Leftovers

• Sean Monahan ☛ new york non sequiturs

  After a long hiatus, I spent three weeks in New York. I have a love-hate relationship with the city, like many people. It’s a city of extremes. Yes, extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Apologies for stating the obvious. But also extremes in the self. Anyone who has spent some portion of their life in New York probably experienced their peak and their rock bottom in the city.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Retrocomputer cheats

  In 2023 I discussed retrocomputer authenticity, and how people in the space have differning opinions on what that is. I consider any interest in old tech to be valid, though others will tell you nothing but 100% original hardware counts. That’s the thing about hobbies: it’s up to you.

  I spend a large portion of my life buying, tinkering with, repairing, and writing about computer history, surprising to precisely none of you. But even I “cheat” in a few areas.

• Ava ☛ lost connections | ava's blog

  But looking at it now, so many people have deleted their Facebook account, no longer log in, or just lurk without posting anything. Same with other platforms. Sad how it all shifted, and how the [Internet] doesn’t lend itself well to (re)connection and care in this way anymore (or maybe, just in specific corners that many do not frequent).

• Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-15 [Older] Africa sees space as 'a means to an end'

• Career/Education

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-12 [Older] How conflict is impacting Nigeria's education system

  • Robert Birming ☛ Life without labels

    Maybe it’s an identity thing. A (false) sense of stability, of knowing who you are and where you belong on this spinning little planet of ours.

  • [Old] Eric S Raymond ☛ September that never ended

  • NL Times ☛ Most bullied children don't seek help from teachers, study finds

    The vast majority, 70 percent, of children who are bullied at school don’t tell their teacher. 30 percent don’t tell anyone at all, not even at home, according to a new study by Nico den Breejen of the education platform Wij-leren and Nathalie Hoekstra of Radboud University, AD reports.

  • The Atlantic ☛ American Higher Ed Never Figured Out Its Purpose

    About 110 miles to the east, Charles W. Eliot was also in his first semester in the fall of 1869. Recently installed as the youngest president of Harvard, Eliot was at the start of a 40-year tenure dedicated to making higher education’s training more practical, its gains more tangible. Students, he believed, needed more than culture; they needed the foundations for a career. As he’d written in The Atlantic earlier in 1869, it was the institution’s job to “convert the boy of fair abilities and intentions into an observant, judicious man,” ready to “rise rapidly through the grades of employment.” Eliot would help transform the American college into the American university in service of that vision.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Robert Birming

    This is the 108th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Robert Birming and his blog, birming.com

• Hardware

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ The Antique Phone Experience

    Also phone, any phone, is much worse than meeting up. And the best use of tech is to schedule meeting up. So if this makes be replace real life meetups with phone, that’s bad, but if it helps replace email with phone, that’s good. I guess I could hook it up to Jitsi or Signal instead of the phone net. That would require re-pairing since this model can only pair to one device at a time. (They had another model that could pair to four, but it didn’t have BT HD audio.) But even though it’s not an easy changeover I’m glad I have more than one use for this thing if I change my mind what I want to use it for.

  • CBC ☛ Nvidia invests $5 billion US in stake and chip partnership with Intel

    The stake instantly will make Nvidia one of Intel's largest shareholders, giving it roughly four per cent or more of the company after new shares are issued to complete the deal.

  • Macworld ☛ Intel and Nvidia are teaming up to make a new chipset. Should Apple be worried?

    For the server market, Intel will build custom x86 CPUs that Nvidia will use in its AI datacenter products. Nvidia already rules the AI datacenter business and if it can eke out a little more performance or efficiency with a custom CPU, that’s good, but it hardly matters to those who use Apple products.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-11 [Older] Dealing with loss: When loved ones commit suicide

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-12 [Older] How can Indian cities become safer for women?

  • EFF ☛ Companies Must Provide Accurate and Transparent Information to Users When Posts are Removed

    EFF has long warned that the DOI policy is opaque, inconsistently enforced, and prone to overreach. The policy has been critiqued by others for its opacity and propensity to disproportionately censor marginalized groups.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Have You Considered Not Polluting the Water?

    The tech industry will do anything to solve our loneliness epidemic except stop causing it in the first place.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ As AI enters exam rooms, states step up oversight

    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

  • Futurism ☛ Samsung Announces Plans to Plaster Your Smart Fridge With Digital Advertisements

    We call it a fridge, but after reading this, you may yearn for the days when they functioned as a mere icebox. Friend of the advertising industry Samsung announced that it will start plastering ads on its Family Hub™ refrigerators in the US, rendering your blank, low-tech slate of a fridge door into a fixture that would look right at home in Times Square.

  • Android Authority ☛ Samsung confirms its $1,800+ fridges will start showing you ads

    Samsung started rolling out an update to its refrigerators that brought ads to the display, whether you like it or not. The whole situation is rather surreal but not entirely unsurprising. There were some doubts that the changelog wasn’t real or that it belonged to a different product. Now, Samsung has confirmed to us that ads are indeed coming to its refrigerators.

  • Dark Reading ☛ Azure Entra ID Flaw Highlights Microsoft IAM Issues

    A critical Microsoft authentication vulnerability could have allowed a threat actor to compromise virtually every Entra ID tenant in the world.

