Leftovers

• Eliseo Martelli ☛ Why I think gear isn't the point

  The main problem is not people that take photos, that's never the problem. The problem is who curates them, and the aesthetic they decide to elevate. Too often I see curators having the "Instagram taste": perfect symmetry, beautiful painted-like skies, reflection so sharp they look AI generated. It's algorithmic pop. Polished and efficient, but completely empty.

• Science

  • The Conversation ☛ [NASA]’s Artemis II mission is crucial as doubts build that America can beat China back to the Moon

    For the first time in half a century, America stands on the threshold of sending astronauts back to the Moon. Slated for launch no earlier than February 2026, Artemis II will not land on the lunar surface, but it will carry four astronauts on a flyby of Earth’s only natural satellite.

• Career/Education

  • 404 Media ☛ Libraries Can’t Get Their Loaned Books Back Because of Trump’s Tariffs

    Libraries have shared their collections internationally for decades. Trump’s tariffs are throwing that system into chaos and can ‘hinder academic progress.’

  • Dave DeGraw ☛ A Few Thoughts About Teaching School

    So what am I driving at? Well, I’ve been giving a ton of thought into what makes a school “awesome” versus “less awesome” (they really are all incredible). I think many would simply throw a metric out, like socioeconomic status, testing scores, or attendance numbers. However, I think this is selling it very short. In my opinion it boils down entirely to expectations. What expectations do the faculty and staff have for the students? What do they have for themselves? Closely related, what goals do they have for the students and themselves and what role can an individual play in meeting those goals? Simply put, I think the difference boils down almost entirely into who cares the most.

• Hardware

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Wireless wearable mouse ‘picoRing’ runs one month on single charge

    The researchers introduced a watchlike wristband that acts as a signal relay between the ring and the connected device. “This allowed us to use far weaker, and less power-hungry, communications components in the ring itself,” Takahashi said.

  • New York Times ☛ OpenAI Agrees to Use Computer Chips From AMD

    On Monday, OpenAI said it would begin using AMD chips in the second half of next year as it built computer data centers. The new facilities would be separate from the data centers that OpenAI has committed to building in Texas, New Mexico, Ohio and an unnamed site in the Midwest.

  • Herman Õunapuu ☛ Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev

    This post is NOT sponsored, the products were bought with my hard-earned money.

    I’ve been running a full SSD storage setup for a few years in my home server and I’ve been happy with it, except for the storage anxiety that I get with running small pools of fast storage, which is why I started looking at how the hard drive market is doing.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Doc Searls ☛ Leavings

    So I’ll be devoting more of my bloggings to surfacing valuable lessons and stories left in my care by those now gone, and to making clearer what I’m bringing to generations after mine.

    Here is one of the biggest lessons: life really is short. Those 78 years went by fast. And each year goes by faster, since it’s a narrower wedge of my life’s pie. I wish everyone a long life, and also knowledge that the decades, years, or minutes one has left will still be too few. And that this is how life is designed.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Amazon turns James Bond into the Man Without the Golden Gun

    After fans caused an uproar on social media, Amazon appeared to change the promotional images it uses for James Bond movies. This time, the promo images show Bond in famous scenes from the films, but in those scenes, he is not holding a gun.

  • Security Week ☛ Microsoft and Steam Take Action as Unity Vulnerability Puts Games at Risk

    Because the extra is passed as a command-line argument to Unity and any application can send the extra to a Unity application, an attacker could control the command-line arguments that are passed to a Unity application.

    An attacker could build a malicious application that would extract the native library containing malicious code, and then launch the Unity application with a specific argument pointing to the malicious library, thus achieving code execution.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Unity Vulnerability Hits Android, Windows, Linux Platforms

    While the Unity vulnerability affects all major desktop and mobile operating systems, its risk level varies. On Linux, the threat is considered lower than on Android or Windows. Still, Unity recommends all developers apply the patch regardless of perceived platform risk.

