Leftovers

• The Independent UK ☛ New York state could owe $10m for [Internet] famous P’Nut the Squirrel’s execution

  On October 30, Longo claimed he was trying to get the proper licensing for Peanut to be certified as an educational animal. However, he had failed to comply with state laws that require owners to get a license for a wild animal in time.

• Nick Heer ☛ ‘Mood Machine’

  The goals of art and commerce are basically opposite. Art fills our soul; it gives us emotional life. I have rarely heard anyone describe commerce similarly.

• Joel Chrono ☛ Webrings, Clubs and Blogrolls I'm part of

  Nowadays I still keep the last two, with a simple redirect, but I have been exploring around looking for websites linking to me and sending emails for them requesting to update my web address and so.

  Because of this process, I’ve encountered websites that have added me to their blogrolls or linked me in some way, and I thought it’d be fun to share some of those. While we are at it, I have linked to some other sites that I’m a part of, from clubs, webrings, viral challenges, independent search engines and some other mentions I found.

• University of Toronto ☛ My policy of semi-transience and why I have to do it

  Some time back I read Simon Tatham's Policy of transience (via) and recognized both points of similarity and points of drastic departure between Tatham and I. Both Tatham and I use transient shell history, transient terminal and application windows (sort of for me), and don't save our (X) session state, and in general I am a 'disposable' usage pattern person. However, I depart from Tatham in that I have a permanently running browser and I normally keep my login sessions running until I reboot my desktops. But broadly I'm a 'transient' or 'disposable' person, where I mostly don't keep inactive terminal windows or programs around in case I might want them again, or even immediately re-purpose them from one use to another.

• YLE ☛ Flags fly for Moomin creator on Saturday

  Jansson, beloved worldwide for her Moomin stories, was also a celebrated painter, illustrator and cartoonist. As a Swedish-speaking Finn, she wrote in Swedish, but her tales have wandered into more than 50 languages, carrying Moominvalley far beyond Finland's borders.

  She published the first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, just after the Second World War in 1945.

• Today I Learned About “AI Sunglasses” and “AI Eyeglasses”

  We all love to joke about buzzwords like “AI” spinning out of control.

  Sometimes some of us joke about hypothetical “AI” products.

• Science

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Trump order gives politicians control over federal grants, alarming researchers

    An executive order signed by President Trump this week aims to give political appointees power over the billions of dollars in grants awarded by federal agencies.

    Scientists say it threatens to undermine the process that has helped make the U.S. the world leader in research and development.

• Career/Education

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ Talent Isn’t a Security Strategy

    One of the best parts of Black Hat is the hallway track. Catching up with friends you’ve known for years, swapping war stories, and pointing each other toward the talks worth seeing. This year I met up with a friend who, like me, has been in the security world since the nineties. We caught up in person and decided to sit in on a session about a new class of AI attacks.

  • Nebraska Examiner ☛ NU will offer tenured faculty buyout program to help close budget gaps

    This is the fourth buyout program NU has offered since 2010, the others in 2014 and 2019.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Fed One Group of People Ultraprocessed Foods and Another Group Whole Foods, and the Difference in What Happened to Them Was Wild

    And zooming in a bit, the researchers found that losses in fat mass, body fat percentage, visceral fat rating and total body water mass were "significantly lower" on the whole food diet, but not the ultraprocessed one. Participants on the processed diet also reported a greater number of "adverse events," like constipation, acid reflux, fatigue, and infections.

  • Science Alert ☛ Microplastics Are Infiltrating Your Brain. What Are The Effects?

    The effects that microplastics and even smaller nanoplastics have on human health is not yet fully understood, but researchers have been working to find out more in this relatively new field.

    The most prominent study looking at microplastics in brains was published in the journal Nature Medicine in February.