    The elevation of privilege (EoP) vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-55241, was addressed over the summer and disclosed earlier this month; but there's no indication the flaw — which initially received a CVSS score of 9.0 but was raised to a maximum 10.0 this week — was exploited in the wild. That said, according to the researcher who discovered the flaw, the vulnerability could have been used for devastating attacks and importantly highlights a lack of security around key components of Azure's authentication stack.

  • Wired ☛ This Microsoft Entra ID Vulnerability Could Have Been Catastrophic

    A pair of flaws in Microsoft's Entra ID identity and access management system could have allowed an attacker to gain access to virtually all Azure customer accounts.

  • Kokada ☛ Things I hate about macOS

    I have a kind of love and hate relationship with my work laptop, a MacBook Pro M2 Pro (what a weird name). I love almost everything about the hardware, from the premium materials, to the amazing ProMotion screen, to one of the best speakers I have in my house (no kidding, those speakers are better than some of my dedicated Bluetooth speakers) and the best touchpad I ever used, period. But I hate macOS: after using it for work for the last 3 years I got used to its quirks, but the experience is just so... bad. I could never really point why I think so, this is why I decided to write about it.

  • University of Toronto ☛ These days, systemd can be a cause of restrictions on daemons

    (One pernicious aspect of systemd as a cause of these restrictions is that they can appear in new releases of the same distribution. If a daemon has been running happily in an older release and now has surprise issues in a new Ubuntu LTS, I don't always remember to look at its .service file.)

  • The Register UK ☛ Google pushes emergency patch for Chrome 0-day

    The vuln, tracked as CVE-2025-10585, is a type confusion flaw in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. This kind of vulnerability exists when the engine misinterprets a block of memory as one type of object when it's actually something else, and can lead to system crashes, arbitrary code execution, and when chained with other bugs, potentially a full system compromise via a malicious HTML page.

  • The Register UK ☛ Cloudflare DDoSed itself with React useEffect hook blunder

    The outage was on September 12, lasted for over an hour, and was triggered by a bug in the dashboard, which caused "repeated, unnecessary calls to the Tenant Service API," according to VP of engineering Tom Lianza. This API is part of the API request authorization logic and therefore affected other APIs.

  • OS News ☛ Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation

    And all of a sudden all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. I instantly figure out the course of events: my wife gets her new Galaxy S25, and transfers over the applications and data from her old phone. During this setup process, the option in the Samsung Gallery application to synchronise photos and videos to OneDrive is enabled without her consent and without informing her. The phone starts uploading the roughly 280GB of photos and videos from her phone to her 5GB OneDrive account, and she gets a warning notification that her OneDrive storage is a bit full.

    And now her Windows 11 PC enters the scene. Despite me knowing with 100% certainty I deleted OneDrive completely off her Windows 11 PC, some recent update or whatever must’ve reinstalled it and enabled its synchronisation feature, which in turn, right as my wife’s new phone secretly started uploading her photos and videos to OneDrive, started downloading those same photos and videos to her Windows 11’s relatively small root drive. All 280GB of them.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • GamingOnLinux ☛ Please make it stop - Google Chrome to be reimagined with AI

      A break from the usual gaming news to moan about Google for a moment, thanks to their new blog post we have a glimpse of the future of Chrome and it's AI AI AI.

    • Futurism ☛ The AI Bubble Bursting Would Actually Be Incredible for the Economy, Economist Says

      Naturally, this has led many analysts to point to an "AI spending bubble," an unprecedented misallocation of resources propping up the economy, with potentially devastating consequences waiting when the bubble "pops."

      However, there might be a bright side: one macroeconomic researcher, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says a bursting bubble might be just what we need to get things back on track.

    • Center for Economic and Policy Research ☛ Why the AI Stock Bubble Bursting Could Be Good for the Economy – CEPR

      Anyhow, the immediate impact of the collapse of the AI bubble will undoubtedly be negative, but there are reasons to still think it would be good for the economy and for most workers. This is best demonstrated by a recent analysis from Moody’s which shows that all the real spending growth over the last year has come from the top quintile of the income distribution. Everyone else has been just treading water.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Business Insider will publish AI stories — without disclosure

      Business Insider had massive layoffs in May after search engine hits went down badly. But they’d fix it — with AI!

      On Thursday afternoon, editor-in-chief Jamie Heller sent out the memo specifying precisely how to write by chatbot.

    • BIA Net ☛ Students acquitted in trial over AI-generated Erdoğan image referencing 2023 earthquakes

      Three students at Boğaziçi University have been acquitted of charges of “insulting the president” after they were prosecuted for displaying and photographing an AI-generated image of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

    • Privacy International ☛ Risks in turning AI chatbots into AI agents... and using MCP | Privacy International

      Model Context Protocol (MCP) can extend the capabilities of AI chatbots into your life, but what are the consequences for our privacy and security?

    • Pivot to AI ☛ OpenAI fights the evil scheming AI! — which doesn’t exist yet

      No, they didn’t. They’re anthropomorphising the chatbot without a licence. The bots are text completers. They don’t have intelligence, they don’t have plans or goals.

