Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

Rümeysa Öztürk may be out of jail but her ordeal isn’t over. It’s now the 52nd day that she’s facing deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like. More press freedom news below.

Attacks on the press aren’t just unconstitutional, they’re anticompetitive

Some say President Donald Trump runs the country like a business. That’s debatable, though he certainly treats the press like one of his corporate rivals — including by targeting news outlets with legal actions that are normally seen in business litigation.

His lawsuits are baseless. But they may open up opportunities for the press to go on the offensive with real legal claims. Trump’s attacks on the press aren’t only a product of his thin-skinned vindictiveness — he’s also acting as majority shareholder of Trump Media & Technology Group, owner of Truth Social, which he has alleged in court is a competitor of the media outlets he harasses.

We wrote about the remedies that might be available to the press and others when Trump and Elon Musk undermine their competitors to line their own pockets. Read more here.

State Department must release Öztürk memo

In his ruling ordering Öztürk’s release, U.S. District Judge William Sessions III confirmed that Öztürk’s only apparent offense was co-authoring an op-ed critical of Israel.

He’s not the only one who said that there was no basis to deport Öztürk — according to The Washington Post, so did the State Department, before federal immigration officials abducted her anyway. But the memo the Post based its reporting on still has not been released, so we requested it under the Freedom of Information Act. But the government is stalling.

The last memo we FOIA’d proved the administration was lying about its bases both for deporting Venezuelans to El Salvador and cracking down on leaks to the press. The public is entitled to know if the administration is misleading it again (spoiler alert, it is). Read more here.

Nonprofit killer bill is back

We wrote last year about a ridiculous bill that would give the Secretary of the Treasury power to unilaterally deem nonprofits to be supporters of terrorism and revoke their tax-exempt status, with little to no due process. The bill is likely intended to target organizations that oppose the war in Gaza, but once that kind of power is codified there is no telling who might be targeted — including nonprofit news outlets.

It was reintroduced this week, buried in a 300-page tax bill. It’s even more dangerous now that we’ve got an openly anti-free speech president who has already threatened to target nonprofits he doesn’t like. Tell your representative to oppose this censorship bill.

What we’re reading

Why the fuck are Democrats helping build MAGA’s censorship machine with KOSA? (Techdirt). How can Sen. Richard Blumenthal or any other Democrat think for a second that this is a good idea, especially now? The current FTC will use the Kids Online Safety Act to go after tech companies that give kids news and information about gay rights, trans rights, abortion, racism, and more.

Trump White House sharpens its knives for Politico’s owner (The Bulwark). Hate to say we told you so (again), but it was obvious that the bipartisan push to ban TikTok was going to normalize even more baseless attacks on foreign-owned news outlets. If your representatives supported it anyway, ask them what they were thinking.

Israel admits killing journalist in Gaza hospital bomb, saying he ‘documented’ 7 October massacre (The Journal). The Israeli army is basically admitting to murdering a journalist for “documenting” news. We don’t know what else to say.

Union will pay Review-Journal attorney fees in settlement over Henderson jail video (Las Vegas Review-Journal). Yet another example that should send a message to those who try to use baseless lawsuits to censor the press and hide the truth: It will cost you.

White House excludes wire services from Middle East trip (U.S. Press Freedom Tracker). In a break with tradition, President Donald Trump left for the Middle East on May 12 without any wire services in the Air Force One press pool. Read more about the harm attacks on wire services do to the news ecosystem.

Nassau County legislators want to create a moving 15-foot halo for its officers (Techdirt). Does anyone think those who support these buffer bills wouldn’t outright ban recording cops if they could get away with it? We shouldn’t give an inch to opponents of transparency, let alone 15 feet.

We’ve got big plans

Our new two-year strategic plan isn’t just about us: It’s about protecting the public’s right to know. A free press serves everyone. If we want journalism that challenges the powerful, we must defend press freedom, even when the press is imperfect.

Journalists should be able to fearlessly investigate, publish, and speak truth to power. Otherwise, all that’s left is propaganda. Read more here.

freedom.press/issues/authorita…

For a while now part of my email signature has been a quote from a Hackaday commenter insinuating that an article I wrote was created by a “Dumb AI”. You have my sincerest promise that I am a humble meatbag scribe just like the rest of you, indeed one currently nursing a sore shoulder due to a sporting injury, so I found the comment funny in a way its writer probably didn’t intend. Like many in tech, I maintain a skepticism about the future role of large-language-model generative AI, and have resisted the urge to drink the Kool-Aid you will see liberally flowing at the moment.

Hackaday Is Part Of The Machine

As you’ll no doubt be aware, these large language models work by gathering a vast corpus of text, and doing their computational tricks to generate their output by inferring from that data. They can thus create an artwork in the style of a painter who receives no reward for the image, or a book in the voice of an author who may be struggling to make ends meet. From the viewpoint of content creators and intellectual property owners, it’s theft on a grand scale, and you’ll find plenty of legal battles seeking to establish the boundaries of the field.