    The scientists tested brain tissue from 28 people who died in 2016 and 24 who died last year in the US state of New Mexico, finding that the amount of microplastics in the samples increased over time.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ California farmworkers still die from heat illness 20 years after law

    Cal/OSHA says it is working to improve enforcement, even as several lawmakers say that laborers continue to be exposed to brutally hot working conditions.

  • Science Alert ☛ A Nuclear Winter Could Destroy Much of The World's Food Supply

    A new study shows just how badly global food production would fare under different nuclear winter scenarios.

    Nuclear winter is a devastating climate effect theorized to follow large-scale nuclear conflict where blasts of nuclear weapons and the resulting firestorms inject huge amounts of soot and dust into the atmosphere. This would reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the surface for years at a time, in turn killing off many plants and animals – including those we rely on for food.

  • Science Alert ☛ Plastic's Impact on Health Costs $1.5 Trillion Every Year, Report Warns

    Plastic pollution is a "grave, growing and under-recognised danger" to health that is costing the world at least $1.5 trillion a year, experts warned in a report on Monday.

    The new review of the existing evidence, which was carried out by leading health researchers and doctors, was published one day ahead of fresh talks opening in Geneva aiming to seal the world's first treaty on plastic pollution.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ The inside story of the Telemessage saga

    DEF CON On Saturday at DEF CON, security boffin Micah Lee explained just how he hacked into TeleMessage, the supposedly secure messaging app used by White House officials, which in turn led to a massive database dump of their communications.

  • Security Week ☛ Free Wi-Fi Leaves Buses Vulnerable to Remote [Cracking]

    They demonstrated various scenarios, including how [attackers] could track the exact location of a bus or access the onboard camera, which is protected by easy-to-guess default passwords.

  • Wired ☛ A Misconfiguration That Haunts Corporate Streaming Platforms Could Expose Sensitive Data

    Independent researcher Farzan Karimi first realized years ago that misconfigurations in application programming interfaces, or APIs, exposed streaming content to unauthorized access. In 2020 he disclosed a set of such flaws to Vimeo that could have allowed him to access close to 2,000 internal company meetings along with other types of livestreams. The company quickly fixed the issue at the time, but the finding left Karimi with concerns that similar problems could be lurking in other platforms.

  • Politico LLC ☛ Federal court filing system hit in sweeping [breach]

    The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts — which manages the federal court filing system — first determined how serious the issue was around July 4, said the first person. But the office, along with the Justice Department and individual district courts around the country, is still trying to determine the full extent of the incident.

  • Simon Willison ☛ When a Jira Ticket Can Steal Your Secrets

    Zenity Labs describe a classic lethal trifecta attack, this time against Cursor, MCP, Jira and Zendesk. They also have a short video demonstrating the issue.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Tesla Shutting Down Its AI Supercomputer As Staff Leaves in Droves to Join Competitor

      As Bloomberg reports, the head of the project, dubbed Dojo and which CEO Elon Musk used to hype up immensely, is leaving the company. The team has already lost around 20 workers to a separate data center firm that's been poaching former Tesla executives.

      The rest of the team will reportedly be reassigned to other data center projects.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Fooled by trampoline bunnies? Why tips to spot AI videos don’t work.

      But these sleuthing tactics are rapidly becoming obsolete. Technology that can conjure people, animals and entire scenes is advancing so quickly that professionals warn it’s hard for them to tell what’s real or AI.

      “The tech has gotten so good that even the Ivy League PhDs on our team can’t tell the difference,” said Ben Colman, CEO of AI detection company Reality Defender. “And if they can’t tell the difference with their naked eyes, how can my parents or my kids ever stand a chance?”

      We must stop trying to be AI detectives. It won’t work. So now what?

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AI Alexa+ rolls out at last! … It’s not so great

      Alexa+ randomly ignores you mid-conversation and gives wrong answers about where to find its own settings.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ OpenAI announces GPT-5! Please Microsoft, don’t kill us

      But I think the main reason OpenAI did a big splash GPT-5 announcement now is because OpenAI has to keep showing momentum — especially when there isn’t any.