  • The Register UK ☛ Clop hits Oracle E-Business Suite users with fresh zero-day

    The bug marks the latest twist in a saga that began when Oracle warned last week that Clop had been exploiting older, unpatched EBS flaws in a wave of extortion attacks. At the time, the company said the activity was tied to vulnerabilities addressed in its July Critical Patch Update. However, the crooks had a fresh ace up their sleeve: a previously unknown zero-day that Oracle now admits was being used in the same campaign.

  • Dark Reading ☛ Clop Ransomware Hits Oracle Customers Via Zero-Day

    That zero-day is CVE-2025-61882, a critical flaw in Oracle E-Business Suite that enables an attacker without authentication to remotely access and compromise Oracle Concurrent Processing. On Thursday, Oracle chief security officer (CSO) Rob Duhart said in a blog post that the recent wave of attacks targeting Oracle customers was potentially related to nine flaws patched in July, but on Oct. 4 Oracle disclosed that a new vulnerability was to blame.

  • Security Week ☛ Discord Says User Information Stolen in Third-Party Data Breach

    Names, usernames, email addresses, contact information, IP addresses, and billing information was compromised.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Up in smoke: Work documents of 191,000 civil servants lost in data centre fire in South Korea

    It had never been backed up externally.

    “As the system was not backed up externally, all documents stored on the repository have been lost, and there is no way to bring back the lost documents,” director-general Lim Jeong-gyu of the Public Service Bureau said at a press conference on Oct 1.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Sam Altman Warns That AI Industry Is Due for a Spectacular Implosion 

      It’s the kind of blasé, bromidic talk you’d expect to hear from a coach of a sports team that’s on a historic losing streak. Oh yes, “there’ll be ups and downs” — and your eyes glaze over. You forgive them, though, because, well, what else are they going to say? That everything’s going down the toilet?

      But Altman commands a half-trillion-dollar startup that’s the tip of the spear for an out-of-control AI gold rush. Pretty much the entire world economy is tangled up in the hundreds of billions of investment being poured into the industry.

    • Variety ☛ Robin Williams Daughter: Don't Send Me 'Gross' AI Recreations of Him

      “Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” Zelda wrote. “Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t. If you’re just trying to troll me, I’ve seen way worse, I’ll restrict and move on. But please, if you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it’s NOT what he’d want.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Deloitte to pay money back to Albanese government after using AI in $440,000 report

      Partial refund to be issued after several errors were found in a report into a department’s compliance framework

    • Simon Willison ☛ Deloitte to pay money back to Albanese government after using AI in $440,000 report

      Here's the page for the report. The PDF now includes this note: [...]

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI in the 2026 Midterm Elections

      The widespread fear that AI would be used to manipulate the 2024 U.S. election seems rather quaint in a year where the president posts AI-generated images of himself as the pope on official White House accounts. But AI is a lot more than an information manipulator. It’s also emerging as a politicized issue. Political first-movers are adopting the technology, and that’s opening a gap across party lines.

      We expect this gap to widen, resulting in AI being predominantly used by one political side in the 2026 elections. To the extent that AI’s promise to automate and improve the effectiveness of political tasks like personalized messaging, persuasion, and campaign strategy is even partially realized, this could generate a systematic advantage.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Microsoft: forget your IT department, use Copilot at work anyway!

      Update: A YouTube commenter had to tell a Microsoft salesperson they weren’t buying any Copilot — “whereupon she revealed that the only thing she is being measured on for Q4 is sales of copilot, so if that’s off the table the conversation is not interesting. LMAO.”

  • Social Control Media

    • Kev Quirk ☛ A Frank Piece About Influencers

      I’m not saying that these people are responsible for Lisa’s suicide, but I am saying that this fabricated bullshit is 100% having an effect on vulnerable people, like Lisa.

    • Manton Reece ☛ Our attention

      I’m a patient person, but this had eaten up way too much of my time. I had to turn them away, apologizing as they gave me a guilt trip that they had driven an hour and a half to get here. The whole thing was what I joke about as delay fish. I could finally see what should’ve been obvious right away: this was all a huge waste of time.

