Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ UNIX For A Legacy TI

  Although now mostly known as a company who cornered the market on graphing calculators while only updating them once a decade or so, there was a time when Texas Instruments was a major force in the computing world. In the late 70s and early 80s they released a line of computers called the TI-99 to compete (unsuccessfully) with various offerings from Commodore, and these machines were fairly robust for the time. They did have limited memory but offered a 16-bit CPU and plenty of peripherals, and now there’s even a UNIX-like OS that they can run.

• James G ☛ Saying thanks on the web

  This got me thinking about how many times I say thank you when it comes to the web, both directly and to myself. When a friend shares a cool link with me, I'll regularly say thank you. A new link precedes that the feeling I'm going to see or learn something new! When I see a page with lots of links, I feel grateful that someone has taken the time to prepare the list. When I read a useful blog post that helps me complete a task or a story that opens my mind, I similarly feel grateful. Thank you!

• Ben Jojo ☛ Some interesting stuff I found on IX LANs

  However that is not always the case, as the humble “internet exchange” (IX) still exists, and while the relevancy of IXs are progressively being diminished by the internet increasingly being concentrated into a small handful of content networks and IXs not keeping up with the lowering price of transit or private fiber connections to the largest networks, there are still a large number of networks that’s attached to at least one IX fabric.

• Science

  • Hillel Wayne ☛ A Very Early History of Algebraic Data Types

    Been quiet around here! I’ve been putting almost all of my writing time into Logic for Programmers and my whole brain is book-shaped. Trust me, you do not want to read my 2000-word rant on Sphinx post-build LaTeX customization. But I spent the past week in a historical rabbit hole and had to share what I found.

    It started with Algebraic [Data] Types are not Scary, Actually. The post covers AlgDTs1 in more detail, but a quick overview is: [...]

  • Allen Downey ☛ The Poincaré Problem - Probably Overthinking It

    Selection bias is the hardest problem in statistics because it’s almost unavoidable in practice, and once the data have been collected, it’s usually not possible to quantify the effect of selection or recover an unbiased estimate of what you are trying to measure.

    And because the effect is systematic, not random, it doesn’t help to collect more data. In fact, larger sample sizes make the problem worse, because they give the false impression of precision.

    But sometimes, if we are willing to make assumptions about the data generating process, we can use Bayesian methods to infer the effect of selection bias and produce an unbiased estimate.

• Career/Education

  • Stanford University ☛ Meet the Stanford student who launched a pro-democracy network

    Turner Van Slyke ’28 spearheaded an initiative at Stanford to protect student free speech and and civic engagement on campus. The movement, called Education and Democracy United, is now on its way to becoming a national non-profit represented at colleges and universities across the United States.

  • Yordi Verkroost ☛ The Power of Commuting

    That hour of commuting isn’t so bad. On those four days, I walk out of the university through the revolving door, hop on the metro for a few minutes, and then sit on the train for a while. Headphones on with some music or a podcast, or maybe a book to read. And most importantly: much more time to leave work behind and welcome the free hours of the afternoon and evening. Hours that really feel like free time, not secretly filled with lingering work thoughts.

    So, the journey from work to home is not just physical. It’s more a mental one. One I certainly can get used to.

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Kris Howard

    This is the 109th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Kris Howard and her blog, web-goddess.org

  • [Repeat] Boiling Steam ☛ TGS 2025: Day 1 Report and First Impressions

    So today was the first day of the Tokyo Games Show 2025! And what a day! It felt like a whole new show compared to the usual editions. I’m not sure what happened suddenly, but the show is bigger than ever. More booths everywhere, and a lot, and I mean A LOT of games to see and try out everywhere. I walked around the whole place during the day without taking a break and I felt I barely scratched the surface! Which is good or SAD! depending on your point of view. Let me first share of the games I have tried and my first impressions. This is not exhaustive - I have done a lot more stuff during the day, but time is of the essence so let me start by this.

  • Brad Frost ☛ Come to Beyond Tellerrand! | Brad Frost

    Ian and I are teaching our full-day Advanced Design Tokens workshop on November 5th! We’ll be teaching attendees how to create sophisticated design token systems to create a thoughtful separation of concerns to help meet your Multi-All-The-Things organization’s multifarious design needs. We’re bringing the whole kit and caboodle from our comprehensive Subatomic Design Tokens course, so expect to level up your design systems game and create architecture that supports wildly different design languages: [...]

  • EDRI ☛ #PrivacyCamp25: The final programme is here

    Privacy Camp is one of the flagship digital rights and privacy gatherings in Europe. Every year, we bring together over 300 digital rights advocates, activists as well as academics and policy-makers from all around Europe and beyond to discuss the most pressing issues facing human rights online. For the 13th edition of the event, we will collectively explore the theme Resilience and Resistance in Times of Deregulation and Authoritarianism, and build collective power against the most urgent challenges facing our digital human rights.

  • Simon Collison ☛ Reflecting on a summer of sound

    A funding award enabled me to dedicate three months solely to developing my artistic practice — something I’ve been reflecting on these past few weeks.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ How Water Vapor Makes Smartphones Faster

    Once upon a time, home computers were low-powered enough that they barely needed any cooling at all. An Amiga 500 didn’t even have a heatsink on the CPU, while the early Macintosh got by with a single teeny little fan.

  • Dan Langille ☛ Finding out more about nvme on FreeBSD

    Recently I’ve been playing with NVMe to find out more about monitoring for wear.

  • The Conversation ☛ Underground data fortresses: the nuclear bunkers, mines and mountains being transformed to protect our ‘new gold’ from attack

    This subterranean data centre is located in a former nuclear bunker that was constructed in the early 1950s as a command-and-control centre for the Royal Air Force’s radar network. You can still see the decaying concrete plinths that the radar dish once sat upon. Personnel stationed in the bunker would have closely watched their screens for signs of nuclear missile-carrying aircraft.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Literary Hub ☛ How To Raise a Reader in an Age of Digital Distraction ‹ Literary Hub

    The difference wasn’t the presence of technology in our lives; it was the nature of our relationship with it.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Critical Cisco firewall holes under active attack

    CISA also warned that any ASA boxes hitting end-of-life on September 30 shouldn't just be patched – they need to be yanked off networks for good.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ CISA says it observed nearly year-old activity tied to Cisco zero-day attacks

    “We observed initial activity that we believe was related back in November,” Chris Butera, acting deputy executive assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, said during a media briefing Thursday. “It started off as reconnaissance activity on these types of devices, and that’s what kicked off back in November.”

    That malicious activity — read-only memory modification — “began as early as November 2024, if not earlier,” he said.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Longtime Investor Warns the AI Industry Is Set to Collapse for a Basic Financial Reason

      By the end of 2025, he writes, the tech industry will have invested over $700 billion in LLMs, a figure he says companies are likely to repeat next year, barring catastrophe. The trouble for tech companies, however, is that catastrophe is likely right around the corner — and underneath all that AI spending, the economy is looking grim

    • Futurism ☛ Spotify's Attempt to Fight AI Slop Falls on Its Face

      It’s been clear for a while that a deluge of AI slop is drowning out real music and human artists on Spotify.

