Leftovers

• France24 ☛ Tens of thousands flock to China's Palace Museum on 100th anniversary

  Tens of thousands of tourists lined up Friday to visit China's Palace Museum, also known as the Forbidden City, as it marks 100 years since its founding. Built in the early 15th century, the Forbidden City in Beijing only opened to the public in 1925. FRANCE 24's Jan Camenzind Broomby reports.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Stefano Marinelli ☛ When Bigger Stops Being Better

    What many fail to grasp is that the world is not the United States. Not every country follows the same rules and laws. In some European countries, even true statements can be actionable if deemed harmful to a company's reputation. The burden of legal costs often falls on the defendant, regardless of the outcome. Truth is a defense, but it's an expensive one.

  • Joel J Miller ☛ Our Ancestors Murdered Their Mother Tongue, Thankfully

    Modern English was once Middle English, which was once Old English, which was once some form of Germanic before that. Every language is the bastard child of another, sometimes many others. Spanish and Italian? Just Latin for different times and climes. Push back farther, and Germanic and Latin themselves slip into the same ancestral soup. And if we scrape the bottom of the cauldron? We reach our Mother Tongue, what specialists call Proto-Indo-European.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Bride surprises new husband with an RTX 5090 on wedding day — Chinese number slang reveals surprise gift

    So, the message started emphatically with 520x10. Or ‘I love you’ x 10. 1314 is significant as it is a homophone for ‘forever and always.’ Elsewhere in the tricky sum, we see 514 (til death), 619 (escaping forever), 666 (awesome), and 957 (I’m teasing).

  • The Verge ☛ Amazon awkwardly edited the guns out of James Bond art | The Verge

    Last week, for James Bond Day, Amazon revealed updated poster art for the movies. But fans immediately noticed that the super spy’s signature Walther PPK was conspicuously missing from every image. In some cases it had clearly and rather clumsily been Photoshopped out. Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan were left awkwardly holding thin air, in the posters for Dr. No and Goldeneye, respectively. Roger Moore seemingly received a body transplant on the cover Live and Let Die, and for A View to a Kill his arms were lengthened to inhuman proportions to coverup his firearm.

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ My (Retro) Desk Setup in 2025

    And then we renovated our home resulting in more shuffling around of room designations: the living room migrated to the new section with high glass windows to better connect with the back garden. That logically meant I could claim the vacant living room space. Which I did: [...]

  • Marc Brooker ☛ Is Systems Research Really Just About Making Numbers Bigger?

    Perhaps the most interesting discussion, however, isn’t about AI at all. It’s about the scope of systems research. What systems research is, or aught to be.

    The paper’s core argument is well captured in the abstract: [...]

• Science

  • Wired ☛ A New Algorithm Makes It Faster to Find the Shortest Paths

    This dilemma is especially relevant to one of the most iconic problems in computer science: finding the shortest path from a specific starting point in a network to every other point. It’s like a souped-up version of a problem you need to solve each time you move: learning the best route from your new home to work, the gym, and the supermarket.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Steve Jobs unveiled the NeXT Computer on this day in 1988 — 'The Cube' would be used to develop the WWW, Doom, and Quake

    Like Apple Macs of the era, The Cube used a Motorola 680X0 main processor, the 68030 in this instance. It came with the 68882 floating-point coprocessor, and ran at 25 MHz. These computers shipped with 8MB of RAM as standard, expandable to 64MB via four available SIMM slots. For storage, the NeXT Computer came with a 256MB magneto-optical drive (an optical rewritable format), and there was an optional 330MB or 660MB hard disk to configure.

    Supporting this interesting array of hardware was the NeXTSTEP operating system. This was “based on the Mach microkernel and BSD-derived Unix, with a proprietary GUI using a Display PostScript-based back end,” says a Wikipedia entry.

• Career/Education

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Converted school bus turned into mobile retro computing museum — historic array includes Sinclair (Timex) ZX Spectrum 48K and Commodore 64

    A father and son duo have converted an old school bus into a computer gaming museum. The Retro Reset Computer Bus was inspired by the son’s visit to a traditional brick-and-mortar computer museum, and the wish to spread the joy of retro-computing more widely, reports the BBC. The non-profit organization founded upon this idea schedules bus visits around schools, colleges, youth clubs, and more, around its East Sussex (UK) base.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Two years after school phone bans were implemented in Australia, what has changed?