      OpenAI needs to keep the funding coming in. In particular, OpenAI needs to turn from a non-profit into an ordinary for-profit company by the end of the year to get the full funding from SoftBank — and Microsoft isn’t keen. A big part of the GPT-5 push is to help convince Microsoft that OpenAI is worth keeping around as a separate entity.

    • [Old] Julien Simon ☛ Why MCP’s Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices Will Burn Enterprises | by Julien Simon | Jul, 2025

      MCP advocates position the protocol as production-ready infrastructure, but its design philosophy, prioritizing ease of adoption over operational robustness, creates a ticking time bomb for enterprises. The same simplicity that enables a developer to integrate a tool in an afternoon becomes a liability when that tool handles millions of requests with real business impact.

      The AI hype cycle has accelerated adoption beyond the architectural maturity of MCP. Companies are deploying MCP not because it meets their operational requirements, but because the AI gold rush demands immediate action. This mismatch between expectations and capabilities will lead to painful production failures.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Zambian Observer ☛ “I’m Not on Social Media”: Kuda Tagwirei Disowns All Social Media Accounts

      In a statement issued by Sakunda’s Public Relations Department on his behalf, Dr Tagwirei made it clear that he currently does not have any presence on any social media platform, including X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or others.

      The statement warns that these fake accounts are being used to spread false information and, in some cases, scam unsuspecting people out of money. Members of the public have been strongly advised not to engage with or trust any pages claiming to represent him.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Embargo ransomware gang has handled at least $34 million in about a year, report says | The Record from Recorded Future News

      Like BlackCat, Embargo is a ransomware-as-a-service operation, providing affiliates with the tools they need to conduct attacks while taking a cut of any proceeds.

      Embargo, however, “retains control over core operations — including infrastructure and payment negotiations,” TRM Labs said. “This model enables threat actors to rapidly scale their operations and target a broad range of sectors and geographies.”

    • The Register UK ☛ Ex-White House cyber guru talks Microsoft security fails

      "The Chinese are so well prepared and positioned on Microsoft products that in the event of hostilities, we know for a fact that Chinese actors will target our critical infrastructure through Microsoft products for two reasons," he said. "One: [Microsoft products] are everywhere within our digital ecosystem. And two: they are so vulnerable that the Chinese familiarity of them makes it a door already open. So that's what gives me the political aneurysm here."

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Wired ☛ Private Companies Are Now Gathering Weather Data for NOAA

    If private services take the place of, rather than supplement, the agency’s core data assets, that could prove problematic, because “less data is bad,” he said. “Are we actually saving money or just giving taxpayer dollars to a private company?”

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • PC World ☛ This PC security guru fell for a scam. Here are 3 lessons from his mistake

      You can read the full details of what happened in the post, but I was most struck by the lessons to take away from Hunt’s clear account of the incident. Not just the things to watch out for, but how to set up your digital life so you’re still safe if you slip up. Let’s dig in: [...]

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • 404 Media ☛ It Looks Like a School Vape Detector. A Teen Hacker Showed It Could Become an Audio Bug

      The Halo 3C is a vape detector installed in schools and public housing. A young hacker found it contains microphones and that it can be turned into an audio bug, raising privacy concerns.

    • The Verge ☛ RFK Jr. wants a wearable on every American — that future’s not as healthy as he thinks

      Mine isn’t a unique experience. Several studies and reports have found that wearables can increase health anxiety. Anecdotally, when a friend or acquaintance gets a new wearable, I usually get one of two types of messages. The first is an obsessive recounting of their data and all the ways they monitor food intake. The other is a flurry of worried texts asking if their low HRV, heart rate, or some other metric is a sign that they’re going to die. Most of these messages come from people who have had a recent health scare, and I usually spend the next hour teaching them how to interpret their baseline data in less absolute terms. And therein lies the rub. These devices overloaded the people in my life with too much information but not enough context. How can anyone effectively “take control of their health” if they’re struggling to understand it?

