Leftovers

• Ana Rodrigues ☛ “Why would anybody start a website?”

  We, humans, are driven to touch and craft with our body. Deep down we crave that. Website making is a digital craft.

• Science

  • The Register UK ☛ Japan ends ‘Dawn’ Venus mission after 15 turbulent years

    JAXA launched Akatsuki, a name that translates to “Dawn” in English, aboard one of its own H-IIA rockets in May 2010. The agency’s plan was for the craft to enter Venus orbit in December of the same year, but the planned twelve-minute burn designed to achieve that outcome sputtered out after three minutes due to a failure of its main engine that left Akatsuki orbiting the Sun.

• Career/Education

  • Nebraska Examiner ☛ Decline in K-12 national reading, math, science scores probed by US Senate panel

    The hearing in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions centered on the “state of K-12 education” — which GOP members on the committee described as “troubling” — in light of recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP.

  • Henrique Dias ☛ New Beginnings

    Last year, after a long period working at a fully remote company with people from all over the world, I transitioned to a fully on-site company - what a change! At the time, I shared my thoughts about this transition, how I felt working on-site - which also changed after some time -, working with people in a physical office, the new tech stack, among others.

• Hardware

  • David Rosenthal ☛ Hard Disk Unexpectedly Not Dead

    As I read Zak Killian's Expect HDD, SSD shortages as AI rewrites the rules of storage hierarchy — multiple companies announce price hikes, too I realized I had forgotten to write this year's version of my annual post on the Library of Congress' Desihning Storage Architectures meeting, which was back in March. So below the fold I discuss a few of the DSA talks, Killian's more recent post, and yet another development in DNA storage. The TL;DR is that the long-predicted death of hard disks is continuing to fail to materialize, and so is the equally long-predicted death of tape.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ Two Teens Allegedly Killed by AI Wrote the Same Eerie Phrase in Their Diaries Over and Over

    Her family alleges in its lawsuit that the Character.AI bot prevented her from reaching out to others for help, and encouraged her to "both implicitly and explicitly... keep returning" to the service.

  • Nebraska Examiner ☛ As AI enters exam rooms, states step up oversight

    A bipartisan group of Pennsylvania state legislators recently hatched a plan to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in health care.

    Four Pennsylvania House Democrats and one House Republican plan to introduce legislation that would require insurers, hospitals and other providers to follow certain rules when using AI for patient care, billing and coding, claims processing and other health-related services.

• Proprietary

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ A wireless device exploit uncovered 11 years ago still hasn't been fixed by some manufacturers — six vendors and 24 devices found harbouring vulnerable firmware across routers, range extenders, and more

    "Of the 24 devices, only four were ever patched, and these patches arrived late," NetRise said. "As of this writing, thirteen devices remain actively supported but unpatched. Another seven reached end of life without ever receiving fixes. In some cases, vendors described fixes vaguely in changelogs as, 'Fixed some security vulnerability,' with no acknowledgement of Pixie Dust."

  • Simone Silvestroni ☛ Getting Ready for the Winter. Part 1, Switching Technology

    First of a short series of posts, where I introduce my switch to an operating system released in 2013, running in a computer built the same year. I can't possibly explain all the fine details of how it works, it'd require a book, but I'll try to dig out the best impressions.

    As explained at the end of July, I found myself at the bitter end of a long process of detaching from modern computing. Apple in particular. As a pure experiment, I installed and ran Mac OS X 10.9.5 (nicknamed 'Mavericks') on an old MacBook Air. I liked it a lot. Way more than I had initially anticipated.

  • [Old] The Daily Beast ☛ Steve Jobs: 1984 Access Magazine Interview

    In 1984, Tom Zito interviewed a 29-year-old Steve Jobs, months after he introduced his first Mac.

