Leftovers

• Monty Widenius 'heartbroken' at the extent of Oracle's MySQL job cuts

  Around 70 members of the team behind the open source database have been shown the door as part of Oracle's latest round of redundancies, according to one high-level source in the MySQL community.

  The Register has asked Oracle to respond and clarify its position and we'll update this article if we hear back.

  Michael "Monty" Widenius, who co-authored the original MySQL in the 1990s, posted that he was "Heartbroken to hear about the widespread layoffs at MySQL last week, and while I'm not surprised that Oracle is going in this direction with MySQL, it still saddens me that it's come to this."

• Robert Birming ☛ Choosing writing

  I used to think it was about not wanting to flood readers with all kinds of content. That’s part of it, sure, but not the main reason.

• Phil Eaton ☛ In response to a developer asking about systems

  You asked how to learn about systems. A great question! I think I need to start first with what I mean when I say systems.

  My definition of systems is all of the underlying software we developers use but are taught not to think about because they are so solid: our compilers and interpreters, our databases, our operating system, our browser, and so on. We think of them as basically not having bugs, we just count on them to be correct and fast enough so we can build the applications that really matter to users.

• John Goerzen ☛ I just want an 80×25 console, but that’s no longer possible

  That feature, of course, is the 80×25 text console.

  Linux has, for awhile now, rendered its text console using graphic modes. You can read all about it here. This has been necessary because only PCs really had the 80×25 text mode (Raspberry Pis, for instance, never did), and even they don’t have it when booted with UEFI.

• Science

  • Matt Wedel ☛ My first palaeo paper is 20 years old today!

    By 2003 I’d read enough papers to have a sense of what was good and what was not. One day (on a transatlantic flight for my day-job, if memory serves), I read one particular paper that was so obviously flawed, I thought even I could do better. So it was in my mind that writing a paper might not be an unrealistic goal. But I had no particular topic in mind, so the idea just sat quietly in the back of my mind, percolating.

• Career/Education

  • Troy Patterson ☛ Students Marking Up Digital Text

    Traditionally, this has been done by printing out the story problem on a sheet of paper (two per page), then cutting them up and passing them out to students.

    This is based on the CUBES strategy for math. However, the basics of this could be used for a variety of classes.

    Can this be done digitally?

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Here are the details of Trump's $1.2-billion call to remake UCLA in a conservative image

    A Times review of the Trump administration’s settlement proposal to UCLA lays out sweeping demands on numerous aspects of campus life.

    The government has fined UCLA nearly $1.2 billion to settle allegations of civil rights violations.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ The Peter Principle, and the unintended consequences of financial work motivation

    You’ve probably heard of the “Peter principle”: that employees get promoted until they reach a job they are no longer good at. And in political philosophy, there is a famous dispute between (the camps of) John Rawls and Jerry Cohen about the appropriateness of people in a just society being motivated by money. Last week, reading around about why on earth we organize work life the way we do, I had a eureka moment about how these two are connected.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • India Times ☛ “Drug myself to death”: Ricky Hatton spoke of pain addiction and suicidal thoughts before sudden death

  • Wales UK ☛ Ricky Hatton's friend reveals final hours as police issue statement

    "It's an unbelievably shocking piece of news because he was in a really good place," said a tearful Bunce. "He's had some troubles, Rick. I mean, he's talked about his mental health problems, he's talked about his addictions; he's addressed them, faced them and attacked them and solved them.

  • Ricky Hatton’s Ex-Girlfriend Issues Heartbreaking Statement as Cause of Death Remains Unknown

    Claire, a model who is 14 years younger than Hatton, met at a bar in Tenerife in 2023 and began a relationship. While the pair did not last, the impact Hatton left on the striking blonde die.

  • SBS ☛ Doctor 'furious' after being told to leave Virgin Australia lounge for expressing breast milk | SBS News

    Virgin Australia has apologised to a Gold Coast doctor who said she was told to leave the airline's lounge at Melbourne airport because she was allegedly making people "uncomfortable" expressing breast milk to feed her baby.

  • [Old] Newsweek ☛ Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment

    "The fact that guns are the leading killer of children and teens and more than 40,000 people are killed by guns every year in this country is not 'a prudent deal'—it's an obscene tragedy," Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, told Newsweek via email in response to Kirk's remarks. "Gun safety laws are proven to save lives and are constitutional. Any suggestion otherwise is shilling for the gun industry as they seek to maximize profits with no regard for the safety of our children."

