Leftovers

• Yinan ☛ Keeping your own data LOCAL - 1nan

  All of my data will be synced/exported locally and periodically via scripts or RSS. For example, if I star an article in freshrss or added one to wallabag, post a Mastodon toot or upvoted a Reddit post, they will be synced to Karakeep via RSS. If I added a task in Things or a worklog entry in Day One, they will be synced to Obsidian via plugin or exported to markdown by scripts that periodically read the local database file. All local plain-text files will be in a private .git repo that keep track the changes over time.

• Lee Peterson ☛ What I’ve learned from blogging for almost 20 years

  I’ve been blogging since 2008 at various sites, starting with a focus around guitar and music and moving into what I think is the natural progression to a personal one. I think in those early days I’d looked at making it my career but as blogs got overtaken by text based social media and YouTube I realised this was the wrong way to think about it and about 10 years ago I just blogged as a creative outlet.

• Gregory Hammond ☛ Why I write long-term

  First, I want to talk about what is this long-term. We’ve all read something that’s about a current event, then when we go back to read it even six months later, it’s either incorrect or no longer worth reading.

  Long-term is focusing on that it can be read, and mostly be accurate many years after it was first published.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ NASA Moving Out of Entire Buildings as It's Gutted by Trump

    The significance of the GSFC in the history of NASA can’t be overstated. It’s played a key role in the development of NASA’s groundbreaking James Webb and Hubble space telescopes, alongside countless other key missions — yet its future is now uncertain as Trump moves to realign the agency’s goals away from science and toward space exploration.

  • The Conversation ☛ Major theories of consciousness may have been focusing on the wrong part of the brain

    In a recently published article, I reviewed over 100 years of neuroscience research to see if some brain regions are more important than others for consciousness. What I found suggests scientists who study consciousness may have been undervaluing the most ancient regions of human brains.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ NASA says on track to send astronauts around the Moon in 2026

    Multiple setbacks have delayed the manned mission, dubbed Artemis 2, which is now scheduled for April 2026 at the latest and could come as soon as February.

• Career/Education

  • Sumana Harihareswara ☛ If You Don't Know What To Do

    So then I asked him whether he knew the phrase "theory of change." He didn't. I gave him the explanation I've written here a few times before (Wikimedia and the late Aaron Swartz also summarized it).

  • Robert Birming ☛ From rookie to master

    It’s simply that I know the drill now. I know what to focus on, the order to do things, and how to present my case.

    This goes for most things in our lives.

  • Andy Bell ☛ Transitioning from being a developer to a manager

    I started my career as a front-end developer and transitioned from developer to leader about 7 years ago. It wasn’t an easy path. I wasn’t prepared for how difficult it would be to let go of work, to trust other people with work that I “knew” I could do better and do faster.

    I also wasn’t prepared for how difficult it was to listen to people, to open up and not assume I knew all the correct answers right away. I had a lot of help along the way and a leadership team that understood the adjustments I needed to make to move into this position. But there were times when I asked myself, “Was this the right move?”.

    All of this to say: I understand what it means to move into a management position as a developer, and hopefully, some advice I can impart here will be useful.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Small Cypress ☛ notes on putting one foot in front of another

    I still read the news every morning, when I have the most emotional capacity, but I am finally accepting that choosing to spend the rest of my day without it doesn't make me a shitty human being.

• Proprietary

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Critical CVE-2025-55241 Exposes Entra ID Admin Access

    This vulnerability, described by experts as one of the most severe to date in Entra ID, revolved around the misuse of undocumented Actor tokens and a fundamental design flaw in the Azure AD Graph API, a legacy interface still relied upon by many Microsoft internal services.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ xAI Workers Leak Disturbing Information About Grok Users

      Instead, his company xAI has turned its in-house AI chatbot Grok into a tool for sexually charged conversations with an eager-to-undress female avatar — while Musk himself warns that the tech is poised to “one-shot the human limbic system.”

      Now it sounds like xAI users are using the platform for pretty much the worst stuff you can imagine, with twelve current and former workers telling Business Insider that they regularly encountered sexually explicit material, including AI-generated material involving the sexual abuse of children, in their work for the company.

    • Nick Heer ☛ ‘How A.I. Helped Locate a Viral Video’s True Origin’ Was by Ignoring A.I.

      On the contrary, this proved little about the advantages of A.I. geolocation. These tools can certainly be beneficial; Green links to an experiment in Bellingcat in comparison to Google’s reverse image search tools.

      I think Full Fact did great work in geolocating this video and deflating its hateful context in that tweet. But a closer reading of the actual steps taken shows any credit to ChatGPT or A.I. is overblown.

    • Kevin Kelly ☛ The Technium: The Periodic Table of Cognition

      The cognitive elements will more resemble the heavier elements in being unstable and dynamic. Or a better analogy would be to the elements in a biological cell. The primitives of cognition are flow states that appear in a thought cycle. They are like molecules in a cell which are in constant flux, shifting from one shape to another. Their molecular identity is related to their actions and interactions with other molecules. Thinking is a collective action that happens in time (like temperature in matter) and every mode can only be seen in relation to the other modes before and after it. It is a network phenomenon that makes it difficult to identify its borders. So each element of intelligence is embedded in a thought cycle, and requires the other elements as part of its identity. So each cognitive element is described in context of the other cognitive modes adjacent to it.