      But people project their own intelligence onto the chatbot — and if they’re paranoid AI doomsday cultists, they project AI doom onto the chatbot.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ $115 million ransomware hacker arrested over extortion attacks — Scattered Spider alumnus allegedly involved in over 120 computer network intrusions targeting 47 U.S. entities

      Jubair is alleged to have been involved in at least 120 different computer network intrusions over a three-year period, starting in 2022. The complaint, filed with the District of New Jersey, accuses Jubair of targeting 47 U.S. entities. He and the group he was a part of, Scattered Spider, were well known for utilizing social engineering techniques to gain access to corporate networks and then steal data or use ransomware attacks to blackmail and extort the businesses for profit.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Qilin Remains Top Ransomware Group As New Threats Emerge

      Qilin remained the top ransomware group in August, but two rapidly emerging competitors are threatening to shake up the threat landscape.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Qilin Ransomware Group Leads Surge, Sinobi's Rapid Rise

      In August, Qilin was the most active ransomware group for the fourth time in five months, while a new ransomware group is quickly moving up the ranks.

      Qilin’s 104 claimed victims in August were nearly double second-place Akira’s 56, but the rapid rise of Sinobi to third place has been one of the more intriguing recent developments in the ransomware landscape (chart below).

    • Bitdefender ☛ Vastaamo psychotherapy hack: US citizen charged in latest twist of notorious data breach

      28-year-old Daniel Lee Newhard, an American citizen living in Estonia, has been charged by Finnish prosecutors aiding and abetting the extortion of psychotherapy patients, who received demands for a cryptocurrency payment in exchange for their medical records not being leaked online.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Pentagon takes step toward potentially privatizing commissaries

    Commissary stores receive more than $1.4 billion annually in taxpayer dollars to cover operational costs, including salaries and other costs, which enables the stores to provide the commissary benefit at a savings to patrons.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ This Health Records Giant Is Undermining Your Privacy Rights

      Epic Systems, the largest electronic health records company in the US, is pushing users of its ubiquitous online health portal MyChart to sign away their rights to sue the company if it mishandles their sensitive information.

    • The Record ☛ Watchdog finds MrBeast improperly collected children’s data

      The Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU), a division of BBB National Programs, said Thursday that MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, violated its privacy guidelines and potentially ran afoul of the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA).

      COPPA requires that websites obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting, using or sharing personal data from children under 13.

    • New York Times ☛ Has Britain Gone Too Far With Its Digital Controls?

      British authorities have ramped up the use of facial recognition, artificial intelligence and internet regulation to address crime and other issues, stoking concerns of surveillance overreach.

    • The Verge ☛ The right to anonymity is powerful, and America is destroying it

      At the end of June, the Supreme Court torched a two-decades-old precedent protecting the right to online anonymity. It declared that requiring age verification for adult websites posed a negligible speech burden and was permissible under the First Amendment, allowing such laws to proceed in nearly half of US states, including America’s second-most-populous state, Texas. While it’s easy to get behind the idea of keeping 13-year-olds off Pornhub in theory, the decision brushed off real concerns about throwing up barriers to legal speech.

  • Confidentiality

    • Unmitigated Risk ☛ Beyond the Mathematics, Deploying Advanced Crypto Successfully

      I argue for an “outside-in” security model that prioritizes foundational defenses before investing in protection against exotic threats. The trick of course, is understanding which threats are exotic and which are impending threats. The result is a framework for rational security resource allocation that prevents expensive technology deployments from becoming elaborate security theater.

    • Andreas ☛ PureVPN IPv6 leak

      I discovered two issues while using PureVPN’s Linux clients (GUI v2.10.0, CLI v2.0.1) on Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS (kernel 6.8.0, iptables-nft)1. One affects IPv6 traffic, the other the system firewall.

    • Hindustan Times ☛ What is Anticorruption of Public Morals Act? GOP lawmakers in Michigan propose new bill to ban pornography, VPNs

      The bill would require ISPs to detect and block VPN use. Selling or promoting VPNs in Michigan would also be banned.

    • India Times ☛ Michigan VPN ban: Michigan’s new bill sparks outrage: VPNs, adult content, even Manga at risk

      Michigan may soon ban VPNs and many types of adult content for all residents. The new bill targets online privacy tools, adult manga, ASMR, AI content, and transgender depictions. Internet providers could face fines if VPNs are used. The law is still not approved, but it could affect privacy, [Internet] access, and set an example for other states.

• Defence/Aggression

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-13 [Older] US Judge Questions Deportation of West African Migrants to Ghana

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-12 [Older] Lawsuit Says US Held West African Migrants in Straitjackets for 16 Hours on Flight to Ghana

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-12 [Older] South Africa Reopens Inquest Into 1977 Death of Anti-Apartheid Leader Steve Biko

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-17 [Older] Saudi Arabia Condemns Israeli Ground Operation in Gaza City 'In Strongest Terms'

  • HRW ☛ 2025-09-17 [Older] Syria: Israel Forcibly Displaces Villagers in Occupied South

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-17 [Older] Saudi Arabia, Nuclear-Armed Pakistan Sign Mutual Defence Pact

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-13 [Older] US, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt call for Sudan truce

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-12 [Older] US, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt Propose Roadmap for Sudan Peace

  • The Local SE ☛ 2025-09-11 [Older] Swedish Migration Agency to restart processing of Syrian cases

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-11 [Older] Sharp drop in asylum applications

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-15 [Older] Sectarian Violence Risks Dividing Syria Despite Sharaa's Diplomacy