      The platform has become overrun by bots and AI-spun trickery, which have actively been scamming revenue from real bands.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Spotify Bolsters 'AI Protections,' Has Pulled 75M+ 'Spammy' Tracks

      In other words, 75 million removals or not, Spotify certainly isn’t free of AI audio. Enter the initially highlighted AI protections, the first being a fresh “impersonation policy” aiming to curb tracks incorporating unapproved soundalike vocals.

    • The Register UK ☛ Many employees are using AI to create 'workslop'

      Workslop is the machine-learning equivalent of spam, and the study claims that the amount of work involved in sorting out the wheat from the chaff, or facts from hallucinations, in such content, costs around $186 per employee per month in lost productivity, a few bucks less than a ChatGPT Pro account.

      Furthermore, once someone receives this kind of content, over half of the respondents reported feeling annoyed, over a third said they were confused, and nearly a quarter said the messages offended them.

    • Tech Policy Press ☛ How Congress Could Stifle The Onslaught of AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material

      New research from Stanford recommends one way the United States Congress could move the needle on model safety: Allow tech companies to rigorously test their generative models without fear of prosecution. In other words, federal authorities could create a safe harbor for red teaming models for child sexual abuse material.

    • International Business Times ☛ 'Did You Know You're Dead?': Jimmy Kimmel's Dad Makes an Appearance After AI Videos of His Death Go Viral

      Kimmel brought up the AI bit by telling the audience about the flood of fake AI videos. The content was created to appear as if it were real recordings of himself, so he played a phoney video of Damon showing support.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Did anyone even ask for this? Meta now has a video feed exclusively for AI content – but what I really want is a feed dedicated to NON-AI content | Digital Camera World

      Meta, my interest is real photographs and real videos – not AI. Is there a way to teach the algorithm that? What I really want is to be able to teach Instagram and Facebook that my preference is not for AI.

    • Chris ☛ The Wind, a Pole, and the Dragon

      One of my favourite requests for help online comes from the shibboleth-users group, where someone Japanese used machine translation to ask about the following problem: [...]

    • Simon Willison ☛ How to stop AI’s “lethal trifecta”

      As I've said several times before, In application security, 99% is a failing grade. If there's a 1% chance of an attack getting through, an adversarial attacker will find that attack.

    • Mandy Brown ☛ Work slop | everything changes

      Jason Koebler reports on a study that defines “work slop” (truly a cursed phrase) as work that “masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” [...]

    • Wired ☛ Meta Accused of Torrenting Porn to Advance Its Goal of AI ‘Superintelligence’

      Strike 3 Holdings, a company that says it makes “high quality,” “feminist,” and “ethical” adult videos, is suing Meta in a federal court in California for allegedly infringing its copyright-protected content and using it to train AI models. The complaint, filed in July, alleges Meta has been torrenting and seeding Strike 3’s videos since 2018. Associated exhibits and details of the complaint were unsealed last week.

    • Linuxiac ☛ Calibre 8.11 Adds “Ask AI” Feature to E-Book Viewer and Fixes Bugs

      The feature is designed to be entirely optional—no AI code is even loaded unless the user sets up a provider. Calibre supports a wide range of services, including Google, OpenRouter, GitHub, and locally running models through Ollama. Many of these can be used free of charge.

    • 404 Media ☛ Pissed-off Fans Flooded the Twin Peaks Reddit With AI Slop To Protest Its AI Policies

      Moderators reversed course on its open door AI policy after fans filled the subreddit with AI-generated Dale Cooper slop.

    • IT Wire ☛ GitLab announces 18.4 release

      “In GitLab 18.3, the company laid the groundwork for human-AI collaboration, introducing leading AI tools such as Claude Code, Codex CLI, Amazon Q CLI, and Gemini CLI as native integrations, delivering the first preview of the GitLab Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in partnership with Cursor, and shipping two new flows, Issue to MR and Convert CI File for Jenkins Flows, to help teams tackle everyday problems.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Are AI users dishonest? If they are, this Nature paper doesn’t show it

      This is another killer headline that appeals hard to my prejudices, and probably yours. I’m seeing people link this paper as evidence that chatbots make you dishonest. But it’s not a good paper.First, it’s an AI paper in Nature, which runs a lot of abject trash on AI these days, in the news section as well as the journal.

      First, it’s an AI paper in Nature, which runs a lot of abject trash on AI these days, in the news section as well as the journal.

  • Social Control Media

    • New York Times ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man Clears Way for American-Owned Fentanylware (TikTok) Valued at $14 Billion

      The administration has been working for months to find non-Chinese investors for a U.S. version of the app.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Privacy Commissioner of Canada Releases Findings of Investigation Into TikTok – Pixel Envy

      This is a restriction TikTok has in place for some regions, but not everywhere. It is not unique to TikTok, either; Meta and Google targeted minors, and Meta reportedly guessed teens’ emotional state for ad targeting purposes. This industry cannot police itself. All of these companies say they have rules against ad targeting to children and have done so for years, yet all of them have been found to ignore those rules when they are inconvenient.

    • Manton Reece ☛ Email to SWICG about handles

      A few days ago there was a discussion on the Social Web Incubator Community Group mailing list about fediverse handles. I sent an email to the list that I want to capture on my blog here.

      There is also a relevant issue in Mastodon’s repo, with comments going back to 2022. While I’m not optimistic that this will be on Mastodon’s radar soon, I think it’s worth continuing to push for.

    • India Times ☛ Meta activates Facebook 'teen accounts' worldwide

      The limits cannot be removed without parental consent for users under 16.

      Recent years have seen an upswell of concern about teens' use of social networks, including fears young people spend too much time on screens with a lack of moderation on some platforms.

    • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Liminal Works fights algorithmic bias against marginalized communities

      The battlefield of social justice has shifted. It no longer unfolds solely on city streets or in marches, courtrooms, or legislative chambers, but hums quietly, invisibly beneath our fingertips, embedded inside algorithms, encrypted messages, and platforms that shape how people live and how they’re seen. For trans, queer, Indigenous, migrants, Black, Latine, and marginalized communities, the fight for survival now includes a digital front.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Ransomware attack on Ohio county impacts over 45,000 residents, employees

      The county government began sending out breach notifications to 45,487 local residents and county employees this week. The letters say ransomware was detected on the county’s network on May 18, prompting officials to hire cybersecurity experts and notify federal law enforcement agencies.