    “When a phone is within reach, a student’s mind is only ever half in the room,” the school’s principal, Caleb Peterson, says. “We wanted their whole attention back.”

    School mobile phones bans typically mandate that mobile devices are kept in bags or lockers during the school day and confiscated on sight and stored in the school office until the end of the day. This month marks two years of phone bans being in operation in most Australian states. Victoria moved early, banning phones in public primary and secondary schools in 2020. By term four, 2023, Western Australia Tasmania, New South Wales and South Australia had followed suit; Queensland restricted phones in term one, 2024.

  • Neil Selwyn ☛ Smartphone bans in schools – how much has changed?

    It is two years on from many Australian states announcing school smartphone bans. I was contacted for comment on ‘whether or not the phone bans were the gamechanger we think they were’. The final piece in the Guardian is here. Below are my full comments to the main questions.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ How I provide technical clarity to non-technical leaders

    My mission as a staff engineer is to provide technical clarity to the organization.

    Of course, I do other stuff too. I run projects, I ship code, I review PRs, and so on. But the most important thing I do - what I’m for - is to provide technical clarity.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Converted school bus turned into mobile retro computing museum — historic array includes Sinclair (Timex) ZX Spectrum 48K and Commodore 64

    A father and son duo have converted an old school bus into a computer gaming museum.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Cambridge University launches project to rescue data trapped on old floppy disks

    Led by the library’s digital preservation team, the project aims to document and formalize best practices for floppy disk recovery, encompassing cleaning and handling methods, as well as imaging workloads. It’s also pulling in expertise from the retro-computing community, whose trial-and-error techniques are often the only reason legacy formats still survive.

    You can forget those cheap USB floppy drives you can buy online. Cambridge’s preservationists don’t just mount disks and hope for the best; they sample the raw magnetic signal itself. Specialized hardware, such as the KryoFlux and open-hardware Greaseweazle interfaces, captures the flux transitions — the tiny changes in polarity that encode data — and reconstructs the file structure later in software. This flux-level imaging process enables archivists to recover non-PC formats and identify weak or damaged sectors that would otherwise remain unread.

  • The Register UK ☛ Intel Fab52: A technical walkthrough

    Last week, during Intel's Tech Tour press event, El Reg had the opportunity to tour Fab52, where mass production of chips based on the company's new 18A process node is already underway.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Straits Times ☛ #KoreaGlowUp: How beauty, anti-ageing industry is powering South Korea’s medical tourism

    A record-breaking 1.17 million overseas patients visited the country in 2024.

• Proprietary

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • Nicolas Magand ☛ Uninstalling apps (part 2)

      To me, uninstalling apps is just as fun as trying out new ones. It forces me to think about what features I really need and how I could use the already installed apps in the best possible way. As I previously explained:

      "Once or twice a year, I get this irresistible urge to uninstall apps from my devices. Apps that I don’t use very often, apps that can be replaced by websites easily, apps that I don’t need all the time, and so on."

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ AI as ‘personal therapist’: Despite risks, Hong Kong teenagers turn to chatbots for counselling

      When Hong Kong teen Jessica started secondary school last year, she became a victim of bullying. Instead of talking to a friend or family member, she turned to an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot from Xingye, a Chinese role-playing and companion app.

    • David Yates ☛ Signifier flotation devices

      The way current-day LLMs work is pretty much the exact opposite of this. They are trained by accumulating a vast corpus of signifiers and mashing them into an array of high-dimensional matrices, which are then searched through to produce new text/images/audio that adhere to the general patterns. It turns out that if you do this with a sufficiently large volume of text, you can create an AI that solves the Turing Test, a goal artificial intelligence research has been chasing for 70 years. Add image data, and you get general-purpose image recognition, a task described as “virtually impossible” by this 2014 xkcd comic.