    • The Atlantic ☛ Chatbait Is Taking Over the Internet

      I reached out to OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic about the rise of chatbait. Google and Anthropic did not respond. A spokesperson for OpenAI pointed me to a recent blog post: “Our goal isn’t to hold your attention,” it reads. Rather than measure success “by time spent or clicks,” OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be “as helpful as possible.” (OpenAI has a corporate partnership with The Atlantic.) At times, however, OpenAI’s definition of helpful can sure feel like an effort to boost engagement. The company maintains a digital archive that tracks the progress of its models’ outputs over the past several years—and, conveniently, documents the rise of chatbait. In one example, a hypothetical student struggling with math asks ChatGPT for help. “If you’d like, you can provide an example problem, and we can work through it together,” concludes a response from a couple years ago. “Would you like me to give you a ‘cheat sheet’ for choosing (u) and (dv) so it’s less guesswork?” the bot offers today. In another, a user asks for a poem explaining Newton’s “laws of physics.” The 2023 version of the chatbot simply responds with a poem. Today’s ChatGPT writes (an improved) poem, before asking: “Would you like me to turn this into a fun, rhyming children’s version with playful examples like skateboards and trampolines?”

    • Futurism ☛ Companies Are Being Torn Apart by AI "Workslop," Stanford Research Finds

      A fascinating new report from researchers at Stanford and the firm BetterUp Labs explores that question. In a survey that’s still ongoing, the team examined the responses of 1,150 full-time employees in the US across multiple industries to tease out how AI content is used in the workplace and how it affects the dynamics between employees.

      Their conclusion? People are using it to churn out busywork that needs to be fixed by a human with common sense, undercutting claims that it can boost productivity in the labor force.

      “Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers,” wrote Kate Niederhoffer, a social psychologist and vice president of BetterUp, in a writeup for Harvard Business Review with her colleagues.

  • Social Control Media

    • BoingBoing ☛ Oracle's Ellison joins Musk and Zuckerberg in controlling platforms that shape what billions see online

      Oracle will invest in the U.S. version of TikTok. And President Trump "hinted this weekend that the media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan were considering an investment, which could come through the media giant Fox Corporation, a person familiar with the talks said."

    • New York Times ☛ American Investors Will License and Oversee TikTok’s U.S. Version, White House Says

      A copy of the algorithm, the recommendation engine that powers the app’s addictive feed of short videos, will be licensed from China to an American investor group that will oversee the app in the United States, the official said.

      Oracle will also invest in the new American TikTok, as will the private equity firm Silver Lake, another senior official said.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Suspected Iran-backed group targets Euro aerospace sector

      First, the victim runs a legitimate Windows executable from the archive, and this file sideloads userenv.dll from the same archive. The legitimate executable then starts another benign file that sideloads the malware loader, xmllite.dll. As Check Point explains: [...]

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Airport cyberattacks: What you need to know

      While Collins said that delays to check in and baggage drop "can be mitigated with manual check-in operations," the widespread cancellations show the knock-on effects of staff having to manually write out baggage tags and perform checks usually done online. It also highlights the reliance of major global infrastructure on IT systems that can be compromised.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Inside Towers ☛ Dallas Flights Back to Normal After Telecom Outage Disrupts 2,000+ Flights

      The FAA blamed the outage on Frontier Communications, saying multiple telecom failures affected the Dallas Terminal Radar Approach Control, which manages both airports. Frontier said a third-party contractor accidentally cut its fiber lines in Argyle, TX.

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ The Risks of NPM

      There was a time when I could ask, “Did you see the latest NPM attack?” And your answer would be either “Yes” or “No”.

      But now if I ask, “Did you see the latest NPM attack?” You’ll probably answer with a question of your own: “Which one?”

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ Governor Newsom Should Make it Easier to Exercise Our Privacy Rights

      A.B. 566 does a very simple thing. It directs browsers—such as Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s Edge or Mozilla’s Firefox—to give all their users the option to tell companies they don't want companies to to sell or share personal information that’s collected about them on the [Internet]. In other words: it makes it easy for Californians to tell companies what they want to happen with their own information.

    • Ava ☛ challenges around AI and the GDPR

      Today, I once again met up with my mentor around data protection law and had some questions about his view on the compatibility of AI with several aspects of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The talk went really well and was super engaging, but I soon had to run home so I would not miss the GDPRhub meeting by noyb.eu!

    • Wired ☛ How to Set Up and Use a Burner Phone

      Obtaining and using a true burner phone is hard—but not impossible. Here are the steps you need to take to protect your mobile communications based on the risks you face.

    • Wired ☛ How to Use 1Password's Travel Mode at the Border (2025)

      There’s a lot you can do to protect yourself at the US border, but most people have at least some sensitive information they need to keep on a phone or laptop while traveling. That’s where 1Password, the password manager, and its Travel Mode feature come into play.

      Although it can’t remove everything, Travel Mode can erase a lot. The way it works is simple: You organize your logins, notes, attachments, and other sensitive information into a series of vaults. From there, you can choose which vaults are safe for travel and which aren’t. When you turn on Travel Mode, your selected vaults aren’t only hidden; 1Password claims they’re entirely removed from your device.

    • Wired ☛ DHS Has Been Collecting US Citizens’ DNA for Years

      Newly released data shows Customs and Border Protection funneled the DNA of nearly 2,000 US citizens—some as young as 14—into an FBI crime database, raising alarms about oversight and legality.

    • Don Marti ☛ a helpful intro to modern surveillance advertising

      Read the whole thing, and you’ll get why regulators and legislators going on about "trackers" and "data brokers" might as well be talking about junk faxes or Flash supercookies. By the time we get to Delete Day in California (save the date, it’s August 1, 2026) it might get listed as a retrocomputing event. ICYMI, the "open web" is in rapid decline as an ad medium, according to Google, and they ought to know.

    • Politico ☛ Europe’s cookie law messed up the internet. Brussels wants to fix it.

      “Too much consent basically kills consent. People are used to giving consent for everything, so they might stop reading things in as much detail, and if consent is the default for everything, it’s no longer perceived in the same way by users,” said Peter Craddock, data lawyer with Keller and Heckman.