    • The Register UK ☛ Lazarus RAT code resurfaces in North Korean IT-worker scams

      In a white paper [PDF] presented at Virus Bulletin 2025, ESET researchers Peter Kálnai and Matěj Havránek identified new links between DeceptiveDevelopment's malware and the Lazarus Group's PostNapTea RAT.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • The Register UK ☛ Australia asks GitHub if it's a dangerous social network

      GitHub’s purpose is not to enable social interaction.

      However, the platform is not always a safe space, as GitHub allows comments and developers can be brutal to each other. The site can also host images, and the GitHub Pages service allows users to create websites based on their repos.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Dem report concludes Department of Government Efficiency violates cybersecurity, privacy rules

      DOGE is “bypassing cybersecurity protections” at three agencies, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Democrats concluded.

    • Privacy International ☛ Patient data and the healthcare AI boom

      However, sharing the NHS’s data with US companies to prompt healthcare innovation has been marred by controversy in recent years. There have been lawsuits in relation to data-sharing schemes between the NHS and large US technology companies, including recent investors, Google and Palantir.

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Meta fails to respect data rights with consent and pay scheme

      Meta has announced that it will offer customers in the UK a new subscription service which will enable them to access the company’s services without receiving adverts. People who want to use Meta for free will continue to see adverts. Even though Meta says they will be able to “control their ads experience”, the ads they see will be targeted according to their personal data.

    • The Register UK ☛ Senate report accuses DOGE [sic] of flouting law, oversight

      In addition to compiling established DOGE [sic] grievances, Peters' report also asserts that leadership at the aforementioned agencies is actively stymying attempts to figure out what DOGE is doing.

      "DOGE [sic] isn't making government more efficient—it's putting Americans' sensitive information in the hands of completely unqualified and untrustworthy individuals," Peters said in a press release. "The Trump Administration and agency leadership must immediately put a stop to these reckless actions that risk causing unprecedented chaos in Americans' daily lives."

    • US Senate ☛ Peters Report Finds that DOGE [sic] Continues to Operate Unchecked, Likely Violating Federal Privacy and Security Laws, and Putting the Safety of Americans’ Personal Information in Danger - Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs

      Over the past six months, Senator Peters directed oversight visits to key DOGE [sic] agencies, including SSA, the General Services Administration (GSA), and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Peters’ staff undertook these oversight visits after numerous formal requests for information went unanswered. What Peters’ staff observed was deeply troubling; several agency officials could not identify who was responsible for major decisions, such as workforce reductions, reorganizations, and data consolidation. In many cases, it was unclear whether agency leaders or DOGE [sic] operatives were actually in charge of operations. Further, staff observed there was a lack of a clear chain of command, leaving agencies vulnerable to manipulation and devoid of accountability.

    • Tim Bray ☛ C2PA Investigations

      This is the blog version of my talk at the IPTC’s Photo Metadata Conference online conference. Its title is the one the conference organizers slapped on my session without asking; I was initially going to object but then I thought of the big guitar riff in Dire Straits’ Private Investigations and snickered. If you want, instead of reading, to watch me present, that’s on YouTube. Here we go.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Neon buys your phone calls to train AI — then it leaks them all

      TechCrunch could even list all the most recent Neon users — with public call and text downloads — and full call records for any Neon user.

    • NYOB ☛ noyb WIN: Austrian authority forbids unlawful credit scoring by KSV1870

      noyb has scored a win in its complaint proceedings against the Austrian credit information agency KSV1870 and the energy provider Unsere Wasserkraft. The Austrian Data Protection Authority has found KSV1870's fully automated credit rating – which prevented the complainant from concluding an energy supply contract – to be unlawful. The DSB has also prohibited KSV1870 from carrying out such credit checks in future without the complainant's consent. Last but not least, the authority also reprimanded the two companies for their lack of transparency. They must now also provide a comprehensible explanation of the decisions they have made.

    • The Register UK ☛ UK to roll out digital ID for right to work by 2029

      The government said that digital IDs will be held on people's phones and will build on existing work to introduce a government digital wallet including driving licenses. It said it will ensure the scheme works for people who cannot use a smartphone, with a public consultation engaging with digitally excluded, homeless, and older people.

    • The Verge ☛ Instagram’s ‘pay or consent’ approach to ads is coming to UK after being rejected in EU

      Meta is bringing its “pay or consent” ad model to the UK after months of wrangling with regulators over the controversial policy. The update will force Instagram and Facebook users to pick between being served up personalized ads or shelling out for monthly subscriptions to ad-free versions.

  • Confidentiality

    • Seth Michael Larson ☛ GZipped files and streams may contain names

      It turns out that GZip streams have fields for information about the original file including the filename, modified timestamp, and comments. This means GZip streams can leak secret information if it's contained within the file metadata. Luckily tar when using $ tar -czf (which is the typical workflow) instead of the gzip and gunzip commands doesn't preserve the original filename in the GZip stream.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Digital Threat Modeling Under Authoritarianism - Schneier on Security

      Since the beginning of this year, the Trump administration’s actions in this area have raised alarm bells: The Department [sic] of Government Efficiency (DOGE [sic]) took data from federal agencies, Palantir combined disparate streams of government data into a single system, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used social media posts as a reason to deny someone entry into the U.S.

      These threats, and others posed by a techno-authoritarian regime, are vastly different from those presented by a corporate monopolistic regime—and different yet again in a society where both are working together. Contending with these new threats requires a different approach to personal digital devices, cloud services, social media, and data in general.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Security Week ☛ Microsoft Reduces Israel’s Access to Cloud and Hey Hi (AI) Products Over Reports of Mass Surveillance in Gaza

    Microsoft has disabled services to a unit within the Israeli military after a company review had determined its Hey Hi (AI) and clown computing products were being used to help carry out mass surveillance of Palestinians.

  • New York Times ☛ Abbas’s Message on Gaza to the United Nations

    The president of the Palestinian Authority addressed the U.N. General Assembly by video after the U.S. denied him a visa.

  • FAIR ☛ ‘Near Daily’ Israeli Assaults on Lebanon Have Become Non-News for Western Media

    The Israeli military unleashed a large wave of air strikes on densely populated towns in South Lebanon on Thursday, September 18—although you’d never know it from the Western corporate media, who have increasingly lost interest in reporting on Israel’s unceasing war on its northern neighbor. This proceeds unabated in spite of a ceasefire, brokered by the United States and France, that ostensibly took hold last November. Prior to Thursday’s strikes, area residents were given an hour to evacuate.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Declares Everyone Who Doesn’t Kiss His Ass Is A Terrorist

    The document has zero legal authority and can’t actually do anything to change the law—it’s performative authoritarian cosplay from a president whose approval ratings have cratered and whose policies are imploding (even the ones that were previously popular). But while it has no force of law, it can absolutely do serious damage by redirected all aspects of the federal government away from serving the public interest, and entirely towards punishing anyone who doesn’t like Trump. The whole thing reveals just how far Trump’s willing to go in redefining basic political opposition as terrorism when he can’t win literally any arguments on the merits.