      The surprising results of scaling a relatively simple process has led some to theorise that a sufficient volume of this sort of training could lead to Artificial General Intelligence, and many to treat the existing results as if they already represent Artificial General Intelligence. And I can’t entirely blame them, because a key part of what makes LLM chatbots work as well as they do is pretending to be Artificial General Intelligence – fake it till you make it!

    • The New Stack ☛ How Solid Is Ed Zitron's 'Case Against Generative AI'?

      Too little demand for GenAI will doom an industry awash in investment, according to a newsletter author and podcaster. What's ahead? "A fiery apocalypse."

    • Futurism ☛ Trump Supporters Are Using OpenAI's Sora to Generate AI Videos of Soldiers Assaulting Protesters

      The phenomenon was first flagged by Gizmodo, which reported a concerning rise in AI-generated pro-Trump propaganda since the release of OpenAI’s Sora 2, an AI video generator capable of spitting out short, nearly photorealistic clips.

    • Gizmodo ☛ Fake Protest Videos Are the Latest AI Slop to Go Viral in MAGA World

      The phrase “I voted for this” has become a common thing for far-right supporters of Trump to say when something particularly brutal has happened to their political opponents.

    • Futurism ☛ University Using AI to Falsely Accuse Students of Cheating With AI

      College students are being wrongly accused of using AI to cheat on their assignments by their university — based, in a headache-inducing twist, on the findings of another AI system.

    • ABC ☛ University wrongly accuses students of using artificial intelligence to cheat

      A major Australian university used artificial intelligence technology to accuse about 6,000 students of academic misconduct last year.

      The most common offence was using AI to cheat, but many of the students had done nothing wrong.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Technology Bubbles: Causes and Consequences

      Whatever it is, few are denying that the technology is impressive. But warnings that there may be a huge AI bubble are getting louder. Worries about the financial underpinnings of all that capital spending are growing. And many people have noted that the AI boom is driving most, possibly all, of the economy’s recent growth. So what will happen if the boom goes bust?

  • Social Control Media

    • New Statesman ☛ Doomscrolling on Vibes, Meta's new AI slop feed

      For the past few years, Gen Z internet users have been calling this genre of unchallenging video “slop”. These productions are sub-lowbrow; they take no intellectual discernment to produce, and no taste either.

    • El País ☛ A generation in crisis: Why young people are so unhappy

      Jonathan Haidt suggests delaying access to social media until age 14 and warns that the rise of artificial intelligence could prove even more harmful to young people than social networks themselves. And, though obvious, improving economic conditions — especially in work and housing — would certainly help.

      For Patricia Castro, the key is strengthening social bonds: “Not all of us are going to have the job of our dreams or live in the city center, but there is no shortage of people in the world.”

    • Julian Simpson ☛ A couple of things

      And this second one I actually listened to here, but I'm linking to the video because there are a couple of diagrams reference that people my find useful. This is Cal Newport on the case for quitting social media and his take is REALLY good. (TL:DR - everything that's wrong is a feature, not a bug, and it therefore can't and won't be be fixed). I'm glad he included Bluesky here, because there is a temptation to think that federated systems aren't as bad as Facebook and Twitter, but they actually do exactly the same damage, because it's not the companies or the profit motive that makes these things dangerous, it's the system itslef. Anyway, REALLY worth a watch/listen. (It's Deep Questions Episode 371, if you'd just like to search for it.)

    • The Verge ☛ Police are asking kids to stop pulling AI homeless man prank

      The premise is simple enough: kids use Snapchat’s AI tools to create images of a grimy man in their home and tell their parents they let them in to use the bathroom, take a nap, or just get a drink of water. Often they say the person claims to know the parents from work or college. And then, predictably, the parents lose their cool and demand they kick the man out. The kids, of course, record the whole thing, and post their parents reactions to TikTok, where some of the clips have millions of views.

    • R Scott Jones ☛ The folly of social media feeds

      There is an inescapable truth to social media feeds: the more you add to the firehose, the less you see of the stuff you wanted to follow in the first place.