    • The Register UK ☛ UK passport database images used in facial recognition scans

      Big Brother Watch says the UK government has allowed images from the country's passport and immigration databases to be made available to facial recognition systems, without informing the public or parliament.

      The group claims the passport database contains around 58 million headshots of Brits, plus a further 92 million made available from sources such as the immigration database, visa applications, and more.

    • The Register UK ☛ UK unveils plans to 'transform' the smart meter experience

      The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero plans "tough new obligations" for energy suppliers to boost the long-delayed and heavily over-budget UK rollout of smart meters, while promising better support for those who have already received such a device.

  • Confidentiality

    • Dhole Moments ☛ Improving Geographical Resilience For Distributed Open Source Teams with FREON - Dhole Moments

      In a recent blog post, I laid out the argument that, if you have securely implemented end-to-end encryption in your software, then the jurisdiction where your ciphertext is stored is almost irrelevant.

      Where jurisdiction does come into play, unfortunately, is where your software is developed and whether or not the local government will employ rubber-hose cryptanalysis to backdoor your software.

      If you’re a European, you probably already assumed this sort of attack is inevitable in America under the Trump administration.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Independent UK ☛ ‘Children like me had to carry bodies’: Japan A-bomb survivors urge world not to forget 80 years on

    Ogura’s family had moved a year earlier to the far side of a small hill just outside the city centre – a decision, made by her father to avoid air raids, that ultimately saved their lives. The hill stood between their home and the bomb’s hypocentre, shielding them from the full force of the blast.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Spanish town bans Muslim religious festivals from public spaces

    The proposal states “municipal sports facilities cannot be used for religious, cultural or social activities alien to our identity unless organised by the local authority”.

  • France24 ☛ Japan marks 80 years since atomic bombing of Nagasaki

    Thousands observed a moment of silence on Saturday to mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Nagasaki as two of the city’s cathedral bells chimed in unison for the first time since the atrocity that ended World War II – and changed the world forever.

    [...]

    Historians have debated whether the bombings ultimately saved lives by bringing an end to the conflict and averting a ground invasion.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Nagasaki warns of nuclear war on 80th A bomb anniversary

    Speaking at the ceremony, Nagasaki Mayor Shiro Suzuki said humanity faced an imminent "existential crisis," warning that the world is plagued with a "vicious cycle of confrontation and fragmentation," Japan's Kyodo News reported.

  • The Register UK ☛ Feds blame 'coding error' for deleting parts of Constitution

    It would be a simple matter to take the Library's word when it said a coding error caused the issue, but some [Internet] denizens weren't willing to accept that excuse, as all three missing bits related to one Trump controversy or another.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Futurism ☛ What Actually Happens If You Sign Up for One of Those Scammy "Online Jobs" Is Pretty Fascinating

    Deciding to see where those messages led, Sammon responded and was soon introduced to "Cathy," his "coach" who claimed, from a Los Angeles area code, to be from Enschede, the Netherlands — though strangely, she spelled it "Enksod," which wasn't even the wildest misspelling she dropped on Sammon by the end of the tale.

  • 404 Media ☛ Congress Launches Investigation into Flock After 404 Media Reporting

    Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi's office said this was “a formal investigation into Flock Group Inc. over its role in enabling invasive surveillance practices that threaten the privacy, safety, and civil liberties of women, immigrants, and other vulnerable Americans.”

• Environment

  • Deseret Media ☛ Utah has water problems now. What if the megadrought lasts another 25 years?

    The megadrought that's lasted 25 years so far could continue parching Utah and the Southwest until 2050. Or maybe even the end of the century.

    New research from the University of Texas indicates global warming may disrupt a key atmospheric pattern that brings winter precipitation to the West — and could do so for decades to come.