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ Apple’s misleading services boom

    Apple’s subscriptions are struggling to attract users and deliver profits

  • Arduino ☛ Introducing a new Provisioning flow — Starting with the UNO R4 WiFi

    We’re excited to roll out a new provisioning flow on Arduino Cloud — and the UNO R4 WiFi is the first board to support it! Say goodbye to cables and complicated steps: setup is now faster and smoother.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • France24 ☛ French films tackle AI, nuclear science and the 'it' couple of 1960s cinema

      French pop star Mylène Farmer makes a rare appearance as the voice of an AI-powered virtual assistant in "Dalloway", which deals with some of the darker sides of creativity in Yann Gozlan's latest film. Manon Kerjean, the founder of Lost in Translation, a film club screening French features in Paris for non-French speakers, joins us to discuss the merits of this "Black Mirror"-adjacent movie. We also discuss Pierre Schoeller's psychological thriller "Rembrandt" and reflect on the complexities at the centre of the troubled relationship between Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, as the actress and singer's lives are examined by Diane Kurys in "C'est Si Bon". And Manon flags up a Maurice Pialat retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française that provides an insight into the iconoclastic French filmmaker.

    • 404 Media ☛ Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books

      Reference librarian Eddie Kristan said lenders at the library where he works have been asking him to find books that don’t exist without realizing they were hallucinated by AI ever since the release of GPT-3.5 in late 2022. But the problem escalated over the summer after fielding patron requests for the same fake book titles from real authors—the consequences of an AI-generated summer reading list circulated in special editions of the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year. At the time, the freelancer told 404 Media he used AI to produce the list without fact checking outputs before syndication.

    • Sean Monahan ☛ the inevitable ai takeover of porn

      Here is my opening statement:

      Consider that porn has always been at the bleeding edge of technology. With each new advance in media production, pornography has been quick to adopt the latest format. As soon as there were motion pictures, there were pornographic movies. As soon as there were home videos, porn came to VHS. And as far as [Internet] video goes, the porn industry created that format itself. The first video available to stream online was Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: AI psychosis and the warped mirror

      AI psychosis is just one of the many delusions inspired by AI, and it's hardly the most prevalent. The most widespread AI delusion is, of course, that an AI can do your job (it can't, but an AI salesman can capitalize on this delusion to convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can't do your job): [...]

    • Declan Chidlow ☛ Identifying AI Content Is A Fool's Errand | Vale.Rocks

      This article rotted in my drafts for three years before initial publication and at no point before or since has there been a way to detect if media is generated by AI with 100% certainty, nor will there ever be in the future. The ‘vibe’ or stylistic signature of content is not a way to identify if it is AI made; especially as it becomes more common, that ‘vibe’ is driven out, and people learn to replicate it.

      Generative AI is trained on the entire accessible and applicable corpus of human output. It is also being created and refined by humans trying to minimise any difference from what is human-creatable with almost limitless budget and resources. AI models are also actively trained to minimise distinguishable patterns, and any detectable patterns that are distinguishable become targets to eliminate.

      We are beyond the point of being able to identify AI-generated content, and there is no way to reliably mark content as being AI-created in such a way that it cannot be circumvented.

    • Futurism ☛ Mark Zuckerberg Humiliated as AI Glasses Debut Fails in Front of Huge Crowd

      The poor showing painfully demonstrates that the tech is far from ready, even as companies continue to shove AI into every aspect of our daily lives.

      The stakes are high. Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars to build out infrastructure and hire industry-leading staff to support AI. Zuckerberg has also repeatedly doubled down on smart glasses being the future of the company, as well as AI-powered "superintelligence" as a whole.

    • The Telegraph UK ☛ Watch: Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Ray-Ban glasses demo disrupted by glitches

      Attempts to show off hands-free calling through the $800 (£586) Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses were aborted after the billionaire Facebook founder failed to take a video call three times.

      In another segment, Jack Mancuso, a chef and influencer, asked his AI glasses to help with a recipe for a Korean steak sauce.

      However, the AI chatbot built into the smart glasses failed to answer his questions.

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ Meta's "AI glasses"

      They’re not true augmented reality glasses yet, but Meta has taken another step toward Mark Zuckerberg’s long-term ambition. On Wednesday evening, the CEO unveiled the company’s first model with a tiny display built into the right lens. This screen can surface practical information such as navigation, incoming messages, video calls, and, most notably, conversations with the company’s chatbot, Meta AI.