  • The Register UK ☛ Cyber threat-sharing law set to lapse as govt shutdown looms

    For those unfamiliar with the decade-old law, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act gives companies permission to share threat indicators with the government. It sounds like something no one would disagree with when you put it that way, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find that the Act permits companies to share cyber threat indicators with the feds but requires removing personal information not directly related to a threat before doing so.

  • The Verge ☛ The TikTok deal raises more questions than answers

    Since the law banning TikTok briefly went into effect in January, Trump has pushed back its enforcement four times, with the most recent deadline giving TikTok until December 16th to strike a deal with American companies. Some argue that the repeated delays violate the US Constitution’s “Take Care” clause, which states that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Instead of enforcing the law, whether he favors it or not, Trump has spent months kicking the can down the road.

  • Wired ☛ Trump Executive Order Will Hand TikTok Over to US Investors

    There are widespread concerns that the Trump administration is willing to weaponize its allies’ control of media and social media to censor content it doesn’t favor. Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder who will have a significant role in the new TikTok entity, has close ties to the Trump administration. CBS, which is now owned by his son David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance Corporation, recently canceled The Late Show, whose host, Stephen Colbert, is a frequent Trump critic.

  • The Washington Post ☛ TikTok deal sparks criticism over foreign involvement and price tag

    An Emirati state-backed investment firm that boosted President Trump’s [cryptocurrency] venture stands to win a stake in TikTok U.S. as part of a deal negotiated by Trump’s White House.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Kindergarten Logic: How Elite Republicans Sold Democracy Down the River

    Now we’re watching the systematic prosecution of political enemies while the very Republicans who promised institutional constraint sit in comfortable silence. It’s time to acknowledge what should have been obvious from the beginning: their position was never respectable—it was morally insane.

    It’s never safe to vote for the guy who wants to be king. This isn’t complex political analysis requiring sophisticated institutional theory—it’s the most basic principle of democratic governance. Yet somehow, this became a controversial position among supposedly serious conservative intellectuals who spent 2024 convincing voters that empowering authoritarians was safe because other people would prevent the authoritarianism.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Nepal's Gen Z protesters look to the future

    When the government abruptly shut down all major social media platforms on September 4, claiming the companies had failed to properly register with authorities, that frustration erupted onto the streets of the capital. Both Mausam and Praveen Kulung joined the swelling crowds of young demonstrators demanding change.

    However, what began as chanting and raising placards, turned into violence and chaos several days later after police opened fire on protesters, killing 19, including Praveen Kulung.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Comey Indictment Is Not Just Payback

    It’s a glimpse of Trump’s next attempt to seize power.

  • Truthdig ☛ Federal Workers Declare Five-Alarm Fires at Key Agencies

    The unprecedented public letters from workers at FEMA, NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control express outrage and dismay that their work protecting the public is being wrecked by know-nothing administrators and trashed by political lackeys.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ TikTok will stay: Trump signs executive order to keep app in the US

    The deal constitutes a qualified divestiture in line with a ban or sell law that was passed last year with the backing of both Democrats and Republicans after years of scrutiny over TikTok’s potential to undermine U.S. national security or enhance the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to propagandize a very large audience.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Capitalist Cartoon: How America’s Business Elite Became Their Own Marxist Caricature

    These aren’t isolated incidents of individual moral failure. They represent the systematic transformation of American capitalism from a system of competitive enterprise into a protection racket where tribute payments and loyalty demonstrations determine market outcomes. Every tech oligarch who showed up to grovel, every Fortune 500 CEO who stayed silent about constitutional destruction, every venture capitalist who treated systematic institutional capture as normal political transition—they’ve all participated in the conversion of free enterprise into oligarchic feudalism.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ Comey Indictment: It’s Mafia Politics and Trump Is the Don

    Many observers, myself included, have already addressed the transparently political nature of this campaign of lawfare. We know that the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia previously failed to identify probable cause for indicting Comey. We know the plight of the White House’s targets, and the chilling effect this government overreach could have on other would-be critics.

    So today I’d like to look at the other side of things: from the perspective of Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and other senior Trump administration officials. In executing the president’s personal vendettas with no regard for their obligations as public servants, these individuals have reached the top of a tree they can’t climb down from.

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Denmark weighs NATO Article 4 after more suspicious drone incursions

    The airport is near Aalborg Air Station, which hosts Denmark's C-130 Hercules and CL-604 Challenger transport aircraft. Drones were also seen near Skrydstrup Air Base, where Danish F-16 fighter jets are stationed.

    The incident comes only two days after Denmark reported a mysterious drone incursion on Sept. 22.

  • ADF ☛ Burkina Faso’s Media Images Far Different From Harsh Reality

    Deaths tied to terrorism in Burkina Faso have almost tripled over the past three years to 17,775. By comparison, Burkina Faso reported 6,630 deaths in the three years before Traoré’s coup, which was carried out in the belief that the military would quickly bring stability to the country.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ Ukraine planning new offensive that would require U.S. intelligence support — WSJ — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ No heat, collapsing roofs, and buckets for toilets While Russia spends billions on the war in Ukraine, its schools are literally falling apart — Meduza

    • RFERL ☛ Ukraine Pounds Major Russian Oil Refineries As Fuel Shortages Reported

      Ukraine said it pounded several Russian refining operations as Kyiv intensifies its attacks on the country's energy infrastructure, which appear to be causing fuel shortages and price increases.

    • RFERL ☛ Zelenskyy Says Convicted Felon 'Supports' Ukraine's Retaliatory Strikes On Russian Energy

      Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says US President The Insurrectionist told him Kyiv could respond to Russia's attacks on its energy infrastructure with tit-for-tat strikes, as Ukraine continues to pound Russian refining operations.

    • LRT ☛ International pressure key to change Russia’s behaviour – Lithuanian president to UN chief

      Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda says only sustained international pressure can alter Russia’s behaviour and help bring an end to the invasion of Ukraine.

    • France24 ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man urges Turkey's Erdogan to stop buying Russian oil in White House meeting

      US President The Insurrectionist on Thursday urged his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan to stop buying Russian oil over the war in Ukraine as the two leaders met at the White House. Convicted Felon signalled willingness to revive Turkey’s suspended F-35 deal and lift sanctions linked to Ankara’s purchase of Russian missile systems.

    • France24 ☛ Mass child deportations: Russia seeks to 'eradicate Ukrainian identity, history, and entire country'

      François Picard is very pleased to welcome Mariam Lambert, Co‑Founder and CEO of the Emile Foundation, to share her life's work, "providing a better future for vulnerable children across the globe". Her current focus is on Ukraine as her team confronts one of the darkest and least visible dimensions of Russia's brutal invasion: the forced removal and deportation of Ukrainian children. Founded in 2011 as an international charitable organisation, Emile’s mandate evolved in 2023 to focus directly on the repatriation and reintegration of Ukrainian minors who have been removed from their families and forcibly sent to Russian territory. Ms. Lambert joins us following President Zelensky’s address to the United Nations drawing renewed attention to Russia's mass deportation of children as a weapon of war.

