Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ Building A Color Teaching Toy For Tots

  Last year, [Deep Tronix] wished to teach colors to his nephew. Thus, he built a toy to help educate a child about colors by pairing them with sounds, and Color Player was born.

• Ness Labs ☛ Interview: The Future of Information with Arun Bahl, cofounder of Aloe

  In this interview, we discussed how information overload hinders deep work and creativity, the power of metacognition, why we should aim to augment human thinking and not automate it away, the importance of mapping a problem space rather than just getting answers, and his plans to continue to develop tools that promote clarity of thought and align with shared human interests. Enjoy the read!

• The Nation ☛ Hulk Hogan Was a Racist, Liar, and Scab

  But Hogan’s harm can be counted in more ways than just what took place behind the curtain. He sold what was left of his soul to Palantir founder and sweaty, ham-faced fascist Peter Thiel who bankrolled Hogan’s lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker. With Thiel’s help, Hogan crushed an audacious Internet journalism outlet that I guarantee would have published the Epstein lists by now. That we lost Deadspin because of Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan will never not make me apoplectic.

• Marisabel Munoz ☛ Konfetti Explorations

  I wonder how many people blog to understand themselves, or to validate their existence. How many write just to spend time with themselves, while the whole world wants to take its share.

• Nick Heer ☛ Adam Aaronson Drank Every IBA Cocktail

  Far from the first, as Aaronson notes later. If you are into cocktails, this looks like quite the experience. If the cocktail is truly a U.S. invention, it is among the finest things contributed by the country, along with Reese’s cups. Which are, I guess, a chocolate cocktail of sorts.

• Howard Oakley ☛ Introduction to Dante’s Inferno

  After the Bible and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Divine Comedy has probably been the motivation for more paintings than any other literary work. Those span the period from the fourteenth century, when it was completed, to the present day, from Botticelli to Degas and beyond. This article introduces my new account illustrated with some of those paintings.

• Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-07-24 [Older] An ultra-black coating for satellites could stop them spoiling astronomy pictures

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-07-21 [Older] Why it’s not a problem that dinosaurs are sold for millions of dollars – art historian

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-07-21 [Older] The hidden history behind every rose blooming this summer

  • Truthdig ☛ The Mad Religion of Technological Salvation

    In ‘More Everything Forever,’ astrophysicist Adam Becker exposes Silicon Valley’s insanity and explains why Mars isn't where we want to go.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ What happens when X-ray, infrared, and optical cameras mix? NASA just shared a stunning “space-based light pageant”

    NASA has released a set of nine colorful space images that illustrate the color and detail that’s possible when mixing views from a visible light camera with those of an X-ray telescope, infrared cameras, UV cameras, and even radio.

  • CBC ☛ Trump's NASA cuts will 'compromise human safety,' hundreds of employees say in letter

    Helson is one of 362 current and former NASA employees who have signed an open letter sounding the alarm about "recent policies that have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission."

  • US News And World Report ☛ NASA Says 20% of Workforce to Depart Space Agency

    Around 3,870 individuals are expected to depart, but that number may change in the coming days and weeks, the spokesperson said, adding that the remaining number of employees at the agency would be around 14,000.

  • Z D Smith ☛ Subset Park: Combinatory Programming

    A combinator is a kind of function. Specifically, it’s a function that applies its arguments—and only its arguments—to each other in a particular shape and order. The number of possible shapes is of course infinite; but in practice a few fairly simple shapes crop up more often than others, and those specific shapes have names. A very few of them are so common and so famous that their names and shapes are already well-known to programmers; because they’re well-known there are often functions available in standard libraries that apply their arguments in shapes corresponding to them. Function composition is one: many languages available today recognize that f(g(x)) is a sufficiently common pattern, and that, for instance, writing xs.map(x => f(g(x))) is sufficiently common, inconvenient, and at times error-prone, that they allow the programmer to write xs.map(compose(f, g)) instead.

    It therefore seems worthwhile to push at the boundaries of this set of well-known shapes; are there others that crop up often enough that we can give them names, and in so doing abstract away some of the repetitive guts of our code?

  • Astronomy & Astrophysics ☛ The growing impact of unintended Starlink broadband emission on radio astronomy in the SKA-Low frequency range

    We present the largest survey to date characterising intended and unintended emission from Starlink satellites across the SKA-Low frequency range. This survey analyses ∼76 million full sky images captured over ∼29 days of observing with an SKA-Low prototype station, the Engineering Development Array 2 (EDA2), at the site of SKA-Low. We report 112 534 individual detections of 1806 unique Starlink satellites, some emitting broadband emission and others narrowband emission. Our analysis compares observations across different models of Starlink satellites, with 76% of all v2-mini Ku and 71% of all v2-mini direct-to-cell satellites identified. It is shown that in the worst cases, some datasets have a detectable Starlink satellite in ∼30% of all images acquired. Emission from Starlink satellites is detected in primary and secondary frequency ranges protected by the International Telecommunication Union, with 13 satellites identified between 73.00 and 74.60 MHz and 703 identified between 150.05 and 153.00 MHz. We also detect the reflections of terrestrial FM radio off different models of Starlink satellites at 99.70 MHz. The polarisation of the broadband emission shows that the flux density of two orthogonal polarisations is anti-correlated with the temporally shifting spectral structure observed. We compare our results to previous EDA2 and LOFAR results and provide open public access to our final data products to assist in quantifying future changes in this emission.

  • IT Wire ☛ Australian university study finds Starlink interfering with radio astronomy

    PhD candidate and Curtin University study lead Dylan Grigg said the team detected more than 112,000 radio emissions from 1806 Starlink satellites, making it the most comprehensive catalogue of satellite radio emissions at low frequencies to date.

    “Starlink is the most immediate and frequent source of potential interference for radio astronomy: it launched 477 satellites during this study’s four-month data collection period alone,” Grigg said.

    “In some datasets, we found up to 30% of our images showed interference from a Starlink satellite.”

• Career/Education

  • Zach Flower ☛ Give a Problem. Grow a Programmer.

    While many of my friends at other schools completed thesis papers or self-direct projects to earn their degrees, the approach at CU was centered around the practical application of our skills in real-world scenarios.

    What that ultimately means is that we built and managed projects for businesses that came in and pitched their ideas to us.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ Why this matters

    The thing I wanted to spend some time reflecting on though, is not the significance of having done something every day for 100 weeks (something I honestly don’t care too much about) but why all this matters. Not the series nor the interviews. Why blogs matter and why the people behind them matter.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Marisabel Munoz

    This is the 100th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Marisabel Munoz and her blog, marisabel.nl.

