Leftovers

• Manton Reece ☛ One of a kind

  One week during my time at Apple, I was asked to fly out to Cupertino to help with an internal web app database project. I worked in an unused cubicle, coordinating with Carl de Cordova, one of the co-founders of WebEdge, where I worked back when webmaster was a job title. I was young and naive, so of course I thought I knew everything. The week was something of a blur, exciting. It was a time that you could build a new system in a few days that today would take months in a big company bureaucracy.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ #971226 is my colour in the web

  One thing I’ve learned is that if your skills are limited, it’s better to keep things simple than trying to be smart with it. That’s bit of an oxymoron though because it’s often harder to design something simple than something complex.

• Zach Flower ☛ Back to the Future

  This past weekend, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and take a look at the evolution of this blog’s design over the years (with a little help from the Wayback Machine). While I’ve really enjoyed the challenge of making an obsessively backwards compatible blog these last few years, the challenge (and limitations associated with it) has sort of lost its luster; so I figure it was time try something new… and old.

• Science

  • Max Bernstein ☛ Linear scan with lifetime holes

    Lifetime holes come into play because a linearized sequence of instructions is not a great proxy for storing or using metadata about a program originally stored as a graph.

• 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.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Why healthcare technology continues to treat patients like paperwork

    The consequences of this fragmentation extend beyond inconvenience: they contribute to poorer health outcomes, duplication of tests, medication errors and unnecessary healthcare costs. When providers lack a full view of a patient’s history, treatment decisions are made without the complete context, which can compromise care quality and patient safety.

  • Futurism ☛ RFK Jr. Cancels Promising Work on Cancer Vaccine

    "If the United States abandons mRNA, it will not simply be forfeiting a public health advantage. It will be ceding a strategic asset," Bright wrote. "In national security terms, mRNA is the equivalent of a missile defense system for biology. The ability to rapidly design, produce and deploy medical countermeasures is as vital to our defense as any military capability.

  • Futurism ☛ Something Extremely Scary Happens When Advanced AI Tries to Give Medical Advice to Real World Patients

    The results suggest current AI systems may be vastly over-relying on recognizing language patterns, making them inadequate for real-world clinical use.

    "It’s like having a student who aces practice tests but fails when the questions are worded differently," Bedi told PsyPost. "For now, AI should help doctors, not replace them."

    The research highlights the importance of finding new ways to evaluate the proficiency of AI models. That's especially true for an extremely high-stakes environment like a hospital.

  • Court House News ☛ To get that perfect ear of corn, weather has to cooperate. But climate change is making it dicier

    Across major corn-growing states, climate change is fueling conditions that make watching the corn grow a nail-biter for farmers. Factors like consistently high summer overnight temperatures, droughts and heavier-than-usual rains at the wrong time can all disrupt the plants’ pollination — making each full ear of corn less of a guarantee and more of a gamble.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Contributor: If tackle football isn't safe for girls, why do we let boys play?

    Critics say that flag football and other adapted sports for girls echo outmoded protective labor laws that treated women as “the weaker sex,” in effect barring them from participating in higher-status positions in public life. But too often another question goes unasked. If we know that tackle football is dangerous for girls, and now understand the human costs of playing football — how every 2.6 years of playing tackle football doubles one’s chances of developing the degenerative brain disease CTE, how playing tackle football seems to render a person more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease — why do we tolerate this game, even celebrate it, for boys?

• Proprietary

  • IT Pro ☛ Software engineers among hardest hit in latest Cisco layoffs

    More than 200 Cisco workers across the San Francisco Bay area will be cut

  • India Times ☛ TikTok layoffs hit multiple regions in latest restructuring drive

    TikTok layoffs hit multiple regions in latest restructuring drive

    TikTok has started fresh round of layoffs affecting employees in multiple regions. The layoffs are said to be part of a broader effort to streamline its global operations and focus more on core business priorities. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, internal sources the layoffs will impact operations in South and Southeast Asia. The company has not yet confirmed the exact number of employees affected but the layoffs reportedly span teams in Singapore, Los Angeles, and London, with roles in sales, marketing, and content operations among those impacted. The company notified some employees last week and others will soon receive formal communication.

  • PC World ☛ It's about time! Firefox starts testing support for progressive web apps

    One such feature? Progressive web apps! Also known as PWAs, progressive web apps are basically websites that can be installed onto your device and behave like platform-specific apps. PWAs are still technically web apps, but they can be added to your desktop and work while offline, and they’re usually cross-platform as well.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Poor Password Choices

    Look at this: McDonald’s chose the password “123456” for a major corporate system.

