Leftovers

• The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Everybody was fondling underwater!’: the Rocky Horror Picture Show at 50 – an oral history

  It remains the longest-running theatrical release in film history and still plays in cinemas today. We look back with the cast and crew to find out how the film became such a cult phenomenon.

• Career/Education

  • Noel Rappin ☛ Programming Proverbs in 1975 and 2025

    I thought I would read this book and do a big compare and contrast as to how best practice advice has changed. As it happens, most of the book is worked out examples, and there’s really only one big way in which practices have changed that colors all the other advice in the book.

    To explain that, I need to give you the context of 1975. I’m not quite old enough to have professional memories of 1975, so this is a mixture of research and extrapolation. (If you think this was an excuse to research what programming was like in 1975… I can’t really argue with that.)

  • Robert Birming ☛ Less time, more blog

    Sometimes, less is more. Sometimes, limits unlock flow.

  • Kev Quirk ☛ How Do You Take Notes?

    I need a better way of organising my notes, to-dos and tasks. I have crap all over the place at the moment, so if you have a system, I'd love to know what it is.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Measurements suggest we inhale 68,000 lung-penetrating microplastics daily in our homes and cars

    New measurements of fine microplastic particles suspended in the air in homes and cars suggest that humans may be inhaling far greater amounts of lung-penetrating microplastics than previously thought. Nadiia Yakovenko and colleagues at the Université de Toulouse, France, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One.

  • Canadian Medical Association Journal ☛ Ensuring the sovereignty and security of Canadian health data | CMAJ

    Health data are critical to health systems in Canada, but the potential of these data to be accessed and used by foreign entities for surveillance purposes without consent is concerning. Furthermore, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have increased the economic value of these data, creating new risks.1 Serious privacy, security, and economic risks arise when companies in other countries hold and use Canadian data. Given the rapidly changing political climate in the United States, preserving the sovereignty of Canada’s health data — notably, ensuring that the data are subject to Canadian laws and legal systems — requires renewed focus.

• Proprietary

  • Tim Bray ☛ De-Google Project Update

    I introduced this family project in the spring of 2024. I won’t reproduce those arguments for why we’re working on this, but in the current climate I feel like I hardly need to. Since that post, our aversion to Google dependency has only grown stronger. Progress has been non-zero but not fast.

  • Clayton Errington ☛ The Invasion of Advertising

    Over the last few weeks I’ve seen an increase in advertising in places that appear new and where I haven’t seen it before. Along with new places, there has been a massive increase in others. I’d like to take a quick tour through these areas.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ In Disturbing Demo, Video Game Characters Panic When Told They're Just Code

      Others in the industry are calling for keeping humans at the heart of video games, or citing concerns that an LLM-powered NPC could lead to all kinds of unpredictable — and potentially unsavory — behavior.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ CSIRO posts AI-fake climate article with made-up quotes

      David Ho is an oceanographer at the University of Hawai’i. Cosmos posted an article about removing carbon from the oceans. Professor Ho was quite surprised the article had a quote from him and a pile of stuff he didn’t actually think — particularly when he hadn’t spoken to Cosmos at all. The article read just like AI slop.

    • Futurism ☛ People Are Becoming "Sloppers" Who Have to Ask AI Before They Do Anything

      For instance, Foster pointed to one viral video in which a man recounted going on a first date with a woman — but was surprised when she pulled out ChatGPT on her phone and asked it what she should order off the menu. ("There was no second date," he concluded.)

      The term "AI slop" has become synonymous with often garbled low-effort content online, from ChatGPT's weird way of talking to a barrage of junk littering platforms like Facebook and Pinterest. Turning it into a noun evokes the "glassholes" who were lampooned for walking around with Google's head-mounted Glass cameras more than a decade ago — and puts the focus on how new technology is changing the way we relate to others, and even now perhaps to ourselves.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Tyler, the Creator’s 'Don’t Tap the Glass' Drowned Out By AI

      Tyler, the Creator’s ninth studio album, Don’t Tap the Glass, was set up for a massive summer impact. But the album release has been overshadowed by an AI song with the same name on TikTok.

    • Terence Eden ☛ Winners don’t use ChatGPT

      This isn't that essay. I'm too lazy to write something amazing, and too aware of the limitations of outsourcing my thinking.

