Leftovers

• UNIXdigest ☛ How I manage my bookmarks

  So one day I decided to change the way I manage my bookmarks.

  I defined a set of goals.

• Chris Done ☛ Argumentum ad colossum

  Nevertheless I hear people slipping into this line of thinking, of the form “well, if we were at X giant corporation we would just…”, including myself, and feel like I need a catchy tongue-in-cheek name, so here it is: argumentum ad colossum.

• Proprietary

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ The Mac App Flea Market

      Oh, and these apps’ names were fascinating to look at. They were basically every spacing and casing combination of “AI”, “Chat”, and “Bot” you can image. Just look at this sampling: [...]

    • Futurism ☛ James Gunn Slams AI-Generated Batman

      As generative AI slop is threatening to turn Hollywood on its head, not everybody in the industry is enthusiastic about the tech.

    • India Times ☛ Rolling Stone, Billboard owner Penske sues Google over AI overviews

      The lawsuit by Penske Media in federal court in Washington, D.C., marks the first time a major U.S. publisher has taken Alphabet-owned Google to court over the AI-generated summaries that now appear on top of its search results.

    • India Times ☛ Google's top AI scientist reveals the most important skill people will need to stay employable in the future, and it's not coding

      Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis attended the event after discussing AI use in government services. Mitsotakis warned that the growth of large tech companies could increase global financial inequality. "Unless people actually see benefits, personal benefits, to this (AI) revolution, they will tend to become very sceptical," he said. "And if they see ... obscene wealth being created within very few companies, this is a recipe for significant social unrest."

  • Social Control Media

    • Indicator ☛ Meta ran 4,000 more ads for AI nudifiers. That may not be the worst part.

      But since the company announced its countermeasures, it has allowed thousands of new AI nudifier ads to run on Instagram and Facebook, according to new reporting from the American Sunlight Project (ASP) and Indicator.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Lund University ☛ Update: Cyberattack on our system provider Miljödata has resulted in a data breach

      Lund University’s system supplier, Miljödata AB, was subjected to a cyberattack over the weekend of 23–24 August. Miljödata provides the Adato system to Lund University. Adato is primarily used to document and manage rehabilitation cases.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Mansueto Ventures ☛ How Bitcoin ATMs Are Helping Scammers Steal Millions

      After Hardy talked to the local cops, she learned that the women were victims of a widespread crypto scam enabled by the proliferation of Bitcoin ATMs, otherwise known as BTMs. There are roughly 30,000 BTMs, mainly run by two major companies Bitcoin Depot and CoinFlip, operating in convenience stores and gas stations across the country. The Stinker Store where Hardy worked hosted a machine from Bitcoin Depot, adding a dose of newfangled finance to the stations’ usual offerings of fuel pumps and fountain sodas, but they’ve also provided a convenient conduit for financial crimes. They turn cash into untraceable digital currencies, which can be transferred to any number of cryptowallets, or perhaps cashed out at an offshore exchange.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Age gate and VPNs in Australia

      Given the wild, wild success (cough!) of age verification in the United Kingdom, the Australian government has decided to charge ahead with a similar scheme. We all know the outcomes:

      It will waste taxpayer money that could be spent on positive and productive endeavours like education

      It will leak private information, intentionally or otherwise

      [...]

      Anyone willfully or knowingly oblivious to these facts are not qualified to be discussing this, let alone enacting legislation. Harsh, but true!

    • Gregory Hammond ☛ No by default

      If you’ve decided you don’t want the company to have all this information, how can you say no?

  • Confidentiality

    • Conservative Cryptography

      There's this fantasy among politicians that it would somehow be possible to create cryptography with backdoors that only the good guys could use to catch the bad guys.

      When mathematicians and cryptographers tell them that's not possible, they disregard the science and challenge scientists to nerd harder.