  • James Kerr ☛ When you put yourself out there, you’ll feel exposed

    So today, I’m encouraged. If my goal is to put myself out there, it’s a good sign to feel exposed.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ A Modern Version Of Famous, Classic Speaker

    Modern musicians may take for granted that a wide array of musical instruments can either be easily connected to a computer or modeled entirely in one, allowing for all kinds of nuanced ways of creating unique sounds and vivid pieces of music without much hardware expense. Not so in the 1930s. Musicians of the time often had to go to great lengths to generate new types of sounds, and one of the most famous of these was the Leslie speaker, known for its unique tremolo and vibrato. Original Leslies could cost thousands now, though, so [Levi Graves] built a modern recreation.

  • Hackaday ☛ Zine Printing Tips From A Solopreneur

    Zines (self-produced, small-circulation publications) are extremely DIY, and therefore punk- and hacker-adjacent by nature. While they can be made with nothing more than a home printer or photocopier, some might benefit from professional production while losing none of their core appeal. However, the professional print world has a few gotchas, and in true hacker spirit [Mabel Wynne] shares things she learned the hard way when printing her solo art zine.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] Floating babies, cosmic radiation and zero-gravity birth: what space pregnancy might actually involve

  • Pro Publica ☛ A aquifers groundwater

    As the planet gets hotter and its reservoirs shrink and its glaciers melt, people have increasingly drilled into a largely ungoverned, invisible cache of fresh water: the vast, hidden pools found deep underground.

    Now, a new study that examines the world’s total supply of fresh water — accounting for its rivers and rain, ice and aquifers together — warns that Earth’s most essential resource is quickly disappearing, signaling what the paper’s authors describe as “a critical, emerging threat to humanity.” The landmasses of the planet are drying. In most places there is less precipitation even as moisture evaporates from the soil faster. More than anything, Earth is being slowly dehydrated by the unmitigated mining of groundwater, which underlies vast proportions of every continent. Nearly 6 billion people, or three quarters of humanity, live in the 101 countries that the study identified as confronting a net decline in water supply — portending enormous challenges for food production and a heightening risk of conflict and instability.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Attention Wars

    We are living through the attention wars—a battle for control of human cognitive resources that determines everything from individual agency to collective reasoning. The stakes transcend politics: this is about whether conscious beings can maintain the sustained focus necessary for meaningful choice, authentic relationship, and democratic deliberation—or whether we will surrender those capacities to algorithmic systems designed to optimize us for extraction rather than flourishing.

    The forces arrayed against human attention understand exactly what they’re doing. They’ve weaponized cognitive science, exploited psychological vulnerabilities, and built economic infrastructures that profit from fragmenting the very mental processes that make democratic citizenship possible. Meanwhile, those who should be defending cognitive freedom remain trapped in frameworks that not only fail to address the threat but actively enable it.

    It’s time to understand what we’re actually fighting and why everything depends on winning.

  • Futurism ☛ Support Group Launches for People Suffering "AI Psychosis"

    As we've reported, the consequences of these mental health breakdowns — which have impacted both people with known histories of serious mental illness and those who have none — have sometimes been extreme. People have lost jobs and homes, been involuntarily committed or jailed, and marriages and families have fallen apart. At least two people have died.

  • Science Alert ☛ Study Confirms Vaccines Protect Everybody – Even The Unvaccinated

    Once vaccination rates reached 51 percent of the population, total flu cases were reduced by 32.9 to 41.5 percent, depending on the severity of the flu. Benefits were seen in vaccinated people, and to a lesser extent unvaccinated people too.

• Proprietary

  • Pro Publica ☛ Microsoft Tech Support Could Have Exposed DOJ, Treasury Data to Foreign Adversaries

  • The Register UK ☛ Senator demands Mandiant hand over telco Salt Typhoon probes

    US Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) has demanded that Google-owned incident response firm Mandiant hand over the Salt Typhoon-related security assessments of AT&T and Verizon that, according to the lawmaker, both operators have thus far refused to give Congress.

  • Security Week ☛ Chinese Spies Target Networking and Virtualization Flaws to Breach Isolated Environments

    A Chinese cyberespionage group has been targeting VMware and F5 product vulnerabilities in a sophisticated and stealthy campaign, cybersecurity firm Sygnia reports.

  • The Verge ☛ Google’s shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month | The Verge

    Google will officially deprecate links generated with its URL shortening tool next month. On August 25th, 2025, all links in the “https://goo.gl/*” format will no longer work and return a 404 error message.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ National treasury confirms malware hit

    “Considering recent media reports since Sunday regarding security incidents affecting Microsoft platforms in the US, treasury has requested Microsoft’s assistance in identifying and addressing any potential vulnerabilities within its information and communication technology environment.”

  • Howard Oakley ☛ Intel Macs can be much slower computing SHA-256 hashes

    Because of their ubiquity and importance, the macOS CryptoKit framework provides access to optimised implementations of SHA algorithms including SHA-256. This article compares its performance in Intel and Apple silicon Macs.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Michael Tsai ☛ The Illusion of Thinking

    • The Register UK ☛ Trump AI plan rips brakes out: deregulate, innovate

      None of these security and protection measures are bad things. Indeed, they're necessary. But there's a solid corpus of existing work from across the globe that looks at the social and ethical risks of AI, not to mention the inherent power structures that enabled development of the technology and what it might mean for the future. That's nowhere to be seen here. In a country that's leading in the field and harboring most of the investment capital for AI, that's concerning.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Lyft partners with Benteler to launch autonomous shuttle service

      Benteler is participating in the project through its Benteler Mobility unit, which helps cities build autonomous public transit fleets. The unit provides financing for vehicle purchases, maintains those vehicles and performs related tasks. Lyft detailed that Benteler will provide “tens of millions of dollars” in financing to support the autonomous shuttle service.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Trump’s AI Action Plan is a distraction

      Despite a flurry of actions this week to extend AI leadership, the administration is dismantling the very advantages that established America’s global lead in AI in the first place.

    • Michigan Advance ☛ Amid questions over ChatGPT use, Detroit school board candidate withdraws

      One survey response attributed to Ricks on the district’s website included text that appeared to have been copied and pasted from a dialogue with ChatGPT, a chatbot that uses generative artificial intelligence.

    • CBC ☛ Quebec man who pulled off AI band hoax reveals his identity

      Boucher has previously been in the news for publishing novels using AI and proposing an AI bill of rights. He also has a history of public pranks, having helped create a fake company and a fake art movement.

    • Futurism ☛ Investors Are Suddenly Pulling Out of AI

      Despite pouring a record-breaking amount of cash into US-based AI startups in the first half of 2025, some of the tech industry’s most bullish backers are now starting to change their tune or even exit the field altogether — and the money isn’t necessarily coming with them.