      But I see the pattern in myself.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Ingram Micro attackers threaten 3.5 TB data leak this week

      Although Ingram Micro previously said it had contained the incident, its appearance on SafePay's website suggests that – if it was being extorted as per the ransomware playbook – it did not pay up.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ U.S. Data Breach Costs Rise As Global Average Falls

      Data breaches in the U.S. are getting more costly even as they’re getting cheaper in the rest of the world.

      That was one of the conclusions in the new IBM-Ponemon Institute 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report, which also found that AI is playing a significant role in cybersecurity, both as an attack vector and as a defensive measure.

    • Press Gazette ☛ Cyberattacks target email accounts of senior journalists

      Phishing remains the most common method of attack, with media groups targeted both by ‘hacktivists’ and for-profit ransomware gangs.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Krebs On Security ☛ Scammers Unleash Flood of Slick Online Gaming Sites

      Fraudsters are flooding Discord and other social media platforms with ads for hundreds of polished online gaming and wagering websites that lure people with free credits and eventually abscond with any cryptocurrency funds deposited by players. Here’s a closer look at the social engineering tactics and remarkable traits of this sprawling network of more than 1,200 scam sites.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Lazarus turns open source into a weapon in its latest global espionage push

      Like many similar groups, Lazarus over the years has shifted tactics. Today, instead of simply attacking financial institutions directly, the group has become more sneaky by targeting developers and deployment environments. It plants malware in widely used open-source repositories such as npm and PyPI. The malicious packages from Lazarus are designed to mimic trusted libraries, often through typosquatting or combo-squatting, to trick developers into unknowingly installing backdoors into their systems.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Papers Please ☛ Palantir breaks new ground in algorithmic surveillance and control

      One of the biggest beneficiaries of the expansion of the homeland-security industrial complex since the second inauguration of Donald Trump has been Palantir.  Shares of Palantir stock have doubled in value since Trump’s re-election.

      Both the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security have expanded their contracts with Palantir for data aggregation, data mining, algorithmic profiling, predictive “pre-crime” policing and preemptive war, and automated decision-making.

      But is Palantir just doing more of what it has been doing since at least the first Trump presidency? Or is it (also) doing something new? We think it’s doing both.

    • The Gray Zone ☛ Israeli spyware firms are fueling the global surveillance state

    • EFF ☛ EFFector 37.9 - Featured Story: Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism

      Why the sudden about-face on privacy? One clue: These days, there are billions of dollars to be made by tech companies willing to work with police or the defense sector to trample on our civil liberties.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Senate Democrats want total audit of DOGE [sic] access to agency systems

      The Pick Up After Your DOGE [sic] Act from Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts would require the administrator of the Elon Musk-created tech collective to provide a full accounting to the U.S. comptroller general of all the agencies and IT systems that DOGE [sic] accessed. Those systems would then be subject to comprehensive performance and security audits.

      “The DOGE [sic]-boys have weaseled their way into Americans’ most sensitive data systems, claiming to hunt ‘waste, fraud, and abuse,’ while actually creating waste, fraud, and abuse. They’re destroying Americans’ trust in once-reliable government systems and could be hawking your stolen data to their friends in Big Tech and AI,” Whitehouse said in a press release. “The Pick Up After Your DOGE [sic] Act protects seniors and all Americans by fixing any bugs or backdoors that DOGE [sic] may have purposefully or negligently created in Social Security, Medicare, and other highly sensitive government data systems.”

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ [Repeat] Google Refuses to Deny UK Encryption Demands

      “When my office asked Google about backdoor demands from the U.K., the company did not answer the question, only stating that if it had received a technical capabilities notice, it would be prohibited from disclosing that fact.”

      In response to the letter, Jim Killock, Executive Director of Open Rights Group said: [...]

    • The Washington Post ☛ Wyden wants Gabbard to press the UK on encryption backdoors

      In the letter, Wyden reported that Google said it could not tell him whether the British government had demanded special “backdoor” access to users’ private data on its services. That seemed to raise the possibility that Apple, which has said it received such a demand, was not alone.