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Ukrainians believe there can be no lasting peace without security

      Ukrainians are acutely aware that Russia remains determined to erase Ukraine and understand that the war will not truly be over until the Kremlin has been decisively deterred from pursuing its imperial ambitions, writes Yaroslava Shvechykova-Plavska.

    • The Straits Times ☛ Rocky relations? Thai mall displays ‘Mt Rushmore’ of Convicted Felon, Putin, Pooh-tin and Kim

      Bangkok’s Seacon Square is known for its unconventional exhibits.

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man called Russia a ‘paper tiger’ because he believes Putin is losing

      US President The Insurrectionist now says Ukraine can defeat Russia. His dramatic change in tone reflects growing recognition that Putin's invasion is not going according to the Kremlin plan, writes Peter Dickinson.

    • Meduza ☛ ‘We were sent to the slaughter’: After three years in the trenches, mobilized Russian soldiers share their thoughts on the war against Ukraine — Meduza

    • Latvia ☛ Russian fighter jets intercepted above Baltic sea

      Hungarian Gripen fighter jets took off from Šiauliai, Lithuania, on Thursday 25 September to intercept five Russian fighter jets, NATO Allied Air Command said in a statement on social control media.

    • Meduza ☛ ‘What war?’ Independent sociologists spent four weeks in Kursk, studying how Russians near the front lines cope without getting political — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ ‘My body didn’t belong to me’: In Russia’s North Caucasus, women who can’t conceive are shamed and silenced — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ ‘A person couldn’t climb up there easily’: Russian municipal lawmaker found hanged in forest with hands tied behind him — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russians pick up the tab The Kremlin’s new tax hike aims to plug a record deficit and fund the war — but it may not be enough — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ ‘Fox News is the channel Trump watches’: Freed Belarusian political prisoner Siarhei Tsikhanouski faces backlash for pressuring wife, opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, to cancel CNN interview — Meduza

• Environment

  • Truthdig ☛ The Oceans Just Hit an Ominous Milestone

    In a new report, scientists warn that we’ve crossed yet another “planetary boundary,” a threshold that keeps Earth’s systems hospitable to life — a sort of global resilience that allows the planet to absorb shocks. This time, it’s the relentless acidification of the seas that’s crossed into dangerous territory, threatening all manner of marine life, including the organisms at the base of the food web. Of the nine total planetary boundaries, this is the seventh that’s been breached.

  • CBC ☛ Oceans dangerously acidic from carbon emissions, report warns

    A new report says that ocean acidification is the latest "planetary boundary" to be crossed, a reference to a set of warning signs related to key planetary systems that keep the Earth safe for human civilization.

    Other planetary boundaries that have already been crossed — including dangerous levels of chemical pollution, the warming atmosphere and changes to the nutrient cycle — have already signalled threats to people.

  • El País ☛ The world’s newsrooms can learn from Bill McKibben’s climate journalism

    Yet the climate crisis barely registers in the world’s news coverage. In the US, only 37% of people say that they hear about global warming in the media at least once a month. In India, the equivalent figure is 53% — still only one out of two people, and still only once a month.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Insight Hungary ☛ Trump calls Orban to discuss Russian oil import

      US President Donald Trump and Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán spoke on the phone on Wednesday about Hungary’s dependence on Russian oil, Hungary’s foreign minister has confirmed. Péter Szijjártó said the Hungarian MP raised the need for Russian fuel to keep domestic energy prices low, and Trump “understood these aspects”. Orbán’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyás, later told reporters in Budapest that Trump had acknowledged Hungary’s limited alternatives, given the restricted capacity of the Adria pipeline from Croatia.

      The call came only days after Trump demanded that NATO allies suspend Russian oil imports to weaken Moscow’s war economy. “He is a friend of mine. I have not spoken to him, but I have a feeling that if I did, he might stop. And I think I’ll be doing that," Trump had said earlier in the week. According to Szijjártó, the leaders also discussed the wider war in Ukraine, prospects for peace, tariffs, and the global economy. Orbán, who has long positioned himself as one of Trump’s closest political allies in Europe, has consistently argued that Hungary cannot afford to end its dependence on Russian energy.

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ How Lowrider Culture Turned Custom Cars Into Colorful, Stunning Works of Art

      The exhibition, presented in English and Spanish, runs through October 3, 2027, and tells an 80-year story of Mexican American ingenuity, family tradition and mechanical artistry embodied in lowriders.

    • NL Times ☛ Amsterdam to enforce ban on microcars on ferries and bike paths

      Amsterdam will begin enforcement actions this fall to prevent microcars, also known as brommobielen, from being used on city ferries and bike paths, city officials announced on Thursday. According to NH, the move comes after repeated sightings of the small vehicles on ferries, often riding where pedestrians and cyclists travel.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Pennsylvania was once a national leader in renewable energy. What happened?

      Robinson traces the origins of Pennsylvania’s failed promise as a leader in renewables to one big shift over the past 15 years.

    • Vintage Everyday ☛ The Story of Fred Finn, the World’s Most-Traveled Concorde Passenger

      Fred Finn, an English businessman, holds a unique place in aviation history as the world’s most-traveled man and, more specifically, the most frequent passenger on the iconic Concorde. His story is a testament to the golden age of air travel and the incredible efficiency of supersonic flight.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Logging to ‘Save’ Northern Spotted Owls From Wildfires Will Not End Well

• Finance

  • FAIR ☛ Jai Dulani and Vivek Bharathan on Data Center Opposition, Keith McHenry (2024) on Homeless Policy

  • DNA India ☛ Accenture layoffs: Why the [Microsoft reseller] cut over 11000 jobs; know real reason HERE

    Accenture has laid off more than 11,000 employees across teams around the world, the tech giant said in a statement as it released its quarterly results. The Dublin-headquartered company has warned that it expects more job cuts in the coming months. The vast layoffs have taken place over the last three months amid the company's increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). The firm has laid out a massive restructuring programme as it forecasts slower growth for the year.

  • Global PR firm We. Communications confirms layoffs at its Singapore office

    Global PR firm We. Communications has confirmed layoffs at its Singapore office. The move comes amid intensifying competition and clients shifting PR functions in-house, creating significant budget gaps for the agency.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • NYPost ☛ Trump demands Microsoft fire ex-Biden DOJ official Lisa Monaco

    President Trump on Friday demanded that Microsoft fire Lisa Monaco — the former Biden-era deputy attorney general now serving as the tech giant’s president of global affairs — calling her “a menace to U.S. National Security” with access to “Highly Sensitive Information.”