      This is a long introduction to saying that I’m making a couple changes to my social media diet.

    • Kev Quirk ☛ Thinking About Social Media

      Is social media in any form really worth the drama, and was it doomed to failure from the start?

    • Ava ☛ a frank piece about influencers

      The obvious has been spread around far and wide: Everyone knows the products they show are not the ones they actually use or like, they were paid to promote it and they got it for free. Some influencers have since opened up about the flood of PR packages and how much they either donate or sadly throw away.

      But what less people know is: The designer bags are fakes a lot of the time. If you are in the right online spaces where people care for spotting this stuff, you can see them post proof by zooming in at a specific part of videos and showing the original bag has a different clasp or a wider rim or has a number there or different packaging. When actually showing off real designer items, some have admitted to simply renting or buying for the video and then returning them, or that they are able to claim these items as a tax write-off for being in a video.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Security Week ☛ Beer Giant Asahi Says Data Stolen in Ransomware Attack

      On October 3, Asahi confirmed that the disruptions were the result of ransomware being deployed on its servers, but refrained from sharing specific information on the group responsible for the attack.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Wired ☛ Vibe Coding Is the New Open Source—in the Worst Way Possible

      “We're hitting the point right now where AI is about to lose its grace period on security,” says Alex Zenla, chief technology officer of the cloud security firm Edera. “And AI is its own worst enemy in terms of generating code that’s insecure. If AI is being trained in part on old, vulnerable, or low-quality software that's available out there, then all the vulnerabilities that have existed can reoccur and be introduced again, not to mention new issues.”

      In addition to sucking up potentially insecure training data, the reality of vibe coding is that it produces a rough draft of code that may not fully take into account all of the specific context and considerations around a given product or service. In other words, even if a company trains a local model on a project's source code and a natural language description of goals, the production process is still relying on human reviewers' ability to spot any and every possible flaw or incongruity in code originally generated by AI.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Techdirt ☛ Chat Control Is Back On The Menu In The EU. It Still Must Be Stopped

      Chat Control is a dangerous legislative proposal that would make it mandatory for service providers, including end-to-end encrypted communication and storage services, to scan all communications and files to detect “abusive material.” This would happen through a method called client-side scanning, which scans for specific content on a device before it’s sent. In practice, Chat Control is chat surveillance and functions by having access to everything on a device with indiscriminate monitoring of everything. In a memo, the Danish Presidency claimed this does not break end-to-end encryption.

      This is absurd.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Meta to settle data protection lawsuit with Nigeria

      The company also faces a separate case with Nigeria’s consumer protection agency: It was fined $220 million last year over allegations of “multiple and repeated, as well as continuing infringements” of the country’s data protection and competition laws. Meta disputed Nigeria’s findings and decision to fine it, but a tribunal upheld the decision in April.

    • Wired ☛ OpenAI Wants ChatGPT to Be Your Future Operating System

      This is not OpenAI’s first effort to introduce ChatGPT apps. The company announced a way to build custom widgets or GPTs at its developer conference two years ago. When the GPT Store officially launched in January 2024, OpenAI said that developers had created over 3 million custom GPTs. Ultimately, however, the widgets did not prove a big hit.

      OpenAI didn’t share details around any revenue-share agreements with Canva, Zillow, Spotify, and the other apps it highlighted today.

    • PC World ☛ Amazon has quietly unveiled a $20 Alexa remote

      Slated to ship on October 30, the $20 Amazon Basics Smart Dimmer Switch and Remote is just that—a palm-sized remote that lets you control your Alexa-connected smart devices as well as trigger Alexa routines.

    • PC World ☛ Warning! Meta will start snooping on your AI chats in its apps in December

      In the near future, according to a recent news release, Meta wants to systematically save and analyze its users’ conversations with the company’s own AI chatbot on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.