    • The Record ☛ Schools are next for Flock Safety’s automatic license place reader cameras

      "There is a pattern when schools adopt such technologies: parents aren’t consulted or asked for consent, vulnerable student populations are impacted and already limited resources are diverted without actually achieving the intended goal,” said Kristin Woelfel, policy counsel in the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Equity in Civic Technology division.

      “Schools are meant to be places of learning, not expansion points for police surveillance.”

    • 404 Media ☛ Spotify Is Forcing Users to Undergo Face Scanning to Access Explicit Content

      Spotify is requiring users in the UK to verify they’re over 18 to view "certain age restricted content," and users are reporting seeing a popup on Spotify to verify their ages following the enactment of the UK's Online Safety Act last week, which forced platforms to verify the ages of everyone who tries to access certain kinds of content deemed harmful to children.

    • Don Marti ☛ personalized advertising is an adult custom

      Cool, cool, all makes sense, I can see they’re trying to get teens to develop healthy online habits, and…hold on a minute, go back to that first one. "Showing only non-personalized ads" is a "protection" now?

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Delta’s AI-based price-gouging

      Data-brokers hold all kinds of data on you, from the "legitimate" information about everywhere your car has driven, to everywhere point in space that the Bluetooth radios on your phone and headphones have passed, to everything you've bought, to every website you've visited and every search you've performed. They also buy data that has been straight up stolen from you by spyware implanted on your phone:

      https://www.404media.co/a-startup-is-selling-data-hacked-from-peoples-computers-to-debt-collectors/

      All of this can be merged into a single file that you have no right to scrutinize, let alone redact. Biden's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau passed a rule banning all this shit, but Trump illegally killed off that rule: [...]

    • Deccan Chronicle ☛ YouTube To Use AI To Detect Viewers Under 18

      “We will use AI to interpret a variety of signals that help us to determine whether a user is over or under 18. These signals include the types of videos a user is searching for, the categories of videos they have watched, or the longevity of the account,” YouTube said in a blog post.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Tea Spilled

      R Street is a think tank that stands for “free markets and limited, effective government”, so they will not say this, but privacy legislation would help protect users from these kinds of abuses. It was probably a bad idea for Tea to be collecting so much personal information in the first place. Yet this kind of data is routinely used in some industries, and it is unrealistic to expect individuals to figured out and monitor the privacy practices of individual services. Policies that limit data collection and retention, along with public auditing or other compliance-checking methods, can allow us to be more confident and provide remedies for bad practices and misuse.

• Defence/Aggression

  • ADF ☛ Terrorists in Mozambique Use Child Abductions to Grow Ranks

    Islamic State-Mozambique is one of many terrorist groups in Africa using child abduction as a weapon of war.

  • SBS ☛ YouTube to be included in Australia's social media ban. Here's what you need to know

    Under-16s won't be allowed to have active YouTube accounts or subscribe to YouTube channels when the federal government's social media ban comes into effect.

  • India Times ☛ TikTok asks users to help police misinformation

    With a new feature, Footnotes, TikTok will let a select group of users add context and background information to some of the short videos on the app, along with links to the information's sources.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Islamic State and Al-Qaida Threat Is Intense in Africa, With Growing Risks in Syria, UN Experts Say

    The experts monitoring sanctions against the two groups said “the organization’s pivot towards parts of Africa continued" partly because of Islamic State losses in the Middle East due to counterterrorism pressures. There are also “increasing concerns about foreign terrorist fighters returning to Central Asia and Afghanistan, aiming to undermine regional security,” they said.

    The Islamic State also continues to represent “the most significant threat” to Europe and the Americas, the experts said, often by individuals radicalized via social media and encrypted messaging platforms by its Afghanistan-based Khorasan group.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Australia Widens Teen Social Media Ban To YouTube

    Since the government said last year it would exempt YouTube due to its popularity with teachers, platforms covered by the ban, such as Meta's Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, have complained

  • The Register UK ☛ Australia bans kids from signing up for YouTube accounts

    The decision, announced today by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, alters the 2024 decision to exclude YouTube from the regime that will require Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and X to use age verification technology to ensure that kids cannot sign up for accounts.

    Australia’s plan, which comes into force in December, is not to ban kids from using social media. The nation’s leaders instead want to stop social media services from tracking kids through their accounts.