    • CNBC ☛ AI startups raised $104 billion in first half, exits different story

      "The dominant exit trend right now is frequent but lower-value acquisitions and fewer IPOs with significantly higher value," said Dimitri Zabelin, PitchBook's senior research analyst for AI and cybersecurity.

    • Variety ☛ Stephen Colbert Praises 'South Park' Naked Trump: 'Message of Hope'

      “I completely agree with him on this one, because, if the government interfered with private AI, innovators at ‘South Park’ wouldn’t be able to make important videos like this one,” Colbert said. The “South Park” footage played, drawing applause from the crowd. “That is an important message of hope for our times.”

    • CBC ☛ 'We're terribly sorry,' South Park co-creator says with straight face after depicting Trump in bed with Satan

      South Park co-creator Trey Parker had the briefest of responses Thursday to anger from the White House over the season premiere of the animated institution, which showed a naked U.S. President Donald Trump in bed with Satan.

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ AI slop goes mainstream as YouTube cashes in

      I’d originally thought this would be a problem for YouTube as it grappled with what looked like a new form of spam, but the general lack of complaint from advertisers coupled with the gangbusters growth of AI content and even appreciative comments from viewers, changed my view. It seems the public is happy to gorge on slop, and that’s not a problem for Alphabet’s most valuable asset after Google Search. Quite the opposite.

    • The Atlantic ☛ ChatGPT Gave Instructions for Murder, Self-Mutilation, and Devil Worship

      As chatbots grow more powerful, so does the potential for harm. OpenAI recently debuted “ChatGPT agent,” an upgraded version of the bot that can complete much more complex tasks, such as purchasing groceries and booking a hotel. “Although the utility is significant,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X after the product launched, “so are the potential risks.” Bad actors may design scams to specifically target AI agents, he explained, tricking bots into giving away personal information or taking “actions they shouldn’t, in ways we can’t predict.” Still, he shared, “we think it’s important to begin learning from contact with reality.” In other words, the public will learn how dangerous the product can be when it hurts people.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ America’s AI watchdog is losing its bite

      This move by the Trump administration is the latest in its evolving attack on the agency, which provides a significant route of redress for people harmed by AI in the US. It’s likely to result in faster deployment of AI with fewer checks on accuracy, fairness, or consumer harm.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Google A.I. Summaries and Search Traffic

      This survey does a good job of showing how irrelevant the source links are in Google A.I. summaries to search traffic. Much like the citations at the end of a book, they serve as an indicator of something being referenced, but there is no expectation anyone will actually read it to confirm whether the information is accurate. There was such a citation to a Microsoft article ostensibly containing an Excel feature Google made up. Unlike citations in a book, Google’s A.I. summaries are entirely the product of a machine built by people who have only some idea of the output.

    • Dan MacKinlay ☛ Discretizing and quantizing neural nets — The Dan MacKinlay stable of variably-well-consider’d enterprises

      The practical way we quantize things in NNs is… well, NNs have their own bloody-minded trade-offs and reinventions as usual. Instead of arbitrary codebooks, we typically use structured ones. The common practice of converting 32-bit floating-point (float32) numbers to 8-bit integers (int8) or even binary values is a form of scalar quantization wherein we assume that the bins are going to be ordered. Here, we are partitioning a continuous interval of real numbers into a finite set of ordered bins. The idea is that these should enable specialized hardware implementation, for speed, and also jsut be smaller to store for compression.

      AFAICT there are two major types of quantization in practice [...]

    • Pivot to AI ☛ 16% of employees pretend to use AI at work to please their boss

      75% of subjects were expected to use AI at work. 22% felt pressured to use AI when it was not appropriate. So 16% of subjects just say they used the AI when they didn’t! People feel they would be putting their job at risk if they pushed back on AI directives.

      A full one-third said that fixing the AI’s mistakes took as much time as not using the AI.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Publishers see traffic plummet as Google's AI answers keep users from clicking links

      As you might guess, while publishers watch their traffic circle the drain, Google's profits are reaching new heights. Surely these two facts are completely unconnected, much like Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Walrus ☛ Your Country Didn’t Change Overnight. You Just Weren’t Paying Attention

      The age of pretending not to see the victim is over. This is the era of gawping at the oppressed and having a good laugh about it, even when the oppressor hasn’t actually called for you to do so.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • The Register UK ☛ First release candidate of systemd 258 is here

    Like it or not, systemd is the industry-standard init system these days. A new release is coming, and it's a big one.

    Version 257 of systemd came out last December, and since the team tends to release new versions twice a year, you could interpret that as meaning that version 258 is slightly overdue. The reason could be that this is a major release, with a substantial amount of new functionality. We don't track these things especially closely, but The Reg FOSS desk has been reporting on new releases of the systemd suite since version 251 in early 2022, and off the cuff, we'd guess this is the biggest in that time.

    Version 258-rc1, meaning release candidate 1, just appeared on GitHub, and the README file contains an impressive list of changes. Among the top ones are that it now needs at least Linux kernel 5.4, and support for cgroups version 1 is gone.

• Security

  • CISA

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-24 [Older] CISA Releases Six Industrial Control Systems Advisories

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-24 [Older] Mitsubishi Electric CNC Series

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-24 [Older] Network Thermostat X-Series WiFi Thermostats

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-24 [Older] Honeywell Experion PKS

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-24 [Older] LG Innotek Camera Model LNV5110R

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] CISA Adds Four Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] CISA Releases Nine Industrial Control Systems Advisories

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] Joint Advisory Issued on Protecting Against Interlock Ransomware

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] DuraComm DP-10iN-100-MU

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] Lantronix Provisioning Manager

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] Schneider Electric EcoStruxure

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] Schneider Electric EcoStruxure Power Operation

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] Schneider Electric System Monitor Application

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] Schneider Electric EcoStruxture IT Data Center Expert

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-20 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability, CVE-2025-53770 “ToolShell,” to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-20 [Older] Microsoft Releases Guidance on Exploitation of SharePoint Vulnerability (CVE-2025-53770)

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-20 [Older] UPDATE: Microsoft Releases Guidance on Exploitation of SharePoint Vulnerabilities

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-18 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-17 [Older] CISA Releases Three Industrial Control Systems Advisories

    • CISA ☛ 2025-07-17 [Older] Leviton AcquiSuite and Energy Monitoring Hub

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • 404 Media ☛ Women Dating Safety App 'Tea' Breached, Users' IDs Posted to 4chan

      Tea, which claims to have more than 1.6 million users, reached the top of the App Store charts this week and has tens of thousands of reviews there. The app aims to provide a space for women to exchange information about men in order to stay safe, and verifies that new users are women by asking them to upload a selfie.