  • BIA Net ☛ 2025-09-15 [Older] PKK leader defies Turkey’s demand, urges Syrian Arabs to back Kurdish forces

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-11 [Older] Saudi Arabia to Supply Syria With 1.65 Million Barrels of Crude to Aid Civil War Recovery

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-12 [Older] ICE Officer Fatally Shoots Suspect After Being Dragged by Car Near Chicago, Officials Say

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-15 [Older] Pakistan's Security Forces Kill 31 Insurgents in Overnight Raids in Northwest, Military Says

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-16 [Older] Under U.S. Pressure, Syria and Israel Inch Toward Security Deal

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-16 [Older] China gathers allies to shape global security vision

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-17 [Older] Suspect in Custody After Driver Rams Car Into Staffed Security Gate at FBI Building in Pittsburgh

  • Vox ☛ After Jimmy Kimmel, we can see how Trump ends democracy

    I mean this literally. The specific threats that Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr made against networks, involving a little-used doctrine called “news distortion,” show how easy it is to weaponize vaguely worded statutes and the executive’s discretionary powers against the president’s enemies. Such tools can also be used to reward friends — to provide regulatory favors, like merger approvals and exemptions from tariffs — who toe a politically correct line.

  • Mike Brock ☛ You are Responsible for Democracy

    When John F. Kennedy declared “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” he grasped something essential about democratic culture that we’ve forgotten: liberty requires responsibility. If you believe in self-government, if you think people should determine their own fate rather than be managed by those who claim superior qualifications, then you have obligations that can’t be delegated to experts, politicians, or algorithms.

    This responsibility isn’t equally accessible to everyone—single parents working multiple jobs face different constraints than retired professionals with flexible schedules and financial security. But within whatever capacity you have, the obligation remains. Democracy asks what you can do, not what you can’t.

  • WNN ☛ Chernobyl shelter repairs: 'Difficult choices' lie ahead

    It has two layers of internal and external cladding around the main steel structure - about 12 metres apart - with both breached in the drone incident. The NSC was designed to allow for the eventual dismantling of the ageing makeshift shelter from 1986 and the management and containment of radioactive waste. It is also designed to withstand temperatures ranging from -43°C to +45°C, a class-three tornado, and an earthquake with a magnitude of 6 on the Richter scale but, as the meeting heard, it was not designed to withstand missile or drone strikes.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ This Place Is Not a Place of Honor

    The structure built over the remains of Chernobyl's destroyed unit 4 suffered such extensive damage in a drone strike in February that it may not be possible to restore it: [...]

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Trump declines approval of Taiwan military aid package: report

    The pair could settle the TikTok drama, after Trump repeatedly put off a ban under a law designed to force Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell its US operations for national security reasons.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Erika Kirk, Widow of Charlier Kirk, Named CEO of Turning Point USA

    The election of Erika Kirk by Turning Point USA's board comes at a time when the future of the organization and its role in turning out young voters in next year's congressional midterm elections has come under intense scrutiny since Kirk's murder

  • Wired ☛ Donald Trump Is Saying There’s a TikTok Deal. China Isn’t

    As for any details on the agreement, good luck. Specifics around the shape and scope of the deal remain largely unclear as of Friday afternoon. More importantly, there’s been no official word from the Chinese government on whether it has agreed to the terms.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Ford School hosts panel discussing the U.S. Constitution

    “A handful of us were actually talking with colleagues at other institutions across the country,” Pasek said. “It was our sense that it was really important to get more dialogue happening around key issues of what’s going on in governance at the moment. It seemed that there would be no better time to kick that off than Constitution Day and to say, ‘Let’s think about the Constitution. What is it saying and how are we measuring up?’”

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Harvard University ☛ Did U.S.-Russia talks on Ukraine make things worse?

      Things have ostensibly gotten worse since Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Trump met in Alaska last month to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine.

      Not only has Russia ramped up military attacks on Ukraine, but it has flown MiG-31 jets over Estonia and launched drone flights that breached airspace over Poland and Romania — all three are NATO countries. In fact, fighter jets from the North Atlantic alliance shot down 19 unarmed Russian drones over Poland last week.

      Russia scholars and analysts, however, view the actions as less of an anomaly and more Putin’s ongoing efforts to test NATO’s resolve and to drive a wedge between Europe and the U.S.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-12 [Older] NATO launches new mission to protect eastern flank

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-12 [Older] Germany reiterates commitment to protect NATO airspace

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-12 [Older] Germany updates: Lawmakers call for air defense investment

• Environment

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-11 [Older] Indonesia: 19 dead after flash floods

  • CBC ☛ 2025-09-16 [Older] Alberta changing industrial carbon tax program to recognize company investments in emissions reduction

  • Energy/Transportation

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-16 [Older] US to Consider New National Security Tariffs on Auto Parts

    • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-09-17 [Older] China’s Electric Vehicle Influence Expands Nearly Everywhere, Except the US and Canada

    • Reuters ☛ US opens probe into 174,000 Tesla Model Y cars over door handle failures

      The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Tuesday it had opened an investigation into about 174,000 Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab Model Y cars from the 2021 model year over reports that electronic door handles can become inoperative. NHTSA said it had received reports citing an inability to open exterior doors, including after parents exited the vehicle to remove a child or to place a child in the rear seat before starting a trip.