  • The Atlantic ☛ America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy

    The United States and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate worlds” in terms of legal understanding of climate responsibility, the human-rights attorney Lotte Leicht, who works as the advocacy director of the nonprofit Climate Rights International, told me. “I think almost nothing could have painted a starker picture,” Nikki Reisch, an attorney and the Climate and Energy Program director at the Center for International Environmental Law, agrees.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ JD Vance went kayaking for his birthday. Secret Service had the river level raised

    The U.S. Secret Service said it requested the increased waterflow for the Little Miami River, first reported by the Guardian, to ensure motorized watercraft and emergency personnel “could operate safely” while protecting the vice president, whose home is in Cincinnati.

    But critics immediately blasted the action as a sign of the vice president’s entitlement, particularly given the Trump administration’s focus on slashing government spending.

  • YLE ☛ Smoke from Canadian wildfires drifting over Finland

    In some areas, the sunset may appear more intensely red than usual, caused by smoke particles scattering the sun's rays.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Kansas Reflector ☛ Trump EPA claws back $7B in solar funding already promised to states

      “We are appalled and outraged at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) blatant and unlawful termination of $7 billion in federal funding for the 60 organizations that received awards through the Solar for All program,” the five Democratic members of Oregon’s congressional delegation wrote in a Friday letter to Zeldin and White House Budget Director Russell Vought.

      “Solar for All funding has been approved by Congress and signed into law, and cancelling or rescinding these obligated funds is a violation of the law and the Constitution.”

    • The Guardian UK ☛ OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models

      But experts who have spent the past years working to benchmark the energy and resource usage of AI models say those new powers come at a cost: a response from GPT-5 may take a significantly larger amount of energy than a response from previous versions of ChatGPT.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Futurism ☛ Torn Apart: Robot Crab Meets Terrible Fate When Its True Nature Is Discovered by Real Crabs

      Initially, the males left Dave alone, possibly because his larger claw was bigger — and therefore more likely to win the attention of females or pose a threat — than their own. At some point, however, "the females realized [the robot] was a bit odd," Wilde said, which led some of the male fiddlers to confront him.

      Unfortunately, things didn't turn out so well for the little crab robot.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Michigan Advance ☛ EU’s new AI code of practice could set regulatory standard for American companies

    American companies are split between support and criticism of a new voluntary European AI code of practice, meant to help tech companies align themselves with upcoming regulations from the European Union’s landmark AI Act.

    The voluntary code, called the General Purpose AI Code of Practice, which rolled out in July, is meant to help companies jump-start their compliance. Even non-European companies will be required to meet certain standards of transparency, safety, security and copyright compliance to operate in Europe come August 2027.

  • [Old] Bruce Schneier ☛ Security and the Internet of Things

    The scenarios I’ve outlined, both the technological and economic trends that are causing them and the political changes we need to make to start to fix them, come from my years of working in [Internet]-security technology and policy. All of this is informed by an understanding of both technology and policy. That turns out to be critical, and there aren’t enough people who understand both.

    This brings me to my final plea: We need more public-interest technologists.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Namibia and Zambia to allow citizens to travel using ID cards only

    In a landmark move to enhance regional integration, Namibia and Zambia have agreed to allow their citizens to travel between the two countries using only national identity cards, eliminating the need for passports.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Wired ☛ Truth Social’s New AI Chatbot Is Donald Trump’s Media Diet Incarnate

      Truth Social owner Trump Media & Technology Group launched the chatbot, called “Truth Search AI,” on Wednesday. The bot is powered by Perplexity AI, a search engine that answers questions using large language models and live web search. The company has garnered investments from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former Coinbase CTO and influential investor Balaji Srinivasan.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • BIA Net ☛ Court blocks access to detained journalist Fatih Altaylı's YouTube channel

    Altaylı, who was arrested on June 22 under charges of allegedly threatening the president, continues to draw significant attention despite his incarceration. According to YouTube’s ratings reports, Altaylı's channel saw a notable increase in viewership since his arrest, with a rise of 7,938,846 viewers in July compared to June. As of July, his monthly viewership reached over 28 million.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Award-Winning Violinist Placed Under House Arrest Over Navalny Donations

    Sources cited by the local news outlet Chesnok said Sorshneva, 42, had pleaded guilty to donating to the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s banned Anti-Corruption Foundation between August 2021 and February 2022.