  • [Old] Alex Petros ☛ Who's Afraid of a Hard Page Load?

    Occasionally though, I’ll mis-time it, and click a link right as the subway is pulling out of a stop: the page fails to load, and now I’m looking at a blank screen. In that situation, I much prefer to be on a traditional website than an SPA. On a website like Wikipedia, one that uses hard links and full page loads, then there’s a decent chance that the browser can save me: the back button will usually load the cached version of the page I was just on.

    If it’s an SPA, however, in all likelihood clicking the back button will take me a different, mostly blank page, and now I’m just stuck. When the [Internet] comes back, I’ll refresh the page and hopefully land in the same place, but maybe not. In fact, my whole attitude towards a website changes if it feels like an SPA. Subconsciously, I know that I have to baby it, and only use it in the most optimal network conditions. The smoothness of a web application is an anti-indicator of its reliability and predictability as a web page.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Using an AI Browser Lets Hackers Drain Your Bank Account Just by Showing You a Public Reddit Post

      Unsurprisingly, that approach can have enormous cybersecurity implications. As privacy-focused browser company Brave noted in a blog post last week, it's alarmingly easy for bad actors to trick Perplexity's browser AI into following malicious instructions embedded in publicly available content.

      The vulnerability, known as an indirect prompt injection attack, is terrifyingly simple.

    • Futurism ☛ The AI Industry Has a Huge "Credit Card Debt" Issue

      Simmering concerns about a growing AI bubble — a word repeatedly invoked by Altman himself during the appearance — have gripped the industry, with spooked investors triggering a major tech sell-off in the wake of the CEO's remarks.

      Also fueling these fears was an MIT investigation that found a staggering 95 percent of attempts to incorporate generative AI into business so far are failing or stalling out.

    • CS Monitor ☛ AI protection in Argentina for children, and homelessness in Norway

      The ruling arose from a case in which a man had been accused of publishing such AI content.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ YouTube admits to applying AI processing “similar to what a modern smartphone does” to videos. Creators aren’t happy

      A few weeks back, YouTubers started to notice something odd about their Shorts – they looked like AI fakes. Now, YouTube has spoken up about what’s going on: an experimental machine learning to improve clarity and unblur videos.

      After creators started pointing out oddities in the quality of the short-form videos posted to YouTube Shorts compared to other platforms, a YouTube representative has finally clarified what was going on.

    • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Just Say No to AI: Infobase Wants to Talk to You About It Too

      On a side note, it was great to talk to someone from a paid database who was as appalled about the infiltration of AI into our resources as I am.

      Below is an introduction from Chambers and an invitation to talk to him. Please pass this on to you database people and school library friends.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Perplexity’s AI browser Comet can be prompt-injected by any website

      Brave is proposing vibe security. These are clowns loudly declaring that other clown is a bigger clown.

      The same day that Brave announced the Comet exploit, Guardio posted about their experiments with a pile of AI agent web browsers — Perplexity Comet, Dia, OpenAI agent mode, and Microsoft Edge Copilot mode. All of the AI agent browsers fell for basic prompt injections just in web page content, and they could all be made to spend the user’s money at fake scam web stores.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Elon Musk's AI is spilling the beans on private conversations

      Elon Musk, boy genius, has done it again. So good are the answers that come from querying his AI chatbot, Grok, that in the service of humanity, he's instructed his underlings to make hundreds of thousands of conversations with the large language model available to anyone to hunt down on Google.

    • BBC ☛ Hundreds of thousands of Grok chats exposed in Google results

      Unique links are created when Grok users press a button to share a transcript of their conversation - but as well as sharing the chat with the intended recipient, the button also appears to have made the chats searchable online.

      A Google search on Thursday revealed it had indexed nearly 300,000 Grok conversations.

      It has led one expert to describe AI chatbots as a "privacy disaster in progress".

  • Social Control Media

    • Manuel Moreale ☛ You will not believe what I just wrote

      Anyway, a post about quitting social media is what I wrote. Not very original, I know, and something I wrote about many times before, but I was catching up with the posts in my RSS reader and I stumbled on a few that were touching on various struggles related to social media, Mastodon setups, and all that stuff. And every time I read this type of post, I can help but both smile and shake my head.