      Cookie technology is now a focal point of the EU executive’s plans to simplify technology regulation. Officials want to present an “omnibus” text in December, scrapping burdensome requirements on digital companies. On Monday, it held a meeting with the tech industry to discuss the handling of cookies and consent banners.

    • The Register UK ☛ EV charging biz zaps customers with data leak scare

      In an email sent to Kia customers in the UK, seen by The Register, DCS said: "A few days ago, we identified irregularities in the handling of DCS data records by one of our service providers. This provider supports us with customer service and is authorized to access customer data for this purpose.

    • The Register UK ☛ TikTok video pre-loads cause ‘massive data wastage’

      The paper notes the popularity of short video apps and cites the billions of people who use TikTok and Kwai as evidence, before explaining that clients for these services usually prefetch videos they think users will want to watch in the future and store them in local buffers.

      After studying Douyin and Kuaishou, the Chinese versions of TikTok and Kwai, the authors found both prefetch “the first chunk of the next few videos” in the hope doing so improves the user experience. In reality, the authors assert, the practice “will result in remarkable video stalls and prefetched but discarded chunks.”

    • Wired ☛ Palantir Wants to Be a Lifestyle Brand

      But what does it mean for Palantir—a company that, in the words of one former employee, essentially sells digital “filing cabinets” to customers like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US Department of Defense, Heineken beer, and General Mills—to be a lifestyle brand?

• Defence/Aggression

  • ADF ☛ For Sahel Terrorists, Motorcycles Are a Key Tool for Quick Attacks and Escapes

    In recent months, terrorists with Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and Islamic State West Africa Province have killed dozens of Soldiers and civilians across the Sahel during motorcycle-mounted raids on military bases and communities.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger announce withdrawal from ICC

    The West African countries are currently in the grip of deadly violence from jihadist groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the so-called "Islamic State", but their armies have also been accused of committing crimes against civilians.

  • BBC ☛ Three West African countries to quit International Criminal Court

    Their armies have faced accusations of crimes against civilians, as violence has escalated in the region against jihadist groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

    In another coordinated move earlier this year, all three countries simulatenously withdrew from the regional bloc, the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas).

  • RFI ☛ Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger jointly announce withdrawal from the ICC

    They point to the use of mercenaries from Africa Corps – the replacement for the former Wagner Group – in the repressive operations carried out by the armies of both countries.

    Human Rights Watch and other groups have also accused Islamist militants, as well as the militaries and partner forces of Burkina Faso and Mali, of possible atrocity crimes.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Trump Admin Fires Back in Shira Perlmutter USCO Battle

    “The President’s power to appoint and remove the Librarian—a power he does not have over true congressional entities like the House Sergeant-at-Arms, who is elected by the members of the House, or the Senate Parliamentarian, who is appointed by the Senate majority leader—confirms the Library of Congress’s placement in the Executive Branch,” the Trump administration’s latest filing reads in part.

  • Techdirt ☛ Donald ‘OPSEC’ Trump Posts DM To AG Pam Bondi To Public Account; Demands More Politically Motivated Prosecutions

    As Kyle Cheney points out, this looks a whole lot like Trump accidentally posting a DM meant for Attorney General Pam Bondi to his public Truth Social account.

    Here’s what the now-deleted (and since re-posted), presumably accidental public post by Donald Trump said: [...]

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Someone accidentally ordered a drone-killing robot in rose gold

    The Bullfrog is made by Allen Control Systems, which markets the device as a low-cost remote weapon system to combat the existential drone problem that 21st-century militaries will face. The Bullfrog uses artificial intelligence to track, detect and shoot down unmanned aerial systems, or UASs, that fly within small arms range of bases or vehicles. It’s compatible with weapons commonly used by infantry, like M240 medium machine guns. The system can work autonomously or be controlled by an operator, according to the company.

  • The Atlantic ☛ A Warning for Those Ready to Capitulate to Trump

    The similarities between what is happening today and what I witnessed in Vladimir Putin’s Russia are frightening: the creation of an oligarchy, the proclamation of a one-party system, and, perhaps most troubling, a promised crackdown on free speech. We are seeing Donald Trump and those around him pick targets to go after, and make them obey the administration’s wishes.

  • New York Times ☛ Opinion | If Only We’d Fight as Hard to Save Our Democracy as Ukrainians Are to Save Theirs

    Meanwhile, in the face of declarations like Trump’s that it should be “illegal” to criticize him, the most cowardly Americans — particularly the tech titans of Silicon Valley and virtually the whole Republican Party — go along for the ride, while those who are the most activist boast that they tweeted against it or pressed the like button on a post from their favorite liberal influencer. That is the protest equivalent of firing a mortar into the Milky Way and believing that you’ve had an impact. Thank God social media was not around for the women’s rights or civil rights movements.

  • Truthdig ☛ Captain America: Domestic Terrorist?

    In December 1940, as the Luftwaffe blitzed London, a new superhero in an American flag–themed outfit debuted on American newsstands. Created by New York artists Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, Captain America started off with a literal bang: The cover of issue No. 1 showed him socking Adolf Hitler on the jaw. The issue was a great success, selling 1 million copies. It also drew death threats for Simon and Kirby from Americans who were pro-Nazi and fans of Hitler. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia called them and said not to worry, the city of New York would protect them.

    In MAGA’s new political schema, Captain America should be detained. But we shouldn’t expect him to go lightly. “The price of freedom is high; it always has been. And it’s a price I’m willing to pay,” he declared in the 2014 film “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.”