    • Wired ☛ How Energy-Generating Sidewalks Work

      So, back to our original question: Is it possible to collect that “wasted” energy and actually use it? Yep, that's what people-powered sidewalks do. Let’s see how it works.

    • CBC ☛ 2025-09-16 [Older] Air Canada flight attendants' union asks to cancel mediation process, sending wage issue to arbitration

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ The Monkey Puzzle Tree Faces More Threats than a Barrel of Monkeys

    • Matt Webb ☛ Filtered for bird calls and catnip (Interconnected)

      A side-effect of the pandemic:

      Without cars, mating calls travel twice the distance, and also more information can be transmitted.

  • Overpopulation

    • BoingBoing ☛ Majority of American women under 40 now childless

      The research shows that 52 percent of women aged 20-39 have not given birth as of 2024. Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at Carsey, found that while there are 4 million more women in this age group compared to 2006, 7 million fewer have become mothers. This has resulted in 11.8 million fewer babies born over the past 17 years than expected based on previous fertility rates.

    • University of New Hampshire ☛ Factors Contributing to the Demographic Cliff: More U.S. Women of Childbearing Age, but Fewer Have Given Birth | Carsey School of Public Policy

      In 2024, there were 44.2 million women aged 20–39 in the United States; 23.1 million (52 percent) have not yet given birth. Figure 1 shows that in 2024 there were 5.7 million more childless women of prime child-bearing age than would have been expected given fertility patterns prior to the Great Recession, up from 2.1 million in 2016 and 4.7 million in 2022. Had fertility patterns from just before the Great Recession continued, 4.4 million (25 percent) more women aged 20–39 would have had at least two children in 2024, and 1.3 million (15 percent) more women would have had a single child. Shifts in childbearing and in fertility patterns have resulted in 11.8 million fewer babies in the past 17 years. In 2024, there were 10 percent more women aged 20 to 39 than in 2006, but the share who had never had a child was up by 45 percent.1

• Finance

  • CBC ☛ 2025-09-11 [Older] Want a slice of the $500M bread price-fixing settlement? The claims process is now open

  • CBC ☛ 2025-09-10 [Older] Why the proposed Teck Resources merger is a big deal for B.C.

  • CBC ☛ 2025-09-09 [Older] Cenovus selling stake in WRB Refining to joint venture partner Phillips 66 for $1.9B

  • CBC ☛ 2025-09-15 [Older] Government lays out next steps in probe of unpaid work in airline industry

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2025-09-15 [Older] Welcome to Canada. Here’s Your Tuition Invoice.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-15 [Older] Critical minerals contribute to instability in Africa

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-15 [Older] Critical minerals could supercharge Africa's future

  • Net Media Europe ☛ Dell Cuts Staff In China Amidst Tensions

    is reportedly carrying out the latest in several rounds of layoffs in mainland China, amidst rising tensions with the US.

    The company is holding meetings this week with staff that it has notified of the terminations, and their last day is to be 10 October, reported Hong Kong-based newspaper The South China Morning Post, citing two people who received notices.

    The job cuts mainly affect Dell’s EMC storage division and its Client Solutions Group (CSG) in Shanghai and Xiamen.

  • Dell reportedly initiates third round of China layoffs, impacting Shanghai and Xiamen

    Dell has reportedly launched a new wave of layoffs in China, affecting departments including the EMC storage division and the Client Solution Group (CSG), primarily concentrated in Shanghai and Xiamen. The scale of the layoffs remains unknown.

  • Taiwan's high-tech supply chain faces rising pressures amid global expansion and outsourcing trends

    Taiwan's high-tech manufacturers are encountering significant challenges as they establish factories overseas, particularly due to cost pressures stemming from US President Donald Trump's Made in America policy.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-11 [Older] Angola: Students and teachers up pressure on government

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-11 [Older] Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro found guilty of attempting coup

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-11 [Older] British PM sacks ambassador to Washington over Epstein ties

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-17 [Older] Indonesia's President Picks Retired General as New Security Minister After Deadly Protests

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-17 [Older] Chile's Presidential Race Kicks off With Security and Stability Dominating Campaigns

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-15 [Older] Turkey: Thousands protest against crackdown on opposition

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-15 [Older] Turkey Court Delays Ruling on Opposition Leader Amid Political Crisis

  • BIA Net ☛ 2025-09-15 [Older] No verdict in case seeking to remove leadership of Turkey's main opposition

  • BIA Net ☛ 2025-09-16 [Older] Turkey’s NEET rate more than twice OECD average

  • The Age AU ☛ 2025-09-12 [Older] Why Mark S. Zuckerberg is suing Facebook’s parent company Meta

  • Mike Brock ☛ A Deep Dive into Democracy, Magical Thinking, and the Path Forward

    We started by examining what Vlad calls the four emotions driving Western citizenries today: feeling unsafe, betrayed, powerless, and most dangerously, that politics has become completely opaque—incomprehensible to ordinary citizens. This opacity, more than any single policy failure, drives people toward what we explored as "magical thinking"—the psychological retreat from complexity into simple narratives that promise certainty at the cost of truth.

  • The New Stack ☛ Microsoft Goes All-in on Rust for Core Infrastructure and Much More [Ed: Rust is controlled by Microsoft, C++ is not]

    The tech giant is systematically replacing C++ with Rust across Windows, Azure and critical systems like cryptographic libraries, while building AI tools to automate code translation.