      These stupid sites are so goddamn good at hooking us that countless people out there are finding it genuinely hard to quit them. Which is absolutely bonkers if you ask me. Quitting social media is seen as some monumental step, and you’d think they’re about to embark on a journey to the moon by how they talk about it.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Data I/O reports business disruptions in wake of ransomware attack

      Data I/O, an electronics manufacturer and software vendor for major automotive suppliers and tech firms, said its operations were disrupted in the wake of a ransomware attack earlier this month. The attack occurred Aug. 16, the company said in a regulatory filing Thursday.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Femte Juli ☛ Naomi Brockwell: “I Have Nothing to Hide” – The Dangerous Myth About Privacy (video)

      »When did privacy start being about having something to hide? It used to simply be about having the right to decide for ourselves who gets access to our data. But over the past decade we’ve lost that choice, and so much of our personal and sensitive information is shared without our knowledge or explicit consent.«

    • Michael Geist ☛ Privacy Lost: How the Government Deleted Bill C-11's Key Privacy Principle Just Two Months After Passing it Into Law

      The Online Streaming Act, the government controversial reform to the Broadcasting Act, continues to attract attention given an ongoing court challenge and backlash from the U.S. government. But there is another element of Bill C-11 that is deserving of attention. Due to what is likely a legislative error, the government deleted privacy safeguards that were included in the bill only two months after they were enacted. As a result, a provision stating that the Broadcasting Act “shall be construed and applied in a manner that is consistent with the right to privacy of individuals” was removed from the bill, leaving in its place two-near identical provisions related to official languages. The net effect is that with little notice (Monica Auer of FRPC spotted it), the Broadcasting Act has for the past two years included an interpretation clause that makes no sense and efforts to include privacy within in it are gone.

    • Matt Birchler ☛ Blood Oxygen comes back to the Apple Watch, with a catch

      Basically, you can once again do the measurement on the watch itself, but you can't see the result on your watch, you need to open the Health app on your iPhone to see it. [...]

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ More UK news publishers are adopting 'consent or pay' advertising model

      This seems bad. Sixteen of the largest news websites in the UK are now charging users if they want to reject cookies.

• Defence/Aggression

  • RFERL ☛ US Army Colonel: In Ukraine, 'We're On The Cusp Of A Revolution In Warfare'

    Frank Sobchak, a retired US Army colonel and professor at the US Naval War College, says that the use of drones in the Ukraine war has created a stalemate reminiscent of World War I.

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ How Russia targets, detains and kills Ukrainian officials in occupied regions

    Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Russian forces have abducted or unlawfully detained around 133 Ukrainian officials, the majority from Kherson Oblast, according to Borys Petruniok, an analyst at the Zmina Human Rights Center. At least six remain in captivity to this day.

  • The Atlantic ☛ What Many Parents Miss About the Phones-in-Schools Debate

    These messages and dozens more like them could have been avoided had my daughter chatted with a classmate or waited to talk with me later. But just as objects in motion stay in motion, kids who have a cellphone use it. And my daughter has very much had hers while in school, when she’s supposed to be focused on learning and engaging with the people around her.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ We Are All Lisa Cook

    I am not going to lead with a discussion of what Cook may or may not have done. That would be playing Trump’s game. Clearly, he’s just looking for a pretext to fire someone who isn’t a loyalist — and who happens, surprise, to be a black woman. If you write about politics and imagine that Trump cares about mortgage fraud — or for that matter believe anything Trump officials say about the affair without independent confirmation — you should find a different profession. Maybe you should go into agricultural field work, to help offset the labor shortages created by Trump’s deportations.

    The real story here isn’t about Cook, or mortgages. It’s about the way the Trump administration is weaponizing government against political opponents, critics, or anyone it finds inconvenient.

  • Garrett M Graff ☛ America Tips Into Fascism

    The United States, just months before its 250th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism. In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here. The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed.

  • YLE ☛ Study: Many suffer from problematic use of social media, but help is hard to find

    Problematic use of social media is linked to depressive symptoms, loneliness and low self-esteem, according to a doctoral dissertation published by the University of Oulu on Monday.

    Doctoral researcher Krista Hylkilä also found that people with ADHD symptoms are predisposed to problematic use of social media.