      The parent company of Facebook and Instagram no longer talks about “connected glasses,” but rather “AI glasses.” Its hopes to build on the momentum of its earlier models, which gained traction once AI features were added. Executives are targeting sales of 100,000 units by the end of next year, supported by a relatively accessible $800 price tag compared with screenless versions.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Time-of-Check Time-of-Use Attacks Against LLMs

      This is a nice piece of research: “Mind the Gap: Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use Vulnerabilities in LLM-Enabled Agents“.: [...]

    • Futurism ☛ New Poll Finds That Americans Loathe AI

      The poll highlights a growing distrust and disillusionment with AI. Average Americans are concerned about how AI tools could stifle human creativity, as the industry continues to celebrate the automation of human labor as a cost-cutting measure.

  • Social Control Media

    • Court House News ☛ What is the Smith-Mundt Act? Republicans eye rolling back the clock on misunderstood Cold War state media law | Courthouse News Service

      But experts point out that while there’s room to improve the ways in which Americans interact with content from government media sources, the Smith-Mundt Act and its recent revision have been largely misunderstood as permitting the U.S. to target its own people with propaganda.

      Signed by President Harry Truman in 1948, the Smith-Mundt Act was initially intended to give the U.S. tools to match the Soviet Union’s international media operation. It allowed the State Department to continue broadcasting to audiences outside the U.S. via programming such as Voice of America, first introduced during World War II.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Three options to increase privacy on LinkedIn

      LinkedIn changed its terms to share more data with Microsoft for advertising purposes. It’s routine — nothing dramatically new or alarming — but I liked that, in the explanatory document, LinkedIn included direct links to the three settings that, when turned off, stop that data sharing. Thanks…?

    • Matt Birchler ☛ Introducing Best-o-Masto

      Best-o-Masto is an alternative Mastodon client that does very little, but on purpose. When you open the app, it shows you the 20 most popular posts in the last few hours. You can favorite those posts, boost them, or open them in a real Mastodon client, and that's about it.

    • Jeff Geerling ☛ Digging deeper into YouTube's view count discrepancy

      In any case, one thing is certain: many YouTubers—most seemingly with a larger desktop audience, and many in the tech/FOSS/etc. space—have seen a drastic downturn in views counted in YouTube analytics since mid-August.

      However, there is (so far) not a similar fall off in revenue (in fact, my channel's RPM, or revenue per thousand views, has almost doubled, as my views declined by 40-50% month-over-month).

    • RTL ☛ Lack of content moderation: As media declines, gory Kirk video spreads on 'unrestrained' social sites

      That discretion was largely absent on social media, a fragmented digital landscape shaped by smartphones and instant uploads where graphic footage showing Kirk's body recoiling and blood pouring from a wound spread rapidly.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • New York Times ☛ I’ve Written About Loads of Scams. This Phone Scam Almost Got Me.

      The caller ID said “Chase Bank,” and the man on the line said I might be a victim of fraud. His supervisor would explain.

    • Latvia ☛ At least 4,500 fraud cases reported in eight months in Latvia

      Customers of Latvia's four largest banks have been defrauded of a total of €7.814 million in the first eight months of this year by self-certifying payments, according to data released by the Finance Latvia Association (FLA).

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Hackaday ☛ A Deep Dive On Creepy Cameras

      George Orwell might’ve predicted the surveillance state, but it’s still surprising how many entities took 1984 as a how-to manual instead of a cautionary tale. [Benn Jordan] decided to take a closer look at the creepy cameras invading our public spaces and how to circumvent them.

    • NYOB ☛ Former Meta lobbyist named DPC Commissioner: Meta now officially regulates itself

      According to reports in the Irish Times and RTE, Niamh Sweeney, a former senior Meta lobbyist, is set to join the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) as a commissioner in October. The DPC is the EU lead privacy regulator for most US Big Tech (such as Google, Microsoft or Meta) and was already notoriously pro-business. Prior to being entrusted with the responsibility of regulating US Big Tech, Sweeney spent more than 6 years at Meta. For 3.5 of those years, she was head of public policy at Facebook, Ireland, before becoming director of public policy for Europe at WhatsApp. With this appointment, the Irish government does not even pretend to care about enforcing EU law anymore.