Anyway, once an LLM has enough text from a particular source, it can do a pretty good job of writing in that style. ChatGPT for example has doubtless crawled the whole of Hackaday, and since I’ve written thousands of articles in my nearly a decade here, it’s got a significant corpus of my work. Could it write in my style? As it turns out, yes it can, but not exactly. I set out to test its forging skill.

In Which I Meet My Digital Impostor

A couple of weeks ago I covered the news of the impending re-entry of a failed Soviet Venus mission stuck in orbit since 1972. It’s a fascinating story because the craft may survive the experience, and it’s possible that by the time you read this it might have been retrieved. I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a 200 word article on the story “in the voice of the Hackaday writer Jenny List”. Here’s what it came up with:

In the early days of the Space Race, the Soviet Union launched a bold bid to reach Venus: the Venera missions. Among them was Kosmos 482, a 1972 mission that never made it past Earth’s gravity. Now, over five decades later, its descent craft is finally coming home—with a bang.

Kosmos 482 was intended to deliver a lander to Venus, but due to a malfunction in its upper stage, it was stranded in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth. Encased in a semi-spherical titanium shell, the descent craft—designed to survive the brutal atmosphere of Venus—has been orbiting quietly, steadily losing altitude. By early May 2025, that orbit had decayed to a precarious 232 x 136 km, setting the stage for an uncontrolled reentry around May 10th.

Unlike typical space debris, Kosmos 482’s reentry carries a bit more drama. Built to endure Venus’s hellish surface, the lander is expected to survive Earth’s atmospheric plunge mostly intact. Impact predictions estimate it will hit the ground at about 65-70 m/s, roughly the speed of a meteorite, packing the punch of a 500 kg hunk of Soviet engineering.

With an orbital inclination of 51.95 degrees, it could come down anywhere between 52°N and 52°S, adding an element of unpredictability. One thing is certain: after 53 years in limbo, Kosmos 482 is finally coming back to Earth—whether we’re ready or not.

Reading it is a fascinating experience, because superficially it feels like a Hackaday piece. It has my vague style with some phrases such as “packing the punch of a 500 kg hunk of Soviet engineering“. It’s casual in its language, and it’s captured my wordiness; in contrast to the more terse style it does when for example I ask it to do the same thing in the voice of my colleague Al Williams. It fails though in several senses, I feel it doesn’t capture my sentence style and the very British way I use punctuation, it relies on far more figures than I would put in a piece, and perhaps most importantly it has no inference. It relies only on the facts it can find, indeed those figures are a sign of it overusing them, and it doesn’t go further in commenting on any likely outcomes. In my human-written version of the same piece I finished up by speculating on who would own it if retrieved, and anything of that nature is absent in its output.

Don’t Worry, Humans Still Needed

So it’s clear from the above that while it can write something which is superficially coverage of the same story in my voice when writing a Hackaday piece, it still fails at the task in hand. Where we would try to give a little introduction, background and comment to the story, it instead presents only a summary of facts it has found. The fact that it can’t infer beyond the story is reassuring, because it means we meat-based Hackaday scribes still have the edge. There are many people who will tell you to look for certain words as clues to AI-written text, but the truth is much simpler. Look for the human touch.

hackaday.com/2025/05/16/chatgp…

Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they take a whirlwind tour of the best and brightest hacks of the last week. This episode starts off with an update about that Soviet Venus lander that’s been buzzing the planet, then moves on to best practices for designing 3D printed parts, giving Chrome OS devices a new lease on life, and a unique display technology that brings a Star Wars prop to life.

You’ll also hear about designing new motherboards for beloved old computers, why you might want to put your calipers on a flatbed scanner, and a NASA science satellite that’s putting in double duty as a wartime reporter. Finally, they’ll cover the interesting physics of meteor burst communications, and the latest developments in the ongoing libogc license kerfuffle.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/…

Download in DRM-free MP3.

Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast

Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:

• iTunes
• Spotify
• Stitcher
• RSS
• YouTube
• Check out our Libsyn landing page

Episode 321 Show Notes:

News:

• Reentry prediction Soviet-era Venera Venus lander – Rocket Science
• Telegram: View @roscosmos_gk

What’s that Sound?

• Know that sound? Fill out this form for a chance to win!

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• Best Practices For FDM Printing
  
  • Learn 15 Print-in-Place Mechanisms In 15 Minutes

  
  

• Turning A Chromebox Into A Proper Power-Efficient PC
• Let The Wookie Win With This DIY Holochess Table
  
  • Aska3D
  • A Little Optical Magic Makes This Floating Display Pop
  • What’s Inside A Neonode Laser Sensor?