  • The Dissenter ☛ Israeli Double-Tap Strike On Hospital Kills At Least Five Journalists In Gaza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • [Old] Lina ☛ A German ISP tampered with their DNS - specifically to sabotage my website

    The timing is more than suspicious. Right after Netzpolitik’s article exposed the CUII for blocking non-existent domains, they make it harder to track their mistakes. Coincidence? Or a move to bury future slip-ups? We can only speculate. Regardless of intent, the result is the same: less transparency and harder oversight. And that benefits the CUII, not the public.

• Environment

  • The Scotsman ☛ Water restrictions put in place as Scottish rivers at 'critically low level'

    It is the highest level of alert and means the rivers have reached a critical level after being very low for 30 or more days.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ How lidar measures the cost of climate disasters

    “They give us a lay of the land,” he says. “This is what a particular region has been like at this point in time. Now, if you have consecutive flights at a later time, you can do a ‘difference.’ Show me what it looked like. Show me what it looks like. Tell me what changed. Was something constructed? Something burned down? Did something fall down? Did vegetation grow?”

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Trail of Bits ☛ Speedrunning the New York Subway

      The coterie of curious computer coders coalescing around the inquisitor quickly classified this question as a case of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). TSP is a classical problem in computer science in which one must find the shortest route for a traveling salesman to visit each city on a map. TSP is known to be computationally intractable to solve optimally for networks even as small as the New York subway system. Therefore, everyone dismissed the problem as “impossible.”

      Except for me.

    • [Old] Larry Bank ☛ How much power does gzip save on IoT web access?

      I created a simple Arduino sketch which sends a GET request to TomsHardware RSS feed. This returns a XML file. For the first test, I request the data as uncompressed (~224K) and on the second pass, I request it as gzip compressed (~47K).

    • The Register UK ☛ Mysterious X-37B spaceplane flies again, this time carrying a quantum GPS alternative

      The US military’s Boeing-built X-37B spaceplane is in space again for its eighth mission.

      The X-37B is an uncrewed craft that, just like the USA’s retired Space Shuttle, launches on a rocket and after re-entry makes an unpowered landing on a terrestrial runway. The vehicle has engines it can use to maneuver in space, but in 2024 deliberately grazed Earth’s atmosphere by “aerobraking” to make a significant change to its orbit.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ OpenAI appoints former Coursera executive Raghav Gupta as education vertical head

    Gupta's appointment was announced by OpenAI's vice president and general manager for education Leah Belsky in New Delhi on Monday.

    OpenAI said last week it would be launching its first Indian office in India this year as it increases focus on what it is one of its key markets.

  • Futurism ☛ Meta Defector Issues Devastating Psychological Takedown of Tech CEOs

    "In Silicon Valley, far from thinking they're lucky, they think they’re hard done by, [that] they’re victims," he continued. "I couldn’t, and still can't, understand this deeply unattractive combination of machismo and self-pity."

    "It is a cultural thing," Clegg noted, citing the tech podcast-sphere and Elon Musk's onstage chainsaw stunt earlier this year, when he was still in president Donald Trump's good graces. (Clegg was, notably, was the person who led the charge to kick Trump off of Facebook in 2021 after the January 6 riots.)

    "If you’re accustomed to privilege," he said, "equality feels like oppression."

    Clegg also charged that the self-styled free-thinkers of Silicon Valley are actually "cloyingly conformist."

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia takes on new White House design chief role

    Gebbia announced that he was appointed as chief design officer in a Saturday post to X, formerly known as Twitter. That role was established by President Donald Trump via executive order last week along with a new National Design Studio and an initiative to improve digital and physical spaces called “America By Design.”

  • Michigan News ☛ Mafalda’s soup rebellion: A comic strip’s delayed revolution in English

    Welcome to “Mafalda,” the beloved comic strip by the late Argentine cartoonist Quino that’s getting a delayed introduction to English-speaking readers. “Mafalda” offered different rewards to different Spanish-speaking demographics across Latin America since its nine-year run from 1964 to 1973 and extended afterlife. Kids could laugh at the antics of the impish, inquisitive yet innocent title character and her family and friends. Adults could smile at the strip’s subversive political humor, including jabs at the Vietnam War and subtler tweaks at Argentina’s military dictatorship. Now, for the very first time, “Mafalda” is also available to English-speaking readers. Irish translator and writer Frank Wynne has rendered 240 strips into English; they are published as one volume by Elsewhere Editions.

  • Canonical ☛ 69% of organizations in Europe believe adopting open source makes them more competitive – new Linux Foundation research

    Growing concerns about trade disputes and political changes causing a sudden and disruptive loss of services and technology have led to individuals, organizations, and governments prioritizing technological autonomy. OSS is increasingly considered key to efforts to achieve digital sovereignty and reverse dependence on a small set of vendors and proprietary technologies.