      At some point, unless you add more scrolling to your day, you must rely on algorithms to choose what you see, and what you don’t. You cede free will over what you consume, and what you consume determines how you view the world.

      It’s a simple problem, with a simple solution, but one that still dominates our current world.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Dark Reading ☛ Manufacturers' Fight Against Ransomware Heats Up

      The manufacturing industry continues to take the brunt of ransomware attacks. Black Kite's 2025 Manufacturing Research Report found that manufacturing was the number one target for ransomware groups four years in a row. The sector accounted for 22% of all reported attacks Between April 2024 and March 2025, 1,314 attacks out of a total of 6,046, according to the report.

• Security

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Nintendo allegedly hacked by Crimson Collective hacking group — screenshot shows leaked folders, production assets, developer files, and backups

    The Crimson Collective hacking group claims to have breached Nintendo's security and stolen files from the gaming company.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Court House News ☛ LinkedIn can’t dodge claims it tracked users’ medical data

      A federal judge on Friday rejected attempts by LinkedIn and other tech companies to toss out the bulk of consumer privacy claims asserting the companies secretly tracked users' sensitive medical information across healthcare websites without their knowledge or consent.

    • IT Wire ☛ Zoom phone ‘hits 10 million seats’, transforming 'how businesses connect in the AI era'

      According to Zoom, since its launch in 2019, Zoom Phone has become one of the “fastest-growing cloud telephony solutions in the market. Its growth reflects the shift from legacy PBXs and fragmented solutions to unified, AI-first communications” - and “built on Zoom’s reliable, scalable, and open platform, Zoom Phone offers enterprise-grade features, flexibility, and AI-first innovation to help businesses of all sizes improve collaboration and customer engagement.”

    • Digital Camera World ☛ As Ring cameras go 4K, are we crossing a line between safety and privacy?

      But here's what bothered me: nowhere in all that marketing speak about "neighborhood safety" did anyone ask whether we actually need to see our neighbors' faces in 4K as they walk past our house.

      I remember when video doorbells first arrived. The pitch was simple: see who's at your door when you're not home. Check if that parcel's been delivered. That's protecting your doorstep, which is what they promised. Yet somewhere along the way, we've shifted from "doorstep" to "entire street".

    • Ava ☛ how can we (re)teach the importance of privacy?

      To be clear, I am not saying that we should just shut up online; this very blog is the antithesis to that, and it would be hypocritical. But it has to be said: It is simply important to be aware, make a conscious decision and draw your own boundaries, while considering the worst case scenario.

      It is also about recognizing when he have been pressured and manipulated into oversharing by companies whose business model depends on it.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Chatbot Histories Is Becoming Evidence in Criminal Cases

      Rinderknecht has yet to enter a plea, but if he goes to trial, the case could offer a meaningful glimpse into how the proliferation of AI technology will affect criminal investigations and prosecutions in the future. Users have proven overly trustful of chatbots, treating them as therapists, confidants, and even romantic partners onto which they can unburden intimate secrets. The reality is that they are divulging sensitive information on platforms that offer no legal confidentiality, developed by companies that will readily turn their data over to law enforcement if served with a subpoena, warrant, or court order.

• Defence/Aggression

  • France24 ☛ RSF drone strike kills at least 60 in Sudan displacement camp

    A drone and military attack killed at least 60 people at the Dar al-Arqam displacement camp in Sudan's El-Fasher on Saturday as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) intensifies its assault on the besieged western city. The RSF has been at war with the regular army since April 2023.

  • New York Times ☛ Dozens Killed in Strikes at Shelter in Besieged Sudanese City

    Missiles struck as many people were asleep in classrooms converted into temporary shelters, a doctor said. Paramilitary forces have tightened their siege on El Fasher for over a year.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man strikes back at China with a 100% tariff and critical software ban — major escalation retaliates for China's rare earth restrictions

    Hell Toupée imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese goods and announced export controls on undefined 'critical software,' a move that could cripple China’s tech and manufacturing sectors more than tariffs themselves.

  • BIA Net ☛ Rare earth element reserves in Turkey: What is known and what remains unknown

    Claims of a 694-million-ton rare earth element reserve in Eskişehir are being discussed by both experts and opposition politicians. We asked specialists about the possibility of this reserve positioning Turkey as the world’s second-largest producer after China.