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Nepal’s Youth Rise Against a Digital Gag Order

    By September 8, Nepal’s youth-led protests had spiraled into deadly unrest. Clashes left streets littered with stones and tear gas shells as at least nineteen people were reported killed and dozens more wounded. Hospitals struggled to treat the injured while the government tightened curfews, signaling a deepening crisis.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Oligarch’s Bible: How Peter Thiel Weaponized René Girard to End Democracy

    This isn’t speculation about hidden agendas—it’s documented in Thiel’s own published writings. In 2009, he published his manifesto declaring “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Not abstract philosophical speculation but a systematic political position announcing his opposition to democratic governance.

    Since then, he’s funded Curtis Yarvin, the intellectual architect of “neocameralism,” who explicitly advocates replacing democracy with corporate governance, citizens with customers, democratic deliberation with algorithmic optimization. Yarvin’s RAGE doctrine—“Retire All Government Employees”—is being executed right now through DOGE (Trump’s Department [sic] of Government Efficiency, systematically purging civil servants) by young operatives trained in anti-constitutional frameworks.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Anti-Religious Politics

    Like plumbers or auto dealership owners, right wing Christians are a special interest group. A remarkably successful one. Did you see the Charlie Kirk memorial? The project of right wing Christians to seize control of America’s government in god’s name is going a bit too well for comfort. Stopping that project is going to require more than just arguing against their particular megachurch-flavored brand of Christianity. It is going to require the establishment of a norm against the presence of religion in public affairs that is much, much stronger than the feeble one that is now being drowned in a sea of red hats.

  • The Walrus ☛ Ukrainians Are Going behind Enemy Lines to Find the Children Russia Stole

    About 20,000 kids have been taken. Families face dangerous journeys to bring them home

  • India Times ☛ Tiktok to be overseen by Oracle, retrained for US; deal to be signed later this week: White House

    Levitte detailed that Oracle will independently monitor the safety and data security of all US user data, which will be stored on Oracle-operated servers in the United States, safeguarded from foreign surveillance or interference, particularly from China.

  • Digital Music News ☛ More Details Emerge on US/China TikTok Deal

    The Murdochs have run their media business for years with a firm conservative lean, while Oracle, which already provides computing resources for TikTok, was co-founded by Larry Ellison. Ellison is a longtime Trump supporter, who the president says is also interested in a TikTok stake. Ellison and his family have also become increasingly interested in media, as he helped finance a bid by his son David to buy entertainment giant Paramount.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Oracle stock rises on TikTok deal

    As part of Washington and Beijing’s yet-to-be-finalized deal over TikTok’s American operations, Oracle is set to license the app’s crown-jewel algorithm, while the recommendation engine will remain the property of Chinese owner ByteDance. Oracle’s stock is on track for its best year since 1989 thanks to its massive AI-driven push into cloud infrastructure: That division’s president was named co-CEO Monday, and Oracle’s recent $300 billion deal to provide OpenAI with computing power is one of the largest cloud contracts ever signed.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ Political Violence Is a National Security Problem

    Case in point: Just hours after Kirk died, my local Fox News affiliate asked me to appear on the 10 o’clock news to give my analysis of the situation.

    The producer apologized for calling me since, saying, “This is not really a national security matter, which is what we usually call you for.”

    I disagreed. Here’s why.

  • NDTV ☛ Tibetan Leader Lobsang Sangay Warns India Of China's Big Arunachal 'Game Plan'

    Tracing the history of India-China relations, Mr Sangay pointed out that every attempt by New Delhi to reset ties has ended in betrayal.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Guardian UK ☛ New statue on National Mall celebrates ‘long-lasting bond’ between Trump and Epstein

    The fabricator of the statue remains unknown, but it has artistic and thematic similarities to recent art pieces critical of the president.

  • Seattle Times ☛ Trump and Epstein hold hands in larger-than-life National Mall statue

    “We felt that Trump had quite a few friends throughout his life,” the artists’ representative Patrick told ArtNews. “One of his friends was Jeffrey Epstein, so we wanted to celebrate that with a statue of what that friendship might feel like.”

  • India Times ☛ Trump and Epstein statue holding hands appears in Washington DC; How the internet 'celebrated' their ‘long-lasting bond’ | - The Times of India

    That’s not all. Keeping up with the tradition – like all statues – this one, too, has a plaque and a very telling message. In fact, there are three plaques around the base. The main plaque reads: “We celebrate the long-lasting bond between President Donald J. Trump and his ‘closest friend’ Jeffrey Epstein,” while another plaque quotes an alleged letter from Trump in Epstein’s 50th birthday book, including a line like: “Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything.” Other excerpts (whether confirmed or disputed) are used, suggesting closeness, shared “enigmas,” or friendship.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Statue of Trump and ‘closest friend’ Epstein holding hands mysteriously appears on National Mall, DC

    According to USA Today, the surprise protest art is the work of a group called The Secret Handshake Project, which claims responsibility for this installation. This is the third anti-Trump piece to emerge in the nation’s capital since June.

  • Great Firewall Report ☛ Geedge & MESA Leak: Analyzing the Great Firewall’s Largest Document Leak

    The leak originated from a core technical force behind the GFW: Geedge Networks (whose chief scientist is Fang Binxing) and the MESA Lab at the Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The documents show that the company not only provides services to governments in places like Xinjiang, Jiangsu, and Fujian, but also exports censorship and surveillance technology to countries such as Myanmar, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, and other unidentified country under the “Belt and Road” framework.

• Environment

  • ADF ☛ Zambia Still Grappling With Impact of Chinese Mining Disaster

    Fifty million liters of toxic mining waste poured into the Mwambashi River, just outside of the mining town of Chambishi on February 18 when a substandard earthen wall of Sino-Metal’s waste reservoir collapsed. Officials reported signs of pollution more than 100 kilometers downstream on the Kafue River, the country’s most vital waterway.