  • Michigan News ☛ Dear Abby: People who come to work when they’re sick are not heroes

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: ``I'm on vacation so I won't be checking email'' will sound funny soon. Maybe it already does.

    Technology has made it so that: [...]

• Proprietary

  • BoingBoing ☛ Digital security nightmare: When your provider locks you out

    It's clear that I've made a mistake by trusting a single company to be my security everything. I've signed up for 1Password again. Google Authenticator is back on my phone. But given that I won't be able to do a damn thing with either of them until I have access to my Proton account again (if that's even possible), downloading this software feels like a meaningless gesture. For a fella that makes his living online, life kinda sucks right now.

  • The Register UK ☛ Starlink outage knocks tens of thousands offline worldwide

    The outage was brief. According to Downdetector.com, approximately 40,000 users reported problems early this morning before service was restored for the majority of affected customers. SpaceX, which operates Starlink, has not responded to a request for comment.

    Starlink's website reportedly acknowledged problems, but the message has since been removed.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Fixing Hallucinations Would Destroy ChatGPT, Expert Finds

      In simple terms, the creators of AI incentivize them to guess rather than admit they don't know the answer — which might be a good strategy on an exam, but is outright dangerous when giving high-stakes advice about topics like medicine or law.

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Realizes It Made a Terrible Mistake

      As a result, despite incurring astronomical expenses in their deployment, frontier AI models are still prone to making inaccurate claims when faced with a prompt they don't know the answer to.

      Whether there's a solution to the problem remains a hotly debated subject, with some experts arguing that hallucinations are intrinsic to the tech itself. In other words, large language models may be a dead end in our quest to develop AIs with a reliable grasp on factual claims.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Historian warns AI may overwrite history by missing human suffering in testimonies

      "Historical writers possess skills that AI currently lacks—especially the ability to capture human suffering," Dr. Burzlaff, a postdoctoral associate in the Jewish Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences, states. "If historical writing can be done by a machine, then it was never historical enough."

      His findings are published today in the journal Rethinking History, in a piece that analyzes Chat GPT's attempts to recapitulate recorded testimonies of Holocaust survivors made in La Paz, Kraków and Connecticut in 1995.

    • Press Gazette ☛ AI bots now represent one in 50 website visits

      In the period from April to June this year, these sites – a broad sample of publishers covering consumer lifestyle, news and special interest titles – saw a 9.4% decline in human-originated page requests versus the previous three months.

      Meanwhile, requests from AI bots increased sharply, representing one in 50 visits, up from one in 200 at the start of 2025.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Penske Media sues Google over AI summaries, claims abuse of search monopoly

      The case is specifically focused on Google’s AI summaries, a feature now appearing at the top of Google searches that summarizes answers. Penske claims the summaries repurpose its journalism without permission, divert readers away from original articles, and unlawfully exploit its content to train and power Google’s AI models while cutting into the company’s traffic and revenue.

  • Social Control Media

    • EFF ☛ Our Stop Censoring Abortion Campaign Uncovers a Social Media Censorship Crisis

      We’ve been hearing that social media platforms are censoring abortion-related content, even when no law requires them to do so. Now, we’ve got the receipts.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • YLE ☛ US citizen charged in psychotherapy centre extortion case

      Finnish prosecutors have filed charges against a US citizen over his suspected involvement in the extortion of patients at the Vastaamo psychotherapy centre.

    • The Record ☛ Uvalde school district says ransomware attack forcing closure until Thursday

      The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District serves about 5,000 students in Uvalde County as well as parts of Zavala and Real counties.

    • Dark Reading ☛ KillSec Ransomware Hits Brazil's Healthcare Sector

      The ransomware gang breached a "major element" of the healthcare technology supply chain and stole sensitive patient data, according to researchers.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ New briefing warns against restricting VPNs

      ORG’s Platform Power Programme Manager James Baker said:

      “VPNs are an important cybersecurity tool. They help businesses, politicians, journalists and members of the public protect their data and communications.”

      “Ideas such as age-gating VPNs would put teenagers using public wi-fi networks at higher risk of cybercrime, and expose their IP addresses to online predators.”