  • JURIST ☛ US strikes in southern Caribbean draws UN call for restraint

    The United Nations on Thursday urged restraint following a series of US air and naval strikes in the southern Caribbean that have heightened tensions with Venezuela. During a UN Security Council meeting, Assistant Secretary-General Miroslav Jenča stated that the UN cannot independently confirm US claims that the strikes targeted drug-trafficking vessels.

  • The Straits Times ☛ South Korean ‘money mule’ recruiters nabbed for luring student to Cambodia, who was later found dead

    The police listed cardiac arrest resulting from torture and extreme pain as the cause of death on his death certificate.

  • NYPost ☛ New Jersey moneyman behind sick ‘monkey crushing’ videos gets just 4 years in prison

    They reportedly arranged for the distribution of various forms of monkey torture, including "animal crushing" — but Dryden was the only one charged with creating the vile content.

  • France24 ☛ Morocco king urges speedy social reforms following youth-led protests

    Morocco's King Mohammed VI on Friday said improving public education and healthcare was a priority, but made no reference to the youth movement that has been staging nationwide protests for sweeping social reforms. The royal speech had been much anticipated by the protesters, who have taken to the streets almost every night since September 27.

  • El País ☛ Finland fortifies itself against its Russian neighbor

    “We, together with the Baltic countries and Poland, are defending all of Europe. This is where we need solidarity for the sake of [common] security. This is something that must be understood in the rest of Europe,” Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo argued during the recent visit of European Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius. “If we have learned anything, it is that with Russia, nothing is impossible,” added Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, last Tuesday in a meeting with EL PAÍS and a small group of European media.

  • The Verge ☛ How Verge readers, and writers, are managing our kids’ screen time

    What you won’t find in the Pew study, however, are what those rules are. That a certain percentage of parents “ever” let their kids watch TV doesn’t tell us useful information like, how long they watch, what they watch, or how parents are making sure they’re not watching anything inappropriate.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Trump, Epstein files thwart swearing-in of Arizona lawmaker

    Arizona’s newly elected congresswoman is poised to break a House logjam on releasing the Epstein files. Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to swear in Adelita Grijalva, despite immediately seating two GOP lawmakers.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Aaron Aziz backlash shows Gaza activism now a litmus test for celebrities in Malaysia

    Celebrities in Malaysia are facing mounting social control media pressure to speak out on the Gaza conflict.

  • New York Times ☛ North Korea Flaunts New Missiles ​in Parade With Chinese and Russian Officials

    The parade, held in North Korea’s capital to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the ruling Workers’ Party, ​gave its leader a chance to show off his growing power.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • New York Times ☛ She Studies the Russian ‘Red Man’ Whose Bloody War Evokes Soviet Tyranny

      After winning the Nobel Prize for her searing portraits of the Soviet world unraveling, Svetlana Alexievich worries about the revival of its violent, anti-democratic ways.

    • RFERL ☛ Ukraine Restores Power To Thousands After Mass Outages Caused By Russian Strikes

      Ukrainian power workers restored electricity to nearly 1 million people in Kyiv and other areas, as officials braced for further Russian air strikes that have already severely damaged power generation and gas supplies.

    • France24 ☛ Russian attack on Ukraine's energy facilities plunges thousands into darkness

      Large parts of Kyiv were plunged into darkness in the early hours of Friday after Russian drones and missiles struck Ukrainian energy facilities, cuttingpower and water to homes and halting a key metro link across the Dnipro river.

    • France24 ☛ ‘Pawns in Putin’s war game’: African women lured into drone factories

      Russia has been accused of making false promises to recruit young women from across Africa to work in drone-assembling factories. The women were coerced into assembling Shahed-136 kamikaze drones in a dangerous area that has been repeatedly bombed by Ukraine.