  • The Verge ☛ What’s a smut peddler to do these days?

    To some creators, the most disheartening thing about itch.io removing thousands of pages of adult content is that it’s relatively unsurprising. The storefront is one of several in recent years that have embraced adult content only to shun it later when payment processors start asking questions. They’ve now found themselves booted from platform to platform, moving from Tumblr to Patreon to Gumroad, only to have the rug pulled out from under them each time.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Record ☛ EU law to protect journalists from spyware takes effect

    A landmark law meant to protect journalists in the European Union from spyware and other forms of surveillance came into effect Friday, but critics at press freedoms groups say the measure could ultimately prove toothless.

    EU countries have done little to “align domestic legislation with the rules outlined by the EMFA (the European Media Freedoms Act), despite having had more than one year to do so,” a coalition of press freedom groups said in a joint statement, referring to EMFA’s adoption in March 2024.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Michael Lydon, Founding 'Rolling Stone' Editor, Dead at 82

    Lydon’s articles, including an investigation into lost funds from the Monterey Pop Festival, began appearing in the magazine’s first issue

  • RFERL ☛ Kyiv Mourns Journalist Tortured Before Dying In Russian Detention

    Roshchyna, a 27-year-old freelance journalist who had previously worked with RFE/RL and other prominent Ukrainian media outlets, went missing in early August 2023. A year later, she called her family from Russian custody, the only time they heard from their daughter after her disappearance.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • TruthOut ☛ 11 Years After Invasion, Thousands of Yazidi Women and Kids Are Still Missing | Truthout

    ISIS branded them heretics — fueling the militant group’s campaign of mass killings, enslavement, and attempted extermination.

    Within days of the Sinjar takeover, thousands of Yazidis were killed; almost half were executed by shooting, beheading, or burning. The rest died from starvation, dehydration, or injuries during the ISIS siege of Mount Sinjar, where tens of thousands had sought refuge from the invasion. Nearly 7,000 Yazidis were kidnapped. Women and girls, some as young as nine, were sold into sexual slavery, while boys were indoctrinated as child soldiers.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ A brief history of the FBI

    It took a hundred years to create the Bureau as we knew it. And it took one dinner at the White House to destroy it.

  • Asha Rangappa ☛ The FBI As We Knew It is Gone

    In February, I wrote a piece for Substack called “A Battle for the Soul of the FBI.” That battle is (pretty much) over, and I’m sad to say that the FBI — at least the one we knew — lost. Weirdly, I’m writing this on the same evening that William Webster, the FBI’s third director, died at the age of 101, a little more than a century after the FBI’s first and longest-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover, was appointed to lead the agency. It is sort of a fitting marker of an end of an era, given that as I write, FBI supervisors across the country are receiving letters from current FBI Director Kash Patel informing them that they are being “summarily dismissed” in what is widely seen as an agency-wide purge of agents deemed insufficiently loyal to President Trump.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Ride-share apps have upped safety features. But women’s sexual assault claims keep coming

    Uber received reports of sexual misconduct every eight minutes from U.S. riders from 2017 through 2022, documents first reported by The New York Times revealed this week. Over six years, that totaled more than 400,000 Uber trips in the U.S. resulting in reports of sexual assault and sexual misconduct, according to the report.

    Uber’s 2022 safety report disclosed 12,522 sexual assault and misconduct reports over the same time period. The tech company addressed the large discrepancy in a statement posted on the company website Wednesday after the Times published its report.

  • The Scotsman ☛ 'Please help us': Why Scotland must hear voices of Afghan women suffering under Taliban's gender apartheid

    A tube of red lipstick is a symbol of resistance – and hope – in Afghanistan. In the country where women are denied the most basic of human rights, such as access to education, freedom of movement and free speech, many women and girls carry out hidden acts of rebellion every day.