    • The Zambian Observer ☛ DATA IS THE NEW OIL — BUT AFRICA MUST OWN THE WELLS – Prof. DR. MIRJAM - The Zambian Observer

      Speaking under the theme “Building a Continental Framework for AI, Data Sovereignty, and Responsible Digital Innovation,” Prof. van Reisen urged African leaders to establish a decentralized, ethical, and inclusive digital architecture that reflects the continent’s values and protects its resources — especially data.

      “Without control over the data, Africa is in danger of entering a new age of colonialism,” warned Prof. van Reisen, referencing the silent extraction of African digital data by foreign tech giants without consent, compensation, or oversight.

    • Wired ☛ The Age-Checked Internet Has Arrived

      “If people choose not to log on [to search engines] to avoid age assurance checks, this could have a wide-reaching impact on the streamlined, integrated ways people search for online information,” says Lisa Given, a professor of information sciences at RMIT University in Australia who has been closely following the country’s age-checking policies. “It will also affect the level of privacy people have come to expect from being able to search freely online, which may change how and where they search for information.”

    • Osservatorio Nessuno ☛ The EU Commission's ProtectEU roadmap? A dangerous step toward permanent surveillance - Osservatorio Nessuno

      The “roadmap” for the ProtectEU initiative, recently announced by the European Commission and framed as an effort to “ensure effective and lawful access” to data for law enforcement and judicial authorities, marks a reversal of democratic priorities: privacy and fundamental rights are treated as obstacles to be managed, rather than founding values to be protected.

      In document COM/2025/349 final, drafted as part of the ProtectEU strategy, the new “internal security” plan unveiled by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, we read that “security is the cornerstone upon which all fundamental freedoms are based.” This statement represents an ideological inversion, one that clashes with both the original framework of European integration and its foundational texts, starting with Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, which place liberty and human dignity at the heart of the common legal order.

      The Commission’s strategy risks turning exception into rule: permanent suspicion becomes standard, preventive data collection is institutionalized, and mass surveillance is established as a governing infrastructure. It is the same security-driven approach that has been promoted for over thirty years across political camps, one that has already eroded essential freedoms, from the right to peaceful protest to the free expression of dissent, wherever it has been implemented.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Insight Hungary ☛ Kneecap claps back at Orbán after entry ban

    Irish hip-hop group Kneecap accused Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, of political censorship after being banned from the country for three years. The group, known for their support of Palestine, had been scheduled to perform at the Sziget festival in August. Hungary’s government spokesperson, Zoltán Kovács, claimed the decision was based on allegations that the band “repeatedly engage in antisemitic hate speech supporting terrorism and terrorist groups,” adding that their planned performance “posed a national security threat.”

    In a statement on X, Kneecap rejected the accusations as “outrageous,” saying no member had ever been convicted of any crime and that they stood against all hate crimes. “It’s clear this is a political distraction and a further attempt to silence those who call out genocide against the Palestinian people,” they said, pointing to Orbán’s recent warm welcome of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The group has faced other cancellations in recent months and has been investigated, though police last week confirmed they would take no further action following a review of their Glastonbury set.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Migrant Camp Contracting Mogul’s Former Company Employed Undocumented Workers

    On Monday, the Department of Defense announced that it had awarded a massive new contract to build the nation’s largest migrant detention camp on the Fort Bliss military base, a facility that will play a key role in the Trump administration’s deportation plans.

    Unmentioned was that one of the subcontractors slated to work on the project, Disaster Management Group, is owned by Nathan Albers, who previously co-owned a company that pleaded guilty in 2019 to a scheme to hire undocumented workers and conceal them from immigration authorities. Albers is a big-time Republican donor who has spent time at Mar-a-Lago.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ India’s Cities Are Being Turned Into Hindutva Theme Parks

    Narendra Modi’s government has launched major schemes of urban transformation in cities like Ayodhya. Behind the rhetoric of development and modernity lurks a crude Hindu nationalist chauvinism that’s seeking to erase the messy pluralism of urban life.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Supreme Court blocks North Dakota redistricting ruling that would gut key part of Voting Rights Act - lonestarlive.com

    The justices indicated in an unsigned order that they are likely to take up a federal appeals court ruling that would eliminate the most common path people and civil rights groups use to sue under a key provision of the 60-year-old Voting Rights Act.

    The case could be argued as early as 2026 and decided by next summer.

  • LRT ☛ Lithuanian intelligence: Belarus KGB targeting Belarusian diaspora for recruitment

    Lithuania’s intelligence agency on Thursday reported an active campaign by Belarus’s KGB to recruit Belarusians living abroad, including those residing in Lithuania.

  • India Times ☛ Nvidia AI chips worth $1 billion entered China despite US curbs: FT

    These Nvidia AI chips were reportedly smuggled to China in the three months following tighter US export controls, including high-end B200 processors banned in China, Financial Times reported. Nvidia stated that using smuggled products available on the Chinese black market for data centres is technically and financially inefficient.

  • Digital Music News ☛ TikTok is At Risk of Going Dark ‘Very Soon,’ US Government Says

    Last month, President Trump extended the deadline by 90 days for China-based ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. assets or face a nationwide ban. That dragged the deadline out to September 17 for a 2024 law that initially mandated the divest-or-shutdown ultimatum take place by January 19 of this year. Trump has granted extensions of that deadline three times.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ What the Army is doing to keep its tanks alive

    On modern battlefields, main battle tanks that were once the lords of the plains are being taken out by cheap quadcopter drones that some had written off as toys for idle hobbyists just ten years ago, despite their almost immediate weaponization by militant groups. Other threats, like loitering munitions, and a proliferation of anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM) with top-attack capability like the Next generation Light Anti-tank Weapon (NLAW), make this one of the most dangerous times for armor since the British Mark I became the first tank to see combat on Sept. 15, 1916, on the Somme.

  • Reuters ☛ Sudan's Islamists plot post-war comeback by supporting army

    In his first media interview in years, Ahmed Haroun, chairman of the former ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and one of four Sudanese wanted by the International Criminal Court, told Reuters that he foresaw the army staying in politics after the war, and that elections could provide a route back to power for his party and the Islamist movement connected to it.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Why China Won’t Stop the Fentanyl Trade

    The opioid that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year has become a source of political leverage that Beijing won’t easily give up.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Chinese companies allegedly smuggled in $1bn worth of Nvidia AI chips in the last three months, despite increasing export controls — some companies are already flaunting future B300 availability

    Despite the U.S. desperately trying to block access to advanced AI chips from Nvidia and AMD, many Chinese companies still find a way to get them into their hands. According to a report from the Financial Times, at least a billion dollars’ worth of Nvidia B200s and other banned chips have been shipped to China ever since President Donald Trump banned the export of China-specific H20 GPUs (and the similarly performant AMD MI308) in April 2025.

