry into Flock’s data “collection, retention, and dissemination” practices — a first step that could eventually lead to federal regulation. State officials have also called for restrictions: The technology is “out of control,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a Wednesday press conference. 

It is one of maybe three times, I would hazard, that DeSantis and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have agreed on anything. Earlier this month, the independent senator also warned that Flock knows when you’re going to the doctor or dropping your kid off at school, among other things. 

For many Americans, his warning was no exaggeration: There are now 120,000 Flock cameras on US roads. You can use the crowdsourced map DeFlock to check your area.

Go a little deeper

As the existence of a crowdsourced anti-Flock map might attest…people really do not like these cameras. In Tennessee this month, one conservative county commissioner went so far as to call for the hanging of Flock’s CEO. Even data centers rarely attract that level of vitriol.

But as with data centers, both sides can find something to hate here, the longtime tech reporter Jason Koebler recently told Vox. On the right, critics typically attack the cameras as government overreach: “‘This is invasive government. This is Big Brother. Don’t surveil me,’” Koebler paraphrased. 

On the left, critics frequently link the cameras to corporate surveillance, racist policing, the erosion of abortion rights, and immigration enforcement: “This protest is about more than license plate readers,” one progressive activist recently put it. “It’s about…mass surveillance as a tool for fascism and political persecution.”

The issue has surfaced in midterm races in states including Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, where some candidates have sought to link their opponents — fairly or unfairly — to Flock. In Michigan, for instance, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed released a campaign video last week that suggested voters could “thank” his opponent for the proliferation of the cameras. That video includes footage from a hearing Rogers chaired in 2013, before Flock was even founded; Rogers has not publicly responded.

Political responsibility for the cameras is complicated, of course: Flock typically inks its contracts with cities, counties, and local police departments, which state and national lawmakers don’t approve. 

But they could certainly limit the use of automated plate readers in other ways, like requiring warrants for accessing data, limiting how long information is saved, and banning the cameras near schools, churches, abortion clinics, and other sensitive places. 

One link for later

➨ Put your phone away. Clubs, bars, music venues, and other social spaces are increasingly hosting “phone-free” gatherings — an attempt to break free from the distraction and surveillance of our screens. These things are popping up everywhere, so chances are you can find one somewhere near you. But if not, it’s pretty easy to throw your own phone-free game night or book club, too. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that women experiencing cardiac arrest are 14 percent less likely than men to receive CPR? Bystanders are apparently less comfortable performing the procedure on people with breasts, which has prompted calls for better-endowed CPR training manikins.
• Today’s trivia: What city serves as the headquarters of the National Collegiate Athletic Association? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the stage name of the singer Paul David Hewson. That would be Bono, which is short for “Bono Vox” — a childhood nickname inspired by a Dublin hearing-aid shop.