  • [Old] Michael Hudson ☛ The End of Western Civilization

    As I have sought to emphasize, oligarchic control of government has been a major distinguishing feature of Western civilization ever since classical antiquity. And the key to this control has been opposition to strong government – that is, civil government strong enough to prevent a creditor oligarchy from emerging and monopolizing control of land and wealth, making itself into a hereditary aristocracy, a rentier class living off land rents, interest and monopoly privileges that reduce the population at large to austerity.

    The unipolar U.S.-centered order hoping to “end history” reflected a basic economic and political dynamic that has been a characteristic of Western civilization ever since classical Greece and Rome set off along a different track from the Near Eastern matrix in the first millennium BC.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ They tried to break Lucy Connolly, but the decent people of Britain will never desert her

    The blood-curdling savagery of the attack and the choice of target – young girls dancing to a pop singer who had been singled out for death threats that summer by Islamic State – told anyone who cared to think about it that Axel Rudakubana had spent time in Islamist chatrooms. (This has never been confirmed, but parallels with the 2017 suicide bombing of young pop fans at the Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena are undeniable.)

• Environment

  • The Nation ☛ The Great Salt Lake Is a Ticking Time Bomb

    This would spell catastrophe for Utah. The New York Times says the Great Salt Lake’s disappearance would constitute an “environmental nuclear bomb.” Water supplies would dwindle, and ecosystems would perish: from the brine shrimp in the lake to the over 10 million migratory birds that refuel in its marshes each year. Utah’s population may vanish with them.

    When Utah industrialized, mines began dumping waste into the lake, polluting it with heavy metals like arsenic. As a terminal lake, the Great Salt Lake has inlets but no outlets other than evaporation. All the metals that have ever been poured into the Great Salt Lake have accumulated in its lakebed over time, with no way out.

    Now, retreating water levels are exposing stretches of cracked, arsenic-laden lakebed. Windstorms have begun to blow across the lakebed, picking up clouds of poisonous dust. They carry it into the Wasatch Front, which houses 2.8 million of Utah’s 3.4 million residents.

  • Deseret Media ☛ Great Salt Lake drops back to a 'really bad' level, but expert sees 'silver lining' for now

    Brine shrimp viability, mineral production and recreation are all threatened when the lake falls to 4,192 feet elevation or lower. At the same time, lower elevation also exposes more of its dried lakebed, leaving communities prone to dust storms that lower air quality, the state's Great Salt Lake Strategic Plan explains.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Japan sees new record high temperature of 41.2C

    Temperatures the world over have soared in recent years as climate change creates ever more erratic weather patterns, and Japan is no exception.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Trump Proposes to Gut Clean Vehicle Standards and Wipe Out Climate Science

    “Vehicle pollution kills, and Donald Trump’s catastrophic rollback of the vehicle standards will eviscerate one of our most effective tools to tackle the nation’s top polluting industry. Trump’s short-sighted, anti-regulatory agenda will deny Americans the option to choose cleaner vehicles over inefficient gas guzzlers. In one fell swoop just months into office, Trump’s pro-polluter administration is trying to destroy the United States’s ability to fight climate change and protect our health and well-being while making us less globally competitive.

  • Wired ☛ Big Tech Asked for Looser Clean Water Act Permitting. Trump Wants to Give It to Them

    Environmental lawyers aren’t so sure that a nationwide permit for data centers, regardless of their size, would follow the intent of the Clean Water Act. “What makes [a blanket data center exemption] a little bit tricky is that the impacts are gonna differ quite a bit depending on where these are,” McElfish says. While one data center may impact just a “fraction of an acre,” he says, by rebuilding a stream crossing or filling in a wetland, other data centers in different areas of the country may have much larger impacts to local waterways during their construction.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Semafor Inc ☛ US clean energy helps prevent blackouts during heatwave

      But solar panels, batteries, and virtual power plant technology have proven to be critical in keeping up the supply of power for air conditioners, and may have saved households in New England up to $20 million on their bills. [...]

    • The Sun ☛ Urgent message sent to pilots after all outbound UK flights grounded by radar failure revealed

      The Sun can reveal cockpit crews were urgently messaged: “Please be aware that there is an ATC radar failure at Swanwick which has zero rated UK airspace as of 14.30 GMT.