  • The Record ☛ Senate confirms Sutton as Pentagon cyber policy chief

    Sutton becomes only the second individual to serve as the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, an office that was established last year after congressional frustration that DOD lacked an accountable civilian leader for its digital plans and activities.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ This console generation is freaking weird (and expensive)

    I’m not one to join the constantly complaining gamer crowd, but this is wild and absolutely worthy of a “WTF is going on, mate?”

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • FAIR ☛ ACTION ALERT: Snopes Thinks Kirk Was Kidding About Killing Gays Being ‘God’s Perfect Law’

      When readers asked Snopes, the popular urban legend–dispelling website, to look at a claim about Charlie Kirk’s take on stoning gays, the site’s headline (9/16/25) was definitive: “Charlie Kirk Didn’t Say Gay People Should Be Stoned to Death.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-11 [Older] Festival drops German orchestra over Israeli conductor

  • TruthOut ☛ 2025-09-10 [Older] Ben & Jerry’s Demands Out From Parent Firm, Citing Censorship on Social Issues

  • Project Censored ☛ 2025-09-11 [Older] The Great Nonprofit Purge

  • EFF ☛ 2025-09-15 [Older] Our Stop Censoring Abortion Campaign Uncovers a Social Media Censorship Crisis

  • Project Censored ☛ 2025-09-15 [Older] Palestine, Censorship, and the Responsibility to Reflect

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-09-17 [Older] CA Lawmakers Back Censorship Disguised as Antisemitism Prevention

  • Vox ☛ Jimmy Kimmel suspension: How the right justifies Trump’s attack on free speech

    The Trump administration is openly coercing media organizations into suppressing speech that it does not like.

  • Common Dreams ☛ The Trump administration’s chilling censorship of Jimmy Kimmel violates the First Amendment and warrants Trump’s immediate impeachment and removal

    Amid political pressure from President Donald Trump and his Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, American Broadcasting Company (ABC), a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, has pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show off the air indefinitely. Such strong-arming of a broadcasting company represents a chilling and direct violation of First Amendment protections on press freedom in the United States.

    Trump and Carr orchestrated this indefinite suspension by threatening federal action against the licenses of ABC affiliates that aired Kimmel’s program. They also leveraged the fact that Nexstar, a company that holds multiple ABC affiliates across the country, needs FCC approval to complete a $6.2 billion acquisition.

  • Truthdig ☛ With Kimmel Suspension, Trump Tightens Grip on Media - Truthdig

    Defamation lawsuits are a longstanding part of Trump’s repertoire, which he first learned at the feet of Roy Cohn, one of America’s most notorious legal bullies.

  • International Business Times ☛ 'Do It NBC!': Trump Demands Fallon and Meyers Be Fired Next After Kimmel Suspension Sparks Free Speech Row

    An unprecedented clash between the White House and late-night television erupted this week as US President Donald Trump demanded for NBC to dismiss Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, following the indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! over controversial remarks about political violence.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Goebbels Ends Careers of Five 'Aryan' Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ The First Amendment Is Under Attack. We Need to Talk.

    We are witnessing an unprecedented government-sponsored attack on Americans’ rights to free speech and a free press. Over two decades ago, I witnessed how my home country, Russia, slid back into dictatorship. Censorship is at the heart of that story.

    So I want to have a real, face-to-face conversation with you about the unprecedented threat facing First Amendment freedoms.

  • New Statesman ☛ Jimmy Kimmel won’t be the last to be silenced

    The context and the details here are critical, so it is worth revisiting what Kimmel actually said. With Tyler Robinson in custody – that is, the man suspected of assassinating right-wing activist Charlie Kirk on a university campus on 10 September – Kimmel decided to address the incident in his opening monologue. “We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the Maga gang desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said.

  • El País ☛ Trump intensifies attacks on the media and freedom of speech following Charlie Kirk’s murder

    The most famous victim of the right’s change of script is comedian Jimmy Kimmel, whose late-night show was suspended “indefinitely” on Wednesday night by ABC, the network that had aired it for 20 years. The decision followed a comment Kimmel made about the reaction of some Trump supporters after learning that the alleged murderer, a 22-year-old man named Tyler Robinson, comes from a Mormon, Republican, gun-loving household.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ For comedians around the world, the laughs often end as democracy fades

    The latest target of what critics say is a campaign to silence dissenting voices was Jimmy Kimmel, who had his late-night ABC talkshow suspended after government pressure. The removal, weeks after the rival network CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert’s satirical show, follows other Trump-led crackdowns on media and academia.

  • El País ☛ From Jon Stewart to Stephen Colbert: Late-night hosts rally around Jimmy Kimmel

    Following the indefinite suspension on Wednesday of ABC’s program after a comment Kimmel made regarding Charlie Kirk’s killer, the U.S. television community rallied around Kimmel. Numerous figures from the cultural world, as well as his colleagues and former peers in late-night television, condemned the cancellation, using strong terms like “censorship” and “criminal authoritarianism.”

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Late-Night Hosts Sound Alarm After Kimmel Suspension: 'Censorship'

    The network pulled Kimmel off the air Wednesday over the comedian’s comments about conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination during his monologue on Monday night. “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said at the time.