    The publication says that the data behind this claim comes from multiple sales contracts, company filings, and people who have been directly involved with the deals. While the U.S. has made it illegal for anyone to sell these banned chips to specific countries, China has no such restrictions, allowing anyone to trade them as long as the proper taxes have been paid.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Starlink outage impacted Starshield, its defense communications service

    While several civilian federal agencies told FedScoop that the service interruption didn’t disrupt operations, the U.S. Space Force confirmed that Starshield, the military-focused communications service on the Starlink network, was taken offline during the outage.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Starlink Outage Blamed On Software Failure, SpaceX Responds

    SpaceX’s Starlink internet service suffered a major international outage, disconnecting tens of thousands of users for over two hours. The Starlink outage began around 3 p.m. Eastern Time (19:00 GMT), according to reports on Downdetector, with over 61,000 users submitting complaints in a matter of minutes. The issue lasted approximately 2.5 hours and, as confirmed by Starlink’s Vice President of Engineering Michael Nicolls, was caused by the “failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.”

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Starlink down: Ukrainian soldiers cut off from Musk’s network

    Soldiers on Ukraine’s front line suffered a communications blackout for more than two hours last night following a major outage on Elon Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink.

    [...]

    In March, the Tesla billionaire boasted that Starlink was the “backbone of the Ukrainian army”, adding: “Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.”

  • FAIR ☛ America’s Opinion Pages Overwhelmingly Supported Trump’s Attack on Iran

    Of the critical pieces, only three (one in the Times and two in USA Today) opposed the idea on legal or moral grounds, challenging the idea that the United States has a right to attack a country that had not attacked it.

  • Meduza ☛ Fighting their way to the front A Kremlin-backed foundation provides war veterans with electric wheelchairs and housing. Orphans and people with disabilities are left to fend for themselves. — Meduza

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ Zelensky’s reasons Ukraine’s president claims anti-corruption curbs will counter Russian influence, but a new report alleges he seeks to shield himself and his inner circle — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ ‘The authorities don’t hear us’: The rise and fall of Russia’s women-led demobilization movement — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Kremlin says Putin–Zelensky meeting unlikely before August deadline proposed by Kyiv — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Ramzan Kadyrov reportedly hospitalized after nearly drowning on vacation in Turkey — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Pro Publica ☛ ProPublica Updates Supreme Connections Database With 2024 Justice Disclosures

  • FAIR ☛ Thom Hartmann on Epstein & MAGA, Han Shan (2009) on Ken Saro-Wiwa

  • Spiegel ☛ Circumventing U.S. Sanctions: Turkish State-Owned Bank Suspected of Transferring $1.5 Billion to Tehran

    The Turkish state-owned bank Halkbank apparently assisted Iran to evade U.S. sanctions. DER SPIEGEL has learned that the financial institution is suspected of having released more than 1.5 billion euros out of a total volume of 4 billion euros for the regime in Tehran. According to sources in Western security circles, the money was allegedly transferred between May 2024 and March 2025, most of it in tranches of just under 200 million euros via shell companies.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Feds Keep Changing Their Story About the Epstein Files

    The Department of Justice keeps changing its story about documents related to the politically connected sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, offering contradictory reasons for refusing to release the files.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump's Calls Epstein 'The Greatest' in Note: Report

    As allegations over Donald Trump‘s relationship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein escalate, the latest report claims that the president’s name appears in a list of contributors for a 50th birthday book to Epstein and that in another book, a copy of Trump: The Art of the Comeback, Trump left Epstein a flattering note.

• Environment

  • New Yorker ☛ 2025-07-23 [Older] Three Books to Understand Our Ravaged Climate

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-07-23 [Older] AP Exclusive: UN Chief Says Market Forces Point the Way to Curbing Climate Change

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-07-23 [Older] UN's Top Court Says Failing to Protect Planet From Climate Change Could Violate International Law

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-07-23 [Older] World Court Says Failure to Meet Climate Goals Could Lead to Reparations

  • Vox ☛ 2025-07-23 [Older] Why your energy bill is suddenly so much more expensive

  • CBC ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] Green energy has passed 'positive tipping point,' and cost will come down, UN says

  • CBC ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] South Australia algal bloom a 'natural disaster,' state's premier says, as species wiped out

  • Wired ☛ The First Planned Migration of an Entire Country Is Underway

    A study by NASA’s Sea Level Change Team revealed that, in 2023, the sea level in Tuvalu was 15 centimeters higher than the average recorded over the previous three decades. If this trend continues, it’s projected that most of the territory, including its critical infrastructure, will be below the high-tide level by 2050.

  • RTL ☛ 14 days over 30°C: Finland breaks 50-year-old heat record

    "This is the longest period of consecutive days with temperatures exceeding 30C since records began in 1961," the institute wrote on X.

  • Truthdig ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] Extreme Weather: The New Frontline of Online Climate Denial

  • New Yorker ☛ 2025-07-21 [Older] In an Age of Climate Change, How Do We Cope with Floods?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-07-20 [Older] How Germany manages extreme heat and climate change

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ 2025-07-19 [Older] “Climate Justice” is the new “Carbon Footprint”

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ 2025-07-19 [Older] Meet the nonprofit preparing Mexico for climate change

  • The Age AU ☛ 2025-07-19 [Older] Four in five Tuvaluans apply to move to Australia. Frayzel is among them

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-07-18 [Older] What’s at Stake: Organizing for Climate Armageddon

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-07-17 [Older] Is It Strategic to Refocus Towards Climate Adaptation?

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Revelator ☛ A Memoir of Resistance Shows Readers the Dangers of Fossil-Fuel Pipelines — and How to Fight Them

    • Meduza ☛ Gas explosion destroys entire section of Russian apartment building, killing at least three — Meduza

    • Bridge Michigan ☛ 2025-07-21 [Older] Opinion | Michigan’s clean energy momentum must continue despite federal changes

    • Bridge Michigan ☛ 2025-07-24 [Older] Michigan home energy efficiency standards stalled amid homebuilders lawsuit

    • NL Times ☛ 2025-07-24 [Older] Dutch regulator orders five energy firms to fix faulty cancellation fee practices

    • Hackaday ☛ Massive Aluminum Snake Casting Becomes Water Cooling Loop For PC

      Water cooling was once only the preserve of hardcore casemodders and overclockers. Today, it’s pretty routinely used in all sorts of performance PC builds. However, few are using large artistic castings as radiators like [Mac Pierce] is doing. 