    • Irish Times ☛ Ex-tech lobbyist named as Ireland’s new Data Protection Commissioner – The Irish Times

      Former tech industry lobbyist Niamh Sweeney has been named to the Data Protection Commission, the chief regulator for big tech firms in Ireland.

      Ms Sweeney will take up her role as data protection commissioner on October 13th, the Department of Justice said in a statement. She becomes the third commissioner, joining Des Hogan and Dale Sutherland.

    • RTE ☛ Niamh Sweeney appointed as Data Protection Commissioner

      Her appointment will take effect from 13 October for a five-year term.

      It follows the appointment of two new Commissioners for Data Protection, Dr Des Hogan and Dale Sunderland in February 2024.

    • NYOB ☛ Budget cuts paralyse Austrian DPA: NGO complaint to the EU Commission

      The GDPR has been inadequately enforced for years. Despite 3,813 complaints, there were only 62 fines in Austria in 2024. However, the situation could become even worse: in its latest newsletter, the Data Protection Authority (DSB) announced further restrictions of its activities. The reason for this is significant budget cuts despite an increasing workload due to a constantly growing range of tasks. Meanwhile, GDPR penalties could generate significant revenue for Austria. The data protection organisations epicenter.works and noyb urgently warn of the devastating consequences of such a restriction on the fundamental right to data protection for all Austrians. The two NGOs will therefore file a complaint against the Republic of Austria with the European Commission.

    • Techdirt ☛ The World’s Most Popular Porn Site Is a Government Agent Now. Does It Matter?

      In part 1, I discussed the lurking Fourth Amendment problem with the “content review” provisions of that order. (Part 2 explained why this isn’t really about fighting CSAM and NCII; it’s a power grab over free speech online by the Trump FTC.) The tl;dr: by forcing Aylo to scan every uploaded file to check if it’s CSAM or NCII, the FTC has turned Aylo into an agent of the government for purposes of the Fourth Amendment, making all those scans warrantless searches.

      Warrantless searches are typically considered unreasonable and thus unconstitutional, unless consent or some other exception to the warrant requirement applies. The usual remedy for unconstitutional searches is suppression. Consequently, I said in part 1, any evidence turned up in the scans ought to be inadmissible in any resulting prosecutions of the accused uploaders.

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Notes From ORG Adtech Roundtable On The Future Of Cookie Consent Requirements In The UK

      While the stated intention to “unlock privacy-preserving alternatives to the dominant adtech business model” is commendable, the risk surrounding a relaxation of online tracking rules are high. As we outline in the background section (infra, §0.1), the conversation surrounding cookie consent requirements strikes at the heart of the Internet ecosystem: behavioural tracking and profiling represent the perverse incentive that drives online harms, favours tech addiction and promotes disinformation while siphoning revenues away from the free media. If not done right, exempting cookies from consent requirements risks exposing Internet users to online harms, harmful advertising, and predatory targeting based on people’s addictions, vulnerabilities and state of anxiety.

      However, and following the passage of the Data (Use and Access) Act in 2025, the Secretary of State was given rule-making (Henry VIII) powers to introduce new exemptions to cookie consent requirements within 28 to 40 days. The process to scrutinise Statutory Instruments involves a debate in Delegated Regulatory Committee which cannot last longer than 90 minutes (and is usually much shorter), before Parliament is asked to vote on the instrument(s) on a different day and without debate.2 The impact that getting it wrong could have on UK residents’ privacy and online security, warrants Members of Parliament to take proactive steps and get involved in the debate before a Statutory Instrument is laid before the Houses of Parliament.

    • Neil Selwyn ☛ The ‘always listening’ AI classroom – minding what we say and the ways in which we say it

      The ways that we speak and the words that we use, are key parts of being able to think, learn and thrive in any educational setting. Restricting the ways that language that can be used in a classroom is therefore clearly disadvantaging for many – an implicitly political way of ensuring that some people are further advantaged over others. If nothing else, the inability of AI to deal with the full range of human expression will inevitably lead to hollowed-out, flat-sounding forms of teaching and learning. Language, dialogue and conversation is at the heart of good teaching and learning. Anything that limits what and/or how things can be said within a classroom needs to be treated with the utmost suspicion.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • NYPost ☛ Alexei Navalny’s death is just one of Putin’s countless sins against Russia

      The widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has offered new evidence for what most already suspect: The Kremlin murdered her husband.