  • Harvard University ☛ Methane tracking satellite lost in space — what now?

    It’s not common, but this happens to satellites. We still have a year’s worth of data and, at the highest level, MethaneSAT’s mission was and still is to make a quantitative assessment of emissions of methane from the oil and gas industry and understand what the methane intensity is: how much methane is lost for each unit of natural gas that’s sold.

  • Finland ☛ Mushrooms 2025 campaign

    Most of the radioactive cesium present in Finnish nature originates from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in 1986, which will have occurred 40 years ago in April 2026. STUK’s nationwide environmental monitoring program has tracked the presence of radioactivity from the Chernobyl fallout in the environment ever since the accident. Small amounts of radionuclides from the fallout are still present in Finnish nature.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Puerto Rico’s climate revolution: Taking power back from the grid

      A working radio service or a solar-powered generator during a storm could be the difference between life and death.

    • Wired ☛ Big Tech Dreams of Putting Data Centers in Space

      The companies frantically building and leasing data centers are well aware that they’re straining grids, driving emissions, and guzzling water. The electricity demand of AI data centers in particular could increase as much as 165 percent by 2030. Over half of the energy powering these sprawling facilities comes from fossil fuels, threatening to reverse progress toward addressing the climate crisis.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it)

      In McKibben's telling, everything about solar is going better than anticipated. Solar efficiency is increasing exponentially with prices falling through the floor. The material bill for solar is also in freefall. Everything surrounding solar is going amazing, too. Battery capacity is improving even faster than solar generation, and the best new batteries use the incredibly abundant element sodium (not lithium) to store those useful electrons. Long-haul transmission lines are crisscrossing the world.

    • Michigan News ☛ Private Michigan island with 1887 lighthouse for sale: What $3M gets you - mlive.com

      The centerpiece of Pipe Island is a fully operational lighthouse built in 1887 and maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard.

    • Michigan News ☛ Edmund Fitzgerald 50th anniversary events to include private ceremony for the crew’s families - mlive.com

      Both ceremonies will take place Nov. 10 at Whitefish Point, just miles from where the Mighty Fitz was later found in two pieces at the bottom of Lake Superior.

• Finance

  • Rlang ☛ A Personal Message from an Open Source Contributor

    If everyone reading this gave just the price of a coffee, I could focus fully on open source work for our community. But not everyone can or will contribute, and that’s okay.

  • India Today ☛ Tariffs leave graduates struggling to find jobs: Trump's former economic adviser

    For many young people in the United States, landing a job is becoming a bigger struggle than before. With rising input costs, tariffs, and tech layoffs, recent graduates are facing a tougher path into employment.

  • The Big Four gain where Accenture and IBM feel the most pain

    Deloitte has even poached IBM’s domestic-market global capability centre and cybersecurity teams over the past few years.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Goddard Media LLC ☛ Jimmy Kimmel’s Suspension Is a Wake-Up Call

    It’s been clear since the last election that conservatives dominate the independent media space. Trump rode the reach of right-wing podcasts to victory while Kamala Harris stuck to traditional television.

    But those old outlets are collapsing — and they’re never coming back.

  • The Register UK ☛ RubyGems maintainer quits after Ruby Central takes control

    RubyGems is the standard package manager for Ruby and is sponsored by Ruby Central, a nonprofit that runs events including RubyConf and the discontinued RailsConf, and sponsors critical tools. These tools include RubyGems and Bundler, the latter being a dependency manager that ensures the gems (ruby packages) required by an application are installed with the correct versions.

  • The New Stack ☛ Open Source Turmoil: RubyGems Maintainers Kicked Off GitHub

    “By doing this, he took control for himself and other full-time employees of Ruby Central,” Dash wrote in a goodbye to RubyGems post shared on social media. “Later that day, after refusing to restore GitHub permissions, Ruby Central further revoked access to the bundler and rubygems-update gems on RubyGems.org.

    “I will not mince words here: This was a hostile takeover.”

  • The Independent UK ☛ 4chan’s ‘Operation Clog the Toilet’ causes panic among H-1B visa holders after Trump’s $100,000 fee announcement

    Users of the right-wing forum 4chan attempted to stop Indian people from returning to the U.S. in response to President Donald Trump’s H-1B visa overhaul by block-booking plane seats over the weekend as part of a prank dubbed “Operation Clog the Toilet.”

  • EDRI ☛ Open Letter: The European Commission and Member States must keep AI Act national implementation on track

    Member States must prioritise national implementation and pass implementing legislation this year to ensure the protection of people’s rights. Additionally, to ensure well-functioning oversight and enforcement of the AI Act, Member States should ensure that national AI governance structures are well-resourced, officially designated, and that civil society is actively engaged and embedded in them.

  • Wired ☛ I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong

    Ever since Jobs began selling the first sleek Apple II’s, digital technology has been touted as America’s pride and future. In its own geeky way, tech spoke truth to power. But now, says Stanford professor of social ethics of science and technology Rob Reich, “an extraordinarily tiny number of billionaires who control the information ecosystem have made allyship with the most consequential and fearsome political power in the world. There’s never been a time in history when those things have been combined.”

  • India Times ☛ Accenture proposes new campus in Andhra Pradesh, eyes adding 12,000 jobs

    India is already Accenture's largest employee base globally, with more than 300,000 of its 790,000 employees based in the country.

  • India Times ☛ Google workers protest company's silence over Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee hike

    Unionised Google employees protested President Trump’s new executive order, which imposes a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa applications. This represents a staggering 6,600% increase over the current cost.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • New York Times ☛ YouTube to Reinstate Accounts Banned Over Content Related to the Pandemic and 2020 Election

      In the letter, Alphabet said that the streaming platform had faced pressure from the Biden administration to remove content that didn’t violate its policies. It said that such government pressure to police speech was “unacceptable and wrong” and that the company “has consistently fought against those efforts on free speech grounds.”