      The initiative will begin starting December 16th, 2025, initially outside the EU and UK where stricter data protection laws will force a later introduction. The data will be used to further personalize advertising and content, and it won’t be possible to opt out.

    • Macworld ☛ I once wanted an Apple smart ring. I wouldn't buy one now

      But I think this less and less. Partly this is because of safety concerns. Samsung’s Galaxy Ring has been hit by recent reports of bloated batteries, and one YouTuber was turned away from a flight and ended up in the hospital after his ring swelled so much it could no longer be removed. This isn’t to say that an Apple Ring would face similar problems, or even that Samsung’s problem is especially widespread. It’s just that a doctor wielding medical lubricant and a pair of bolt cutters isn’t the sort of image you want in your head when considering an expensive purchase. It’s not an issue the reviews ever really considered before, but it’s certainly something people will remember when deciding whether to buy one.

    • Bitdefender ☛ Discord users' data stolen by hackers in third-party data breach

      According to the hugely popular messaging platform which has more than 200 million monthly users, the hackers breached a third-party customer service provider rather than gaining access to Discord directly.

    • EFF ☛ Opt Out October: Daily Tips to Protect Your Privacy and Security

      Online privacy isn’t dead. But the tech giants make it a pain in the butt to achieve. With these incremental tweaks to the services we use, we can throw sand in the gears of the surveillance machine and opt out of the ways tech companies attempt to optimize us into advertisement and content viewing machines. We’re also pushing companies to make more privacy-protective defaults the norm, but until that happens, the onus is on all of us to dig into the settings.

    • RFERL ☛ Kazakhstan Is Building A Surveillance State. Will China Be Its Model?

      The Kazakh Interior Ministry said that Boqaev was added to the database incorrectly due to his resemblance to another individual. Interior Minister Yerzhan Sadenov said afterward that the government is not compiling a database of activists and that "technology can make mistakes, too."

• Defence/Aggression

  • Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Restored in Indonesia, Its Second-Largest Market

    TikTok has said it would respect the laws and regulations in countries where it operates, including Indonesia—the second-largest market for the short-form video platform—and was working with the ministry to resolve the issue. Now, the ministry has confirmed that TikTok complied with the government’s request.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Texas National Guard deploying to Chicago on Monday

    Speaking at a press conference Monday, Pritzker said the troops are not needed in Chicago and labeled the order “Trump’s invasion.” He said federal agents were shooting rubber bullets and tear gas canisters at protesters to “incite” residents and provide Trump the pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act.

    “There is no invasion here. There is no insurrection here. … The folks in the neighborhoods do not want armed troops marching in their streets,” he said at the conference.

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ Must-Reads and the War on Chicago

    If you’re here for my must-reads list, you can find that at the top. If you’re here for a rundown of Trump’s recent escalations in Chicago, scroll down.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Brad Lander Wants New York City to Resist

    Long an advocate for organized labor, Lander has become a high profile activist for immigrant rights. He was arrested by federal agents in June while observing immigration court, and again at a sit-in protest against ICE last month. In addition to his official duties supervising the city’s finances, Lander is busy supporting Mamdani’s campaign, planning how to resist the Trump administration, and considering his own political future.

    On Friday, we spoke to him in his downtown office about ICE, the Democratic Party, Trump-proofing New York City, and what to do in Brooklyn. Our conversation is below.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ Trump’s March on Chicago

    I’m not into click-bait headlines heralding the death of democracy. Democracy is a system; an idea. It’s hard to pin a precise expiration date on something like that. You rarely go to sleep in a free society and wake up under a dictatorship. Authoritarianism erodes freedom steadily.

    But there are waypoints on the road to democratic oblivion. Each one you pass makes it harder to turn around.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Rob Reiner Warns U.S. Has 1 Year Before 'Democracy Completely Leaves'

    “The two big things that an autocrat needs: They need control of the media, which is what they’ve been trying to do, and they need military control of the streets, and that’s the other thing that we’re seeing,” Reiner noted, referring in the first instance to what happened to Jimmy Kimmel when his show was temporarily suspended following remarks he made about Charlie Kirk’s killer and a threat from President Donald Trump’s FCC chair, who called for broadcasters to pull Kimmel’s show.