  
  

• A Brain Transplant For A Philips Smart Lamp
• Tearing Down A Forgotten Video Game
  
  • Pong-Story : PONG in a Chip

  
  

• Another Old ThinkPad Gets A New Motherboard
  
  • Replacement Motherboard Brings New Lease Of Life To Classic Thinkpads
  • Revive A Sony Vaio P-Series With KiCad’s Background Bitmaps

  
  

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  
  • Move Over, Lithophane: 3D Printed 3D Photos With Gaussian Splats
  • A Single-Pixel Camera Without Moving Parts Using Compressed Sensing
  • Scan Your Caliper For Physical Part Copies

  
  

• Tom’s Picks:
  
  • Studying QR Code Degradation
  • The World’s Longest Range LED Flashlight
  • Open Source ELINT Accidentally From NASA

  
  

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Radio Apocalypse: Meteor Burst Communications
• RTEMS Statement Deepens Libogc License Controversy
  
  • Libogc Allegations Rock Wii Homebrew Community

  
  

hackaday.com/2025/05/16/hackad…

Intuitively, you think that everything that you stretch will pull back, but you wouldn’t expect a couple of pieces of plastic to win. Yet, researchers over at [AMOLF] have figured out a way to make a mechanism that will eventually shrink once you pull it enough.

Named “Counter-snapping instabilities”, the mechanism is made out of the main sub-components that act together to stretch a certain amount until a threshold is met. Then the units work together and contract until they’re shorter than their initial length. This is possible by using compliant joints that make up each of the units. We’ve seen a similar concept in robotics.

Potentially this may be used as a unidirectional actuator, allowing movement inch by inch. In addition, one application mentioned may be somewhat surprising: damping. If a structure or body is oscillating through a positive feedback loop it may continue till it becomes uncontrollable. If these units are used, after a certain threshold of oscillation the units will lock and retract, therefore stopping further escalation.

Made possible by the wonders of compliant mechanics, these shrinking instabilities show a clever solution to some potential niche applications. If you want to explore the exciting world of compliance further, don’t be scared to check out this easy to print blaster design!

youtube.com/embed/KxtkcL0z5j0?…

Thanks to [I’m Not Real] for the tip!

hackaday.com/2025/05/16/compli…

The new market report titled “Anti-Drone Market”, published by Roots Analysis is one of the most sought-after solutions for businesses operating in the global market.

The report comes with a concise summary of the details regarding the historical market data, current market trends, future growth prospects, product landscape, key marketing strategies, technological progress, as well as the emerging market trends and opportunities. The Anti-Drone industry is anticipated to expand significantly. However, the latest report is mainly intended for readers interested in this specific business space and is available in the forms of PDF and spreadsheet.

The Anti-drone market size is projected to grow from USD 2.70 billion in 2025 to USD 33.97 billion by 2035, representing a CAGR of 28.83%, during the forecast period till 2035. The report will help readers stay updated with the latest market trends and maintain their competitive outlooks in the modern-day fast-paced business environment.

Anti-Drone Market Characterization:

Market Scope and Market Size:
The global market is broadly segmented on the basis of Type of Anti-Drone, Type of Component, Type of Application, Type of Technology, End-Users, Geographical Regions.

Segmental growth helps the reader get a lucid picture of the niche pockets of growth, as well as the strategies deployed by the market players to drive the growth of these segments. This section of the report helps them understand and determine the core application areas and the differences between the target markets. The report scrutinizes the Anti-Drone Market in terms of market size & volume and significant information pertaining to product bifurcation and application overview.

Key Market Contenders:
This particular section of the report covers all the necessary details of the renowned market players operating in theAnti-Drone Market. The report goes on to elucidate various marketing strategies employed by companies across this industry. Information on the shareholdings of these players in the global market has also been included in this report.

Moreover, the document presents a detailed account of the market size based on geographical segmentation. It also covers the product portfolio, their application landscape, and sales and revenue predictions of the regional fragments of the global market.

Key players
Blighter Surveillance Systems, Boeing, Dedrone, DeTect, DroneShield, Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace, Liteye Systems, Lockheed Martin, Prime Consulting and Technologies, QinetiQ, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Raytheon Technology, RTX, Saab, Skylock, Thales

The section of this report focusing on the competitive terrain of the Anti-Drone Market endows the reader with every significant detail and information about the leading competitors on the market. The report provides an exhaustive study and accurate statistics on revenue (on both global and regional levels) related to the prevalent competition in the market. The report offers additional details on this fundamental market segment, including major businesses, company description, total revenue & sales, recent developments, latest product launches, and revenue accumulated by these players over the forecast period.

Read More :-rootsanalysis.com/anti-drone-m…

Main chapters covered in this report:
Part 01: Market Overview
Part 02: Market Size, by regions
Part 03: Market Revenue, by countries
Part 04: Market Competition, by key players
Part 05: Company Profiles

We appreciate your interest in our latest research report. Should you require additional details or wish to receive a customized version tailored to your specific needs, please do not hesitate to contact us. Our team is ready to assist you with further insights and strategic guidance.