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Researchers say media outlet targeting Moldova is a Russian cutout

      REST’s content — spread through its website and social media sites like Telegram, X and TikTok — often hammered Moldova’s pro-EU party, the Party of Action and Solidarity, with claims of electoral corruption, vote selling and other forms of misconduct. The site also sought to explicitly cast Moldova’s anti-disinformation efforts as a form of government censorship.

    • Digital Forensic Research Lab ☛ Sanctioned Russian actor linked to new media outlet targeting Moldova - DFRLab

      Once launched, REST quickly gained an audience, with a single TikTok video garnering more than three million views through repeated reposts by other TikTok accounts. Amplification on X (formerly Twitter) added further reach, with more than 700,000 views generated from just four posts; additional X accounts also achieved noticeable traction when promoting REST. Pro-Kremlin amplification networks also played a role; the Russia-linked Pravda Network, as well as Russia-linked Telegram clusters, such as the InfoDefense network, promoted REST articles, alongside actors like Moldova’s former Prime Minister Vlad Filat, who has aligned himself with campaigns targeting Moldovan President Maia Sandu. Together, these efforts attempted to embed REST narratives into Moldova’s information environment.

    • Wired ☛ The DOGE [sic] Subcommittee Hearing on Weather Modification Was a Nest of Conspiracy Theorizing

      As American culture becomes saturated with conspiracy theories, the idea that the government is controlling the weather—an old chestnut—seems to be getting new legs. This theory has led to a raft of proposed legislation in more than two dozen states. Tuesday’s hearing showcased the messiness of what happens when conspiracy theories collide with a federal government that has proven especially willing to entertain them.

    • The Verge ☛ YouTube gives creators who spread covid misinformation a chance to return

      Back in 2020, during the height of the pandemic and during the first Trump administration, YouTube implemented a “medical misinformation policy” that blocked content promoting covid conspiracy theories and eventually banned them outright. After the January 6th riots in the U.S. Capitol, YouTube temporarily suspended channels, including Donald Trump’s own YouTube channel, that claimed that the election was “stolen” from Trump. They continued to crack down on high-profile MAGA influencers for violating those policies, such as demonetizing and removing videos from Steven Crowder’s channel in 2021.

    • Meduza ☛ How Charlie became a Russian propaganda hero Pundits, spokespeople, and even Putin’s so-called ‘personal confessor’ warn of U.S. civil war, cannibals, and more in the wake of Kirk’s murder

      Kirk was pro-Russian

    • Omicron Limited ☛ What do some researchers call disinformation? Anything but disinformation

      Some researchers are now opting for more neutral language—words, and at times, technical jargon that are less likely to inflame or derail vital public discourse about falsehoods flooding the internet.

      Earlier this year, the watchdog NewsGuard announced it was retiring the labels "misinformation" and "disinformation" –- terms it said were "politicized beyond recognition and turned into partisan weapons by actors on the right and the left, and among anti-democratic foreign actors."

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • FAIR ☛ Charlie Kirk Purges Show the Need to Stand Up to Government Bullying

    For many years, the nation’s capital was known as Chocolate City, owing to its sizable Black population, which in the 1970s topped 70%. These days that moniker is less used, as DC’s Black population is now a little over 40%.

  • FAIR ☛ Trump Turns Pentagon Into Department of War on First Amendment

    The Trump administration has said it will require Pentagon reporters to “pledge they won’t gather any information—even unclassified—that hasn’t been expressly authorized for release, and will revoke the press credentials of those who do not obey,” the Washington Post (9/19/25) reported. It added that even being in possession of “confidential or unauthorized information, under the new rules, would be grounds for a journalist’s press pass to be revoked.”

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Supporters Are Lying About Biden ‘Censorship’ To Justify Brendan Carr’s Unconstitutional Kimmel Threats

    This false equivalency isn’t just wrong—it’s embarrassingly so. But since MAGA supporters are now running with it (and some mainstream outlets are credulously repeating it), it’s worth demolishing the argument piece by piece. Of course, the people pushing this narrative won’t bother with the details and will immediately skip to the comments to shout “you lie!” without addressing the actual points raised here as to why they’re wrong, but for everyone else, let’s dig in.

  • New York Times ☛ Opinion | Now the Left Cares About Free Speech Again

    Because there’s a silver lining for most things in life, maybe there’s also one for ABC’s craven (if brief) suspension, under thuggish government pressure, of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show. To wit: Now the left is once again all but unanimous in wanting to defend free speech.

    That hasn’t always been the case in recent years.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Universities are paying the U.S. millions of dollars. Where will the money go?

    The Trump administration celebrated a series of multimillion-dollar settlements with U.S. universities this summer. The sums were unprecedented and more might come. Harvard, the oldest and wealthiest university in the United States, was reportedly in negotiations to restore billions in grant money before a judge ruled in the university’s favor. In return for the payments and other concessions, schools have had federal funding restored. In total, the settlements have amounted to $250 million so far, with the potential to reach into the billions.

  • 404 Media ☛ Florida Sues Hentai Site and High-Risk Payment Processor for Not Verifying Ages

    Nutaku is owned by Aylo, which is also the parent company of Pornhub and some of the biggest porn platforms on the internet. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said in a press release last week that his office is suing Aylo and Segpay—a high-risk merchant account that specializes in adult entertainment—and alleges that the companies are violating state law HB3, which requires websites to verify that visitors based in Florida are at least 18 years old.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Man spared jail for assault after Koran burned outside Turkish consulate in London

    A Muslim man who attacked another man who was burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London has been spared jail.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Jimmy Kimmel Live won’t air in several states as Nexstar joins Sinclair boycott

    Sinclair announced Monday that it would continue to preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live! on its affiliate networks over the host’s controversial Charlie Kirk comments.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘It kept our spirits alive’: Taliban’s [Internet] blackout leaves girls in despair

    Last Monday, the Taliban started shutting down Afghanistan’s fibre-optic [Internet] across the northern provinces. On 15 September, the connection to Balkh province was cut and since then access to broadband [Internet] has also been closed to Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan, Nimroz, Zabul, Baghlan, Takhar, Kunduz, Badakhshan, Herat and Parwan.