  • The Age AU ☛ US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth reposts video featuring pastors saying women shouldn’t be allowed to vote

    The report featured a pastor from Wilson’s church advocating the repeal of women’s right to vote from the Constitution, and another pastor saying that in his ideal world, people would vote as households.

  • US Navy Times ☛ Hegseth reposts video featuring pastors against women’s voting rights

    In the post, Hegseth commented on an almost seven-minute-long report by CNN examining Doug Wilson, co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, or CREC. The report featured various pastors of the denomination advocating the repeal of women’s right to vote from the Constitution and congregants saying that women should “submit” to their husbands.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Childcare Is Not Just an Economic Fix. It’s a Social Good.

    Even strong defenders of childcare sometimes rely on the economic case that childcare programs keep workers in the labor force. While it’s not wrong, that argument misses the true role of childcare: social infrastructure that keeps families connected.

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ Selk’nam Woman Carrying Her Child on Her Back, 1923

    The Selk’nam were victims of a brutal genocide in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially during European colonization and the gold rush era. Ranchers and settlers saw them as obstacles to development and often hunted them for bounties.

    Missionaries attempted to “civilize” them by forcibly relocating survivors and assimilating them, leading to the loss of language and culture. By the mid-20th century, the Selk’nam people were functionally extinct as a distinct community.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • America Online ☛ Dial-up Internet to be discontinued - AOL Help

    AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30, 2025 this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up [Internet] connections, will be discontinued.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ South African streaming music showdown

    TechCentral’s latest analysis looks at pricing for the individual plans of five streamers: Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer and Tidal. Pricing for international markets, including the US, the UK, Germany and Kenya, are given to give a broader perspective about the cost of music streaming around the world.

  • Michigan News ☛ When is Amazon's free TV app shutting down? Service coming to an end soon

    Time is running out for users of the streaming TV service Freevee as the platform is set to be shut down soon. The free service -- which is owned by Amazon -- offers a variety of ad-supported content such as TV shows, movies and documentaries.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Google to kill Steam for Chromebook beta in 2026 — Installed games will 'no longer be available to play'

  Google has just announced that it will end its Steam for Chromebook Beta program on January 1, 2026, with devices losing access to installed games on that date. According to 9to5Google, you can still install Steam on your Chromebook through the ChromeOS Launcher, but it will show a warning saying that support for the service is ending soon.

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Millionaire on billionaire violence

  For the past year, I've been increasingly fascinated by a political mystery: how has antitrust enforcement become a global phenomenon after spending 40-years in a billionaire-induced coma?

• Patents

  • US News And World Report ☛ Exclusive-Harvard Patents Targeted by Trump Administration

    Lutnick also said the Commerce Department has begun a "march-in" process under the federal Bayh-Dole Act that could let the government take ownership of the patents or grant licenses.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Axios ☛ AI deepfakes after death could help grieving families, but some don't want it

      Why it matters: As cheap and free generative AI tools become capable of replicating voices, faces and personalities, some people are adding clauses to their wills to prevent the creation of their digital likeness after they die.

    • The Register UK ☛ Dead need right to delete their data against AI, lawyer says

      People die but their data may endure, which troubles legal scholar Victoria Haneman.

      The emergence of generative AI means a person's digital presence can be recreated and revived, even if they or their family don't want that kind of memorial.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Publishing Giants Escalate War on 'Shadow Libraries' With Broad Cloudflare Subpoena

    Major academic publishers, including Elsevier and Springer Nature, are trying to unmask the operators of several shadow libraries including Anna’s Archive, Z-Library and Libgen. They're also targeting SLUM, a third-party uptime monitor for these unofficial libraries. A DMCA subpoena, issued by a D.C. federal court, requires Cloudflare to hand over identifying user data for possible legal action.