    While Kimmel has yet to comment on the issue, the suspension has set off a national debate over free speech and accusations that ABC and Disney, its parent company, have succumbed under pressure from the government.

  • TMZ ☛ Jon Stewart Mocks Donald Trump Following Jimmy Kimmel Suspension

    Before Stewart appears in a Trump-like outfit against a golden decor backdrop ... the show's announcer says, "From Comedy Central, it’s the all-new government-approved ‘Daily Show’ with your patriotically obedient host, Jon Stewart."

  • Variety ☛ Jimmy Kimmel Fans Protest Trump, Erosion of First Amendment Rights

    Several hundred people took part in protests Thursday after Disney and ABC opted to preempt “Jimmy Kimmel Live” indefinitely amid a MAGA media-fueled pressure campaign. Kimmel, who has long been a vocal critic of Trump, has come under fire over some of his remarks related to the Sept. 10 slaying of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

  • New Yorker ☛ The Grave Threat Posed by Donald Trump’s Attack on Jimmy Kimmel

    To talk about Kimmel’s suspension, and more broadly about authoritarian leaders and their response to comedy, I called Michael Idov, a novelist and filmmaker who ran GQ Russia between 2012 and 2014, and wrote and directed the 2019 film “The Humorist,” about a fictional comedian in the late Soviet era. (Idov’s most recent novel is “The Collaborators.”) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the similarities and differences between Trump’s and Putin’s approaches to cracking down on comedy and culture, the speed of Trump’s attack on institutions in his second term, and Russian comedy under Putin’s rule.

  • Vox ☛ Jimmy Kimmel pulled from slot: How the comedian became Trump’s nemesis

    ABC pulled late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air “indefinitely” Wednesday night following pressure from the Federal Communications Commission over comments Kimmel made on the suspect apprehended for the killing of right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Kimmel silenced, as political and corporate pressures converge

    News divisions of big entertainment firms have long worried about their corporate owners bowing to political pressure. But the latest clash between the Trump administration and a media company concerns not hard-hitting news coverage but rather an ill-founded remark by a late-night comedian, Jimmy Kimmel, whose show ABC suspended this week.

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ The high cost of free speech

    Jimmy Kimmel's suspension shows us that nothing will ever satisfy Trump's unquenchable thirst for power.

  • CNET ☛ New Bill Aims to Block Both Online Adult Content and VPNs: How Your VPN Could Be Affected

    The bill, called the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act and advanced by six Republican representatives, would ban a wide variety of adult content online, ranging from ASMR and adult manga to AI content and any depiction of transgender people. It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Constitution Protects Jimmy Kimmel’s Mistake

    It is one thing for Trump loyalists like Carr to make threats. It is another for the targets of the threats to capitulate. In the early months of the second Trump administration, we have discovered that many American corporations, including companies that own media outlets, are ready to surrender their First Amendment rights as soon as Trump indicates the slightest displeasure with their politics. Whether they are capitulating because of fear or because they see a financial interest in aligning with the administration is ultimately irrelevant. Their rapid surrender to state coercion points to the absolute rot in these elite echelons, filled with people whose commitment to fundamental rights like free speech is utterly superficial.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-11 [Older] Global media urge US not to restrict journalists' visas

  • FAIR ☛ Matthew Cunningham-Cook on Criminalizing Witness, Tim Karr on Media Compliance

  • FAIR ☛ As Ellison Buys Out TikTok, US Moves Toward One-Party Media

    Larry Ellison, founder of the software firm Oracle, is the second-richest billionaire in both the US and the world, and for a brief moment was No. 1 in the world (AP, 9/11/25). But for a long time, unlike many of his peers, he was unable to boast that he controlled a chunk of the news and opinion reaching the American public.

  • TMZ ☛ Bullets Rip Through Local ABC News Station In Sacramento, Cops Say

    Journalists were working inside the building when the bullets came bursting through ... but incredibly, no one was injured.

  • Northwestern University ☛ Sale of Illinois newspapers puts new state law to the test

    The law requires Illinois media companies to provide the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, local county government, the company’s employees and any Illinois nonprofit that might be interested in buying the business with 120 days’ notice before the sale happens.

    “The point was, of this law, to create the ability for local stakeholders, anybody who might want to offer up competing bids for a local news organization and maybe want to keep it local,” Matt Pearce, director of public policy at the nonprofit advocacy organization Rebuild Local News, told Capitol News Illinois.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan reportedly on trial again

    Zhang Zhan was detained in May 2020 for her coverage of China’s initial response to the Covid-19 outbreak, and served four years in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” — a charge routinely used by authorities to suppress dissent.

  • Techdirt ☛ Jimmy Kimmel’s Firing Comes As Feckless TV Networks Lobby Trump To Destroy Remaining Media Consolidation Limits

    The Ellison family needed Trump FCC approval for its plan to merge Paramount, Skydance, CNN, Time Warner, CBS, Bari Weiss’ Free Press, and TikTok into one giant right wing piece of shit. But ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox have also been lobbying the Trump FCC to eliminate some of the last remaining media consolidation limits Trump hasn’t killed yet: rules prohibiting the “big four” networks from merging.