    • CNN ☛ Flights at UK airports hit by major technical issue

      Inbound flights were still able to land, London’s Gatwick Airport said. Monitoring site Flightradar24 showed that no flights were taking off from UK airports at one point, though planes were later seen departing from several hubs.

      The flights were affected after an air traffic control center controlling 200,000 square miles of airspace experienced a “technical issue,” the country’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS) said in a statement. Engineers were quickly able to restore the system that was affected, it later added.

    • Futurism ☛ AI Datacenters Are Raising Nearby Residents' Electric Bills

      Serving 67 million customers, the PJM region covers just over a dozen states, including Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, as well as DC. Some of these states will see their energy bills surge by more than 20 percent this summer, Reuters reported; in Philadelphia, according to WaPo, the typical bill rose by about $17. And in Columbus, Ohio, prices spiked by $27.

      "We are seeing every region of the country experience really significant data center load growth," Abe Silverman, a researcher of energy markets at Johns Hopkins University, told WaPo. "It's putting enormous upward pressure on prices, both for transmission and for generation."

    • The Washington Post ☛ Electricity rates in Ohio and elsewhere rise due to AI and cloud computing

      This time around, though, it is possible to trace the price hikes in these cities to a specific source: the boom in data centers, those large warehouses of technology that support artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other Big Tech wonders. They consume huge amounts of electricity, and, as they proliferate, the surging demand for electricity has driven up prices for millions of people, including residential customers who may not ever use AI or cloud computing.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Power usage in Wyoming AI data center could eclipse consumption of the state's human residents by 5x — tenant of colossal investment remains a mystery

      The upcoming huge AI data center is so big that it will need its own dedicated energy production using a mix of gas and renewables. Despite this, and the positive spin from local politicians, some experts still think regular households could see their bills increase due to the AI industry's unquenchable thirst for energy.

    • Associated Press ☛ Cheyenne to host massive AI data center using more electricity than all Wyoming homes combined

      The latest data center, a joint effort between regional energy infrastructure company Tallgrass and AI data center developer Crusoe, would begin at 1.8 gigawatts of electricity and be scalable to 10 gigawatts, according to a joint company statement.

      A gigawatt can power as many as 1 million homes. But that’s more homes than Wyoming has people. The least populated state, Wyoming, has about 590,000 people.

    • The Register UK ☛ Datacenter lobby blows a fuse over EU efficiency proposals

      The Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact (CNDCP or the Pact) is made up of more than 100 bit barn operators and trade associations, and claims to account for more than 85 percent of Europe's datacenter capacity. It lists AWS, Microsoft, and Google among its signatories, as well as firms like Digital Realty, NorthC, and Vantage Data Centers.

    

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Earth Versed: 10 New Poetry Books About Our Relationship With Nature

  • Overpopulation

    • The Independent UK ☛ Migration fuels second biggest population rise in 75 years

      The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the population grew by 700,000 in the year to last June, almost entirely driven by migration.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • FAIR ☛ WSJ Ran 10 Op-Eds in One Week to Try to Take Down Mamdani

    New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani handily won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in June, despite corporate media’s best attempts to discredit and suppress his campaign. But his opponents are not giving up, and Mamdani faces three noteworthy challengers in the general election.

  • Techdirt ☛ Canada’s Bill C-2 Opens The Floodgates To U.S. Surveillance

    Bill C-2, the so-called Strong Borders Act, is a sprawling surveillance bill with multiple privacy-invasive provisions. But the thrust is clear: it’s a roadmap to aligning Canadian surveillance with U.S. demands.

    It’s also a giveaway of Canadian constitutional rights in the name of “border security.” If passed, it will shatter privacy protections that Canadians have spent decades building. This will affect anyone using Canadian internet services, including email, cloud storage, VPNs, and messaging apps.

  • The Register UK ☛ EU law for GenAI comes into force this week

    The EU's AI Act was enacted in March last year, making it the first legislation designed specifically to address the risk of artificial intelligence, including biometric categorization and manipulation of human behavior, as well as stricter rules for the introduction of GenAI.