• Environment

  • The Register UK ☛ Starlink burns up one to two satellites a day

    "If just one percent of Starlink satellites [assuming the planned 30k constellation] die on station, that's still 300 satellites," McDowell explained. "Three hundred big satellites could tip low Earth orbit into Kessler."

    Excepting the possibility of unplanned disaster, Starlink's operations aren't the biggest concern, McDowell added. China's satellite plans are far more worrying.

  • Live Science ☛ Massive system of rotating ocean currents in the North Atlantic is behaving strangely — and it may be reaching a tipping point

    The North Atlantic subpolar gyre plays a key role in transporting heat to the Northern Hemisphere, and it is a part of a much larger network of ocean currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). But new evidence suggests the subpolar gyre has been losing stability since the 1950s, meaning the gyre's circulation could weaken substantially in the coming decades, researchers report in a study published today (Oct. 3) in the journal Science Advances.

  • University of Southhampton ☛ north-atlantic-tipping-point

    “If this mixing or convection weakens—for example, due to excess freshwater from melting Greenland ice - the SPG could slow down or even collapse, triggering disruptions in weather, sea level, and global ocean circulation,” says Doctor Bieito Fernandez Castro , a Lecturer in Physical Oceanography at the University of Southampton who is leading the POLEMIX project.

    “The UK and northern Europe could experience much harsher winters, similar to parts of Canada, while the East coast of the USA could see dramatic sea level rises due to changes in ocean circulation.”

  • Energy/Transportation

    • CNBC ☛ OpenAI looks to take 10% stake in AMD through AI chip deal

      OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD's Instinct graphics processing units over multiple years and across multiple generations of hardware, the companies said Monday. It will kick off with an initial 1-gigawatt rollout of chips in the second half of 2026.

    • SFGate ☛ Families of students killed in Bay Area Cybertruck crash sue Tesla

      About 10 months after a fiery Cybertruck crash in Piedmont killed three college students, two of their families are suing Tesla with allegations that the electric vehicle’s rear door design turned a survivable collision into a deadly disaster.

    • San Fancisco ☛ Tesla sued: Parents say Cybertruck trapped daughter in Piedmont crash

      On Thursday, the couple added Tesla to their lawsuit, and Nelson's parents filed their own suit. Both filings accuse the company of negligence and failing to address significant safety issues with the doors on its vehicles, making it impossible for the plaintiffs' children to escape the blaze.

      The car company’s doors are powered by a 12-volt battery. If a vehicle loses power during a crash, it can cause the electronic door mechanism to fail, according to the lawsuit, and the interior release is hidden and difficult to find.

    • ABC ☛ Piedmont Cybertruck crash: Family of Krysta Tsukahara sues Tesla claiming car's door design didn't allow her to escape flames

      The parents of a college student killed in a Tesla Cybertruck crash in Piedmont say she was trapped in the car as it burst into flames because of a design flaw that made it nearly impossible for her to open the door, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Digital Music News ☛ Spotify CEO Trades Streaming for Bankrolling EU “Moonshots”

    Daniel Ek will officially step down as CEO of Spotify on January 1st, 2026 — then, it’s Ek is switching to big dog investor mode. He’ll use the wealth he gained from cashing out SPOT stock—estimated at nearly $10 billion—to focus on investing in high-risk European technology investments, according to details shared this week. This follows a tenure defined equally by massive streaming growth and fierce criticism from within the music industry.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Free Press co-founder Bari Weiss named editor in chief of CBS News

    The official announcement came after months of speculation on the deal and Weiss’ high-profile role within the news division. Weiss, 41, will report to Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison, who personally courted the former New York Times journalist.