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ ID cards: UK risks sleeping walking into pre-crime state

    Rather than embarking on another costly digital ID card scheme, ORG has called on the government to learn from the flawed digital e-visa scheme that was rolled out by the Home Office this year.

    The evisa scheme has highlighted many of the risks and harms that digital IDs can bring: [...]

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Anthropic to triple international headcount, add offices following latest funding round

    More than 100 of the employees Anthropic plans to hire will join its offices in Dublin, London and Zurich. The latter facility is reportedly focused on supporting the company’s AI research efforts. Anthropic also plans to grow its presence in northern and southern Europe, Germany and Austria.

  • CNBC ☛ Anthropic to triple international workforce in global AI push

    The company is recruiting country leads for India, Australia and New Zealand, Korea, and Singapore, with broader expansion underway across the UK, northern and southern Europe, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

  • The Register UK ☛ Oracle takes on $18B debt amid AI infrastructure gamble

    The move follows Oracle's first quarter results from earlier in the month, when it stunned the stock market by announcing it had bagged cloud contracts, signed but not yet paid for, worth $455 billion.

  • Pete Brown ☛ Fake civility

    The gist of it is that calls for civility in the public sphere are a means of control by the people in power. I think that is right; those in power want to be able to be able to say and do whatever they want without consequences or criticism, and they want to preserve that privilege for themselves. These calls are a display of dominance, a public subjugation of anyone who disagrees with them or whom they dislike.

  • Mike Brock ☛ A Memo to Corporate America: How to Stop Being Cartoon Villains

    I’ve spent considerable time lately documenting how America’s corporate elite have transformed themselves into the exact cartoon villains that Marxists always claimed they were—groveling before authoritarian power, paying tribute to criminal regimes, abandoning every principle they’ve spent decades claiming to represent. But criticism without constructive alternatives is just intellectual masturbation, so let me offer some practical guidance for any CEO who might still possess a functioning moral compass.

  • Latvia ☛ WATCH: President Rinkēvičs addresses the United Nations

    On September 24th, Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs took his turn among world leaders by addressing the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, USA. His full speech is reproduced below. Unlike the hour-long effort delivered by US President The Insurrectionist the previous day, President Rinkēvičs was done and dusted in a little over ten minutes.

  • European Commission ☛ President Ursula von der Leyen was in New York this week to participate in the UN General Assembly.

  • New York Times ☛ The Justice Dept. Is Taking Aim at Convicted Felon’s Foes

    Also, Convicted Felon waded into bailout politics by offering a lifeline to Argentina. Here’s the latest at the end of Thursday.

  • New York Times ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man Says He Wants to Give Aid to Struggling Farmers

    The president said some revenue from tariffs would go to crop farmers, but the agriculture secretary said a plan wasn’t yet ready.

  • New York Times ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man Wades Into Bailout Politics in Offering a Lifeline to Argentina

    A $20 billion loan to support Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, could come with economic and political risks.

  • JURIST ☛ Kyrgyzstan undermines human rights with closure of torture prevention body, UN report

    United Nations (UN) Human Rights Chief Volker Türk on Wednesday condemned Kyrgyzstan’s dissolution of its National Center for the Prevention of Torture (NCPT), warning that the country’s new legislation constitutes a breach of its international legal commitments under the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT). 

  • New York Times ☛ Microsoft Disables Some Services to Israel’s Defense Ministry

    Microsoft said it found that Israel was violating some terms of service for its products and that it does “not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians.”

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Microsoft blocks Israeli military’s access to some cloud services to prevent mass surveillance

    Microsoft Corp. said today it has stopped a unit in Israel’s Defense Ministry from accessing some of its cloud services following an investigation into claims that it was using the company’s Microsoft trap Azure cloud platform to enable the mass surveillance of Palestinians.

  • JURIST ☛ UN group of human rights experts on Nicaragua warn of escalation in transnational repression

    The UN group of human rights experts on Nicaragua revealed in a new report on Tuesday that the Nicaraguan government, led by President Daniel Ortega, has intensified repression of exiled critics abroad. The repression includes legal persecution, denial of passport renewals and other documents, transnational surveillance, and intimidation of family members.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Straits Times ☛ ‘When did Messi and Ronaldo come to Malaysia’: Penang eatery goes viral with Hey Hi (AI) images of celebs

      TikTok posts by Nasi Kandar Sulaiman have gone viral for depicting AI-generated images of celebrities.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Russia Targets Moldovan Election in Disinformation Play

      Threat hunting vendor Silent Push published research on Sept. 23 concerning a threat actor tracked as Storm-1679 (aka Matryoshka). Silent Push's research builds upon a Recorded Future analysis published earlier this month, explaining how Russia has been using disinformation to disrupt Moldova's Sept. 28 parliamentary elections and thwart its efforts to join the European Union.

      This campaign generally takes the form of news sites that contain articles biased against current Moldovan leadership and Moldovan's potential entry into the EU, as well as false headlines about the current government.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Truthdig ☛ Pentagon Becomes 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 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.”

    The National Press Club called the rules “a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the U.S. military.’” Even right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe came out against the restrictions, saying the U.S. government “should not be asking us to obey.”

  • TruthOut ☛ California Officials Defend Right to Read Banned Books — Unless You’re in Prison | Truthout

    While these safeguards are undeniably important, Thurmond’s conviction that “we don’t ban books” is missing a caveat: We don’t ban books here — except in our state prisons. Access to literature for people experiencing incarceration has always been heavily monitored; often the very same books that state officials fight for access to in public schools are restricted in jails and prisons.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ We Are All Domestic Terrorists Now

    Trump’s new EO is the formal declaration of the rabid fascist war to crush political opposition. It is a statement of the administration’s intention to designate any institutions organizing and funding political opposition as agents of domestic terrorism, and then to use the toolset of “anti-terrorism” to harass, disrupt, and destroy them. The order first lists off some disparate recent events—the killing of Charlie Kirk and United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the pot shots taken at Trump during his campaign, the (half ass, not really) “assassination attempt” on Brett Kavanaugh—along with quasi-imaginary “Riots in Los Angeles and Portland” to paint a picture of a crisis of political violence.

  • RFERL ☛ Afghans Fear Losing 'Last Hope' As Taliban Shuts Down Internet

    "We have faced many problems due to the Internet shutdown," Maryam, who lives in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, told RFE/RL's Radio Azadi, using a pseudonym for fear of retribution. "I'm the breadwinner of my family."

  • RFERL ☛ Imprisoned Iranian Activist Rashidi Dies Amid Allegations Of Medical Neglect

    Rashidi was arrested on April 24, 2025, while writing protest slogans in Tehran’s Javadiyeh neighborhood, according to Hengaw. Security forces beat her during the arrest and charged her with "propaganda against the state," it added.

  • EDRI ☛ Chat Control: What is actually going on?