    The move has been taken, according to the Taliban’s supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, to “prevent immorality”, and there are now fears that this is the first step towards a total shutdown of [Internet] access for ordinary Afghans.

  • RFA ☛ China to crack down on hostile, gloomy online content`

    Officials in Xinjiang last year banned ethnic Uyghurs from using social media apps. Censors tightened restrictions on posts by Tibetans ahead of the Dalai Lama’s birthday last year. Pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong say scrutiny of social media and police action based on social posts have intensified since the Article 23 national security law went into effect.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Jimmy Kimmel’s Return: Sinclair Will Not Air Show on Its ABC Stations

    As Jimmy Kimmel Live! returns to ABC on Tuesday night and millions of screens across America tune in in, swaths of the country will only have access to “news programming” instead of the late-night show. Broadcasting giant Sinclair announced that it would not air Kimmel’s show despite its return to the airwaves this week.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ West Point violating First Amendment with professor crackdown: Lawsuit

    The U.S. Military Academy at West Point is banning opinions by professors in the classroom and some books and courses in a crackdown that violates the First Amendment, a law professor at the military school said in a lawsuit Monday seeking class action status.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Jimmy Kimmel is coming back to ABC. Now what?

    The Burbank giant and its chief executive, Bob Iger, found themselves in a no-win situation as they took heat from fans, free speech advocates, labor unions, elected officials, celebrities and countless podcasters and TV commentators, including some of ABC’s own.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ The Only Journalist In US Detention For Their Reporting

    Journalist Mario Guevara faces imminent deportation from the United States unless a federal court intervenes to protect his First Amendment rights and orders his release from detention.

    Guevara, a Spanish-language reporter in Atlanta, Georgia, fled El Salvador more than 25 years ago. On June 14, he was arrested while covering a “No Kings” protest against President Donald Trump. Police transferred Guevara to a county jail, and days later, he was in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

  • JURIST ☛ Rights experts urge release of journalist after reported second conviction

    Zhang, 42, is believed to have stood trial in Shanghai on Friday and received a four-year sentence. The latest case is understood to stem from social media activity, though authorities have not publicly released details.

  • American Oversight ☛ American Oversight Investigating Trump’s National Guard Deployment in Memphis, Other Cities

    On Monday, American Oversight filed two dozen Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for records related to President Trump’s recent memorandum authorizing the deployment of National Guard troops, as well as federal law enforcement and immigration enforcement officials, to Memphis, Tennessee. The filing is the latest effort in the nonpartisan watchdog’s investigation to shed light on the administration’s abuse of federal power and normalization of military presence on the streets of U.S. cities.

  • CPJ ☛ 8 Turkish journalists face jail for ‘insult’ and ‘false news’ over talk show comments 

    “These cases against broadcast journalists are only the most recent in a series of unjust judicial actions meant to muzzle the press and political opposition,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities should welcome critical reporting and commentary as a crucial part of a working democracy, and stop prosecuting journalists.”

  • New York Times ☛ TikTok Deal Could Make Oracle Founder Larry Ellison a New Kind of Media Mogul

    The database billionaire and his son, David, are Trump favorites. The family could soon control an empire that includes CBS, Paramount, Warner, CNN and a piece of TikTok.

  • Don Marti ☛ Right to Know email

    Generally the easiest thing for me is to send this to whatever email address I can find in the company privacy policy. Sometimes they just do the RtK without further maze-running, sometimes it gets ugly. This will start the process anyway.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Reach hires first head of digital subscriptions

    Reach has hired its first head of digital subscriptions as it begins to put a “serious focus” on reader revenue.

    Harry Fawkes has started in the role this week, joining from The i Paper where he was head of digital subscriptions, marketing and business data for the past five years.

  • ANF News ☛ Journalist Jina Modarres Gorji released from prison in Iran

    Women’s rights activist and journalist Jina Modarres Gorji, who had been imprisoned, was freed from Sine Prison in Rojhilat (East Kurdistan). She had been sentenced to 16 months in prison. A previous request for release with an electronic ankle bracelet had been rejected due to interference from the Sine Intelligence Directorate.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Truthdig ☛ The Dismantling of the Forest Service

    That changed in 1891, when Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act, which authorized the president to place some unregulated tracts under “judicious control,” thereby mildly restraining extractive activities in the name of conservation. In 1905, the U.S. Forest Service was created as a branch of the Agriculture Department to oversee these reserves, and Gifford Pinchot was chosen to lead it. A year later, the citizens of southeastern Utah successfully petitioned the Theodore Roosevelt administration to establish forest reserves in the La Sal and Abajo mountains.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Iran executes at least 1,000 people in ‘mass killing campaign’

    The Norway-based Iran Human Rights organisation (IHR), which tracks executions, said at least 64 executions happened in the past week alone, averaging more than nine hangings per day.

    With more than three months remaining in 2025, the figure already surpasses the 975 executions recorded in 2024 and is the highest total since the group’s records began in 2008.

  • JURIST ☛ Rights group urges China to release Tibetan activist

    Human Rights Watch on Tuesday urged Chinese authorities to release activist, Zhang Yadi (张雅笛), also known as Tara, after she created a digital platform advocating for Tibetan rights in the Chinese language.