      “Younger children are unlikely to be using a VPN while teenagers may be able to find clever workarounds to any restrictions. Adults use VPNs as they have low-trust in age assurance technologies and their would likely reduce if the Government introduced higher standards of data protection and privacy for age-checks.”

    • BoingBoing ☛ Danish justice minister: we must break perception of right to private messaging

      "We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services," he writes, as translated by one source.

    • Security Week ☛ West Virginia Credit Union Notifying 187,000 People Impacted by 2023 Data Breach

      Now, two years after the fact, the credit union is notifying (PDF) its customers that the hackers stole files containing their names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, government ID numbers, financial information, medical and health insurance information, and other personal data.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Lawsuit About WhatsApp Security

      Attaullah Baig, WhatsApp’s former head of security, has filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that Facebook deliberately failed to fix a bunch of security flaws, in violation of its 2019 settlement agreement with the Federal Trade Commission.

    • Cryptography.doc OÜ ☛ Shouldn't we trust Google and other pertinent questions

      I apologize for the mildly clickbaity title. Now that you're here, let me quickly answer the question of whether we should trust Google:

      HAHA, No.

      With that issue settled, I should probably provide a little background about why anyone would possibly ask such a question in 2025.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Verge ☛ Facebook gave our data to Cambridge Analytica and all I got was this $38.36

    Remember back in 2023, when we told you how to get your cut of a $725 million class action settlement? A couple of years later, that money is going out.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Last-minute 'deal' on TikTok: Trump drops a ‘certain’ hint after US-China talks ahead of Sept 17 ban deadline

    The agenda expressly included the fate of the social media giant, for which the US is the biggest market, while a sister app owned also by Chinese company ByteDance dominates the home market.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Lawsuit Alleges that Laura Loomer Illegally Got Ghislaine Maxwell's Prosecutor Fired

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Channel 4 To Air Marathon of Trump Lies Amid UK State Visit

    Channel 4, the publicly owned broadcaster founded in 1982, announced on Monday that it will greet Trump’s visit with a televised special chronicling the many lies told by the president during the first months of his second administration. Trump v The Truth will air on September 17 and, according to a statement provided to The Hollywood Reporter, the special will likely be “the longest uninterrupted reel of untruths, falsehoods and distortions ever broadcast on television.”

    The special will catalogue over 100 of Trump’s lies and falsehoods, with “brief text-based fact-checks, offering viewers the truth behind the tweets, speeches and soundbites.”

• Environment

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Fiji's Ants Are Struggling. Scientists Say They're Part of the Broader 'Insect Apocalypse'

    The trouble for endemic Fijian ants started after humans began living on the islands roughly 3,000 years ago, the researchers report. Declines have accelerated over the past 300 years, a timeline that coincides with the arrival of Europeans, as well as the rise of modern agriculture and global trade. Non-native ants that have been introduced more recently, meanwhile, are thriving.

  • CBC ☛ The Arctic is heating up quickly, but scientists say polar geoengineering is 'unrealistic' and 'dangerous'

    Their findings were published in the journal Frontiers in Science on Monday.

    "There's a lot of false hope being created, suggesting that a little intervention will solve the problem," said co-author Martin Sommerkorn from the World Wildfire Fund.

    "There are really no shortcuts to fixing climate change.… Our research really shows that there is long-term commitment required over many, many years."

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Terence Eden ☛ How big a solar battery do I need to store *all* my home’s electricity?

      I have a modest set of solar panels on an entirely ordinary house in suburban London.

      On average they generate about 3,800kWh per year. We also use about 3,800kWh of electricity each year. Obviously, we can't use all the power produced over summer and we need to buy power in winter. So here's my question:

      How big a battery would we need in order to be completely self-sufficient?

    • Futurism ☛ Heroic Gas Station Clerk Realizes Elderly Women Are Being Scammed at the Bitcoin ATM, Unplugs It to Save Them

      "It's not super, super popular, that Bitcoin machine," Hardy told Inc, estimating that less than two dozen customers have used it for a legitimate purpose in the past year, meaning that an enormous proportion of the machine's total business is implicated in defrauding the elderly. In all, Hardy says she stopped seven [cryptocurrency] scams from happening in her store.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ The Exotic Pet Trade Harms Animals and Humans. The European Union Is Studying a Potential Solution

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Papers Please ☛ Foreigners must register and carry their papers

    The US  Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is threatening to step up enforcement of Federal laws that require each foreign citizen present in the US for more than 30 days — even as a tourist or other visa-free visitor — to register with the  US government and “at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession” the registration certificate issued by the US government.