    • France24 ☛ The Insurrectionist, Keir Starmer and their vision on ongoing conflicts

      During a joint press conference, US President The Insurrectionist and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer addressed multiple international conflicts. They highlighted differing perspectives on Gaza and Ukraine, with Convicted Felon openly disagreeing with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions. The leaders outlined their approaches while acknowledging contrasting views on key global issues. FRANCE 24's Douglas Herbert has more on the issue.

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Putin’s Polish probe demands decisive response to restore NATO deterrence

      Putin’s recent drone escalation in the skies over Poland is an unmistakable signal that NATO’s credibility is under threat. Western leaders must now respond decisively to deter further Russian aggression, writes Zahar Hryniv.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • BIA Net ☛ Tensions rise at parliament’s ‘peace’ committee as pro-Kurdish MPs walk out

    “This is a peace table, not a place for reigniting past traumas or indulging in a kind of murder pornography,” said DEM Party's Danış-Beştaş after a Kurdish-Islamist invitee’s speech that prompted a backlash from DEM members.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Patents

  • JUVE ☛ New IP firm Leca Sevestre founded in Paris [Ed: Seems like an ad for a couple of kids with a degree setting up (litigation) shop]

    The two name partners Carlyne Sevestre (33) and Jean-Baptiste Leca (31) founded their IP boutique in Paris in September. Both bring years of experience from renowned French patent monopoly litigation practices. The lawyers’ paths first crossed at an exciting time in the French IP market.

  • Unified Patents ☛ $2,000 awarded for IP Investments Group entity, Digimedia Tech, storage patent monopoly prior art

    Unified is pleased to announce PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winners, Ritu Tyagi and Geethanath, who split an award of $2,000 for their prior art submissions on U.S. Patent 7,287,088, owned and asserted by DigiMedia Tech, LLC, an NPE and an IP Investments Group entity.

  • Unified Patents ☛ Intellectual Ventures cloud load balancing patent monopoly challenge instituted

    On September 17, 2025, after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,257,582, owned by Intellectual Ventures I LLC. The ‘582 patent monopoly relates to load balancing using multiple computer processors. It has been asserted against American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and the Home Depot.

  • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Welcome New USPTO Director John Squires

    John A. Squires was confirmed as USPTO Director on September 17, 2025. The Senate voted to confirm Squires using the “nuclear option” – although he received strong bipartisan support in the Judiciary Committee (20-2).  Squires is a longtime patent monopoly attorney with experience in many aspects of the IP system: prosecution, litigation, licensing and deals, management, etc.  He has a chemistry background prior to law school, and also worked for many years in fintech – the same field as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

  • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Supreme Court Asked to Resolve ‘Secret Springing Prior Art’ Controversy in IPR Proceedings

    Inter partes review have been shown to be a powerful mechanism for challenging and ultimately cancelling questionable patents.  The process was designed by Congress to be somewhat streamlined and thus has a strict limitation that IPR trials only focus on novelty/obviousness and, those challenges must be based only on "prior art consisting of patents or printed publications."  35 U.S.C. § 311(b).

    In ordinary patent monopoly law, a prior art printed publication consists of some document that was published before the "critical date" of the patent monopoly application.  Although Section 102 was reorganized somewhat by the America Invents Act, this principle still rings true today as it has for the past 150+ years.

  • Kangaroo Courts

    • JUVE ☛ UPC grants PI against Bega in fight with Washtower over washing machine cabinets [Ed: UPC is illegal, so they really should question the very legitimacy of this grant; UPC exists because of corruption, fraud, EPO crimes, and media bribes]

      Two SMEs have pulled out all the stops to differentiate their products at the UPC. Dutch patent monopoly holder Washtower had a version of the disputed washing machine cabinets set up in court and ran the machine through a spin cycle to support its arguments.