    The legislation comes into force in stages. Later this week (August 2), a set of rules will be in place for builders of generative AI models, such as ChatGPT, meaning developers will need to evaluate models, assess and mitigate systemic risks, conduct adversarial testing, report serious incidents to the European Commission, ensure cybersecurity, and report on their energy efficiency.

  • EFF ☛ Ryanair’s CFAA Claim Against Booking.com Has Nothing To Do with Actual [Cracking]

    The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is supposed to be about attacks on computer systems. It is not, as a federal district court suggested in Ryanair v. Booking.com, applicable when someone uses valid login credentials to access information to which those credentials provide access. Now that the case is on appeal, EFF has filed an amicus brief asking the Third Circuit to clarify that this case is about violations to policy, not [cracking], and does not qualify as access “without authorization” under CFAA.

  • The Record ☛ Google Project Zero to publicly announce bugs within a week of reporting them

    Previously the team of security researchers followed the 90+30 timetable, where vendors were told about a bug and given 90 days to fix it. Then, 30 days after that patch was shipped, the full technical details about the bug were published.

    This timetable is still going to be used, according to the Project Zero announcement, but now within one week of reporting a bug the team will also publicly share that a vulnerability had been discovered to alert other companies that might be affected.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ This Is The Craziest Email I’ve Ever Received

    There’s a lot in this message that reads far-left. The anti-Israel, pro-Iran worldview. The obsession with demographics. The naked antisemitism.

    And there’s a lot in this message that reads far-right. The anti-Israel, pro-Iran worldview. The obsession with demographics. The naked antisemitism.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Meduza ☛ ‘Maybe it will distract people from rising prices’ What the Kremlin’s latest propaganda guide tells state media to say about Trump’s E.U. trade deal

      Similar messaging has also spread across pro-government Telegram channels.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • CBC ☛ Sask. author's anti-racism book is among 596 banned by U.S. Department of Defence for use in its schools

    Dill's book is one of 596 that are banned on the department's list, which was made public earlier this month by a federal judge hearing the case of E.K. v. the Department of Defence.

  • 404 Media ☛ Journalist Discovers Google Vulnerability That Allowed People to Disappear Specific Pages From Search

    Negative articles about a tech CEO vanished from Google after someone made fraudulent requests using the Refresh Outdated Content Tool.

  • Sean Monahan ☛ the anglo-american [Internet] schism - by Sean Monahan

    The [Internet] as we know it is in failure mode: [...]

  • ANF News ☛ Rights groups warn of mass executions in Iran’s prisons

    Fears are mounting that the Iranian state may be preparing to repeat the 1988 massacre in which thousands of political prisoners were executed. Human rights defenders and opposition sources report a surge in executions and warn that systematic state repression is laying the groundwork for another mass killing.

  • Ava ☛ never comply

    The current moves are a disaster for freedom of speech, artistic expression, creation of online spaces away from the big apps, and consumer rights. I hope more services just threaten to leave until the OSA is amended or taken back, and I hope more consumers refuse using a service with such unnecessary surveillance and control. It's the only way to revert and possibly prevent copycats.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ This is how Labour's new definition of Islamophobia could spectacularly backfire

    There of course remains a danger with use of the vague term “Islamophobia” to describe hatred against Muslims. It not only captures anti-Muslim hatred, but also legitimate criticism of religious doctrine. Anti-Muslim hatred, like anti-Christian hatred or anti-Hindu hatred, is more precise terminology.

    There are also serious free speech concerns with the term – the APPG definition of Islamophobia adopted by Labour, The Mayor of London and many Labour-led councils risks censoring historical truth, like the fact that Islam was spread “by the sword”.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • JURIST ☛ Russian journalist sentenced to 12 years for ties to Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation

    Judge Rafis Nabiyev of the Kirovsky District Court of Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan, sentenced Komleva under Article 282.1, part 2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, which criminalizes participation in an “extremist” organization, for associating with the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FKB). The Moscow City Court deemed the FKB an “extremist” organization in 2021. Additionally, the Court found Komleva guilty of disseminating “fakes” about the actions of the Russian armed forces under Article 207.3, part 2.