    Zhang, 22, is a member of the activist group Chinese Youth for Tibet, which aims “to foster a deeper understanding of Tibetan culture within Chinese-speaking communities, challenge and deconstruct Han chauvinism, and address ethnic conflicts and prejudice.” The group emerged in 2022 after the “White Paper” protests in Bejing. She maintained the group’s website from France, where she was studying. She was arrested July 31 in Shangri-La, Yunnan province, after returning to China to visit family.

  • US News And World Report ☛ China Detains Student for Tibet Activism, Rights Group Says

    Zhang Yadi, 22, also known as Tara, went missing in the southwestern province of Yunnan on July 31, and since then she has not been reachable by friends or family, her friends and New York-based Human Rights Watch said.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Wired ☛ ‘SIM Farms’ Are a Spam Plague. A Giant One in New York Threatened US Infrastructure, Feds Say

    The agency says it found a network of some 300 servers and 100,000 SIM cards—enough to knock out cell service in the NYC area. Experts say it mirrors facilities typically used for cybercrime.

  • Zimbabwe ☛ How an SA Data Centre and Subsea Cables Power Zim’s Internet

    Over the past nine years, around $2 billion a year has gone into new subsea cable construction. But between 2025 and 2027, more than $13 billion worth of new systems are expected to come online.

    Unlike the early 2000s, when state-owned enterprises and telecom companies joined forces and led in this, the investment map has shifted.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Indie-Led Suno Lawsuit Amended to Include Stream Ripping

    Consequently, both suits contain similar descriptions of the alleged circumvention and are painting the alleged stream ripping – separating and downloading audio from, among other sources, videos, that is – as a DMCA violation.

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ Kimmel reinstatement preempted Disney+ price increase

    Despite any good will earned by Disney from the announcement that they were bringing Kimmel back, the price increase is likely to create another wave of backlash against a company that was already on perilously thin ice. More than a million people had canceled Disney streaming subscriptions as of Monday, the Disney source told me, and the company likely knew that trend would only continue the longer they kept Kimmel silenced. Once they brought him back, there may have been a window of opportunity to reel them back in. But just one night of sleep surely wasn’t enough to both win them back and convince them to pay more money.

  • Leon Mika ☛ Hosting's Not the Problem With Distributed Video

    Open-web distributed video needs to be much like this. It’s nice to think that at the end of the day, people will open an webpage of their favourite creator, and start playing video in the browser’s — dare I say — bare-bones video player. But that’s never going to happen in a world of YouTube. They’re just going to do what they do every day: which is open YouTube on their mobile or TV, and start viewing video. Sure they may care about certain YouTuber creators, but not enough to change their habits.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Suno Faces 'Stream-Ripping' Claims in Amended Copyright Action

    Enter the initially mentioned amended complaint, which doubles down on the plaintiffs’ existing arguments, trades the singular “model” for the plural when describing Suno’s AI systems, and, most significantly, leans into the new stream-ripping claims.

  • Michigan News ☛ Amazon just pulled the plug on this popular free service - mlive.com

    This month’s shutdown consolidates Amazon’s streaming offerings under the Prime Video umbrella while maintaining free access to Freevee’s content library. Users will continue to view advertisements during programming, as was the case with the original Freevee service.

  • Artyom Bologov ☛ Just Let Me Select Text

    Except… I can’t do that. The text is not selectable/copyable in Bumble app. I have to do a bunch of relatively unsurmountable steps to do what should’ve taken half a minute. Like screenshot the profile and scrape the text with iOS Photos text recognition. Or use some OCR (web)app elsewhere. It’s… discouraging. Thus I give up and swipe left. A shame—she was beautiful at the very least!

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Google is back in antitrust crosshairs

  The US department of justice and a coalition of states are trying to make Google sell its ad exchange, AdX, where online publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when users load websites. The government is also seeking to require Google to make the mechanism that decides the winner of those auctions open source.

• The Verge ☛ The EU is scrutinizing Apple, Google, and Microsoft over online scams

  Regulators will evaluate how Apple and Google are handling fraudulent applications like fake banking apps in their respective app stores, while Google and Microsoft’s search engines will be examined for fake search results. Booking, the only Europe-based company being scrutinized, will be analyzed over how it handles fake accommodation listings. These information requests could lead to official investigations being launched into the four companies, which would leave them faced with potential fines of up to six percent of their annual global turnover.

• Copyrights

  • The Verge ☛ Pokémon lawyers won’t sue DHS for that video, former legal head predicts

    Yesterday afternoon, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted a piece of disgusting propaganda that glorifies the concept of a militarized police state forcefully entering people’s homes and businesses and leading them away in handcuffs and zip ties — all set to the classic Pokémon theme song and using numerous pieces of obviously copyrighted imagery from the ‘90s TV show.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Google Search's DMCA Transparency Report Resumes, Adds 2.1 Billion 'Pirate' URLs

    After an unexpected five-month freeze that left researchers and journalists in the dark, Google Search's DMCA transparency report is back on track. The search giant has updated its figures through mid-September, revealing that takedown efforts have not slowed down. On the contrary, the company has processed billions of new URLs, mainly due to requests from publishers.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • 🔤SpellBinding — ACIOPSU Wordo: BICEP

  • Technology and Free Software

    • Internet/Gemini

      • ROOPHLOCH 2025

        I had an errand which took me to Omotesando, and I am now in a quiet part of Meiji Jingu (Shrine.) It is far removed from the throngs of people going up and down the main road. Luckily there are places in this city where one can escape the chaos and find some (relative) peace and quiet.

        I had planned on making this entry someplace else, but I feared I was going to run out of time this month. This can happen when you procrastinate.