• Environment

  • 404 Media ☛ Earth’s Climate Has Passed Its First Irreversible Tipping Point and Entered a ‘New Reality’

    Tipping points include global ice loss, Amazon rainforest loss, and the possible collapse of vital ocean currents. Once crossed, they will trigger self-perpetuating and irreversible changes that will lead to new and unpredictable climate conditions. But the new report also emphasizes progress on positive tipping points, such as the rapid rollout of green technologies.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Earth enters 'new reality' as coral reefs reach first climate tipping point

    With ministers gathering ahead of the COP30 summit, the second Global Tipping Points Report finds that warm-water coral reefs—on which nearly a billion people and a quarter of all marine life depend—are passing their tipping point. Widespread dieback is taking place and—unless global warming is reversed—extensive reefs as we know them will be lost, although small refuges may survive and must be protected.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Straits Times ☛ One Malaysian killed, 5 S’poreans injured after express bus crashes into signpost in Selangor

      The Super Nice bus was travelling from Boon Lay to Ipoh, Perak.

    • The Straits Times ☛ Beijing blames US for raising trade tensions, defends rare earth curbs

      China said its export controls on rare earth elements followed a series of US measures.

    • The Straits Times ☛ How China powers its electric cars and high-speed trains

      China’s aggressive embrace of clean energy technologies has left it with an unquenchable thirst for electricity.

    • New York Times ☛ China Flexed. Convicted Felon Hit Back. So Much for the Thaw.

      Beijing’s trade curbs and Hell Toupée’s tariff threats show how quickly calm can give way to confrontation between the two largest economies.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Futurism ☛ Canada Considering Doing Something Unforgivable to its Beluga Whales

      Horrible.

  • Overpopulation

    • [Old] University of Adelaide ☛ Stop! Grand theft water. | Newsroom | University of Adelaide

      “Much of the world’s focus right now is on water efficiency investments, which might achieve (at best) between 10-20 per cent savings for water managers. But if we can recover 30-50% of ‘lost’ water, targeting those who steal for profit making, then that would be good for our water supply, and good for us,” said Dr Loch.

• Finance

  • The Straits Times ☛ ‘China isn’t afraid’: Beijingers shrug off Convicted Felon tariff threat

    They see the US President as “childlike”, “capricious” and “a bit unreliable”.

  • The Straits Times ☛ China ready to walk away from Xi-Dihydroxyacetone Man summit amid erosion of US credibility, say analysts

    Washington’s credibility with Beijing is on shaky ground.

  • France24 ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man announces additional 100 percent tariff on Chinese imports

    US President The Insurrectionist announced an additional 100 percent tariff on China Friday and threatened to cancel a summit with Pooh-tin Jinping, reigniting his trade war with Beijing in a row over export curbs on rare earth minerals. FRANCE 24's Fraser Jackson reports.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ The Gordian solution to gerrymandering

    Through gerrymandering, political elections can be won this way. You create many regions where you’re either juuuust winning (but unambiguously winning) by also creating a few regions where you get totally clobbered, making your opponents wastefully overconcentrated in those regions.

    Now, political representation isn’t meant to be a game, let alone one that can be cheated this way, so gerrymandering is rightly seen as a problem.

  • Jacky Alciné ☛ Adherence to societal norms as a form of acceptable self harm

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Deseret Media ☛ Glenn Beck says he planned to turn his media empire over to Charlie Kirk

      The former CNN and Fox News personality also co-founded Blaze Media, with a subscription TV product, BlazeTV, boasting around half a million paid users as of 2020.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • New York Times ☛ Social Media Restrictions and 2-Day Internet Shutdown Rattle Afghanistan

    In shutting down the [Internet] and cellphone services across Afghanistan last month, the Taliban government turned the clock back decades, in a move reminiscent of their first time in power from 1996 to 2001. Connectivity came back after two days, but this week, the Afghan government blocked certain types of content on social media apps like Instagram and Facebook, signaling that it would only tolerate tightly controlled access to the internet.