  • CPJ ☛ Kurdish journalist Omed Baroshky’s imprisonment extended by 6 months

    “The use of overlapping defamation charges and suspended sentences to keep journalists behind bars has become a dangerous pattern for press freedom in Iraqi Kurdistan,” said Doja Daoud, CPJ’s Levant program coordinator. “Omed Baroshky has already faced retaliation for his reporting. We urge Iraqi Kurdish authorities to stop criminalizing the work of opposition journalists and ensure that they can operate without fear of reprisal.”

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Alabama Public Television may drop NPR programming after federal funding cuts

    Wayne Reid, executive director of APT, said it will lose about $3.2 million, equal to about 13% of its FY24 budget, in federal funding after President Donald Trump signed a law revoking $1.1 billion for public media over the next two fiscal years. Reid said there is a possibility that APT will drop NPR programming and instead take up programming from the Public Radio Exchange (PRX) for its stations based in Huntsville.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • France24 ☛ War against captagon: Why is Saudi Arabia executing drug dealers on a massive scale?

    Those found guilty of drug trafficking face the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. Of a total of 217 executions since the start of 2025, 144 have been put to death for drug-related offences.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ DC Voted to Raise Wages. The Restaurant Lobby Said No.

    But as the push to scrap the tipped minimum wage gains momentum, it is also encountering resistance. In Washington, DC, where voters overwhelmingly passed Initiative 82 in 2022 to phase out the tipped minimum wage, under pressure from industry lobbies seeking a repeal of the new law, Mayor Muriel Bowser announced in June that the city would pause its implementation. This week, the DC city council voted to amend the law, slowing down changes and capping eventual increases of the subminimum wage, now to be implemented by 2034, at 75 percent of the full minimum wage. In Chicago, where the city council passed a One Fair Wage ordinance in 2023, a new proposal in the city council (opposed by the pro-labor mayor, Brandon Johnson) would freeze the tipped wage at 68 percent of the full minimum wage.

  • BIA Net ☛ 82nd anniversary of Sefo Stream massacre commemorated

    Eighty-two years have passed since 33 Kurdish villagers from the Saray (Serav) and Özalp (Qelqelî) districts of the eastern province of Van were detained by soldiers and executed ont he shores of Sefo Stream.

  • ANF News ☛ Iraq refuses to admit Yazidi genocide

    On the 11th anniversary of the genocide committed by ISIS in 2014, discussions, evaluations, and efforts within the Yazidi community and among the people of Shengal have intensified around building a free and democratic future. Since 2014, the Yazidi people have not only defended themselves against continued attacks but have also begun constructing their own democratic system.

  • New Yorker ☛ “No Tax on Tips” Is an Industry Plant

    Trump’s “populist” policy is backed by the National Restaurant Association—probably because it won’t stop establishments from paying servers below the minimum wage.

  • BoingBoing ☛ U.S. inches into fascism as ICE tells Texan to "shave your beard"

    No amount of explaining how he was born in College Station and had never been arrested penetrated these ICE agents — who did not have a warrant. Insisting that he looked like a violent criminal on their wanted list, they continued to interrogate him. Until, that is, he finally showed them his tattoos — which did not match those of the suspect.

  • Newsweek ☛ ICE Agents 'Tell Texas Man to Shave Beard' After Arrest Mishap

    Ponce told KHOU: "Federal agents take an hour and a half, almost two, trying to figure out who I am. You know it just doesn't make sense."

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Spotify Stock Plummets 12% Following Q2 '25 Earnings Release

    Regarding other noteworthy takeaways, Spotify has bolstered its existing $1 billion stock-buyback program; the company can now repurchase up to $1.9 billion worth of shares by April 21st, 2026.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ PlayReady DRM Leak Triggers Microsoft Takedown and Amazon Account Suspensions

    DRM is crucial for protecting premium streaming content, with Microsoft's PlayReady a leading solution used by giants including Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+. When cracks appeared in PlayReady's armor recently, Microsoft took swift action, asking GitHub to remove a series of leaked SL3000 certificates. It appears that Amazon also responded by indefinitely suspending subscribers who attempted to try out leaked credentials.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• PC Mag ☛ Opera Calls Out Microsoft for 'Anticompetitive' Tactics With Edge

  Opera files a formal complaint with a Brazilian regulator, alleging that Microsoft is discouraging Windows users from trying other browsers.