  • Press Gazette ☛ The Free Press goes from zero to $150m valuation in five years on Substack

    Substack-based news publication The Free Press has been bought by Paramount for a reported $150m (£111m) in cash and stock.

    Founder, chief executive and editor-in-chief Bari Weiss will continue in her roles but also become editor-in-chief of CBS News reporting directly to its new owner, Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s son David Ellison.

  • Seth Godin ☛ The grid

    Which leads to Cory’s latest, out soon. When companies run out of inspiration, creativity and innovation, they revert to seeking monopoly. Creating chokepoints and offering less and less value is a lazy way to make the stock price go up. No wonder it’s endemic. Enshittification is real, and if we care, we can make it go away.

  • Dedoimedo ☛ Cool down with your Digital Dystopia, bro

    Manufacturing lines come to a standstill. Airport flights get delayed. A healthcare provider gets hacked. A telco provider gets pwned. An EV charger provider suffers a loss of data. The list of fabulous and scandalous goes on and on. You would think this is the plot line of a new cyber-action thriller starring Jason Statham and Steven Seagal. Nope. This is just the last month of IT security bloopers in the sordid reality we live in.

    To call the state of digital affairs appalling is an insult to the word appalling. Catastrophically, apocalyptically abysmal would be more like it. You would say, maybe we need to reassess the situation? Maybe put the brakes on the digital "revolution" a little, try to make it more manageable? Ah, no. Quite the contrary! The powers that be are even more keen on taking away your analog controls and replacing them with digital crap. Welcome to the ever-hackable future.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ 'A mystery to me:' Eisenhower library director ousted after sword denial, but he doesn't blame Trump

    “I have no idea,” he said. “I don’t know. I never had any indication that anyone thought I’d done anything wrong. So what happened is a mystery to me. I have no idea. I would love to know. I have reached out to superiors at the National Archives, and I have not had anyone call me back.”

    In our conversation, the former librarian was at pains to tell me that none of the national or local reporting about his departure had been 100% accurate. That’s catnip to a journalist like yours truly, who’s always on the search for untold stories.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Trump’s carrot for college reform

    Last week, however, the White House appeared to shift tactics. It offered an experiment in incentives and listening. It proposed a “compact” with nine universities that would reward them with “multiple positive benefits,” such as new federal research grants, if they volunteered to make specific changes in 10 areas, from grade inflation to gender definition to a cap on international students.

  • Project Censored ☛ Banned Books Week: Censorship Is So 1984, Read For Your Rights!

    Today on the program, we celebrate Banned Books Week: Censorship Is So 1984, Read For Your Rights! Today we’ll speak with several people involved in Banned Books Week, starting with this year’s Youth Honorary Chair for the Banned Books Week Coalition, Iris Mogul. Later in the show we’ll be joined by the president of the American Library Association, Sam Helmick. And we’ll conclude the hour by speaking with the Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, Lee Rowland. Today on the Project Censored Show, we’ll spend the hour celebrating the right to read and the right to know. It’s Banned Books Week!

  • The Sun ☛ Putin newspaper baron, 87, dies after plunging 70ft from balcony in ANOTHER mystery death rocking Russia

    Leontyev wasn’t just any old Soviet relic.

    For decades, he ran Pravda — “Truth” — the mouthpiece of the Communist Party and one of the most powerful media machines of the USSR.

    Long after the Soviet collapse, he remained in charge, a man believed to know where the party’s hidden billions were buried.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Inside Trump’s War on Dissent Following Charlie Kirk's Killing

    Even for a government run by Trump, Miller, and all of the Project 2025 architects, the pace at which the administration got to work escalating its agenda for domestic political and legal warfare was intense. Two Trump administration officials describe pulling all-nighters following Kirk’s assassination, examining how to use existing anti-terrorism laws for the next fronts in Trump’s campaign of aggression on the American left. “For Charlie,” the officials would say to one another, as they worked after-hours, plotting the coming blitz, and gaming out scenarios, including likely court challenges to their actions.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russian Soldier Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison After Giving Interviews to Ukrainian Blogger