    In summer 2025, so-called “Chat Control” became a huge topic of public attention. This is because in a major vote planned for 13 or 14 October, EU governments will decide whether to endorse or reject a mass surveillance, encryption-breaking and anonymity-ending law: the EU CSA Regulation. However, there remain many democratic checks-and-balances in the EU lawmaking system that mean we still have a strong chance to stop measures that would amount to Chat Control.

  • The Atlantic ☛ What Republicans Can Do If They Really Want to Protect Free Speech

    I recently reached out to the most principled, nonpartisan free-speech organization that I know of, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, to ask what legislative changes it would suggest to bolster free-speech rights. FIRE responded with five suggestions, emphasizing that it had supported the changes long before the current presidential administration. These ideas are best thought of “not as a response to the current moment,” Carolyn Iodice, the organization’s legislative and policy director, told me, “but as options for removing powers that have been abused by both parties, and which no government official should have had in the first place.”

  • New Yorker ☛ How Free Is Free Speech?

    This is not social shunning. This is not speaking from the bully pulpit. Apart from the libel suits, which the President can add teeth to by threatening regulatory sanctions or by slow-walking mergers and other business deals that require government approval, this is the persecution of people and organizations based on point of view. Much of this is exactly what the Supreme Court has said the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from doing. The Administration is not even pretending to follow the law, let alone its own proclamations about free speech. It’s getting results, so why should it?

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Death by Falling: A Timeline of Cases Across Russia and Abroad - The Moscow Times

    The Moscow Times has gathered a running list of notable cases over the past three years.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' returns to Sinclair and Nexstar stations on Friday

    Neither Nexstar nor Sinclair cited a specific reason for returning the program, which has not aired on its stations since Sept. 16. But in the days since Kimmel returned to his late-night perch on Tuesday, he has scored a massive number of views on YouTube while attracting strong TV ratings despite the preemptions.

  • El País ☛ Jimmy Kimmel returns with an emotional, defiant monologue: ‘Our government cannot be allowed to control what we say on TV’

    Trump did not temper his words in his fiery post on Truth Social. And yet, Kimmel’s show was not aired at the White House... or anywhere else in Washington. Two groups of ABC-affiliated local stations that together cover around 25% of U.S. territory — Sinclair, whose owner is a well-known Trump supporter, and Nexstar, the most widely spread across the country and the one behind the initial suspension — decided not to broadcast Kimmel’s program.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ Returns to Nexstar Stations

    Nexstar owns and operates more than 30 ABC affiliates across the nation, including stations in Nashville, Salt Lake City, and Hartford/New Haven, Connecticut. The company added that it wants “to protect and reflect the specific sensibilities of our communities.”

  • Case Western Reserve University ☛ Jimmy Kimmel returns to air after suspension

    Reporters have described Carr as threatening Kimmel with mafioso behavior, sending a message to other artists and activists that dissent of conservative figures could potentially carry serious consequences. Carr, who believes that he can reserve the power to withhold broadcasting licenses that do not serve the public interest, has been known to criticize liberal media outlets.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • FAIR ☛ ‘The White House Is Shaking Down Media Owners to Get Them to Follow the Trump Agenda’: CounterSpin interview with Tim Karr on media capitulation

  • Press Gazette ☛ Former Observer big-hitters launch new title with redundancy payouts

    Five senior Observer journalists including Carole Cadwalladr have launched their own culture-led publication partly funded with their redundancy money.

    The Nerve, which is promising culture journalism that connects the dots with tech, politics and art, is launching as a twice-weekly newsletter through Substack rival Beehiiv, with a beta website.

    The aim is to expand it to a full website and twice-yearly print publication in 2026 around the launch of its first major investigation.

  • New Yorker ☛ Is Trump’s Attack on the Media Following Putin’s Playbook?

    In Putin-era Russia, the takeover of NTV, and similar cases of state encroachment in the media, eventually led to a culture of self-censorship, in which outright bans or other repressive measures were relatively rare. Instead, individuals were enlisted as agents of their own oppression. Better to avoid certain topics or stories, lest your show, article, or media outlet become the next NTV. “I’m afraid this tendency is inevitable in autocracies,” Sergey Parkhomenko, the former editor-in-chief of Itogi, a popular newsweekly that was part of Gusinsky’s media holdings, said. “But it seems as if it’s happening terribly fast in the U.S. Russia needed twenty-five years for this culture to embed itself. In the U.S., it feels like it’s becoming the norm in a matter of weeks.”

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Billboards aimed at troops ask 'is this what you signed up for?'

    “Did you go to Airborne just to pull security for ICE?” a billboard asks in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The billboard is one of two put up last week in North Carolina outside of two of the largest military bases, the Army’s Fort Bragg and the Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Trump Is Setting the National Parks Up to Fail

    But rangers say the real crisis is happening beyond the trails and campgrounds, where visitors can’t see it. Park employees’ experiences, which several people described to me and dozens more have shared publicly, suggest that the Department of the Interior sacrificed long-term stewardship of American lands to maintain a veneer of normalcy for this summer’s crowds. “We are really pulling out all the stops to make sure that the impacts are being hidden,” an emergency-services ranger in the western United States told me. (She and other park employees I spoke with for this story requested anonymity, out of fear of losing their job.)

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Report: Nearly half of all federal funding for tribes at risk under Trump’s ‘big beautiful’ bill

    Roughly $530 million of the $1.19 billion allocated to Northwest tribal nations in fiscal year 2024 — used to fulfill the federal government’s trust and treaty obligations to Native American and Alaska Native tribes — is at risk of being cut. The congressionally allocated funds serve myriad functions for tribes in the Northwest, including providing clean drinking water, affordable housing, schools, transit and land management. Funding is decided by Congress on a yearly basis and can be disbursed over a period of time that exceeds the calendar year it is allocated.

  • Pro Publica ☛ I Filmed the ICE Officer Who Shoved a Woman

    Since arriving, I’ve spent time reporting in immigrant neighborhoods, emergency rooms, churches, ICE field offices and, most recently, in the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. I’ve gone there most every morning for the past two weeks.

    During that time, I’d seen ICE drag several immigrants away from their families, all of them sobbing and pleading with the officers not to separate them from their loved ones.

    But what happened Thursday was a shocking escalation.

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ ICE agents point guns at bystanders during violent arrest in Maryland

    For about nine minutes Wednesday morning, ICE agents pinned a man to the ground in the middle of a Maryland intersection. It was broad daylight as he screamed in anguish and shouted for help in both Spanish and English. When bystanders gathered to bear witness, agents briefly brandished their guns and pointed at them, with one officer appearing to keep his finger on the trigger for several minutes after. According to witness Raphi Talisman, “It looked like he was trying to calm himself, but at the same time, his gun was brandished and he was ready.”