    These laws are not new, but they have rarely been enforced. Until the creation by the DHS in March 2025 of a new registration procedure, there was no practical way for many foreigners to comply. This was especially true for Canadian citizens who can stay in the US for six months at a time without a visa and without being registered by US authorities at land border crossings.

    These laws and others like them that place foreigners under special suspicion and surveillance should be repealed, not revived. They are a threat to the freedom of foreigners in the US and, to the extent that other countries reciprocate, a threat to the freedom of US citizens traveling abroad. We shouldn’t always have to carry government-issued papers to prove who we are, whether we are in the country of our citizenship or any other. Human rights, including rights to freedom of movement, should not depend on citizenship.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Alphabet joins the $3-trillion club

  • Cyble Inc ☛ China Enforces 1-Hour Cybersecurity Incident Reporting

    Under the new rules issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China, any “particularly serious” cybersecurity incident must be reported to relevant authorities within one hour. Authorities receiving the report must, in turn, notify the National Cyberspace Administration and the State Council within 30 minutes.

  • Jonathan Riddell ☛ Adios Chicos, 25 Years of KDE

    It was the turn of the millenium when I got my first computer fresh at university. Windows seemed uninteresting, it was impossible to work out how it worked or write programs for it. SuSE Linux 6.2 was much more interesting to try and opened a world of understanding how computers worked and wanting to code on them. These were the days of the .com boom and I went to big expos in London where they showered you with freebies and IBM competed with SuSE and Red Hat for the biggest stall. IBM said that Linux had made it on the server and now was going to take over the desktop so I realised that working with KDE would be a good idea. And as a novice coder it was very perfect for learning Qt and how open development worked and I loved the free software ideals. Going to the pre-Akademy conference (it was called Kastle then) in Nove Hrady was a great intro to the community in person and in some ways I learnt more about software development in a week there then my years at uni.

  • Linuxiac ☛ Jonathan Riddell Leaves KDE After 25 Years with Mixed Emotions

    As I mentioned, Riddell’s most visible contribution came with Kubuntu, the KDE-based variant of Ubuntu. He worked to bring KDE into Ubuntu’s ecosystem, spending roughly a decade leading the distro’s development, making it probably the best Ubuntu flavor.

    Under his watch, the project was adopted by institutions such as Google, the City of Munich, and Weta Digital. After Canonical withdrew funding for Kubuntu, Riddell and others continued their work under Blue Systems, which later backed the creation of KDE neon.

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ Oracle's revenge

    But its most promising prospects lie with OpenAI. With Microsoft’s blessing, the ChatGPT maker turned to Oracle for additional compute power, first in a more modest deal last year and now with a $300 billion agreement. The new contract lifts Oracle’s backlog to $455 billion — bigger than those of Microsoft and Amazon. Analysts expect cloud to generate more than half of Oracle’s revenue by 2029.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • US News And World Report ☛ US Says China Spreads 'False' World War Two Narratives to Pressure Taiwan

      China is intentionally mischaracterising World War Two-era documents to put pressure on, and isolate, Taiwan, as those accords made no determination of the island's ultimate political status, the de facto U.S. embassy in Taipei said.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Pussy Riot Members Sentenced to 13 Years in Prison in Absentia

    Through the band’s legal representatives, the five Pussy Riot members rejected the charges, claiming the trial and sentences are politically motivated.

  • Techdirt ☛ The FTC’s Settlement With Aylo: This Isn’t Really About Fighting CSAM And Revenge Porn

    This is part two of a two-part series about the recent settlement between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Utah Consumer Protection Division (CPD), and Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub. The order (which has now been approved by a federal court) settled allegations that Aylo let child sex abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) such as revenge porn and rape videos run rampant on Pornhub and other adult sites under Aylo’s umbrella.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ It's not just UCLA. UC president warns of Trump push into all campuses and hospitals

    The University of California’s top leader warned Monday that the federal government’s $1.2-billion fine and sweeping proposals to remake UCLA are “minor in comparison” to what could hit the entirety of the nation’s premier university system of campuses, hospitals and clinics.

  • Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ Free Speech

    I used to write political commentary on Twitter. But we should stop doing that. Tweets are like farts in an elevator full of people. They relieve the stress, but you’re ruining everyone’s day, and just like farts gone in the wind, tweets have no lasting value. Quite the contrary, out-of-context tweets will be used in the court of public opinion, if you’re ever found guilty of blasphemy.

    Politics has a way of finding us, we all have an ideology, and if we’d like to share it, it’s best if we articulate it, to explain the reasoning behind it. Which is why, occasionally, I’ll write political commentary on this blog.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ After Charlie Kirk's slaying, workers learn the limits of free speech in and out of their jobs

    Social media prevalence enables employers to increasingly monitor and punish workers for political views expressed outside the workplace.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Press Gazette ☛ Regional daily ABCs: Print circulation down by average of 18% in H1 2025

    The 2025 figures show a faster rate of overall decline than in the same period a year a year go, when regional dailies audited by ABC were down by 17%.

    Only three regional daily newspapers in the UK now sell more than 10,000 copies per day (none of which are based in England).

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • ANF News ☛ TJK-E on the anniversary of “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” uprising: The resistance lives on

    In a statement released on the anniversary of Jina Mahsa Amini's arrest, the TJK-E honored the victims of the uprising and emphasized the ongoing significance of the movement: “Democratic change and a free life require a women's revolution.”

  • The Conversation ☛ Racism isn’t innate – here are five psychological stages that may lead to it

    Maybe other areas of psychology can provide a better explanation. Research shows a link between prejudice and poor psychological functioning, including poor relationships with insecurity and aggression. This can often be traced back to a disturbed and insecure childhood. Other research has shown a link between racism and anxiety, demonstrating that people become more prejudiced during challenging times.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ You Aren’t Allowed in These Billionaire Towns

    Welcome to the fully privatized city, where the ultrarich can do as they please — no whining from the rabble permitted.

  • [Old] Economic Policy Institute ☛ CEO Pay Continues to Rise as Typical Workers Are Paid Less

    From 1978 to 2013, CEO compensation, inflation-adjusted, increased 937 percent, a rise more than double stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 10.2 percent growth in a typical worker’s compensation over the same period.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ What’s Happening to Non-Deployment BEAD Money?

    NTIA wants some $13 billion in non-deployment BEAD funding returned. But Republican Governor Jeff Landry of Louisiana says that money actually belongs to the states.

  • Inside Towers ☛ FCC Plans Vote on Easing Wireless, Wireline Infrastructure Deployment Permitting

    The FCC will begin its September 30 meeting by considering two proposals to reform permitting rules and accelerate wireline and wireless infrastructure builds. The effort is part of the agency’s Build America Agenda. The Commission has already advanced plans to: speed the upgrade from old copper line networks to modern ones, ease access to utility poles and revamp the agency’s approach to environmental reviews, Inside Towers reported.

    One proposal is a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that seeks comments on reforms to streamline deployment of towers and other wireless infrastructure. The agency says it still hears about regulations “that inhibit the deployment, densification, and upgrading of wireless networks, resulting in an effective prohibition of 5G wireless services,” it states in the draft text.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• New York Times ☛ Nvidia Broke Antitrust Law, China Says, as Tensions With U.S. Mount

  In 2020, China approved Nvidia’s acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, a firm founded in Israel that makes computer networking equipment. On Monday, the Chinese regulator said that Nvidia had violated commitments it had made during the deal to prevent anti-competitive practices and ensure supplies to China.

• Trademarks

  • Simon Willison ☛ A quote from Poul-Henning Kamp

    We have tried to negotiatiate with Varnish Software for many months about this issue, but their IP-Lawyers still insist that Varnish Software owns the Varnish Cache name, and at most we have being offered a strictly limited, subject to their veto, permission for the FOSS project to use the “Varnish Cache” name.

  • Varnish HTTP Cache ☛ Varnish HTTP Cache

    This is as good as any excuse to take stock and make some changes so we are ready for the next 20 years.

    Open Source is not what it used to be: The EU has launched a broadside of directives against software related industries, and while they have gone to great lengths to carve out a niche for Free and Open Source Software, they have wisely not chosen to make it a “Get out of jail for free” card to slap “FOSS” sticker on something.