    As Philippe Ensarguet, VP of Engineering at Orange, and Board Member at Linux Foundation Europe, states in the report, “the changing geopolitical landscape has underscored the importance of open source: relying solely on vendors from specific regions could pose risks, and open source offers a way to mitigate these concerns.” Open source gives everyone the opportunity to develop, modify, and control technology at its foundation.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Scam Altman and UK government minister reportedly discussed giving ChatGPT Plus to all Brits for free

    However, insiders say the potential £2b (~$2.7b) cost for the government was prohibitive.

  • IT Wire ☛ South African internet exchange chooses Nokia for infrastructure modernisation

    INX-ZA will deploy Nokia’s IP routing portfolio to offer new 400GE and expanded 100GE services to its customers across the country.

  • IT Wire ☛ Ericsson and partners launch new Swedish AI company

    Telecommunications equipment vendor Ericsson and a conglomerate of high profile Swedish companies have launched a Sweden-focused advanced AI company under the name Sferical AI.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Futurism ☛ Local Restaurant Exhausted as Google AI Keeps Telling Customers About Daily Specials That Don't Exist

      "Please do not use Google AI to find out our specials. Please go on our Facebook page or our website," the restaurant wrote in a weary Facebook post. "Google AI is not accurate and is telling people specials that do not exist which is causing angry customers yelling at our employees."

      "We cannot control what Google posts or says," the post added, "and we will not honor the Google AI specials."

    • Gray Local Media ☛ ‘Please do not use Google AI to find out our specials, ’ Wentzville restaurant asks patrons

      Eva Gannon, part of the family that owns the restaurant, said the issue was that customers had been learning about deals or offers at Stefanina’s that weren’t available.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • CBC ☛ Trump signs order banning flag-burning — a right protected by the U.S. Constitution

    U.S. Supreme Court has ruled 1st Amendment protects flag-burning as legitimate political expression

  • Citizen Lab ☛ The Citizen Lab’s Submission on Transnational Repression in the UK - The Citizen Lab

    In response to increasing accounts of foreign governments reaching across borders to harass and silence people in the United Kingdom, the UK’s Joint Committee on Human Rights launched an inquiry into transnational repression.

  • UK ☛ Transnational repression in the UK

    People from countries around the world come to the UK as a place of safety from repression. However, transnational repression (TNR) risks undermining the UK’s ability to protect the human rights of its citizens and those who have sought safety within its borders.

    It is deeply concerning to hear increasing reports of foreign governments moving beyond their own national borders to persecute people in the UK. The Committee received credible evidence that a number of states have engaged in acts of transnational repression on UK soil. These actions have a serious impact on those targeted, instilling fear, limiting their freedom of expression and movement, and undermining their sense of safety.

  • Sean Conner ☛ A neat idea, but I can see this leading to the Balkanization of the Internet

    There's also the 1989 Tiananmem Square massacre, Falun Gong persecution and last but not least, that Xi Jinping looks like Winnie-the-Pooh. I was considering the idea to include such information in each post, but then in a follow-up comment to that one: [...]

  • BoingBoing ☛ UK vs 4chan: can one country's laws control the global [Internet]?

    The clash began when Ofcom, Britain's media watchdog, demanded information about how 4chan protects users from illegal content. The site's response? A firm no. "4chan has broken no laws in the United States — my client will not pay any penalty," lawyer Preston Byrne told the BBC. The site claims First Amendment protections shield it from foreign regulations.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • RFERL ☛ Iranian Nobel Laureate: Islamic Republic Has 'No Future But Collapse'

    She asserted that the Islamic republic, which has been in existence since 1979, is at “its weakest” and suffering from domestic crises, economic pressures, and regional setbacks.

    “The system has no future other than collapse,” said Ebadi.

  • El País ☛ In the heart of the Miccosukee, the Native American tribe that shut down Alligator Alcatraz

    When tourists wearing Alligator Alcatraz T-shirts walked into the Miccosukee Indian Village crafts shop in Florida last week, Troy Sanders, a 35-year-old member of the tribe who works as a museum guide, felt anger. “You have people on the side of the road selling shirts that says, ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ And they come into the store thinking there’s nothing wrong. Saying, ‘Hi,’ being nice. They have a huge detachment from what it all means to us. The Everglades [the vast swamp ecosystem west of Miami] is meant for our tribes, it protects life, it shields it. It’s not meant to detain life,” Sanders says.