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Why did feds cancel a $4.9 billion loan for the Grain Belt Express transmission line project?

      In the works for more than a decade, Grain Belt Express is expected to run from southwest Kansas carrying renewable energy through Missouri and Illinois before ending at the Indiana border. When it approved the project, the Missouri Public Service Commission found that Grain Belt would save Missourians $17 billion in lower electric bills.

      But to complete the project, the line needs to cross thousands of properties and requires easements on landowners’ properties across three states.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ China is developing nation-spanning network to sell surplus data center compute power — latency, disparate hardware are key hurdles

      Many data centers were built on the assumption that state-owned companies and government agencies would purchase computing power. However, demand has fallen short of expectations, leaving many data centers idle or operating at a 20% - 30% load, way below their capacity.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ China's AI data center boom goes bust: Rush leaves billions of dollars in idle infrastructure

      Insiders believe Chinese officials will not abandon these projects, viewing them as growing pains rather than failures. The government is expected to take over floundering centers and assign them to more capable operators. However, for those operators that cannot rent their capacity to clients that can pay, the bubble has clearly gone bust.

    • Stephen Hackett ☛ Memphis Light, Gas & Water Made $1 Million Error in xAI's Billing

      For the second time, xAI has fallen behind on its bills to our local utility company. In February 2025, it was reported that the AI company was $400,000 behind and received several cutoff notices.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Hiltzik: False advertising from Tesla?

      California has finally called him out, via a lawsuit accusing Tesla of leading buyers to believe that its vehicles can operate autonomously — as self-driving cars — which they “could not and cannot do.” That amounts to false advertising, the Department of Motor Vehicles asserts.

      The DMV is seeking to bar Tesla from selling cars in the state for at least 30 days. A five-day hearing in the case began Monday in Oakland before a DMV administrative law judge.

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Is Quietly Trying to Get More Money as It Burns Through Cash at a Staggering Pace

      There's just one wrinkle: the funds roll out in two tranches, with $10 billion dispersed immediately, and $30 billion only available if OpenAI restructures to a for-profit company. If it doesn't, the Wall Street Journal reported back in March, SoftBank has the option to withhold $20 billion, cutting the historic funding round off at the knees.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Tesla profits fall for third consecutive quarter

      The company still hasn’t released a lineup of newer, cheaper EVs to compete with the discount models offered by its competitors, especially China’s BYD, for markets outside the US. Sales of its much-maligned Cybertruck flopped 50% compared with last year. And the road ahead will likely remain bumpy: CEO Elon Musk said the cuts to EV tax credits signed by Trump this month will lead to a “rough few quarters” before revenue from other sources, including long-awaited self-driving taxis and related software, starts to come in. Musk’s forays into right-wing politics in the US and Europe also lost the company support among prospective EV buyers, analysts said.

    • Wired ☛ It Looks Like the Tesla Model Y Refresh Has Bombed

      While there’s no definitive data yet on how well the car is performing at retail—Tesla doesn’t publish model or country sales number splits—the early signs do not look good. Many markets offer discounts and low-interest loans for the Model Y, and delivery is reportedly immediate for those interested, suggesting a general lack of demand, which is far different from the long wait times typically seen for the previous Model Y.

    • Kyle Ford ☛ Big in Japan: Part One

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Conversation ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] Hosepipe ban survival guide: which garden plants to save and which to sacrifice

    • The Conversation ☛ 2025-07-23 [Older] Mysterious fossil may rewrite story of skin and feather evolution in reptiles

    • The Conversation ☛ 2025-07-23 [Older] Gene editing technology could be used to save species on the brink of extinction

  • Overpopulation

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Why Should We Worry About Declining Birth Rates?

      Declining birth rates around the world may pose new challenges for humanity. A new book on the topic by Elon Musk–funded economists indulges in questionable philosophy and sci-fi speculation that fails to shed much light on this important topic.

    • RFERL ☛ Tehran On The Brink: Can Iran Survive Its Water Crisis?

      • Worsening Water Crisis: Iran is experiencing a deepening water crisis that has forced authorities to impose widespread water cuts, with dam reservoirs across the country dropping to their lowest levels in decades. Drought, mismanagement, and mounting climate challenges are causing major disruptions to daily life for millions.

• Finance

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-07-17 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini Hits Amazon with 50 Percent Tariffs

  • Vox ☛ 2025-07-24 [Older] Companies can spy on you to set prices. What does it mean for your next purchase?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ Intel to jettison networking business NEX

    Intel isn't just laying off employees and closing plants in a bid to cut costs – it's also reportedly planning to get rid of its entire Network and Edge Group (NEX) to help right the ship.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Intel to spin off NEX networking business into independent company

    On Thursday, Intel disclosed that it plans to reduce its headcount by 15% more this year in a bid to boost financial performance. The company expects to end 2025 with 75,000 employees, down from 99,500 in 2024. Intel will also scale back investments in its foundry business.

  • PC World ☛ 'What the hell is Nvidia?' said Trump while presenting on AI

    A few days ago, President Donald Trump admitted that he had never heard of Nvidia or its CEO Jensen Huang even as he wanted to break the company up, reports Tom’s Hardware.

    All of this occurred at Trump’s presentation of his AI Action Plan in Washington, making the remarks while presenting on stage: [...]

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ When Automation Becomes Bureaucracy

    So why am I writing about this? This morning I was reflecting on recent experiences changing flights and helping my parents with their Comcast subscription. Over and over, I ran into automation that was supposed to make things easier but actually made things worse.

  • Ireland ☛ Speech by Minister for Justice, Home Affairs and Migration, Jim O'Callaghan: A Contested Arena: Balancing competing human rights in the area of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration

    I am not blind to the fact that this proposal will impinge upon the right to privacy.

  • India Times ☛ Irish watchdog threatens Elon Musk's X over adult content controls

    Ireland's media watchdog, acting on behalf of the EU, has warned Elon Musk's social network X that it must enact rules to restrict children's access to adult content by Friday or "face action". It said it "will take further action" if X does not provide evidence of compliance with the code by Friday.

  • The Register UK ☛ Intel dumps European sites, signals more job cuts to come

    This means that the much-vaunted megafab near Magdeburg in eastern Germany, first announced in 2022, will not be built. Intel was planning to invest more than €30 billion (about $35 billion) in the chip factory, but it ran into delays and former chief Pat Gelsinger put it on hold last year.