  • Court House News ☛ Iowa teacher fights firing over Charlie Kirk post

    Matthew Kargol, an art teacher and wrestling and track coach, has sued the Oskaloosa Community School District and its superintendent, Michael Fisher, in federal court, claiming he was unlawfully fired for a Facebook post after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed. Kargol claims his comment, “1 Nazi down,” is protected speech, saying it was made outside of work hours and was unrelated to his job.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Journalist going to trial after highlighting porn shared by ex-MP on X

    Retired Brighton-based journalist Greg Hadfield will go to trial over drawing attention to an obscene X message posted by the account of former Labour MP Ivor Caplin.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Mandy Brown ☛ Self-exploiting workers

    [...] they lose all sense of solidarity with other workers. Other workers become competitors instead of comrades. And everyone loses.

  • El País ☛ Operation Lone Star 2.0: Texas turns into an ‘immigration police state’

    Experts warn that Texas has taken on a role that belongs to the federal government. So far this year, the state Department of Public Safety has arrested more than 3,100 undocumented migrants

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Hires Immigrants So He Can Pay Them Less, Lawsuit Allege

    The lawsuit claims that Tesla relies heavily on workers who hold the H-1B visa, which grants temporary employment for specialized technical jobs, and that workers who have been recently laid off from the electric vehicle company are disproportionally Americans.

  • Reuters ☛ Lawsuit says Musk's Tesla hires visa holders instead of Americans so it can pay less

    Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab, the electric vehicle company led by billionaire Elon Musk, was accused in a lawsuit on Friday of favoring visa holders over Americans when making employment decisions so it can pay less.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ A Lawless Nation

    The reason I pulled the identity switcheroo was to help readers imagine how we would react if something like this happened to Americans trying to do business abroad. There would be a wave of outrage, coupled with demands for retaliation — maybe even demands that we invade Mexico. And you would expect many companies — not just American corporations — to reconsider any plans they might have had to invest in Mexico. Who wants to do business in a lawless country where anyone visiting is at risk of being chained up and imprisoned?

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-09-12 [Older] Kate, Furtado, Baerbock: Why trolling is sexist

  too soft https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/19/ofcom_osa_enforcement/

  • The Register UK ☛ Charities warn Ofcom too soft on Online Safety Act violators

    As UK ministers continue to quiz stakeholders over the effectiveness of the Online Safety Act, one charity chief raised concerns over the robustness of Ofcom's enforcement of the controversial legislation.

    Asked about how well the communications regulator has enforced penalties on organizations that violate the OSA, or fail to implement the required safeguards, Andy Burrows, CEO of the Molly Rose Foundation, said: "I do not get the impression that the companies are quaking in their boots at Ofcom's enforcement approach."

    The Molly Rose Foundation was established in 2017 by the family of 14 year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life. Her father discovered she had viewed thousands of images online that promote suicide and self-harm.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Semafor Inc ☛ How the Jimmy Kimmel saga reorders FCC politics

  So the administration has made it clear that the talent’s politics are less likely to get mergers approved.

• Nick Heer ☛ U.S. Federal Trade Commission Sues Live Nation and Ticketmaster

  The complaint’s description (PDF) of the relationship between Ticketmaster and TradeDesk, beginning at paragraph 84 and continuing through paragraph 101, is damning. If true, Ticketmaster must be aware of the scalper economy it is effectively facilitating through TradeDesk.

• Patents

  • IBM Patent Could Rein In Power-Hungry Data Centers

    The company is seeking to patent a system for “energy-efficient deployment of workloads in cloud computing systems.” As the title implies, IBM’s tech aims to deploy tasks in cloud environments while using the minimum possible amount of energy.

  • El País ☛ Mexico and Canada deepen ties ahead of USMCA trade talks with Trump

    The rapprochement between Mexico City and Ottawa has also been formalized with a series of agreements on trade, investment, and security that Sheinbaum and Carney sealed during this visit. They call it the Mexico-Canada Action Plan 2025-2028, and it can be summarized as investments in ports, railways, the aerospace sector, and energy.

• Copyrights

  • US Library of Congress ☛ Five Copyright Office Resources You May Not Know Exist

    The U.S. Copyright Office provides a wide range of resources to support creators, educators, and other copyright users, but some of the most valuable tools can fly under the radar. Here are five lesser-known Office resources that can help you better understand, register, and manage your creative works.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

    Why is that? Large language models are good at producing a lot of code, but they don’t yet have the depth of judgement of a competent software engineer. Left unsupervised, they will spend a lot of time committing to bad design decisions.

  • Digital Music News ☛ UK Creators Demand PM Recognize Creators’ Human Rights

    “Administration of copyright must be transparent. And it must have an artist’s full permission. These two principles are the bedrock of our industry and crucial for the survival of future generations of world-beating UK creatives,” wrote Elton John, whose storied career as a singer-songwriter spans over 50 years.

    “What is being waved through leaves the door wide open for an artist’s life work to be stolen, skimmed, and scraped by Big Tech AI companies. We will not accept this, and we will not let the government forget their election promises to support our creative industries.”

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Filmmaker Tries to Unmask Private Torrent Tracker Owners through Cloudflare

    Through a DMCA subpoena directed at Cloudflare, an independent filmmaker is trying to uncover the identities of people connected to several prominent private torrent trackers. The legal paperwork was obtained at a California federal court and targets HDbits, PassThePopcorn, BroadcasTheNet, KaraGarga, and others. The information was requested for copyright protection purposes, without clarifying what this would entail.