  • JURIST ☛ Rights groups condemn Saudi Arabia execution of minority individual for crimes committed as a minor

    The death penalty for crimes committed by individuals under the age of 18 is explicitly prohibited under customary international law, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It is also recognized as a peremptory norm of international law from which no derogation is permitted.

  • JURIST ☛ ICE detains Kilmar Ábrego García amid ongoing litigation over wrongful deportation

    The detention occurred despite several federal court orders directing the government to ensure his presence in the US while his legal claims were resolved. His arrest has raised renewed questions about executive compliance with binding judicial orders.

    ICE’s action followed a prior illegal deportation in March, which was overturned by a court order mandating his return to the US in June. On March 24, he and his family filed a complaint in the US District Court for the District of Maryland, arguing that the deportation violated due process and the courts’ prior orders.

  • The Nation ☛ The Bravery of Kilmar Ábrego García vs. the Barbarism of Donald Trump

    Ábrego García’s “crime,” we must recall, was no crime at all. The Trump Justice Department admitted in court that it had imprisoned him and sent him to an El Salvadoran slave-labor prison due to an “administrative error.” The judge was appalled, particularly that Ábrego García—a union worker legally in the United States—was sent to be brutalized in El Salvador without due process, and the judge insisted that he be brought back to his family. That was March, and Ábrego García has been in hell ever since. Ábrego García is not suffering because of anything he did. He is suffering because the Trump regime’s autocratic outlook is defined by the idea that it cannot make any mistakes. The great leader, and by extension his slavishly loyal hacks, must be infallible. Therefore, in Ábrego García’s case, the person fired by the Justice Department was not the one who made the “administrative error” but the lawyer, Erez Reuveni, who admitted it in court. Think about it: The Trump administration fired a Justice Department attorney for not lying to a judge.

  • International Business Times ☛ Is the American Dream Dead? High Earners Say $100k 'Isn't Enough' — Now Need at Least $500k to Survive

    Once considered the benchmark of middle-class success, a $100,000 annual income is now being dismissed by many Americans as insufficient to maintain a comfortable lifestyle.

    Amid rising inflation, housing costs and stagnant wage growth, a growing number of high earners claim that even half a million dollars a year is barely enough to 'scrape by' in major cities, prompting renewed debate over the viability of the American Dream.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Cruelty Really Is the Point

    This is not law enforcement. This is psychological torture disguised as legal process, and it represents something far more sinister than immigration policy gone wrong. This is sadism as statecraft—the deliberate infliction of suffering for its own sake, wrapped in bureaucratic language and carried out by federal agents who treat human beings like cargo to be processed and shipped.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ "We'll notify next of kin if she dies."

    Mass. mom detained by ICE for 10 days over decades-old minor marijuana charge: [...]

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Enshittification, the audiobook (the Kickstarter)

    Audiobooks are hands-down the most enshittified aspect of publishing, which is why I make my own audiobooks and pre-sell them on Kickstarter, which is how I get around the fact that Amazon refuses to carry my audiobooks: [...]

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Macworld ☛ Elon Musk's xAI sues Apple and OpenAI over antitrust claims

  The case was filed in the Northern District court of Texas, Fort Worth Division, a court known for being so friendly to conservatives that some have accused it of making slanted decisions in defiance of legal precedent–it is a frequent target of “judge shopping” for conservative cases and causes.

  The 61-page filing (PDF) makes several claims against both Apple and OpenAI, accusing the companies of conspiring together to eliminate competition in the AI industry. It says that AI is “the most powerful technology humanity has ever created” and says that Apple and OpenAI’s arrangement makes it impossible for any other AI company to compete. Further, it claims that Apple has “deprioritized” other AI chatbots and “super apps” (like X) in the App Store, and dragged out the app review process for those apps.

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • Apple Inc ☛ An update on Blood Oxygen for Apple Watch in the U.S.

      Users with these models in the U.S. who currently do not have the Blood Oxygen feature will have access to the redesigned Blood Oxygen feature by updating their paired iPhone to iOS 18.6.1 and their Apple Watch to watchOS 11.6.1. Following this update, sensor data from the Blood Oxygen app on Apple Watch will be measured and calculated on the paired iPhone, and results can be viewed in the Respiratory section of the Health app. This update was enabled by a recent U.S. Customs ruling.