    Its cancellation means that Intel stands to lose out on the €10 billion ($11.7 billion) in subsidies it was set to receive from the German government as EU Chips Act funding for the site.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Intel to lay off 15% more staff by year-end and scale back foundry investments

    The disclosure came as Intel published its second-quarter financial results today. The chipmaker said it plans to end the year with a “core workforce” of about 75,000 staff, which would mean it loses almost a third of its employees in a space of about 12 months. The reductions will come via layoffs and attrition, the company said.

  • The Verge ☛ Intel is laying off 24,000 employees and retreating from some countries

    In April, Intel attempted to announce layoffs without announcing layoffs. “We have not set any headcount reduction target,” Intel spokesperson Sophie Metzger told The Verge. But the company has laid off thousands of employees since — and today, in the company’s Q2 2025 earnings, it has revealed that Intel will dramatically shrink as a result of those layoffs. Intel says it will retreat from planned projects in Germany and Poland, end its assembly and test operations in Costa Rica, and finish 2025 with just around 75,000 “core employees” in total.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The General Theory of Enshittification - Paul Krugman

    Everyone loves enshittification. Not the thing itself, of course. But Cory Doctorow’s neologism was an instant hit, neatly encapsulating the public’s growing disappointment, sometimes bordering on rage, with what was happening to internet platforms. His pithy summary of the process was also brilliant:

    "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

    I argued earlier this week that enshittification has a lot to do with the way the tech industry has fallen out of public favor: [...]

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Conversation ☛ 2025-07-18 [Older] Cognitive warfare: why wars without bombs or bullets are a legal blind spot

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Project Censored ☛ 2025-07-21 [Older] Systems of Control, Histories of Resistance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] How Hollywood films are modified by censors around the world

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-07-17 [Older] Remember When Code Was Speech? It Still Is

  • Wired ☛ Trump’s Anti-Bias AI Order Is Just More Bias

    The Trump administration says it wants AI models free from ideological bias, as it pressures their developers to reflect the president’s worldview.

  • RFERL ☛ Can The Kremlin Finally Get Russians To Stop Using YouTube? Not Yet.

    Authorities have throttled the Google-owned platform, trying to frustrate Russian viewers by slowing it to unbearable speeds. They’ve threatened the Silicon Valley giant to get it to house its servers inside Russia, so regulators can better monitor its traffic.

    They’ve also tried to cultivate homegrown alternatives that would be under the thumb of regulators.

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Internet disruptions reported in North Ossetia amid drone threat alert

    North Ossetia is experiencing a second day of mobile [Internet] disruptions amid a drone threat alert. While local media and social media channels have cited a damaged backbone [Internet] cable as the cause, regional authorities have denied any technical malfunction and attribute the slowdown to security measures.

  • The Nation ☛ Columbia’s Settlement With Trump Is Pure Cowardice

    There’s every reason to believe, based on the terms of the deal, that the only thing proceeding with focus and clarity is the MAGA takeover of higher education. The agreement creates a mechanism for the ongoing federal review of Columbia’s admissions records, which will be set in motion anytime the school’s new federal overseers pick up the whiff of anything resembling affirmative action.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Columbia’s Dangerous Agreement With the Trump Administration

    The university’s agreement with the Trump administration bodes ill for American higher education.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Columbia University settles Trump lawsuit for $200M

    The university did not admit wrongdoing, but pledged to follow laws against considering race in admissions and hiring and to work to reduce antisemitism.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ South Park’s billionaire creators taunt Trump with their bravest - or stupidest - episode yet

    But the decision has been interpreted in liberal circles as Paramount in essence bending the knee to Trump, who has the power to veto a proposed $8bn merger between Paramount and Skydance and recently received that $16m legal settlement from the former over a report on 60 Minutes, the American equivalent of Panorama.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Striking at something sacred’: Meduza asks a journalist, a political insider, and a sociologist to weigh in on Ukraine’s anti-corruption crisis — Meduza

  • Truthdig ☛ Who Thinks the Free Press Is Worth a Quarter-Billion Dollars? - Truthdig

    Aside from the above, it’s not clear what service Weiss actually offers CBS. Ostensibly, her conservative brand was proposed as a sop to the Trump administration, to grease approval of the CBS/Skydance merger. But one would think the name Ellison would do that already. That handle belongs to David Ellison — CEO of Skydance Media, which brought you a Jack Reacher movie starring garden-gnomic Tom Cruise and coincidentally the worst “Star Trek” film. But Ellison is a leader the same way that you’re the driver when you sit in your dad’s lap and steer the car; you might have your hands on the wheel, but come on. And in Dave’s case, his dad is Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, and — in the universe of right-wing whackjobs in charge of tech companies — something like the Karl Lueger to Elon Musk’s Adolf Hitler. You don’t need Bari Weiss to gloss this pedigree, and the problem for her, Ellison and CBS, is that she can’t do anything else.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Financial journalism cuts its losses, yet loses the people

    Financial newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal and CNBC, reinforce this fixation on numbers. In doing so, financial journalism overlooks the human impact by detailing the consequences of current events on profits and stock prices instead of on people’s lives and communities. Many business students or professionals have an overreliance on financial news, learning to analyze current events based only on their value to generate portfolio returns or impact a company’s profitability. When we lose this human focus, we become unaware of these problems and stop thinking about ways to help.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Trump signs law yanking $9B from NPR, PBS, foreign aid

    The law also cancels about $8 billion in foreign aid accounts, including global health initiatives.

  • Vox ☛ Why Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch

    Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the press. Even before taking office for his first term, he began dismissing the mainstream media as “fake news,” and soon after assuming office he tweeted that the “FAKE NEWS media” is “the enemy of the American people.”

    Trump has since used the courts to muzzle his critics, filing lawsuits that target media companies like CBS and ABC. Those companies have chosen to settle rather than fight, as have tech companies like Meta and X.

    In his second term, Trump has also punished other outlets he dislikes, including Voice of America, the Associated Press, NPR and PBS, and Politico.

  • [Repeat] Press Gazette ☛ Fortune Europe editorial team made redundant but new roles being created

    The job cuts took place before a new round of layoffs announced by Fortune this week to affect 10% of the global workforce.

    However, several new editorial roles in London are being created.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] Dog thefts: what really happened during the COVID pandemic

  • Gannett ☛ Trump wants to move homeless people from streets with new order

    Trump's action comes after the Supreme Court ruled in June that that people without homes can be arrested and fined for sleeping in public spaces, overturning a lower court’s ruling that enforcing camping bans when shelter is lacking is cruel and unusual punishment.