    A Russian soldier freed in a prisoner swap with Ukraine has been sentenced to four years in a penal colony after he gave interviews to a Ukrainian blogger, the exiled news outlet Mediazona reported Monday, citing court records.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Paul Krugman ☛ State Terror, American Style

    Over the weekend I talked to a couple of people, people who generally try to keep abreast of the news, about the Chicago apartment raid last Tuesday — and discovered that they hadn’t heard about it. And that’s extremely worrying. It suggests that many people don’t realize how fast and aggressively the Trump administration is moving to end rule of law and convert America into a full-fledged autocracy.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Register UK ☛ AI to take 97M US jobs in 10 years, says AI-aided report

    As an answer to this perceived jobs apocalypse, he proposes that the government should institute a "robot tax" to be paid when workers are replaced, a 32-hour working week for everyone else without reducing pay, a requirement for corporations to share profits with workers and allow them on the board of directors, a ban on union busting, and another ban on stock buybacks by corporations.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Call The Wealthy's Bluff

    Read that again. Half of all economic activity in the United States depends on the spending decisions of one-tenth of the population. This isn’t a sign of a healthy economy. It’s a symptom of extractive capitalism—an economic system where wealth accumulates upward so rapidly that ordinary people are being priced out of asset ownership entirely, leaving them dependent on wages alone while the wealthy collect rents on everything from housing to intellectual property to financial instruments.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ When He’s Not Busy Censoring Comedians, Brendan Carr Is Eliminating Free Wi-Fi For Poor Rural School Kids

    But that disaster class in shitty governance shouldn’t overshadow all the other, terrible things Carr has been up to. Like last week, when Carr announced he’d be killing a popular, bipartisan program that provided free Wi-Fi to school kids at no additional cost to taxpayers.

    Some background: last year, the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring free Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses and libraries, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) to get online.

  • Old VCR ☛ The end of AOL dialup

    America Online has ceased offering dialup access since first doing so in 1991 (using GeoWorks), and presumably any systems attempting to dial in will no longer be able to make a connection.

  • Test-IPv6 ☛ Retiring test-ipv6.com

    TL;DR: I will retire test-ipv6.com in December 2025.

    I have provided test-ipv6.com to the public since 2010. I've sunk significant resources - engineering, support, equipment, and hosting fees - into what is a revenue-free product.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ Sam Altman Reverses Sora’s Opt-Out Copyright Structure

    OpenAI has been quick to reverse its stance on requiring rights holders to opt out of having their copyrighted works used to train the company’s Sora 2 model. The Sam Altman-fronted company initially said rights holders would be able to opt out, but would not be required to opt in before their work would be used to potentially generate content.

    That’s a stark contrast to Altman’s latest stance, revealed in a blog post on Friday. According to his post, Altman said the new policy will be “similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls” for rights holders.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ RIAA: Telegram & Discord Are Notorious Hubs For Pre-Release Music Piracy

    The RIAA has submitted its latest overview of "notorious markets" to the U.S. Government. The list includes familiar names, including torrent sites, stream-rippers, and direct download portals. In addition, the music group brands Telegram and Discord as key distribution hubs for pre-release music piracy.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Muso.AI Audit Tool Reveals Shocking Scale Unpaid MLC Royalties

    Digital Music News recently reported on the alarming scale of data discrepancies within the MLC (Mechanical Licensing Collective) database, including instances of duplicate works and royalty fraud. That’s bad news for those not getting paid, but the good news is that serious solutions are already arriving.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Technology and Free Software

    • Programming

      • Linewise Scripts

        Unix shell scripts do the exact same thing. As a consequence the shell script can be changed on the fly. The reasoning I heard for this was that shell scripts are supposed to emulate commands typed in at a terminal, hence the care taken (if you process trace a shell and watch how it does file I/O) to line up the offset at the beginning of the next line.