      Their fantastic cryptography is such that there are good guys whom it protects but does not bind, alongside bad guys whom it binds but does not protect.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-08 [Older] EU asylum applications drop by 23% in first half of 2025

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-10 [Older] Germany: Life sentence for Solingen knife attack suspect

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-10 [Older] Germany's state-owned KfW bank linked to rights violations

  • Mike Brock ☛ We Are Falling Now

    We are falling now. Deeper and deeper. More people can feel it—the vertigo of watching institutions collapse, the nausea of systematic lies becoming official truth, the dread of violence becoming the language of political discourse. A siege mentality is taking hold across the country. People want to know: how does this end?

    The truth is, it never ends. Civilization is a process, and it has no conclusion unless we end it. That is a possibility. But nobody should act like it's inevitable.

  • France24 ☛ Nepal’s new PM says will only serve for 6 months, urges 'cooperation' after deadly protests

    Nepal’s new prime minister took office Sunday and “urged calm and cooperation to rebuild” the Himalayan nation after days of violent protests last week left at least 72 people dead and destroyed government buildings and politicians’ homes.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-08 [Older] Nepal police kill protesters in social media ban unrest

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-08 [Older] Nepal police kill several people at 'Gen Z' protest

  • NDTV ☛ Young Activists Who Toppled Nepal's Government Now Picking New Leaders

    Hami Nepal's early social media posts on Discord became so influential that they were referenced on national television.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Exclusive-Young Activists Who Toppled Nepal's Government Now Picking New Leaders

    A former DJ and his obscure Nepalese non-profit used a social media app popular with video gamers to drive massive protests and become the unlikely power brokers in installing the country's new interim leadership.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Political Violence Is Wrong. Charlie Kirk Didn’t Think So.

    The murder of Charlie Kirk was a moral travesty. We can recognize that without ignoring that he repeatedly fanned the flames of political violence himself.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Armin Ronacher ☛ What’s a Foreigner?

    Where does this leave us? The realities of international mobility leave our current categories of immigration straining and misaligned with what the population at large thinks immigration should look like. Economic anxiety, war, and political polarization are making some groups of foreigners targets, while the deeper drivers behind immigration will only keep intensifying.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-08 [Older] France updates: Government facing defeat in confidence vote

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-10 [Older] France: Prime Minister Lecornu takes office amid protests

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-10 [Older] German extremists charged with planning neo-Nazi state

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-08 [Older] Germany remembers the neo-Nazi NSU's first victim: Enver Simsek

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-08 [Older] Japan: What now after PM Ishiba's resignation?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-08 [Older] Norway vote: Labour Party expected to take narrow victory

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-08 [Older] Fact check: Israel spends vast sums on propaganda ads

    • The Telegraph UK ☛ How my face ended up on a Russian propaganda site

      She did not know it at the time, but Helen was the latest victim of journalistic identity theft by a Russian propaganda campaign run by a fugitive American police officer based in Moscow.

      It’s a bizarre, but potentially dangerously disruptive, part of the Kremlin’s propaganda war: a well-funded attempt to sway public opinion in the West by planting fabricated stories on clumsily cloned websites.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Illinois, Michigan see union membership gains after state policy changes

    Michigan repealed its “right-to-work” law in 2023, and gained 15,000 members in 2024 after years of union membership decline, the report shows. Michigan’s action was the first reversal of a state “right-to-work” law in decades, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. With the change, unionized workplaces can now require union dues or fees as a condition of employment.

    States have been active in recent years when it comes to determining the balance of bargaining rights between workers and employers.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-10 [Older] India: What can be done to make cities safe for women?

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirates 'Hide Uploads With Morse Code', RuTube 'Hides' Movies on its Front Page

    A new piracy study published in Russia has some good news, and some more good news. Due to blocking and lower payouts from advertisers, pirates' revenue fell by 14.5% in the first half of 2025. Search traffic fell too, down 13.9% with some pirates using morse code to thwart detection. With piracy on social media and hosting sites reportedly falling from 12.1% to 1.6% of piracy overall, the tactic of hiding Hollywood movies on RuTube's front page may have been overlooked.