  • Dan Sinker ☛ Disasters, Invisible and Visible

    The speed and unpredictability of the ICE roundups make hearing about them difficult. News organizations can't be everywhere all at once, not to mention most of the orgs in Chicago are in a defensive crouch from years of layoffs and budget cuts. As a result, there's much less visibility on this unfolding tragedy than there should be. While some days get lots of coverage, focused largely around the ICE detention facility in the suburb of Broadview where daily protests have been held for weeks, other days this disaster is nearly invisible unless you know where to look.

  • EDRI ☛ Building movement capacity at the intersection of digital and environmental justice

    Within the digital rights movement in Europe, EDRi identified in 2024 a number of vital opportunities to bring the fight for the climate closer to the movement for digital rights. We recognised that even if we achieve the protection of digital fundamental rights for people in Europe, we won’t achieve justice if we don’t address the massive global impact (and disproportionate harm towards communities in Global Majority countries) stemming from European tech production, use and misuse.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Trump’s War on Wind Power Is Killing Thousands of Union Jobs

    A stop-work order from the Trump administration last month paused construction of a wind turbine farm off the coast of Rhode Island, laying off 1,000 unionized workers. The administration is threatening to halt yet more offshore wind projects.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Rage Against the (Algorithmic Management) Machine

    Obviously the "gig economy" was ground zero for this bullshit, with delivery drivers/riders and rideshare leading the pack, followed by all the other jobs getting sucked into piecework: dog walking, nursing, house cleaning and more. But – as the report notes – 79% of EU companies are doing algorithmic management.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • GreyCoder ☛ Archive.Ph: Get Snapshots Of Web Pages That Are Behind Firewalls Or Have Changed - GreyCoder

    Archive.Ph allows you to make a snapshot of a webpage that will always be available even if the original page changes or is deleted. It saves a textual and graphical copy of the page and provides a short URL.

  • [Repeat] Zimbabwe ☛ Zim: Fixed Users on 490GB a Month, Mobile Users Budget 4GB

    At first, you might be surprised that mobile usage is even that close. Zimbabwe has millions more mobile users than fixed, but aren’t they all stuck on cheap capped bundles? How can mobile traffic still be a third of fixed?

    The answer is in the averages. And once you see them, the story becomes clear: Zimbabwe doesn’t have one internet, it has two.

  • [Repeat] Zimbabwe ☛ Starlink reshapes Zimbabwe’s [Internet] as leased lines die

    It doesn’t sound mind-blowing until you see what those 40k users are doing: they chewed through 83.9 petabytes of data, nearly a quarter of all the country’s fixed [Internet] traffic.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ Spotify’s risky bet

    For years, on-demand playback on smartphones was one of Spotify’s main selling points, reserved exclusively for paying subscribers. But the Swedish streaming platform has now decided to soften its strategy. Since last week, even free users can choose the track they want to listen to. This move partially ends the shuffle-only constraint: daily on-demand listening time is capped, then the number of “skips” will also be limited.

    Spotify hopes the change will attract new users, especially teenagers who tend to prefer YouTube, and in turn boost its advertising revenue. Executives are betting this shift won’t slow down conversions to paid subscriptions, nor prompt existing customers to cancel.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• New York Times ☛ Google Asks Supreme Court to Intervene in Dispute With Fortnite Creator

  The case could rewrite the rules on how businesses make money on Google’s smartphone operating system.

• 404 Media ☛ The SIM Farm Hardware Seized by the Secret Service Is Also Popular With Ticket Scalpers

  I have been familiar with and meaning to write about SIM banks for a few months now, specifically because they have become popular with ticket scalpers. Like many “anti-scalping” and anti-fraud measures taken by Ticketmaster, relatively recent updates that require SMS verification to create a new Ticketmaster account and immediately before buying tickets hasn’t actually stopped scalping. Instead, it has created a new underground market for tools that make SMS authentication at bulk easier. By adding this barrier to entry, Ticketmaster has ensured that normal fans have one single attempt to buy tickets, while motivated ticket scalpers with specialized tech can have many attempts at buying tickets.

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU

  Apple has threatened to stop selling iPhones and other devices in the European Union (home to over 500,000,000 affluent consumers) if the bloc doesn't rescind the Digital Markets Act, a democratically accountable anti-monopoly law that bans Apple from blocking third parties from offering services to iPhone owners: [...]

• The Conversation ☛ Despite Google’s recent victory, a flurry of competition cases could still change how the tech giants do business

  A US judge recently decided not to break up Google, despite a ruling last year that the company held a monopoly in the online search market. Between Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Meta, there are more than 45 ongoing antitrust investigations in the EU (the majority under the new EU Digital Markets Act) and in the US.

• The Register UK ☛ Apple, Google tell Europe the Digital Markets Act is a FAIL

  At the time of writing, the EC appears not to have posted submissions online. The Register expects other tech giants will also have plenty to say about the DMA, and that the Trump administration will watch the situation with interest given its belief that regulating or taxing American tech companies is harmful.

• Michael Tsai ☛ Apple’s Thoughts on the DMA

  I find the way Apple is communicating this really frustrating. It reads like either a bad faith smokescreen or that something got lost in the translation between engineering and marketing. I would have a lot more respect if they just said that DMA compliance is too slow or too expensive or that they don’t believe in interoperability. Instead, we get this nonsense where we’re supposed to believe that their teams are actively working on a way to share data without actually sharing data, but they haven’t quite cracked it yet.

• Alex Russell ☛ Apple's Antitrust Playbook

  Make no mistake about what's going on: Apple is claiming that the EU is forcing Apple to adopt interpretations of the DMA that no other party has, which the EC itself has not backed, and which are “forcing” Apple to avoid shipping features in the EU.

  Or, put another way, Apple wants to launder the consequences of its own anticompetitive, anti-user choices through a credulous tech press. The goal is to frame regulators for Apple's own deeds.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ U.S. Govt. Asks to Speak on Cox's Behalf in Supreme Court Piracy Liability Showdown

    Cox Communications is not fighting its billion-dollar piracy liability case alone. In a formal motion, the U.S. Solicitor General requested speaking time to voice the government's interest in the landmark case. The Internet provider has agreed to cede ten minutes of its argument time, allowing the government to personally advocate against a lower court ruling it fears would put Americans' internet access at risk.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Bungie's Copyright Battle Against Cheat Seller AimJunkies Ends with Final Capitulation

    The legal battle between game developer Bungie and cheat seller AimJunkies is over. A stipulated dismissal filed at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals effectively marks the end of the case, one notable for a first-ever verdict holding a cheat maker liable for copyright infringement. Comments shared with TorrentFreak suggest that AimJunkies takes full responsibility.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Italy Expands Piracy Shield to Live TV, Begins With 'The X Factor'

    Legal amendments adopted during the summer expanded the scope of Italy's Piracy Shield blocking system beyond sports to all live entertainment events. Given the prevalence of piracy around big movie premieres, a Hollywood blockbuster seemed like a logical choice to test out the system. Instead, Sky Italia's exclusive rights to broadcast the world-famous X Factor TV show will take center stage.