  • Deadline ☛ Apple Postpones Jessica Chastain Thriller 'The Savant' Last-Miunute

    The streamer would not elaborate on the reasons for the last-minute change but The Savant’s subject matter is believed to be behind it, with the storyline about preventing extremist attacks and some of the imagery considered possibly triggering following the Sept. 10 assassination of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk. The series includes a sniper in action and the bombing of a government building among other acts of violence.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • New York Times ☛ China Detains Dozens of Members of Underground Church

    The church’s pastor, Ezra Jin Mingri, turned Zion Church into one of China’s largest unofficial congregations, even as government pressure on Christianity increased.

  • Papers Please ☛ CBP changes procedures for airline passengers with “X” passports

    [CBP implementation guide says that only “M” and “F” are accepted in APIS data.]U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP has announced plans for changes to its procedures for processing information sent to CBP by airlines (and possibly also train, bus, and ferry operators) about passengers on international routes with non-binary or non-gendered “X” gender marker passports, to take effect on Tuesday, October 12, 2025.

    The planned changes were disclosed by press release rather than by rulemaking notice in the Federal Register. Implementation has been outsourced to airlines subject to secret “Security Directives” from CBP.  Neither the current nor the planned procedures comply with the law. All of this makes it difficult to predict what will happen to anyone with an “X” gender marker on their passport who tries to make reservations, buy tickets, or check in for international flights after October 12th.

    But here’s what we know:

  • US News And World Report ☛ Naked Bike Riders Demonstrate Against Federal Troops in 'Quintessentially Portland' Protest

    “Joy is a form of protest. Being together with mutual respect and kindness is a form of protest,” the ride’s organizers said on Instagram. “It’s your choice how much or little you wear.”

    Fewer people were fully naked than usual — likely because of the cool, wet weather — but some still bared it all and rode wearing only bike helmets.

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ They Came for Our Neighbors. We Showed Up.

    I was still groggy, drinking my morning tea, when my phone started buzzing with alerts about ICE hitting a corner within walking distance of my home. At first, it was unclear if they had taken a street vendor who was familiar to many of us. Soon, we learned that the vendor was still there, but that two other neighbors had been seized.

    That series of texts would soon activate a neighborhood.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Taliban minister confronted over women’s rights during rare press conference for female journalists

    Afghanistan is the only country in the world where the government has banned girls and women from their basic rights, including being seen in public parks, gymnasiums, mosques, markets and salons.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • Tracy Durnell ☛ Question: my site’s not indexed but I’m getting referrals from Google

      Google Search Console shows that only my robots.txt page is indexed, and 1300 pages are blocked from being indexed by noindex.

      However, AWStats shows I’m getting referrals: – Google .com ( catchall ) 41,634/ 41,634 – Google .com 12,960/ 12,972

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Death to Spotify’: the DIY movement to get artists and fans to quit the music app

    The talks come as the global movement against Spotify edges into the mainstream. In January, music journalist Liz Pelly released Mood Machine, a critical history arguing the streaming company has ruined the industry and turned listeners into “passive, uninspired consumers”. Spotify’s model, she writes, depends on paying artists a pittance – less still if they agree to be “playlisted” on its Discovery mode, which rewards the kind of bland, coffee-shop muzak that fades neatly into the background.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Michael Tsai ☛ DEICER Removed From the App Store

  Some people are upset about this part because government officers aren’t normally considered a protected class. But that’s not the language the guideline uses. And I see no reason to allow this sort of content targeted at any group, be it teachers, Supreme Court justices, people who look a certain way or live in a certain state, whatever. Apple’s reasoning isn’t bogus because it’s protecting the wrong people; it’s bogus because that’s not what the app is doing.

• Copyrights

  • JURIST ☛ Computer scientist petitions US Supreme Court to reconsider AI-generated copyright

    Computer scientist Stephen Thaler on Friday formally petitioned the US Supreme Court to decide whether creative works produced entirely by artificial intelligence can qualify for copyright monopoly protection. Thaler’s filing challenges the 2025 DC Circuit Court decision which reaffirmed that only works with human authorship are eligible for copyright monopoly under US law.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Lawsuit claims Apple trained AI on stolen books

    Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, professors at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, New York told the court in a proposed class action late last week that Apple used illegal “shadow libraries” of pirated books to train Apple Intelligence.

    A separate group of authors sued Apple last month for allegedly misusing their work in AI training.