  • TruthOut ☛ New Trump Executive Order Will Further Criminalize Homelessness, Mental Illness

    Predictable, but no less shocking or reprehensible: Trump just signed an executive order urging states to forcibly institutionalize homeless people, defund Housing First, criminalize encampments, and cut aid to cities that don't comply.

  • Jono Alderson ☛ What the world's first factory can teach us about AI - Jono Alderson

    Richard Arkwright wasn’t building a museum. He was solving a technical problem: how to increase the efficiency of cotton spinning. What he built instead was the prototype for the modern factory.

    This was the start of abstraction.
    The decoupling of labour from craft.
    The optimisation of tasks into systems.
    The moment where time, process, and people became programmable.

    And I can’t stop thinking about how familiar that feels.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the U.S. Postal Service With These 15 Photographs

    These shots from the Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest are truly a dream delivery

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Homelessness Crisis Is a Crisis of Democracy

    Homelessness is often thought of either as an issue of individual moral failings or merely of bad policy. It should instead be seen as a moral crisis for our democracy, one that demands transformative economic reforms.

  • The Register UK ☛ The EFF is 35, but the battle to defend internet freedom is far from over

    In July 1990, before the World Wide Web even existed, an unusual alliance was formed to fight for the rights of the emerging online community.

    Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow – who wrote some of the Grateful Dead's most epic lyrics – and John Gilmore, co-founder of the GNU Project for free software and employee number five at Sun Microsystems, met in San Francisco to form the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

    The organization has since been prominent in some of the most important legal battles for privacy, online operations, and legislative correction. The Register sat down with executive director Cindy Cohn to discuss the past, but more importantly what's coming down the line.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • India Times ☛ Musk's Starlink satellite [Internet] sees hours-long global outage

    SpaceX chief Elon Musk's Starlink satellite [Internet] service experienced an hours-long global network outage Thursday, which executives attributed to a key software issue. Starlink, a subsidiary of Musk's space rocket venture SpaceX, has deployed more than 6,000 low-orbit satellites to provide high-speed [Internet] to isolated and poorly connected areas.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Starlink suffers rare global outage

    SpaceX’s Starlink suffered one of its biggest international outages on Thursday when an internal software failure knocked users offline, a rare disruption for Elon Musk’s powerful satellite [Internet] system.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• IP Kat ☛ 2025-07-21 [Older] General Court: Sale of second-hand Testarossas by Ferrari dealers can constitute genuine use

• IP Kat ☛ 2025-07-20 [Older] [Guest Post] Sylvanian Family Drama

• Tom's Hardware ☛ President Trump threatened to break up Nvidia, didn't even know what it was — 'What the hell is Nvidia? I've never heard of it before'

  "I said, look, we'll break this guy up — this is before I learned the facts of life — I said we'll break 'em up," he continued. "They said 'very hard', I said 'Why?' I said, what percentages of the market does he have? 'Sir, he has 100%.'"

  Trump continued, "I said, 'Who the hell is he? What's his name?' 'His name is Jensen Huang, Nvidia, ' I said, 'What the hell is Nvidia?' I've never heard of it before.

• Silicon Angle ☛ EU cloud provider group files complaint over Broadcom’s VMware acquisition

  VMware develops vSphere, the industry’s most popular hypervisor. It also sells a range of other software tools designed to help companies manage their infrastructure. According to CISPE, Broadcom scrapped some customers’ VMware software contracts after the acquisition closed and went on to apply “onerous new licensing conditions.”

• Patents

  • Kangaroo Courts

    • IP Kat ☛ 2025-07-24 [Older] G 1/24 in the spotlight: Description definitions do not override clear claim language (T 1999/23)

• Trademarks

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-07-17 [Older] Country of Iceland successfully freezes out British supermarket's trade marks on the grounds of descriptiveness

• Copyrights

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-07-22 [Older] Tote Bags at Dawn: Bona vacantia, trade marks and copyright

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Copyright Lawsuit Accuses Meta of Pirating Adult Films for AI Training

    Adult film producers Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media have filed a significant copyright infringement lawsuit against tech giant Meta. A complaint filed at a California federal court alleges that their films were downloaded via BitTorrent for AI training purposes. With at least 2,396 movies at stake, potential damages could exceed 350 million dollars.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Police, LaLiga & Alianza Target MagisTV With ISP Office Raids & Arrests

    Top-tier Spanish football league LaLiga and Latin American anti-piracy group Alianza have joined forces to maintain the pressure on illegal IPTV service Magis TV. In conjunction with law enforcement partners in Argentina, multiple arrest warrants were executed in five regions against local sellers of premium Magis TV packages. Two of the locations targeted are operated by a local internet service provider; reports indicate that the owner of the ISP is now considered a fugitive.

  • Tedium ☛ Google Web Guide: Does It Break &udm=14? No, But …

    But the bad news about all this is that Google is still trying to add AI to their one small respite against AI. Let’s talk real quick about what Web Guide does. Essentially, I would describe it as a way to get the top results on a bunch of different topics at once. So, if you search for “salamanders,” it not only gives you the basic details for salamanders, it also does starting point searches for you for topics like “salamander biology and composition,” “salamander images,” “salamanders as pets,” “salamander mythology and folklore,” and even “salamander” in relation to Warhammer 40k. As you’ll see from my example below, Gemini actually pulled up the top two results of my search twice: [...]

  • Futurism ☛ Spotify Caught Doing Something Unbelievably Ghoulish With AI

    Weeks after trending "indie rock band" The Velvet Sundown admitted its Spotify oeuvre was entirely generated by AI, news has emerged that the streaming company is using AI to publish new tunes by dead musicians.

  • Digital Music News ☛ White House Unveils 30-Page 'AI Action Plan' Featuring 90 Policies

    Bearing that in mind, President Trump addressed copyright protections during an AI summit speech; those comments begin at the 20-minute mark.

  • The Register UK ☛ AI scrapers would be forced to ask permission under bill

    The AI Accountability and Data Protection Act's text does not mention fair use. However, it does present both personally identifiable information and copyrighted material as types of "covered data" that require the data owner's prior consent to be used for training.

    Blumenthal, a frequent legislative partner of Hawley's, agreed with his take, noting that AI safeguards are urgently needed.

  • Guy LeCharles Gonzalez ☛ Marketing books is hard — but don't blame authors.

    Marketing is hard, even when you do it right.

    I’ve spent my entire career in marketing — from old school direct mail for magazine subscriptions to old school guerilla marketing promoting poetry readings and selling handmade chapbooks in smoky bars. I was segmenting email lists in Excel before email marketing became a billion-dollar industry, and I was engaged in and managing online communities before algorithms went mainstream.